Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy - History

History

The Ford School was founded in 1914 as the Institute for Public Administration. Consequently, it is the oldest public policy institution in the United States. It was part of the Progressive Era movement for clean government and well-trained professional civil servants. For the first half-century of its existence, the institute focused on training individuals who would serve in state and local government in the United States.

In the mid-1960s, academic work in the social sciences suggested that the analytic methods of the social sciences could be usefully applied to the understanding of public concerns. The institute, which was renamed the Institute for Public Policy Studies, redesigned its curriculum to include rigorous training in the social sciences, particularly quantitative analysis of economic, political, and organizational questions. The focus of faculty research and student training moved to national and international issues.

The University of Michigan established the institute as the School of Public Policy in 1995, with Lorch Hall as the host building. Since achieving this status, the school has been expanding. In 1999, the school adopted as its current namesake Michigan alumnus and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.

In the fall 2006, the Joan and Sanford Weill Hall became the new permanent home of the Ford School. The Weill family donated $8 million, $5 million for construction of a new $35 million building (dedicated on October 13, 2006), which houses classrooms, offices, and meeting space for students, faculty and staff, and $3 million to endow the position of dean of the School. The five-story structure, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, houses several research centers, a policy library, and study areas for students. At the same time, the school has begun admitting junior-level undergraduate students for two-year programs for public policy majors.

Read more about this topic:  Gerald R. Ford School Of Public Policy

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.
    Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.
    —J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)