Current Update.

PPOL Update January 6, 2006:

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the break from classes. I thought I would go ahead and send you all an update of all the things that have recently happened and that are on the horizon, with classes ready to start next week. Lots of news, so take a moment to read through this. This Update includes the following:

1. Welcome to the New PPOL Students.
2. New Student Orientation.
3. PPOL Lunch.
4. Spring Schedule and Calendar.
5. Summer schedule.
6. Budget News.
7. Upcoming Conferences.
8. Accomplishments.
9. ASPA Meeting.
10. Doctoral Committee Form.
11. New Comps Guidelines Forthcoming.
12. Graduate Student Government Meeting.
13. Knight Professor of Public Policy Presentation.
14. PPOL Co-hosts Visiting Speaker on Urban Environmental Policy.
15. Women in Science Lecture.
16. African Diaspora Conference.
17. Melman Grant Opportunity.
18. Governor's Policy Fellows Program.
19. Student Publishing Opportunity.
20. Job Announcement.
21. Graduate School Newsletter.
 

1. Welcome to the New PPOL Students:

With the beginning of the new semester, we have the arrival of several new students that are beginning the program. As you meet them please welcome them aboard. They include:

Lilly Meng (social)
Connie Wesenser (urban/regional)
Norman Lovitch (justice)
Martha Bottia (justice)
Bob Sturge (urban/regional)
Marina Nistotskaya (social)
Sun Chengxui (social)

We also have several students that are “toe-testing” the waters and taking a course this term to see if this is the program for them. Furthermore, we are already receiving a large number of indications that this spring will see the largest number of applicants to the program to date, making this year truly the year we come of age with our first batch of graduates and full compliment of students!

2. New Student Orientation:

For the new students starting this term, there is a New Student Orientation hosted by the Graduate School tomorrow (Saturday). You should have received information from them directly about this. Details are available at:

http://www.uncc.edu/gradmiss/gs_orientation%202006.html

3. PPOL Lunch:

For those that might have missed PPOL student Andy Baxter’s email, there is a lunch for the PPOL students on Thursday, January 12th at noon in the Prospector (next to the bookstore and food court). All PPOL students are encouraged to join in for a welcome back and a welcome aboard to the new PPOL students.

4. Spring Schedule and Calendar

Registration for spring courses is still open. If you have not already registered, please do so soon. If you need a permit for a course, please contact the professor of the class. Here’s the calendar for the start of the term:

5. Summer Schedule:

While we are only now beginning to start the spring term, I wanted you to know that the summer schedule has already been set. Again, we will offer two core courses:

PPOL 8622 Qualitative Analysis Wednesdays 3:00-7:00pm
Dr. Leland Fretwell 407

PPOL 8630 Advanced Program Evaluation Thursdays 3:00-7:00pm
Dr. Manuel Fretwell 407

6. Budget News:

We got an early gift just before the break last month. The dean’s office granted us the budget increase I requested for this year. This means we will have additional money for supplies and travel support. For those of you with additional unreimbursed travel, let me know and I now some latitude to provide more support. For those of you still deciding about traveling to conferences and the like, please let me know as soon as possible because I would like to spend this money before it magically disappears! I am also trying to acquire more equipment for the program, but we are still waiting for a final decision about whether we are going to be allowed to keep our space in Colvard. I will resume this battle once classes are back underway. But the budget news is positive at the moment!

7. Upcoming Conferences:

With the additional travel money available, students should be giving serious consideration to participating in and presenting paper at conferences. Here are a few I know about (ask your professors about others that might be better targeted at your interests):

North Carolina Political Science Association
The NCPSA will have their 35th annual one-day conference at High Point University on Friday, March 31, 2006. This is a good, small conference to “get your feet wet” in conference participation. The PPOL program will cover your registration costs if you would like to participate. Since this is a local conference and only one day, we will arrange for a university van and go as a group if there is sufficient interest in participation. Paper proposals are due March 1. If you would like additional application information, let me know as I have that.

Southeastern Conference on Public Administration
This conference is a mix if government and nonprofit practitioners with academics. UNCC hosted the conference year before last with great success. The 2006 conference will be held September 27-30 in Athens, Georgia. Again, this is near enough that we will probably have a group transportation scheme in place and I will allocate funds to help offset participation costs for PPOL students. However, proposals for conference paper submissions will be due this spring (between February and May). I will have more details for you as they become available.

The Association for Public Policy and Management
APPAM’s fall conference will be November 2-4 and held in Madison, Wisconsin. This is the main public policy conference. Visit their website and see the archives from the previous conferences to see why. Paper proposals for them will be due in a couple of months and I will update you on these as it becomes available. But this should be one all PPOL students given serious consideration of.

8. Accomplishments:

While we were on break, I learned that PPOL student Carr Boyd has been promoted to Captain in the fire department. Congrats to Carr! On Monday, January 9th, he will receive the promotion in a ceremony. Our way of celebrating for Carr is to immediately thrust him from that ceremony into the first of the three preliminary exams! Good luck to Carr (and the other examining students) on Monday.

9. ASPA Meeting:

Please be reminded that the Central Piedmont ASPA Chapter will meet Thursday, January 12th at 11:45am for its monthly meeting (speaker to begin at 12:15pm). We will meet in Old City Hall, 600 E Trade Street, 1st floor, conference room 4. Parking is provided at 4th and Davidson Streets if you bring in your parking ticket. Snacks and drinks will be provided, so bring your lunch and join us for our first meeting of the year. This event is free for everyone. This month’s speaker will be from the Charlotte Housing Authority and will talking to us about HOPE VI and the Peidmont Courts HOPE VI project. This will be a good topic for our social and urban students.
 

10. Doctoral Committee Form:

We have a large number of students that will be taking their comprehensive exams this spring semester. As such, I wanted to remind everyone that one of the important bureaucratic steps after you pass the comps is to establish your official doctoral committee. The Graduate School and I must approve all such committees and there is a form you use to accomplish this. The form is available from the Grad School web page or from me. You will need to appoint your chair, then you and your chair will appoint another committee member from within the PPOL program. As director, I will appoint a 3rd committee member (with input from you and the chair). These three are the required readers, though you can have other readers as well. Once you have these on the form and signed, I deliver the form to the Grad School who places another member on the committee from outside the PPOL program. And that’s how the committees are made.

11. New Comps Guidelines Forthcoming:

At the December PPOL faculty meeting, we agreed that the comprehensive exam process needed further specification. We designed a new process that empowers the student and his/her chair more so that the current system. These new guidelines will be released shortly and will go into effect immediately in order to assuage the concerns of the large number of you getting ready to go into this process. Fundamentally, the new guidelines clarify the system we have used in the initial comps offerings, so I am hopeful that this will be well received news. It is in no way a detriment to any student. I will release these as soon as I have finished the final drafting for posting to the webpage.

12. Graduate Student Government Meeting:

The first Graduate and Professional Student Government senate meeting for the Spring will be held on Tuesday, January 17th at 5:30pm in CARC 101. The PPOL Student Group is part of this organization, which provides additional funding for travel to conferences and the like. If you would like to get involved with the student group, please contact Nick Swartz (njswartz@uncc.edu) or Barbara John (bbjohn@uncc.edu).

13. Knight Professor Presentation and Meeting:

The university is hiring for the Knight Professor of Public Policy this month. All three of the finalists for the position will be visiting campus in January. As part of this process, and because the Knight Professor will be a major participant in the PPOL program, PPOL students are strongly encouraged to attend the research talk as well as the student meeting, in which the candidate will have a chance to meet with the PPOL students with the other faculty hanging around. The dates for the first two candidates have been set and I will get the third’s out once they are available.

Dr. Jean-Claude Thill from SUNY-Buffalo will be here January 8-11. His research presentation will be 1:00 on Monday, January 9th in Colvard 5090 and the student session will be afterwards at 3:30 in Colvard 5100.

The second candidate, Dr. Reid Ewing from the University of Maryland, will arrive shortly after Dr. Thill departs. His research presentation will be on Thursday, January 12th at 1:00 in Colvard 5090 and the student session will be at 3:30 in Colvard 5100.

Please participate if at all possible. This is not simply a good opportunity to see solid research from well-regarded academics. This is an opportunity to have input into the hiring decision since this professor will play a significant role in the PPOL program.

14. PPOL Co-hosts Visiting Speaker on Urban Environmental Policy:

For the first time, the PPOL program is co-hosting a special event here on campus with the Center on Applied Ethics. Dr. Andrew Light, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, will be on campus for a presentation entitled “When We Restore Nature, What Do We Owe the Past?” In addition to his positions at the UW in Public Affairs and Geography, he is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University (UK), and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. A prolific author and editor of 16 books in environmental ethics and policy, philosophy of technology, moral and political philosophy, and aesthetics, he is currently finishing a book on ethical issues in restoration ecology.

15. Women in Science Lecture:

Dr. Sue Rosser, dean of the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech will give the inaugural lecture of the UNC Charlotte Women's Academy on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 11:00 a.m. in the Barnhardt Student Activity Center. This event is open to the entire UNC Charlotte Community. Her address is titled, "The Science Glass Ceiling: Academic Women Scientists and their Struggle to Succeed." This is clearly a topic with significant HR and policy implications and one unfolding mainly in the public sphere.

16. African Diaspora Conference:

The Department of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is hosting a stimulating exploration of the past, present, and future of the African Diaspora in this national conference at the Westin Hotel in Uptown Charlotte, April 5-8. Seen as perhaps the quintessential global periphery, Africa and its Diaspora stand at the center of this conference. We hope to generate new perspectives toward these areas by encouraging scholarship that interrogates the Diaspora’s role in broad historical and sociological trends, innovations in literature, music, and art, and geopolitical developments. More information is available at http://www.aaas.uncc.edu/Diaspora_Conference_2006.htm.

17. Melman Fellowship Opportunity:

The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC is pleased to sponsor the Seymour Melman Fellowship Program to underwrite research and writing in the fields of demilitarization and workplace democracy. As military budgets in the United States continue to climb, funding a limitless war on terror and a catastrophic war in Iraq, the need has never been clearer for a new generation of scholars examining the ways and means of militarism, and the alternatives to it. Likewise in a climate of concerted efforts to erode workers' rights, research and writing on workplace democracy is critically needed. IPS will select one fellow to receive a stipend of $5,000. Over the course of the year, this Melman Fellow will be invited to spend some time at IPS and, when appropriate, will be mentored by an IPS Fellow/project directors in completing her or his project. The application deadline is March 15th. Additional information is available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/melmanfellow.htm.

18. Governor's Policy Fellows Program:

I have received this year’s announcements for the Governor’s Policy Fellows program. This is a large scale fellows program in which recipients do a two-year stint working in the state house of Maryland, executing three 8-month rotations through different agencies in the state government and building their repertoire of skills and experience. If this is of interest to those of you who had or are going to graduate between March 1, 2005 and September 1, 2006 (the start date for the position), stop by my office. I have the booklets and applications here. This is an annual competition, so those of you that won’t be eligible now, you might want to keep this in the back of your mind for later.

19. Student Publishing Opportunity:

Last semester, I began identifying some opportunities for students to publish their work in field-related outlets in order to work up to higher tier journals. Here is another good starting place: The LBJ Journal of Public Affairs, published by the University of Texas. Information on submission rules and journal issues are available at: www.lbjjournal.org.

20. Job Announcement:

While there have been countless jobs come across my desk in the weeks since the last Update, this one caught my eye as a of potential interest to PPOL students further along in their studies. The job description is attached with this email. This is illustrative of a position that combines the academic and practitioner training quite nicely.

21. Graduate School Newsletter:

In the off chance you happen to be a newsletter junky and this email failed to satisfy those needs, there is a new Graduate School newsletter that has begun. The first issue is available at: http://www.uncc.edu/gradmiss/index.asp.


As always, if you have any questions or would like additional info on anything I have list in this Update, just shoot me an email at daswinde@uncc.edu.


I hope you all have an excellent and productive semester!

Dr. David Swindell, Assoc. Professor & Director
Ph.D. in Public Policy Program
3040 Colvard Bldg.
9201 University City Blvd.
University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
(704) 687-4532 (Office)
(704) 687-3497 (Fax)

Previous PPOL Updates:

PPOL Update 11-28-05

PPOL Update 11-10-05

PPOL Update 10-25-05

PPOL Update 10-7-05

PPOL Update 9-21-05

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