From the Editor
Don’t Know Much about History?
Does It Matter?
David Schultz
Editor in Chief
The most famous line in Sam Cooke’s song,
“Wonderful World,” is “Don’t know much
about history.” Though Sam is singing about
unrequited love, some faculty think this line
describes their students. Many of these
individuals don’t seem to know much about
lots of things, and so the task falls to public
affairs professors to require their students to
know what seems to be just about everything.
In four years plus of editing this journal, I have
read a range of articles lamenting students who
cannot write, speak, do analysis, think critically,
be culturally competent, or understand social
equity. They cannot do a host of other things,
nor can they deploy skills that we think they
ought to know and that implicitly we think
students or public administrators of yesteryear
possessed. Somehow, students today are not
getting these skills or bodies of knowledge
developed elsewhere in their studies, thereby
necessitating that public affairs programs pile
on requirements.
But does it matter if our students don’t know
much about history or other matters? It all
depends. Certainly in an ideal world with
infinite time and resources, we would instruct
our students in a whole host of matters and
they would be competent in everything. To
borrow another line from Sam’s song, “what a
wonderful world it would be.” In reality such a
world does not exist, public affairs faculty
cannot do it all, and we should not expect our
students to be masters of everything when they
graduate. Like those before them, they will
graduate, get jobs, and develop or learn skills
JPAE 20 (1), 5–7
on the job. It’s called work experience. Learn-­­
ing takes place on the job, and our students will
be specializing at work, suggesting some skills
will be important to some students for some
jobs but not for others. There is simply a limit
to what we can or should do with a public
affairs curriculum.
Without question, public affairs education
should be meaningful, and our students should
enter the workforce with appropriate skills. But
beyond debating what these skills are, another
question arises: What should NASPAA and
public affairs faculty address, and what should
be left to other fields to instruct? Competence,
if not excellence, as a public administrator is
more than simply a bundle of technical skills,
standards, and learning objectives. Somewhere
along the line, public affairs education must
rest upon a liberal arts base; such learning will
take place outside of our classrooms or even our
schools. Public affairs faculty cannot be history,
communications, and economics teachers at
the same time, so we need to decide what we
can do best along with determining overall
what our students should know. In the eight or
so years I ran a doctoral program, I argued that
the basic question should always be what do we
want our students to look like, both when they
matriculate our programs and when they
graduate them? The debate over what our
students should know, what NASPAA should
mandate, and what we should teach correctly
dominates this journal, and it continues again
as JPAE enters its 20th year of publication.
Journal of Public Affairs Education5
D. Schultz
Volume 20 opens with the address from
incoming NASPAA President Ethel Williams.
In her “The ABC’s of NASPAA: Addressing
Challenges, Being the Authoritative Voice in
Public Service Education, Continuing to
Model Public Service Excellence,” Williams
first describes her journey to NASPAA
president. She then articulates her vision and
agenda for her term. She describes previous
NASPAA presidents as having erected a
foundation of initiatives upon which she wishes
to build. President Williams takes seriously the
idea that NASPAA ought to be the “global
standard” for public affairs, as the association
likes to advertise. She also believes it should be
an institution that is relevant and applicable to
all public affairs programs around the world.
This new issue then turns to history and
considers how much of it students should know
and for what purposes. Perhaps two of the most
familiar quotes about history are George
Santayana’s reputed statement, “Those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it,” and Henry Ford’s claim that “History
is bunk.” If Ford was saying that history does
not teach us anything and we can safely ignore
it, then Santayana was saying just the opposite.
History is important and instructive, and so is
its use in the teaching of public affairs
and policy.
This Winter 2014 issue features a symposium
entitled “Uses of History in MPA and MPP
Programs,” edited by Richardson Dilworth. In
his introduction—“Why and How to Teach
History in MPA and MPP Programs: An
Introduction to the Symposium”—Dilworth
makes a powerful case not for public affairs
teachers to become historians, but instead for
them to bring history into the classroom as a
way to offer context, teach understanding, and
help students realize how policies and problems
evolved, got solved, or even were ignored. In
his introduction, our guest editor summarizes
the major points of the five articles in the
symposium, which offers a set of ideas about
where history resides in a public affairs
education: Richardson Dilworth, “Historical
6
Journal of Public Affairs Education
Thinking as a Skill in Public Affairs Graduate
Education,” Richard A. Harris, “Let’s Stop
Educating Closet Historians,” Scott A. Cook
and William E. Klay, “George Washington and
Enlightenment Ideas on Educating Future
Citizens and Public Servants,” Jessica
Trounstine, “How (and How Not) to Use
History in the MPA/MPP Classroom,” and
Guian McKee, “A Confident Humility: MPP
Students and the Uses of History.”
History can inform, but the teaching of it is not
the sum of what public affairs is or ought to do.
This issue also contains several other articles
that debate or describe what should be taught
as part of a public affairs program.
Teaching evidence-based policy making that is
driven by social science is a more than emergent
feature of many public affairs programs. But
the teaching of such a type of policy often
challenges instructors, because it can take
classes into controversial political issues that
often center on specific case studies. In “The
Enemy of Teaching Evidence-Based Policy: The
Powell-Bush Doctrine of Public Affairs,” Joseph
Ferrandino uses the Powell-Bush Doctrine and
discussions of peace and war to highlight many
of the tensions in deploying evidence-based
policy making. The article uses a deeply divisive
issue to teach a lesson about how as citizens and
public administrators, students can recognize
the uses and abuses of evidence to prevent what
the author contends was a failed policy initiative
from the start.
Public affairs programs offer a variety of nonclassroom experiences to enhance learning.
Among those are practicums or capstones that
give students real field experiences and the
opportunity to apply what they have learned in
the classroom and that also serve as an
important supplemental way of knowing. But
do these experiences affect students down the
line, long after they have completed a class? In
“The Immediate and Long-Term Impact of
Practicum Experiences on Students,” Mary
Sprague and R. Cameron Percy do what their
article title suggests—they assess the benefits of
From the Editor
practicum for students over the more sub­
stantive parts of their career as opposed to the
immediate and short-term impacts. They find
that the benefits range from enhanced commun­
­ications and other general skills to more specific
ones regarding policy analysis and evaluation.
In the alternative to practicum and field
placements, designed classroom simulations
can be powerful surrogates for experiential
learning. Carlos Figueroa’s “Developing
Practical/Analytical Skills Through Mindful
Classroom Simulations for ‘Doing’ Leadership”
offers a novel pedagogy for inculcating
leadership skills. By placing students in
situations where they face scenarios close to
what they would find at work, this model
encourages students to draw upon and develop
skills that emulate what would be required in
real contexts. The article is an intriguing spin
on current notions and applications of the type
of simulations that many of us already use.
The Affordable Care Act is perhaps the most
significant piece of regulatory legislation in
nearly 50 years. In seeking to reform the
delivery of health care, or how people pay for it,
the act makes major changes to an industry that
represents nearly 20% of the U.S. economy.
But with legislation exceeding 2,000 pages,
hundreds of thousands of administrative rules,
and a plethora of national, state, local, private,
and nonprofit actors, the Affordable Care Act
will be hard to teach. Still, there is a need to
teach it, according to Jacqueline L. Angel and
Toni P. Miles in their timely “Lessons Learned
From Teaching the Affordable Care Act of
2010.” The authors offer great ideas and
suggestions for how a class on the Affordable
Care Act should be taught, describing the
essentials for professors and programs to know
as they augment their curriculum to add a class
on this topic.
text to be an excellent edition for advanced
undergraduates or graduate students in classes
that emphasize the role of the bureaucracy in
the policy process.
Congratulations go to Cheryl Simrell King,
whose “What’s a Girl Like You Doing in a Place
Like This?” received an award from the editorial
board for the best article to appear in JPAE
volume 18. Her story of her blue-collar roots
and how they inform her teaching is truly
inspiring. Cheryl was not able to receive her
award in person, and I could not congratulate
her publicly. Let me do so now.
Finally, at the October annual meeting, I was
honored to receive the 2013 NASPAA
Leslie A. Whittington Excellence in Teaching
Award. I thank my students and my peers for
this accolade.
—David Schultz
dschultz@hamline.edu
about the editor
David Schultz is Hamline University professor in
political science and School of Law. Professor
Schultz is a two-time Fulbright Scholar and the
author of more than 25 books and 100+ articles
on various aspects of American politics, election
law, and the media and politics. He is regularly
interviewed and quoted on these subjects in the
local, national, and international media,
including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post, the Economist, and National
Public Radio. His most recent book is Election
Law and Democratic Theory (Ashgate Pub­
lishing, 2014).
This issue concludes with Barbara Coyle
McCabe’s review of the new third edition of a
minor classic—Bureaucracy and Democracy:
Accountability and Performance, by William T.
Gormley and Steven J. Bella. McCabe finds the
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