Shortly after resigning as associate director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in February 1995, Christopher Edley Jr. prepared to resume teaching duties at Harvard Law School, where he had been tenured since 1986. But before he could leave the government, Edley was approached by White House officials who wanted him to chair a high-profile, interagency working group on affirmative action.

Edley considered the assignment a risky one. At the time, the national news media was reporting that affirmative action had become one of the most divisive issues in the country. Controversial lawsuits challenging it were pending in the federal courts. President Bill Clinton had come under pressure to make clear to the nation where his administration stood on the topic.

Nonetheless, Edley realized his political experiences -- spanning from the Carter presidential campaign of 1976 to the Dukakis presidential campaign to the Clinton Administration's OMB -- had brought him too far in public life to avoid duty on a policy matter he deemed critically important to the nation. Well-versed in civil rights law and social policy, Edley had believed himself among the best prepared in the Administration to lead such a working group. He feared that his refusal to participate would allow the working group to fall under the domination of staffers less sensitive to affirmative action policies than he. He took the job.

The president followed the recommendation the working group under Edley's leadership and defended affirmative action as morally just and necessary. Clinton won praise from the civil rights community and from observers who applauded his firmness on the issue. Edley, who departed the administration during the summer of 1995, called the experience one of the best he has had in public life. "I wouldn't change a thing," he said.

During the first term of the Clinton Administration, Edley stood out as one of several hundred African Americans holding appointed political position. Yet from the ranks of faculty and administrators at American universities and colleges, Edley found himself belonging to a much smaller category of black appointees. This small but well-placed group of academics-turned-public servants included others such as Drew S. Days III of Yale University Law School, Dr. Walter Broadnax of the University of Maryland, Ron Noble of New York University Law School, Dr. Joycelyn Elders of the University of Arkansas, and current Assistant Secretary of Lahor Dr. Bernard Anderson.

The Clinton Administration has gotten high marks from diversity advocates for its record in hiring minority political appointees. African Americans, in particular, held a record number of political positions -- more than 600 -- in the first term of the Clinton Administration. According to Dr. Yvonne Scruggs, executive director of the Black Leadership Forum at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies that is double the number of African American appointees who served in the Carter Administration, another presidency credited with hiring Blacks in significant numbers.

The road from academe to top-level public service can be very bumpy, however, as can be attested to by law professor Lani Guanier and Spelman College president Johnetta Cole -- each of whom was considered for top posts in the Clinton Administration. The lack of unwavering support for these women from the White House is the reason the pending nomination of Alexis Herman as secretary of labor is seen by many as a litmus test for the extent to which Clinton will stand by his African American nominees.

As President Clinton s second term gets underway, African Americans hold numerous political positions in the administration -- including top jobs at Labor, Transportation, OMB, and the Veterans Department.

The Pros and Cons for Academia

Scruggs, who served in the Carter Administration, believes that too few African Americans in academia try their hand in the national political arena. She feels that more of them should seek federal political appointments. Her view is shared by other former African American federal appointees w ho hail from universities.

Political appointee positions differ from civil service jobs, which are considered nonpolitical and account for the vast majority of all federal positions. When the presidency switches from one party to another, many political appointee jobs become vacant. When a new president is elected but comes from the same party as the former president, he is also likely to fill most political jobs with new hires. And w hen an incumbent president wins re-election, as did Clinton, hundreds of appointees leave jobs that require replacements.

An appointee's position in a presidential administration is considered a notable prize for many thousands of politically active Americans. It can boost an appointee's political standing in his or her community. It also provides experience to many who eventually seek elected office and future appointments. And appointees can later move into comfortable private sector positions.

For those in academia, service in a federally appointed job can prove beneficial to the careers of teachers and administrators, according to Scruggs, who has chaired the City and Regional Planning Studies department at Howard University Aside from the exposure to national policy-making, appointees make valuable contacts with high-level political officials. Scruggs says that her stint in the Carter Administration -- as an Assistant Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development -- helped her become a full professor at Howard and allowed her to collect research data for a dissertation in city and regional planning.

But Scruggs cautions that seeking and holding a federal appointment can turn into a risky enterprise -- particularly for academics.

"These aren't long-term jobs. One must understand clearly the risks. You can fall behind in your effort to get tenure," warns Scruggs, who adds that the struggle by faculty to gain and maintain tenure by meeting publishing and teaching requirements is at odds with pursuing an appointed position -- especially if that means spending time away from the campus in campaigns.

"It really depends upon the individual and what he or she wants to accomplish in public life," says Scruggs, who also advises, "But whatever [those who seek political appointments] do, it should be well-planned. "

"A Life in Public Service"

For the past twenty years, Edley has combined a career in public service with that of law professor. He is the son of Christopher Edley Sr., a former head of the United Negro College Fund, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School, as is the elder Edley.

As a law school student, the younger Edley joined the Carter presidential campaign. After completing his law degree, he worked in the Carter White House and at what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1981, Edley returned to Harvard Law School, where he accepted a teaching job. From that point on, he would use his teaching position at Harvard as a base from which to pursue ventures in national politics.

"The primary thrust of my career has been to pursue a life in public service and to have teaching as a secondary pursuit," Edley says.

The young professor taught law school courses in taxation and national defense policy as a means of immersing himself in the details of complex public policy areas. He specialized in administrative law, which allowed him to use his experiences from the Carter Administration to teach students about the workings of federal agencies. Then in 1987, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis recruited Edley to join his presidential campaign.

Edley, who had worked for Dukakis in the 1982 and 1986 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaigns, turned down a general counsel position offer to become the national issues director for the Dukakis campaign. The job required that Edley oversee a staff to educate the candidate and develop issue positions which the candidate could present during the campaign.

"Had I gone into private practice after the Carter Administration, or followed a typical route as a law professor, I would never have been in a position to become national issues director in the Dukakis campaign," Edley says. "My experience in the Carter Administration and being a law professor steeped in public policy qualified me for the job."

Following the failed Dukakis campaign, Edley returned to Harvard to resume teaching. Not eager to join a national campaign again. Edley sat out the 1992 presidential race. After Clinton's victory, Edley was offered a job on the Clinton transition team, which led to the associate director's job at OMB. After leaving the Clinton Administration, Edley completed a book in 1996 -- entitled, Not All Black or White: Affirmative Action and American Values -- which grew out of his experiences while serving on the special task force on affirmative action.

Since returning to Harvard, Edley has pursued efforts to write and lecture about affirmative action. He is teaching courses which immerse him in the details of the new federalism -- redefining state and federal responsibilities, and civil rights policy. He considers his current sojourn at Harvard as a period to recharge himself before the next tour of duty.

"I want to go back to Washington in a few years," Edley says.

Sharing Insights

Drew Days did not set out to make service in a presidential administration the cornerstone of his career as a civil rights attorney and law professor. But his three-year tenure as the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General Janet Reno stands out as a career high for Days, who is currently teaching law at Yale.

The Solicitor General's office at the Justice Department carries the responsibility of representing the federal government before the U.S. Supreme Court. The office and duties of the Solicitor General are expected to be run in nonpartisan and nonpolitical manner. Typically the Solicitor General gets involved in nearly two-thirds of the Supreme Court's cases --either representing the federal government in a dispute or as a "friend" of the court by providing guidance to the justices.

During his tenure, Days says that he supervised a team of attorneys that made more than 200 appearances before the Supreme Court. Seventeen of those appearances were made by Days, who says, "I am quite happy with my experiences as SG. I don't foresee myself going back into government service again."

Days is the third African American to serve as the Solicitor

General -- the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall served under President Lyndon Johnson, and Wade McCree served under President Carter. Days traces his path to the Solicitor General's office back to working with McCree during the Carter Administration. Prior to joining the Carter Administration, Days had worked as a civil rights attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

"When Carter was campaigning, I was litigating police brutality cases in Tennes-see. I wasn't in a position to get involved in a political campaign," Days admits.

Under Carter, Attorney General Griffin Bell sought out Days and hired him to be chief of the civil rights division at the Justice Department. "It was tough duty," Days says. But McCree became his mentor and inspired Days to consider the possibility of seeking the Solicitor General's job in the future.

"I admired what McCree was doing as Solicitor General, and I left the Justice Department with an interest in the job," Days recalls.

A graduate of Yale's law school, Days had prior experience as a teacher at Temple University. Following the Carter Administration, he became a law professor at Yale Law School, where he taught for twelve years before becoming Solicitor General. During that time, he regularly used his experiences from the Carter Administration in teaching civil rights law.

With Clinton's victory in 1992, Days made it known that he wanted the Solicitor General s job. The President nominated Days for the position and the Senate approved his nomination in May 1993. Days left the Solicitor General's office in 1996 to return to Yale.

A stint in the Peace Corps had made him aware of the possibility of government service. And while Days says that he did not begin his career with the goal of serving in a high-level appointed office, he wanted public service to play a significant part.

"You don't have spend a lifetime in government. You can serve for awhile and go back home," Days said.

Days believes it is healthy for democracy for people who serve in government positions to return to their home communities to share "their insight" with others. He also says that the experience can be of great value in teaching.

"A Neophyte in the Policy World"

Sheryll Cashin, a first-year visiting law professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., brings a long list of accomplishments in national politics and government service to her newly-launched academic teaching career. Although her professors at Harvard Law School had long ago encouraged her to consider teaching, Cashin did not consider it a desirable option until after she had toiled in the Clinton White House for more than three years.

Says Cashin: "[Teaching is] something that I had thought about, but it was not a concrete goal of mine [before joining the Clinton Administration's transition team in 1992]. Many of my professors in law school had encouraged me to consider teaching. I had pursued the kinds of activities that many in academia pursue before going into teaching."

Raised in a politically active family in Huntsville, Alabama, Cashin knew from an early age that she wanted to be involved in public life. In the late 1960s, her father organized an independent political party to provide African American voters in Alabama with an alternative to the state Democratic party --which at the time supported a platform that was hostile to the conditions of the state's Black residents.

Cashin, who studied electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University and jurisprudence at Oxford University in England as a Marshall scholar, earned a law degree from Harvard Law School in the late 1980s. After law school, she was a judicial clerk for D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Abner Mikva and for Supreme Court Justice Marshall. Cashin practiced law for a short time in Birmingham, Alabama before returning to the nation's capital in 1992.

"I was a neophyte in the policy world," Cashin says of her return to Washington

The experience of working in the Clinton White House as a policy aide taught Cashin the process of policy development and implementation. She initially worked as an assistant to Gene Sperling, then Deputy Director of the National Economic Council in the White House. In her first few months on the job, Cashin was assigned to help push the controversial 1993 budget through Congress -- the budget that was the central focus of two federal government shutdowns.

After passage of the budget, Cashin helped coordinate the implementation of Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community legislation. She was eventually promoted to serve as Staff Director of the Community Empowerment Board, an interagency taskforce chaired by Vice-President Al Gore. As Cashin grew more savvy and skilled on the job, she increasingly grew weary of the grueling pace of White House life.

"I found that I was reacting to everything. I never had the time to be reflective, deliberative and well-versed substantively as I wanted to be," she says. "The source of frustration was [that] I didn't have the luxury of time to grapple with issues."

By 1996, this young single attorney had grown convinced that teaching law would offer her another outlet for her talents and interest in public policy.

"I wanted the freedom to pursue ideas and I wanted the quality of life that you have in academic life," she said.

Cashin signed on with Georgetown and began teaching administrative law in the fall of 1996. This semester, she is teaching a seminar entitled Urban Policy, Urban Development and the Law. Although she remains interested in public service, Cashin says her immediate goal is to do well and acquire tenure at Georgetown. She credits her White House experiences with providing her with insight into the workings of the federal government.

"There's no question I'm better prepared to teach as a result of working in the Clinton White House. It has been an invaluable experience," Cashin said.

Some Practical Advice

Dr. Bernard Anderson, who served as an economic adviser in the Carter presidential campaign of 1976, currently is an assistant secretary of Labor for Employment Standards. He has spent most of his career as an economist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Anderson says that college-level teachers and administrators who desire a role in policymaking have to first demonstrate excellence in their academic fields. With solid credentials in hand, an academic then has to be aggressive about participating in campaigns and forums where they can meet elected officials.

"As an economist, I have always had an interest in influencing public policy. I have made an effort to get out of the ivory tower and off the campus," says Anderson.

Edley suggests that teachers should also consider the possibilities of public service at the state and local government levels.

"There are always more hard problems than there are good people to solve them," he said.

Academics & Public Service

Walter Broadnax, formerly deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton, is now professor of public policy at the University of Maryland-College Park.

Drew S. Days III, formerly solicitor general under President Clinton, is now professor at Yale University Law School. He served a previous stint as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Justice under President Jimmy Carter.

Joycelyn Elders, M.D. Surgeon General under President Bill Clinton, is now at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Bonnie Guiton Hill, formerly Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Education under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, became dean of the School of Business at the University of Virginia and was just named president and chief executive officer of the Times/Mirror Foundation.

Augusta Kappner, who was assistant secretary at the Department of Education under President Clinton, returned to academe as president of Bank Street College of Education.

Catherine LeBlanc, formerly director of development at Clark Atlanta University's school of business, is now executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Condaleeza Rice, formerly director for Soviet and East European Affairs of the National Security Council under President George Bush, is now provost at Stanford University.

Louis Sullivan, M.D. former secretary of Health and Human Services under President George Bush, is now president of Morehouse School of Medicine.