On Developing a Critical Public Service Perspective
It’s so tempting to adopt a “not my business” mentality in the workplace when we observe or learn of inequities, discrimination or just plain offensive behavior . . . but [advocacy and] allyship requires showing up where injustice shows up . . . true [advocates and]allies don’t confine their interest to their box on the organization chart.
Dana Brownlee, Senior Contributor at Forbes
Amid the antiracist activism of 2020 sparked by a police officer’s murder of George Floyd, the University of Utah’s Programs of Public Affairs (MPA, MPP, and MIAGE) received necessary feedback from students and alumni. In candid letters, community members of color and their white allies articulated that the Programs had not only failed to live up to the ideals of an antiracist public service, but had perpetuated systemic racism in their curricula, classrooms, and treatment of students.
The legitimate criticism extended to my own instruction. At the time I was teaching a section of Governance and the Economy, the content of which at failed to even acknowledge that the economic oppression and exploitation experienced by Black residents and other people of color in the United States. Nor did it speak to the fact that American racial discrimination, oppression, and exploitation are constructed — and the primary tool of oppression is government policy. I’d avoided such topics in most of my classes — out of both privileged ignorance and to avoid discomfort — and I had surely committed and allowed microaggressions in the classroom.
Although it by no means excuses the Programs’ or my own failures, genuine concern for social equity and justice has too often been absent from public affairs education. Public policy and public administration often neglected their complicity (both as a professions and academic fields) in perpetuating racism and other forms of oppression. The titles of works that buck the trend expose many scholars’ abdications. Examples include Jennifer Alexander’s Avoiding the Issue: Racism and Administrative Responsibility in Public Administration, Matthew Witt’s A Noteworthy Absence: How and why Race and Racism is Ignored by Public Administration Scholarship, and Anthony Starke, Nuri Heckler, and Janiece Mackey’s Administrative Racism: Public Administration Education and Race.
Beyond the confines of public affairs programs (although still relevant to them), educational institutions and the academic enterprise are often characterized by discrimination and hostility towards individuals other than able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, and white males. Women have always suffered differential opportunities and treatment (especially women of color), as have those whose gender identities do not follow binary gender norms. Discrimination and systemic exclusion are further experienced by individuals with disabilities and those who come from backgrounds of limited resources.
Against the backdrop of these institutional deficits, critical pedagogists have paved the way for academics to do more than pay lip service to diversity (by which I mean social/demographic differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, ability, and language) and equity (the fair distribution of resources and opportunities, accounting for past and present events, conditions, and contexts). The starting point is a lesson articulated as by Paulo Freire in 1971 and repeated in the more recent antiracist work of Ibram X. Kendi — that in an oppressive system one cannot be “non-oppressive,” as neutrality simply perpetuates discriminatory, marginalizing, and exploitative systems.
For public affairs scholars and professionals especially, such a critical perspective calls for study of the ways in which public policy and administration create and sustain oppression; for example, how the origins of U.S. public administration are found in the colonial administration of early America; that racism has been enacted through a grim series of policies, from slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to redlining, and those that prop up the contemporary carceral state; and that public servants create and implement policies designed to discriminate, be it against refugee-immigrant children or nonbinary students. It further requires one to also set aside the myth of the neutral public servant for an understanding that places public administrators central to (in the words of Susan Gooden) “fulfilling the democratic principle of fairness.”
To these ends, I invite you to assume a critical public service perspective in this class by interrogating both the empirical topics that we discuss, as well as the scholarship with which we examine them, for how they enable or perpetuate oppression — and how this might be changed. Inspired by Jamila Michener, the following questions may offer a fruitful starting point:
- How should scholars ground policy and administration-oriented research on discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and social justice? What, if any, core ideas root such research?
- Which theoretical frameworks can be most fruitfully applied to the task of studying discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and social justice?
- What intellectual and disciplinary challenges must scholars overcome in order to advance towards bolder, more wide-ranging scholarship on social justice and public policy?
I also invite your critical appraisal of this course’s treatment of oppression and social justice through its curriculum, content, and delivery. You should find evidence of a (renewed) commitment to such matters. Nonetheless, my realization of this commitment remains a work in progress and, just as I intend to recruit you as a pedagogical collaborator, I’d like to enlist you as a critical perspective partner. By helping me see beyond my own experiences, privilege, and outlook, your contributions can help this course better reflect genuine concern for matters of anti-oppression, equity, and social justice.
