As recipients of Fulbright-Hayes lectureships, we taught political science courses at two Chinese universities during the academic year 1983-84. Professor Thompson, at the International Politics Department of Beijing University, the major liberal arts university in North China, and Professor Morrison with the History Department of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, the comparable institution of the south. We were the first western political scientists in residence and teaching on a regular basis in mainland Chinese universities in over thirty years, and taught the first political science courses included in Chinese curricula since the late 1940's. In addition to lecturing in each other's departments. Professor Thompson spent a week at Fudan University in Shanghai and Professor Morrison lectured at Nanjing University. These are our perceptions regarding the current state of political science in the People's Republic of China.

The first day of class has always presented something of a dilemma for me, and the contribution offered here is a suggestion for dealing with the first day of an Introduction to Politics course. This class centers around a lone textbook (Magstadt and Schotten's Understanding Politics, St. Martin's Press) and is designed to introduce government majors and nonmajors alike to the broad range of questions examined by political scientists. In this respect the course is similar to any number of other introduction courses, and colleagues tell me that they have been able to use a variant of the idea presented here in their own introductions to Sociology, Criminal Justice, or History.

In political science as well as other areas of the academic world, computer- assisted instruction is being proclaimed as an innovative teaching tool which teachers should be bringing into the classroom. Workshops on the subject are offered and short courses taught to those unfortunate enough to have missed the computer revolution in their own educational process. The proponents of C.A.I, (for some reason the computer field is devoted to acronyms) or Computer Assisted Instruction are like snake oil salesmen. They always dwell on the positive aspects but fail to warn the consumer of the negative ones.

Many of the great truths of the world have found applicability in more than one area. An illustration of this is a series of statements given the world by Murphy.

Educating and training professional administrators in public service ethics is complex. Just one of the many questions is whether ethics can be taught in the classroom at all, particularly to graduate students at a late period in their lives. Essential life patterns of our MPS and MBA students have already been established during their formative years, and their jobs and other adult experiences influence their thinking, feeling and acting. What is “practical” administrative behavior vs. high sounding ethical prescriptions and codes? Recognizing such caveats, the following account documents the author’s classroom teaching experience.

The unique student body involved combined MPA and MBA students, who were all part or full time practitioners and mature individuals. This setting provided an opportunity for government-business cross study and dialogue on administrative ethics.

I have taught courses on political philosophy at four schools — the University of Chicago, Rosary College, Idaho State University, and Northern Illinois University. I have had to adjust the style of my teaching to conform to the distinctive character of each school. But I have found that the most fundamental obstacles to winning the attention of students have been the same.

Many students have begun my courses with four unfavorable preconceptions. They believe that political philosophy is too abstract. And for that reason they also believe that it has no application to contemporary political issues. Moreover, many students assume that since the classic texts of political thought are old, the ideas they contain must therefore be obsolete. And finally they think that political philosophy is ultimately subjective because no philosopher can prove his ideas to be absolutely true.

If we are going to integrate the new materials on women into political science classes I believe it is important to do so in the introductory courses. Often it is only in the introductory courses that we reach nonmajors and give our potential majors a sense of the field. If we make clear to students how the new scholarship on women affects our concepts and ideas about the discipline, then our students get a sense of the questions that political scientists themselves are wondering about, and about how the discipline changes as it confronts new questions.

Nonetheless, in teaching the basic introduction to American Government course I have had what I expect is the typical experience: there is already too much to cover in a semester.

A course on “Women and American Politics” ought to focus on the subordinate political position held by women as a class, reasons for that status, and the issues involved in the redistribution of political power to women. Students need to understand why women have traditionally been subordinated and why they are not gaining full political equality easily, even now.

A useful framework for clarifying these issues examines the structural importance of role definition in allocating power, the nature of power and the reasons for conflict as power shifts from one group to another. The American Political Science Association Women's Project units can help in the exploration of these issues in terms of their impact on women.

In the nearly two-hundred-year history of the American republic, no episode resulted in so sharp a confrontation between and among the three branches of the national government as the proposal Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled on February 5, 1937, to reorganize the federal judiciary. Promptly dubbed the "Court-packing plan," FDR's recommendations constituted an effort by the chief executive to alter the outlook of the Supreme Court to such an extent that it would henceforth validate virtually all acts of Congress, especially socio-economic measures. Instead of forging an alliance of the executive and legislative branches against the judiciary, however, the ensuing struggle pitted the executive against a powerful segment of the legislative with the judicial branch playing a not inconsequential role in how the battle came out. The repercussions of that momentous combat continue to reverberate in our own day.

J.W. Fulbright once called it "American Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century Under an Eighteenth Century Constitution." In no other policy sphere has our governing charter generated as much anxiety about its suitability to the modern world. Can a system with divided authority, with two major foreign policy decisionmaking institutions, meet the need for united national action on life-or-death matters like, for example, the control and deployment of nuclear arms?

There are those who would deny the problem through simple assertion of presidential predominance. Citing authorities from John Marshall (as federalist Congressman) through Woodrow Wilson (as Constitutional scholar) to Edwin Meese (as presidential counselor), executive branch practitioners and even scholars assert repeatedly that, on foreign policy, the president reigns supreme (or at least ought to).

This essay seeks, in a very preliminary way, to explore the constitutional ramifications of a new wave of laws designed to combat pornography. Pornography is not new, of course; and neither are laws designed to curtail it. It has long been prohibited by federal and state statutes. The first state obscenity law was passed in Vermont in 1821, and the first federal statute, which prohibited the importation of obscene materials such as “French post cards,” was enacted in 1842. As early as 1931, in Near v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court announced that obscenity was not entitled to constitutional protection under the First Amendment.

What has changed is the economics of the sex industry, the demography of its constituency, and the nature of the materials themselves. Pornography today is flourishing as never before; by some estimates it is a $7 billion industry.

At Suffolk University we seized upon the idea of field testing one of the “Women and American Politics” units as a quick and easy way to achieve one of our own goals, gender-balancing our new introductory course in politics and government. By now, the validity of this goal should require no argument; nevertheless, it will be useful to specify some of our particular objectives, as they will make possible a more particularized evaluation.