The Plan for Academic Enrichment has been a boon at 36 Prospect St.
The tan, green-trimmed building across from Carrie Tower that houses the Department of Political Science has welcomed seven new faculty members since the plan was approved in 2002 - four as replacements and three as "incremental" additions provided by the plan.
With another new addition set to arrive next year, there will be a total of 21 faculty members formally associated with the department, up from 17 three academic years ago, according to Professor of Political Science Alan Zuckerman, the chair of the department.
"What we've been able to do is to replace all those who've retired and to add as well. ... For this department, the academic enrichment program has only had positives," Zuckerman said.
The new faculty have revitalized the department, strengthened its reputation and increased its course offerings, according to Zuckerman and other political science faculty members.
For students, the change is primarily felt in the greater range of faculty expertise, producing new courses such as PS 182.42: "Women and Politics," taught by Assistant Professor of Political Science Jennifer Lawless, and PS 121: "Latin American Politics," taught by Associate Professor of Political Science Richard Snyder. Both professors came to Brown last year.
According to Professor of Political Science Wendy Schiller, the past several years' growth has affected the entire department, including senior faculty.
"We've been infused with both energetic younger people and more energetic mid-level people," Schiller said. "When you're around new people who are doing new things, you modernize."
Schiller said the department has hired "the best people in political science" who have come out of graduate programs at, among others, Harvard, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. She added that the department has been able to better form long-term plans because "we're not just focusing on one single position every two years."
The infusion of new faculty has elevated the stature of the department in the field of political science, according to Darrell West, professor of political science and director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions.
"We've recruited several very strong researchers who are really putting Brown on the map," West said.
As for concrete evidence of the department's strengthened faculty, Zuckerman pointed to an increase in faculty publication in more prestigious university presses and political science journals.
Though he described the political science courses at Brown today as "more theoretically informed" than they were five years ago, Zuckerman said the composition of the department has stayed about the same with respect to four subfields of political science - American politics, political theory, comparative politics and international relations.
Adding a faculty member in a fifth subfield - political economy - is a future priority of the department, Zuckerman said. The department previously offered all five subfields as tracks for undergraduate concentrators, but it does not currently include political economy because there are not enough courses available in that area.
After the then-Initiatives for Academic Enrichment were approved in 2002 - including the provision to expand Brown's faculty by 100 - the departments submitted proposals to the administration that made their cases for allocations in the faculty expansion. According to Zuckerman, the administration has been very supportive of the political science department and has given it almost everything it has asked for.
This semester the administration made a second call for proposals, and Zuckerman said the department intends to continue growing and will "put in" for this next round of faculty expansion. For the future, there is "a priority in the general area of political economy," he said.
He said the planning and decisions about the department's growth came out of several years of internal meetings as well as interaction with the University administration. Besides wanting high-quality teachers and researchers, Zuckerman said that "there's a consensus view that we should be strong in all the major areas of political science" rather than try to specialize.
Zuckerman added that when recruiting faculty, besides the usual attractions of Brown, the department has used the academic enrichment plan as a selling point.
"We could tell them about how the University as a whole and the department in specific was growing," and "they knew they could be a part of the process" of change, he said.
