Top of Mind: Doug Jones
Dialogue with Doug Jones: The Pentagon Papers
Faculty Emeritus Doug Jones was an administrative assistant to then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel when Gravel read thousands of pages of the Pentagon Papers into the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds. He remembers the era in this 2018 conversation with Glenn College Distinguished Adjunct Professor William Shkurti.
After receiving his doctorate in economics and fulfilling his promise as a professor at the Air Force Academy, he served as chief economist to President Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Committee for Developing Alaska following the 1964 earthquake — still the strongest ever recorded in North America — and then special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce for regional economic development.
At the end of the Johnson administration, then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel asked Jones to be his administrative assistant, leading to a public service experience he never could have anticipated. When Gravel decided to publicly release the Vietnam War Pentagon Papers in 1971, reading them into the Congressional Record at a subcommittee meeting, Jones and three other staffers spent the previous night reviewing and redacting security information from the thousands of pages.
I always thought it was an example of where in public service, as a dutiful public servant, sometimes you’re unintentionally in the middle of pretty big-time stuff.
Doug Jones, Glenn College Faculty Emeritus
“Doug Jones made the NRRI into a nationally recognized, reliable, trusted source of expert policy analysis at a time of turmoil in utility regulation,” said Vivian Witkind Davis, a 1982 graduate of the Glenn College PhD program who worked with Jones as a researcher and associate director at NRRI. “He conducted and managed decades of impartial, always thorough research that commissions routinely used in their consideration of alternative policy choices that made big differences for markets and consumers. During his service as NRRI director, Doug was a giant in the U.S regulatory community, known and respected everywhere. Working for him was a high challenge and greatly satisfying because we always knew we were serving a public need well.”
Padma Sastry, PhD, Public Policy and Management, 2006
Dr. Doug Jones, who corrected me once to call him Doug: Nothing makes me smile more than remembering his classes at 5 to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. As a PhD candidate, I had signed up for a series of three courses themed on regulation spanning over a year. I would be exhausted after a full day of work only to awaken to rapt attention, completely absorbed in his insightful class full of discussions, court visits to watch a congressional debate or its kin, and lectures by a renowned government official on the nuances within. But Doug was kind enough to always treat us with cupcakes or a sweet that would be duly devoured with eagerness.
Doug was a stickler for perfection, conciseness and brevity in what the class produced — an essay, a response to a current affair question and ultimately my own dissertation. Over multiple trips and poring over each word I had carefully penned, he would still find fixes to be made in what finally ended up as a more than 300-page document. All with a smile and often a suggestion of his own, and for chuckles, occasional tidbits of his recent stay at his summer house on the East Coast.
“Doug cared.”
Padma Sastry, PhD, public policy and management, 2006
When my graduation approached and my committee chair was unavailable, Doug offered to hood me in his stead.
Years after my graduation, he and I worked on research papers together, many in his office filled with his treasures and often in the Faculty Club.
A staunch believer in democracy and good regulation (as he would refer to it), his values opened and expanded my own over the many years I had the privilege of working with him. Always there to support and encourage me to go beyond my aspirations, his references led me to multiple opportunities that would not otherwise have come my way.
I continue to look forward to meeting with Doug, our interesting dialogue and, as always, leaving with fresh insightful thoughts.
Bruce Weston, Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, retired
More than 40 years ago, at the beginning of my career in utility consumer protection, I became one of the many Ohio State students taught principled government regulation of monopoly utilities by Professor Doug Jones. At the time, I was a law student and legal intern at the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel. His teachings — for regulating utility services that are essential to the welfare of the public — reflect a career of instruction in how government officials can live up to their duty to regulate the powerful and influential utility industry.
Of course, few failures to protect the public are more egregious than the recent government and industry corruption involving FirstEnergy — which Professor Jones described as “sordid” in his 2020 letter to the editor of the Columbus Dispatch. My grounding in the regulatory principles taught by Professor Jones stood me well, as the then-Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, in opposing House Bill 6 and requesting its veto, then asking for its repeal, and in seeking reforms of the PUCO. Professor Jones’ lessons for protection of utility consumers, spanning almost half a century, have never been more needed than in Ohio government now.
Over the decades, Professor Jones and I kept in contact. And he invited me to guest-lecture in his classes on a number of occasions. Further, I read and learned from the research papers on public-interest utility regulation issued by the then-National Regulatory Research Institute that Professor Jones headed for years.
Professor Jones was one of the faculty members who nominated me for the 2023 John Glenn Outstanding Public Service Award. The award is a great honor for me, as I retired from public service as the Director of the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.