Other Activities for a Bonus Break
Welcome! This is Post No. 2.
Post No. 1 is a reading list for students for the unexpected vacation - a second week of spring break - created by the Covid-19 outbreak. Like many colleges and universities, CMC has a slight delay before classes resume online. The list of book suggestions can be found at this link: here.
This post covers some other activity suggestions, all of which can be done from home while practicing appropriate “social distancing.” As in: what would a political scientist do with free time, if that free time was not sucked up by writing papers and watching kids? Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but just a few suggestions.
Use the internet archive to play the greatest civil war simulation ever made. For American politics nerds, this is great. It’s from 1991 and is called “No Greater Glory.” You will want to find - you can - a copy of the instructions as a pdf to defeat 1991-era security (“On the top of page 6, which is the first word?”). It’s a single-player game. You can play as either Lincoln or Davis. Unlike many military simulations, which focus on ordering around little people, this really is a politics simulation — you pick the cabinet officials, make proposals to Congress, and so on. You can issue broad orders to generals (“General McClellan will invade Northern Virginia”) but… they don’t always do what you tell them (“General McClellan reports his army isn’t ready.”). It’s a hoot. If you use the search feature on the internet archive for “No Greater Glory” you should be able to find it, or you can follow this link.
Get some friends and play online diplomacy! This is a classic board game. You can play for free online at: https://www.playdiplomacy.com/. If you get a premium account, which is not very expensive, you have access to some more game variants and so on. This is a great game. College students with free time could easily advance the game at 1 turn per day. You can stab your friends in the back… when they are safely far away! Anyway, it’s a nice excuse to get to constantly talk to a group of several of your friends every day.
You can use Amazon’s BritBox to watch all of Yes, Minister. This is a wonderful British TV show about public administration. It’s very funny and universally relevant, even though it is from some time back. I am on a quest to find a way to sneak a Yes, Minister quote into everything I write, which is not hard (“democratic accountability… requires a human sacrifice.”). If you want something else that is really reflective of the mood of a certain period of American politics (but, strangely, perhaps less accurate than Yes, Minister, which is deliberately a comedy), you can try to look up The West Wing. I believe West Wing is on Netflix.
You can watch all of the original Jeeves & Wooster television series. This is assuredly wasting your time in possibly the best way to waste your time possible. I have the old DVDs, so I’m not sure where you would find this (other than buying them), but students seem very good at figuring this sort of thing out…
If you are at home with your family, or in someplace safe with a small number of people, the board game Tammany Hall plays well with three people (or as many as five).
The Claremont Colleges Library has access to lots of publishers that offer e-book editions, particularly on technical subjects. If you are stuck inside without much of a social life for a while, this is a good opportunity to look for resources to learn how to use R (free to download, statistics program), LaTex (for making documents), or any of the other skills you may wish you had and just haven’t had time to start acquiring.
If you are going to be at home, there are worse ways to spend your days than playing diplomacy, watching political-themed tv, and learning something about R.
