Politics department reopens popular courses

After meeting with West College administrators last week, the politics department reopened enrollment in several fall semester courses that had been filled by juniors and seniors during the first round of course registration earlier this month.

POL 388: Causes of War and POL 397: National Security are the two most popular courses that have been reopened for registration by the Registrar's office. The two courses traditionally enroll about 130 students each, but were initially capped at 90 for next semester.

Rising sophomores expressed frustration at not being able to sign up for the classes, which are popular with prospective politics and Wilson School concentrators. "I went on SCORE to sign up for a class at 7 o'clock on Friday morning and by the time I got there it was filled," David Byowitz '09 said. "It was completely taken up by juniors and seniors."

Nick Morgan '09, who plays varsity football and plans to major in politics, noted that many classes do not work well with practice schedules and it is hard enough to find appropriate classes without them being full.

"I'm most likely going to major in Politics and so I really wanted to take POL 388. Sadly, when I got onto SCORE it was already filled," he said in an email. "I was pissed because I had to spend another hour and a half looking for a class that fulfilled a graduation requirement and fit into my schedule."

Some students originally believed that class sizes had been cut to encourage students to enroll in less popular classes in smaller departments, as part of the administration's Major Choices initiative to draw students to less smaller majors.

However, politics department associate chair Chris Achen denied that the University was attempting to discourage students from taking classes in politics, noting that the issue of encouraging students to seek out classes in other departments never came up in meetings with administrators. He reiterated that both he and the administrators wanted students to take classes that are of interest to them.

Achen said the reason for the smaller class sizes was a shortage of qualified preceptors. The department decided to reopen some previously closed classes after the University committed to allocating more resources for the two classes.

Byowitz, like other students, emailed the course instructors to express interest and try to squeeze into the course, but to no avail. He tried to sign up for both classes and was shut out, even after about 10 more seats were added to National Security.

Causes of War professor Gary Bass and National Security professor Jason Lyall declined to comment. Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel did not respond to repeated requests seeking comment.

"The student interest in international relations was particularly heavy this year," Achen said. "And we have a relatively small grad program in international relations," leaving an insufficient number of graduate students available to be preceptors for Causes of War and National Security.

He suggested that the surging popularity of these two courses is linked to current events. "I imagine that the fact that the U.S. is in the middle of the war and has very serious international relations issues in front of it is part of the cause," he said.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

The politics department is looking for preceptors from departments with interest and experience in international relations, Achen said. Along with graduate students at Columbia and other universities within a commutable radius from Princeton, the department should be able to find enough qualified international relations preceptors, he said.

Only two politics classes remain closed. POL 385: International Political Economy and POL 356: Comparative Ethnic Conflict are both being taught by new faculty, Achen said, and the department does not want to overload them with students.