In a speech before the American Bar Association in July of 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese III tersely proclaimed: “Far too many of the (Supreme Court's) opinions, on the whole, have been more policy choices than articulations of longterm constitutional principle.” Speaking in reaction to the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down an Alabama law for a “moment of silence” in public schools, Meese argued that the Court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as “demanding a strict neutrality between religion and irreligion would have struck the founding generation as bizarre.” The Court, he concluded, should follow a constitutional “jurisprudence of original intention.” (Meese: 1985)

Michael Genovese's summer 1985 article, “Politics and Science Fiction Films,” is an excellent introduction to the broader topic of futurism and forecasting as methods of public policy analysis. These methods can be an interesting and challenging aspect of a graduate public administration course in public policy analysis.

“The future does not simply happen. We create it. We can choose our future.” Accepting this assumption, I have integrated futures studies and forecasting into the Troy State University European Region graduate public administration course, “Policy and Decision Making in Government.” The course is a required component of a master's degree program offered under contract with the U.S. Air Force European Command. I have taught the course seven times, at bases in England, Turkey, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Many political science departments face the difficult challenge of providing practical learning experiences of use to students beyond their collegiate years. The problem is particularly pronounced in the international field, where there are fewer internship and work-credit outlets and participation in study abroad programs may be limited by financial or logistical considerations. An alternative device offering “hands on” experience is a practicum, combining classroom instruction with the opportunity to apply acquired knowledge through activity outside the traditional classroom setting.

One such effort to augment the international relations curriculum is the Great Decisions practicum. Sponsored nationally by the Foreign Policy Association (FPA), Great Decisions is a non-partisan study/discussion program intended to familiarize citizens with critical foreign policy issues facing the United States. Each year, participants are exposed to eight major policy issues by reading the Great Decisions study guide and through involvement in a community lecture and discussion series.

A number of article explain how to useful microcomputer can be for teaching social science research methods, particularly statistical analysis, because students can quickly obtain output from archived or inputted data and experiment with changing inputs and procedures to gain insights into various aspects of statistical analysis. Instructors combine this with lectures and discuss what is or should happen, and help students organize data, draft reports, retrieve information, and interact with others. This article describes a way microcomputers can be used to teach public policy substance, rather than methods or office practice, especially involving controversial issues.

Instructors directly responsible for improving student writing skills rely on many techniques, among them student journals, to help their charges master the rudiments of written communication. Instructors in such disciplines as political science, however, may exclude the development of written communication skills from the objectives they hope students achieve. Instead they regularly bemoan their students inability to put together two or three readily understandable sentences on any topic of concern, simultaneously condemning the high schools or English department for failing to teach students how to write.

Introduction: Why Ethics and Theory.

Blaise Pascal once exhorted, “Let us endeavor, then, to think well, this is the principle of morality” — sound advice, indeed, especially in an era such as ours in which both the substance and the character of morality appear “up for grabs.“

That a moral or ethical perspective can facilitate classroom instruction, particularly with regards to the development of clear, competent, cogent, even, compelling reasoning, has not gone unnoticed by both readers and contributors to the NEWS. On the contrary, several recent issues have linked moral perspectives to the teaching of various subjects, eg., Guenter Lewy, “Teaching War and Morality,” (Winter, 1982, No. 32) and William P. Brandon and William T. Bluhm, “Teaching Ethics in a Not- So-Ivory Tower of Babel: Using Health Politics as a Text,” (Fall, 1984, No. 43).

Purpose

I wish to describe a role-playing simulation, as opposed to an educational game. A game normally has an elaborate set of rules and requires participants to function within the logic of its own reality. A role-playing simulation, on the other hand, allows the participants to maintain their own personalities and values as they interact within far more general roles and rules, creating a unique reality each time. The goal of this particular simulation is to overcome a public policy problem within a simulated political environment.

This simulation sets up a presidential and congressional structure and demonstrates the various institutional and political factors that exist in the law making process on the American national level. We have designed a role-playing framework for presidential initiative, congressional action/reaction, and interest group and media activity. Students will become aware of agenda setting, the budget as a policy instrument, and the forces and strategies of influence that affect lawmaking. It can be inserted into a semester course to diversify routine lectures and discussion. It is flexible, easily adjusted to class size and time available to highlight the executive-legislative process (it may take three to eight class sessions).