Journal of Public Affairs Education

This paper focuses on the importance of transgender education in public affairs programs, particularly as its students prepare to enter an increasingly diverse workforce in the 21st century. The paper first connects transgender awareness and education to the social equity literature. To date, attention within the social equity literature has primarily focused on race/ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, on women. However, issues of gender identity and sexual orientation have largely been missing from the social equity dialogue. This paper aims to fill the void. Next, the paper examines the transgender movement as a means to eliminate transgender oppression from the workplace. The paper also includes a survey conducted with 26 University of Vermont public affairs graduate students and 68 undergraduate students across disciplines also enrolled at the university. The surveys revealed attitudes about transgender citizens and their rights. The paper concludes with tangible strategies for working with transgender organizations and infusing transgender education into the public affairs curriculum.

Social equity has been challenged in recent years through increasing income inequality. The widening gap between the rich and the poor contributes to economic segregation among regions and neighborhoods and has a direct impact on public service delivery. This article examines declining mobility, economic segregation, and education to demonstrate the relevance of social class and socioeconomic status to the field of public administration. The potential for positive change lies in the willingness of scholars to advance social equity through representation, research, and pedagogy.

Fusing the concepts of social justice and service learning can create a powerful pedagogical framework for public administration courses. This article explores this fusion framework and its use in a graduate public policy analysis course where local government partnered with faculty to address health disparities. The students utilized the tenets of policy analysis to produce best practices research and a policy analysis on health disparities for the local government client. Social equity can be used both as a delivery mechanism for course content and to produce useful products for a community partner via service-learning. In this model, students not only learn about social equity but also actually participate in social equity work in the context of the class setting, in the process enhancing classroom engagement, skill development, and awareness of social justice through the lens of health disparities.

Although social equity was brought to the table in the New Public Administration of the 1960s and named the fourth pillar of public administration by the National Academy of Public Administration near the turn of this century, it still struggles to find its place as an equal among the traditional public administration values of economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. The question to be addressed here is, “How do we elevate social equity to equal playing status with the other pillars of public administration?” In addressing this question, three key areas are examined: definitions, measures, and curriculum. By examining how we currently define, measure, and teach about the values of public administration, including social equity, this paper provides ideas for “imagining and improving the future” so that social equity becomes an equal among its peers and becomes a standard of practice as opposed to a stand of courage among public administrators and policy makers.

The purpose of this article is to promote the benefits of the Fulbright Specialist Program—which was created in 2001 as a short-term complement to the Fulbright Scholar Program—and to encourage more public administration scholars to consider teaching abroad. After providing an overview of the Fulbright Specialist Program and the collaborative teaching approach we used for the preparation and delivery of instructional materials, it presents a number of lessons learned from the perspective of the Fulbright Specialist and the host institution for maximizing the experience of teaching abroad. This article also is dedicated to the work of Fulbright, which has pursued its mission to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries for 65 years.

The mission of the Bachelor of Science in Public Policy degree is to prepare students for roles as good citizens and for careers in the public service. This is a case study of how civic engagement is used to accomplish this mission in three courses within this curriculum. These courses use service learning, leadership, and an internship to teach civic engagement. The experience of the faculty in developing these courses within the undergraduate public policy curriculum may assist other institutions as they seek to incorporate civic engagement in their programs. The lessons for other programs include recognizing the importance of civic engagement in educating students for citizenship, the use of faculty-directed reflection in civic engagement courses, and the continuing challenge of connecting the approaches to civic engagement into a coherent program.

To address ongoing discussions about the convergence of MPA and MPP curricula and students, data were collected on career values and goals of 175 MPA and MPP students, very similar in terms of their ages, gender, and work experience and matched on university location, tuition costs, and local job market. On none of the multiple measures of altruism, intrinsic, and extrinsic job characteristics did the two groups differ to a statistically significant degree. Along with sharing a very similar career ethos and temperament, MPA and MPP students did not differ in their interest pursuing jobs in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors. Yet these siblings were not identical twins. Most MPAs seemed to already think of themselves as administrators, ranking management issues highly, while most MPPs were analysts who wanted to master quantitative analytical techniques and critique public policies. The findings have implications for MPA and MPP curriculum design and for recruiting the next generation of public servants.