Syllabus for Public Administration and Public Finance

This morning, #ChaseKBH and I are going down to the 18th Mars Society Convention. But back here on Earth, I have classes to prepare and problems to solve. I have posted the syllabus for PUAD 701 Public Administration and Public Finance.

The course has two major distinguishing features. First, I moved to an almost fully flipped classroom. The flipped classroom has become a huge experimental success in high schools, but there’s not a lot of talk about it in higher education. In fact, I found almost no talk at the graduate level when I searched a few months ago. But my classroom has been slowly flipping, anyway. Over the last three terms, I’ve gone from pure lecture, to a minimal homework review, to a pretty strong focus on collective problem solving. But it was the students driving those changes, not me. I was just along for the ride. So why not embrace it. It will be interesting to see how this goes.

Second, we will have a class focus on how public finance and public administration intersect with the problem of Baltimore’s food deserts. There are a lot of places in the City without regular access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food, and this has a damaging effect on public health, welfare, and local stability. The city is now running the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative to combat these issues. The University of Baltimore has engaged in a campus-wide project to focus on these food deserts over the 2015-2016 academic year. Classes will be working on projects in classes across the University to investigate and solve these problems. It’s exciting to be a part of that.

Image by james j8246 / Flickr.