Abstract
This paper argues that mainstream approaches to teaching American politics not only fail to give students the intellectual tools they need to become effective citizens, they also help to legitimize the market values that threaten liberal arts curriculums today. The American Political Development (APD) approach to teaching American politics is best suited for teaching a critical civic education and nurturing democratic values, such as civic engagement, public service, and social solidarity, at liberal arts colleges. Moreover, liberal arts colleges provide a particularly effective educational setting for taking an APD approach to American Politics.
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Notes
See Joan Cocks, “The Death of Politics as a Liberal Art?” in this volume.
Stephen T. Leonard, “The Pedagogical Purposes of a Political Science,” in Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, ed. James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81.
Leonard, “Pedagogical Purposes,” 86.
Terrence Ball, “An Ambivalent Alliance: Political Science and American Democracy,” in Political Science in History, ed. Farr et al., 56.
Ira Katznelson, Mark Kesselman, and Alan Draper, The Politics of Power: A Critical Introduction to American Government, 6th edn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); John J. Harrigan, Empty Dreams, Empty Pockets: Class and Bias in American Politics, 2nd edn. (New York: Longman, 2000).
Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “The Study of American Political Development,” in Political Science: State of the Discipline, ed. Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 722–54; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Order and Time in Institutional Study: A Brief for the Historical Approach,” in Farr et al., Political Science in History, 296–317; Cal Jillson, American Government: Political Development and Institutional Change; 6th edn. (New York: Routledge, 2011); Marc Landy and Sidney Milkis, American Government: Balancing Democracy and Rights, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman, “Formative Acts,” in Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, ed. Skowronek and Glassman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 3.
Orren and Skowronek, American Political Development, 203–04.
Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Brian J. Glenn and Steven M. Teles, eds., Conservatism and American Political Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Skowronek and Glassman, “Formative Acts,” 1.
Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008); Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King, The Unsustainable American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Katznelson et al., The Politics of Power; Harrigan, Class and Bias in American Politics; Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006).
Skowronek and Glassman, “Formative Acts,” 1.
I have not done any survey of liberal arts colleges, so I am basing my observations on my experience at Mount Holyoke as well as what I have learned from my colleagues at comparable institutions. While there was significant variation among the colleges that were represented at the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges Workshop, November 11 and 12, 2011, Amherst, Massachusetts, in terms of class size of introductory courses, the colleges seemed fairly uniform in having permanent faculty teaching these courses.
This comment has more to do with the working conditions in which many permanent faculty members at liberal arts colleges find themselves (versus those that adjunct faculty experience) than with qualifications. Being tenured or even tenure track allows for faculty to invest more time in their classes and in advising. Moreover, their job security allows for more experimentation in teaching. For instance, faculty are able to incorporate a community-based learning component to their course, which is very time consuming. Permanent faculty can also bring more experience to teaching because they have seen classroom dynamics over time at a particular college and therefore have a sense of what resonates for students and what does not.
See Alfred P. Montero, “Comparative Politics and the Liberal Arts College: A Fragile Symbiosis,” Polity 46(1): 55–61.
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Lichtenstein, American Capitalism.
The disciplines of history, sociology, economics, and political science make up the American Political Development subfield. It rises to the standard of interdisciplinarity because the incorporation of these other disciplines has transformed how the APD subfield examines politics. Of all the disciplines, history has had the largest impact on the subfield’s perspective. See Orren and Skowronek, “The Study of American Political Development.” See also Martha Acklesberg, “(Feminist) Political Science as an Interdisciplinary Exploration,” Polity 46(1): 39–45.
Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development (New York: Routledge, 2008), 12. Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” in Race and American Political Development, ed. Lowndes et al., 80.
King and Smith, Racial Orders, 80–105; Desmond S. King and Rogers Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Civic engagement does not mean the same thing for every student. There are a variety of ways students can get involved in public life while in college: through community service, community organizing, community-based learning, government and NGO internships, and so on. Many students bring a value of civic engagement with them, and it gets nurtured at a liberal arts college. The chief obstacle to civic engagement after students graduate is the time it takes to obtain an adequate income. For those students who do not have a tradition of civic engagement before coming to college, the institution can stress the importance of civic involvement for their personal and intellectual growth during their college career.
See Joan Cocks, “The Death of Politics as a Liberal Art?” Polity 46(1): 9–15.
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Thanks to Amrita Basu for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as to the anonymous reviewers of this symposium entry.
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Smith II, P. American Politics and the Liberal Arts College. Polity 46, 122–130 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.33