Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students…The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.

A person looking back on his college course in American Government in the Forties or Fifties probably recalls its encyclopedic text full of details of the structures of government and the mechanics of politics with a second dose of the same — interspersed with normative exhortations — from his professor's lectures. The prof probably got away with verbal murder in promoting his own interpretations and conclusions as if they were equal to facts from the text. Probably most profs took their title quite literally; that is, they professed or declared their views, often with a passionate conviction. In those days, a prof could be reasonably sure he would not be contradicted by the students who were generally well-mannered, neat, clean, and docile. Today, the majority are well-mannered, neat, clean, and hypercritical.

Undergraduate students in most disciplines hope to gain some practical experience in applying the principles they learn in the classroom. It is sometimes difficult to provide students with such opportunities for practical experience, but courses in political communication offer abundant possibilities of this type.

The political communication course described here is entitled “Mass Media and Politics,” and it seeks to blend both theory and research in political campaigns with mass media skills. Although this particular course is taught in the Radio-Television-Film sequence at the University of Oklahoma, it could easily be adapted to political science courses at any university. In addition to providing an integration of political theory and practical experience in politics, the course has several subsidiary goals: (1) to give students a broader understanding of the modern electoral process, (2) to make students better consumers of political information, (3) to make students more aware of the problems and responsibilities involved in direct participation in the electoral process, and (4) to give students an opportunity to apply political organizational and communication skills in a realistic setting.

Several political Scientists, philosophers, English and speech specialists, legal specialists, and even one geographer recently gathered to discuss and consider how to teach news and new-making at the third annual “Classroom and the Newsroom” seminar sponsored by the Modern Media Institute and The Poynter Center, Indiana University with Ford Foundation funding. It was an excellent opportunity for us to discuss news theory, criticism, and pedagogy among ourselves and with prominent broadcast/print journalists and media scholars.Various local media organizations provided special tours or meetings, and most interesting of all, access as observers to working sessions.

Apart from discussion of news theory and classroom technique an extenseive bibliography for books, films and video tapes about news and news media was available to seminar participants. An abbreviated list indicating those materials likely to be most directly useful to political scientists follows.

An instructor needs to resolve several issues in teaching a course on policy evaluation. Those issues include matters of course content such as what books to use, what evaluation methods to present, the role of statistical analysis in determining relations, the role of legal analysis in determining values, the role of political and administrative feasibility, and how to combine policy analysis and program evaluation.

Back in 1958, the economist Roland McKean, working for the Rand Corporation, wrote a book entitled Efficiency in Government Through Systems Analysis: With Emphasis on Water Resources Development (Wiley, 1958). That may have been the first book that attempted to provide a survey, of methods involved in systematically evaluating alternative public policies, although only the first 100 pages are general in nature.

New Jersey is a fascinating state, and New Jersey politics is a fascinating business. The state is Newark, Camden, Jersey City, and aging urban areas typical of the northeast. New Jersey is also the Pinelands preserve, a fragile environmental area the size of Rhode Island protected by the state from indiscriminate development. New Jersey is the expansive beaches of the Jersey shore, the rugged beauty of the Delaware River Water Gap, and comfortable patrician estates whose owners continue to devote weekends to fox-hunting. New Jersey is valuable farmlands which still make New Jersey the Garden State, and it is the Hackensack Meadowlands, the Sports Complex and Atlantic City as well. New Jersey is a diverse state, and its political life reflects both that diversity as well as the state's changing political traditions and developing political institutions.

In 1981, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Charter granted to William Penn by King Charles II permitting the former to assume proprietary rights over the territory that was to encompass the Province of “Penn's Woods.” If the general euphoria and “hoopla” which is likely to characterize this celebration does not deprive everyone of energy for subsequent commemoration, citizen and scholar alike will be reminded that in 1682, the year after Penn's arrival in the territory, a governmental system began functioning in the Province and, coincidentally depositing along the way, a record of its activities and outputs. The process continued through four Basic Charters or Frames of Government and beyond 1776 when a Provincial Convention composed the first constitution for the state that had emerged simultaneously with the start of the American War for Independence. It is a process which obviously is still going on and which accounts for large quantities of documentation and records regularly being added to the stockpile started by the Provincial Council and other governmental institutions in 1682.

In Southern Politics written during the 1940s, V.O. Key, Jr. said that the lines of political division in ten of the southern states of the old Confederacy were drawn around the issue of race. Texas was the exception. “The Lone Star State,” Key wrote, “is concerned about money and how to make it, about oil and sulfur and gas, about cattle and dust storms and irrigation, about cotton and banking and Mexicans.” Unveiling his crystal ball, Key prophetized what this meant for the future: “in Texas the vague outlines of a politics are emerging in which irrelevancies are pushed into the background and people divide broadly along liberal and conservative lines. A modified class politics seems to be evolving, not primarily because of the upthrust of the masses that compels men of substance to unite in self-defense, but because of the personal insecurity of men suddenly made rich who are fearful lest they lose their wealth.” Key also had a word to say about an emerging two-party system in Texas.