Though recently retired, David Feldman still leads campus resource Water UCI
Many people say when they retire, they look forward to traveling. Count David Feldman among them. Having retired early in the year after more than 17 years at UC Irvine, the emeritus professor of urban planning & public policy departs next month for Tanzania.
To teach.
Feldman will lead a workshop for government ministers on trust- and confidence-building in trans-boundary water negotiations, under a National Science Foundation grant at the east African country’s United Nations University.
“That’s very much a great honor,” says Feldman of being asked to lead the high-powered seminar—something he also expressed about having been asked in 2007 to leave the University of Tennessee as a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and come to UC Irvine as a professor and chair of the Department of Urban Planning & Public Policy (UP3).
You see, while Feldman left the southeastern U.S. campus, he remains a frequent visitor to Tennessee because that is where his girlfriend resides. And while he left the day-to-day of UP3, he remains a frequent visitor to campus as he remains director of Water UCI, an interdisciplinary center within the School of Social Ecology that addresses key water issues through research, education and policy solutions.
“On behalf of our faculty, staff and students, we thank Professor David Feldman for his contributions to the School of Social Ecology and wish him well in his future endeavors,” says Dean Jon B. Gould. “Since joining the UC Irvine faculty in September 2007, he has been a valuable member of the school, jumping right in to guide the Department of Urban Planning & Public Policy as chairman when it transitioned from the Department of Planning, Policy & Design. Professor Feldman also helped form Water UCI, which we are happy to report he will continue to lead as director.”
Originally from Cleveland and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, Feldman attended Kent State University and originally flirted with becoming a lawyer. But he so loved his political science classes that he said to himself, “You know what? This is what I want to do. I want to teach political science.”
He went to the University of Missouri-Columbia for his graduate studies, ultimately earning a doctorate in political science in 1979. His professors nominated him for a Presidential Management Fellowship, a two-year training and leadership development program aimed at attracting young academics to positions in the federal government. (President Trump signed an executive order in February abolishing the program.)
“The jobs that came my way at the federal level, frankly, just were not really compelling or interesting,” Feldman recalls. “There weren’t enough to kind of draw me away from pursuing an academic job. But one day, out of the blue, I got a call from a guy who described himself as the director of the Water Resources Planning Program for the State of Missouri.”
The director explained he found Feldman’s name in a federal file of job prospects and he wondered if the newly minted Ph.D. could come in for an interview in Jefferson City, the state capital. Intrigued by what the director had in mind, and considering Jefferson City is only a 35-mile drive from Columbia, Feldman showed up to learn Missouri was drafting a state water plan, and the person who filled the open position would help coordinate input from neighboring states and affected federal agencies when it came to irrigation, water rights, water supply abatement and other public issues.
“I said, ‘This is really interesting, but I don’t know anything about water,’” Feldman remembers. “And he said, ‘No, you don’t understand. We’re not looking for somebody who knows something about water. We’re looking for somebody who knows something about policy. If you come on board, you will teach us what we need to know about policy and helping us write this plan, and we will teach you about water.’ I said, ‘Sign me up,’ and it was a fascinating, great experience. What I found out immediately was it was like a postdoctoral program.”
Addressing the challenge of drafting a state water plan turned out to be an interdisciplinary endeavor, as the political scientist found himself surrounded by geographers, lawyers, hydrologists and urban planners—all with advanced degrees.
“It was kind of an epiphany,” Feldman says of the experience. “It was like I rediscovered myself. And from that point forward, I said water is what I want to study and really devote my career to.”
That was evident years later, in 2002, when the then-University of Tennessee Energy, Environment and Resources Center expert testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment. Referencing the drought conditions that had gripped the Southeast, Feldman recommended steps legislators could take to ward off looming water shortages.
While at UT, Feldman met and befriended fellow political scientist and water expert Helen Ingram, who was then the Warmington Endowed Chair at UC Irvine with joint appointments in the departments of Political Science, Criminology, Law & Society and what then known as Planning, Policy and Design. Ingram was leading a search committee for a new chair of what would become the Department of Urban Planning & Public Policy when she contacted Feldman, who decided to throw his hat in the ring.
At his hotel the day before his interview at UC Irvine, Feldman asked the concierge about walking from there to the campus. That brought a shocked look from the hotel worker and an offer to personally drive the candidate to the school. “I said, ‘No, no, no, I’d really like to walk,’ and she just hinted at me that’s just not something people generally do in Irvine.”
Feldman was adamant, so the chagrined concierge instructed him to follow the San Diego Creek down to UC Irvine. Once he arrived, he was immediately struck by the natural beauty in and around the campus. “I had, of course, looked at pictures before I came. Do you know the old saying, ‘Pictures don’t do you justice?’ The pictures didn’t do the campus justice. Walking around, you discover the reason it’s an attractive campus is because of the landscaping, the different terrains and the ways the frontages of buildings don’t all point the same way. These are little things you can’t appreciate from pictures. I was very impressed.”
Fortunately, he was offered the UP3 position in 2007, and he remained the department chair for the next nine years.
“What I found is that all of the things that I had been doing in my career were working up to this,” Feldman says, “because one of the things about UP3 that was unique was that you had urban planners and you had some policy analysts and you had some people with various training, but it was all very much focused on problem solving. How do we take our scholarship and use it to make our cities better?”
The switch from Planning, Policy & Design to Urban Planning & Public Policy created an air of uncertainty at first, and Feldman considers his guiding the department through that period a career highlight.
“You had an urban planning program that was flourishing, but then you were going to start a public policy program, and people weren’t sure how that would affect the planning program,” he explains. “And then on top of that, we were told that we needed to bolster our undergraduate enrollment because we really didn’t have a bona fide undergraduate major to speak of, or at least not one that drew students. We were in transition. There was lots of anxiety, frankly.”
With the caveat being Feldman does not want to take all the credit for what followed, he is nonetheless “proud that I was able to navigate some challenging decisions in terms of enrollment, in terms of convincing the dean that we needed some additional faculty lines, those sorts of things that every chair tries to deal with. I am also proud that I helped to launch the public policy program along with a number of other senior faculty and to really push it along even thought we were going through a budget crisis when I first started.”
Another moment of pride came when Feldman was given the opportunity by the provost about eight or nine years ago to develop an inter-school initiative around water (while still chairing UP3). The result was Water UCI.
“I’m very proud of that initiative because not only did we successfully launch it with the support of the administration and their funding, but we’ve managed to sustain it. I have been soliciting external grants and contracts. So here we are, eight or nine years later, and we’re still going strong.”
Feldman remains Water UCI’s director, and he already sees his emeritus professor status paying dividends as he can devote more energy to the initiative.
“Basically, my schedule is my own,” he says. “I don’t teach full time, although I do mentor students. And, you know, I am not burdened with a lot of administrative things and internal service things that you would do as a faculty member.”
He is also relishing having more time to spend with his girlfriend in Tennessee—as well as his trusty two-wheeled friend.
“Just being able to get out on my bicycle and ride, it’s cool,” Feldman says. “And I have an interest in music.”
In fact, he’s the drummer in a band, although they are currently on hiatus because their lead singer is teaching part-time at a university in China.
“Those things are just a lot of fun,” Feldman says, “and I’d like to keep those going indefinitely.”
He believes water studies remain in good hands at UC Irvine.
“One of the things that I feel really good about is the people,” he says. “Not just water but those who are working in the environmental domain, the urban footprint. We have faculty that say, ‘I’m really interested in climate change or environmental justice or sustainability or whatever the issue might be, and I want to be able to talk to the people who are making decisions and help them do the right thing and help them make better policies. That’s a real positive marker of what a research university in general should be about, and a land grant public university particularly should really be about the commonwealth.”
Despite his confidence in the “first-class scholars” who remain, Feldman does reserve an even greater soft spot for another segment of the UC Irvine community.
“I do miss being around students on a regular basis,” he says. “I have students who I mentor through Water UCI, but I do miss the teaching because students here are really a lot of fun. There is such a wide range of students. Some are highly interested in what they’re studying, and some are not so interested. But it’s always fun to work with students because they have a lot of curiosity and they have their own motives for studying what we teach, You get them at a point in their life when you’re able to make an impact on their thinking, and I like that and I have missed that.”
Indeed, Feldman would like to clear up some of what’s assumed by today’s supposedly narcissistic, career-obsessed, social-media influenced students.
“Unlike my generation, I would venture to bet that a sizable plurality if not a majority of our students come from mixed families,” he says. “They are children of divorce and separation. Students here often speak about their step brother or step mom or spending the holidays with their dad and his wife, that kind of thing. You didn't hear that years ago, and I think, without the students coming out and saying it, that they have been through a lot of adversity and life challenges. I just think that’s something that’s very profound and that we have to be cognizant of.”
He continues, “Another difference is that I don't know any students who don’t work. They have to work at least part-time to sustain themselves here. They do it to be able to afford to come to the university. … Then a final difference is students today, unlike those in my generation, have a good fakery sniffer. They have a very acute sense that there’s a lot of people in this society that are trying to put one over on them. Whether it be in the media, whether it be in politics, whether it be in advertising, they seem to have a very acute sense of that. It’s reflected in the classroom experience by the fact that when students ask, ‘What do you think?’—they don’t want seven opinions. They want to know what you think. It doesn’t make any difference if what you think is different from what they think, but they want to know. They want integrity. They want honesty. That existed in our generation, but I think it's more acute today.”
— Matt Coker