Scholarly hypocrisy or apostasy in public administration: Preaching to the choir, or to an empty room?

Abstract

As a discipline, public administration is at a crossroads.This is hardly the first time that concern has been raised about public administration scholarship's position (see Dubnick, 2018;Ostrom, 1973;Stivers & McDonald, 2023), but we currently find ourselves in a situation as unique as it is potentially dire.Like other disciplines, research within public administration has its roots in improving practice (Perry, de Graaf, van der Wal, & van Montfort, 2014;Vogel & Hattke, 2022).The creation of professional public administration education programs, namely Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs, coupled the basic and applied research of faculty with teaching and gave students access to state-of-the-art solutions to the novel policy and management problems of the day (Farrell, Hatcher, & Diamond, 2022;McDonald, Hatcher, & Abbott, 2022).Research and institutional expectations for extramural research funding, however, have driven a wedge between these two primary faculty functions (Coggburn & Neely, 2015;Tayaban & O'Leary, 2022).The growing emphasis to publish or perish creates a divide between what we teach in the classroom and the research we conduct back in our offices.So divergent are these needs that a proliferation of teaching professors and adjunct faculty is common in many large public policy schools.Moreover, there is a developing generational rift between scholars who see their purpose as contributing to the core theory of the discipline and publishing accordingly, versus those who dedicate their time to highly-applied sponsored research projects.The value proposition for faculty at research universities is now somewhere between a dual path that recognizes faculty for both publications and research funding, and a tangible shift in preference for the pocketbook over the publications that distinguish faculty, units, and universities.Let us be honest from the start-much of the research published in our journals today is completely inaccessible to lay practitioners.Overly theoretical work lacks a tangible connection to real-world problems.Sophisticated

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