The Need to Reconnect Public Administration Education, Research, and Practice

How relevant is current public administration pedagogy to the discipline and to those working in public service? Public administration education prepared leaders during World War II and the New Deal and once was viewed as a critical subfield of political science. Over the years, and despite various Minnowbrook incarnations, public administration has become a self-standing but narrowly defined body of knowledge characterized as “the business of government,” without any relational emphasis on its historical, legal, and economic context. This diminished intellectual scope poses a serious challenge to its practical relevance.