Integrating Social Equity into the Core Human Resource Management Course

The National Academy of Public Administration’s Board of Trustees recently adopted social equity as the fourth pillar of public administration. Human resource management (HRM) courses are situated to increase the public affairs graduate curriculum’s emphasis on social equity, because these courses already give attention to related concepts such as due process, discrimination, sexual harassment, and work-life policies. The challenge is to directly apply this pillar in the HRM curriculum by strengthening students’ exposure to formal and informal personnel policies and practices that promote or impede social equity. Drawing on our teaching experiences, we describe how HRM professors can enhance their students’ social equity competencies by incorporating the use of informal “HR dialogues” in their courses. These dialogues allow students to develop managerial competencies to handle the real-world social equity tensions and resistance they are likely to encounter.