If the presentations and discussions of the Program Assessment track are any indication, assessment in political science is slowly moving forward. Several presentations provided excellent ideas for instructors and departments seeking to get started and move beyond to take assessment seriously. Presenters and discussants were a mix of veterans and newcomers to assessment from a range of institutions, but the group largely shared an understanding that assessment done well is really a conversation about teaching. Teaching political science is something that we all care about.

In memoriam.

Despite comprising a large and increasing proportion of the United States population—about 14.7%, according to March 2006 Census Bureau estimates—Latinos continue to be severely underrepresented in political science, and today comprise less than 2% of the academy (Census Bureau 2006; Michelson 2007). Increased recent attention to the issues of recruitment and retention of Latino political scientists by professional associations such as the American Political Science Association (APSA) notwithstanding, the number of Latino scholars in the field continues to lag behind that of other racial and ethnic groups. But just where in the pipeline does the problem exist? Are not enough Latinos being recruited for graduate study? Are Latinos being successfully recruited but then not finishing their degrees? Or is the leak occurring later in scholars' careers, perhaps between graduation and tenure? Avalos (1991) noted that Latinas were particularly underrepresented, with few women entering or completing Ph.D. programs. More than 16 years later, does a gender gap persist among Latino political scientists? Do leaks in the pipeline differ for Latinos and Latinas? These are the questions that drive this research.An earlier version of this research was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We would like to thank Maria Chavez, Patricia Jamarillo, Lisa García Bedolla, Celeste Montoya, Luis Fraga, Anna Sampaio, and Juan Carlos Huerta for their helpful comments, as well as Michael Jackson and Lilly Montalvo for their research assistance. We are also indebted to all of the respondents for their cooperation. All errors, of course, remain our own.

The Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession wants to encourage more members of the APSA to participate in the mentoring program. Mentoring is not just for junior scholars; mentoring goes on one's entire professional career. Senior scholars can help in immeasurable ways as a mentee moves through different stages in the profession, becoming a senior scholar, moving through the administrative ranks—department chair, dean, even president of the university of college—or pursues a career outside academia. Mentoring can be part of a formal program and narrowly focused on how to get published, do research, and improve teaching, but it also can be ad hoc, informal, and can include how one assumes a greater role in professional societies or politics in general. It also addresses integration of life choices, touching on the issues that are important to us as people as well as scholars, and how our roles as human beings relate to our identities as scholars and teachers. So the concept of mentoring is broad.

The 104th Annual Meeting returns to Boston, Massachusetts, August 28–31. Program Chairs Jane Junn of Rutgers University and Edmond Keller of the University of California, Los Angeles, will present 47 thematic divisions that explore the meeting's theme, “Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities.” Organized around these divisions, over 700 panels and roundtable presentations will cover every major field of political science, area studies, and international relations.

How well do we prepare our graduate students for the diverse careers they pursue in teaching, research, and outside of academia? This is the second time Graduate Education has been a track in the TLC, and this year we have also incorporated topics related to professional development. Despite the diversity of our presentations, we arrived at a unifying theme for our track: we must prepare graduate students for the multiple arenas they will enter into after graduation. We discussed at length how most of our graduate students seek something other than the traditional, research-oriented model of graduate education that we experienced. They seek a graduate experience that is civically engaged, prepares them for teaching in addition to research, and is perhaps more connected to disciplines outside of political science. Either we provide graduate students a framework of knowledge consistent with these demands or they will be left to develop these skills through trial and error alone. In support of this goal, we urge systemic change to our professional institutions that will value and reward a more holistic approach to graduate education and professional development. Elements of such change can be found in the variety of presentations contained in our track.

This paper represents a broad survey study of assessment models used in political science programs at 50 universities and colleges across the country. We examine the most frequently used assessment activities and then investigate whether differences between institutions is a function of institutional characteristics. What are the techniques currently employed by departments across the country?

Accelerating technological change is one of the defining characteristics of this era. And the intersection of information, technology, and politics is a constantly changing arena. Technological change can provide the subject for political debate, such as in the controversy over electronic voting (see Tokaji 2005); affect the means by which politics is conducted, such as in the use of information technologies to provide government services and collect regulatory feedback (see Fountain 2001; West 2005; and Mayer-Schonberger and Lazer 2007); or challenge our understanding of political theories and concepts, such as the meaning of privacy and of the public sphere (see Etzioni 2000 and Sunstein 2007 on the meaning of privacy and the compartmentalization of “public” speech, Bimber 2003 on the effect of information technologies on democracy, and Benkler 2006 on the reinterpretation of the public sphere). Each of these perspectives is visible locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

In 1973, then-Chief Justice Warren Burger, at the suggestion of his administrative assistant, Mark Cannon, created the Judicial Fellows Program to allow scholars to engage in “challenging work for a year” at the Supreme Court and other federal judicial agencies (Tobias 1996, 510). The program is designed to attract, in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's words, “bright-minded, caring, uncommonly fine humans, people who remain … in permanent fellowship with the Federal Judiciary” after their year (Ginsburg 1998, 3).

The participants in the Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Inequality track represented a great deal of diversity themselves and included faculty and students from a rich variety of research institutions, private liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. While participants engaged issues and strategies in each of the three substantive areas—diversity, inclusiveness, and inequality in education (DIIE)—the bulk of our conversations focused on diversity and inequality. Topics included curriculum and course content issues, negotiating institutional support for DIIE, challenges of student recruitment and retention, and negotiating power relationships and identities among different kinds of student populations both within and outside of the classroom. This summary reviews four sets of questions that the group addressed and that point to critical areas rich for future research and reflection. In brief these are: (1) How can we simultaneously promote learning about difference and learning about ourselves? (2) How can faculty develop a range of strategic pedagogies and classroom environments in order to avoid some of the challenges inherent in teaching about DIIE? (3) How can we move beyond narrow understandings of diversity that limit the concept solely to a category of identity, neglecting the ways in which diversity and inequality are categories of analysis, processes, and indicative of power relations? (4) What steps are necessary to more fully integrate DIIE across the political science curriculum?

APSA will host short courses on Wednesday, August 27, prior to the 2008 Annual Meeting in Boston, as an added opportunity for attendees to enhance their knowledge and teaching and research skills. This is a preliminary list of proposed short courses; a complete list will be printed in the July issue of PS. For the most updated information on short courses, please consult the Online Program at www.apsanet.org/2008. For further details or to find out how your group or organization can host a short course, visit www.apsanet.org/content_4650.cfm

This is the 36th year that I have been monitoring participation by women at our Annual Meeting. These PS reports have documented the ascent of women in our profession. 2007 was one of the best years for female participation at our meetings.

A diverse group of 25 faculty and graduate students participated in the 2008 Teaching Research Methods (TRM) track. Participants represented a range of institutions—public and private, urban and rural, domestic and international, large research universities and teaching colleges. Presentations provided evidence of the heterogeneity in methods instruction and of pedagogical innovations in course design and delivery. The discussion in this year's meeting echoed and built upon prior meetings, reflecting the workshop format and participation of several track members in successive TLC meetings. The recommendations formulated by the track will be discussed following a brief summary of the presentations and discussion.

The last time members of the graduating class of 2008 lived in a nation at peace, they were in the first month of their high school sophomore year. Because they are not subject to conscription; because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought by a professional army that has separated itself in many respects from civil society; and because the government has asked little of society in the way of sacrifice for the wars, today's undergraduates have little direct experience of conflict, the armed forces, or those people most affected by it. What do we teach students about the war? Political scientists are often reluctant to teach current events—aside from the fact emotions can run high and classroom discussion can be hijacked by unproductive ideological debates, in real-time we lack the kinds of patterned data that lend themselves to systematic analysis and prediction.

APSA is pleased to recognize political science faculty members who received campus-wide and department awards for teaching excellence during the 2007–2008 academic year. APSA, Rowman Littlefield Publishers, and Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, recognize award-winning faculty members each year at the Reception Honoring Teaching at the APSA Annual Meeting. Recognized faculty members receive a certificate noting their accomplishment and their awards are announced in PS and on the APSA web site.

Here's a preview of some of the articles that will be published in the July 2008 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics.

News and notes.

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) often have important effects on promotion, tenure, and merit raises, even if only through the negative effects that poor evaluations can have on these decisions (Langbein 1994). SETs can be affected by student characteristics (class, GPA, major, expected grade, gender), class characteristics (size, required, discipline, quantitative), and professor characteristics (age, gender, race, ethnicity, personality traits). Both experiments and analysis of end-of-semester SETs in a range of disciplines and institutional settings have been used to examine the effects of each of these characteristics and the interactions among them to understand the factors that produce higher SETs.

In November 2006, undergraduate students in a Model United Nations Club (MUN) conducted an exercise intended to simulate a series of crises in the Middle East. In the exercise, a total of 66 undergraduate students role-played cabinet-level officials in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and were required to make foreign policy decisions based on knowledge acquired in the classroom and on information delivered as the exercise unfolded.

The Simulations and Role Play I track examined a broad range of approaches to classroom simulations and role-playing exercises. The presentations covered designs that operate online and face-to-face, model decision making at local and international levels, and run from only a few minutes to an entire semester. Participants and discussants identified several elements that are common to successful simulations. These elements included establishing clear objectives for a simulation prior to its use in a course, designing simulations to actively engage students in the learning process, and using simulations to develop professional skills, empathy, and intercultural understanding among students. The track members agreed that simulations need not be time intensive in preparation or presentation, but can be flexible and made to fit unique situations. Finally, while simulations may not increase student perceptions of the quality of instruction, the simulations do seem to increase student empathy and student decision-making skills, which are worthwhile achievements.