Edwin Dorn
Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
Ed Dorn became Dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in September 1997, after spending 20 years in Washington shaping and studying public policy. His last Washington job was at the Pentagon, where he served from 1993 to 1997, initially as an Assistant Secretary and later as an Under Secretary of Defense. Mr. Dorn also worked at the U.S. Education Department and at two "think tanks", the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Brookings Institution. His first position in Washington, in 1977, was as a special assistant to then-Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Joseph Califano.
As Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Mr. Dorn's policy responsibilities included recruiting, training, pay, and benefits for the total force of more than three million military and civilian personnel. He also oversaw the Defense Health Program, the Commissary System, Overseas Dependent Schools, and the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute.
A native Texan, Mr. Dorn is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UT-Austin. In 1967-68, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for West African Studies at the University of Birmingham, England. He completed an M.A. in African studies at the University of Indiana-Bloomington and a Ph.D. in political science at Yale. From 1970 to 1972, he served on active duty with the U.S. Army in Germany.
Mr. Dorn's major publications include Rules and Racial Equality (Yale, 1979) and an edited volume, Who Defends America? (Joint Center, 1989). He has been an advisor to two PBS-TV series: Congress: We The People, and the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. His affiliations include the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Kettering Foundation, the United Way/Capital Area and the Children’s Defense Fund Texas Advisory Board. In 1999, Dorn was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin.