- Comparative politics
- International relations
- Political theory
- American politics
What do these terms have in common?
See the problem? Yeah, so do we!
As students of my “American Political Campaigns” class learn over and over during the semester, language matters, and language is more meaningful when it maps onto people’s values and experiences.
So, that’s what we’re doing.
Starting in 2017, we’ve begun a radical shift in how we communicate the value of the government major to current and prospective students. Our approach is two-pronged. The first prong is our new “pathways through the major”. We’ve created and published pathways through the major that both reflect the interests that students come to Cornell with — the language they actually use to talk about these topics — and that pique the interest of employers. Interested in how public policy gets made in the United States? Great! How about the relationship between business and government? We’re on it! Same goes for war and diplomacy, and political philosophy. We’ll be expanding these as time goes on, but so far feedback has been great.
Our second prong is about how we talk about our classes. Class titles are all well and good. They sound great in faculty meetings and look spiffy on syllabi. But to our students they often obscure the cool and innovative opportunities that students have when they take these classes. Or they bury them on page 4. Now we’re bringing them front and center. For instance, I want people who are interested in my “American political campaigns” course to know that they’ll learn about campaigns, but also that they’ll have the opportunity to actually design a campaign, and to do it in a way that is grounded in empirical evidence about how and when campaigns actually work. As another example, we want students in Suzanne Mettler’s Introduction to American Politics class to know that they’ll learn all about the various institutions of the American government, but also that they’ll likely have the opportunity to meet either a current or former congressperson. And we want prospective students in Alex Livingston's course "Civil Disobedience” to know that they’ll learn the theory and history of civil disobedience as well as also receive civil disobedience training. We’re implementing these changes during the enrollment periods — staring in 2017 we started advertising courses for the following semester that try to capture excitement and interest about unique opportunities that students can only get with the classes we offer.
What impact does all of this have? Cara Sierks ‘18, senior major, sums it up nicely: "When I came to Cornell as a freshman I had no idea what my path through the major would look like, let alone what I hoped to do after graduation. While seeing the four designated subfields helped me academically conceptualize the major, practically I wasn’t sure what use it would be to say I was specializing in American Politics. When I was searching for internships, no research positions or political organizations were using that academic terms. I didn’t see how “American Politics” translated into the day-to-day life and career for a major who was researching social welfare policy. After I realized I wanted to focus on public policy, I was not sure how that interest fit into the broader discipline, because I didn't have the words to describe what I was doing. Seeing the path through the major sheets helped me see that the classes I was taking did fit a broader pattern, and helped me convey what I wanted to do after graduation during my interviews."
