Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Balkinization

Legal Commentary

: Balkinization

Vote for Me (Maybe)

By Jack M. Balkin

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.

Full post as published by Balkinization on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).