Balkinization: Vote for Me (Maybe)

Vote for Me (Maybe)

Mark Graber

I have just been nominated to be on the Governing Council of the American Political Science Association. Below is my assessment of the some of the issues facing the discipline. As those who have looked at this blog today may note, I had some trouble getting this entry to post correctly. My apologies to Charles for deleting his comment in my attempt to improve matters.

I am honored to be nominated to the APSA Council, even if the nomination occurred thirty-five years too late to be included on my college applications. My main disciplinary interests are pedagogical. As a profession, we should be concerned with the increased roles of adjuncts in the political science classroom. Consider in the diminishing number of undergraduates who find two tenured or tenure track professors to write their letters of recommendation. If as is the case at many universities, adjuncts routinely teach Introduction to Comparative Politics and Civil Liberties for an economic pittance, then perhaps all universities and colleges should rely on adjuncts. I do not believe that as a profession we have confronted this issue or explained what tenured and tenure track professors contribute to the classroom.

I am also concerned about the increasing narrowness of thinking in the discipline and the academy at large. Once upon a time, people like me were scholars. Then we became political scientists. Afterwards, we were progressively reduced to being members of the law and courts subfield, part of the constitutionalism wing of the law and courts subfield, historical institutionalists in the constitutionalism wing of the law and courts subfield, etc. As a white, married Jewish male with three daughters (“children” would be too general), who is an historical institutionalist in the constitutional wing of the law and courts subfield, I am increasing expected to talk only with the other three members of the field who might meet that description. I would like to be a scholar again, an ambition I suspect animates many of us. To this end, I believe the APSA should continue ongoing efforts to have us broaden our intellectual focus, provide increased opportunities for interactions between political scientists in different fields, and promote extensive contacts with scholars in other buildings whose work ought to be of interest.

Posted 4:18 PM by Mark Graber [link]

Comments:

What does "605" stand for? Why was the other thread deleted?

# posted by

Charles : 4:40 PM

Congratulations. In my semi-retirement I have gotten back to ConLaw with this and other blogs as well as articles available via SSRN. I had ConLaw with Prof. Thomas Reed Powell back in the fall of 1952 and recall well his wit and wisdom especially as the presidential campaigns of Ike and Adlai progressed that semester. We knew back then of his involvement with FDR's New Deal and his one-on-one relationships with several Justices of the Supreme Court. He was not shy in criticizing them. His exchange of correspondence with Justice Douglas demonstrated not only his constitutional skills but also his wit. But I did not know of this correspondence back then. Several years ago I learned of and obtained Prof. Powell's "Vagaries and Varieties in Constitutional Interpretation" consisting of his James S. Carpentier Lectures in April and May of 1955 at Columbia University. I had finished law school the year before and in April of 1955 was drafted. I did not know of these lectures or of his demise a few months later for several years. Here's an excerpt from Paul Freund's December 1955 Introduction to the lectures in book form that may be of interest to you in your new role:

"It is altogether fitting that this undertaking should have been stimulated by the invitation from Columbia, for it was there, following his legal course at Harvard, that Professor Powell was exposed to the professors of political science, and they to him, in doctoral studies, and so became the enfant terrible of two disciplines. He remained to teach constitutional law at Columbia as Ruggles professor, serving for several years also as managing editor of the Political Science Quarterly, before going to the Harvard Law School in 1925. On the subject of his bi-professionalism he liked to quote the remark of his his friend Robert H. Jackson, speaking at a meeting of the American Political Science Association in 1937, when Professor Powell was president of the Association: 'Professor Powell stands high in the imagination of two professions. The lawyers imagine him to be a great political scientist, and political scientists imagine him to be a great lawyer.'"

In my recent studies of ConLaw, I have learned much from the writings of constitutional scholars with political science backgrounds. Here's to bi-professionalism. I look forward to more contributions from you.

# posted by

Shag from Brookline : 5:02 PM

This calls to mind Justice Souter's involvement with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, particularly his remarks as to history and judging.

# posted by

Joe : 7:23 PM

I neglected to cite Prof. Melvin I. Urofsky's "'Dear Teacher': The Correspondence of William O. Douglas and Thomas Reed Powell," Law and History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp 331-386.

"After practicing law in Vermont for a few years, [Powell] went to Columbia to study political science and earned his Ph.D in 1913. He accepted an offer to teach political science at Columbia at a time when good relations prevailed between that department and the law school."

Have the wounds been healed?

I wonder if a biography of Powell is still in the works.

# posted by

Shag from Brookline : 9:11 AM

Congratulations.
As a fellow academic, I agree that both the reliance on adjunct labor and hyper-specialization in our disciplines [mine is Philosophy] are pressing problems.
Regarding either, but especially the former, do you think your new role would provide genuinely effective means to change things?

# posted by

CTS : 1:55 PM