Abstract
1940–2018
After a short illness, at the age of just 78, on 13th November 2018, the community of teachers of public administration lost one of its leading lights. The contribution of Jens Carl Ry Nielsen to the development of pedagogy for public administration and practitioner development, and perhaps especially his innovative work on one of the foremost European MPA programmes at Copenhagen Business School, merits a special place in the modern history of the discipline.
Ry, as most of his many friends knew him, was born in Horsens, a provincial town in Jutland, on 18th February 1940. After graduation, he commenced a career in the military services, learning Russian and working for three years as a language officer in military intelligence before accepting a Research Assistantship in the Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology at Copenhagen Business School. On completion of an additional MA in Economics in 1968, he was appointed to a Research Fellowship at CBS and then, two years later, to an Associate Professorship. He remained a member of the CBS faculty for the next 47 years before becoming an Emeritus Professor in 2017.
Ry’s key research contributions centred, on the one hand, on leadership/management and organizational change, particularly in the public sector, and, on the other, on pedagogy for mid-career practitioners on postgraduate programmes. He published chapters in five books and authored some 50 articles in scholarly journals. Furthermore, he held visiting professorships at the School of Management, Buffalo, USA (1971–1972); at Aalborg University, Denmark (1977–1978) and at Kristiansand University College, Norway (1991–1996, part-time).
His contribution to the development, management and teaching of the MPA Programme at CBS – from 1994 to 2018 (including the establishment of equivalent programmes in Krakow, Poland and in Trondheim, Norway) – established Ry’s outstanding reputation in the field of education and training. In addition, he played a leading role from 1994 to 2006 in running the international summer school on public administration held annually in Krakow, Poland. Indeed, through his inspirational teaching and pioneering of new approaches in the development of mid-career practitioners, Ry became a beacon within management education and was recognized as such through the award of two pedagogical prizes.
More than all this, a key legacy of Ry’s contribution to the discipline is the annual workshop on teaching public administration to mid-career practitioners (TPAM) that he launched in 1998 (initially under the title of ‘The Copenhagen Forum’ because CBS was the venue for several of the early workshops) which, as the founder always intended, takes place in a different European city each year. With contagious energy and passion, Ry was able in these workshops to combine productivity and focus with an ethos of informality, enthusiasm and good humour. In 2016, some 18 years after convening the first such workshop, Ry, together with workshop colleagues and friends, took stock of the development, character and accomplishments of these workshops and of the associated output in what was to be his final publication 1 .
Above all, however, as everyone who ever met him will agree, behind his very Danish forthright demeanor, Ry was a thoroughly warm-hearted, loyal, caring and self-effacing individual who always made time for others. He was also a devoted family man and leaves two children (by his first wife, Lisbeth), 10 grandchildren, and Karen (his second wife of 32 years), with whom he particularly enjoyed travelling to different European capitals, going to concerts and the opera and visiting museums, art galleries and other such cultural centres.
Ry is greatly missed and fondly remembered as the enthusiastic teacher and inspirational mentor to generations of students and colleagues, the resourceful and influential scholar and the dear friend that he was to so many of us.