Educational Requirements for Civil Infrastructure Managers: What Should They Know and When Should They Know It?

There was a time, so it is said in the legends, when managing civil infrastructure systems wasa simple matter. You needed a bridge built to connect, say, the growing City of Brooklynwith its neighbor, New York, across the river, and you simply built it. You had expanding neigh-borhoods that required sewer and water mains, and you built those. Politicians made the deals asfar as facility siting and, usually, ran the contracting. Public works managers in those days gen-erally supervised the building and then ran the systems once they were built. But the best peoplefor such a job were generally civil engineers.

Time went on, and public administration became professionalized while corruption lost itsvogue. Now there arose a class of professional technocratic public managers untainted by graft,unable to be bought. They became, or tried to become, the people who made the deals and let thecontracts, this time with the public interest in mind, not personal gain. The public works manag-ers still had to supervise the building and operate and maintain the system once it was built, butstill the best people for such a job were civil engineers.

This is a description of history that is surely far too simplistic. The past was not that uncom-plicated, and the present is not as complicated as it seems. But two things are certain as far aspublic works management is concerned: Public works managers, as is the case for all publicmanagers, are being called upon to be at least a jack, if not a master, of multiple trades, more sothan in even the recent past; and higher education for public works managers is being challengedto keep up with these expanding and shifting demands.

This dialogue will discuss what these new demands consist of and then make some specificproposals as to how traditional civil engineering and public administration curricula may needto shift to meet these demands.