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Robert M. La Follette
School of Public Affairs
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Telephone: 608.262.3581
Fax: 608.265.3233
Last updated:
August 18, 2011
© Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Alumni and Friends: La Follette Notes: Fall 2008
Founding director Dennis Dresang to retire
Dennis Dresang took a roundabout way to become an internationally recognized expert on public management. His career and research interests took him from Kimberly, a little town in Wisconsin’s Fox Valley, to Madison, Los Angeles and Africa, all in pursuit of knowing more about how governmental systems function.
Dennis Dresang
Champion of the Wisconsin Idea: Alumni, friends value Dresang’s expertise, style, advice
Along the way, Dresang taught hundreds of public affairs and political science students. Outside the classroom, he was vilified or sanctified (depending on one’s position) on so many issues of fairness and equity for women that he was named an “honorary woman” and was the only man ever allowed on stage at Wisconsin Women in Government’s annual banquet.
Dresang will retire at the end of the fall 2008 semester after 39 years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dresang’s academic journey began when he attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 1964. Dresang then headed for the University of California, Los Angeles, to work on his master’s and doctoral degrees in political science.
“From the beginning, I wanted to specialize in public management, but in those days that field was the kiss of death for a political scientist just starting a career,” Dresang says. “The hot fields were electoral studies or something comparative, so I focused on making comparisons of public management in East Africa —
in Zambia, Uganda and Tanzania.”
After finishing his degrees, he landed a tenure-track position with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Political Science in 1969. He used his international expertise to teach public management for the Center for Development, which trained mid-level civil servants from developing nations and Americans interested in development careers. “I was primarily teaching professionals, people from Africa, Asia and Latin America, who had been working for several years and could take a two-year leave from their government jobs to come to Madison to earn master’s degrees,” he says.
As the political scenes in Africa shifted, Dresang found that African immigration officials could no longer tell the difference between professors and Central Intelligence Agency operatives and barred him from their countries. So when Wisconsin Governor Patrick Lucey asked Dresang for help with an examination of the State of Wisconsin’s personnel structure, Dresang welcomed the opportunity. He took a leave of absence from the university for the 1976-77 academic year and directed the Wisconsin Employment Relations Study Commission. “It was an opportunity to work on management issues,” Dresang says, “which I couldn’t do in Africa at the moment, and public management was no longer the taboo specialty that it had been. The rest is history.”
That history includes a memorable debate with conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly on pay equity — the effort to remove the effects of gender discrimination from pay scales. Dresang and Schlafly argued about the effects pay equity might have on the workplace and the role and status of women. Dresang’s involvement with the issue and other personnel matters marked him as someone open and committed to fairness and equity in pay and work for women and minorities — issues he championed outside the classroom.
When Dresang returned to campus, he added teaching American public management and public policy to his repertoire. He became associate director of the Center for the Study of Public Policy and Administration in 1977. As director in the early 1980s, he won a Ford Foundation grant so faculty could conduct research for the State of Wisconsin. “The program brought together state agencies and the university, and it enabled us to enhance the center and create what became the
La Follette Institute of Public Affairs,” Dresang says.
As director, Dresang nursed the unit through its transition, working with Wisconsin Assembly speaker Tom Loftus, a 1972 center alum, and Rep. Tom Harnisch to phase in the institute as part of the university’s budgeted state funding.
“It was kind of improbable that we began the institute when we did because we were in the middle of the Reagan era and the recession,” he says.
The institute was formally established in 1983, with Dresang as its first director, a position he held until 1988. During that time, he served as chair and research director of Wisconsin Governor Tony Earl’s Task Force on Comparable Worth. The panel’s 261-page report presented research findings, policy recommendations and legislation that was subsequently enacted. For his effort, Dresang is still praised or damned because the changes that came about included new job descriptions and more pay for many women in Wisconsin government.
In the classroom, Dresang teaches two courses for La Follette, Public Management and Personnel Management, and he developed Advanced Public Management. Three of his textbooks are standards: Politics and Policy in American States and Communities, co-author James J. Gosling, now in its sixth edition; Public Personnel Management and Public Policy retitled Personnel Management in Government Agencies and Nonprofit Organizations for the fifth edition; and the Public Administration Workbook, co-author Mark W. Huddleston, sixth edition.
Dresang has advised federal agencies, state units in Alaska and Iowa, and governmental units in South Korea and Eastern Europe. Continuing to serve the State of Wisconsin and help its public managers improve employee relations, Dresang:
- worked with the City of Madison and Dane County on good government, pay equity and the merger of their public health departments;
- collaborated with many of Wisconsin’s 11 Indian tribes on a variety of issues, including special training projects with the Ho-Chunk, Menominee and Lac du Flambeau Chippewa;
- ran, for 10 years, a class on gangs and youth violence that visited almost 50 Wisconsin communities to help form teams to address this major public health issue;
- directed a project in 2004-05 that recommended how the Wisconsin State Supreme Court could overhaul its personnel administration; and
- has been the primary organizer, for 15 years, with the Council of State Governments to give leadership training to legislators as part of the Bowhay Institute for Legislative Leadership Development. Nearly half of all Wisconsin
legislators have participated since its inception.
Dresang is the La Follette School faculty member behind an annual six-week leadership program for mid-career women that La Follette and Wisconsin Women in Government sponsor. More than 160 women from around the state have participated to improve their skills in management, networking and leadership to help them advance their careers. His work with WWIG earned him a spot on stage at the group’s 2006 meeting, where Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton named him an “honorary woman” for his work on leadership, equity and pay issues for women.
In learning how governmental systems operate, Dresang has uncovered inequities and made recommendations for improvement. “My interest in removing barriers faced by women and minorities is personal, part of my value system,” he says. “Inequities in pay or access to government should be addressed. Inequities are an injustice.”