George J. Graham died on November 30, 2006, after a courageous battle with cancer. He was 68 years old. George is survived by his daughter, Carmen Michelle Graham Christgau of San Francisco and a sister, Joyce Graham Johnson of Sarasota.

Assessment is increasingly present on many campuses, and as state legislatures, parents, employers, and accreditation agencies continue to ask for documentation of what students learn at college, it is not likely to go away in the near future. How, then, do we know what our students learn? How can we demonstrate that they do learn, and what they learn?

A Look at the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs

Thomas E. Flores is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Michigan and is currently working on his dissertation, entitled The Market and the State: The Politics of Property Rights and Economic Exclusion. This research examines how the design of political institutions underlies cross-national differences in the protection of legal rights to property.

This list celebrates the generous contributions of our members in giving to one or more of the following programs from 1996 through 2006: APSA awards, programs, the Congressional Fellowship Program, and the Centennial Campaign. APSA thanks these donors for ensuring that the benefits of membership and the influence of the profession will extend far into the future. APSA will update and print this list annually in the January issue of PS.

Wendy Ginsberg is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently at the Centennial Center working on her dissertation, entitled “Roll Out the Barrel: A History of Earmarks as More Than Pork, But Why There's Still Beef.” The project uses qualitative and quantitative research to trace earmarking's drastic growth and its impact on the arena of juvenile justice. Specifically, the project links a loss of bureaucratic autonomy and power to the explosion of earmarks in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s.

A Look at the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs.

People like Glendon Schubert never die. Glen was an individualist who lived by his work, and I'm one of his products. I was not a born scholar. I had no idea of what “the life of the mind” was all about. College was for me merely four more years of high school. Academic achievement was just competition by other means, and grades were nothing but a way of keeping score.

Cynthia Burack is associate professor of women's studies at Ohio State and is currently a visiting scholar at the Centennial Center. Her new book is Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right, forthcoming from SUNY Press in 2008. She is co-editor (with Jyl J. Josephson) of a new SUNY book series: Queer Politics and Cultures.

Eugene R. Wittkopf, professor emeritus of political science at Louisiana State University, passed away suddenly on September 18, 2006. He was 63 years old. Gene was a native of Algona, Iowa and received his B.A. from Valparaiso University in 1965, and his M.P.A and his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 1966 and 1971, respectively. He started his academic career at the University of Florida, where he taught for 17 years. In 1987, he moved to Louisiana State University, where he taught until his retirement in 2005. Gene Wittkopf was an extraordinary scholar and teacher and a wonderful colleague and mentor.

To deny someone the right to water is tantamount to denying them the right to life, and to set a price on water is to set a price on life. It comes as no surprise then to find a good amount of anxiety and contention over who gets to set the price of water and how much they charge. And over the past two decades, throughout both the developed and developing world, setting the price of water has fallen increasingly to private companies at the same time as various demographic changes have increased water scarcity. Thus we hear water described simultaneously in terms of both a humanitarian crisis of global proportions—one standard though very rough figure is that more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water (Davis 2005, 146; Black 2004, 28)—and as the “oil of the 21st century” (Wessel 2005).

Do “vote-buying” activities of locally elected legislators in developing countries crowd out the representation of mass policy preferences? If a legislator can buy a citizen's vote with a material benefit, does he really have an incentive to represent the interests of his constituents in legislative decision-making? Imagine the following setting: A slum neighborhood near Bangalore city center in Southern India. A group of women in worn-out sari-s, domestic servants who clean houses for a living, sit chatting outside their one-room concrete shacks with tin roofs. They have no bathing or cooking facilities in their shacks. They share the same water tap with hundreds of neighbors. Their toilet is the nearby railroad track. A well-dressed man exits a car and approaches.

The 103rd Annual Meeting will take place in Chicago, August 30th–September 2nd, 2007. Over 700 panels will be organized in 47 thematic divisions focusing on the meeting's theme, “Political Science and Beyond.” In addition to division panels, program Chairs Elisabeth R. Gerber (University of Michigan) and David Lake (University of California, San Diego) will offer panels broadening the scope of the study of political science, including “Funding Interdisciplinary Research,” moderated by APSA President Robert Axelrod.

APSA international membership and upcoming international events.

Mentor and leader, Paula D. McClain has significantly contributed to the study of multi-racial and multi-ethnic populations in the political science discipline through her service in multiple organizations and dedication to the growth of future members of the profession.

Herbert McClosky, professor of political science emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died on March 13, 2006, of pneumonia and complications of Parkinson's disease in Oakland, California. He was 89 years old.

The number of students pursuing degrees and graduating in political science is growing again after the discipline experienced falling or stagnant enrollment numbers at all academic levels in the 1990s, according to data in the latest Digest of Education Statistics (2005). After experiencing a growth in enrollments and degrees awarded in the 1980s, political science departments reported falling enrollments in the early 1990s and stagnant numbers of degrees awarded in the later half of the 1990s (Mann 1996; 2002). Political science departments began to report increasing enrollments starting in 1998–1999 (Mann 2002), reflected in the increase in graduation numbers beginning in 2002.

Here is a quick look at some of the short courses planned for Wednesday, August 29th at the 2007 Annual Meeting in Chicago. A complete list of courses will be printed in the July issue of PS. For further details, and for information regarding pre-registration, transportation, and housing, visit www.apsanet.org. The online preliminary program, which will be released in May, provides information on panel schedules and the latest updates on the meeting.

Ten outstanding students from the 2007 Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI) presented their research at the American Politics II and Teaching and Learning Poster Session at this year's Annual Meeting in Chicago. This year's class of RBSI students and the research they presented at this year's meeting:

Saluting APSA's 50-year members.