The Political Science Department offers a wide variety of courses on politics, law and government. These courses explore political institutions of every kind: executive and legislative bodies, courts and legal systems, bureaucracies, political parties, interest groups and coalitions, mass media, structures of international cooperation and conflict, ethnic, religious and ideological movements.

We try to understand where political power is, how it operates, whose interests it serves—who gets what, when, where, how. But we also ask not only how political institutions work, but how they should work, what human values they serve or violate, and what is the ultimate meaning and purpose of political life.

The department prepares people for careers in politics and in government employment generally in law, mass communications, health professions and in every aspect of private and public planning. Our central vocation however, is to give students the knowledge and awareness they will need to become free men and women, as well as active citizens.