David H. Rosenbloom, SPA Distinguished Professor and internationally acclaimed expert on public administration, will be serving as a visiting professor at Renmin University of China (RUC) in Beijing as part of China’s Thousand Talents program. 

Rosenbloom will be in residence at RUC during the spring and summer of academic years 2017, 2018, and part of 2019. He will teach at SPA during the fall semesters. 

Rosenbloom said he is “excited about this opportunity to work with faculty and students on public administration theory building, research, and education in China.” His appointment is a return engagement: He has visited RUC many times, and in the mid-2000s, conducted an intensive, six-day seminar on human resource management there. This time, Rosenbloom especially looks forward to collaborating with fellow professors and working with doctoral students over a longer period of time. 

In the mid-1990s, a textbook Rosenbloom co-authored, Personnel Management in Government, was translated into Chinese. A second text, Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector, was translated in 2003; now in its eighth edition, it is widely used in Master of Public Administration programs throughout China and was ranked as the fifth most influential book published in U.S. public administration from 1990 to 2010. Two other co-authored texts – Constitutional Competence for Public Managers: Cases and Commentary and Public Administration and Law– were translated into Chinese in 2006 and 2007, respectively. 

China’s Thousand Talents Plan, also known as the National Recruitment Program of Global Experts, seeks to recruit foreign scholars to work on long-term or short-term programs across the nation. Launched in 2011, it aims to recruit 1,000 international experts by 2021, with targets of 50 to 100 people each year. 

Rosenbloom has considerable experience in international academia – he has taught at Tel Aviv University (1971 to 1973) and City University of Hong Kong (2009 to 2010) – and he said teaching abroad is “always very enlightening and rewarding because it generates different ways of thinking about common administrative problems and practices.” Still, he has a particular fondness for this assignment. “I greatly enjoy visiting China and interacting with Chinese faculty and students,” he said, adding that “the Chinese take public administrative education very seriously” and he expects this visit to be “fascinating, productive, and also lots of fun.” 

Rosenbloom earned his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1969. Before joining the SPA faculty in 1990, he served as an assistant professor in political science at the University of Kansas from 1969 to 1971 and assistant and associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont from 1973 to 1978. From 1978 to 1990, he was on the faculty of The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he held a number of titles: professor of public administration, courtesy professor of political science, and adjunct professor of law. In 1988, he became the first faculty member at the Maxwell School ever appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor. 

A fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Rosenbloom has received numerous awards, including the Whittington Award for excellence in teaching, the Gaus Award for exemplary scholarship in political science and public administration, the Waldo Award for outstanding contributions to the literature and leadership of public administration, the Levine Award for excellence in public administration, and the Brownlow Award for his book, Building a Legislative-Centered Public Administration. 

Rosenbloom is perhaps best known for developing a framework for understanding public administration in three perspectives that reflect the constitutional separation of powers: politics, management, and law. He served on the Clinton-Gore Presidential Transition Team for the Office of Personnel Management in 1992 and has testified before Senate committees. His first book, Federal Service and the Constitution, was cited in two U.S. Supreme Court cases as an authoritative source on the history of federal employees’ First Amendment rights.

Rosenbloom was editor-in-chief of Public Administration Review from 1991 to 1996 and has served on the editorial boards of more than 20 academic journals. In 2011, Rosenbloom became editor-in-chief of the CRC Series in Public Administration and Public Policy. At AU, Rosenbloom served as chair of the Faculty Senate in academic year 2004-2005 and as acting department chair the following year.