Nonprofit expert named to Bantle Chair

Steven Rathgeb Smith, a prominent expert on nonprofit organizations, public management and social policy, has been named to fill the Louis A. Bantle Chair in Business and Government Policy at the Maxwell School. Smith, currently the Evans Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, will join the school in the fall.

“Steve Smith is an internationally recognized leader in the field of nonprofit organizations and public-private partnerships,” says Maxwell School Dean James Steinberg. “As our new Bantle Chair holder, he will allow us to build an even stronger research and teaching capacity in this increasingly important area of public policy.”

Smith has been a faculty member at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington since 1996. He spent 2009-2011 teaching at Georgetown University’s Georgetown Public Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and has also taught at Duke University, American University and Washington University at St. Louis. Smith has published extensively, including “Government and Regulation in the Third Sector” (Routledge, 2010); “Old Assumptions, New Realities: Economic Security for 21st Century Working Families” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010); and “Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting” (Harvard University Press, 1993).

He is past president of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action and former editor of its journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Smith serves on the editorial boards of eight journals and is a member of a number of professional organizations, including the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, the American Political Science Association, the Public Management Research Association and the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management. Smith earned a Ph.D. in political science at MIT in 1988.

“I am very excited to be joining the Maxwell School and very honored to be the new Louis A. Bantle Chair in Business and Government,” says Smith. “I look forward to working with the entire Maxwell community.”

Among the previous holders of the Bantle Chair are Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute; retired Gen. Montgomery Meigs (USA); and Sean O’Keefe, chairman and CEO of EADS North America, who served formerly as president of Louisiana State University and administrator of NASA.