The Relevance of Political Science

(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. 

Once people are hired, they also have to figure out 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.