“Throughout most of the 19th century the most important course in the college curriculum was moral philosophy, taught usually by the college president and required of all senior students. The moral philosophy course was regarded as the capstone of the curriculum. It aimed to pull together, to integrate, and to give meaning and purpose to the student's entire college experience and course of study. In so doing it even more importantly sought to equip the graduating seniors with the ethical sensitivity and insight needed in order to put their newly acquired knowledge to use in ways that would benefit not only themselves and their own personal achievement, but the larger society as well.” Douglas Sloan

Policy analysis is one of the most frequently used buzz terms in public administration and political science. A recent spate of textbooks indicates that a substantial segment of the MPA curriculum is devoted to the study of policy analysis. In this essay, we will examine the concept and practice of policy analysis as defined by its various proponents.

How do the authors whose work we scrutinize define the term? For Duncan MacRae and James Wilde, “policy analysis is the use of reason and evidence to choose the best policy among a number of alternatives.” This definition closely resembles that of Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser, who are concerned with “The advantages and disadvantages of each course of action.”

Until recently most students of Congress were limited to studying it from afar, depending primarily on secondary sources. Limited press coverage of current debates and behavior were often so skimpy that it was necessary to wait a number of years until a select group of events percolated through the process to become part of “the literature.” It took even longer before the events found their way into the classroom as relevant examples of important principles and concepts. The primary sources available (The Congressional Record, Committee Reports, etc.) were ponderous, poorly indexed and often retained the tainted image that they did not truly represent reality. While the Congress of recent years is much more open to public view than its predecessors, open committee meetings and the increase in recorded voting did little to enhance the resources available to teachers or students for understanding the process.

Many scholars of international relations admit to the necessity of making international expertise concentrated in colleges and universities available to the school systems. While there may be a strong consensus among academics to support this as a goal of their institution, it is in many cases not regarded as a priority, nor is it easily accomplished. According to Humphrey Tonkin and Jane Edwards in The World in the Curriculum, “Creating effective cooperation between high schools and colleges is difficult, because of both bureaucratic incompatibilities and a rather ill-considered professional dignity on the part of college teachers.” It must be added that the high school teachers' attitude may also prevent a viable link between the two institutions.

When I went to college in the forties, I could not have imagined questioning the teacher, the syllabus, or the texts we were given to read. I was at Hunter College, in those days still a women's college with a high percentage of women faculty, even a few women administrators. None of these persons, however, seemed concerned about the fact that the entire curriculum taught women that their education would carry them into domesticity and/or jobs in school teaching, social work, the library, or, if they were exceptional, on a women's college campus. The message of the curriculum was, in short: men achieve and work; women love and marry. The twin message of love and marriage, I should add, was present in sociology and literature: elsewhere, women were almost entirely absent, except for the traditional nudes painted by scores of male artists one viewed in art history.

American higher education has been molded by forces outside the educational community. From the Civil War through the mid-1970's our political leadership considered investment in education good for the economy and, therefore, good public policy. This link between schooling and the economic system developed as the United States moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Industrialization demanded skills that neither the family nor the church could provide, and tax-supported public higher education was to assist the transformation to an industrial society. The catalyst for this transformation came in 1862 with the passage of the Morrill Act establishing the land grant colleges. These new institutions emphasized the development of technical skills and the application of scientific principles to agriculture, industry and commerce.

Integrating Women's Studies with any curriculum, political science or otherwise, is a formidable task. And like most changes in curriculum, the integration of Women's Studies material has not come about in orderly fashion. There are some dimensions to Women's Studies integration, however, that set it apart from other curriculum change.

The thrust of Women's Studies vis a vis any discipline is to revise and reinterpret that discipline from a feminist perspective. Feminist philosophy has argued that traditional methodologies, theories, and manifest analyses have contained a patriarchal bias which has excluded the impact of women from the intellectual evolution of humankind. Thus, on the discipline and on the academy itself, the very premise of Women's Studies makes demands which are far-reaching and threatening to establishment doctrine.

The intriguing thing about the study of political behavior is that it focuses our attention directly on “the people” in a political system. Without the existence and actions of people a political system has no meaning — it could not exist. There have been attempts to break this rule, but they have not been successful. There is a spot under the North Sea off the coast of England, for example, that continued to have parliamentary representation long after the sea had buried what was once the important port of Dunwich. This was one of the famous “rotten boroughs”. This make-believe borough, however, required the political action of real people to have political meaning, even if the real people had to act in rowboats.

Governments claim to protect citizens. They claim to protect them from criminals at home and enemies abroad. A government's capacity to protect is rooted in that government's capacity to do violence — specifically, its capacity to do more violence than can criminals and/or enemies. Governments lay claim to skill, sagacity, and support, but they also claim strength and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Citizens may enjoy security but they also provide for security through the payment of taxes and men especially pay for it through personal service and sometimes sacrifice.

State violence is often approved by citizens. Indeed, when the state exercises or threatens violence it is often seen not as violence but as “defense” or as “law enforcement.”