An Intellectual Decline? The Ford Foundation’s decision had a quick and hard impact. In 1973, CAG was disbanded and, in the following year, the field’s major journal ceased publication. 65 By the mid – 1970s, courses in comparative and development administration were almost never taken by students;66 by the mid – 1990s, only 14 percent of graduate programs even offered comparative administration;67 and, over three years in the nineties, five major public administration journals published just five articles devoted to cross – cultural administration.68
This is regrettable, as comparative and development administration can illuminate American public administration. As one of its giants put it, “Ultimately we can overcome this [American] ethnocentrism only by learning to view our own American system of public administration in a comparativecontext.”69
There is hope of a renaissance. Comparative and development administration appears to be more practitioner- and policy-oriented than in the past, although “the field as a whole” still “lacks features that give it clear identity,” and its “overall status . . . remains ambiguous.”70 If. However, a renaissance is not realized, then it might become the field’s sad fate to serve merely as an example of scholarly hubris: “Public administration should take full notice of the fact that comparative administration should take full notice of the fact that comparative administration’s failure rests substantially on a self-imposed failure experience. It set an unattainable goal . . . in its early and persisting choice to seek a comprehensive theory . . . in terms of which to define itself”71