School That Teaches Future Politicians the Rules of the Game Gets Students’ Votes

NEW YORK — When Marguerite Chandler, a successful businesswoman in New Jersey, tried to persuade her community last year to build a shelter for the homeless, she said she “hit a brick wall.”

She was arguing the morality of the issue, but for the county board, “it was purely a political decision,” Chandler said.

So she set out to learn the rules of the game of politics.

Now, she and 25 other students have earned diplomas from the Graduate School of Political Management, the inaugural class at what bills itself as “the nation’s first degree program in professional politics.”

The school’s dean, Christopher Arterton, said there has been a “tremendous commercialization of politics” and a transfer of power from “party elites to people whose services can be bought.”

And just as MBA programs sprang up to train legions of recruits for the tough new world of business, the politics school hopes to turn out the campaign consultants and lobbyists of the future.

“Why promote myths?” said Neil Fabricant, the school’s president and principal founder. The new politics is “something we have to live with.”

But does America need a graduate school devoted to teaching future politicians and lobbyists how to conduct and read polls, how to design and produce a TV commercial, how to raise the money?

Wanted to Learn From Pros

“I would have given anything to learn from the pros,” said George Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater. He plans to teach at the school after the Nov. 8 election.

This fall’s class includes two actors, a prosthodontist and a former member of Parliament from an eastern Caribbean island who wants to put his degree to use back home.

Classes are held at Baruch College in lower Manhattan, but the school, which is chartered by the New York state Board of Regents, is not affiliated with any institution.

Tuition is $13,200 for the one-year, full-time program; $16,200 if you stretch it out over two years.

The faculty consists mainly of political entrepreneurs, such as Douglas Bailey, a one-time consultant to former President Gerald R. Ford.

Efforts are made to be nonpartisan, say students and administrators. Guest lecturers have included union leaders and political activists from such groups as national right-to-life organizations.

Contacts the students make through the school are considered a strong selling point. “The networking alone would have been worth the money,” Chandler said.

Political Technology

The school hopes make accessible to more people the “political technology (which) is now a condition of participating in political life,” Fabricant said.

Of the 30 students in this fall’s incoming class, 10 are women. Five are black and two are Latino. The school advertises in minority-oriented newspapers and offers scholarships to minority students, Fabricant said. Most students receive some financial aid, mainly loans.

School officials say its goals include raising the moral level of politics by focusing on professional responsibility.

“No professional ethic ever emerges out of the profession itself. You need a professional school, especially in this area (because) you can’t bar anyone from . . . participating in politics,” Fabricant said. “It can’t be a licensed activity, unlike medicine or law.”

Still, teaching ethics can be difficult in a school for politics.

The New Republic attacked the school in a July cover story titled “The School for Sleazeballs: Training America’s future influence-peddlers, media manipulators and political hacks.”

“ ‘Professionalism,’ ” according to the article, “is the means by which professionals achieve maximum income with minimum accountability.”

But Marty Linsky, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said “politics has always been a mix of . . . motives.”

Whether the school proves to have a positive or negative influence depends on how its curriculum develops, he said. “If the school didn’t teach them why to use (political skills) as well as how, it would be missing part of the education,” he said.