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

This essay recognizes 25 years of publication of the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE). As JPAE Editor-in-chief from 1998–2000, this is my third occasion to look back at JPAE’s achievements and promise, having done so previously at the 10- (Perry, 2004) and 15-year (Perry, 2010) marks. In this essay, my reflection is a potpourri of thoughts about elevating both the status of public affairs as a field and JPAE as the field’s journal of record. In contrast with my essays at the 10- and 15-year anniversaries that sought to assess JPAE’s impact in the preceding period, this essay looks to the future and an agenda that the public affairs field and its journal of record might pursue. My suggestions are by no means comprehensive, but instead highlight areas of strategic importance and knowledge gaps that I believe the journal can help fill.

Reflections about public affairs education and implications for JPAE

Some of my reflections below are much broader than JPAE, but I try to indicate the journal’s role with respect to each of the reflections. My reflections are also personal. I apologize in advance for this indulgence, but I am very aware of how my experiences have shaped my worldview and perspectives about the field.

Public affairs programs need to elevate their status in our universities and JPAE could help further that goal

My academic career started in 1974 when I became assistant professor at the University of California-Irvine’s Graduate School of Administration. The start of my career pre-dates JPAE’s founding by two decades. The 1970s ushered in a period of significant change in public affairs education – including creation of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) in 1970, initiation of MPA program self-study, the rise of comprehensive schools, and founding of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) – that continue to today. In some respects, however, our field is stuck in the past, devoting large amounts of attention to issues such as MPA accreditation when so many other emerging issues simultaneously deserve attention. Thus, I envision a need for re-balancing our attention from the past to the future. JPAE can play a significant role in advancing an agenda for the field’s future.

Public affairs schools and our associations are at a juncture where they could strategically and collectively pursue new paths that are in keeping with their diverse portfolios. To do so could have a variety of implications, among them:

• Taking on a much larger role in undergraduate education in the universities in which our colleges, schools, departments, and programs reside;

• Becoming a much stronger voice for developmental needs within public service, needs that extend far beyond the boundaries of our current programs;

• Taking on a much bigger role for continuing education of both our graduates and also public servants who have not been exposed to the intellectual content of our programs

• Developing closer relationships with public service professions, ranging from city managers, to social workers, to civil engineers, to public health specialists  (Perry, 2018).

Professional schools that prepare people for public service are well-positioned to be a powerful lever of change to strengthen public service. The futures mindset that our schools need to adopt should push our activities well outside the boundaries of how we defined ourselves in the past.¹ Although what happens in specialized schools preparing professionals for public service is critically important to effective execution in government, education for public service of those “outside” our programs, and people already in government is also vital. In regard to the latter group, the deficiencies of governments with respect to developing staff are well known. Governments underinvest in training and development. When they do, their budgets are under constant duress.

It is likely that some prominent failures to effectively execute in government are the result of emergent situations for which professionals in public service are unprepared by either their university education or their development after they join government. One type of emergent situation is working across professions in ways that constructively incorporate different expertise, skills, and values from a multiplicity of professions (Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018). This type of cross-boundary situation is one class of real challenges in government for which neither university programs nor in-service training now adequately prepares public professionals.

An area for which colleagues urge more action to improve governance processes is developing the next generation of citizens. Donald Kettl (Forthcoming) argues that the interweaving of government with indirect, private instruments has created public policy strategies where the line of sight from citizens to elected leaders is distorted and broken. Governance processes are complex and broken. A remedy, Kettl argues, is reframing American institutions to rediscover and reinforce the role of citizens. I touched on a similar theme in an editorial in JPAE 20 years ago (Perry, 1998). Public affairs units across our universities can play vital roles helping to reinvigorate citizenship to answer Don Kettl’s and my call for more citizenship by citizens. The irony of adding citizenship research and education to the collective missions of our schools and programs is that it brings us full circle to our roots when the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs was founded in 1924.

As the journal of record for public affairs education, JPAE could be influential in expanding our imagination about our field’s boundaries and its prospects for making a difference for governance and public service. One way to advance a futures agenda would be to regularly publish articles on a theme like “public service education 2050” that address imaginatively but concretely new vistas for programs and schools of public affairs.² In conjunction with the same theme, JPAE might solicit articles from cutting-edge initiatives in public service education that define alternative futures grounded in innovations that exist today.

Public service and quality scholarship are complementary, but their joint importance depends on faculty and leader commitments

One issue about which practitioners and scholars have been highly critical of the trajectory of public affairs education involves faculty tenure and promotion standards. The Volcker Alliance (2017) recently issued a working paper that paints a picture of the current state of tenure and promotion practices. The picture is familiar to most faculty, particularly those at Research I universities: research output dominates teaching and service in most personnel decisions; junior faculty are shielded from encroachments to their research agenda in the pre-tenure period; and engagement with practice is often a secondary or tertiary concern for public affairs faculty.

As The Volcker Alliance (2017) report conveys, tenure and promotion standards can be a straightjacket that homogenizes behavior outside a set of widely accepted norms. At the same time, we need to be careful not to reify the rules by which we operate. Individual faculty and their leaders – chairs, directors, deans, and professional associations – are their own agents and have more latitude and influence than we often acknowledge.

Let me comment on the agency of leaders to illustrate my point about opportunities to deviate from accepted norms. I begin with an anecdote from a recent conversation with a high-ranking federal career civil servant. In our conversation about how the academy intersects with practice, the civil servant lamented: “In all my years as a civil servant, I have never been approached by an academic looking to do research related to the data and access I oversee.” The civil servant’s lament came as a big surprise. Given what I know about this civil servant’s responsibilities, I had expected that he would be sought out frequently by scholars seeking good data and pursuing interesting research questions. But the civil servant’s experience speaks to how disconnected theory and practice may have become in the realm of public affairs.³

How can the public affairs field close the gap between theory and practice? A variety of ways are possible, but leaders need to step up. One arena of opportunity is how public affairs units manage faculty sabbaticals. Sabbaticals have been viewed historically as opportunities for faculty to refresh, rejuvenate, and redirect their activities. At the same time, sabbaticals have become entitlements, a semester or two to exit the rat race and to continue lines of scholarship that may be disconnected from practice. A challenge for program leadership is how to promote the former vision of sabbaticals and steer away from the latter. Can the leadership of public affairs schools that are seeking to increase faculty engagement ignore these sabbatical tradeoffs? The answer is obvious: No!

My own sabbatical experiences represent a contrast with current norms, and I share them because they not only served me well, but represent an alternative for the field. Most of my sabbaticals were funded, two by Fulbrights, two by Intergovenmental Personnel Act (IPA) mobility grants, one by a senior scholar appointment and another by a university. The consequence of the funding made a world of difference in what I could do with my sabbatical. The funding extended my sabbatical leave from one semester to two, supported time away from campus working in federal agencies, and helped to connect me regularly with practitioners to facilitate career-long education and re-education.⁴

Current management of faculty sabbaticals within the field is, to the best of my knowledge, largely passive and non-strategic. Few public affairs programs impose strings on the basic university sabbatical policy. I readily admit the good fortune I experienced from my sabbaticals was the result of my agency rather than external prodding. I also acknowledge, however, that, for example, the grants I received involved no special access or extraordinary grant writing, but instead were a product of routine action on my part.

Do I believe that my experience could be repeated more frequently if faculty either took the initiative or were provided some direction and inspiration from their chairs or deans? Yes! The passiveness that characterizes university management of sabbaticals extends to the primary schools association, NASPAA. In fall 1992, I was supported by an IPA mobility grant to spend a semester in Washington as a NASPAA Fellow, working for the Assistant Secretary for Personnel in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).⁵ Unfortunately, I was one of the last faculty to find my way to Washington on the NASPAA Fellows Program, which ended about the time of my sabbatical. If leaders in public affairs are serious about developing closer ties between the academy and practice, then I encourage them to consider re-instituting a fellows program.⁶

I do not envision a change in the management of sabbaticals as a magic bullet, but it represents a strong step toward reducing the gap between the academy and government. Another step would be for the field to develop better information about tenure and promotion standards and their consequences. This is an area in which JPAE could be especially influential by encouraging more descriptive reporting about standards, analyzing their consequences qualitatively and quantitatively, and assessing trade-offs associated with diversity of standards. Having spent more than a decade at each of two major research universities, University of California-Irvine and Indiana University, Bloomington, I know promotion and tenure standards can be quite different across universities. We need to begin to pay as much attention to diversities in the standards as we do to isomorphism. JPAE would be a good outlet to facilitate transmission and assessment of differences.

Another area to which JPAE and other journals could contribute would be by encouraging and publishing research about faculty careers and how different factors, such as institutional, organizational, and individual variations, affect career outcomes. Given the volume of public information about relevant variables, this type of research would be feasible and could be grounded in hard data about faculty behaviors and multi-faceted performance. The development of appropriate databases could be facilitated by organizations such as NASPAA and APPAM because it advances their role as stewards for the field.

Public affairs education is a global enterprise and JPAE must mirror that reality

Public affairs, administration, and policy have become international enterprises. Some indicators of rapid and extensive internationalization of our field are as follows:

• The Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration’s (NASPAA) name change, and its current practice of accrediting programs internationally, including programs in China and South Korea;

• The growing number of international conferences sponsored by organizations like the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), APPAM, and Public Management Research Association (PMRA);

• The proportion of content authored by non-U.S. scholars in previously “American” journals; Public Administration Review, which I edited from 2012–2017, is probably the best illustration of this trend.

JPAE has been slow to embrace the internationalization of the field. Although I have not systematically analyzed the contents of JPAE, a review of the contents of JPAE from its first 23 volumes (Raadschelders, Whetsell, Dimand, & Kieninger, 2018) concludes that JPAE’s international content is modest. One reason for the modest international content may be the makeup of JPAE’s teams of editors and associate editors, which has drawn almost exclusively from U.S. universities, both during my editorship and subsequent editorial teams to the present day. Another benchmark for a journal’s international reach is the composition of its editorial board. The affiliations of JPAE’s editorial board in the most recent issue available for review (Volume 24, No. 4) indicate that 3 of 26 board members are from non-U.S. universities. Although we have no standards for international representation on journal editorial boards, 25% strikes me as a minimum for credible claims to international status, and 50% international representation does not strike me as unreasonable. International representation on the JPAE editorial board is constrained by the current appointment process because the NASPAA Executive Council shares responsibility with the editorial team. It is incumbent on all stakeholders to recognize NASPAA and JPAE’s changing status internationally and bring international representation into line with norms of other successful journals.⁷

Because public affairs education is now a global enterprise, JPAE must take on a greater international profile. Making JPAE a credible player internationally, however, will require giving the goal a high priority, continuous attention from JPAE’s editors, and concerted efforts by members of the editorial board and team of editors to recruit international authors and content. NASPAA’s recent agreement with Taylor and Francis to publish JPAE should facilitate internationalization of the journal, but other actions such as those I mention above are also necessary.

JPAE could take the lead in initiating a more robust discussion about public affairs doctoral education

An area of significant growth of public affairs programs since my term as JPAE’s Editor-in-chief is doctoral education (Holzer, Xu, & Wang, 2007). Doctoral education in public affairs is important for a variety of reasons. Although public affairs faculty are recruited from many different fields and disciplines, doctoral programs in our schools and program are a major source of socialization for future faculty, signals to the academy about the quality of our programs, and resources for important scholarship about salient research questions for the field.

Despite its growth and importance, doctoral education appears to get little attention from the field, particularly in JPAE. My seat-of-the-pants search of “doctoral education” in JPAE yielded only a handful of articles and many of them date to the 1990s. The field’s inattention to doctoral education is an oversight that needs to be remedied.

A variety of initiatives by the JPAE editorial team could help remedy the oversight. NASPAA annually gives the William Duncombe Excellence in Doctoral Education Award. The recipient of the Duncombe Award could be invited each year to share her or his wisdom with the public affairs community in an essay published in JPAE. This mirrors a practice I initiated in 1999 to bring the viewpoint of NASPAA’s Excellence in Teaching Award (now the Leslie A. Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award, re-named to honor the 2000 awardee who died on 9/11/2001 in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon) recipient to the wider public affairs education community.⁸

Showcasing the insights of the Duncombe awardee could be augmented by other initiatives. One would be a symposium on doctoral education to establish the contours of doctoral education issues confronting the field. A related step would be to invite respected scholars and others with views about doctoral education to contribute a series of articles over an extended period. Publishing regular offerings about doctoral education could help to raise visibility about this facet of our field.

Conclusion

The Journal of Public Affairs Education has made significant strides on many fronts during its 25 years. Those strides are readily apparent to me because of my close involvement with the journal during its first 6 years and my monitoring from a greater distance in recent years. The progress with which JPAE has been associated, however, strikes me not as a source for self-satisfaction but instead as a stimulus for future aspirations, that continue and, perhaps, far exceed past achievements. I hope those who take stock at the 50-year anniversary are able to claim that JPAE has again exceeded expectations.

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.

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.