Forging new tools for new administrative houses: Comments on the symposium

In 1964, a reporter asked Fannie Lou Hamer, a redoubtable leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, whether she and her party were “seeking equality with the white man.” She answered, “No! What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don’t want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that’ll raise me and the white man up…raise America up” (Harding, 2010, pp. xx-xxi).

Among the amazing aspects of Ms. Hamer’s declaration is her conviction that freedom and equality do not mean assimilation to the normal, nor conformity to the neutral. More than 50 years on, as we continue to struggle with the hegemonic power of maleness and whiteness, her dedication to “true democracy” still inspires, and reminds us that gender and race equity offer America an opportunity rather than requiring a sacrifice.

The essays in this symposium reflect many interesting and heartening views on where the field of public administration stands now on these issues, and where we might head. Their arguments and empirical evidence give us all hope of “raising America up.” From this rich assortment, a few points stand out for me.

(1) The first has to do with what Bishu, Guy, and Heckler (2019) call “seeing gender.” Their essay focuses on the persistence of gender (and by implication race) neutrality, even blindness, in organization and management texts. It seems to me this issue has implications for the paradigm that has come to constitute “normal science” in public administration, that is, quantitative empiricism. Feminist theorists have long observed the implicit masculinity of this form of science: objective, unbiased, rigorous, and dependent on the model of the scientist as a “separated self” that supposedly has no identifying entanglements (e.g., Keller, 1985, Bordo, 1987; Harding, 1986).

Today, the gender dimensions of normal science persist in the scientist’s fear of contamination by Mother Nature and in the preference for “hard” over “soft” data, norms our field has doubled down on in the last couple of decades. The entire conversation about social equity is imprisoned within the disciplinary rule that only objective measurements count (pun intended), even though equity is an ethical-political issue. In our field’s normal science terms, to understand gender and race as they are lived (see Edwards, Holmes, & Sowa, 2019) somehow seems to threaten bias. As accomplished a piece of research as Thomas (2019) has produced should not have to justify including interview results, especially those that so clearly reveal the lived experience of African-American female faculty members. In my view, there is a huge literature gap that only interpretive research can fill with evidence on this and other issues, documenting how individuals and groups understand social realities in bureaucracy and academia. Just as not all professors, students, and bureaucrats are white males, not all solid evidence is quantitative. Causal links are not all we need; we also need to know more about how to forge them, that is, about social processes.

(2) Several of the essays (e.g., Edwards et al., 2019; Thomas, 2019) raise the issue of strategies for public administration education, given the fraught gender and race dimensions in many academic departments. One such dimension: When there is only a sprinkling of “other” faculty, they are frequently loaded down with responsibility to meet the needs of “other” students, but such intellectual and emotional labor typically gets “disappeared” by the organizations that depend on it for effective performance, as the work of Joyce Fletcher (1999) revealed. When the publication of normal science research articles is the measure of worthiness for tenure and promotion that counts above all the rest, “other” faculty face constant struggle with their consciences. They know how valuable service learning is to students, but they also know how much extra time it takes over ordinary courses. They know how much “other” students need empathetic guidance, because they once needed it themselves, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and the tenure clock is ticking.

(3) Another pedagogical issue has to do with gender-related student preferences: the link between the choice of concentration and the paths that such choices open up or close down, shaping students’ current and future careers. As Stabile, Grant, and Saleh (2019) show, the concentrations women students choose tend to be linked to lower-paying public sector occupations like social services, whereas men tend to choose the perceived more rigorous topic areas like policy analysis. This finding reinforces the “glass walls” literature (e.g., Miller, Kerr, & Reed, 1999), which showed that not all the gender barriers in bureaucracy are vertical; women tend to cluster in welfare and public health work, whereas men head for transportation and public works. There is little mystery over which of these clusters pays more. But how free are the career choices students (or bureaucrats) make? Students come to us after many years of gendered socialization. Faculty have always needed to destabilize students’ unexamined opinions in general, but especially to get them to question the assumptions they enter an MPA program with, about what their interests are and what kind of work they could become qualified to do. In other words, students need help (perhaps even permission) to see gender.

It seems to me that one thing these pedagogical issues bring to our attention is that the classroom and the academic department are not only race- and gender-influenced but have long-standing roots in hierarchical understandings of what professional education, including in public administration, is all about. As these authors all know, the challenge we face is not simply a matter of “add difference and stir.” As Edwards et al. (2019) note, inclusion is not just the numbers, it stands or falls on “felt acceptance.” Greater variety of faculty and student identities inevitably creates fault lines that require willingness to work on building a new sense of belonging that, over time, everyone can come to feel. As Thomas (2019) puts it, equity has to be experienced. This is another example of the lost opportunities that result from restricting research in the field to a paradigm that refuses to explore people’s felt sense of their situations.

(4) Chetkovich (2019) raises a strikingly fundamental issue: What is or will be the effect on our thinking about gender as the dichotomy that has shaped it for millenia begins to give way? I first encountered this question a few years ago as raised by Hutchinson & Mann’s “Gender anarchy and the future of feminism in public administration” (2006). The authors defined gender anarchy as “the effort to dismantle common assumptions about gender and sex, starting with our own gender identities…” and leading to the emergence of identities that refuse to be confined within the male-female dichotomy and are breaking it down (p. 411). Chetkovich’s discussion covers a myriad of ways in which ordinary policy thinking has to be transformed in order to accommodate itself to this new reality (for that is what it is). For example, she asks how traditional dichotomous gender assumptions and the social processes they structure create and sustain systemic disadvantage. What happens when masculine and feminine no longer correspond to firm biological differences (if they ever did)? How can analysis take non-conforming identities into account? For me, her discussion not only advances our understanding of gender (and its discontents), its critique spills over into destabilizing the long-accepted understandings of “analysis” and “fact.” And not a minute too soon! As John Dewey once advised, “Many people seem to suppose that facts carry their meaning along with themselves on their face,” when the case is rather than phenomena become facts only in their encounter with an interpreter (2012[1927], p. 41).

To conclude, as a result of reading these wonderful essays, I can feel the ceilings and walls cracking. Following Audre Lorde in the project of dismantling the master’s house, we are setting aside the master’s tools and forging some of our own:

Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone…and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish….For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change (Lorde, 1984).

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Notes on contributors

Camilla Stivers

Camilla Stivers taught public administration at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, and The Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. She is the author of Gender Images in Public Administration: Legitimacy and the Administrative State (2002, 1994), among other works.