Jonathan Rauch Keynotes at the Gray Center’s Conference on “The Need for Professionalism”
At a conference last week on bureaucracy and presidential administration hosted by Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Jonathan Rauch, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, gave keynote remarks on “The Need for Professionalism,” which he claims is “an underappreciated concept in American public life.” Drawing upon recent examples of government officials who made headlines by defying orders to do something they considered inappropriate, Rauch argued that “the reigning spirit of our time, on both the left and the right, is a populism that’s hostile to elites, including experts, technocrats, and bureaucrats” but “at many turns, professionals have stymied efforts to put the machinery of government at the disposal of the president’s whims.” Videos of Rauch’s full keynote talk as well as other conference panel sessions will be available on the Gray Center’s website by the end of the month.