Journal of Public Affairs Education 33

Lets Stop Educating Closet Historians

Richard A. Harris
Rutgers UniversityCamden
ABSTRACT
Public administration is inherently an interdisciplinary eld, prominently incorporating theory
and methods from economics, political science, and sociology. Less obviously, however, MPA
curricula include historical treatments of particular policy arenas, institutions, the administrative
state, and the professions of policy analyst and public management. In addition, the case method
that gures prominently in MPA pedagogy and the research MPA students perform depend on
doing history. Yet, history as a scholarly endeavor is rarely included in basic courses, much less
instruction in research methods. This essay explores the use of history in MPA curricula and how
MPA students might acquire a deeper appreciation of history and how historians ply their craft.
KEYWORDS
historiography, political development, public administration history, interdisciplinary curricula
The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself,
nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters.
Stephen Fry, Making History
When invited to prepare an essay on the use of
history in public administration courses, I
readily accepted with the idea in mind that I
would write straightforwardly about my
reliance on history in teaching core MPA
courses: Foundations of Policy Analysis, Law
and Public Policy, and Principles of Public
Management. That discussion, in fact,
constitutes the rst half of this essay. However,
in conceptualizing this project, it gradually
dawned on me that such an exercise would be
both obvious and prosaic. More importantly, I
quickly came to the startling realization that
teaching history in public administration or
policy courses without teaching how to do
history does a disservice to MPA students.
Thus, this essay is at once a mea culpa and an
argument for explicitly including historiography
among the research tools we teach.
Master of Public Administration (MPA) is, by
denition, interdisciplinary. The overarching
elds of public policy and of public management
that demarcate the curricula of MPA programs
assure that our graduate students engage with
an array of technical skills and conceptual
frameworks. From economics, they learn about
market failure and benet-cost analysis; from
the law, they develop an appreciation of
regulatory procedure and statutory guidance;
from philosophy, they acquire an appreciation
of rights and ethics; from political science, they
derive insight into democratic principles and
the decision-making models; and from socio-
logy and psychology, they obtain tools to explore
organizational behavior and leadership theory.
Interestingly, however, even though much of
their coursework includes case studies, accounts
of policy development, and explorations of the
JPAE 20 (1), 3344
34 Journal of Public Affairs Education
disciplinary evolution of public administration
and policy, historiography and the construction
of historical narratives are not among the
analytic tools we consciously seek to impart.
Our textbooks and syllabi often incorporate
histories of public administration as a
profession, of policy analysis as a eld of study,
and of government programs. My MPA
students receive a lot of history from readings
and lectures, but never acquire a deep
appreciation of what history is and how
historians ply their craft. They learn of history
but do not learn about history; their courses
impart historical knowledge but not the skills
to evaluate historical evidence and organize it
into a causal narrative. It is unusual for them to
wrestle directly with historians approaches to
constructing or deconstructing narratives that
frame, contextualize, or for that matter
implicitly assert historical claims. As a practical
matter, I (and I strongly suspect this is the
norm) ask my MPA students to practice history
without a license; I had to acknowledge that I
was, in effect, educating closet historians.
This essay explores two related questions about
the use of history in MPA instruction: (a) how
does history inform MPA classes; and (b) how
might it be employed to greater advantage both
pedagogically and methodologically? Animating
both of these questions is the challenge posed
by Stephen Fry in the epigraph: explaining to
MPA students why history matters. The short,
twofold answer is that whether in class or on
the job, they consume as well as produce
historical analyses; therefore they should know
how history is done in order to critically
examine their own work and the work of others.
Without an understanding of historiography,
our MPA students and graduates will remain
closet historians, self-aware of neither what
they are doing nor how they can do it better.
Without an understanding of the nature of
historical narrative, there is a high likelihood
that they will remain dilettante interpreters of
policy and management. In answering Frys
challenge, I turn rst to a review of the standard
and quite sensible uses we make of history in
public policy and management education. This
survey will set up a consideration of how to
move our students from their current closeted
and often credulous uses of history as a mode of
analysis to a more overt and robust practice of
historical analysis.
HOW HISTORY INFORMS MPA EDUCATION
In a substantive sense, history suffuses MPA
programs. A cursory examination of prominent
textbooks produced for core MPA classes
reveals historical treatments of the emergence
of public administration and policy analysis as
professions and as elds of study. Examples
exist as well of history being used to illustrate
the origins of the administrative state; evolving
relations among different levels of government;
public budgeting; the enactment and imple-
mentation of social programs; underlying
causes of public policy change; and globali-
zation of management approaches. Commonly,
though, the rst encounter MPA students have
with history occurs in their introductory classes
such as Introduction to Public Administration
(Cleveland StateMaxine Goodman Levin
College of Public Affairs), Public Admini-
stration and Democracy (University of Georgia
and Maxwell School), Law and Public Policy
(Rutgers UniversityCamden) or Law and
Public Affairs (University of IndianaSPEA).
Often, basic texts for such classes begin by
recounting the American founding to bench-
mark the starting point for building of
administrative and governmental capacity in
America. These familiar narratives chronicle
how, in practice, public administration has
evolved from Alexander Hamiltons insistence,
in The Federalist Number 70, that America
needed an energetic government:
A feeble Executive implies a feeble
execution of the government. A feeble
execution is but another phrase for bad
execution; and a government ill-
executed, whatever it may be in theory,
must be, in practice, a bad government.
(Rossiter, 1961, p. 423)
Indeed this history often includes a review of
the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson as
R. A. Harris
Journal of Public Affairs Education 35
the beginning of an ongoing conversation in
history of American Politics and Administration.
As Nicholas Henry explains in his Public Admini-
stration and Public Affairs, Hamiltons notions
on how public administration ought to work
were in direct contradiction to the ideals of
Jefferson, whose inuence on the American
administrative tradition was far more pervasive
than Hamiltons (2013, p. 5).
The Hamilton-Jefferson debate sets the
historical frame for the conventional portrayal
of how an ever more energetic government
evolved into the present-day administrative
state (Kettl & Fessler, 2009; Waldo, 1948).
This developmental narrative informs students
on the seemingly inexorable logic of govern-
ment expansion as America evolved from a
regional and agrarian to a national and
industrial political economy. It applies an
essentially progressive narrative that implicitly
rationalizes a parallel transition from a classical
to a modern liberal public philosophy. To be
sure, as this narrative is presented, it incorporates
all the customary complications and caveats
about the relationship between big government
and democracy. Beginning with the famous
Brownlow Commission admonition that by
the mid-1930s the administrative state had
grown to the point that American bureaucracy
had become a headless fourth branch of
government, our curricula acknowledge the
modern meaning of Jeffersons fears about a
distant federal governing structure. Basic texts
in public administration delineate the history
of this tension, perhaps best exemplied by
Theodore Lowis inuential The End of Liberalism
(1969), as a frame for the tradeoff between
democratic accountability and legitimacy on
the one hand and expanding government
programs and policies on the other. The basic
historical narrative is one of necessary, even
ontological, administrative growth that ought
be regulated but not reversed. In this history,
the passage of the Administrative Procedures
Act of 1946 (Kerwin, 2010) and the line of
Supreme Court decisions dealing with
bureaucratic delegation, accountability, and
responsiveness (Hall, 2011) represent a historical
accommodation with the more or less inevitable
growth of government advocated by FDR
when he declared, The age of enlightened
admini stration has come (Roosevelt, 1932).
History thus permeates our MPA curricula
from the outset, and this is as it should be; it is
appropriate to educate public and nonprot
managers about the origins and development of
their professions as well as the history of the
governmental system that they work in or
partner with. Largely the product of law and
political science, this historical analysis
embedded in our introductory MPA curricula
is a valuable approach for inculcating an
appreciation of the foundations on which our
governing institutions rest. Moreover, since the
early 1980s, when historical institutionalism
and American political development began to
gain traction in political science and public
administration, a theoretical overlay of state-
building and path dependency (Pierson, 2004;
Skowronek, 1982) has informed this narrative
explanation for why our politics and our policy
process function as they do today. Equally as
important, this historical narrative sheds light
on the evolution of values and interests in the
policy process and offers vital insight to our
students on how to appreciate the program-
matic and political environments in which they
may work.
1

A second use of historical analysis in MPA
curricula is to introduce students to the
evolution of public administration as a eld of
study. Interestingly, this line of inquiry also
begins with Enlightenment views of gov-
ernment and xes the thought of Alexander
Hamilton as a wellspring for the study of
American public administration (Van Riper,
1983). One leading text even cites Hamiltons
Scottish Enlightenment contemporary, Adam
Smith, as a progenitor of our administrative
state (Starling, 2011, p. 27). This intellectual
history of the discipline conventionally leads
MPA students from the late 18th century
through Woodrow Wilsons seminal 1887
Public Science Quarterly article, The Study of
Administration and the Progressive Era quest
to separate politics from administration
Historical Thinking as a Skill in PA Graduate Education
36 Journal of Public Affairs Education
(Goodnow, 1900); the succeeding effort to
articulate universal principles of administrative
science (Follet, 1930; Gulick & Urwick, 1936)
that informed the Brownlow Commission and
the New Dealers; the postWorld War II
challenge to both the politics-administration
dichotomy and the meme of an administrative
science (Morstein Marx, 1946); the contem-
poraneous attack on the ambition to assert
universal principles of administrative science
(Simon, 1947; Waldo, 1948); and eventually
the effort in the 1960s and 1970s to uproot
public administration from its original
Hamiltonian grounding in government in-
stitutions and transplant it into the more
generic turf of organizational management
(March & Simon, 1958; Thompson, 1967).
2
A third subject of historical exploration in
MPA programs is found in the story of how
policy analysis emerged as a distinct profession.
This history, of course, overlaps with the
evolution of public administration insofar as
policy analysis demands an understanding and
appreciation of politics and institutions as well
as analytic techniques. As William Dunn
(2011) aptly notes, the eld of policy analysis
covers both the study of the policy process
(i.e., the politics of public policy) and study
in the policy process (i.e., technical analysis
in the service of policy goals). The distinct
history we teach our MPA students of policy
analysis as a eld focuses on the development
and application of techniques in the policy
process. The origins of this enterprise, our
students learn, date from the advent of distinct
social sciences in the late 19th century and the
faith of their Progressive practitioners that
societal problems were amenable to rational,
scientic resolution (Heineman, Bluhm,
Peterson, & Kearny, 2002). Leaders educated
in this traditionsuch as Rexford Tugwell and
Harry Hopkinshelped to shape the New
Deal, and their legacy extended into the Great
Society. Contemporaneously, legal realists
inuenced by John Dewey and Roscoe Pound
introduced social scientic analysis to court
proceedings, thereby transforming the law
explicitly into an instrument of public policy.
3

The progressive project, in fact, was predicated
on linking professional social science with
policy making to inform government decision
making. Without social science, reform
advocacy would merely be a political exercise
buttressed by moral argument. With it, the
methods of Emil Durkheim and Max Weber
provided modern liberal reformers a rational,
scientic basis not only for describing social ills
but also for demonstrating what policy alter-
natives might work.
This history of policy analysis, as MPA students
learn it, identies the next major episode of
professional growth: the governments use of
systems analysis and operations research during
World War II. The experience of applying these
approaches to planning, coordination, and
logistics in wartime demonstrated the efcacy
of multidisciplinary scientic and economic
analysis to nd efcient solutions to complex
problems. Postwar application of this kind of
systematic analysis to socioeconomic problems
was a major llip to the growth and acceptance
of planning and policy analytic techniques to
public problems. The 1948 separation of the
RAND Corporation from its parent Douglas
Aircraft Company and its establishment as a
nonprot research entity signaled the elevation
of these approaches to core techniques of
professional policy analysis. As RAND (n.d.)
explains, its mission is to focus on
the issues that matter most such as health,
education, national security, inter national
affairs, law and business, the environment,
and more. With a research staff consisting of
some of the worlds preeminent minds,
RAND has been ex panding the boundaries
of human knowledge for more than 60 years.
Policy science, with its emphasis on quantitative,
behavioral research, laid the analytic
groundwork for the Great Society programs.
Moreover, the history of policy analysis
embedded in our MPA programs tracks with
the Progressive narrative we attach to the sister
eld of public administration. Our students
learn that just as critiques arose to contest the
early administrative science advocated through
R. A. Harris
Journal of Public Affairs Education 37
the 1930s, so too did policy analysis generate
its own challenges to scientic orthodoxy. Our
textbooks show how, even before the Great
Society programs began to recede, students of
public policy were questioning the hegemony
of economics and the quest for objective
analysis (Dror, 1986; Sabatier & Jenkins-
Smith, 1993). But also, as in the history of
public administration, the postmodern critique
of policy analysis sought to improve and extend
rather than undermine and attenuate its use.
The fourth area where MPA students encounter
history, the study of programs and policy
development, is also the area in which we ask
our students to write history as well as read it
and respond to our presentations of it. A widely
used pedagogical approach is to engage our
students with case studies, a qualitative metho-
dology that depends, fundamentally, on historical
narrative. In framing and analyzing of cases,
students must construct histories of a policy
issue or public program (Guess & Farnham,
2012). For example, studies of welfare reform
may begin with an exposition of the origins of
Aid to Families with Dependent Children in
the context of the Great Depression. When we
teach cases on the use of benet-cost analysis, a
beginning narrative is essential to contextualize
the problems we ask our students to address.
Team projects and individual papers we assign
may revolve around analyses of how a particular
law or regulation came to be, how a particular
organization responded to changing resources
or politics, the implementation of a policy or
culture change in an agency. To execute these
assignments, MPA students must trace their
topic through the various stages of the policy
process or through episodes of change at
government agencies or nonprot organizations,
both of which require them not only to write a
historical narrative but also to nd and use
public documents or other primary sources and
to master secondary sources that present
historical analyses.
In substantive policy seminars, we may require
our students to master accounts on the develop-
ment of health policy (Altman & Shactman,
2011), education policy (McGuinn, 2006),
environmental policy (Rosenbaum, 2008),
international development (Carbonnier, 2012),
and so forth. Regardless of the policy focus,
these readings either are or include historical
narratives. Altman and Shactman, in meti-
culously examining the story of the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka
Obamacare), frame this historic achievement
by walking us through the preceding century of
efforts at universal health care policy. Similarly,
McGuinns excellent study of the No Child
Left Behind Act (NCLB) traces the United
States federal education policy leading up to
the enactment of NCLB before presenting a
careful historical analysis of the agenda setting
and legislative process leading up to its passage
and the subsequent implementation efforts of
the Bush administration. The two more general
textbooks by Rosenbaum and Carbonnier cited
earlier depend on historical analysis to situate
contemporary environmental and development
policy respectively.
In sum, it seems clear that delivering a Master
of Public Administration program relies heavily
on history and our students themselves are
called upon to interpret, evaluate, and construct
historical analyses. Yet, it is difcult to discern
how we prepare our students to produce and
consume history, to create a narrative that
reects best practice among historians, or to
critically evaluate sources that inform such a
narrative. Anyone surveying programs accred-
ited by the Network of Schools of Public Affairs
and Administration (NASPAA) would nd
widespread offerings of courses and assignments
that depend on historical analysis. However, a
review of those same programs reveals that our
instruction in the areas of research skills focuses
on statistics, experimental versus quasi-experi-
mental methods, econometrics, surveys and
sampling, eld interviews, or even ethnography.
It is as if we expect our students to learn
historiography by osmosis: No doubt a number
of them do a credible job based on their prior
educational experiences and their own initiative
or common sense. Notwithstanding individual
examples of success, though, perhaps it is time
to consider including history and historical
research skills in our core curricula.
Historical Thinking as a Skill in PA Graduate Education
38 Journal of Public Affairs Education
HOW HISTORY MIGHT IMPROVE
MPA EDUCATION
As Deborah Stone reminds us in her extraordi-
nary critique of policy research and instruction,
Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making:
Denitions of policy problems usually
have narrative structure; that is there are
stories with a beginning, a middle, and
an end, involving some change or
transformation. They have heroes and
villains and innocent victims, and they
pit forces of evil against forces of good.
The storyline in policy writing is often
hidden, but one should not be thwarted
by the surface details from searching for
the underlying story. (Stone, 1988,
p. 138)
Clearly, embedded historical narratives charac-
terize much of policy analysis as it is taught to
and practiced by MPA students. So it is as well
with the histories of public administration and
political development that we supply to MPA
students who consume them through readings
and didactic instruction. These embedded
narratives guide students, as if by an invisible
hand, to particular plot lines and presumptions.
The danger is, of course, that in this marketplace
of ideas, there are glaring information asymme-
tries; our students (my students) often absorb
historical narratives uncritically, or worse, they
are asked to create their own historical analyses
without the same level of preparation we
provide when imparting other analytic tools
and research skills. In dispassionately examining
the use of history in teaching public
administration, it is difcult to avoid the
conclusion that history ought to be treated
unambiguously as a mode of analysis with its
own research skills and evidentiary standards.
Just as we ask our students to be self-conscious
and critically aware in social scientic research,
so too should they be alert to the research
standards historians apply to their craft.
Even though my MPA students have not
received training in how to do history, they
readily, if ingenuously, deploy historical
narratives in their coursework. This reality
raises the question, How do they acquire an
ability to grapple with history and narrative
despite the fact that they receive no dedicated
instruction in these areas? Walter Fisher
provides the intuitively appealing answer that
we are all homo narrans; narratives are the
central paradigm by which humans
communicate and give meaning to their lives.
Building on the insights of Martin Heidegger
(1949), Paul Ricoeur (1976), and Hans Georg
Gadamer (1981), Fisher argues that we are, so
to speak, born into a world in which narratives
are a means of communication, a basis of social
action, and perhaps most importantly our
primary acquired experiential method of
evaluating causal explanation. In this paradigm,
all human beings are essentially storytellers
who instinctively convey and evaluate narratives
with good reasons that we grasp through an
inherent awareness of narrative probability,
what constitutes a coherent story and a
constant habit of testing narrative delity,
whether narratives ring true (Fisher, 1984,
pp. 78). MPA students, like all humans,
possess an acquired predisposition to the
historical form.
It should not be surprising, then, that our
students come to MPA study with some facility
in dealing with narratives; they are socialized
into a world of storytelling. Still, as Fisher
cautions, not all narratives are equally
persuasive. Assessing what he terms good
reason, or the degree of probability/coherence
and delity/plausibility, is something that
should be undertaken along with, not in place
of, what he terms traditional rationality.
As he explains, traditional rationality is
subsumed by the narrative paradigm.
The earlier notion was attuned to the
rational world paradigm and essentially
held that rationality was a matter of
argumentative competence: knowledge
of issues, modes of reasoning, appro priate
tests, and rules of advocacy in given
elds. As such, rationality was something
to be learned, depended on deliberation,
R. A. Harris
Journal of Public Affairs Education 39
and required a high degree of self-
consciousness. Narrative rationality does
not make these demands. It is a capacity
we all share. (Fisher, 1984, p. 9)
We can easily recognize traditional rationality
or the rational world paradigm as bases of
policy and management analysis in our MPA
programs and, by now, should recognize
narrative rationality as the modality our
students use to grapple with the histories they
consume and produce. Fisher might applaud
this circumstance, because he saw narrative
rationality as the democratic counterpoint to
elite and expert dominance. Siding with V. O.
Key, Fisher nds refuge in the knowledge that
the voters are not fools, that they use their
powers of narrative rationality to evaluate
leadership and judge public debate even if it is
carried out in administrative argument and
technical jargon. For the purposes of this essay,
however, we do not need to contemplate the
societal tension between democracy and
technocracy. Fishers relevance to our
consideration of history in MPA education lies
in his perceptive recognition that the narrative
paradigm melds the argumentative and
persuasive with the literary and the aesthetic.
The most effective stories in public policy and
administration, as Deborah Stone observes,
combine both. Unfortunately, the literary and
aestheticthe historical narrative, with its plot
lines and its characters and its implicit appeals
to widely held public values (both deregulation
and abortion are framed as narratives of
freedom), receives short shrift in MPA
education despite being vital to both public
administration and policy analysis. All of us
can use our innate abilities to communicate
and nd meaning through narrative, but MPA
graduates ought to be held to a higher standard.
If we ask our students to write and interpret
history not just for its descriptive utility but
also because it is a mode of argument and
advocacy, it may well be time to take seriously
the idea that historiography and historical
analysis should be a focal point along with the
more traditional tools of analysis we emphasize.
Should our graduates be equally as adept at
discerning differences among social, economic,
cultural, political, and transformative histories
as they are at comprehending the differences
between experimental and quasi-experimental
methods? Should they be as comfortable dis-
cussing the strengths and weaknesses of primary
sources as they are weighing the robustness of a
stratied versus a non-stratied sample? Should
they be as competent in recognizing and writing
coherent narratives as they are in constructing a
professional policy memorandum (which pro-
bably incorporates its own narrative)? It is time
to acknowledge that history is inextricably part
and parcel of MPA studies and should be
brought out of the closet.
LISTENING TO THE MUSE
If history, as an approach to research and
analysis, is to be openly explored in MPA
curricula, at least two matters must be ad-
dressed. First, we must specify what constitutes
the teaching of history and historiography.
Second, we must consider where in the public
administration curriculum historical analysis
should be taught. History, like any of the other
disciplines that populate an MPA program, is
demarcated along two dimensions, substantive
and methodological. While substance may mean
the subject matter of a research project such as
the history of a government agency, the case
study of a specic policy, or the analysis of an
explicit decision, for our purposes, the term
applies more broadly to the conceptual
approaches open to historians. Clearly, we
recognize distinctions between classical versus
neoclassical or Keynesian versus Chicago
School economists as well as among structural/
functional, conict-based, and symbolic inter-
actional sociology Just so, there are competing
schools of historical thought. Methodologically,
history includes both its own approach to
evaluating evidence and its adaptation of the
methods of other disciplines, principally
philology, linguistics, and social sciences, to
historical questions. If we are to meet the
challenge of preparing MPA students to
consume if not produce history, we ought to
ensure that they understand history both
Historical Thinking as a Skill in PA Graduate Education
40 Journal of Public Affairs Education
substantively and methodologicallywhat
history is and how it is done.
The days are long past when historians took
seriously the disciplinary goal of creating an
accumulated body of objective knowledge that
could be labeled history. That pipe dream
depended on dening history as the study of
politics and diplomacy practiced by important
men (and perhaps a few women). The godfather
of this modernist view of history was, of course,
the renowned German scholar Leopold von
Ranke, the most inuential proponent of
eschewing an older moralist view of history in
favor of the scientic search for historical facts
to be gleaned from the meticulous analysis of
primary documents. Defenders of this ancien
regime such as Sir Louis Namier and Sir
Geoffrey Elton have been supplanted by
academic equivalents of the sanscoulottes who
brought forth an understanding of history as
both pluralistic and relativistic. By 1980, the
study of economic history, social history, and
cultural history had expanded (some would say
fragmented) the discipline.
4
The new historians,
like Peter Stearns, since 1967 editor of the
Journal of Social History, insisted on a bottom-
up version of history that explored events and
experiences from the viewpoint of those who
neither exercised political power nor produced
ofcial documents. These approaches intro-
duced the unsettling idea that multiple truths
rather than a singular, coherent narrative might
inform our understanding of society and
government. This polyglot view of history nds
its voice in the transformative agendas of
African American, Womens, Latino, and
LGBT history as distinct subelds. Close on
the heels of this academic revolution from
below, postmodernism presented an even more
fundamental challenge. Whereas the new
history sought a more reliable approach to
understanding and explaining historical
phenomena, postmodernism and its associated
linguistic theories denied the existence of
discoverable truths, whether examined from
the top down or the bottom up. The only
legitimate focus history, as postmodernism
would have it, is the language employed by
historians that supplied a vantage point from
which to understand the power in contemporary
society; historians and historical writing became
the evidence rather than the analysis. This
familiar historiography, though interesting in
its own right, is relevant to public administra-
tion pedagogy not only for the obvious reason
that the narratives that imbue MPA courses and
readings materials ought to be discussed hon-
estly as reecting particular schools of thought
but also because understanding the competing
conceptual approaches to narrative construction
equips our students with additional tools for
critical thinking and reective analysis.
In fact many widely used textbooks implicitly
reect the comfortable von Ranke tradition of
relating history through the writings and
thoughts of political elites. For the most part,
courses deliver narratives about the development
of the administrative state from the perspective
of Hamilton and Wilson and FDR. Similarly,
case studies rely on government documents and
elite interviews. This is not to argue (as
postmodernist critiques might) that these
narratives are illegitimate, but rather to suggest
that they should be presented transparently as
traditional histories of the kind depicted in
Eltons The Practice of History (2002) and that
our students ought to be prepared to recognize
the strengths and weaknesses of that approach.
Moreover, it is to suggest that to do so, our
students must have a rudimentary appreciation
of the other schools of thought and conceptual
frameworks employed by historians. They ought
to understand, as Richard Evans explains in his
magisterial In Defense of History (2000), that
the problem of how historians approach
the acquisition of knowledge about the
pastcan stand for the much bigger
problem of how far society at large can
even obtain the kind of objective
certainty about the great issues of our
time that can serve as a reliable basis for
taking vital decisions on our future in
the twenty-rst century. (p. 8)
The key challenge in this enterprise, as Evans
astutely notes, is not discovering objective facts,
but the more creative exercise of interpreting
R. A. Harris
Journal of Public Affairs Education 41
them and weaving them together into an
explanatory narrative and evaluating the
narratives created by others. He might as well
be describing a primary purpose of the MPA
degree to educate professionals who can critically
analyze and act on complex organizational,
policy, and political information. Indeed, three
of the ve core competencies identied by
NASPAA (2012) as essential to the MPA degree
relate directly to such an understanding of history:
1. To participate in and contribute to
the policy process
a. Participate substantively in the
design, implementation, and
evaluation of public policy
2. To analyze, synthesize, think critically,
solve problems and make decisions
a. Contribute ethically to decision-
making through appropriate use
of evidence that recognizes
stakeholders competing values
3. To articulate and apply a public
service perspective
a. Demonstrate a commitment to
improving social welfare and
social justice
Achieving such an understanding, though,
hinges on appreciating not only what historians
do but also how they do iton their method.
Although historians, by and large, have
abandoned von Rankes aspiration of fully
apprehending the past in its own terms, his
methods are still central to the art of historical
analysis (Fulbrook, 2002). A philologist by
training, von Ranke strove to discover and
analyze primary sources, ofcial documents,
diaries, rsthand accounts, archival records,
and the like. The key to this approach is to
critically assess the source for its internal
consistency, congruence with other contem-
poraneous sources, authenticity, andperhaps
above all elsethe motives of those who wrote
the documents. Ranke saw history as a science,
dependent on the accumulation and verication
of facts. Despite following these methods,
historians of course do propose explanations or
interpretations that social scientists would term
theories, though not in the sense of professing
generalizable and replicable hypotheses. When
MPA students encounter primary documents,
they should be familiar with the same standards
of evaluation that have served historians in
analyzing such sources. For example, a policy
course on race or poverty might include a
reading of The National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders (1967; known as the Kerner
Report) or a course on education policy might
include the famous analysis, A Nation at Risk
(1983). In courses covering law and democracy,
they might well read excerpts from landmark
Supreme Court cases. Students, I submit,
should be equipped to assess these documents
critically, much as historians would.
Of course, the aforementioned critique of
social history and the various transformational
subelds brought with it a rejection of von
Rankes methods as the litmus test for sound
historical analysis; the powerless and the
dispossessed did not generate the same
documentary trail as elites. Thus the new
history turned to alternative evidence and
methods derived from the social sciences.
Cultural historians relied on anthropology.
Economic historians relied on budgets and
business data. Social historians turned to the
methods, often explicitly quantitative, of
sociology.
5
This nontraditional and frankly left-
leaning work shared, with earlier advocates of
scientic history, a quest for objective recovery
of the past, albeit with a more egalitarian gloss
and more interdisciplinary methods. Not so
postmodern historians who, following Michele
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, saw recovery of
the past as hopelessly fraught. Interestingly,
although they share a critical view of society,
they characterize social historians as no less
delusional than their Rankean predecessors;
but ironically, they share with traditional
historians an emphasis on politics and ideology
as opposed to society and economy. In any
event, for postmodernism, analysis of language
and what it reveals about the author or teller is
the only meaningful focus. When carried to its
logical conclusion, postmodernism can stultify
Historical Thinking as a Skill in PA Graduate Education
42 Journal of Public Affairs Education
all analysis, historical or otherwise, but it does
raise important questions about evidence and
interpretation. At a minimum, historical
methods demand that as researchers pursue
scientic objectives of reconstructing and
understanding the past, they also examinein
their own work, in their evidence, and in the
work of othersthe issues raised by post-
modernism. Students of public administration
as a eld will of course recognize the postmodern
point of view, which established a disciplinary
foothold through the Public Administration
Theory Network (PAT-Net) and its associated
journal, Public Administration Theory and Praxis.
In the vernacular of postmodernism itself, this
New Public Administration sought a disci-
plinary discourse. Unlike history programs,
though, MPA programs have not brought post-
modernism into their courses in as robust and
widespread a manner. Introducing historical
meth ods might well create a space to critically
engage postmodernism more centrally in
our curricula.
Accepting that public administration students
might benet from a systematic introduction
to history and historiography, of course raises
the question of where in the curriculum this
introduction ought to occur. Short of sending
MPA students to graduate history departments
to learn how to analyze documents, how to
develop an appreciation of alternative schools
of historical analysis, how to read historical
research, and how to write history of their own
that critically incorporates both primary and
secondary historical sources, how might history
be embedded in MPA instruction? It is unlikely
and probably unwise to design specic MPA
courses on historiography or historical methods.
A more sensible approach would be to identify,
as we do for core competencies, multiple oppor-
tunities across the curriculum, to acquaint
MPA students with the study of history. If an
MPA program requires a qualitative methods
class, a serious treatment of historical methods
and approaches would be a natural t in such a
class along with ethnography, case study, eld
notes, and key informant interviews. In
traditional, quantitatively oriented research
methods classes, especially if there is a two-
semester sequence, we might reserve a course
module for history and historiography. Inviting
a public administration colleague who uses
historical institutional methods in her research
or a history department faculty member to
discuss his work might be an enriching
experience for our students in these classes. To
the extent that specialized substantive courses
incorporate histories of policies or organiza-
tions, they present occasions to explore how to
evaluate and interpret primary sources as
historians do. In introductory MPA classes,
readings ought to be discussed transparently
with respect to their historical biases and
frameworks, thereby alerting our students to
both the imperative and skills for a critical
reading of history. Of equal importance
whenever we ask MPA students to write history
or produce research that depends on historical
analysis, they ought to have had at least a
rudimentary overview of the issues historians
face in practicing their trade.
I end this mea culpa by resolving to more
forthrightly and judiciously employ history
when I teach public administration and public
policy. More than that, though, Iand I hope
otherswill help MPA students not only to do
history but also to know why, as Stephen Fry
queries, it matters. The historian John Arnold
reminds us,
To study history is to study ourselves,
not because of an elusive human nature
to be refracted from centuries gone by,
but because history throws us into stark
relief history is an argument and
arguments present the opportunity for
change. When presented with some
dogmatist claiming that this is the only
course of action or this is how things
have always been, history allows us to
demur, to point out that there have
always been many courses of action,
many ways of being. History provides us
with the tools to dissent. (2000, p. 122)
History, then, can help to prepare MPA
students for citizenship and public service as
well as research.
R. A. Harris
Journal of Public Affairs Education 43
NOTES
1 In the following section, we explore the need to
provide students with the tools to critically examine
the narrative framing of these histories.
2 Excellent examples of this history, often framed as
paradigm shifts in public administration, may be
found in Nicholas Henry, Public Administration
and Public Affairs (2013); and Grover Starling,
Managing in the Public Sector (2011).
3 Perhaps the leading example of this legal realist
approach was the use of a so-called Brandeis brief,
rst used in the 1908 Muller v. Oregon child labor
case. Brandeis collaborated with his sister-in-
law, Josephine Goldmark, to analyze the impact
of unregulated child labor. The same approach
informed the NAACP 1956 strategy in Brown v.
Board of Education.
4 Strictly speaking, Marx introduced economic history
in the mid-19th century and conservative historians
at least in part were reacting to Marxism. However,
economic history, like social and cultural history,
did not take root in the discipline until the 1960s
and reected a looser interpretation of Marxs critical
insight that socioeconomic factors framed free will.
5 Perhaps the most notable example was the brief
emergence of cliometrics heralded by the
publication of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engermans
study of American slavery, Time on the Cross (1995).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard A. Harris holds a joint appointment in
Political Science and in Public Policy and
Administration at Rutgers UniversityCamden.
He has served as chair of both departments and
as associate dean of the Graduate School. He
also founded and is currently senior fellow at
the Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public
Affairs, a university-based center for applied
research and technical assistance.
R. A. Harris