ABSTRACT
A 25 retrospective on Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE) reveals clear evolution and differences in issues of interest to public affairs teachers. Historical contingency and circumstances impact what should be taught. But there are also constants – repeated and recurrent themes that transcend time, authors, and editors. As the longest serving editor-in-chief or co-editor for Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE) for nearly eight years, I learned a lot by reading the article submissions, and among the constants are the three themes – change, crisis, and continued belief in a single best way to teach or do things. This article reflects on these three themes and what they mean for the teaching and practice of public administration and affairs.
Baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra reportedly stated: “You can observe a lot by just watching.” As editor-in-chief or co-editor for Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE) for nearly eight years, I appreciate that sentiment. As editor you learn a lot about the profession by editing a journal. More specifically, as editor, you perform a host of tasks often not known or appreciated by authors, many of which require an attentiveness to significant and emerging scholarship trends impacting the teaching of public affairs.
Most academics do not appreciate that editing a journal is managing a small business. Hidden behind the scenes of each issue are production deadlines, copy editing, page layouts, and distribution of the final product. All of this involves worries about cost and coordination of people, both authors and staff. Over an eight-year period as editor, I was excited to transition JPAE from a mostly hard copy, self-published, US-based journal to one now affiliated with a publisher who reaches authors and audiences globally. It is also a journal that moved from paper manuscript submissions to the digital world, and one where the editorial board reflects a world audience. Much in the same way, I inherited a great journal from predecessors who each improved JPAE under their tenure; I hope I handed it off to the current editors a better product that they will improve even more.
But editors also manage the overall editorial content of the journal. In doing that, the editor is taking the pulse of the profession. It involves understanding what are the major interests and lines of scholarship of those who care about public affairs teaching. This involves both a reactive and proactive stance. Reactive in that one attends the NASPAA conference, talks to potential authors, and eventually reads and reviews scores of manuscripts to see what interests writers and the JPAE audience. But it also is proactive in sensing trends, anticipating issues or topics that should be addressed, and soliciting authors and manuscripts that fill that void.
A 25 retrospective on JPAE reveals clear evolution and differences in issues of interest to public affairs teachers. Historical contingency and circumstances impact what should be taught. US health care reform in 2009, globalism, and the rapid rise of international NGOS involved in service delivery, the events of 9/11 and rise of global terrorism, cultural competence in a world of rising diversity, Brexit and Donald Trump, social equity at a point when economic inequalities have exacerbated, and the emergence of, and challenges to democracy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America all were occasions for new lines of scholarship and research during my editorship. Previous and future editors will find history opens news lines of research.
But there are also constants – repeated and recurrent themes that transcend time, authors, and editors. Perennially concerns about the practicability or connection between the teaching of public affairs and what skills are needed to be administrators, for example, are a source of scholarly interest. So are issues about recruitment of new faculty, merging public affairs programs and institutional missions or identities, department funding, course content of specific classes, and internships or service learning. But among the other constants are the three themes – change, crisis, and continued belief in a single best way to teach or do things.
Perhaps the single most recurrent theme of my editor-in-chief columns was change. From the very first issue I was responsible for, I quoted or referenced Heraclitus’ adage that one can never step in the same river twice. Change includes the idea of challenge and was a metaphor for many points. It referenced taking over a journal and managing editorial content that built on and departed from the past. It was about changing the business model for JPAE. But mostly it was about how the teaching of public affairs had to change with the times. That was not just my conclusion but the sentiment of the authors and manuscripts that reached my ears and eyes. It was about the fact that “9/11 changed everything.” By that, public affairs teaching would now have to spend time thinking about emergency management, or domestic or global security issues, or about stabilizing democracies, or state building across the world.
Change was also about the rise of the corporate university and the challenges it posed to the teaching of public affairs, especially at times when many of our programs were forced to merge with or compete with business programs for students and resources. Change was the need to become more culturally competent so that we could both better recruit new students and prepare professionals for serving a public far more diverse in many ways than in the past. Change was about adapting curriculum to reflect demands to have more practical courses such as internships. Change was preparing students not just for traditional government jobs in the United States, but educating for a global market and international employers, some of whom were not in typical public sector settings. Change and challenge simply seemed to dominate the themes of so many of the manuscripts I received, often with the inflection that these times were unique and demanded a departure from the norm or what was normally accepted or done.
Crisis was a theme closely related to change. Scores of manuscripts referenced the crisis of public affairs teaching as reflective of broader problems facing the world. Crisis of course was about real crises – global terrorism, the crash of the world capitalist system in 2008–2009, and threats to democratic governance. But they precipitated secondary but still important crises in the teaching of public affairs. Repeatedly there were manuscripts that involved surveys of departments or programs across the country or world, noting how many of them did not teach some in adequate detail. It could have been budgeting and finance, cultural competence, or something else. There were articles surveying practitioners on the skills they thought critical to be effective administrators and how many programs failed to meet these needs. There were articles describing how NASPAA or accreditation standards failed to ensure that all programs offer or promote certain skills or how many public affairs programs did not do an adequate job teaching some specific competency. The conclusion of these articles was generally a call to arms for more emphasis across the board in all public affairs programs to remedy these deficiencies.
Finally, within and among the above-described articles and others was the persistent belief that there was a singular set of best practices or a best way to teach, administer a program, or structure a curriculum. As editor, I was struck by the continued and powerful sway that Frederick Taylor and Taylorism had on public affairs teaching and thinking. Taylorism is of course associated with efficiency, but also is at the core of thoughts about mass production, Fordism, and the idea that if we study something enough we can determine the best way to do it. NASPAA and accreditation standards reflect a belief in Taylorism, and so many of the articles recounting change and crises facing public affairs teaching embodied a belief that data and evidence would yield a single best way to teach, organize a curriculum, or run a program. In effect, there was a singular best way to engage public affairs pedagogy – and therefore the editorial mission was dedicated to discovering and promoting that goal.
As editor, I shared the goal in promoting the enhancement and improvement of public affairs teaching. But as someone who also did training to become a high school teacher and who has taught in several countries and across several disciplines, I knew that many of the issues we confronted were not unique to public affairs. Many other disciplines faced similar issues and often I pushed authors to look to these fields to enrich our understanding of teaching. But where I also pushed back when it came to the trinity of change, crisis, and the single best way was in rejecting the assumptions underpinning all three.
Change is a constant, not novel, and crises are not one time but also recurrent. Each new generation thinks the problems its faces are unprecedented, and perhaps they are in some ways. But public affairs and its teaching are always about change. I once penned in one of my introductions that the paradigm of the bad teacher is the one who comes to class with notes, so old the pages are yellowed. It is a professor doing the same thing over and over. The best advice I received when I first started teaching was always to experiment and change – one can learn something from that and it also prevents you from getting stale.
Change is also a constant because the world is always changing, and rivers forever flow and alter their course. The world we teach in 2018 and 2019 is different from the one when JPAE was first founded and so of course the curriculum should reflect to make those changes. John Dewey, whom I referenced many times in my introductions, understood the connections between a changing world and curriculum, and so should we.
Crisis too is constant, but also overblown. In my first job as a public administrator, I did some training and the instructor said that the people we serve have crises, we do not. We have a job to do in helping others resolve their personal crisis. In my tenure editing JPAE, as noted above, crises were terrorism, world financial collapse, and diversity. But take a longer horizon beyond even the life of JPAE and in the past World Wars I and II, the Cold War, Vietnam, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the race riots of the 1960s and the Kerner Commission Report, or police corruption and the Knapp Commission highlighted crises then facing public administration and public affairs teaching that had to be addressed. As a profession we did respond, how well a matter of history to decide is. But the point is that crises are something that we always face in public affairs teaching, it is our job. This is a point I sought to make as editor.
Finally, the Taylorism’s one best way is something I questioned. Back in the 1980s, Postmodernism challenged the idea of metanarratives. There is no one best way to teach public affairs or structure curriculum or programs. I argued several times that in a pluralistic world, it is acceptable and good that there be a diversity of teaching programs. Not every program has to be good in everything or do things the same way as every other curriculum. Accreditation standards are good except when they lead to one-size-fits-all or a cookie-cutter approach to teaching. Diversity is good; public affairs teaching benefit collectively from letting a thousand flowers bloom. We can better prepare to face challenges and crises if we encourage a diversity of approaches to teaching, structuring curriculum, and running public affairs programs.
Reflecting on both my tenure as editor and on JPAE in general, I took Yogi Berra to heart in that I observed a lot by watching. I came to appreciate the need to reflect and respect there are many approaches to how we teach public affairs and that the goal of the profession and the journal is not to force a single model but instead foster a dialogue of experimentation on the many ways we can improve teaching to reflect the reality of a world constant with change and crises.
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David Schultz
David Schultz is a Hamline University professor of political science and University of Minnesota professor of law. He is a three-time Fulbright, scholar, 2013 winner of the Leslie A. Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award, and author/editor of more than 35 books and 200 articles. He was editor-in-chief or co-editor of JPAE from 2010 to 2017.