Public Administration Program

This is a graduate seminar designed to introduce you to the multidimensional, interdisciplinary field of public administration. The title of the course, "Survey of Public Administration," indicates that the course focuses on becoming aware of and understanding the different ways that public administration is viewed.

In trying to provide you with these perspectives, I make the assumption that the students in this course are either oriented toward becoming professional public administrators, are currently in the public administration field and want to enhance their understandings and skills, or at the very least have an academic interest in the subject.

It is my goal to help you gain perspectives that will help you to better understand the "field" of public administration and your professional obligations. I take the term "professional" seriously. It means that you must come to understand yourself as representing a profession and having responsibilities to that profession. Ultimately, it means for me that you must possess some degree of what we call "reflexivity" with respect to yourself, your environment, and your administrative activities.

For many public administrators it is enough to know the "nuts and bolts" of public administration - how to survive in a political environment, how to budget, how to develop managerial and personnel skills, etc. As important as those nuts and bolts skills are, a professional administrator's perspective should be much more than that. Professional administrators should be concerned with their role as administrators in a democratic society, with how their biases influence their views and actions, with the legitimacy of the institutions that have come to represent modern public administration, and with other similar issues.

Assuming that public personnel requires a legal foundation this course is split between a more detailed look at the case precedent and legislation, and whether managers can actually influence the decisions of street-level bureaucrats. It begins with the history of the civil servant and some of the values held by public administrations and addresses the role of politics in helping to shape personnel laws. The other portion of the class takes a bottom up approach to studying personnel through the lens of the street-level bureaucrats. It asks, do personnel laws exist because of discretion, or does discretion exist because of personnel laws?

This class is based on the idea that a major part of successfully managing an organization or working within one is based on the ability to better understand how a wide range of people think within it. It assumes that if you can understand problems an organization faces from a series of different perspectives you will also have a more comprehensive toolkit to solve administrative issues. It asks you to think critically about concepts like individual freedom and consciousness in an organization and some of the tension between organizational pursuits and individual ones.

This course is designed to introduce you to basic concepts and processes of public budgeting. In addition, various topics in public financial management will be treated as they relate to budgeting. The context and characteristics of the budget process, and the norms, roles, and behaviors of participants will be examined and their impact on policy will be explored as well. Importantly, the politics of the budgetary process will be a major concern for this class. What we will recognize is that in large part it is the "politics" involved in public budgeting that sets it apart from its private sector counterpart.

This course is based on the idea that we as public administrators do not face old problems. With technological developments and a changing social environment we instead face new problems, which lack a prescribed code or "ethic" to follow. This changes how we think about what ethical behavior for public administrators consists of, as well as how to train administrators in ethics. Along these lines, the course examines the philosopher Immanuel Kant's concepts of thinking, reasoning and judgment in an effort to improve how we make ethical decisions while on the job.

This course is designed to provide both a theoretical and practical approach to the field of public policy. In general, we will be considering the process by which policies are made, implemented, and evaluated. Although we will be discussing policy analysis techniques, the actual application of those techniques is covered in POLS 5864. A central premise of the seminar is that despite the recurring notion policy is about "facts" and "science," it is a thoroughly political process.

Designed for students in public administration to train them to make decisions based on empirical evidence in policy and management. Course draws concepts from system analysis, management science, operations research, and social science methodology to provide an understanding of various policy analysis and program management techniques across many applications. Prerequisite: PBAD 5000.

Integrates theories and concepts introduced in core and option-core courses, and emphasizes students' application of them to various administrative settings. Prerequisite: completion of all other core and option core requirements in the MPA Program.