The Great Neck Choral Society
Performing musical masterpieces for Long Island audiences for more than 50 years
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PROFILE Ellen Rosen: |
It is easy to visualize the petite lady with the big, warm smile as a loving mother and loyal friend. But in an earlier life Ellen Doree Rosen, a member of GNCS for the past 33 years, carved out a significant niche for herself in a field, public-sector productivity, that calls for uncommon ability to analyze and communicate.
Measuring the productivity of someone who stamps out widgets is not hard. It is much tougher to assess the performance of someone who moves paperwork,
visits "cases," or patrols a beat. Understanding and measuring productivity in such public-sector jobs has become a significant area of study in the past few decades.
And Ellen made an important contribution.
It occurred during and after a 17-year stint on the faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice that began in 1973. Armed with a Ph.D. in political
science and a dissertation on "open-system theory" from the City University of New York, she taught as an adjunct until receiving a regular faculty appointment in 1977.
Though her first full-time assignment was teaching American government to undergraduates, she soon was teaching graduate courses in such subjects as organization theory.
In 1980 she co-authored a book titled "Current Cases in Public Administration" with a colleague, Marc Holzer, who now administers the doctoral program in
Public Administration
at Rutgers University. It was during her association with Prof. Holzer that she became interested in measuring productivity in the public sector and began to present papers in this area. Eventually she became associate director of a Productivity Center set up at John Jay and began to teach courses in productivity. Her students primarily were middle managers in public service, including, for example, the police and fire departments of New York City.
Along the way, she developed a course in "bureaupathology," a term that that she coined to characterize communication failures endemic in bureaucracies. Bureaupathology (also spelled as two words) was one
of the alleged causes of the Challenger spacecraft disaster in 1986.
In 1986 Ellen became chair of John Jay's newly formed Dept. of Public Administration. But just three years later she suffered a heart attack. She relinquished the chair,
though she continued to teach, finally retiring in 1991 at the age of 69.
Before retirement, though, she had decided that there was a need for a good text on public-sector productivity. There were by then plenty of research papers in the field, as well as books consisting of contributed chapters. But there was no book from which a course could be taught. So she collected her own course material and began to write her own text. In taut, disciplined prose, the book organizes the concepts that apply to productivity measurement and improvement, but it is also chock-full of references to the results of field projects. Her students, equipped with worldly experience in managing operations, she says, approached classes with "a hard shell of cynicism." Without the practical input, she says, "they wouldn't have paid any attention."
Titled "Improving Public Sector Productivity: Concepts and Practice," the book was published by Sage Publications in 1997. One reviewer called it "thought provoking, intelligent, and one of the more practical public administration texts I’ve read." Ellen has not made any effort to track sales of the book. But she is encouraged that eight years later, in such a dynamic field, the book retains enough authority and timeliness to continue to crank out royalties.
Making up for a late start
As academic careers normally go, Ellen’s was short, and that was because it started relatively late in life. Ellen Doree was a good student at Bushwick High
School in Brooklyn and entered Hunter College. But after one semester she found she could not afford to continue. She went to Drake Business School and
learned how to be a secretary. Her first job, in 1942, was working for a glass-engraving company in Manhattan for $16 a week.
In 1944 she started studying nights at Brooklyn College, and two years later landed a job as secretary to the head of the Chemistry Dept. at the college. That was convenient, but
fortuitous in another way, too. Milton Rosen, a young chemist, walked into the department one week later, and two years later they were married. In 1951, the Rosens
moved from Brooklyn to Laurelton, Queens.
The first of three children, Leslie, was born in 1952, and two more, David and Craig, followed. "I became a stay-at-home mom," Ellen recalls,
but she did eventually go back to school.
During her ensuing studies at Brooklyn College, Ellen switched majors twice, from English to physics to political science. There was also a year's
break when she and Milton lived in Jerusalem, where Milton was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "At that time," she says, the city "was the most magnificent amalgam
of people from all over."
In 1960, 19
years after starting, Ellen finally got her BA, along with a Phi Beta Kappa key that she did not mention during our interview. Two years later, Ellen got her MA in political science, and in 1965, after another year in Israel, she started work on a PhD at CUNY. She got her PhD in 1971. A year later, after a third sojourn in Israel, the Rosens moved to Great Neck That was the year that Ellen, having sung in her high school glee club and in the Brooklyn College chorus, joined GNCS.
Years later, starting in 1999, she served a four-year term as president.
Even as Ellen was making a name for herself in the social sciences, husband Milton was becoming internationally known for his research in surfactants--chemical molecules that are essential today in such diverse areas as household detergents, pesticides, lubricants, and oilfield recovery. He currently heads the Surfactant
Research Institute at Brooklyn College, and his leading text on surfactants is in its third edition.
Letters that brought her father close
Over the past decade, Ellen had a special, time-consuming project that culminated last July with the publication of her book, "A Wobbly Life." The book is based on the letters her father, E.F. Doree, wrote to her mother during his travels as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), widely known as the “Wobblies,” and then during his incarceration, along with many IWW colleagues, on grounds of sabotage and conspiracy. Mr. Doree's sentence was commuted in 1922, but he died just five years after returning to his family, when Ellen was just three years old.
Writing the book was a chance to shine a light on an organization, and on its often unjust persecution by government, that, Ellen realized, few people today know
anything about. But more urgently, it was an opportunity
to discover the father she had hardly known. It was "a wrenching experience," Ellen recalls. It was so emotionally wearing, she says, that "I had to back off
now and then." ( More information on the book is contained in a separate story on this website.)
The Rosens have traveled widely together--in Europe, but also in such less obvious places as Iceland, Greenland, and Antarctica. When she’s not
traveling--or singing soprano with GNCS--Ellen can often be found stitching. Her needlework is evident in chair seats and a rug, and she always has a
current project stretched out ready for a few stitches at any odd moment. At the age of 80, and 16 years after the heart attack that halted her managerial climb,
there is little evidence that she is ready to slow down.
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