This short video of Valerie Lemmie senior advisor for state and local government at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, a longtime public administrator, a former city manager, a public state utility commissioner and a congressional aide, was one of eight we filmed at the American Society for Public Administration’s annual conference in Hollywood, California between March 20 and March 24^th. 

In this video, Lemmie, a self-described “pracademic,” voices her concerns about the fate of democracy. “I am worried that this generation of managers will not be prepared to understand how you manage in a situation where democracy is under threat and how you engage everyday people in the work that is required for us to sustain and grow our democracy.”

As she says, “I am really stunned to see how quickly the guardrails of our democracy can fall by the wayside unless we recognize and know our history. . . and secondarily to learn what to do when we start to see the guardrails slip away.”

Part of the route to establishing these guardrails, she argues, is through good preparation. “I am at times surprised how little our graduate students know about civics and then I am reminded that we don’t teach it in school anymore, you don’t learn it in high school. You don’t learn it in college. And so, it’s incumbent upon you, who are preparing for the profession (in public administration) to learn the history. . . “

As she concludes, “I am encouraging and imploring, particularly young people but all of us to . . . have the courage and the willingness to fight together for something that is as important as democracy. The world has followed us in moving toward democracy. We can’t let them down, we can’t let ourselves down, and we certainly can’t let the next generation down.”