Federal Executive Institute
The Federal Executive Institute (FEI) is an executive and management development and training center for governmental leaders located on a 14-acre (57,000 m2) campus near the center of Charlottesville, Virginia, less than a mile from University of Virginia.
FEI offers values-based leadership development opportunities through an "interagency residential learning experience" which emphasizes “personal growth as well as professional growth." Programs are designed specifically for public sector senior management.
The Federal Executive Institute was founded in 1968 “to endow the career leadership levels of the Federal government with the capacity and motivation to bring proactive change to a huge enterprise.”
In the 1950s, the federal civilian workforce was larger than it had ever been. Millions of workers had been hired to manage the programs of the New Deal in the 1930s, and more still were brought into federal service to manage the American mobilization during World War II. However, the United States had not implemented any kind of education programs to prepare federal executives to manage this expanded workforce. As a result, the Society for Personnel Administration published a proposal for a “federal staff college” in 1953. Early ideas for senior executive education were based on military models, specifically the military staff colleges which were used to prepare officers for assignments in the upper ranks, specifically as admirals and generals. The United States military had a long experience of organizing and training millions of men and it was believed by many that a similar model of continuing education should be applied to civil servants, to prepare them for more senior assignments. The first step towards the creation of such a federal staff college was taken in 1958 when Congress passed the Government Employees Training Act. The act established several precedents that became central to the formation of the Federal Executive Institute. First and foremost, it cleared the way for the establishment of an executive training center funded by its own revenues, rather than by congressional allocations. This allowed FEI freedom of maneuver and sheltered it from political storms. Second, the act gave agency directors the authority to determine how much money they would spend on executive education and where they would send their executives to be trained. This encouraged FEI to remain tied to the senior executives it was founded to serve because they constantly had to market themselves to federal agencies. Finally, the act paved the way for interagency training. Interagency interaction would become one of the hallmarks of FEI, where senior executives from various backgrounds and agencies would live and learn with each other for weeks at a time. However, it would still be approximately 10 years before FEI was founded. In the meantime, federal executives furthered their education primarily through the Brookings Institution. Additionally, the Civil Service Commission (CSC) founded two Executive Seminar Centers. The first was founded at King’s Point, Long Island in 1963 and the second at Berkeley, California in 1966. Even with these centers, Chairman Macy wanted more to be done. He wanted to create an institute for those civil servants who had reached the pinnacle of their careers, the “supergrades.” These people could not be motivated by further promotion and would only attend the institute in order to improve their own work and the work done by their organizations. Therefore, in August 1966 the CSC completed a proposal for a center for advanced executive study to be called the Federal Executive Institute.
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