Courses on international relations, U.S. foreign policy, Soviet foreign policy, and national security policy spend a great deal of time exploring the question of the Soviet or U.S. strategic threat. For all of its centrality to these courses, students often have, difficulty dealing with the issue in anything other than a gut feeling manner. In part, this is due to the highly technical and complex nature of the subject matter, but it is also due to the passive manner in which students are exposed to the subject. This essay presents one way of actively engaging students in the learning process, forcing them to formulate and defend their own view in the form of an individually or collectively produced intelligence estimate.

Understanding why U.S. (Soviet) policy makers see a Soviet (U.S.) threat requires an understanding of the process by which threats are established. The most formal and authoritative U.S. government statements on the dimensions of the Soviet strategic threat are found in national intelligence estimates (NIE's). Typically, the intelligence estimating process is broken down into six functional steps: 1) requirement setting, 2) collection, 3) processing, 4) analysis, 5) reporting, and 6) receipt and evaluation by the consumer (Ransom 1970). NIE's are only one kind of finished intelligence produced by the intelligence community. There is no fixed length or format for an intelligence estimate to follow. The Senator Mike Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers (1971) presents a number of estimates on Vietnam that can be used by students as models. Ransom (1970) presents a handy checklist of questions that students as consumers can use to evaluate estimates.

Many political science instructors often look for ways to increase the amount of writing in their courses without over-burdening either themselves or their students. The following practical suggestions, none particularly new or innovative, are nonetheless useful for including more writing in undergraduate political science courses. I have successfully used these assignments for several years and they are generally enthusiastically received by students.

The underlying theory in my approach is that students are better able to cope with writing when the assignments are briefer and varied, though more frequent. Furthermore, it may be more productive to focus on what students are saying rather than on how they say it (MacAllister, 1982; Sommers, 1982). Adopting such an approach is not to advocate grammatical anarchy. Rather, it recognizes that good, grammatically correct, effective writing must be taught to college students in a manner that is sensitive to their prior experiences and capabilities.

A journal is much like a diary (Fulwiler, 1987). In it, students record their thoughts, observations, and feelings about the political world or specific course material. Students may be asked to write about questions or problems they discover in their readings, current political events, or they may be asked to reflect on issues or questions raised in class. The instructor can pose a specific question, or students may be permitted to write about anything (political) they choose.

Before entering the teaching profession, I served as the administrator of an environmental agency, a lobbyist, and a policy advisor in the state of Pennsylvania. These experiences made me aware of the need for practical suggestions on how to improve bureaucratic effectiveness and measure organizational success. My research interests focus on developing quantitative measures of implementation efforts and applying these measures to administrative agencies. I believe this approach to studying administration will become increasingly important in the future because it concentrates on measuring productivity and can be adapted to the private as well as the public sector.

Orange—In a play that recalled one of the darker moments in U.S. history, an Army Colonel walked across a dimly lighted stage Monday, handed a pistol to a lieutenant and ordered the man to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.

“You can't be serious,” stammered the horrified lieutenant as his superior officer loudly repeated the order.

Upset and confused, the lieutenant let an awkward moment of silence pass, then he quietly told the colonel, a prosecutor: “I can't do it.”

So went the chilling climax of a morality play at Chapman College's Waltmar Theater on Monday as students from the freshmen seminar program moved the study of war and peace out of the classroom onto the stage….

This is how a local paper reported a play my class wrote and performed about the court martial of Lt. William Calley. As you may recall, William Calley was the Army Lieutenant who, during the height of the Vietnam war, led his platoon into MyLai 4, a small village in South Vietnam. Expecting to find heavily fortified North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, Calley and his men instead encountered several hundred South Vietnamese civilians, most of them old men, women, children, and babies. The civilians were herded into groups. They were then shot. Calley was later court martialled in one of the most controversial trials in our nation's history.

One of the more significant challenges confronting instructors of international politics survey courses is the coverage of current events issues. Most students have limited knowledge of the unfolding events, leaders and institutions shaping the present global environment. Perhaps even more disturbing is their general disinclination to seek out information which might enhance their overall awareness.

The task of devising appropriate infusion strategies is not a simple one. On the one hand, one must resist the temptation of devoting too much classroom time to a discussion of current issues. The range of historical material and theoretical concepts which must be addressed in such courses is simply too great to allow inordinate concentration on breaking news items. At the same time, however, a failure to consider these issues might prevent students from appreciating the relevance and significance of some of the more abstract ideas and past events incorporated into the core curriculum.

To be sure, a number of approaches may be utilized to focus attention on contemporary matters. The use of up-to-date examples when presenting material pertaining to some of the broader themes covered in the course is particularly helpful. A willingness to deviate from the syllabus periodically to describe and assess the implications of emerging crises or especially noteworthy events might also prove useful. Moreover, the selection of a supplementary text oriented toward current issues could serve to organize discussions in a more systematic and sustained fashion.

The theories of international political economy certainly lend themselves to classroom teaching. And courses on Asian politics and society have long been offered. Typically, however, international political economy and Asian studies are not formally mixed in a single course offering.

My task was to devise a restricted-enrollment, upper-level seminar which encompassed political economy theory applied specifically to Asia. The department offered no courses in political economy, and the only offerings on Asia were two courses in Chinese politics I had taught the prior semester.

Despite the lack of supporting coursework, the topic proved to provide an interesting conceptual focus, and students became quite engaged with the subject matter. Further, it appears that an explicit geographical focus may help, rather than hinder, the teaching of political economy concepts. The body of theory in international political economy is rather abstract in the absence of application to concrete situations. The Asian areas examined (Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea) provided stimulating grist for such concepts as interdependence, the connections between “high politics” (security policy) and “low politics” (economic relations), and the dependency-vs.-developmental models of economic growth.

Sniping at the desire and ability of undergraduates is common sport at most institutions of higher learning. Get a few professors together, and the talk soon turns to the fluffy heads of our youthful charges. Often we try to outdo each other's dumb student stories. Perhaps less common are special efforts to make things better. It is, after all, easy to complain about the product the high schools send us, but far more difficult to improve it.

This is particularly true of student writing ability. Grading papers and essay exams takes time which few of us have. Besides, it can be awfully depressing to confront the mangled sentences of all too many students. It's better, or at least more comforting, to pretend the problem isn't there. At large institutions with credible graduate programs, teaching assistants often allow professors to remain blissfully ignorant of bad undergraduate writing. At smaller, less prestigious schools, there is an analogous temptation to live and die by the multiple guess/short answer format. The students certainly won't complain, and colleagues and administrators are usually busy with problems of their own.

The Advanced Placement (AP) program has been growing rapidly in the last decade. In 1987, a new AP program was begun in American Government and Politics and its impact is beginning to be felt in high schools and colleges across the country. However, there has been no objective assessment of the program communicated and discussed throughout the political science community.

To begin—what is the AP program? The Advanced Placement program offers the equivalent of introductory college courses which may lead to college credit upon satisfactory performance on an AP exam. The AP program is administered by the College Board which contracts with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to operate the AP examinations. “About 31 percent of American secondary schools currently participate, serving approximately 17 percent of their college-bound students in this way. This use, by both schools and students, has been growing steadily in recent years” (Guide to the AP Program, 1986, p. 4).

The College Board highlights the positive aspects of the AP program for learning, education, and all concerned—students, teachers, and administrators. AP programs are considered part of society's effort to revitalize the educational system in the United States, especially in high schools and higher education. The quality and implications of the AP program are all positively portrayed. Yet, the implementation of the AP program has not been closely examined and publicly discussed.

Decision making under conditions of crisis is an integral part of international relations. Yet in most introductory IR texts, crisis decision making consists of Graham Allison's models, the Cuban missile crisis, and updated examples, discussed in five pages or less. In supplementing such texts, instructors of international politics at the introductory level may find themselves skirting Scylla and Charybdis. In the cliffs lies the extensive simulation exercise requiring additional readings and valuable class time to establish the game. Ahead, lies the whirlpool of detailed historical case studies all vying for attention as the necessary cases for relating to the student experience.

Over the past few semesters, I have sought to resolve this dilemma with a simple simulation exercise that integrates current events with the basics of decision making under crisis. The demands on class time are minimal. The simulation adds anywhere from 30 minutes to one hour to the regular classroom time spent on discussing foreign policy decision making. Instructor preparation merely requires a scan of reference materials and some creativity. The results, in terms of student interaction, awakening the shy student, and promoting learning instead of regurgitation of simple facts have all been extremely positive for classes as small as 25 students and as large as 65 students.

Biopolitics is the study of the relationship between our biological makeup and our political behavior. While this line of inquiry can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, the contemporary surge of interest dates from the middle 1960s. Among the major contributing factors then were—take your pick—James C. Davies' Human Nature in Politics (1963), a 1964 essay by Lynton K. Caldwell, and a panel chaired by Albert Somit at the Southern Political Science Association (1967). Over the past two decades, there has been a dramatic growth of interest in “biopolitics,” as the area came to be known, to the point where some 900 works have now appeared (Peterson and Somit, in press).

A variety of indicators testify to the acceptance that biopolitics has since achieved within the discipline: formal recognition by the International Political Science Association (1972); biopolitical articles in our leading professional journals; books bearing the imprint of leading publishers; the regular inclusion of panels on biology and politics at regional, national, and international conferences; support from major foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Lilly Foundations; awards by NSF and NIA for biopolitical research; the establishment of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (1981) and its journal, Politics and the Life Sciences (1982) and, most recently, recognition by the American Political Science Association of biopolitics as an “organized subfield.”

The purpose of this brief review is to update the article entitled “Microcomputers and Public Policy Analysis” which appeared in the summer/fall 1985 special symposium issue of the Public Productivity Review on “Microcomputer Applications to Productivity Improvements.”

A lot happened in the three years since early 1985 (when the original article was drafted) and early 1988 (when the current updating review was drafted). The main idea that the 1985 article reported was the development of pioneering software. The logical next step was the inclusion of such software as part of the textbook literature of public administration, business administration, policy analysis, political science, and related fields.

This updating review thus mainly reports the availability of recent textbooks which provide a microcomputer interface regarding the five fields which were emphasized in the original article. Those five software fields most relevant to public productivity are multi-criteria decision making, management science/operations research, statistical analysis, information systems, and computer-assisted instruction.

Despite enormous changes in the global circumstances that impinge on American government and despite a growing recognition that the undergraduate curriculum must be internationalized, relatively little has been done to incorporate a global perspective in the one place where political science teachers can reach very large numbers of undergraduate students—the introductory American national government course. The internationalization of the American economy, the developing interdependence between the United States and other countries, the growth of local-international links—these phenomena have scarcely touched the bedrock political science course.

Textbooks for the introductory American government course reflect this neglect of the international dimension. They typically allude to the international factor briefly in the context of the president's powers in conducting foreign relations and discuss it more extensively in a chapter on “Foreign Policy” or “Foreign and Defense Policy.” As a practical matter, however, this chapter is usually near or at the very end of the book, which many teachers and students probably never reach. A perusal of various current textbooks confirms the conclusion made by a 1981 survey of 50 leading textbooks that very few of the books recognize the interdependence phenomenon or the importance of global circumstances. Apart from textbooks, learning packages designed for the American government course on such topics are rare.

To expose students to the international dimension of American national government, the writer conducted a special project in two sections of his American national government course during the spring 1988 semester. The following instruction sheet was given to the students.

What's worth teaching and how to teach it are two questions we constantly pose to ourselves. As we ponder these, we inevitably run into two other questions: how to engage those who are less than fully motivated and how to involve students in learning about a world which is so incredibly complex and where virtually all issues are so globally interdependent. Because of the conditions of complexity and interdependence, we label ourselves global educators and what we do as global education.

George initially became concerned with these problems as a middle school teacher in Colorado. Later, as director of the Center for Teaching International Relations (CTIR) at the University of Denver, he was involved in developing strategies for student centered, interactive learning.

Steve has taught political science at a state university in California. Several years ago, he became convinced that the input, lecture based mode of learning he employed was terribly inadequate. So the search began for alternatives which eventually led to meeting George and to our subsequent collaboration.

The purpose of this article is to share some of the activities we have found to be successful in addressing our concerns. These activities have been used in a variety of settings: residential programs for approximately 35 high school students from all over the country, held at Las Palomas de Taos; the Tennessee Governor's School for International Studies, which is a four week, summer program for 150 high school students; workshops for elementary and secondary educators; and a variety of college courses including Global Politics American Government, and Public Policy Making.