Letter from the Chair
Spring 2008

Rochester Political Science takes pride in its youth and its record of achievement. Our PhD program is just four decades old, and it is only since the 1970s that we have routinely supported one of the largest undergraduate majors in the College. Yet we number many prominent public officials, attorneys, and business leaders among out undergraduate alumni, and we number many of the leading political scientists of the early twenty-first century among our graduate (and undergraduate) alumni and faculty. Senior scholars on our faculty include a past president of the American Political Science Association, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, three fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former managing editor of the American Political Science Review, the current editor of Perspectives on Politics, Fulbright fellows, two Guggenheim fellows, a Woodrow Wilson Center fellow, and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Our faculty also includes a large number of the discipline's emerging young stars, scholars and teachers engaged in innovative and award-winning work.

We first made our mark as a department in formal theory, statistical methods, and the study of Congress. We continue our commitment to those fields alongside vigorous new initiatives in comparative politics, international relations, normative theory, and a broad range of subjects in American politics, including African-American politics. The department is diverse in its interests and approaches, but distinctively single-minded in its commitment to a vision of political science that requires systematic testing, analysis, and theory.

One of the rare and laudable traditions of this department is that we are constantly conscious of the relationship between teaching and scholarly research. Bill Riker, who established the graduate program at Rochester in the early 1960s, always held that scholarship consists in the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that publication and teaching ought to fit almost seamlessly together in that process. Thus the department faculty includes two winners of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, given for the year's best book in political science, as well as recipients of the College's and University's highest awards for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Today we remain as committed as ever to the principle that world-class teaching and research are complements. New research enriches and energizes our teaching, and good teaching forces us to explain clearly what we think we know, to apply theory, and to generalize convincingly from facts--an often humbling experience if not taken seriously.

We have recently concluded major reviews and revisions of both our graduate and undergraduate curriculums. With the full support of the College and University's leaders, we are in the midst of an initiative to expand the size of the department faculty, as we continue to nurture and build on the distinctive spirit of learning and teaching that has long been the Rochester hallmark. We have hired several new faculty over the last few years, including specialists in American politics, comparative politics, international relations, methodology, and positive political theory. We are very pleased this year to welcome Alexandre Debs to the faculty.

We invite you to explore our department, on the web or in person. Please feel free to contact me or any of my colleagues with any questions.

Gerald Gamm
Associate Professor and Chair