J. Patrick Dobel

J. Patrick Dobel joined the Evans School faculty in 1985. He studies the intersection of politics, institutions, and judgment. He teaches in the MPA and Executive MPA programs. His teaching covers strategy, leadership, public ethics, and public management. His main research explores the integration of values and institutional structure in articles such as “Holy Evil” or “The Beleaguered Ideal: Defending NCAA Amateurism.” More recently he has returned to earlier research on the nature of integrity and political corruption and has also explored the ethics and culture of athletic achievement and competition.

Professor Dobel has served on many university and national committees around the areas of public management, organizational design, and integrity issues. He served as the University of Washington’s Faculty Athletic Representative at the PAC 10 and NCAA, for eight years, overseeing the academic integrity of the athletic program and governance. For five years he published a widely cited blog on the relations among athletics, culture, and ethics at pointofthegame.blogspot.com.

He is the author of several academic award winning articles as well as many others on public leadership, ethics, and integrity. He recently gave the Spencer Lecture in Public Ethics at the University of Arizona and the Cresse Lecture on Public Ethics at Florida State University. He has been the  John and Marguerite Walker Corbally Professor in Public Service at the University of Washington since 2011. His books Compromise and Political Action-Political Morality in Liberal and Democratic Life and Public Integrity are widely taught and study the reality of ethics in public life.

Professor Dobel has chaired numerous public commissions including the King County Ethics Board, and has served on the Seattle Ethics and Election Commission. Presently he chairs the Ethics Commission of the Port of Seattle. He has consulted widely on integrity, management, and leadership issues to numerous public and nonprofit agencies.