While many political scientists have been concerned about teaching methods, teaching materials, and modes of teacher evaluation, relatively few have considered the more general question of the undergraduate political science curriculum itself. Specifically, what kinds of courses should we be teaching, what role should such courses play in a liberal arts education, and what factors should determine the overall structure of the political science curriculum at the undergraduate level?

These questions relate further to the practical question of staffing a small department of political science. When vacancies arise, or when there's an opportunity to expand in a modest way, one is confronted with certain basic choices. In most circumstances, we confront these choices by thinking in terms of fields within our discipline.

As part of an on-going effort at West Oahu College (a small, liberal arts, upper-division campus of the University of Hawaii) I am experimenting with ways to help my political science students improve their ability to think critically and communicate clearly. For some time we have been aware of a large number of students having difficulties in writing and critical thinking. We have made an informal and voluntary commitment to use writing-across-thecurriculum (WAC) with faculty participating in workshops and conferring with the writing instructor who coordinates our WAC program.1

In-coming students must now produce a writing proficiency sample which is analyzed, returned with numerous comments, and results in students being urged to take a writing class if there are serious problems. A writing lab is offered several times a week and students are free to drop in for help.

The lights dim. The students stir nervously, not sure of what to expect of the strobe light and the background music from "Thriller." The student course guide had recommended American Humor in Literature and Politics, but no one had been able to locate a living survivor to provide a personal testimony. Two middle-aged men of spacious girths enter the room and begin calling the roll. One looks like he might be a Democrat. The other one doesn't. As they alternate calling student names, crack terrible puns, and climb in and out of fright wigs and false noses, it begins to dawn on the class why no Ishmael has stepped forward to tell the story of American Humor.

The movie theatre may seem like an odd place for politics, but almost all movies could be considered “political.” Even stranger is the notion that those spacemen, monsters and aliens we are so accustomed to seeing in science fiction films may be more than just entertaining us, they may be conveying a political message. In fact, most science fiction films make deeply political statements about the society from which they emerge.

Science fiction films provide a unique opportunity for movie makers to comment on the implications of both human and “non-human” behavior. Through science fiction, one can look ahead to the way the world “might” look if the right wing, left wing, scientific rationalists, corporations, etc., take over and create their own “Brave New World.” It is an opportunity to play out the implications of various political philosophies for all to see and evaluate.

Internships are “ in.” During an era of lagging liberal arts enrollments, deans. Admission Office personnel, students, and their families, are demanding education they believe will help the undergraduate get a job on graduation. For the instructor however, usually trained in conventional academic roles, the off-campus internship program is a rather new challenge. Rather than mastering a definable body of knowledge, the student is expected to master an “experience.” Rather than controlling student workload and specific tasks, the instructor only sets general parameters, which he must depend on others to follow. Rather than containing student personalities, styles and demeanors on campus, the instructor must send them off-campus to reflect well (or ill) on the college, their program and themselves.

Since the drafting of the federal Constitution in 1787, the legal status of women in the United States has passed through four distinct phases and is on the brink of entering a fifth one. In this two-hundred-year period, there has been more change in the last twenty years than in the previous onehundred- and-eighty. Yet, a decade and a half ago scholarly classes about women and the Constitution could not be taught because too little primary research had been conducted in either the new social history with its subfield of women or the latest version of the new legal history with its subfield of sex discrimination.

Both subfields reflect the increased interest of historians and lawyers in interdisciplinary research techniques developed in this country and abroad since the 1960s.

The spring 1984 issue of APSA's NEWS for Teachers of Political Science contains Herman Belz's provocative piece on “Constitutionalism and Bureaucracy in the 1980's.” His definitions of both terms are unsatisfactory. His concept of constitutionalism is anemic. It fails to recognize that governments must have some characteristics of Leviathan: they must be large and formidable. To constitutionalize such governments is proportionately difficult. In the United States the difficulty is greatly aggravated by the bureaucracies which the separation of powers fosters that tend to fragment government into quasi-independent power blocks. Nor are these bureaucracies mere aggregations of civil servants. They typically include political administrators, veteran legislators, and experienced group leaders. Let me turn first to Professor Belz's argument.