Political Science
Mission Statement
The Political Science Department is committed to providing its majors a rigorous and relevant education in the fundamentals of political inquiry necessary to informed citizenship. The Department provides its students with a strong grounding in each of the major sub-fields of Political Science – American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations and Political Thought – as well as with the analytic tools and theoretical approaches needed to be successful in their careers.
The approach of the Department reflects not only our Lasallian mission to provide a distinctive value laden liberal education but also our commitment to giving students the kind of education that will benefit them in graduate school, law school and throughout their career.
We believe that it is important to equip students not only to understand the world, but also to help students think critically to make choices in pursuit of “the good life.” Therefore, we emphasize high academic standards and encourage students to grapple with original texts and data to improve their analytic ability.
We educate our students to express themselves through a variety of formats, but particularly through the written word. For this reason, all Political Science major required courses have a minimum academic writing requirement. And we encourage our students to become independent thinkers and to pursue their own lines of research, especially through their capstone Senior Seminar course. Each year the Department retains electronic copies of the best seminar papers as models for subsequent classes. And each spring the author of the “best” seminar paper receives a trophy as the Joseph Brogan Senior Seminar Award and has her/his name engraved on a plaque in the main hallway.