Monday
December 1, 2008
Advertisement
News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education
Aug. 29
Should American Politics Be Abolished (as a Field)?
Should American politics be abolished? The arrival of attack ads for the fall presidential campaign may have many in the public feeling that way. But at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, the question focused not on the practice of politics, but the study of politics. Spurred by discussion of how the discipline should respond to globalization, the APSA has been talking about whether the way the discipline organizes itself — with a prime position for American politics — makes sense any more.
Related stories
- On Historic Day, Political Scientists Take the Long View, Nov. 5
- The Gay Political Scientist, Sept. 3
- Politics, Equity and Meeting Boycotts, Aug. 29
- Poli Sci Fi, Aug. 13
- The Perils of the Polling Shop, July 10
The precise number of subfields within political science is itself the subject of debate. Most people would include American politics, comparative politics, political theory and international relations. Some would add methodologies or area studies or various other topics, but American politics always makes the list. Should it? What would new organizations for the field look like? While the discussion of this issue Thursday at a panel of the political science association’s annual meeting didn’t find a consensus, there was agreement that the current structure has real flaws.
Scholars who called for the abolition of American politics as a subfield were not arguing that scholars shouldn’t study American politics, which may have been reassuring to audience members, most of whom identified by a show of hands as Americanists. But they said that using the United States as an organizational structure, in isolation from the rest of the world, is producing flawed ideas.
Mary Hawkesworth, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said that when the United States is studied in isolation, “certain things get masked.” The “notion of American exceptionalism,” she said, produces “a social amnesia.” For example, she said that that the violence and corruption of the American revolutionaries receives little emphasis, so when students are exposed to the violence of other revolutions, they see no connection to the American revolution and have little tolerance for those other revolutions. Similarly, she said that slavery is taught only as “an aberration in the United States rather than as part of a racist feudalism” imported from Europe.
American politics scholars, she said, largely embrace a view of their work as “non-ideological and moderate,” limiting the critique they may offer of American society. And the current organization of political science, she said, isn’t producing the kinds of understanding that the public needs. Where was political science in predicting the reunification of Germany or the rebound of Russia? she asked. A more global perspective might make the discipline more aware and useful, she said.
Anne Norton of the University of Pennsylvania agreed that the American politics formulation should go.
Norton said she agreed with the “ethical and scholarly imperative to study the place where we live.” In theory, she said, the focus on one’s country would produce a particularly deep and meaningful scholarship. The reality, she said, is that the field of American politics is exceedingly narrow, overly methodological and unwilling to explore issues of race and class. She noted that many of the political scientists who study race in American politics tend to define themselves as political theorists, or leave the field for other disciplines, sensing a lack of welcome.
She also criticized scholars of American politics for their failure to jump on key issues. In an era in which executive power has been abused to encourage torture and to deny civil liberties, too many professors in the field seem more likely to study some Congressional subcommittee, she said, using “extraordinarily small-scale, literature driven methodological studies.”
The field did have defenders — at least in part. David Mayhew of Yale University said that there were perfectly legitimate reasons to keep American politics as a key subfield. There is nothing wrong, he said, with the “home field argument.” He said that political scientists in Iceland should have a subfield on Icelandic politics and that the same principle applies to American political scientists.
And he also said that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that the United States’ role in the world is such that a subfield makes sense. “It’s the argument for studying Rome 2,000 years ago,” he said. “The U.S.A., for better or worse, is a very important and consequential country,” he said. When you consider, for example, the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as international organizations based in the United States, such as the World Bank, there is plenty to study, he said.
That’s not to say that American politics scholars are doing the right work, Mayhew said. The growth of executive branch power has not received the attention it deserves, he said, in part because of an excess of work on public opinion and elections. Further, he said that there are issues where it has become apparent that a comparativist perspective may have been needed but ignored.
For example, he said that research on the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 has been too narrowly focused on the United States and its fear of attacks on its still young government. At the same time, he said, similar limits on dissent were being enacted in Britain and Canada — suggesting that the issues were not “distinctively American.” In another example, he said that recent reading he’s done of research in Canada on the “cleavage” created in politics there by the mid-19th century rise in Irish immigration has made him question the conventional wisdom that slavery was the issue that destroyed the Whig Party in the United States. A comparative study of the impact of immigration might lead to a different conclusion, he said, such as that immigration played a role in the demise of the Whigs.
Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania said he too agreed that there are in fact topics that merit an American focus. A book exploring the state legislatures in the United States need not add comparisons to other countries to have value, he said. “What matters is the question you are asking,” he said.
But even as he defended the idea that some scholars may want to focus on American politics, he said it’s time for a larger rethinking of subfields. The current division of the discipline dates to the Cold War and reflects some of the biases of that period. “We’re now in a different period,” he said. While there are “deeply institutionalized sources of resistance” to breaking out of the traditional models, he said it may be time to do so. Smith said that already “the comparative and IR [international relations] boundaries have dissolved,” but the question is what to put in place. He advocated a system in which more hires are made along new themes, such as violence, representative structures, governance and identities.
Several of the panelists said that they believed graduate education should be changed to promote different divisions of the field — or at least a broader perspective from Americanists. Norton of Penn said she would like to see every Americanist Ph.D. required to become fluent enough in a foreign language to do real comparative work. Mayhew said that graduate students need to be barred from focusing just on the United States, even if that is their focus.
While most of the audience members didn’t question the intellectual arguments being made, several raised practical issues. One person said that many of her undergraduate majors are pre-law, and want to focus just on the United States.
And — inevitably perhaps — the job market for Ph.D.’s came up. One political scientist suggested that the association bar departments for placing job ads using the traditional field divisions. Smith said that while he would like to see more hiring that is thematic — and that he has had a little success encouraging such searches at Penn — the association could not tell departments how to hire, and would be “contemptuously ignored” if it tried. He said that graduate reform may be the way to go in breaking away from traditional divisions.
But one audience member predicted that without changes in job titles, change would be slow as it would be difficult for job seekers to present themselves in ways other than the long used subfields. “No graduate student can afford to be out of place with the categories,” she said.
Want it on paper? Print this page.
Know someone who’d be interested? Forward this story.
Want to stay informed? Sign up for free daily news e-mail.
Advertisement
Comments
I’m a comparativist and Latin Americanist, and have long wondered why there’s not more effort to compare the US and Canada with Latin American cases, or think about the histories of the US and Canada as intertwined, and interacting with Latin American histories.
Modernization scholars a couple of generations ago did do such comparative work (though mostly ahistorical), but problems in their method and theory led later scholars to jettison such comparisons. I think another reason is that Latin Americanists generally ignore Canada and treat the US as an external factor, a structural constraint on Latin America, rather than a possible comparison. I mean, how can you call yourself a Latin Americanist if spend too much time up north! The same reasoning holds in the Americanist field, which is like another Area Studies, but without the comparativist training.
Anyway, for practical reasons, I don’t think you can just do away with the Americanist field. It would be easier if we 1) insist that students in the Americanist track do more comparative coursework (more than the usual distribution requirement); 2) encourage Americanists to bring a more comparativist sensibility to their courses, at both the undergrad and graduate levels; and 3) we should end the common practice of making the Intro to American government the entree into the Political Science undergraduate major.
Also, its up to Poli-Sci departments to look for Americanists with a comparativist side, thus giving graduate programs an incentive to change, perhaps producing more comparativists who happen to focus on the US.
Andrew Schlewitz, at 8:45 am EDT on August 29, 2008
Academic silliness
If anyone wonders why university faculty are currently held in pretty low esteem, this article offers cogent evidence. Those seeking to abolish American politics as a field wish to replace it with their own slanted, ideologically driven, conformist views.
As to comparative studies, they have real value. I’ve read some really good comparative work, but most of it is poor. It seems like too many comparativists acquire a mere surface knowledge of two places rather than an in depth knowledge of either one.
AProf, at 9:25 am EDT on August 29, 2008
Interesting ... But Much Too Timid
I have never taken a course in political science ... or sociology ... or psychology. I have, however, spent most of my professional career teaching mathematics and statistics to social “scientists” (and business students). I have had joint or full appointments in five political science departments, three of which are unquestionably in the top ten in the land. I have a few publications in political science journals.
Just last year I gave a graduate class of social science students – and take my word for the fact that they are the best-of-the-best – the following short essay assignment”
”So you are going to write a short paper, telling me ...
1. something about the scientific nature of your discipline ... and its history (the scientific part).
2. what the paradigms are that drive research in your discipline. You will get bonus points for identifying one or more paradigm shifts during your discipline’s reign as a science ... if there have been any.
You might have occasion to use the phrase, the political process (or the process of environmental science or the public policy process) – with emphasis on ‘the.’ If you do that, please explain what I should understand that process to be; e.g. what is ‘THE political process?’
3. Pick one of the paradigms in your discipline. What significant open questions are identified with that paradigm? ... i.e., in the body of open questions (or even research objectives) clustered under the paradigm, which ones are most compelling? You might think the ones that are “most compelling” are (i) the ones with the largest number of scholars pursuing research in that area, (ii) the ones whose answers will have a profound impact on the human condition, (iii) the ones that seem to present the greatest intellectual challenges, etc.
4. Finally, for the clincher, I would like at least one example – bonus points for two – of a mathematically- or statistically-based analysis that has revealed something of significance vis-a-vis your paradigm. I not only want to know about the analysis itself, I want to know how it fits into the paradigmatic structure. Sorry, but you don’t get to use Arrow’s Theorem. That one is mine.”
I had a good sense of how a graduate student in mathematics or physics would answer those questions, but I have a very close friend and colleague – a mathematician who has also spent much of his career teaching mathematics and statistics to social scientists — who keeps pressing me about the existence of mathematically- or statistically-based analyses of the political process that have revealed anything of importance ... and he scoffs at how little of consequence we (chiefly the University of Michigan) have learned from our rather substantial investment in trying to understand the American voter. He happens to believe almost all “quantitative” analyses in the social sciences are either applications of undergraduate mathematics revealing pseudo answers to inconsequential questions or greatly abused uses of undergraduate statistics that, because of those abuses, are of very questionable value.
I must admit that I am one who thinks very little about understanding the nature of the “political process” was gained — and much was lost — when we made the academic transition from history and government to political science. It’s a substitution principle.
P.S. Unfortunately, I got virtually nothing to write home about in the responses to my essay questions.
P.P.S. It’s a bit frightening to see how little of importance has been accomplished in political science (and throw in public choice for good measure) since the early work of Kenneth Arrow (1950s) and V.O. Key (1940s and 50s).
P.P.P.S. And don’t mention to my friend the profound contributions of game theory and Prisoners Dilemma to understanding political behavior ... that is unless you’ve got a few hours to listen to his critique.
Frizbane Manley, at 10:05 am EDT on August 29, 2008
Who or what is “American"?
As long as academics continue to use the term “Americanist” to refer only to the United States as a field of inquiry, then they are defining their political and cultural limitations. One of my degrees is in Latin American Studies, but it of course had to have “Latin” as part of its title. The US should not continue thinking of America as its name and not take into account the many South and Central American countries as well as the others that are in North America. Perhaps relegating “American” studies or politics to a subcategory will make the point that the US is part of a much larger group of American nations — some more sovereign than others, some better off than others — that occupy the same hemisphere. There is more to be learned from viewing oneself as a member of a group rather than as a group unto itself. Especially in today’s world.
Kathleen March, Professor of Spanish, at 10:05 am EDT on August 29, 2008
Let’s be consistent if it’s changed
If you’re gonna change the name of the subfield, then change the name of the organization that it’s a part of as well.
AnAmericanistPoliSciProf, at 11:30 am EDT on August 29, 2008
I have a recent degree in Political Science. I took courses in Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Politics in America. I found them very important in the way we should relate to political systems around us. American politics is relevant because we live in... @#$% the United States (Thank You Lewis Black). Should these courses be revamped and comparative? Yes. Is the world the same as it was during the Cold War? No, but in some cases it is. Relaying the importance and relevance of America and its relationship with the rest of the world is up to academia. Academia is charged with the task of inspiring their students to learn on thier own and think critically.
Liberty Metcalf, American Politics, at 11:30 am EDT on August 29, 2008
Americanist haters of the world unite!
If this was a general criticism of the field of political science rather than an attack on Americanists I would take it seriously. If you think that only American politics is narrow and not relevant I guess you don’t read journals in other subfields.
I’ve often thought to myself why would someone write a dissertation on Jamaican politics (yes, this and even more ridiculous things happen in political science)? The fact that this is deemed acceptable but studying American politics isn’t by some is hilarious. Maybe the Jamaican political scientists should write about American politics so that they are not narrow. And I know why someone would want to do “field work” in a warm, exotic locale with nice beaces rather than say Iowa City or Columbus, OH.
Should Americanists have knowledge of other systems to guide their research? Of course, and most do. Virtually every text book on American government has a section discussing the differences between the U.S. and other systems in the area of say, welfare policy. But it also points out similarities to other countries in terms of our tradition of limited government(UK) or institutions like Federalism (Cananda, Germany, Brazil, etc.). Furthermore, the US is indeed an outlier in many areas, and the causes and consequences of these differences are fascinating to Americans and others. Just look at how much foreigners have written on the lack of a socialist/labor party in the US.
What should really be critiqued is the narrowness of academic training which is driven largely by the need to push PhDs through quickly due to lack of funds and the hiring tendencies of major R1 departmens that want an expert on something rather than a well-rounded inquisitive scholar. Next time these critics departments hire for an Americanist positions I hope these esteemed scholars will take the time to read the applicants graduate transcripts and be open to picking a candidate with no publications (yet) but with broad training and a alot of courses in different subfields. You wanna bet they won’t?
Chris, at 4:55 pm EDT on August 29, 2008
Women’s Studies should be abolished
Mary Hawkesworth, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said that when women are studied in isolation, “certain things get masked.” The “notion of women’s exceptionalism,” she said, produces “a social amnesia.” For example, she said that that the violence and corruption of the American woman receives little emphasis, so when students are exposed to the violence of men, they see no connection to the women’s experience and have little tolerance for men.
Yes, I am joking, but no, she is not.
Chris, at 4:55 pm EDT on August 29, 2008
‘American’ imperialism
I agree with Kathleen March: I resist the US’ colonisation of ‘America’ as the name for their country, which of course is only part of the Americas.
As a corollary, ‘North America’ is not just Canada and the US but also includes at least Mexico (as in the North American free trade agreement) and probably also Bermuda and Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
Gavin Moodie, Principal Policy Adviser at Griffith University, Australia, at 9:55 pm EDT on August 29, 2008
I am a mid-career political scientist at a major research institution in the U.S. who has published in “American” politics, political theory, public law, and public administration. And frankly, I think that part of this is navel gazing. But part of it is a real response to the myopia of the subfield.
There are a few different things going on here. One is one of those bits of semantics that get everybody sidetracked — whether American means U.S. or the Western hemisphere. Hence my quotes around American above. Call it U.S. or American — I couldn’t care less — it’s not the central problem.
More importantly, the problems with the subfield largely stem from how we train graduate students. More than in the other subfields, American politics seemingly excludes itself from the larger debates in the field, and far too few Americanists spend serious time on the larger theoretical debates over, for instance, the evolving nature of the modern state under globalization, which tends to be dominated by comparativists. Instead, training is dominated by statistical methods and formal (rational choice) theory. I’d like to second the comments above about how unproductive much of that work is. Far too much of what is published is primarily about the methods used rather than the putative subject at hand.
Breaking down the subfield boundaries would, in my opinion, be a good thing. But that does not mean that anyone need stop studying US politics. It means that Americanists need to talk more to, and read more from, other political scientists. And it’s amazing how little this happens. Thus, the comment in the piece about exceptionalism is right on. The American Revolution is different from other revolutions, as is every revolution, but its uniqueness — and hence its meaning — can only be understood in relation to other revolutions. And its many similarities to other revolutions is also part of a proper understanding. While analyses of Latin American revolutions often contain references to the American revolution — it doesn’t go the other way. Just try finding comparative references to non-US legislatures in the literature on Congress. While the policy literature is better than other subfields within American politics on this, articles on institutions and behavior are largely “inner-directed.”
All that said, the other problem in the subfield is that the many sub-subfields (Institutions, Behavior, Policy, etc) aren’t horribly well-integrated either. So it’s not just a problem that the subfield is too clearly demarcated. It’s also a problem that the field is somewhat incoherent.
Of course, one may be better off not worrying about the labels and till one’s own field, or subfield, as one defines it one’s self. Which sounds like a proper plan to me.
Dan, Associate professor at University of Utah, at 7:20 am EDT on August 30, 2008
In graduate school, we call for ultra-specialization, so obviously some students are going to end up studying and focusing on American issues exclusively.
What I’m glad to hear is the concern shared by a few here that it is the statistical modeling that has gone overboard in politics. Sure — analyzing demographics and opinions — this is how you win elections, but it is rarely relevant to crafting new policy solutions or even what is necessary to implement changes in a political environment of competing and powerful interests.
I’m holding off on my political science PhD because the University in my state that is supposed to be the best only offers statistical methods as a PhD program. Politics has to be more than using data to win elections! And where’s the economics? I think even undergraduate political science classes need a heavy dose of macro & international economy.
John, at 1:30 pm EDT on August 30, 2008
real scientists don’t trash talk
It’s funny: as a political scientist who has had the pleasure of friendships with serious mathematicians, physicists, and geneticists from some of the planet’s top research universities, I notice that none of them ever talk like Frizbane Manley. Like any serious scholar, they are fascinated by interesting problems and conjectures, and not trash-talking other fields and methods (they also seem to be less likely to quibble about appropriate definitions and boundaries of their fields, and they almost never throw around the word “paradigm” unless baited by questions about Kuhn).
Now to be sure, there’s selection bias here: no doubt I avoid friendships and acquaintances with truly obnoxious scholars. But I’m making a prescriptive point, not a statistical inference: it should tell us something that the best minds in the sciences (and if you take Frizbane’s word that his graduate students are “the best of the best” then take mine here, with the obvious caveat) are not into the sort of games that preoccupy lesser minds.
Random scholar, assistant professor at a small university, at 7:35 am EDT on September 2, 2008
Response To Random Scholar ...
Four things ...
First, in my earlier post I only included a short excerpt from my assignment to my graduate students. All of them had read Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” I included two URLs (and a photograph of Kuhn) in the assignment itself; to wit ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~willerd/weinberg.html,
they knew full well that we were talking about paradigms in the Kuhnian sense, and I even included the sentence, “Warning: Thank goodness none of you is studying so-called ‘management science,’ where every time someone sneezes or looks cross-eyed it is classified as a new paradigm.”
Second, I am perfectly happy to be classified as being obnoxious, but it would have been useful, I think, if you had addressed or refuted a single point made in my earlier post. I mean just one critique of substance would have done the trick.
Third, where in the world did you get the completely erroneous idea that “real scientists don’t talk trash?” Read any 100 pages about cosmology ... or read about James Watson, Francis Crick, and the double helix ... or try 100 pages about Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann ... or read about Louis Pasteur, Antione Bechamp, and immunization ... or read the on-going debates about global warming ... or, omigod, sit in on a conference devoted to animal taxonomy. Especially physics, I think, is replete with trash-talking scientists at least from the days of Sir Isaac Newton until today. Barely disguised “trash talking” – and I agree it’s a matter of definition – is almost a way of life amongst scientists.
Fourth, I think there is a big difference between “trash-talking” in the hard sciences and “trash-talking in the social sciences. Here’s my theory: In the hard sciences, trash-talking is interpreted to be 90% substantive and 10% personal. In the social sciences, “trash-talking” is interpreted to be 5% substantive and 95% personal. And that’s why a mathematician should never marry a political scientist.
Frizbane Manley, at 2:05 pm EDT on September 2, 2008
More on trash-talking, and the scientific ideal
What’s to refute?
You offered up no clear thesis. Insofar as there was a polemical point being made in your original post (to wit: `social science isn’t science and your grad students are dumb, so nah-nah!’) you argued for it by generalizing from a small sample of (unreported) answers to a (frankly not that inspiring) writing assignment—an exercise, for instance, that my scope-and-method undergraduates would gleefully tear apart like ravenous hounds, starting with the ambiguity of “significance” and the (questionable) utility of a Kuhnian approach to understanding the human sciences, and indeed the sciences more broadly.
You also engaged in argument from authority (’best in the land, cream of the crop — trust me’), and made a pretty strange claim to certainty about how physicists would answer your exercise (I mean, seriously? how about those cosmologists? particle physicists? theorists? ask a string theorist about foam models and see what sort of uniformity you get in answers to your “something of significance” question).
Finally, there’s a world of difference between passionate and often-acrimonious disputes (the kind we find all the time across the sciences), and the sort of cheap trash-talking you engaged in above. Even calling out bullshit doesn’t count as trash-talking, if (a) you know what you’re talking about, and (b) it really is bullshit.
Thus, for instance, Alan Sokal wasn’t talking trash, because he (a) was upfront about what he didn’t know, yet still put effort into getting up to speed in philosophy and social studies of science, and (b) the stuff he was mocking really is dense with bullshit.
I have no idea how you personally come out on (a), but I am questioning your case for (b): polisci as bullshit. And I’m largely questioning it on scientific grounds: fuzzy conjecture, and likely problems of small sample and selection bias in the evidence you appeal to.
I stand by my (remember: prescriptive, not empirical) claim. A truly scientific attitude is fundamentally about two things: rigor and wonder. We feel wonder about the problems we find, and we approach them as rigorously as we can (which may require different tools for different domains of inquiry, and frankly some questions may simply not admit the sort of rigor and certainty we’d ideally like).
No doubt many of us fail in practice, but a person who lives up to this ideal doesn’t feel the need to denigrate and belittle other fields of inquiry, and is instead genuinely curious to find plausible answers to interesting questions about ourselves and the universe around us, regardless of the somewhat arbitrary disciplinary boundaries we erect to justify tenure and funding and the like.
All that said, I’m inclined to agree with you that much was probably lost with the first moves from history to “science” in social studies. I don’t, however, believe (as you seem to) that we cannot be scientific in studying human affairs. Rather, I just think we started off with some foolish understandings of what science is fundamentally about, and who were the appropriate role models for budding social “scientists” (I’d have looked to ecology before physics, for instance, and worried less about calculus and more about distributions and combinatorics and graph theory).
Random scholar, assistant professor at a small university, at 7:05 pm EDT on September 2, 2008
Advertisement
Jobs Related to Should American Politics Be Abolished (as a Field)?
or search for jobs directly.
Assistant Professor of Public Administration
Roger Williams University
Roger Williams University is one of the top ranked liberal arts universities in the Northeast and is an Equal Opportunity ... see job
Assistant/Associate Professor, Tenure-Track — Public Policy
University of California, Irvine
School of Social Ecology Department of Planning, Policy, and Design Position: Assistant/Associate Professor, Tenure-track The ... see job
Multiple Faculty Openings — Asst, Assc, and Full Professor
Georgia Gwinnett College
Georgia Gwinnett College, the 35th member of the University System of Georgia, is a premier 21st century four-year liberal ... see job
Assistant Professor, Public Policy
University of Colorado
Posting Description: The Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder invites ... see job
Assistant Professor-Comparative Politics
James Madison University
Join one of the finest regional universities in the nation. James Madison University, home to 18,000 + students, welcomes you ... see job
Professor — Public Policy and Research Methods
Monterey Institute of International Studies
About Monterey Institute of International Studies: Nestled in beautiful Monterey, California, MIIS is a small professional ... see job
Assistant Professor
Princeton University
Position Summary: Assistant Professor in Demography and Public Affairs The Woodrow Wilson School of Public ... see job
Assistant/ Associate Professor/ Political Science
Lebanese American University
School of Arts and Sciences Division: Humanities and Social Science Discipline: Political Science Campus: Byblos Vacancy ... see job
Political Science (Adjunct) Instructor
Hillsborough Community College
Hillsborough Community College is a public, comprehensive multi-campus, state-supported community college located in the ... see job
International Peace and Conflict Resolution ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR (TENURE-TRACK)
American University
American University is an independent liberal-arts university located in Washington, DC with 12,000 students. The faculty are ... see job
Home
| Sign up | Log in
| About us
| Work for Us
| Press Releases
| Rights and permissions
| Contact us
| Advertise
| Partners
| RSS 
| Podcasts
| Links
| Privacy
| My Account
© Copyright 2008 Inside Higher Ed
I taught American Politics before switching to sociology for the PhD. Clearly this point of view represents only that of a few crackpots. Or maybe the cultural studies people have snuck in from English departments. Moves against the “canon” in the social sciences have ushered in essentially contentless courses— all Foucault, no meat. Please not here too.
TBD, at 8:00 am EDT on August 29, 2008