Letter to the Yale Community
Last spring, we invited the Department of Political Science to envision what it could do if it were allowed to add a number of incremental faculty positions. Given the University's recent history, this represented a significant step: the first enlargement of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences following the capping that had been necessary to deal with the financial situation of the early and middle 1990s. Political Science seemed an obvious first candidate for expansion because it had all the features that would justify an initiative of this sort. It is a discipline in a lively state of intellectual development; it has had student enrollments in continuing excess of its teaching capacity; and a modest investment in faculty resources might well allow this department to turn its existing strength into national preeminence.
At our invitation, a committee chaired by Professor Ian Shapiro and including Professors David Cameron, Geoffrey Garrett, Donald Green, David Mayhew and Frances Rosenbluth prepared a proposal, which the Political Science faculty has endorsed. We publish it here both for the community's information and because it represents an exemplary act of academic planning. Rather than imagining a future in which areas of specialization within the discipline remain unaltered, the proposal makes a clear, compelling diagnosis of the shape of the emerging political world, then envisions a Political Science Department focused on this order's new problems and opportunities. At the advice of the Social Sciences Advisory Committee and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Steering Committee, which have also given the proposal enthusiastic approval, we are happy to make a University commitment to the Political Science initiative. It promises to bring great vitality to a central area of inquiry and education.
Richard C. Levin
Alison Richard
PresidentProvost