2021 Alumni Award Winners

Meet this year’s recipients of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs alumni awards! 

His scholarship has been recognized by the Public Management Research Association, the Network of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, the American Society of Public Administration and the American Political Science Association. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He has also had a distinguished career as an academic administrator and leader. He was the first director of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. He also served as director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse. The first president of the Public Management Research Association, he is a former president of NASPAA, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration. 

Entrepreneurship has always been at the heart of his career, he said. 

“It’s been wonderful to mix an academic career with an institution-building career,” he said, “and frankly these are the skills that I learned and the examples I had before me when I was at Ohio State.” 

His advice to the next generation of academic leaders: Avoid the monoculture. 

“It’s very easy to follow in the footsteps of whoever your mentor is and make very marginal improvements in whatever you are working on as a doctoral student,” he said. “Find your own path. Find things that interest you. It’s a long career. It can get pretty boring if you don’t find new things.” 

She said the Glenn College put her public service career on track and gave her a community for civil discourse as well as working through big questions and challenges. 

“When I graduated, it was really important to me to stay connected to that community, not only because it continues to be that kind of place for me,” she said, “but also because I wanted to support everything the college was doing to make it that kind of place for other students and for people who interact with the college.”  

Now, as a faculty member at Chicago State University, she conducts research and offers courses on criminal justice administration while still finding time to conduct applied work, most notably as a police practice and community engagement expert for the Ferguson, Missouri, Consent Decree Monitoring Team. 

Anderson says she wants to work with criminal justice entities to provide policy recommendations to solve their challenges, and she’s driven to success by staying loyal to her passion.  

“This isn’t, ‘You only live one life, so go out and do what you do,’” she said. “This is more, ‘What really invigorates you to actually go after what it is that you’re looking for and make change?’ We’re not necessarily always in a space where we can be agents of change. So there are down times when we learn, and then there are times when we get up and we go.”