Computers inspire mixed emotions among political scientists. Love, hate, fascination, ennui, and frustration sometimes occur during the course of a single computer work session. Individuals come to terms with the beast in varying ways; obviously personal work style and level of computer dependency are each scholar's own business. However, expanded use of information technology in the disciplinary curriculum is a common concern deserving discussion. Like earlier debates between behavioralists and traditionalists, the current discussion raises questions about the discipline's central purpose. This essay reviews proposals to “computerize” political science curricula in light of contemporary theories about information and managerial work.

Historically, political scientists' computer involvement has been limited, but it is now intensifying in response to educational, technological, and environmental influences. Political scientists have used computers as teaching tools since at least the early 1970s, when the APSA “SETUPs” began appearing, but as novelty items, diversions reflecting the devotion of idiosyncratic individuals. This publication has disseminated many such “experiments,” as have Social Science Computer Review and the National Collegiate Software Clearinghouse. Even as desktop machines began proliferating in the early 1980s, their use in the classroom was considered to be optional, something peripheral to the discipline which one could attempt if one had the inclination.

This laissez-faire ambience may be ending in the face of societal transformations. In the classroom political scientists foster intellectual skills broadly useful to former students. A student may be an activist or an avid pre-lawyer, but his or her future professional development will be built on analytical, and communications skills honed in political science courses. This linkage between political science classrooms and the professional world could weaken if we do not adopt to societal change.

These comments are mostly derived from my teaching experience at the University of Texas at Austin, which has a sophisticated and elaborate teacher evaluation system, and in the universities of London and York in England, which don't.

1. Students' evaluations of their teachers do not depend solely on the qualities of the teacher. If objective evaluations are to be obtained, a multivariate statistical analysis should be conducted, controlling for such factors as:

a. class size—the smaller the class, the better the evaluations.

b. expected grade—one of the strongest correlates of teacher evaluations proved to be the grade the student expects to receive—the higher the expected grade, the “better” the course. This too can be controlled for—by asking the students on the form what grade they expect to receive.

c. whether the class is required or optional—compulsory courses will obviously be less popular. One way to test for this is to ask students on the evaluation form to rate the class relative to their expectations of the class (above, below, or as expected).

2. A statistical study at Texas by J. Sidanius showed that student evaluations of teachers tend to be biased against women and minority teachers. Apart from the intrinsic worries this raises, such information, if true, could be used in court actions over denial of tenure for women/minorities where teacher evaluations played a role.

3. There is of course the general philosophical question of whether students are best able to assess whether they are learning anything from a given teacher.

From campus to campus, there is only modest variation in the core content of the introductory science or social science course, from anthropology to biology to physics to sociology. But what should the first course in political science include? Political scientists have less consensus on the content of their introductory course than teachers in any of these other disciplines. I have grappled with this question over the last 16 years in attempting to teach “Introduction to Political Science” at a large public university. The question became even more compelling when, during the last several years, I was writing a textbook (Danziger, 1990) for such an introductory course. This forced me to be more universal (or at least less idiosyncratic) in the choice of topics and examples.

In fact, the first course in political science at most colleges and universities does not introduce students to “the discipline.” Rather, the course focuses on the American political system. It seems unimaginable that the first course in biology would center in American biology, or that the first course in economics would be a study of the economic system of the United States. In most fields, an introductory course aims to familiarize students with the basic theoretical and conceptual elements of the discipline, whether the discipline is paradigmatic or preparadigmatic (in Thomas Kuhn's terms).

The tendency to begin political science with a course in American politics does have some reasonable justifications. First, it is possible to learn basic principles and ways of thinking within a discipline by the study of an exemplary case which is used to reveal those basics.

Many negative comments have been made about lecturing. One suggests that this methodology “violates the belief that learning results on the part of the students” (Adler, 1984). Another author suggests egotistical reasons for lecturing: “when we professors get into a classroom, we profess” (Balliet, 1970). One widely published writer blames both administrative policies and faculty preference: Lecturing has “continued due to cost-conscious administrators whose major interest is the logistical efficiency of the large lecture…” (Erickson, 1970) and many professors use lectures as a “security blanket without which they would neither feel like teachers nor be recognized by their students” (Erickson, 1970). The traditional lecture has faced stiff competition from other teaching methods: coaching, Socratic questioning, simulations, collaborative education contracts, role playing, self-instruction, the case method, and personalized systems of instruction.

Despite the challenges of innovative teaching methods, lecturing persists. Wagner Thielens (1987) in a random study of half of American universities found that 81 percent of social scientists lectured. This confirms an earlier study which found that “the dominant mode of instruction remains the lecture…” (Eble, 1972). Thus, lecturing persists because of the power of tradition, the structure of the classroom, the textbooks, and the subject/discipline orientation of higher education.

The truth of the matter is that lecturing, when done well, is effective, for “a skillful lecturer can gain as favorable a response as a seminar leader” (Eble, 1972). Lecturing is an efficient method of imparting information, analysis, and explanation of complex questions and concepts, and thus is an effective medium for introductory classes. Further, good lectures can update texts, synthesize tomes, provide structure, and pique students' interests.

The familiar final exam survives as a fundamental component of most college courses, but usually proves frustrating and disappointing to both student and instructor. The culmination of the undergraduate teaching and learning experience, the completed exam usually exhibits a rapid display of facts and figures gleaned from countless lectures and months of readings. It rarely reflects thoughtful, mature analysis or the application of the substantive knowledge acquired during the course to particular problems or themes. A strong factual knowledge of course material hardly prepares the student for such a task. Even if the final challenges the student to exercise rudimentary analytical skills, the end product tends to suffer from time constraints as the task of writing generally outweighs that of organizing and pursuing thoughts.

Instructors normally entertain certain objectives in elaborating a course which may or may not be incorporated into the syllabus. These demarcate the scope of material to be covered and the theoretical and analytical abilities to be mastered by the student; but rarely are these incorporated or represented in the content of the final exam. Usually, these pedagogical goals are more comprehensive and rigorous than what is actually tested or graded on the final given its traditionally limited and constrained format. Consequently, the final's impact on the student's grade tends to surpass its role in shaping the learning experience; the course suffers from treating the final as solely an evaluative instrument rather than a learning device.

Just as central research questions and an elaborate strategy guide sophisticated scholarly research, issuing the final exam questions at the course's outset can help focus and steer the learning process and more appropriately correspond to course objectives. A number of advantages result from issuing the final exam up front.

Simulations, like many games of sport and politics, are capable of producing complex, entertaining and, often, instructive behavior on the basis of a simple format and small set of rules which structure the activity. Although the real congressional budget process is highly complex, the simple simulation materials presented here reproduced an authentic process and set of outcomes for the students involved in it. In our “run” of this simulation last fall, these results came as quite a surprise to the student participants, who began the exercise skeptical both of Congress' efforts to reduce the deficit and of the power of simulations to capture real, complex phenomena. After the simulation, the shared experience provided a basis for several discussions of the merits of different explanations of policy outcomes: those achieved in the simulation, in the current Congress, and by policy makers more generally.

This simulation was developed for use in an introductory course in public policy, but it is equally well-suited for any course involving legislative policy making or national taxing and spending policy. The simulation materials themselves are provided in the last section of this presentation. The next sections describe the context of the simulation in the course, how it worked when we used it, and the character of the discussion which resulted from it.

The purposes of this introductory course in public policy are first, to introduce students to the substance of public policies, for example, to what defense policy or tax policy actually consists of, and second, and more important, to develop in students a capacity to think critically about why particular policy outcomes evolve as they do. We use texts, such as Dye's Understanding Public Policy (1987), which combine substantive material with different theoretical approaches. The simulation comes at the point in the course where we are shifting from political explanations of policy choices to structural and environmental theories; that is, from explanations which reference the interests and intentions of policy makers, to theories which explain choice in terms of constraints, such as the amount of resources available, which cannot easily be manipulated by decision makers.

The study of the politics of the Vietnam War raises some interesting dilemmas for both teachers and students. Opinions differ about the importance of the war to the politics and history of the United States. Many books are available concerning the American involvement in the Vietnam war, but most accounts differ from book to book. The relevance of the Vietnam experience needs to be discussed in a broader perspective. Certainly, the Vietnam war was different than any war fought previously by the United States of America.

Recently, a professor at a southern university defined war as having winners and losers (c.f. Emerson, 1976). She then asked her 150-student American government class to identify the winner of the Vietnam war. Because no one could provide an answer, her second question concerned the last time American troops were used in a foreign country. The answer the professor was expecting was the Christmas 1989 invasion of Panama. No one made the correct identification. The only student who hazarded a response suggested that the last use of troops was in Nicaragua! If students have difficulty remembering what happened a few months in the past, they are likely to conceive of the Vietnam war as ancient history. Yet, the war provides lessons that future decision makers need to learn.

One dilemma for teachers is choice among subject matter. American policies are important, but other factors need examination as well. Should a combination of both American and Vietnamese politics (North and South) be considered? What about those who stayed home, protested, or went to Canada? The material can be overwhelming.

In the fall of 1986, I agreed to meet with a handful of students and a Policy Studies professor to discuss undergraduate education at Syracuse University. I had no idea that four years later I would be referred to as “founding member and president of Undergraduates for a Better Education.” I'm still trying to sort out what exactly happened and how it affected me. It's true that, in the beginning, I was idealistic and had hopes for great improvement at the university. It's also true that the more I learned about how the university works, the less confident I felt that anything could be accomplished by an energetic, but somewhat naive group of students. At this point, I'm wavering between “Wow. I was president of a national student organization” and “Higher education is a mess and it will always be a mess and what good did any of it do?” In spite of this indecision about what I actually accomplished, I have little doubt about what I learned.

Structural problems do largely account for a university's shortcomings. Many of our proposals for change were met with an administrator's explanation of logistical problems. At first, we were convinced that our ideas were being brushed away with excuses. I finally began to realize that there are serious structural problems in university communities which prevent even small changes from being made. One dean told us early on, “You fix one problem, you get twenty more.” I didn't really believe him at the time. Now I do. Also, there are structural problems in motivating students to take steps toward improvement. It's not easy to find a student who will complain about an incompetent professor who teaches a ridiculously easy course.

Undergraduates for a Better Education (UBE) is an official student organization at Syracuse University which grew out of an informal study group that started in the fall of 1986. The purpose of this article is not just to tell you about this organization but to exhort you to try a similar activity on your campus. Working for UBE provides students with the opportunity to develop skills and test theories about politics in a policy area that is very important to them. And even if you don't buy the proposal on pedagogical grounds, you certainly can appreciate the justness of UBE's cause —to pressure administrators and fellow faculty to give higher priority to teaching. However, you may want to think twice before embarking on this road especially if you are not a tenured full professor.

A study group composed of seven students in my freshman course, PAF 101: Introduction to the Analysis of Public Policy, met in the fall of 1986 to discuss public policy issues. From this small number of students, a highly visible student organization emerged with representation from across the university. The organization has had an impact at Syracuse University and has held two national conferences attended by twenty different schools from across the United States. As its faculty advisor, I played a major role in its creation but at this time play a smaller role. (I talk or meet with officers about once a week and attend a meeting once a semester.) Michael K. O'Leary, a political science professor, has served in an advisory role on several projects. Other professors have offered private support but kept a public distance from the organization.

C-SPAN's mission is to present as complete and unfiltered a view of the policy process as possible. The organization prides itself on providing “the whole story without editing and without commentary.” The Purdue Public Affairs Video Archives tapes and catalogs all of C-SPAN's 24-hour daily coverage of the policy process, thus facilitating the use of C-SPAN for teaching and research. For professors reluctant to adopt the added burden of using C-SPAN in the classroom, Purdue Archives significantly reduces that burden.

C-SPAN viewing is not meant to replace lectures and classroom discussions. Rather C-SPAN viewing is meant to enrich a course curriculum. Ideally, the use of tapes should complement class lectures and discussions. C-SPAN allows students in an American Government or Congress course to observe directly the House and Senate in action. Viewing can incite student interest, reinforce class materials, and enable students to experience the drama of the legislative process. C-SPAN viewing will instigate class discussions, though professors must provide the context for student viewing by introducing the tape and directing discussion afterwards. These tapes are not filmstrips.