Systematically examining the mentoring process for PhD students' needs to recognize that it has characteristics of unit/small batch production and relies heavily on the coproduction of the PhD student. This article examines one mentor's experiences with 80+ PhD students over an extended period of time using these conceptual lenses. Three general…

The renewal of efforts to disrupt or dismantle White supremacy in public service organizations and society has been met by strong cross-currents from the current political and policy climate in the United States. We see efforts by public administration faculty to incorporate more critical perspectives around pedagogy and public service as very…

On the 75th anniversary of Herbert A Simon's "Proverbs of Administration," it is fitting to consider its place in the public administration canon, with an eye to contemporary realities. In Proverbs, Simon interrogated prevailing mid-century "principles of public administration." But even as he reduced in rank each…

Traditional MPA programs that deliver public affairs education often use gender blind pedagogies. Gender blind pedagogies maintain that organizational practices and decision-making processes are gender neutral and have similar outcomes to both men and women who engage in public service. Gender neutral assumptions in PA education perpetuate gender…

Many graduate public affairs programs offer both residential and online options for students. One of the challenges for multi-format programs is creating a sense of belonging among online students who may never set foot on campus. In 2017, the MPA program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed an "immersion" course…

Master of Public Administration (MPA) alumni face increasingly diverse and global professional expectations. Public affairs specialists generally go on to manage complex partnerships that involve a wide array of participants. Public administration education ought to do its part to ensure these graduates succeed. In this sense, we offer comparative…

Debates about trade-offs among values are central to the field of public administration and to graduate education in public affairs. Accreditation guidelines from the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) direct graduate programs to articulate the public service values that guide their curricula. Moreover,…

This article investigates transformations in public service education over the past 50 years, specifically: How have organizational forms evolved, and what lessons can we draw from that evolution? The organizational form construct originates in population ecology theory. We draw from a variety of evidentiary sources in answering the research…

Academics are becoming more thoughtful on where they want to live as the culture war on queerness has entered higher education. Universities, in order to recruit the best and the brightest, need to consider how to create an environment that retains and attracts diverse talent. In this article, we examine how to recruit and support LGBTQIA+…

The potential benefits and challenges of AI in the workplace are documented with public service facing a particular choice to leverage this tool to better communities. This article explores the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in public service education. As students prepare to enter public service, they need to gain the skills…

Public affairs education can benefit from the potential of active learning practices in preparing students for the complex surroundings of real public service. This article aims to explore the use of those practices in public affairs education and the extent to which those practices are suitable in a public affairs school in a country in the…

There are 61 million people in the United States that live with a disability. This figure is expected to rise in the coming decades through both an aging population and the long-term impacts of the global pandemic. Improving accessibility in the MPA classroom is imperative and one step toward improvement is to implement the use of assistive…

The issue of teaching staff perpetrating sexual misconduct is prevalent within academia, and more specifically, in graduate education programmes. In the United States (U.S.), 24.2% of women and 15.6% of men report being sexually victimised as undergraduates on a college campus in just the last 2 months (Jouriles et al., 2020); and, 1 out of every…

A growing literature highlights the benefits of playing the classic board game Diplomacy in international relations (IR) courses. But how exactly can it help students to learn not only about different IR theories, but also about what it means to "use" a theory in the first place? To address this question, I highlight my experiences…

Diversity, cultural competency, and global awareness are three broad and mutually reinforcing conceptual themes in the literature of American public affairs education that are rarely implicitly interconnected. A primary challenge has concerned how to teach these themes, either separately or in unison, when designing courses and curricula to…