College professors are evaluated for promotion and tenure on the basis of their accomplishments in three areas: teaching, research, and service. All too often, however, service is considered the poor cousin of the trio. In political science in particular, we believe that this imbalance is detrimental to the individual scholar, our students, the discipline, and the general public. The goal of this symposium is to contribute to what we see as a nascent revitalization and rehabilitation of service—especially public service—as a respectable and integral part of a political science career. We encourage our colleagues to engage the political world more often, more directly, and more reflectively, and we encourage the profession—the APSA, our departments, and our colleagues—to value such engagement institutionally and through our social norms.
As scholars who spend our careers studying and teaching politics and government, we have the capacity to contribute uniquely and extensively to the commonweal. Indeed, despite the dearth of professional incentives, many political scientists regularly devote a significant portion of their professional energies to public service. The contributors to this symposium describe a wide range of activities in which political scientists are engaged today. They report that time spent on service does not come at the expense of their other professional activities, but rather that interaction with the subject of their scholarship greatly enriches their teaching and research. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many political scientists began to become more sincere in their commitment to quality teaching, as evidenced by the founding of the APSA Conference on Teaching and Learning and the Journal of Political Science Education, as well as the multitude of articles regarding pedagogy published in this journal. We believe that in the past decade, many political scientists have likewise begun to incorporate public service into their careers more systemically and seriously. We encourage the discipline to recognize and promote such public service, rewarding those individuals who engage in it and encouraging a more even spread of these efforts into the various corners of the political and governmental world.
We offer this symposium as a modest contribution to this effort. In a sense, these articles serve as a set of how-to essays that describe how political scientists can enhance their academic careers through meaningful public service. Following Paul Posner (Reference Posner2009), we call this service pracademic activity, referring to the creation of professional connections between full-time, university-based political scientists and the practical political world that they study. Indeed, this symposium is unapologetic about its aim of recruiting scholars, especially junior scholars, into the ranks of pracademics. These articles encourage scholars to think about public service as engagement beyond the occasional speech to the Rotary Club or chat with a journalist. They offer a range of ideas about how to integrate public service into an academic career. Importantly, these authors strive to be practical in the advice they offer. They describe relevant activities, talk about how to get involved in them, and discuss their pros and cons.
In conversations with colleagues around the country and in articles in PS, Perspectives on Politics, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere, we have sensed a vague but growing dissatisfaction with the discipline's relevance to the “real world” of politics.Footnote 1 This ennui is manifested in various ways, from the appearance of methodological criticism like the Perestroika movement (Hardin Reference Hardin2002) to an increase in the percentage of political science doctoral graduates who are leaving academia (Biggs and Jones Reference Biggs and Jones2010). This alienation has likely helped stoke the current pracademic movement. Aside from a rise in the number of scholars participating in these activities at the grassroots level, there is public evidence of political scientists' growing interest in significant public service. Several panels at the 2010 APSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, took up the issue of the discipline's relevance and enjoyed some of the most exuberant discussion that occurred at the conference (Jaschik Reference Jaschik2010). Also in 2010, a popular e-journal, The Forum, devoted an entire issue to the topic of “Political Science and Practical Politics.” Indeed, the very appearance in 2002 of The Forum, which bills itself as “a journal of applied research in contemporary politics,” is evidence of increasing interest in pracademics. Of course, some political scientists have been involved in significant public service since the birth of the discipline (think Donna Shalala, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger, and even Woodrow Wilson), but it seems that to a greater extent than in a generation, today, more of us—including the top scholars in several fields—are working as pracademics.Footnote 2
Readers may not be aware of all this public service activity because it is often not very public, even to a pracademic's own departmental colleagues. But consider the following: When we distributed this symposium's call for proposals in March 2010, we received over 60 proposals in just six weeks. We also received many other inquiries and notes of encouragement, even after the deadline had passed. Clearly, political scientists have considerable interest in this subject.
But why aren't more political scientists involved in serious public service? After all, we are all interested in policy and government. A significant force limiting pracademic work is that college professors have traditionally been discouraged from pursuing professional service in politics and government. This discouragement stems both from the incentives and traditions of the promotion and tenure process and from colleagues' direct advice. Perhaps just as important, some political scientists who may wish to become involved in public service simply do not know where to start. This symposium aims to reduce these barriers to public service, especially the latter one. The articles are written by scholars who have successfully integrated public service into their careers and are thus true pracademics. Each article explores a different type of public service opportunity, describing what it is, how to get involved, and its benefits and drawbacks. In this way, we offer a smorgasbord of ideas for public service activities. We know that this list is not even close to comprehensive, as we were forced to turn down many intriguing proposals when creating this symposium.
Why should a political scientist become a pracademic? Some common themes emerge from these articles. Public service can stimulate one's professional life by allowing an individual to leave the classroom and the computer screen to interact with fascinating people who are doing the things about which we teach and write. And, of course, pracademic work can offer more direct personal benefits, such as travel, prestige, and money to supplement a university paycheck. However, since we are here discussing public service within the context of a full-time academic job for which teaching and research are the primary duties, most of the personal benefit that accrues to the pracademic involves improving his or her ability to perform these two duties. The pracademic is a better teacher because he or she can more easily generate new ideas for course topics, examples for lectures, and guest lecturers. The pracademic is a better scholar because he or she can gain access to informants and datasets and be exposed to new questions that demand new theory and methodologies. All of these benefits demonstrate the falsity of the old chestnut that public service must necessarily come at the expense of scholarly output or time spent on teaching. Just as good scholars are usually excellent teachers, good pracademics are also often both fine teachers and well-respected scholars.
In addition to these individual-level benefits of serious public service, there are also broader benefits for a pracademic's department, the discipline, and, of course, society as a whole. A pracademic's department can more easily gain access to student internship opportunities, jobs for graduates, and potential adjunct professors. When a department hires professors whose teaching is enlivened by their service and who have a reputation for having enjoyed “real world” experience and expertise, the department gains students for its courses and majors. After all, political science undergraduates are often more interested in practical politics than are the field's graduate students and professors.
Political science as a discipline also stands to gain from the pracademic activity of its members. All the benefits that individual scholars and departments enjoy as a result of pracademic activity also accrue to the entire field through better scholarship, more energized scholars, better teaching, and more undergraduates. Furthermore, as political scientists' significant public service increases, the discipline also becomes more relevant to the world of government and politics. While every scholarly discipline gets a bad rap for being made up of “pointy-headed academics,” if we have something interesting and meaningful to say to politicians, policy analysts, and the public, the audience and demand for our work will increase, as will the resources allotted to more of this work.
Perhaps the most significant benefit to the discipline from more pracademic work will be to decrease what Lawrence Mead (Reference Mead2010) has called an increasing scholasticism in political science. When we detach ourselves completely from the practical world of government and politics and become specialized and isolated from our colleagues in different subfields, we lose relevance and our scholarship loses meaning. By interacting with the political actors whom we study, we invigorate our scholarship and teaching, expand our audience, and validate ourselves and our scholarship. The fact that it is not unusual for a scholar of the legislative process not to have spoken with or personally observed a legislature in action does not demonstrate our objectivity; rather, this detachment should raise a red flag about our discipline's values and priorities. Therefore, we encourage political scientists to discover ways in which they can serve the public significantly and systematically, and we encourage departments and the APSA to support and promote these activities. While not every political scientist is interested in or suited to this sort of activity, the more pracademics that we have in a department, a field, and the discipline, the better off we all will be.
