new book
whoami
David P. Adams, Ph.D.
I'm an Associate Professor of Public Administration at California State University, Fullerton. My work looks at how people build power together, how agencies actually work, and how we can do better by each other.
[dadams@arch ~]$ fastfetch
dadams@csuf
- Role
- Associate Professor, Public Administration
- Also
- MPA Director · Associate Chair
- Host
- Cal State Fullerton
- Uptime
- 10 years (since 2016)
- Research
- water · energy · data centers · govtech
- Teaching
- POSC 315 · 320 · 509 · 521 · 588
- OS
- Arch Linux x86_64 · macOS
- Shell
- zsh
- Lang
- Python
- Tools
- taskwarrior, jrnl, whisper, ollama
[dadams@arch ~]$
ls ~/
Quick links
I earned my Ph.D. in public policy and public administration from Auburn University, then joined the faculty at California State University, Fullerton. I serve as Associate Chair of the Division of Politics, Administration, and Justice and as MPA Director.
- If you're looking for the student orgs I advise or want to schedule time with me, start here.
- The about page has the longer version, along with my GitHub and CSUF profile.
- I keep a course resources site with slides, assignments, and materials, plus a syllabi repository I update regularly.
~/cv/
Curriculum Vitae
Degrees, positions, publications, the whole timeline.
~/research/
Research
Projects on environmental governance, energy policy, and institutional change.
~/teaching/
Teaching
Syllabi and teaching resources for public administration and policy analysis.
~/contact/
Contact
Say hello, schedule time, or ask a question.
cat ~/now.md
Current work
latest article
Fostering Equity, Engagement, Ethics, and Empathy in Public Service: A Narrative Vignette Study of City Managers
forthcoming
Who Welcomes the Data Center? Infrastructure Siting, Community Capacity, and the Limits of NIMBY Politics
teaching
5 courses, undergraduate and MPA
# 9 peer-reviewed articles · 5 manuscripts under review · full list →
ls -t ~/blog | head -3
Recent writing
-
The Commons Was Never Empty. But It Was Ours.
Hardin gave us the tragedy of the commons; Ostrom showed communities can govern one without collapse. But data center siting breaks both models: mobile, multinational capital drawing on resources still stuck at the local scale.
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My AI Assistant Hired a Bookkeeper (It's a Mac Mini)
Claude Code's memory layer was quietly burning ~1,400 LLM calls a day against my usage limits. I moved all that background bookkeeping onto my kid's M4 Mac mini running Ollama—local, private, and free.
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Whisper for Accessibility: A Practical Solution for April 2026 ADA Compliance
With the April 2026 ADA Title II deadline looming, OpenAI's Whisper offers a practical, locally-run workflow for generating accurate caption files from course recordings — no vendor required.