During the 1980s, there has been an enormous amount of interest in the idea of faculty development. But what exactly does faculty development mean? Is the expression used so often and imprecisely that it loses all meaning? Surely everyone must favor faculty development?

My feeling was that faculty development was something that every good college must do as a matter of enlightened management. I decided to investigate the topic in two ways. First, I read some of the literature (mostly in higher education, but some discipline-based), looking especially at definitions and assumptions about faculty development. Second, I conducted a survey of chairs of departments of political science, suggesting a definition of faculty development and asking about their experiences.

Many articles dealing with faculty development are too broad and fail to define the term. There is also a tendency to equate faculty development with improved teaching (Lacefield, 1983; Moses, 1984). One exception is this:

Applying such a broad definition suggests that faculty development occurs constantly at all levels of an institution, which does not take us very far in trying to analyze its effectiveness.

Mosely (1981) suggests three different foci: faculty development; instructional development; and organizational development. Development of a faculty's skills should occur automatically as part of good academic administration. If Penn State provides me with a computer in my office or gives me a research assistant, I will perform better, albeit with slow, incremental improvement. More central to an understanding of faculty development are those cases where faculty achieve a substantial improvement in their performance. In order to assess the nature and incidence of these cases of “substantial improvement,” I surveyed chairs of departments of political science in the U.S. A questionnaire was sent to each institution with at least eight faculty where one individual had been chair for at least five years, presumably long enough to get a perspective on faculty development.

It seems appropriate in this bicentennial year to examine the treatment introductory American government textbooks give the U.S. Constitution. Nearly every text devotes a chapter (typically, the second) to the events leading up to, and the writing of, the Constitution. But what of the political theory on which the Constitution is based? The Constitution, by itself, is too brief and devoid of theory to provide students with an overall assessment of that document. The source that is often relied upon by constitutional scholars to provide that theory is The Federalist Papers. It is the textbooks' treatment of these essays that we will explore here.

The Federalist Papers were 85 newspaper editorials written by Hamilton, Madison, and jay, under the pseudonym Publius, in support of ratification of the proposed Constitution. The first essay was published October 27, 1787, and when the last essay was published, the authors had written 175,000 words. This was an average of 1,000 words a day, and was about 35 times the length of the Constitution itself.

Hamilton initiated the project in reaction to another set of pseudonymous literature published in New York. New York support of the Constitution was essential, and it was doubtful that the state would ratify. As the seat of the central government, New York was in a pivotal position on the eastern seaboard. It had a lively commerce, and thus was not eager for change. Governor George Clinton staunchly opposed ratification. New York had not signed the Constitution because all of its delegates, except Hamilton, had left in protest and no one signatory was authorized to approve the document for the state.

One of the most frustrating tasks in teaching “Introduction to Politics” is to convey a tangible, realistic sense of what revolution means to American undergraduate students. Insulated as most Americans are from the turbulence of political upheaval (which is actually the norm for many of the world's nation-states), ongoing revolutions around the world are very far away from their own concerns.

As a result, I decided to take a chance and engage in some of my own revolutionary teaching and stage a revolution in the classroom. I conspired in advance with several graduate students who were strategically positioned throughout the large lecture hall. For the experiment to succeed, authenticity had to be the key.

I seized upon one of the students' main concerns and frustrations with the course: the protracted and inconvenient scheduling of their weekly sections with the teaching assistants. Half-way through one lecture I announced a change in the T.A. assignments. One student “rebel” (one of the plants) vehemently vocalized the class' sense of outrage. My altercation with him (as I autocratically asserted my role as authority) resulted in my telling him to leave the class. When he refused, I called on my teaching assistant (“lackey running dog”) to go to the dean's office (calling on higher authority and perhaps force) to quash this rebellion. When the teaching assistant attempted to exit, the rebel physically prevented him from leaving the room (true insurrection). As I went to break up the confrontation, I was expelled, along with the teaching assistant, from the lecture hall (overthrow).

The proposal and syllabus that follow are primarily concerned with the content of a seminar on cultural theory. I would like to preface these materials by saying a bit about teaching.

Because of the vast confusion surrounding the concept of culture, a seminar is an ideal place to work on clarification.

The version of cultural theory being discussed departs from ordinary modes of thought and raises many questions, albeit in a more political direction: What sort of people, organized into which cultures, would act in certain ways (accept or reject blame, tax and spend high or low, participate a little or a lot, etc.) in order to do what matters most to them—support their way of life and discomfort their opponents? Hence time for questions in the seminar is essential. Hours and hours of discussion do more to straighten out thought than any amount of reading.

Application of this cultural theory is also essential. Doing is different than thinking. I have found that 1,000-word essays on such subjects as the Comanche Indians (competitive individualists to the core) or the Khmer Rouge (radical egalitarians) enable seminar members to come to grips with the theories they are trying out. Immersion in this material, bolstered by continuous discussion, sharpened by several short applications, greatly facilitates writing a research paper. The idea is to take a paper already written, or about to be written, derive a problem from it, and see how one cultural theory compares to others.

The complexities of the governmental machinery and personal perceptions involved in the formulation of American foreign policy are difficult for students to comprehend from the confines of the classroom. Beginning students often enter the study of international relations/political science with a simplistic view of policy making. They tend to accept a priori what Graham Allison (1971) calls the “rational actor model” in which students “package the activities of various officials of a national government as action chosen by a unified actor, strongly analogous to an individual human being.” Students often believe that foreign policy is set by a cohesive group of individuals who share common goals and preferences. The additional tendency to anthropomorphize the state leads undergraduates to write papers in which nation-states are portrayed with such diverse human qualities as sympathy, cruelty, greed, and aggression.

Modern scholarship on decision making has expanded beyond this traditional view to encompass differing variables. There is an ongoing debate in the discipline as to what is the most potent variable in American foreign policy. One group of scholars contends that the bureaucratic or role variable is more important. While agreeing that role is a powerful restriction, particularly at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, other scholars argue that the individual perceptions and beliefs of policy makers are more important in the decision-making process.

Given the complicated nature of this debate, a creative way to expose beginning students to American foreign policy decision making is through a simulation. Simulations are useful for the study of the decision-making process because the standard lecture-discussion format, which provides a linear overview of the subject, does not adequately communicate the complex structure and multiplicity of factors in operation.