Journal of Public Affairs Education

Are racism and discrimination forgotten issues in public administration research on the promotion of diversity in graduate education and faculty employment? Studies touching on diversity and employment equity usually address subjects such as education and training—the competencies needed by professional administrators, for example—as well as best practices in diversity management, persistent problems such as the lack of racial or gender diversity in upper management positions in public sector agencies, and the enduring challenges of minority recruitment and retention in public administration programs. The subjects of racism and discrimination as such—or of underlying factors generally—are seldom addressed centrally. Consequently, questions such as the following arise: What role might racism play in academic as well as public sector employment? What about other lines of causation impacting discrimination? How do individual, group, and institutional predispositions and actions affect employment equity? How have such questions been addressed in the public administration literature? In other research and research applications in the social, behavioral, and management sciences? And, finally, what can be learned from successful and failed diversity-promotion practices among academic programs?

A significant body of empirical research is uncovering patterns of action that have the intended or unintended effect of excluding candidates of color from recruitment pools, interview short-lists, and faculty hiring and advancement opportunities. This essay reviews and analyzes some of this literature, particularly as it relates to public affairs education. On that basis, it suggests the following: (1) new directions for diversity-related research, (2) changes in the articulation of diversity commitments, particularly by public administration departments and programs, and (3) ways to successfully realize those institutional commitments (assuming that they are more than rhetorical), pointing to research that specifies proven practices.

This paper addresses the need for culturally appropriate and culturally effective public programs and public services. The author discusses cultural competency in public services programming and public services delivery and addresses cultural competency concerns in human resources training, education, and service delivery. Examples of best practices in public policymaking and management are provided, and the author discusses what a public agency must do to develop and promote an ethos of community spirit through the use and application of cultural competency. The paper also provides a cultural competency glossary for public agencies.

Successful governance of multiethnic democracies and advancement of social and political equity for minorities in Europe are well-recognized goals. As has been noted recently in the activities of the Working Group on Democratic Governance of Multi-ethnic Communities of the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee),

The importance of finding effective long-term solutions to the management of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic difference and reduction of conflict in the region is without question. Strengthening the capacity of the public and NGO sectors to manage diversity is an essential step to improving governance and service delivery in general. Sustained attention to issues of diversity require long term capacity building through public administration education in addition to current efforts to reform laws and intervene in existing conflicts.¹

The challenge has drawn attention from many sectors and is being tackled in a wide range of ways (Brintnall, 2004; Kovacs, 2002). Solutions have been viewed variously, and often simultaneously, as a matter of law (Weller, 2005), as a matter of education (Tibbetts, 2002), as one of social psychology, community organizing, and social integration (Danchin and Cole, 2002; Petrova, 2002), as a matter of new policy and institution building (Ablyatifov, 2004; Krizsán, 2004; Marinova, 2005), and as one of reform of governance (Gál, 2002). The issue is genuinely multidimensional.

This paper explores what the civil service can contribute to achieving these goals, and particularly the role that education and training for public administration can play.² It reports on a survey of public administration education and training programs in the region intended to learn how they approach this problem and what progress they are making.

The issue here examined grows out of the proposition that tax policy is the public policy that has the most pernicious effects on social equity in the United States. We hold that this proposition is so self-evident that it need be examined only tangentially to the main topics of this article: first, why would tax policy be excluded from a core MPA course on social equity, and second, how could the social equity implications of alternative tax structures be most effectively explored in the graduate classroom? The second proposition on which this analysis rests is that the substance of social equity is ultimately operationalized as economic equity. This does not refer simply to the distribution of income that emerges from market transactions, but rather to the distribution of the total range of social goods and other benefits produced by a society.

The social goods and benefits that are the products of collective actions taken to either supplement or correct the distribution that emerges from the private sector are of particular interest here. The term correct leads naturally to the question of what is the correct distribution, and this issue is ultimately a purely political one whose resolution can only be informed by analysis.

One step toward generating social equity in public policy and administration is to expose future leaders within the field to a variety of discourses from historically marginalized groups. The new Diversity Across the Curriculum standard recently passed by NASPAA requires MPA/MPP programs to incorporate diversity into the curriculum and other program activities. Through the use of a survey of program directors and a separate content analysis, this study examined the extent to which stand-alone courses on diversity are offered, the instructional strategies used to incorporate the subject of diversity into existing courses, and MPA/MPP program directors’ perception of the standard. Results indicate that race, ethnicity, and gender continue to receive more attention than other elements of diversity. Most programs also attempt to integrate issues of diversity into existing courses rather than offer stand-alone courses. Program directors emphasized the need for flexibility because of variations in size, composition, and resources of graduate public policy and administration programs.

This article presents an approach to teaching leadership that employs in-class exercises to build three sets of skills: decision-making, collaboration, and negotiation. It provides a detailed explanation of these teaching techniques based on 11 years of experience with MPA students, highlighting the benefits of the appropriate sequencing of games, the use of debriefing as a pedagogical tool, and the value of patient observation and risk-taking by the instructor. The success of the approach is assessed with student survey data.

This brief study outlines ongoing research by the author, research that explores the relationship between levels of privatization and minority¹ employment in the 1980s and 1990s. The privatization of municipal services, either through service contracts between government and industry or through government’s total divestment² of responsibility, often enabled financially strapped communities to maximize efficiency. On the other hand, many observers questioned whether the increased efficiency of contracting out resulted from a decreased emphasis on diversity goals and affirmative action. Employee groups, it may be said, often opposed privatization when a loss of jobs was at stake (see Ferris, 1986, and Murray, 1985). This research note indicates an ongoing exploration of the empirical links between privatization initiatives and diversity commitments.