The Citizen

Next fall, Professor Steve Jarding will teach PAL 230 To Be A
Politician when he returns to KSG. Jarding¹s fall module PAL 111Communications and Advocacy has been dropped due to MPP core restructuring.

Jarding, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, says the course (currently taught by Elaine Kamarck, Lecturer in Public Policy) will grant students insight into the daily nuts and bolts of being an elected official. PAL 230 will be taught in addition to Jarding's current course offering, PAL 224 Running for Office and Managing Campaigns.
 

“The lectures and topics covered will be completely different from [PAL 224 Running for Office and Managing Campaigns], but should complement that course very well,” Jarding said. “While [PAL 224] is designed to provide a blueprint for how to set up and run a campaign organization, the ‘Politician’ course will cover things such as conducting a focus group, writing press releases, building web pages, conducting press conferences, preparing for debates, writing radio and TV ad copy, dealing with and responding to negative attacks, setting up satellite feeds, writing blogs, writing, taping and sending out radio feeds, and a host of other candidate specific activities.”

Academic Dean Mary Jo Bane says KSG is developing several new course offerings for Fall 2007, including one devised by Dan Levy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy. Currently titled “Reasoning from Evidence,” the course seeks to equip students to draw on multiple kinds of evidence‹quantitative, qualitative and historical‹in evaluating policy.  An example, Levy says, might be looking not only at the quantitative results of a government program, but also assessing its implementation.

“Anyone who wants to have a career in some type of policy analysis would be a good candidate [for the course],” said Levy.  “If someone wants to be president of your country, it might not be the ideal course.  But they would still be welcome since I¹d like to teach a future president.”

New faces on campus this fall will include Jennifer Lerner, currently Associate Professor in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).  Lerner, who also directed CMU’s Emotion and Decision Making Laboratory, will partner with Iris Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy, to teach a new class that combines the
emerging interdisciplinary field of decision science with behavioral economics. Lerner hopes the course will "improve the judgment and decision-making of individuals, groups and organizations."

“Historically, courses on decision-making have drawn almost
exclusively from normative (economic) models of rational choice,” Lerner said. “The content [of the new course] will foster an understanding of: (a) the cognitive, emotional, social, and
institutional factors that influence judgment and choice; (b) normative (economic) models of rational choice; and (c) how judgment and decision making can be predicted and/or improved.”

In Energy and Natural Resources, William Clark, Harvey Brooks
Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human
Development, will bring his training as an ecologist to a new course exploring the relationship between globalization and sustainability.  University Professor Larry Summers will be teaming up with Lant Pritchett, Lecturer in Public Policy, to teach a class on globalization that will be jointly offered by KSG and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Pritchett is returning to KSG after working as a socio-economist for the World Bank in India.

Christopher Robichaud, Instructor in Public Policy, has been invited back to teach API 601 The Responsibilities of Public Action to another cohort of MPP1s. Robichaud, who taught the course for the first time last fall, initially planned on using the semester to work on his dissertation.

“I’m absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to return this
upcoming fall to teach again," Robichaud said. “The [MPP1] ‘08 Epsilons are awesome and will be a tough act to follow, but I¹m optimistic that I can persuade my new students to be as tolerant of my use of aliens, zombies and superheroes to illustrate moral and political theories as the Epsilons were.”

According to Bane, the administration is finalizing additional changes and offerings for next fall. Students can expect their first glance at the new course catalog by mid-May.

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