Journal of Public Affairs Education

Public affairs education faces a critical challenge in providing managers and analysts with the right knowledge and skills in a time when governance has been transformed. While government's traditional institutions and processes have become less central to the attainment of public purposes, new institutions and processes that rely on private partners and networks have become more important. The challenge facing public managers is to frame new tactics to manage programs effectively while preserving basic processes of democratic accountability. The challenge for public affairs programs is to prepare students to manage in a world in which not all public service will be in government; more program implementation will occur through nonhierarchical relationships; more domestic policy will be shaped by global forces; and government will need to incorporate new forms of public participation.

Increasingly high public expectations and changes in the environment of government are creating substantial challenges for government and its policy makers. Critical among these challenges are budget issues, a human capital crisis, the use of a complex set of policy tools, and the use of nonfederal actors to deliver public policy. To address the needs created by these challenges, schools of public affairs should expose students to principles and case studies of leadership, provide multidisciplinary training, foster understanding of operations in multiple sectors, ensure knowledge of financial management, ground students in ethical challenges of public service, and ensure skill in the development and use of performance measurement.

If e-government will transform how public sector organizations operate, what is the connection between e-government and public administration education? The purpose of this paper is to make that connection. The paper addresses the following questions: First, what are the emerging issues in public management in the era of e-government? Second, what does the literature say about the corresponding transformation required in public administration? Finally, what changes in public administration program curricula are necessary to respond to this transformation? This paper explores the emerging issues in public management in the era of e-government and proposes two levels of modification to the current MPA curriculum in order to connect e-government to public administration education: first, the adaptation of existing curricula to respond to emerging issues, and second, additional e-government content for leaders dealing with the transformations occurring in the way government conducts business and the perception of e-government-associated information technology by public leaders. This paper encourages students, academics, and practitioners of public administration to discuss how to make a connection between these emerging issues and public administration education.

U.S. schools of public policy and management (PPM) recently have devoted considerable attention to the international content of their degree programs. Most U.S. PPM programs, however, focus on training professionals for domestic employment and very little aggregate information on international outreach activities among these programs has been gathered. This paper applies the results of a new survey about the international activities of U.S. PPM programs to the specific issue of curriculum transformation. The survey findings raise important questions about the strategic orientation of U.S. PPM programs toward globalization. We envision a globalized framework for public policy graduate education and use that framework to identify some elements of a strategy for achieving international outreach and curriculum transformation simultaneously and coherently. We note that the greatest impediment to implementing such a strategy is money, rather than basic institutional capacity, suggesting that a realistic opportunity exists for fundraising in support of international outreach.

A task force of the National Academy of Public Administration released a report in January 2000 that questioned whether public affairs programs were in a position to cope with the transformation of governance well underway in public institutions. An essential part of this transformation is performance, a component of capacity building referenced throughout the report. This article presents the results of a curriculum survey of the programs affiliated with the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration to determine the extent to which students of public affairs education are offered instruction on the areas of performance, productivity improvement, and performance measurement. The findings reveal that 88 percent of the respondent programs provide instruction on these topics and that public affairs programs have made adjustments to their curriculum coverage since 1990.The author concludes that public affairs programs are in a position to embrace the transformation of governance in regard to performance.

In a world where the very nature of public service is undergoing radical change, how are schools of public affairs to respond? The transformation of governance identified by the National Academy of Public Administration provides one important framework. The transformation in public service students provides another. Using the experience of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this article identifies implications of these two transformations for public affairs education and illustrates ways in which responses to them can be woven into a public affairs curriculum.

The Rice-Semple-Haardt House, or Wallace Museum, being moved along Monroe Street in Montgomery, Alabama, on October 10, 1992. At the moment the photograph was taken, the house was immediately north of the Alabama State Capitol. The house was constructed for its first owner, Samuel Farrow Rice, in about 1855 at 725 Monroe Street, one block to the east. The original portion of the State Capitol had been completed four years earlier. Photograph and commentary by Charles T. Goodsell, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.