Political Science 1 and Political Indoctrination

Extract

The departments of political science in America's colleges and universities are now numbered in the hundreds, their students in the tens of thousands. The variety of these departments is bewildering, differing as they do in size, curriculum, teaching methods, political complexion, aspirations, and even in name. It is no easy matter to discover what the fifty-man faculty in political science at Columbia and the one-man department of government at a California junior college have in common; yet one thing in common they certainly do have: the introductory course, and the complex problem which it presents.

That the introductory course does present a major problem to departments of political science everywhere was clearly acknowledged by the program committee of the 1947 meeting of the American Political Science Association, when it scheduled a panel entitled “The Beginning Course in Political Science.” The problem was further acknowledged by the panel itself; hardly a person of the many who took part in its proceedings, whether seated at the round-table or holding forth extemporaneously from the audience, failed to show some degree of candid dissatisfaction with the introductory course as presently conducted at his institution. Rare indeed is the department of political science which is willing to let its introductory course ride along through 1948 in the exact shape it assumed through 1947. The urge for improvement is nation-wide, and several prominent departments have gone so far as to relieve instructors of part of their normal teaching burden and commission them to work out definite programs of radical revision.