(This blog post will probably be interesting to the handful of political scientists who read this blog. Everybody else be patient. I feel a rant coming on.)
Both Duck of Minerva and the Monkey Cage have discussed the move by Western Lutheran College to dissolve their political science department. In tough economic times, political science has been determined to be an expensive frill. A spokesperson for the college said, "the college determined it wasn't necessary to its liberal arts mission to offer political science."
PTJ at Duck of Minerva writes that there is too great of a gulf between our research and student needs and interests.
what to assign to their students; for that purpose, they need books and
articles. Naturally, people want to assign the current, contemporary
research in their field if they can, but not only does that not say
much about civic engagement or the future of the political landscape,
but it doesn't even say what it does say in a way that is particularly
accessible to undergraduate students. "The Role of Parties' Past
Behavior in Coalition Formation," to pick just one of the articles from
the most recent issue of the American Political Science Review,
doesn't exactly sound like a page-turner. And yes, I know full well
that other disciplines also have a dichotomy between their contemporary
research and the kinds of things that one assigns to undergraduates,
but the gulf is particularly pronounced in contemporary Political
Science.
Political science is essential to an undergraduate liberal arts education. Essential. These students will need to make knowledgeable choices in the voting booth. They will need to go to their town council meetings in the future to complain about zoning regulations or demand more money for schools. They have to know who should get a cranky letter when the world is out of whack. The problem is that the actual work of political science has nothing to do with that. The research that we produce is fighting over minutia and is miles away from the needs and concerns of average citizens.
Undergraduate political science education should be a different animal than graduate political science. The students need to learn how the system works, who to complain to, how to debate issues, the different positions on hot button issues, and why they should care. Textbooks should not be name dropping references of irrelevant facts. Nobody should ever assign readings from our journals.
At Duck of Minerva, they said that the most relevant of all the political science classes is political theory. Here, the classics are taught – Marx, de Tocqueville, Locke. May I just say, yes! The students love this class at my school and have requested an upper level section beyond the intro/survey class that I teach. But it's not just theory that can and should be made relevant to students.
I also teach State and Local Government. In the first day of class, I tell the students that they may never go to Congress or participate in world affairs, but I guarantee them that each and everyone of them will one day, after they buy a house and have kids, will participate in some way in local government. They will be ticked off about a bank being built on their street corner or they will want their town to spend money on a town pool. They will be involved. And therefore, they needed to learn from me how the system works.
In my Introduction to Politics class, I give them the basics about how the system works and assign practical assignments. I have them figure out who represents them in Congress. They have to call the guy, talk to one of his assistants, and find out his/her positions on three political issues. Then they have to write up their experiences and relate it to the class discussion on political ideology.
Now, it is a major pain in the ass to have to spend half your life writing articles and reading research that have absolutely no application in an undergraduate classroom. To get tenure, you must publish articles and attend conferences and all that work can't carry over to the teaching world. I'm not sure what to do about that problem.
Apt. 11d 
“Now, it is a major pain in the ass to have to spend half your life writing articles and reading research that has absolutely no application in an undergraduate classroom.”
I think that is one of those facts that you aren’t supposed to mention publicly. But, I’m not sure the gap is especially wide in political science. When I took physics, they were teaching things that nobody has researched since Newton. I’ve only taught once, but it seemed to me that, at least in IR, some concepts from the literature can be taught to freshmen (e.g. realism vs. liberalism — leaving aside the neos).
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“I think that is one of those facts that you aren’t supposed to mention publicly.”
Dude, I’m on my way out. I’m going to say all sorts of shit soon.
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I only agree to an extent because I think some of it is our own responsibility. In every class I teach, at the beginning students have to bring up current events relevant to the class. Then I help them understand how concepts and theories in political science give us insight into those events.
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Dude, I’m on my way out. I’m going to say all sorts of shit soon.
So it’s definite, Laura? I’m sad to hear it. Just don’t go and leave us all hanging like Invisible Adjunct did, ok? Not that she didn’t have her reasons, but still, losing your rants would be a serious blow to my blog reading.
As for your claim that “political science is essential to an undergraduate liberal arts education,” obviously I couldn’t agree more. And in particular I agree with your choice of classes–Political Theory, yeah!–though I do think that ideally American Government and State and Local Government could be effectively combined into one hybrid course which every student ought to be required to take. Some states–Texas comes to mind–requires every undergraduate to take a course in state government; Kansas doesn’t, but they probably ought to.
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I find that in my composition classes, which are skills-based courses, I find myself gravitating towards civics/politics topics (I started out in college as a government major). I’m trying to avoid that this term and focus on social media among other things, but I know I’ll get sucked in again.
One of the issues I’m probably going to raise this term (see, I can’t stop, even when I try) is how politics and civic engagement relates to careers. They have such a narrow idea of what politics means (abortion, income tax, the war) and they don’t think about the day to day importance of the government, on any level. I have a lot of restaurant and hotel management people in my classes. Immigration is an important issue relating to human resources, to the cost of the food they buy. It’s not just about “Send all the illegals back home!” There are theoretical issues at stake, there are general ideas about “othering” at stake. But there are also pragmatic considerations.
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Wisconsin Lutheran is making a choice, and likely an interesting one. Small christian school fertile place to promote dissenting opinion let alone discussion. I sort of liken this to BYU filtering their student radio station. Private school, they can do what they want, I’d never go there even though I could have gotten a full ride.
My guess is that they are trying to salvage something to define them as a niche school with a 28K tuitionhttp://www.wlc.edu/cie/index.aspx?id=7146 . Though considering Univ of Wisc schools likely grab a majority of the Poli Sci Majors, I’m not too worried for the Cheese State,especially with 10K less tuition per year instate. http://www.wisc.edu/about/facts/fees.php
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I think that gap is a problem in almost every academic field. Certainly English professors shouldn’t be teaching their more arcane research to beginning–or even advanced–students. But is the solution to suck it up, or to –as Ernest Boyer argued more than ten years ago– recognize other forms of research as contributing to the life of the academy? Applied research, the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of integration–those, not the original research that we currently reward, are the things that do have an impact in the classroom.
(I took two poli sci classes in college in the early 80s. One did cover some political theory and was fascinating. I can’t remember anything about the other one except that it had nothing to do with American government. So this problem has probably been going on for a long time.)
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My thoughts are here.
I’m sorry to hear definitively you’ve decided to leave our not-so-fun little universe, although I certainly can’t blame you, having been in a similar boat and probably within a day or two of making the same decision at least once.
Onto the Boyer thing… whatever the merits of the Boyer model (and I think it does have merit at least as a component of being a well-rounded teacher-scholar), STOL etc. really doesn’t have the sort of widespread respect yet sufficient for a faculty member without tenure to engage mostly in “non-traditional” research. Even if you’re at a place like mine where a Boyeresque definition exists, there’s no guarantee your external reviewers will agree and it could seriously limit your options for mobility elsewhere (voluntary or otherwise).
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Well, I’m very much with the Duck of Minerva comments, except to say there’s nothing especially unique about the situation of political science in that respect. Well, it may be that academic research in political science has drifted farther from its general intellectual purposes as a discipline, but not that much farther than is the case in many disciplines. I was talking recently with a colleague at another institution in history who told me that his dean explicitly told him that if he wrote a general introductory book about his speciality that was aimed at undergraduate audiences, that wouldn’t count at all towards his tenure dossier. (He had an offer to do a book of this sort.)
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I’m not 100% sure that I’m checking out of academia for good. I know I don’t have a teaching gig for the fall and that I think I’ll write a book. But beyond that… who knows? I’m also definitely not checking out of blogging. Might even step up the efforts over the summer.
Yeah, Tim. My dad wrote an introductory to amer gov and has been doing a very successful issues textbook for years now. It gathered him nothing but disdain from his colleagues. He had tenure, so it didn’t matter too much.
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The only poli sci class I took in college was an intro-level course where our only textbook was Aristotle’s “Politics,” and our only class subject was rehashing what we had read. So while I benefited from the class, it certainly did fit the model you are talking about, and I graduated in 2000, which isn’t all that long ago.
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“major pain in the ass …”
Several prominent economists get credit for “If you can’t explain it to your mother-in-law, you don’t understand it well enough.”
That’s probably true of contemporary political science research as well. I bet it has a bearing on Introduction to Politics or Comparative Politics, the key is to bring it out in a straightforward way.
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@ Tim and Laura, Mr. Geeky left his first tenure-track job because his research was gravitating toward computer science education. He, too, was told that any research his did in this area would not count. Given that his current department is all about this kind of research, things are much better now.
I don’t see why they don’t try to bridge this gap between research and teaching or just let people freaking teach already without the research!
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Stephen,
The problem isn’t (usually) that you couldn’t explain your research to your mother-in-law or freshmen, but that what you are researching is not relevant to what an undergraduate should be studying.
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Great post, Chris. There’s nothing wrong with the research that we do as political scientists. I’m not saying that the research should stop. It’s just that it’s super hard to convince students that they really need to know about the restricting efforts in three counties in upstate New York in 1972. Or the voting habits of blind, lesbian, amputees. Students aren’t going to take the classes, and administrators are going to cut departments. We have to make the classes useful and interesting if we want to remain viable as a discipline.
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“What you are researching is not relevant to what an undergraduate should be studying.”
Hmm, OK, I’m not familiar enough with the core of political science to rebut that. Or perhaps I’m the odd economist who has somehow made a career out of problems in energy and heavy industry and immigration …
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Would it help to spend, say, a week on something that I will suddenly call public numeracy?
Over at Unfogged, a discussion segued into learning and teaching statistics. Several commenters said you needed at least calculus and preferably linear algebra to be doing anything called statistics. Several others said that there were important and useful bits of statistics that could be taught to people who did not know calculus.
I’m definitely in the latter camp, and I wonder if intro political science courses aren’t the place to do something like that. (If you don’t already. It’s been a long time since I darkened the doors of an intro class.) Starting with simple stuff like what share of a budget someone is actually talking about but going into more sophisticated analysis as a bridge to what your more cutting-edge research is about.
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Stephen, I was overbroad in my earlier comment. I should have put it as “What you are researching is typically releveant to only a small portion of what is taught in the typical undergraduate course.” At least where I have been, most undergrads will take at least one PS course. Therefore your undergrad classes are largely introductory and survey courses. To cover the background information (e.g. this is how a bill becomes a law) and the breadth of material needed, you won’t have much time to teach whatever narrow field of PS you are researching. The upper-level undergrad courses I took were focused on what the prof researched, but those upper-level courses are relatively rare.
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The comments by Doug and MH get to the heart of the matter. There are some fundamentals of the liberal arts that are part of being an educated person. One does not require the esoterica of sigma-algebras to develop students’ feel for statistically sound presentations (why else the continued popularity of How to Lie With Statistics and the like?) Likewise, one does not require the latest refinement of coalition-proof equilibrium to explain why the high school civics version of legislation might not square exactly with the presence of earmarks.
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Thanks. I’m not usually known for getting to the heart of anything.
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I wonder if intro political science courses aren’t the place to do something like that. (If you don’t already. It’s been a long time since I darkened the doors of an intro class.) Starting with simple stuff like what share of a budget someone is actually talking about but going into more sophisticated analysis as a bridge to what your more cutting-edge research is about.
I agree with Doug (and Stephen) here. One of the things I’m attempting to do with the political science major here at Friends–and ultimately, with introductory political science courses generally–is to make sure that at least some minimal economic and budgetary knowledge is always a required component.
As always, more here.
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“Now, it is a major pain in the ass to have to spend half your life writing articles and reading research that have absolutely no application in an undergraduate classroom. To get tenure, you must publish articles and attend conferences and all that work can’t carry over to the teaching world.”
“Can’t”? I dissent. Everything I publish, cutting edge and dull edge, works its way into my classrooms all the time for usually pretty good pedagogic profit. I’m not talking about assigning poli sci articles as readings (and esp. not my own), I’m referring to what I learn as a product of spending time grinding and writing. And on the earlier related topic on MC, Matt Bai’s already flagging credibility has sunk further.
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Yeah, I saw that, JMT. I love that journal, BTW. Worth signing up for the free subscription. I read the book that Bai savages and I know the author. I was thinking about writing a reply. That Bed, Bath, and Beyond line was pretty funny, though.
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As in life, I’m with JMT. I teach comparative politics and transitions to democracy. My research bleeds into my teaching, carries over in a big way. My students regularly comment in my evals how the references to work I’ve done make the material come alive for them.
To be honest, I think the teaching vs. research debate hides the real deal. Some people can’t teach and/or don’t give a da@n about it, others are willing to learn and do. The fact that research is the key criterion for keeping one’s job helps create animosity between those who put more time into teaching either at the expense of research or at the expense of personal family time.
But to say that political science has no relevance to the real world and practitioners of it are out of touch with reality: I certainly beg to differ. IR and comp. psci. scholars, for ex., are embedded in questions like how to resolve wars and build states that do not kill their own people. These theories, tests, and ideas affect how countries write their constitutions (Sartori wrote Italy’s for example), how foreign policies are made (BOTH W.’s neocon experiment and Obama’s entrance into realism), and how and where aid money is spent.
sorry. venting. but that sort of sh*t pisses me off. They see one APSR article dealing with the turnout question and decide that all political science is worthless. Talk about an absence of creativity in thinking — precisely what is claimed is lacking in the field.
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Are we talking about the Monkey Cage posts? Actually, I’m happy to keep this discussion buried in the comment section of an old thread.
Well, to back up, my research is only connected with one of the seven classes that I teach. Maybe I’m spread too thin in the classroom, but I have no idea how I would bring in the paper I just did on YouTube into my theory class. I did bring it into my media class, but the students didn’t really care about it. Could be my research. I think that research makes me a generally smarter, more well-read person and that has indirect benefits for the classroom.
And, to back up for all the people who don’t get what we’re all hot and bothered about, the Monkey Cage people have been ranting about an article written by Matt Bai for the Journal of Politics. Bai reviews a book that is presently sitting on my living room table. He thinks the author is way off about his findings about the Internet and democracy. Bai says that this is because the author, like all other political scientists, are too wed to their numbers and don’t interact enough with humanity. Their knowledge of politics and the world is limited to what they pick up at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. (The MC people totally misunderstood how they were being insulted, which is kind of embarrassing.) In short, Bai thinks that political science research is all BS and the political scientists are in an uproar.
I think that this is a silly fight. Political scientists do their thing and journalists do theirs. It’s really different work and, in a better world, we would inform each other.
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I was talking about this tizzie with a colleague, and he reminded me that I have a reasonable beef with these journalists’ claim of being actually in touch with politics (instead of we mere scholars too wrapped up in bed bath and bai-yond). If journalists didn’t need academics, why do they keep calling me? I poked my name (and its misspellings) into LexisNexis to see the articles which contain some reference to an interview with me, and I now remember why it’s initially exciting to have newspaper and magazine reporters call you, but it’s actually annoying half the time. At least as often as not, reporters disdainfully already know what they want to say (empirically speaking) and are trying to find data (quotes, I guess) to conform. My most recent media contact actually asked me the same question three times in three different ways in an attempt to persuade me to respond. Now, don’t get me wrong, something will keep me returning this phone calls (narcissism? vanity? hubris?), but I’ve gotten a bit cynical about them.
Just checked, the latest, most egregious case I mentioned has not been published in the reporter’s outlet (yet).
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They look suspiciously like Hormel’s potted meat product.
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Click on the link and run a virus scan.
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