As we move farther into a condition of “post literacy” in our society (a condition where reading and writing have been displaced by television and video as the primary sources of mass entertainment and communication), the problem of students entering universities and even graduate programs with substandard communication skills is becoming more pronounced.

In addressing the problem, despite frequent references to the “art and science of public administration,” there seems to be far too little emphasis on communication skills. Most public administration schools concentrate on the behavioral and management sciences—while largely ignoring the equally important communication techniques upon which our students' competence and effectiveness will be assessed in their careers.

We aid and abet the problem by failing to recognize those skills, or lack of them, in our program guidelines. The National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration calls for specialized areas of study—management, program analysis, and policy analysis—that seem to assume a firm grounding in communication skills; but that assumption is so often incorrect.

The science of public administration can only take us as far as systematizing our search for information. Effective evaluation and interpretation of that information rests in the ability to use it persuasively. It is the normative evaluation of information, mostly absent from scientific inquiry, that is so important to effective public administration. And the normative interpretation of policy conclusions is largely contingent on persuasive ability, alacrity in the use of the art, not the science, of public administration.

During the 1980s, there has been an enormous amount of interest in the idea of faculty development. But what exactly does faculty development mean? Is the expression used so often and imprecisely that it loses all meaning? Surely everyone must favor faculty development?

My feeling was that faculty development was something that every good college must do as a matter of enlightened management. I decided to investigate the topic in two ways. First, I read some of the literature (mostly in higher education, but some discipline-based), looking especially at definitions and assumptions about faculty development. Second, I conducted a survey of chairs of departments of political science, suggesting a definition of faculty development and asking about their experiences.

Many articles dealing with faculty development are too broad and fail to define the term. There is also a tendency to equate faculty development with improved teaching (Lacefield, 1983; Moses, 1984). One exception is this:

Applying such a broad definition suggests that faculty development occurs constantly at all levels of an institution, which does not take us very far in trying to analyze its effectiveness.

Mosely (1981) suggests three different foci: faculty development; instructional development; and organizational development. Development of a faculty's skills should occur automatically as part of good academic administration. If Penn State provides me with a computer in my office or gives me a research assistant, I will perform better, albeit with slow, incremental improvement. More central to an understanding of faculty development are those cases where faculty achieve a substantial improvement in their performance. In order to assess the nature and incidence of these cases of “substantial improvement,” I surveyed chairs of departments of political science in the U.S. A questionnaire was sent to each institution with at least eight faculty where one individual had been chair for at least five years, presumably long enough to get a perspective on faculty development.

The Soviets have complained that they know more about us than we know about them. While the veracity of this view is difficult to assess, the level of American ignorance about the USSR clearly is appalling. Many Americans do not know which side the Soviets fought on in World War II and are taken aback to discover that not all Soviet citizens are Russians. Those who engage in serious study of the Soviet Union disagree, sometimes vociferously, regarding the fundamental nature and future prospects of the USSR but an understanding of the terms of the debate should form a part of American education.

For those teachers seeking to address this need by developing new courses on the Soviet Union, the first obstacle involves resources: How do I find—and select—readings for my students? And where do I secure materials which will provide me with the background necessary to deliver lectures on topics like collectivization and socialist realism? With the current growth of interest in the USSR more high school and college instructors find themselves in the position of offering courses about the Soviet Union, while, at the same time, they seek to move from being relative novices to reasonably accomplished (and confident) teachers of Soviet politics and society.

Although every academic trained in Soviet area studies probably has his or her own recipe concerning “How to teach about the Soviet Union,” there are some fundamental approaches—and texts—which reflect a certain underlying consensus about what kinds of materials should be included in the student diet.

It seems appropriate in this bicentennial year to examine the treatment introductory American government textbooks give the U.S. Constitution. Nearly every text devotes a chapter (typically, the second) to the events leading up to, and the writing of, the Constitution. But what of the political theory on which the Constitution is based? The Constitution, by itself, is too brief and devoid of theory to provide students with an overall assessment of that document. The source that is often relied upon by constitutional scholars to provide that theory is The Federalist Papers. It is the textbooks' treatment of these essays that we will explore here.

The Federalist Papers were 85 newspaper editorials written by Hamilton, Madison, and jay, under the pseudonym Publius, in support of ratification of the proposed Constitution. The first essay was published October 27, 1787, and when the last essay was published, the authors had written 175,000 words. This was an average of 1,000 words a day, and was about 35 times the length of the Constitution itself.

Hamilton initiated the project in reaction to another set of pseudonymous literature published in New York. New York support of the Constitution was essential, and it was doubtful that the state would ratify. As the seat of the central government, New York was in a pivotal position on the eastern seaboard. It had a lively commerce, and thus was not eager for change. Governor George Clinton staunchly opposed ratification. New York had not signed the Constitution because all of its delegates, except Hamilton, had left in protest and no one signatory was authorized to approve the document for the state.

One of the most frustrating tasks in teaching “Introduction to Politics” is to convey a tangible, realistic sense of what revolution means to American undergraduate students. Insulated as most Americans are from the turbulence of political upheaval (which is actually the norm for many of the world's nation-states), ongoing revolutions around the world are very far away from their own concerns.

As a result, I decided to take a chance and engage in some of my own revolutionary teaching and stage a revolution in the classroom. I conspired in advance with several graduate students who were strategically positioned throughout the large lecture hall. For the experiment to succeed, authenticity had to be the key.

I seized upon one of the students' main concerns and frustrations with the course: the protracted and inconvenient scheduling of their weekly sections with the teaching assistants. Half-way through one lecture I announced a change in the T.A. assignments. One student “rebel” (one of the plants) vehemently vocalized the class' sense of outrage. My altercation with him (as I autocratically asserted my role as authority) resulted in my telling him to leave the class. When he refused, I called on my teaching assistant (“lackey running dog”) to go to the dean's office (calling on higher authority and perhaps force) to quash this rebellion. When the teaching assistant attempted to exit, the rebel physically prevented him from leaving the room (true insurrection). As I went to break up the confrontation, I was expelled, along with the teaching assistant, from the lecture hall (overthrow).

This paper summarizes the findings of a study of syllabi for the core course in comparative politics offered by a sample of political science departments in the United States with field offerings in comparative politics granting annually more than one Ph.D. These courses are given a variety of names. Some simply specify the subdiscipline, for example, Princeton's “Comparative Politics,” MIT's “Field Seminar in Comparative Politics” or Illinois' “Core Seminar in Comparative Politics.” Others specify the aspect or aspects of the subdiscipline given principal attention, for example, Stanford's “Major Theories in Comparative Politics,” Kentucky's “Comparative Politics: Theory and Method,” or Indiana University's “Seminar in Comparative Politics: Issues and Approaches.” Each is intended to provide graduate students with an understanding of the fundamental ideas of comparative politics. The purposes of the study were to assess the state of the subdiscipline and to facilitate the exchange of ideas among those involved in teaching such core courses. We recognize that a syllabus indicates only a part of what is taught and learned in any course. Nevertheless, syllabi fairly well reflect the topics and scholarly readings deemed most important by teachers in the field.

Scholars in the subdiscipline of comparative politics frequently have noted the lack of agreement among comparativists on frameworks, methodologies and subject matter. Macridis and Brown in the 1961 edition of their reader described the field as “in a state of flux” (3). During the 1960s and 1970s, the lack of agreement probably increased. Kaufman and Rosenau in 1977 described the field as then “in a state of ferment” (45).

The time is July 1988, and baseball fever is rising. With barely a glimmer of hope remaining, “Big Jim” Thompson steps into the batter's box to swat a ninth inning “home run” that prevents the White Sox from going down to defeat—or more accurately—from going down to Florida. Such is the stuff of legends, although the real story is hardly less dramatic. Seated at a desk at home plate of Comiskey Park, Illinois Governor James Thompson signed a $ 150 million financing package for the construction of a new stadium that will keep the White Sox in Chicago and fore-close the team's removal to St. Petersburg. With vigorous lobbying from the Governor, the Illinois General Assembly, in the closing minutes of its 1988 session, had narrowly approved the stadium legislation.

The news from Chicago, however, is more than a baseball story. The news tells us a great deal about modern governors in domestic policy making. They are more activist than their counterparts a generation or so ago, particularly in the realm of homestate economic development. Though most governors do not serve as long as Thompson–by late 1988, he had been governor for nearly 12 years–modern governors, as compared to their 1950s counterparts, are staying in office longer and, perhaps as a consequence, acquiring greater national influence.

The proposal and syllabus that follow are primarily concerned with the content of a seminar on cultural theory. I would like to preface these materials by saying a bit about teaching.

Because of the vast confusion surrounding the concept of culture, a seminar is an ideal place to work on clarification.

The version of cultural theory being discussed departs from ordinary modes of thought and raises many questions, albeit in a more political direction: What sort of people, organized into which cultures, would act in certain ways (accept or reject blame, tax and spend high or low, participate a little or a lot, etc.) in order to do what matters most to them—support their way of life and discomfort their opponents? Hence time for questions in the seminar is essential. Hours and hours of discussion do more to straighten out thought than any amount of reading.

Application of this cultural theory is also essential. Doing is different than thinking. I have found that 1,000-word essays on such subjects as the Comanche Indians (competitive individualists to the core) or the Khmer Rouge (radical egalitarians) enable seminar members to come to grips with the theories they are trying out. Immersion in this material, bolstered by continuous discussion, sharpened by several short applications, greatly facilitates writing a research paper. The idea is to take a paper already written, or about to be written, derive a problem from it, and see how one cultural theory compares to others.

Cold, irrefutable demographics clearly signal a traumatic intergenerational shift in political power. Statistics indicate that by the year 2020 political and economic clout will have drained from the middle-aged to the elderly, or more specifically, to the “young-old.” By the time the Baby Boom generation reaches retirement, its cohort could wield enough political and economic influence to alter political-campaign and corporate-marketing strategies, to tip the scales of the candidate selection process, and to dominate most decision-making centers. This process of power recognition and accumulation is now irreversible. The media, marketing departments, and campaign strategists are all struggling to redefine their target audience, to reassess the depth of political involvement, and to reshape their imagery to fit the new reality. Ironically, political science departments appear reluctant to restructure their course offerings so that this dramatic power transfer can be examined from a political perspective at the undergraduate level.

We make a statement by what we don't teach—by what we fail to discuss and to dissect. Realizing this, in 1987 Santa Clara University's Center of Education on Aging, in conjunction with the political science department, initiated a senior seminar with a strictly political slant on the aging dilemma. Participants chose to function as an exploratory team in the creation of a “political profile” of the aging in the Santa Clara area. Together with their individual research projects, this profile was to serve as the core of a pilot course—a model which subsequent classes and other colleges might draw upon in structuring their own format.

Ask most political scientists about constitutional law, and they will tell you about the Federal Constitution and its interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court. Examine a text on American constitutional law, and you will likely find the same tendency to equate constitutional law with the U.S. Constitution. Even the recent campaign for constitutional literacy during the Bicentennial of the Constitution altogether ignored the most obvious gap in Americans' constitutional knowledge—namely, the virtually total ignorance about state constitutions.

This inattention to state constitutions and state constitutionalism is unfortunate, because state constitutions are assuming an increasing importance in American politics. They have served as the incubators for institutional innovations that are now receiving national attention. President Reagan's proposals for a balanced budget amendment and for an item veto both had their origins in state charters. Moreover, because most state constitutions can be amended relatively easily, they have provided an alternative avenue by which groups that are blocked in the legislative process can pursue political change. California's Proposition 13 is a case in point. Finally, state constitutions have furnished the basis for probably the most significant development in civil liberties law over the past two decades, namely, the rediscovery of state bills of rights as independent protections for civil liberties.

The complexities of the governmental machinery and personal perceptions involved in the formulation of American foreign policy are difficult for students to comprehend from the confines of the classroom. Beginning students often enter the study of international relations/political science with a simplistic view of policy making. They tend to accept a priori what Graham Allison (1971) calls the “rational actor model” in which students “package the activities of various officials of a national government as action chosen by a unified actor, strongly analogous to an individual human being.” Students often believe that foreign policy is set by a cohesive group of individuals who share common goals and preferences. The additional tendency to anthropomorphize the state leads undergraduates to write papers in which nation-states are portrayed with such diverse human qualities as sympathy, cruelty, greed, and aggression.

Modern scholarship on decision making has expanded beyond this traditional view to encompass differing variables. There is an ongoing debate in the discipline as to what is the most potent variable in American foreign policy. One group of scholars contends that the bureaucratic or role variable is more important. While agreeing that role is a powerful restriction, particularly at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, other scholars argue that the individual perceptions and beliefs of policy makers are more important in the decision-making process.

Given the complicated nature of this debate, a creative way to expose beginning students to American foreign policy decision making is through a simulation. Simulations are useful for the study of the decision-making process because the standard lecture-discussion format, which provides a linear overview of the subject, does not adequately communicate the complex structure and multiplicity of factors in operation.

Experience with the concepts of federalism and sovereignty is usually limited to readings and lectures, especially in a class of undergraduates. Since these two concepts are the foundation of American governmental structure on all levels, I want to ensure that the students grasp them. I feel that students have a better grasp of information and its application when they can actually use the information themselves. I have developed the following exercise to explore federalism and sovereignty issues: posing a question concerning a state's revision of its constitution to the students as if they were on the state's constitution revision commission. The lively debates and discussions that ensue cover not only the main issues of sovereignty and federalism but encompass the use (and misuse) of executive power, legislative oversight, and commissions—all concepts that are critical to the study of American national, state and local government.

Towards the end of a class focusing on constitutions (and after a class covering the basics of federalism), the stage is set by talking about state constitution revisions and the trend toward simpler “plain English” state constitutions. (Note: This can be adapted for county/city/town charter revisions also.) The class is told that the instructor is the governor of the State of Confusion, and they have been gathered to form the State of Confusion's Constitution Revision Commission. The first section the commission will address at the next meeting is the following: