Papers presented by Brent Cebul since 2019

2022 Mexico City

"The Origins of White-Collar Interning: Entrepreneurial Public Administrators, Cash-Strapped Universities, and the New Deal Roots of Substituting Experience for Pay "

Abstract:

This paper locates origins of the modern, private white-collar internship in the growing New Deal administrative state and the emergence of entrepreneurial, growth-oriented private universities and philanthropies concerned with fostering “realistic,” “impartial” public administrators. The explosion of New Deal agencies coincided with the maturation of the field of public administration. Blocked by an arch-conservative Comptroller General, an appointee of the Harding administration, New Dealers were unable to establish administrative training programs within emerging agencies. Liberals instead turned to civil society – the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Institute of Public Affairs (NIPA), and American University, chief among them – to create not only “in-service” training programs for inexperienced federal officers, but also graduate and undergraduate training and internship programs designed to recruit promising public servants to Washington. By the 1940s, American University, which had earlier been teetering on the brink of insolvency, adapted the NIPA’s model of graduate internships and in-service programs to anchor a postwar strategic growth plan focused on winning philanthropic grants, federal contracts, and other universities’ tuition dollars. Its pioneering Washington Semester Program, begun in 1945, placed students in federal agencies as well as lobbying associations, polling firms, newspapers, radio, and television stations, the DNC and RNC. By 1954, 71 colleges sent 200 students to American University each semester, predating the 1960s’ boom in similar programs begun with McGeorge Bundy’s “Harvard in Washington” program. This paper illuminates a number of interrelated developments: how did these developments relate to the Fair Labor Standards Act’s exceptions for “trainees” over time (e.g., after its clarification in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co., 1947)? How did distinct but converging ideas about low wage or wage-less white collar work, compensated instead by public spiritedness and/or the opportunity to gain networks and experience move from the public to the private sector?

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