From music to city management, Rob Baker, professor of political science, inspires students to pursue public administration and help make government better.
by Karen Saatkamp Gerboth ’93, portrait by Erin Pence ’04
As a middle school student growing up in southeast Missouri, Rob Baker watched the news with an intensity that proved in sharp contrast to his peers. The news, he discovered, always seemed to show people making important decisions, and for Baker, that realization ignited a love of politics.
“Nothing happens in the world without politics,” he says. “Successful people understand that politics affects every place, every arena.”
Baker’s remarkable ability to help his students understand and appreciate this fact, and then go out and play an active role in public administration and politics clearly captured the attention of colleagues, alumni and students who recently nominated him for Wittenberg’s top faculty prize, the Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching, which he received in April.
Established in 1960, the award recognizes superior classroom teaching at Wittenberg, a field Baker had actually not planned to pursue in college.
“I was a music major at first, having played the trombone for years,” he says. “I just couldn’t write music well enough to make a living at it.”
With his constant engagement in news of the day – he even debated his neighbor friend at the age of 8 over his family’s political preference during the 1968 presidential election – Baker soon found himself gravitating away from music and toward politics, specifically at the local level.
“I had worked on the campaign of a friend who was a Boy Scout leader, and I enjoyed that,” he recalls.
A few years later while an undergraduate at Central Methodist College, Baker found himself presented with a unique opportunity in city management. His senior year, the city of Slater, Mo., current population 1,926, offered him a paid internship.
“As a 22-year-old thrown into city management, I saw the benefits of that experience,” Baker says. “It helped me to learn to negotiate issues and find solutions.”
That experience, combined with later work as Slater’s official acting city manager and a teaching assistantship while in graduate school, forced Baker to re-evaluate his life goals.
“As I examined it all, I decided to enter the Ph.D. program and go full-time into academia,” he says. The decision included selling his prized trombone and turning down the official city manager position in Slater.
Now in his 25th year at Wittenberg, Baker has never looked back on his decision to teach, nor has his gratitude waned with respect to having the chance to teach at Wittenberg.
“The political science program at Wittenberg provides a wonderful well- rounded experience for students, giving them an advantage in graduate schools and in the workplace,” Baker says. “We also try to do different things in the classroom.”
For Baker, John Dewey’s quote, “We learn best by doing,” has influenced his own style of teaching.
“Hands-on learning helps students see how it all works as active participants in the process,” he says.
With that in mind, when the university built Hollenbeck Hall, which houses the political science department and all the humanities, Baker specifically requested that one classroom be designed to resemble a legislative chamber or city council forum in order to enhance the simulations he conducts in two of his classes.
Baker also started engaging students in the concept of bureaucracy.
“One of my greatest delights is to hook students into the notion that in spite of its problems, bureaucracy can actually be a force for progressive change, and to open their minds to the role and power of it,” he says.
In addition, Baker, along with his colleague Jeff Ankrom, professor of economics, started the first-ever local government internship program to change a trend he was seeing.
“There was and continues to be a generational crisis in local government as more people retire and fewer young people pursue the field,” he said.
Following the local program’s success, Baker worked with the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) to bring the program under its wings. The first ICMA Local Government Management Program took place in 2005, and Baker and Ankrom continue to play leadership roles in the eight-week program, which took place in Amery, Wisc., this year.
Consisting of an internship component and a class/seminar component, the program places students as interns in a host local government department where they are given one or more projects to complete by the end of the program. Previous locations include River Falls, Wisc., Meredith, N.H., and Fernandina Beach, Fla.
Add to his teaching and hands-on field experiences with his students Baker’s own return to the trombone – for his 50th birthday his wife bought him a trombone so that, in the words of his high school choir teacher, he “would never let music out of his life” – and the well-rounded approach to living clearly defines Baker as much as it does his students.
“I love it here.”