By Matthew Kredell
Chester Newland, professor emeritus at the USC Price School of Public Policy, has been named the recipient of the Elmer B. Staats Lifetime Achievement Service Award by the American Society for Public Administration in recognition of his career accomplishments and contributions to public service and ASPA.
Newland received the award in a ceremony on March 9 at the ASPA Annual Conference in Chicago.
“Elmer Staats performed as a life-long exemplar of topmost leadership in public administration,” Newland noted. “This award honors the values and means that he practiced personally and that he broadly facilitated professionally in government.”
Staats, who died in 2011 at age 97, served as deputy director of what is now the Office of Management and Budget under four U.S. presidents. He also served a full 15-year term as Comptroller General of the United States, leading vast changes in the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Newland’s path intersected with Staats during their long public service careers. When Newland served in the 1970s as director of the Federal Executive Institute, the U.S. government’s development center for top-level public executives, Staats was a member of FEI’s board.
“I have been greatly blessed to share, for six decades, in many of the efforts advanced by Elmer to enhance constitutionally democratic government,” Newland noted.
Newland, 84, began at USC in 1966. He taught public administration off and on at the Price School during 46 years, spending time based at USC’s centers in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., in addition to the University Park Campus. He credits the school’s leadership for allowing him a flexible schedule to remain chiefly a practitioner.
Newland served as the initial director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library from 1968-70. In addition, he was national president of ASPA in 1980-81 and served two terms as editor in chief of ASPA’s Public Administration Review.
“Chet Newland’s contributions to ASPA began in the classroom, where he would tell his students that respectable public administrators should be members and have our publication Public Administration Review on their bookshelves,” said Maria P. Aristigueta, president-elect of ASPA who received her doctorate in public administration from USC Price in 1997. “He has been eminently present at every ASPA conference and the consummate host at USC’s reception for many years.”
Newland has also made an enormous international impact on developing countries, most recently through his work with the United Nations Development Programme, helping to establish or refine professional public administration frameworks in Bahrain, Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kuwait and Iraq.
In January, he received a lifetime public service award from the California League of Cities and the California branch of the International City/County Management Association for his outstanding and tireless service to preserve professional local government management in the City of Sacramento.