J. Patrick Dobel

September 15, 1948 - January 29, 2025

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

Professor Dobel 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 was the author of several academic award winning articles as well as many others on public leadership, ethics, and integrity. He gave the Spencer Lecture in Public Ethics at the University of Arizona and the Cresse Lecture on Public Ethics at Florida State University. He was named the John and Marguerite Walker Corbally Professor in Public Service at the University of Washington in 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 chaired numerous public commissions including the King County Ethics Board and the Ethics Commission of the Port of Seattle, and served on the Seattle Ethics and Election Commission. He consulted widely on integrity, management, and leadership issues to numerous public and nonprofit agencies.

Professor Dobel passed away on January 29, 2025.