Returning to CMC: The Fall 2020 Semester
I have had a few students email me about plans for the Fall 2020 semester, so I thought I would write something for everyone. I do not have any secret information about returning the campus, but I can tell you about my own course plans. This term, I am signed up to teach Govt 20 (Introduction to American Politics) and Govt 116 (Public Policy Process). I plan to teach Govt 50 (Public Administration) and Govt 65 (Public Opinion) in the spring term; I will focus these comments, though, on my two fall courses.
For those of you who have written to ask questions: thank you. It is a delight to teach CMC students, and I’m sorry you’re going to college in the middle of this Covid-19 mess. I very much appreciate your positive and enterprising spirits, though; I am sure we will get through this all together somehow.
Intellectual Debate and Distance
In my Introduction to American Politics course, I ask my students to read a book chapter focused on the late-in-life exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.[1] As I have thought about what teaching at Claremont McKenna will look like in the Fall 2020 semester, I have thought a lot about those letters. Only July 15, 1813, Adams wrote to Jefferson, his old friend, and later bitter political rival: “You and I, ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”[2] Like many political and cultural leaders of their era, they carried on a lively intellectual exchange: the content of the exchange is interesting, of course, for what I teach; the existence of the exchange is inspiring for how I will teach in the era of Covid-19.
I’m going to be teaching my courses with an “online” backbone, with in-person components if possible. Perhaps the right way to say that, though, is that I’m teaching them at a distance. If productive intellectual exchange could be carried out over tremendous distances – across oceans crossed only at great hazard, over roads turned into seas of mud – with the technology of 1800, we ought to be able to do the same now with all of our modern conveniences. It would be nice to be on campus and in person. If we are allowed to – at the time I write this, CMC has not announced if there will be an in-person component or not – I would like to meet up in person with my students even this semester. Still, the heart of political discussion and learning is the thoughtful formulation of intellectual arguments; the minimum requirements for productive exchange simply have not changed very much since Adams put quill pen to paper. You need books, articles, news, and experiences for references, data, and all the raw materials of arguments. You need some way to exchange information, to put forward your own views and test them against others, and to learn by seeing where your own ideas could be improved. And that, really, is pretty much it.
I am genuinely quite enthusiastic about the fall term. It has captured my own imagination, anyway; there is something authentic and challenging about this kind of intellectual exchange which really appeals to me. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, I had not really thought about un-bundling the traditional classroom activities into component parts: like most professors, I taught in a fairly similar way to how I had been taught myself. The product was reasonably good, I think (although I’m probably not the right person to make that assessment); at least, I’ve always had reasonably good teaching reviews both at NYU and (now) at CMC. The crisis has generated a need to innovate, though, and it turns out I find the innovations to be pretty exciting. What is perhaps most telling is that I think some of the changes I will adopt for the Fall 2020 semester will remain part of my teaching approach – even when we have returned to more normal operations.
My Fall 2020 Plan
My approach to teaching at this time involves unbundling the traditional classroom experience. Before: in a particular class period, students could expect to get some lecture (interruptions and questions welcome), some peer-to-peer group interactions, and some general discussion. In addition, there always was what my father calls “the meeting after the meeting” – standing around after class, or walking off to the next place, just having a general (and slightly less restrained) conversation about politics. That was a class period: four different things. A course also included other components; individual meetings in office hours, reading, writing different kinds of assignments, and really working to pull the material together to make a student’s own understanding of the course (in preparing for an exam – but the value is not in the exam, it is in the studying!). Those are also four different kinds of activities, making eight in total. In thinking about the term, I have been trying to figure out how best to accomplish these tasks in the current environment.
While I’m still working out the details, I’m leaning towards doing something like this:
Lectures. The lectures are going to become something more similar to a podcast. What had been a traditional lecture will be broken up into smaller podcast-sized parts and I will record and distribute these to be consumed asynchronously. That is: students can listen at their own convenience. This will be video lectures because it is often helpful to display stuff on the screen, but these are intended for listening.
Conversations. I have always liked including some component of peer-to-peer small-group discussion in my classes. I will carefully organize groups for this that will take place synchronously – a live thing at a particular time, in which everyone is expected to participate. The purpose of these groups is not to debate – to convince someone else to change their mind, or to convince an audience that one student is right and another wrong. These are intended to do as John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson: to explain ourselves to each other. Success in these conversations is fully coming around to understand what someone else thinks. Of course, it is possible that someone will be convinced to adopt someone else’s point of view, but what typically happens is, through the process of explaining, students will refine and develop their own views, reflecting on the experiences and perspectives of others. Students will have the opportunity to write letters to each other to start these conversations.
Special Sessions. These will fill the roles of more general discussions, as well as the “meeting after the meeting” – those components were often dedicated to discussing the application of the course material to current events. These may, or may not, fit with the ordering the main content of the theme of the course, so it makes sense to cover this material as it is relevant and in a different format than the standard lectures. I’ll also talk a fair amount about my research in these.
Assignments. Many of the assignments will remain the same as they would be if we were in-person. The ‘conversations’ piece will require some additional writing, so I will make space for it; that will, though, fill the part of the grading scheme traditionally reserved for ‘participation.’ The kinds of assignments that I give reflect my background, having taught in a public affairs school for some time: most are not traditional academic papers, but they are instead are simulated work products (op-eds, think pieces, memos, reports, etc.).
Replacing the Exam. I actually think in-person and closed-book exams are quite useful for making a good academic experience. I didn’t believe this as a student: I expected to banish these as a professor. Upon reflection, though, these are often efficient and useful ways to help students produce their own comprehensive intellectual view of a course. I do not think, though, that exams are the only way to do this, nor are they the best way to accomplish this goal at this time. So the final exam will be converted into a final paper assignment in both of my courses, focused on evaluating events related to the 2020 presidential election.
Gov. 20: This will build off the “letters” for the Conversations, and focus on “what next?” for one of the two major American political parties, taking into account the election results. The focus here will be on how the party approaches separation-of-powers issues. I will argue over the course of the term that many of the fierce disputes we have seen over the last several years, and will likely see moving forward, involve the fundamental operation of the U.S. Constitution. Success in this course means thinking not only about what policies you want but also how the system of government operates.
Gov. 116: The final assignment in my policy process class will be similar, although the perspective different; this assignment will focus on advancing a particular policy in this new environment.
For both: my hope is that this will get you to look forward over the next four years, or out even further into the distance, and to think about what you expect to have happen and what particular people actually do. As you experience the results - whoever wins the presidential election, and whichever side you support - these assignments will allow you to compare the unfolding path of history with your own ideas of what participants should do. I want these assignments to stick with you, and for you to be still thinking about them several years from now. This really does happen: there are conversations I had, and papers I wrote as a college student, that I still actively think about today.
Office Hours. Converting office hours to zoom hours is one of the simpler adjustments. I have always thought that one of the benefits of in-person office hours is that students get to see “the bear in its natural habitat” – to get a sense of the place where a professor does their own intellectual work. Whenever I’m in someone’s office, I always look around at their bookshelves. It’s not just the intellectual content, but also the context. So I’ll make sure to do this in a way that students feel like they get a sense of my office here at home.
Reading. At the end of the day, all of my courses tend to have fairly deep reading lists, including optional supplemental readings. As it was in 1800, it is today: an enormous amount of an education is simply spending time reading thoughtful books. The value I add is in building the reading list and then helping to guide you through it – and from it onto “what’s next?” While teaching at a distance does not alter the nature of reading very much, it does impact my ability to assess in real time how things are going. The few minutes before class of getting to chat, and the ability to look around the room to see how students are feeling about the reading, can provide a lot of information for me about what students have understood – and what students have done or not done (“big weekend, was it?”). I’m getting some before the term begins on the best way to implement friendly assessment strategies that will help keep everybody on track and give me a sense of how the term is going.
Supplemental Activities. I also plan on working to help facilitate some supplemental activities that are politics-adjacent. Last spring I had a few students join an online Diplomacy game; I may organize that again, or something similar. I will look for opportunities to help facilitate students talking to other students about politics concepts. I have also been running a reading group in the summer of 2020 that has a fairly extensive email list of current students, former CMC students, and former NYU students too. I hope to help to continue to build an intellectual community that spans both class years and geography.
Note: if you have previously taken one of my courses and want to sign up for this email list, I’ll add you to the list I started building with my Summer Reading Group in 2020. The email form is here: https://tinyurl.com/yy86pfg9. If you signed up for the reading group, you don’t need to sign up again unless you’ve changed your email.
In any event, we are all working to adjust our plans for the environment in which we’ve found ourselves. I am optimistic that this will go well, actually. CMC is already a small-scale place; with very small class sizes, strategies are available to us to address the challenges of distance. I’m increasingly looking forward to the term.
Why study politics now?
I am, of course, also looking forward to the term because this is a great time to be teaching American politics. Yes: there are a lot of stressful things going on in the world and, yes, I do find them concerning, stressful, and often heartbreaking. But, also, yes, this is why I became a political scientist. I want to learn about what we can do, as a society, to fix problems.
The courses at CMC that I teach – Gov. 20, American Politics; Gov. 116, Public Policy Process; Gov. 50, Public Administration; and Gov. 65, Public Opinion – are all closely tied to my own research agenda. By that I mean: I want to teach about the things that I actually think are important. Fundamentally, I believe that there are choices we can make about how to design political institutions – the formal and informal rules of politics – that can get us to better outcomes. That’s why I got interested in primary election reform and other electoral institutions. That’s why I got interested in government reorganizations and agency termination. Since all of this rests on the demands and capacity of voters, that’s why I got interested in public opinion. I do not have all of the answers about the consequences of different choices – it is research because I don’t know what the answer is – and, of course, I approach my academic work as an analyst rather than an advocate. Still, I care about this stuff because it is important. It is important now. In the famous words of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign commercials: the stakes are too high for you to stay home.
I am particularly excited about replacing the final exam in both Gov. 20 and Gov. 116 with (different, of course) projects related to the 2020 presidential election. In both of these courses, students will have an opportunity to engage directly with the debates surrounding the most important issues of our day. Learning about American politics side-by-side with a consequential presidential election, a national conversation about race, and an enormous public health and economic crisis ought to be about as engaging as politics can get. I am looking forward to seeing how my students take what they have learned over the course of the term and turn it into a piece of analysis focused on what next.
As my teaching assignments and research work are very closely connected, I am also looking forward to sharing with my students ongoing work on these issues. I am planning on using “special sessions” – lectures not tied to the sequence of readings in the course – to give students a sense of the frontiers of academic inquiry. For example, I am currently working on a paper (coauthored with CMCers Maria Gutierrez-Vera and Maya Love) for the 2020 American Political Science Association conference on public administration and calls to “defund the police.” I’m also planning on implementing a survey project before the 2020 election, so I will have new data to share. There is just going to be a lot going on. It should be fun.
Students should feel free to write with more questions. I am always happy to answer them. My inbox is a mess: if I miss you somehow, don’t be shy about emailing again.
Best,
Andy Sinclair
[1] Ch. 6 in Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers. This is a neat little book. Any fan of the musical Hamilton will appreciate that Ch. 1 focuses entirely on the Hamilton-Burr duel.
[2] Ellis cites this letter in Founding Brothers, pp. 223. Here’s a link to the letter, which I recommend reading in full: https://tinyurl.com/y7kdmvro. Jefferson noticed and repeated the phrase back to Adams, 28 Oct. 1813: https://tinyurl.com/ych2tywj.