I'm a professor all right. But I was always violently anti-New Deal. - Dan Throop Smith

It may be that the process of education can do no more than make a man aware of the need for making decisions and taking action, and of the advantages of doing so wisely and with good judgment. But even that, though it can be expressed in a sentence, is manifested in many different ways that its full development and the appreciation of it may be a lengthy process. Can a formal educational process assist students to develop facility in making and implementing wise decisions in administrative matters? There are many aphorisms about the advantages of self-education, the dangers of the theorist with his learning and lack of common sense, and the value of experience as the best teacher. Certainly. it is difficult to match, with formal education, the wisdom that comes from experience. It may be noted, however, that experience may lead to a lack of mental flexibility in meeting new situations; an experienced but opinionated man is as ineffective as one with a formalized doctrinaire approach.

Though it is possible to develop various principles of administration by generalizing from particular cases, the resulting abstractions seem to have little significance. The process of administration involves action requiring the application of any given principle in infinitely varying actual situations. In brief, administration is an art requiring skill, practice, and judgment. However much it can be analyzed in the abstract, it becomes manifest only in specific concrete situations. In fact, the best administrators may have difficulty in relating their actions to explicit principles; the fully developed skill will most often lead to quasi-intuitive action without a conscious frame of reference or checklist of points to be considered.

Although good administrators are not necessarily interchangeable, there appear to be certain recurring aspects of administrative work to which attention may be profitably directed.