The splendid March 2025 issue of Public Management introducing Julia D. Novak as the association’s CEO/executive director includes an important, well-informed article by her and Jan Perkins, “Fifty Years of Aspirations for Women in Public Administration.”

I would like to share a story that further demonstrates changed understandings since some 60+ years ago. In the early 1960s, Charldean Newell, who a few decades later became the author/editor of ICMA’s famous greenbook, The Effective Local Government Manager, was a student in the city management program at North Texas State University in Denton, near her hometown of Fort Worth. 

Blessed to be her professor, in hopes of arranging an internship for Charldean, I made an appointment with Perry Cookingham, whom I knew from his years in Kansas City, Missouri, before he became Fort Worth’s city manager. Perry was often referred to back then as the dean among professional city managers.

Following my explanation of Charldean Newell’s outstanding merits, Perry told me no, that his Fort Worth city council would not allow him to have a woman intern, thinking that “women have no place in city management and never will.”

Charldean Newell’s efforts then turned to admission to doctoral study at the University of Texas at Austin, although such graduate study was generally barred to women at the time. Charldean succeeded in overcoming barriers and completing her PhD with distinction. Dr. Newell then returned to the North Texas faculty, where she became a leading author, teacher, and advisor in the advancement of public administration broadly, especially including local government management and ICMA’s leadership of the field. She was instrumental in  the development of various ICMA educational programs and the ICMA Voluntary Credentialing Program.

Inclusiveness of gender, racial, and social diversity became an aspiration for enlightened civilization in the 1960s. It broadened slowly via such exemplars as Charldean Newell and Jan Perkins, and now Julia D. Novak at ICMA. It is central to other aspirations in search for reasonableness and human dignity, broadly understood under Constitutional rule of law. 

While these values are endangered in today’s historically troubled times for responsible civic culture, politics, and professional public administration, ICMA continues to strengthen them.

CHESTER A. (CHET) NEWLAND, a long-time city manager and academic, has been an ICMA member since 1967 and an ICMA Honorary Member since 1980.