The Journal of Public Affairs Education at 25: An agenda for the future

ABSTRACT

This essay is a potpourri of reflections about elevating both the status of public affairs as a field and the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE), the field’s journal of record. The reflections argue that public affairs programs need to elevate their status in our universities, and program leaders and faculty must take more responsibility for closing the gap between theory and practice. JPAE could facilitate these initiatives, support globalization of the field, and lead a more robust discussion of public affairs doctoral education.

KEYWORDS:

• Faculty commitments
• future agenda
• leadership
• public affairs field
• strategy

Notes

1. Dean Angela Evans of the LBJ School of Public Affairs provides a glimpse of how the future of public affairs schools might differ significantly from the past in “Upending Public Policy Education” (Evans, Forthcoming).

2. The “transformation” of public service education was an issue I addressed in an editorial (Perry, 2000b) and a symposium I commissioned. Both the editorial and symposium are early examples of what I am calling for her. What I did not anticipate in 2000 was the depth and volume of change governance institutions and our field would experience in subsequent years.

3. Public affairs are not alone in being criticized for a divergence between scholarship and its application to practice. Others have been critical of management and business administration. Although the underlying problem may be precipitated by the larger university environments and incentives in which programs like public affairs and management are embedded, I am restricting my observations and advice to our field. Progress in reconfiguring values and behaviors in public affairs might serve not only to correct what we find misaligned in public affairs, but could help alter practices in universities as institutions.

4. I refer to “education” and “re-education” because I started my academic career without practical experience except for an International City-County Management Association (ICMA) summer internship that I served after my second year as an undergraduate in 1968. Thus, my sabbaticals and research gave me valuable experience I lacked when I entered the academy. As my career progressed, I looked upon many of my sabbatical experiences as opportunities for new exposure and refreshers about what was happening “inside” the bureaucracies and policy arenas in which I was interested. Thus, my reference to “re-education.”

5. I would not have spent the semester in Washington, but I received a call in spring 1992 from Tom McFee, HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Personnel, inviting me to work in his office. Tom was familiar with my research on the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and had some projects, including one with the National Academy of Public Administration, in which he was interested in having me work. I had just been denied a Fulbright for a highly competitive West Europe fellowship so Tom’s call was welcome. His unexpected call also reflects how important serendipity is for “success.” I reflected on the larger issue of how IPAs can contribute to breaking down theory/practice barriers in a JPAE editorial (Perry, 2000a).

6. On at least two occasions, one in the 1970s at UC-Irvine and another in the 1980s soon after I moved to the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, I participated in bringing federal administrators to the university for extended leaves using IPA mobility grants. Thus, IPAs can be helpful for bringing talent from government to the university, as well as from the university to government.

7. Two of the journals with which I have been closely affiliated, Review of Public Personnel Administration and Public Administration Review, confronted concerns about international representation by expanding their editorial boards to be more inclusive of international representatives. Soon after ROPPA’s leadership expanded international representation, the journal was added to the Social Science Citation Index. When I became editor of PAR, the size of the editorial board was doubled to increase representation in a variety of ways. Many of the new appointments were international members. By 2017, PAR’s international and domestic submissions and articles published were at parity.

8. In my scan of recent volumes of JPAE, I encountered difficulty in finding essays from winners of the Whittington Award. The first essay appeared in Volume 5, No. 1 (Perry, 1999) and was written by the 1998 winner, Marc Holzer (Holzer, 1999). If the practice of publishing an essay from the winner of the Whittington Award has fallen by the wayside, then I encourage re-instituting it. I believe personal insights from our finest teachers, undergraduate, Masters, and PhD deserve to be shared with the field.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James L. Perry

James L. Perry is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington. He was the Journal of Public Affairs Education’s Editor-in-chief from 1998 to 2000. From 2012 to 2017, he was Editor-in-chief of Public Administration Review (PAR). Perry is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and recipient of the John Gaus, Dwight Waldo and H. George Frederickson Awards.