Edwin Dorn, Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs
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[Edwin Dorn has served as dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs since 1997, when this article was written.] The dean's office of the LBJ School of Public Affairs is bounded by a wall of windows on the west side. It is bright and spacious and looks out onto the limestone courtyard and the LBJ Library. In late August [1997], the office, now occupied by Edwin Dorn, former Under Secretary of Defense, is well-appointed, though the move is not quite complete. Leaning against the walls are various framed items on the floor. Some were cracked in the trip from the Pentagon, including a print from a painting called "Endangered Species" of a black boy sitting on a stoop, and a large color map of the former Soviet Union. 
"I will tell you a story about that map," Dorn says as he leans back in his chair, folding his hands and bringing his index fingers to a point. "That is a very high-quality map, which, if it were available in a map store or a book store in the U.S., would cost $30 to $40. I got it in downtown Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in around 1988, and it cost the equivalent of $2 in rubles," he explains in clear, concise English with no hint of Texas accent. "That $2 map cost me about $100 to frame, but there is a larger lesson here." He pauses, hands still folded. "You cannot sustain an economy when you spend 70 years selling $40 maps for $2 and when you continue to sell bread and everything else for considerably less than it costs to make it. The amazing thing about the Soviet Union is not that it broke up, but that it didn't break up much sooner." . . .Born in Crockett, Texas, and raised just outside of Houston, Dorn has spent little time in Texas since he left in 1967. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in government before going to England to study as a Fulbright Scholar. He later received an M.A. in African Studies from Indiana University and went on to earn a Ph.D. in political science from Yale. Dorn says he considers Houston home in a sense, but that he also considers Austin home because it was there that he had many important experiences. "It was here that I voted in my first national election, here that I participated in my first protest demonstration, here that I drank my first beer, legally, down at Scholz's when they offered a free pitcher when you turned 21. But also, importantly, it was here that I made a commitment to public service, and that is much of what I have spent the last 20 years in Washington doing." Dorn left his position as Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, where he served for four years, to return to UT Austin. A presidentially appointed position, the Under Secretary serves as the Defense Secretary's senior advisor on recruitment, training, pay, and benefits for the nation's largest workforce. As such, Dorn exercised authority over the $15 billion Defense Health Program, the $5 billion Commissary Agency, a large K-12 school system, a major social science research organization, and the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. 
Hans Mark, former UT System chancellor and former Secretary of the Air Force, believes Dorn's experience in the Pentagon and the skill with which he served will provide a fresh and valuable perspective for the LBJ School. "What is important for the LBJ School is we have someone as dean now who is not somehow related to Lyndon Johnson and that legacy," says Mark. "LBJ was a great president and his wife is a very great lady, but the time has come to bring in someone who has a different perspective and does things differently and Ed Dorn is the guy to do that." Dorn is not sure what the transition from the Department of Defense to the LBJ School will be like. "I am interested in seeing what the differences are. In any organization, the big challenge is figuring out how you elicit the support and cooperation of your colleagues. There is a way in which you go about this and I think the basic techniques are the same whether we are talking about an infantry company or a huge bureaucracy like the Pentagon or an academic environment." 
Max Sherman, outgoing dean, says . . . "Dorn will bring a significant Washington base to the office and I think that will help open some doors, or open them a little wider, for the school and its students," he says. . . .Dorn is no novice at negotiating delicate issues such as civil rights. According to Hans Mark, Dorn expertly served the Department of Defense during a period when the department faced some crucial questions on race and gender relations as well as issues such as the "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy on homosexuals in the military. Before working for the Defense Department, Dorn was a senior staff member at the Brookings Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., where he wrote Brookings Review articles and op-ed pieces on military personnel issues. He is the editor of Who Defends America? (Joint Center Press, 1989) and the author of Rules and Racial Equality(Yale University Press, 1979), as well as dozens of articles, research reports, and op-ed pieces. 
When asked what implications the end of the Cold War has had for public policy students, Dorn says, "The Soviet Union has receded as a concern, and that means other things have become more apparent to us. We still have got to pay a lot of attention to the international environment, because it increasingly affects our daily lives, whether the issue is public health, or product quality, or worker safety." Dorn doesn't necessarily agree with the idea that Americans are more comfortable with a single, monolithic threat. "I think it was Bernard Malamud who wrote in The Fixer that people are more easily mobilized by their fears than by their hopes. Still, you can mobilize people around hopes. The Civil Rights movement was an example of that. Martin Luther King was able to mobilize people around the hope of racial justice," he says. . . . "Can we do the same thing about . . . challenges like education or health care, I don't know. But that is what we need to do." By Rachael Shaw Jones, excerpted from The Alcalde magazine article (November/December 1997) Learning to say "jump": the lesson of a lifetimeBy Edwin Dorn "C'mon, now, son, jes' say 'jump.' " He was a large man, his Texas drawl exaggerated by alcohol. Somebody at the party had told him that the maid's nephew couldn't talk. He found me in the kitchen where my aunt was working. Staggering through large, theatrical gestures, he folded his handkerchief to look like a tiny rabbit with big white ears. Then, he beckoned for me to come closer. "See, son. I got this li'l rabbit in mah hand. Wanna see 'im jump? Well, say it. Tell the rabbit to jump." "Ghuh." I couldn't get the j and the p to come out. "Hey, boy, you're not tryin'." He called one of the other guests into the kitchen. "Say 'jump'." The woman drawled "jump" and the cloth rabbit flew up from the man's hand. Mocking applause came from the small crowd that had begun to gather. The man glared at me. "Now, say what she said." "GHUH!" This went on for a while, as guest after guest made the rabbit jump. I felt trapped at one end of the hot, narrow kitchen as they closed in, pounding me with a single repetitive sound. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump. Afterwards, my aunt tried to console me. "He didn't mean no harm, Edwin. He wanted to help. He thought you weren't trying." I was. A speech therapist gave me pronunciation exercises. She started with phonetic sounds, which I was supposed to repeat dozens of times each morning before school, and each afternoon. After a few months, we moved on to syllables. Then whole words. By the sixth grade, I had graduated to sentences: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers, Peter Piper picked." By the time I entered junior high school, I spoke in se-pa-rate syl-la-bles. My odd speech would elicit giggles from polite classmates and ridicule from the rest. My seventh-grade civics teacher, sensing my reluctance to speak up in class, decided that the solution was more practice with public speaking. So he contrived to have me announce the results of our student council election. As soon as the first words were out of my mouth, the titters started in the auditorium. By the time I finished, the whole student body was laughing. I became so distracted that I misread the results and had to do the whole thing over again, setting off another uproar. It was nearly two years before I could be suckered into that kind of practice again. A young lawyer named Barbara Jordan was the guest speaker at my ninth-grade graduation ceremony, and I had to introduce her. When Ms. Jordan began to speak, I noticed that her diction was very precise. No one laughed at the way she spoke, though. Standing on the stage at Miller Junior High School that warm spring day, Barbara Jordan offered ringing proof that "talking proper" was okay. I was inspired to keep practicing. In high school, I could get whole sentences to sound spontaneous. I could talk to girls. During college, the sharp-edged syllables became smoother, more pleasant to the ear. The woman who became my wife said that the first thing that attracted her to me was my voice. My story carries a clear lesson about persistence and hard work. So I use it on my three young daughters. When they're having trouble with school work or music lessons, I tell them they just have to try harder. But I would be doing my children a disservice if, by stressing personal effort, I disregarded the other factors at work. I know from humiliating experience that a lack of performance is not the same as a lack of effort; and I know how hurtful it is when the former is unfairly attributed to the latter. Lots of children have handicaps. Some, like mine, are obvious; others are more subtle. Dealing with them requires hard work, a lot of support and, most important, a willingness to acknowledge the problem. In this country, for example, the inability to speak standard American English is a handicap. We often treat people with language problems the way many of us used to treat people with physical handicaps -- with impatience, avoidance, and exclusion. I, too, can be impatient with people who fail to learn seemingly simple things. It drives me crazy to hear teenagers say "ax." Why don't their teachers take time to teach them to pronounce the word "ask"?' Don't these kids understand that "ax" is a marker many employers use to decide which job applicants to consider seriously, and which to turn away? I can work myself into a lather over such simple failures until I remember that, once upon a time, I couldn't say "jump." To judge people fairly, it is not enough to know where they are. You also need to know how far they've had to come.
This op-ed article appeared in The Austin American-Statesman (May 27, 1997). Reprinted with permission.
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