There are many issues of ethics and openness in elite interviewing that I have learned how to deal with through the years.Thanks to Beth L. Leech, Rutgers University, for including me in this workshop. I learned a lot listening to my fellow interviewers and gleaning wisdom from their experiences. Thanks also to Jeffrey Berry and the Political Organizations and Parties Section of APSA for putting the workshop on. My work has focused on people who cause trouble: protesters, litigants, defendants, sidewalk counselors, rescuers, and abortion providers, to name a few. Of course, in dealing with people you are studying you must be honest and ethical. It is important to remember that their activism comes from something they deeply feel. Their activism is because of their beliefs, opinions, experiences, and sense of community. They do not exist as activists so that you can add more lines to your vita or finish your dissertation. You must leave them in the same position in which you found them. You must do no harm to them.

When terrorists struck on September 11, 2001, President Bush's responses would develop from information and decision-making channels established well before he entered the White House. Organizational work during the transition and people he brought into his administration shaped the structure he needed to respond. While transitions color the start of an administration and its goodwill, they are even more significant for how the administration operates.

For those who study and teach politics or history for a living, The West Wing unsheathes a double-edged sword. A great strength of the series is its ability to put a human face on engaging political discussions, demonstrating that politics can be accessible and enjoyable. However, this fictional White House also presents potential dangers. The purpose of The West Wing is to entertain rather than to educate, and the program deliberately plays the emotions of viewers through such techniques as background music and sophisticated camera work.

The analysis and discussion in this article are based on the preliminary results from a study of a redesigned American National Government course funded by a $200,000 grant from the Pew Program in Course Redesign. One of the central goals of this grant is to evaluate the effectiveness of the partial replacement of face-to-face classroom time with web-based interactive assignments. (We refer to the redesigned courses as “reduced seat-time” or RST.) The grant supported the development of pedagogically appropriate uses of the Internet for an introductory general education program (GEP) course, and it funded the evaluation of the impact of the redesigned course on student attitudes and learning outcomes.

Many of the early important empirical works on policymaking in Washington were built around elite interviews. We first learned about how Congress really operates from pioneers in elite interviewing such as Lewis Anthony Dexter (1969), Ralph Huitt (1969), and Donald Matthews (1960). No less revered is the scholarship of Richard Fenno (1978), John Kingdon (1995), and Robert Salisbury (1993), who have produced enduring and respected work from elite interviewing. Yet there are few other contemporary political scientists working on public policymaking who have built reputations for their methodological skills as interviewers. Elite interviewing is still widely used as the basis for collecting data, but most interviewing depends on a few trusted templates. Most commonly, elites in a particular institution are chosen at random and subjected to the same interview protocol composed of structured or semistructured questions. For example, state legislators are asked a series of questions about their attitudes on particular issues or institutional practices. Or policymakers involved in certain issues are selected and then quizzed about those matters. Some confident and skilled interviewers, like William Browne (1988) and Richard Hall (1996), combine different interview approaches in their work but they are the exceptions and not the rule.

In this article, we examine the impact of syllabi wording on how students assess a hypothetical instructor for an introductory political science course at a medium-sized state institution. Student participants were recruited from political science classes at this institution and randomly assigned to two groups. The groups were asked to review a sample syllabus from an introductory political science class and answer a number of questions regarding the instructor, as well as a few demographic questions. The syllabi were identical except for the wording of the requirements. For one group, the requirements were expressed in “rewarding” terms; for the other, the requirements were expressed in “punishing” terms.

The early months of a new presidency represent the most important period for establishing the tone and character of the White House's relationship with Congress. It is the time of closest scrutiny and the greatest vulnerability to making major mistakes. Taking the right steps early and avoiding errors can lay the foundation for a productive working relationship. Actions taken early create lasting impressions.

In my course, I have students read the Federalist and some of the antifederalist writings. And I require them to read as much of Tocqueville's Democracy in America as possible. But I begin with Shakespeare's Coriolanus. This choice of text is peculiar, and I here address myself to that peculiarity. My aim is to show that Coriolanus fits with these other works and to show, given the depth and breadth of its themes, that it might also profitably be read and studied in other political science courses. To put it in the briefest compass: the more prominent themes of Coriolanus—the nature of ancient politics, political expertise, regimes, and the interplay of honor and ambition—make it well suited to the exploration of politics in general.

The past decade has opened up unprecedented opportunities for scholars of post-communist countries. Throughout much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, scholars can now engage policymakers and other elites directly through interviews—probing their decision calculi and obtaining unpublished information and data. Yet there are gaps in the scholarly literature that would prepare researchers for interviewing highly placed individuals in these countries.

The symposium begins with an edited transcript of the roundtable, “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Political Science,” held during the 2001 APSA Annual Meeting. Next, Susan E. Clarke, University of Colorado, Boulder and Carnegie Scholar in 2000, synthesizes the objectives of STL—one of which specifies that STL be discipline-based—in her introduction to Jenny R. Kehl's data essay. In her essay, Jenny Kehl provides an initial exploration of what can be classified as STL work in political science. Finally, the annotated bibliography of STL literature prepared by Pat Hutchings, Chris Bjork, and Marcia Babb provides references for political science faculty new to this discussion.

Even before the 36-day fandango following the election, George W. Bush and his team focused both on the presidential transition and the initial days of the presidency. Bush and chief political adviser Karl Rove had read history, examining how previous presidents had handled their initial phases in transition and in office; early on, Rove cautioned reporters and analysts to watch not the first 100 days but the first 180 days for an early measure of the president's capacity and success.

This paper suggests one reason for the weak empirical results relative to civic engagement is that many service and volunteer programs have failed to sufficiently address development of fundamental civic skills such as expressing opinions and working collectively to achieve common interests as part of their design. As a result, while some studies of service learning participants show enhanced compassion and interest in social problems generally, those attitudinal changes do not consistently translate into behavioral changes (Eyler, Giles, and Braxton 1997; Perry and Katula 2001). This paper reviews recent empirical studies of community service, service learning, and volunteering, and then frames the consistently strong evidence that participation in clubs and organizations during adolescence leads to higher levels of civic engagement during adulthood within the political participation model developed by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995).

What evidence can be found of political science scholarship on teaching and learning? What questions are being asked and what methodologies are being used by political scientists engaged in this work? This article identifies and discusses six transformative trends in STL, specific to the discipline of political science. The most prominent trends are the dramatic increases in:

1. democratic and civic education

2. the use of technology in the classroom

3. curriculum development and innovation in teaching strategies.

A lifetime award can be a mixed blessing. As my daughter Ashley has observed, a lifetime award means you must really be getting old. I think she has decided it means entering the mode that my computer calls, “stand-by, energy saver.” Then again, last week at dinner my wife Beverley said, “I don't mean this to sound morbid, but I don't know a lot of what you've done to get this award. Don't you think it would be a good idea to write out your obituary?” As always, I am grateful for Beverley's advice, but I told her the first thing I had to do was write this talk for tonight. And the first thing I must do tonight is to thank all of you for coming to hear it. I know there are many other things you could have chosen to do after a hard day of conferencing. You are here voluntarily. That is a strange thing for me, since I am used to lecturing to people who are there only because the material is going to be on an exam. So I thank you and hope there will not be too many who are thinking after the lecture (as my departed co-author Aaron Wildavsky might have put it), “better he should have written the obituary.”

The circumstances of the 2000–2001 presidential transition will never be repeated, or at least I hope not for the sake of all concerned. Nevertheless, what we planned and what actually happened are highly relevant to future transition efforts. Most observers agree that the Bush-Cheney Administration got off to a strong start in large part because it made good use of the time available to it during the abbreviated transition period. Understanding this may help future presidents-elect plan their own transitions.

In a New Republic cover story published three years ago entitled “Irrational Exuberance: When Did Political Science Forget about Politics?” the journalist Jonathan Cohn (1999) lamented the disappearance of a certain kind of academic—typified by the Harvard professors James Q. Wilson, Samuel Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann—from contemporary political science departments. Wilson “was more than just a scholar,” Cohn wrote, “he was a public intellectual” whose “byline was as apt to appear on some policy-related article in the New York Times (or The New Republic) as it was on a peer-reviewed paper in the American Political Science Review.” Huntington, “arguably his generation's most influential student of international relations,” helped to start a popularly read foreign-policy journal. And Hoffmann, whose scholarship spanned “political theory, comparative government and international relations,” still found “time to write regularly for the New York Review of Books.”

Fatherhood is rapidly becoming the number one social policy issue in America. President Bill Clinton stated in 1995 that “the single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children's homes, because it contributes to so many other social problems.” In 1997, Congress created task forces to promote fatherhood, and in 1998 the governors' and mayors' conferences followed. President George W. Bush recently unveiled a $315 million dollar package for “responsible fatherhood.” Nonprofit organizations such as the National Fatherhood Initiative were formed in the mid-1990s. Fatherhood was seen as the most serious social problem by almost 80% of respondents to a 1996 Gallup poll (NFI 1996, 1).

We compiled this bibliography to acknowledge the work that CASTL builds on, and to locate this new effort in the longer trajectory of related developments. It has two sections. The first, a definitional one, includes significant statements about the idea of the scholarship of teaching and learning, drawn from various traditions that contribute to its evolving conception. The second section points readers to resources that may assist them in performing the scholarship of teaching and learning.

They called me Sisyphus at the White House. While bearing no resemblance to the Greek king of Corinth who rolled boulders up a mountain in Hades, I pushed nominees up Capitol Hill, helping them win Senate confirmation. And like Sisyphus, my work often came cascading back over me, in the form of delayed hearings, stalled nominees and requests for additional information from Congress.

After debating whether to go on the job market, I finally decided to make that move. After only four years of graduate school, I knew that I was hitting the market early. Still, members of my committee were confident that I would obtain my doctorate in time to assume an academic position the following year. After all, I had taken my preliminary exams, written and defended my prospectus, as well as completed the last of my coursework in one single semester. Did I really need the time off? My committee had faith in me. Why shouldn't I? Hence, I began by gathering my teaching evaluations, drafting my job letter, updating my curriculum vita, and searching for job announcements in hopes of securing an academic position before the end of my fifth year. In this article I describe that process. I offer practical and sound advice about developing a dossier that will get job candidates noticed, including suggestions for both the telephone and campus interviews.