Jeremy L. Hall, professor and director of the master’s in public administration program for the School of Public Administration, led a panel presentation entitled "Enhancing Academic-Practitioner Exchange and Collaboration" for the National Academy of Public Administration. Hall, who is also co-editor-in-chief of the field’s top-ranked journal, Public Administration Review, joined co-editor-in chief Paul Battaglio, Ph.D., to discuss the importance of collaboration among practitioners and academic researchers. Established in 1967, the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to help government leaders solve their most critical management challenges. The elite group consists of more than 850 fellows who have made lifetime contributions to the field of public administration as scholars or practitioners.
One way to ensure the advancement of the discipline is continued dialogue between faculty researchers and practitioners actively working to solve today’s complex challenges. Conversations among practitioners and faculty must address several questions: “What should we be looking forward to? Where should research be directed in the future?” says Hall. “We are actively working to bridge the gap between research and practice.” In an age where policy and practice decisions are increasingly required to be evidence-informed, Hall says it is important to ensure that research is timely, relevant and salient. Hall defined the core challenge as a distinction between the time-constrained, problem-directed research needs of government agencies and the conceptual focus of scholarly publications for tenure-earning faculty.