Bayard L. Catron
Bayard L. Catron III, Professor Emeritus of Public Administration, the George Washington University, died at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, two days after his 83rd birthday.
Dr. Catron was born January 11, 1942, in Springfield, Illinois, the son of B. Lacey Catron, Jr., and Connie Dycus Catron. He graduated from Springfield High School (1959), then received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Grinnell College (1963), and a Masters in Philosophy from the University of Chicago (1965). At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned a Master of City Planning (1972) and a Ph.D. in Social Policy Planning (1975). His Ph.D. dissertation, titled Theoretical Aspects of Social Action: Reason, Ethics and Public Policy, set the conceptual framework for the rest of his life.
Bayard, who often went by “BL,” was privileged to spend twenty-eight lively years (1973-2001) as a Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC, five blocks from the White House. He taught public policy, organization and social theory, and public service ethics; chaired numerous doctoral dissertations; and chaired the GW Department of Public Administration from 1978 to 1980. He taught some twenty MPA/DPA/PhD courses, including Policy Analysis and Ethics in Public Service. Bayard shaped the policy field around a “policy topics” series to give students close-hand, lived experience doing policy studies. During his last four years at GW, he developed three courses drawing from his experiences doing pro bono community service work in Rappahannock County, Virginia: Land Use Policy and Planning, Environmental Policy and Ethics, and Community Organizing and Sustainability.
He founded the Ethics in Public Service Network (more than 2000 members) and was founding editor of the quarterly newsletter, EthNet (1986-87). In 1989, Dr. Catron was program director for Ethics inGovernment: An Intricate Web, the first American Society of Public Administration (ASPA) national ethics conference. He chaired the ASPA Standards and Ethics Committee and authored or co-authored publications dealing with ethics in administration. His 1987 paper, “Teaching Ethics, Teaching Ethically,” won the “best paper” award at the Tenth Annual International Conference on Teaching Public Administration.
In the 1990s, his interests broadened to include ecophilosophy (e.g., “Are only human beings worthy of moral consideration?”); intergenerational equity (e.g., “Is it fair to burden future generations with the hazards of nuclear waste?”); land use planning and policy; community development/sustainability; and community and civil society. In 1993-1994, at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), he was the research director for a panel study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. The panel explored ways of ensuring intergenerational equity in environmental decision making and priority setting, and published its findings in the NAPA report: Deciding for the Future: Balancing Risks and Benefits Fairly Across Generations. On a Fulbright Award (1995-96), he taught environmental ethics/eco-philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway.
After retiring early from his faculty position at GW, he became a community activist in a rural Virginia county. Some of the roles he played included organizer and founding president of the Rappahannock County Conservation Alliance (a land trust); founder of RappNet, an online community forum and bulletin board; board member of the Rappahannock League for Environmental Protection; and principal author of a successful grant proposal for TEA-21 funds for the Sperryville Main Street Project. Later he moved to California where he taught at California State University, East Bay, and the University of San Francisco. From there he moved to Springfield, Illinois, just in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his high school graduation and where he became a new grandfather and spent much of his retirement immersed in body/mind/spirit integration.
In addition to his parents, Bayard was preceded in death by his brother, Louis Earl Catron, Professor Emeritus at the College of William & Mary.
Bayard is survived by his wife of eighteen years, Dr. Alexis A. Halley, and his loyal rescue labrador Gracie. He leaves behind two children, Bayard L. Catron, IV (Roxanne Jarrett) and Janel Catron Morland (Paul Morland) of Montgomery County, Maryland; sister Jennifer Lee Catron of Madrid, Spain; brother John Markwood Catron (Mary Ellen) of St. Paul, Minnesota; and his three grandchildren, Ryan, Ethan, and Sofie. He will be sorely missed by his many friends, especially Christen McCormack Clark, John Kirchner, Michael Harmon, Cynthia McSwain, and by his many nieces, nephews, and cousins. He is also survived by his first wife of thirty years, Beverly Elliott Catron, his high school sweetheart, devoted mother of Bayard and Janel, and the person who urged and supported him in earning his Ph.D. at UC-Berkeley and then throughout his academic career.
To all who met him Bayard embodied goodness, wisdom, and a love of learning, along with passions for social justice, institution building, and appreciative inquiry. He had a remarkable capacity to hold, retain, recall, integrate, and synthesize ideas and concepts and mold them into new and useable ways of viewing life and world events. He lives on in the memory of his family, colleagues, many friends and decades of students who were lucky enough to learn from him and he from them. Among his memorable aphorisms in later life was the by-line in his emails: “Don’t cry that it’s over. Smile that it happened.”
Informal hybrid services will be scheduled at a later date.
