Fenn helped design the Senior Executive Fellows program 26 years ago, drawing on his wide experience in government administration. He was the founding director of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, as well as a staff assistant to President Kennedy. His government experience also included a stint as commissioner and vice-chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission. He also was special assistant to Sen. Benjamin Smith (D-Mass.) in 1961.

During the class discussion of management changes at a New Jersey public television station, Fenn offers the “first law of public management: When your horse is dead, dismount.” Adjusting to change is difficult, but “when your boss switches, you have to do something different.” And it usually means giving up something, he said.

Fenn’s quick wit keeps the 90 minutes lively. “She was like the Mona Lisa on Valium,” Fenn says, describing an unusually sedate student. Or telling an anecdote about a passive-aggressive official in the case study: “Let’s just say the fellow’s Myers-Briggs score was JERK.”

He also expressed a strong sense of rivalry with competing schools. Fenn referred, in one instance, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as “that plumber school.”

But he is committed to keeping the program free of political bias. “People ask me if this program has a Democratic, liberal bias,” Fenn said. “My bias is a very fundamental belief in the importance of government and in the possibility of doing it better.”

Without exception, each student interviewed for this story was impressed with the lack of bias shown by the teachers toward any one philosophy of government. “You’re in Boston, in Massachusetts, so it’s hard to escape the leaning toward the left,” said Michael Audino, an Army branch chief. “But the teachers went out of their way to hit it down the middle. Dan Fenn, in particular, was excellent at taking you down one road, then turning around and going the other way.”