Goodnow took up his teaching in October 1884 at Columbia, giving some instruction in History as well as in United States Administrative Law. Made Adjunct Professor in 1887, Goodnow became Professor of Administrative Law in 1891, and in 1903 Eaton Professor of Administrative Law and Municipal Science. He became the first president of the American Political Science Association in 1903. Governor Theodore Roosevelt made him a member of the commission to draft a new charter for Greater New York, and President Taft chose him as a member of his Commission on Economy and Efficiency. In October 1912 he accepted, on the recommendation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the commission of constitutional adviser to the Chinese Government which took him to China in March 1913. During the years 1913–1914 he served as legal adviser to the Yuan Shikai government in China. Yuan had hired Goodnow at the recommendation of Charles Eliot, a former president of Harvard University, and had tasked him with drafting a new constitution. Between 1913 and 1915, Goodnow wrote two versions of the constitution. The first effectively made Yuan president for life, and granted him sweeping powers over the budget and foreign policy. The second version, completed in 1915, would have made Yuan emperor had he not died soon thereafter. Goodnow became known for his assertion that the Chinese people were not mature enough for a democratic form of government—a position that was later utilized by Yuan, as he attempted to proclaim himself the Emperor of China in 1915–1916. In 1914 he became the third president of Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins, he is best remembered for his attempt to eliminate the bachelor's degree by cutting the first two years of undergraduate work. Called the Goodnow Plan or New Plan, students would have entered Hopkins after two years of study in other universities and would have worked toward an advanced degree, bypassing the bachelor's degree. Although briefly implemented, the plan failed, largely because of the difficulty of persuading enough students to transfer to Hopkins halfway through their college education. The plan was attempted again in substantially the same form, in the early 1950s, under President Detlev W. Bronk, meeting with the same lack of success. Known as a good financial manager, Goodnow greatly increased the university’s income during his fifteen-year presidency. Goodnow is considered an important early scholar in the field of public administration and administrative law, as well as an expert in government. Goodnow argued for the centrality of law in public administration. His first book, Comparative Administrative Law: An Analysis of the Administrative Systems, National and Local, of the United States, England France and Germany brought two important contributions to the emerging field of political science. It was one of the first systematic studies of public administration and a pioneer work in the United States for the use of a comparative method of inquiry. His most influential work Politics and Administration: A Study in Government was published in 1900 and triggered a long lasting controversy. Goodnow was also a well-known and influential Progressive, authoring a critical view of America's founding principles in his 1916 essay: The American Conception of Liberty. Influenced by previous studies by Woodrow Wilson, Goodnow carved a dichotomy between two distinct functions of government, politics as the sphere that “as to do with the guiding or influencing of governmental policy” and administration as the sphere that “has to do with the execution of that policy”. The distinction was severely criticized by Dwight Waldo in his Study of the Administration but later rehabilitated by scholars who argue that Goodnow intended the distinction as a “typological” one, useful for analytical purposes. Goodnow resigned the Johns Hopkins University Presidency in 1929 and was succeeded by Joseph Sweetman Ames, but thereafter frequently gave graduate lectures in his special subjects. He was for some time a regent of the University of Maryland and a member of the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore.
Modern Day Award
The Frank J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service was established in 1996 to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to both the development of the political science profession and the building of the American Political Science Association.
