Pre-registration for seminars is not permitted. Instructor permission is required before registration. Please see here for detailed seminar registration guidelines.

Section 001: Executive Leadership
Professor Martha Zebrowski
This seminar is an examination of the nature and practice of executive leadership in public, private (i.e., for profit, business), and non-profit institutions in the US. The course does not begin with a theory of executive leadership. Rather, the goal of the course is to develop such a theory, a theory that takes into account the similarities and differences among the very different institutional sectors in American life, and a theory that distinguishes authentic leadership from three related matters, the effective exercise of power, effective management, and celebrity. The first half of the term is devoted to a discussion of common, required readings that consider the nature and practice of executive leadership in public, private, and non-profit institutions, and to a discussion of problems associated with research and with organizing and analyzing data on leadership. During the first half of the term, each student prepares a research prospectus (approximately 12 pages) for a major research paper (approximately 35 pages) on a particular public, private, or non-profit executive leader or problem in executive leadership. The second half of the term is devoted to students' oral presentations, in class, of their own research and to class discussions of their research (each presentation approximately 50 minutes). The seminar research paper is due at the beginning of exam week; there is also a final quiz during exam week.

Section 002: First Amendment
Professor Robert Amdur

Section 003: Issues that Divide America
Professor Irwin Gertzog
Seminar focuses on four political issues so contentious that they have produced enduring cultural, socio-economic, and political divisions throughout the United States. The four issues are slavery and efforts to end it; the use of alcoholic beverages and the struggle to curtail it; abortion and attempts to prohibit it; and lesbian and gay rights and the battle to impede them.

Section 004: Majority Rule & Minority Rights
Professor Raymond Smith
This course will examine one of the central challenges to both the theory and the practice of democracy: the reconciliation of majority rule with minority rights in a way that neither sacrifices popular sovereignty nor oppresses small or disfavored groups. This course will draw upon both "classics" of political science regarding the role of minority groups in American politics as well as upon contemporary scholarship focused largely on ethnoracial and other minority groups.

Section 005: Elections & Representation
Professor Robert Erikson

Section 006: 20th Century African American Political Thought
Professor Fredrick Harris
This course surveys the political and social thought of African-Americans during the 20th century.  It will consider the social, political, and historical context of political ideologies in black communities, from the standpoint of early thinkers and activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett to post-World War II thinkers such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, bell hooks, Cornel West, among others.  The course will critically assess such perspectives as liberalism, nationalism, feminism, conservatism, and Marxism as considered by important black thinkers of the era.  The course approaches the study of African Americans political and social thought from theoretical and historical perspectives.

Section 007: Political Psychology
Professor Kathleen Knight
The seminar is designed to examine some major psychological concept useful in politics. These include: rationality & emotion, socialization, ideology, persuasion, tolerance, authoritarianism, racism & terrorism.

Section 008: Community Organizing & American Politics
Professor Dorian Warren

Spring - 2010