Teaching Leadership and Policy Change in a Public Affairs School

Abstract

Public affairs graduate schools may have difficulty integrating public leadership and management and the analysis of public policies and the political process. Too often in the curriculum, process is separated from analysis, and policy issues are separated from politics and the mechanics of policy making. This article describes the design and operation of a two-course sequence, taught at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, that fosters this integration and helps students gain a stronger sense of themselves as leaders and stronger skills for intervening in the policy process from a variety of standpoints.