ABSTRACT
The emphasis on evaluating program and policy efficacy, in its turn, occasioned a transformation of public administration schools into graduate programs in public policy. Mark T. Lilla is correct in urging that an administrator's moral education requires an appreciation of generally agreed-upon virtues. Moral education teaches, and if need be preaches, that virtues exist in tension with one another. The changed ethos recognizes the administrator's accountability to legitimate political authority. It also appreciates the radically pluralistic context and wicked nature of contemporary administrative problems that often serve to obscure the very nature of political accountability. Being politically responsible in this context means to be cognizant of the dominant societal values as expressed not only through the pronouncements of whichever current regime but also through the law and society's history. To be politically responsible is also to be responsibly political. Although the politics/administration dichotomy has long been discredited, both a conceptual and real-world difference between the two remains.
