The epigraph beginning this article came from a student in my standard Introduction to Political Theory course at the end of the fall, 2005 semester. This course was offered at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a large (30,000 students), public, urban institution and part of the California State University system. The size of the class was 45 students, typical for such an introductory course, consisting mostly of juniors and majors in political science (since the course is a requirement for graduation for such majors). The intellectual caliber of the students appeared to be normally dispersed: there were some excellent students and some weak ones, especially with regard to the latter group's writing skills—a quite common occurrence at SFSU. Almost all of the students had completed at least one other core class (usually Introduction to American Government or Comparative Politics) and were taking a political science elective concurrently with the introductory political theory course.