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The Last Laugh: Skill Building through a Liberal Arts Political Science Curriculum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Marijke Breuning
Affiliation:
Associate professor of political science at Truman State University. Her teaching and research interests are international relations and comparative foreign policy, with an emphasis on psychological approaches and issues of foreign aid and development.
Paul Parker
Affiliation:
Professor of political science at Truman State University. He has authored both annual curriculum reviews and five-year reports for external review purposes. His teaching and research focus on judicial politics.
John T. Ishiyama
Affiliation:
Associate professor of political science at Truman State University. He has published in both political science and pedagogical journals. His teaching and research interests focus on comparative politics, with a special emphasis on democratization and political party development in the former USSR and Eastern Europe.

Extract

Quite often, people make jokes at the expense of political science majors. These jokes suggest that political science majors—and especially those graduating from liberal arts colleges and universities—have not acquired the necessary practical skills to make a living, let alone to acquire a lucrative career.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank their colleagues—Randy Hagerty, James Przybylski, John J. Quinn, Charles Turner, L. Stuart Vorkink, and Candy Young—for the many conversations about the logic of the major. We also wish to thank the alumni who confirmed in letters, emails, phone calls, and visits that the political science curriculum prepared them well.