Blue Wooldridge is elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration

By Michael Ford
University News Services

A faculty member from Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a non-partisan organization that provides policy advice to local, state, national and international government leaders.

Blue E. Wooldridge, D.P.A., associate professor of government and public affairs, will be formally introduced and inducted into the academy at the group’s fall meeting in Arlington, Va., on Nov. 17. Wooldridge has worked with the academy as an associate member for the past three years.

“The National Academy of Public Administration has made an excellent and deserving choice in its election of Dr. Wooldridge,” said VCU’s Robert D. Holsworth, Ph.D., interim dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences and director of the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. “He is an outstanding scholar and researcher who has shared his expertise in budget and financial management, human resource management and work force diversity with state, local and international government bodies in more than a dozen countries.”

Founded in 1967, the academy is an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan corporation composed of 550 fellows. Academy members are elected by their peers and include the nation’s top policy makers, public administrators and distinguished scholars of public policy with extensive experience in a variety of issues at the highest levels of public service. The fellows include current or former cabinet officers, members of Congress, governors, mayors, city managers, state lawmakers and diplomats.

“The academy is involved in the most vital and complex governance issues facing our nation, and we look forward to your active participation in our work,” wrote Valerie A. Lemmie, chair of the board of directors of the National Academy of Public Administration, and C. Morgan Kinghorn, the organization’s president. “You join an impressive number of individuals elected this year based on your outstanding leadership and devotion to the cause of effective public administration.”

For more than 30 years Wooldridge has designed and delivered workshops for elected and appointed officials at all levels of government. He has conducted numerous training programs for domestic and international elected and public officials, including groups in Armenia, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Jamaica, Thailand, Hungary, Macedonia and the Czech Republic.

A member of the VCU faculty since 1987, Wooldridge teaches graduate courses in public and nonprofit management and organizational behavior. He also teaches undergraduate courses in urban government and politics and public policy.

His current research interests include strategies for increasing the effectiveness of management education and training; issues in privatization; trends in local government revenues; procedure and content of local government budgets; strategies to improve productivity; and implications for public managers of the increased diversity of the work force.

Wooldridge is a member of the Government Finance Officers Association, the Academy of Management, the Commonwealth Association of Public Administration and Management and the American Society for Public Administration. In 1988, he was a Fulbright visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Wooldridge received a doctorate in public administration and a master’s of public administration from the University of Southern California. He also received a master’s of governmental administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree from Berea College in Kentucky.