WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

ook (Oldfield & Johnson, 2009). The interviewer’s questions allowed us,
among other things, to elaborate on how American universities generally ignore
questions about social class and socioeconomic inequalities, including the odds
people from humble origins will become professors.
While examining literature relating to the previously mentioned studies
of student recruitment and enrollment practices at the country’s elite political
science and PA programs, I encountered articles extolling the virtues of
diversity among medical and law school students and personnel. There were
heartwarming testimonials to groundbreaking efforts in this regard. Wondering
about the scope of their commitment to demographic diversity, I surveyed deans
at America’s top 50 medical schools and top 50 law schools to determine their
socioeconomic backgrounds. The results showed a striking underrepresentation
of administrators who were first-generation college graduates and of workingclass
origins. I suggested that if these programs expand their diversity criteria to
include socioeconomic background, other medical (Oldfield, 2010c) and law
schools (Oldfield, 2010b) will likely follow their precedent.
Based on my previous research, last year I challenged our field to prove its
commitment to the ideals it supports by including socioeconomic origins among
its faculty diversity criteria (Oldfield, 2010a). Not surprisingly, my proposal elicited
both complaints (Stever, 2010; Stivers, 2010) and support (Candler, 2010). These
responses afforded me an opportunity to refute the critics and further detail why
our field should adopt my proposed personnel plan (Oldfield, 2011a, b).
CATEGORIES OF REFORM
We cannot rely on the “kindness of strangers” to achieve the egalitarian and
democratic ends our field endorses. Thus, we should employ two categories
of reform to give social class inequalities their due attention. The first set
of concerns involves organizational policies of PA, while the second entails
pedagogical techniques for helping students appreciate the importance of social
class inequalities for understanding public sector processes. These recommended
changes are consistent with the “equality,” “fairness,” “representativeness,” and
“affirmative action” principles NASPAA (2011, p. 39) and ASPA (Code of
Ethics, 2006) support.
Systemic Changes
Class Rooms
Structural reform 1.
NASPAA should require all PA programs to begin recruiting and placing
more PA students and faculty of humble origins. ASPA should publicly support
this democratizing effort. In 2009, NASPAA expanded its definition of diversity
to include class, although current accreditation standards do not require all PA
programs to gather and maintain data on student and faculty socioeconomic
Journal of Public Affairs Education 41