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Announcement for Week 2:
  • Links to all readings are found at the bottom of this document in the "Schedule" section.
  • Get a head start on your reading by going to the Blackboard page for this site and reading the article on interviewing. Also read your textbook, Barbour and Wright, Chapter 1.

We live in the most American of all cities at a time when the city, the country, and indeed the world face deadly serious challenges and opportunities. So....

What should we do?
But it might help to know
Why hasn't it been done already?
And then we can ask
How should we do it?
And then, maybe, we actually will.

It is easy to look at the world's problems, or the country's, the state's, or even the city's, and throw up our hands in defeat. We are told--and some insist it to be more than simply a political slogan--that indeed we can do something. In this course we will try to figure out how much we actually can do and then make plans to do it. Believe it or not, the best place to start is politics. Yes, politics has a bad reputation. Yes there are good reasons for that. And yes, high school classes about politics--often a curricular afterthought called "Civics" --grind away what little interests students might have had. But politics is bigger than the foibles of politicians and more interesting than interminable lectures on the three branches of government. Politics is nothing less than the way in which people work together to solve problems. And if you want to accomplish anything big, anything that takes the help of other people, you need to understand politics. This course looks at politics in the American setting, asking how things get done--and why some things are left undone--and helping you take steps toward doing something you find worthwhile with the cooperation with others. That is politics.

Goals
The course is designed to help you achieve the following six objectives, three related to content and three related to process:

Content

  • Facts. You need basic factual details about politics--especially American politics--that you can use to amaze (or bore) your friends and family and at the very least to help you cast a more informed ballot at the next election.
  • Concepts. You should understand how political systems fit together--the conceptual basis of politics--and to look at basic conceptual framework of the current American political system in light of alternative political systems from abroad, from U.S. history itself, and from the realm of hypothetical possibilities (some serious, some funny).
  • Application. For the facts and concepts to mean anything, you must be able to see how they are related to what is happening (or could hypothetically happen) outside of class, particularly in the city of Detroit. The most important part of application in this class will be your efforts to get out into the community and talk to the people who live and work there.
Process
  • Writing. No matter where you go or what job you take, you will need to write well. We give you the chance to practice and the feedback necessary for you to improve.
  • Collaborating. Universities have slowly learned that students learn a lot when they work together to solve a problem. Our course will give you a chance to work on a collaborative project and help you learn some of the tools of successful collaboration (which is not as easy as it sounds).
  • Learning how to learn. We cannot even pretend to teach you all you need to know, but we can prepare you to figure out how to meet your post-college challenges. In particular we will help you learn to find out what you need to know from all available sources, direct or indirect, printed or electronic.
Methods
In the large sessions the instructor will speak to the group but will often turn to students to ask their thoughts and to connect the dots. Discussions sections will turn occasionally to lecture but will focus primarily on engaged participation with active discussion to simulation. The writing assignments will challenge you to think more deeply about particular topics covered in the course and to apply what you have learned to new situations. They will also help you develop your ability to conduct interviews and other research, construct cogent arguments and write with clarity and precision and to do so in cooperation with others.

Instructors
The Honors 2000 course is a collaborative effort among six scholars trained in various fields of the social sciences and humanities. In addition to the common requirements and assignments listed in the syllabus, each may have additional requirements, assignments, notes and announcements that can be found on their individual pages, listed below.

Assignments
The following list of assignments and expectations should give you an idea of what you will need to do in this course and how we will evaluate your work:

Category Method of evaluation Assignment Due Value
Facts, Concepts We will average the percentage of your weekly readings into a single numerical score and grade it on a curve in line with the distribution of paper grades. Weekly in-class quizzes. Every week in section 20%
Application, Writing We will grade papers for responsiveness to question, quality of thesis statement, argument, evidence, organization, and grammar and syntax! See more on how we grade. Interview Paper Week 6 (your section between February 16-19) 15%
Policy Analysis Paper Week 10 (your section between March 23-26) 15%
Site Assessment Group Project Presentation in section, Week 14 (April 13-16)
Presentation of selected projects in main lecture, Week 14 (April 19-20) (1/4th of total project grade)
Submission of final paper, Week 16, (April 26)


40%
Attendance Attention and Participation We will note your absences and evaluate your responsiveness in classroom discussion Attend and participate in every class. All semester long 10%
Engagement Pass/fail Complete at least two (2) passport items Last day of classes (April 26) ---
Overall You must complete all assignments by the final day of classes in order to pass the course. 100%

The following paragraphs should help to clarify our expectations in these assignment categories. If you have any further questions, please ask your senior lecturer:

Attendance.
Class attendance is mandatory. In lecture you must demonstrate your attendance by signing in with your instructor before class begins. In discussion you will demonstrate your attendance with your completed quiz (see below). Each unexcused absence from lecture or seminar will lower your final grade by one point. If a class session conflicts with a religious holiday, notify the instructor in advance so alternative arrangements can be made. We make no other provisions for absence except in cases of written evidence of trauma or tragedy.

Attention and Participation.
It is no longer enough to compel your physical attendance. "Virtual" absence is equally problematic, and while you are in class--even in lecture--we expect you to be fully engaged and not to let your attention stray to the many appealing worlds that you carry with you--your phone, your iPod, or any irrelevant websites or programs open on your laptop. We know how appealing these are, but we also know the value of an occasional respite from multiple, simultaneous demands on your time (and we think what we have to say in class is more important than those, at least for a few hours per week) so we ask you to sit back, listen and, when appropriate, talk. We know (since we have done it ourselves) how easy it is to hide your phone unobtrusively in your lap or alt-tab away from your Facebook page when the instructor is passing by, so we will not make the futile effort of trying to police our request. Rather we will put you on your own honor and (unless you are incompetent enough to get caught watching YouTube in class) we will evaluate you instead on the basis of your engagement, your willingness to respond to our questions (which will be frequent), and your willingness to ask questions of your own. Stony silence, unprepared rambling will reduce your grade, as will failure to demonstrate respect for the comments and questions of others.

Weekly Quizzes. At the beginning of each discussion section you will receive a brief quiz which will ask questions about lectures from the previous week and/or about the readings for the coming week. These will make sure that we begin each week with a common basis for discussion. We offer no makeup provision for late arriving students or unexcused absences (as above) and will award all quizzes a grade of F. We will calculate your overall quiz grade as the average of all individual quiz grades.

Papers.
Good writing is good thinking. Writing is one of the most important things you can learn while you are at Wayne State. In this class you will have several good opportunities to practice and refine your writing. These papers will determine more than half of your grade.

Paper Content and Style. Papers will be marked and graded as if this were an English class. If you are having problems, please take the opportunity to talk with me about possible remedies and we will do whatever we can to help. You can find on-line guides to writing in the English language at the Grammar and Style resources website and at Wayne's Academic Success Center on the second floor of the Undergraduate Library. There is also a very good website called "The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing" which is a companion to Michael Harvey's book of the same name, and has excellent coverage on a variety of writing questions including paper arguments,style,organization and plagiarism. We have also received the permission from a few former students to post some examples well-written student essays that we have received in the past at Wayne, in the hope that these may offer some guidance. If your ambition extends beyond writing correctly to writing well (and we hope it does), you cannot ask for better guides than the following two authors: Citing your sources. In our information-based society, ideas are as precious as the gold of earlier eras. Stealing someone else's ideas is no more acceptable than stealing someone else's possessions, and it will get you in a lot of trouble. But why steal something that is already free? The only cost to you as a student for using somebody else's ideas is that you must give them appropriate credit and that is very easy to do. If you get any idea from any source, you must cite that source, even if you do not use the same wording. In other words, you must cite the source even if you rewrite it in your own words. Furthermore, if you use an author's specific wording for more than three words in sequence ("In the beginning..."), youmust put the words in quotation marks. For more guidance, we have adapted guidelines written Dr. Noel Parker of the University of Surrey on when and why to cite others' words. In general, please simply follow the adage: 'when in doubt, cite your source'" (Cason 1998). The previous sentence is a case in point. The quotation in question came from the web-site of Prof. Jeffrey Cason at Middlebury College. If this syllabus were a paper, it would have to contain the following entry:

Works Cited
Cason, Jeffrey. 2009. Academic Conduct. Available WWW: https://segue1.middlebury.edu/index.php?&site=is101a-s03&section=1902&page=6718&action=site [Accessed 10 January 2009].

Individual senior lecturers will provide their own specific guidelines for citation format, but all of them will require that you use a consistent style all the way through your paper. If you have any questions or doubts about what to cite, you must contact us before you hand in a paper with questionable references. Do not risk your grade--perhaps even your college career--by needlessly using somebody else's ideas and failing to credit them.

The consequence of plagiarism is automatic expulsion from the course with a failing grade

Of course the most serious problems with citation are not accidental omissions but intentional efforts to save thought and effort by simply copying what somebody else has already done. The paper assignments in this course cannot be answered by anything you can buy or copy whole from the internet or from fellow students, and we have become extremely adept at identifying the sources of plagiarism. Unfortunately, there have been enough attempts (none successful) that we now subject papers to a random screening process involving test-based search engines and the surprisingly discerning services of the university's web-based plagiarism detector. In the unlikely event that you still want to take the risk of plagiarizing, we will deal with the attempts in accordance with the provisions of the Student Due Process Statue specified in the university's Academic Integrity statement, which you can obtain online at http://www.otl.wayne.edu/wsu_integrity.php.

Paper Format. Papers must be double spaced, with reasonable font size (12) and margins (1 inch), and within the specified length guidelines. All these guidelines are there for your benefit as well as for ours. A paper that is too long bears evidence of inability to be concise and organized. A paper that is too short suggests that something is missing. Finally, think for at least a moment about aesthetics. Papers that are messy, crammed together or otherwise unreadable suggest a lack of attention to detail that may also be found in the content itself.

Paper Deadlines. Papers are due at the beginning of discussion section in the week in which they are due. They must be handed in in person. We will not accept emailed papers or any other form of submission except by explicit prior written agreement with your senior lecturer. Papers not handed in at the beginning of discussion will incur an immediate deduction of a full letter grade (for example from A- to B-). After 24 hours has elapsed the deduction will increase to two letter grades, and so on for each additional 24 hour period. We will not grant extensions for any reason except (as above) written evidence of trauma or tragedy.

Paper Evaluation. An excellent paper must demonstrate a strong argument expressed in a coherent thesis statement and developed in an organized fashion using appropriate argument and evidence. Grammar and syntax are also crucial. We will grade papers as if this were an English class. An abundance of grammatical and usage errors can have a severely negative effect on your grade. If you have questions, we have prepared an extremely detailed account of how we grade written work.

Presentations. Edward Tufte, guru of visual design, once noted that "Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely." Most presentations these days use some sort of electronic display of information. Most presentations are (therefore) terrible. Presenters offer incomprehensible slides densely worded with text and then read from those slides. In other settings these could easily be used as an enhanced interrogation technique. Your group project will require you to make a project presentation. Instructors will work with you in discussion sections to design presentations that make effective use of the technology and get your points across as effectively as possible. The quality of your presentation will comprise 20% of the grade of the group project (or, for those with a mathematical inclination, 8% of the overall course grade).

Engagement. You may have noticed that although this is a four credit course, you only spend 3 hours per week in the classroom. The reason for this is that we also expect you to spend considerable time becoming engaged in the community outside the classroom. As part of your course requirements we therefore require you to become involved somewhere, somehow. We will record this involvement through the use of the Honors passport. We expect you to complete two items from the list by the final class day of the semester (April 27). Since these items are quite different in scope and format, your senior lecturers will work with you to find ways of demonstrating your completion.

Grades
Grades depend on you. We will use the following scale to translate between percentages and letter grades:
F D D+ C- C C+ B- B B+ A- A
<60 60-64 65-69 70-73 74-76 77-79 80-83 84-86 87-89 90-93 94-100

Note: No student can receive a passing grade without completing all required assignments

It is not enough simply to do well on most assignments and leave one or two undone.

We will do our best to ensure that all grades fairly assess your work. You may request a review of your grade on a particular assignment, but you must do so in writing and you may do so no sooner than 48 hours after receiving the grade (a waiting period which gives you the opportunity to look over your work and formulate cogent arguments for a grade change). Please know that instructors have full discretion in their grade review and may choose to keep the grade the same, raise it or lower it.

Accessibility.
Every student should have the best possible chance to engage in learning. If you are registered with the Educational Accessibility Services office, please see your senior lecturer during the first week of class and bring your EAS paperwork to help us be of service. If you are not registered and have a disability that requires accommodations, you will need to register with Student Disability Services for coordination of your academic accommodations. The Student Disability Services (SDS) office is located at 1600 David Adamany Undergraduate Library in the Student Academic Success Services department. SDS telephone number is 313-577-1851 or 313-577-3365 (TDD only). Student Disability Services’ mission is to assist the university in creating an accessible community where students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to fully participate in their educational experience at Wayne State University. Please refer to the SDS website for further information about students with disabilities and the services for faculty and students: http://studentdisability.wayne.edu/

Materials.
This course will use a combination of online readings and books. The online readings are listed below in the schedule. There is also one required book:

Honors Home - HON2000/PS1010: Citizenship
THE BOOK THAT YOU MUST BUY
Keeping the Republic, 3rd Brief Edition.
Christine Barbour and Gerald C. Wright. 2009. Washington: CQ Press. ISBN 13: 978-0872899353
Available at your independent local bookseller:
  • Marwill's bookstore, at Cass and Warren 313-832-3078,
Or online:
Note: Yes, it's a textbook, but it has the major virtues of being among both the best and the cheapest textbooks on the market. So enjoy!

We will also occasionally refer to another textbook-like item that you are welcome to find in a used bookstore somewhere.
Honors Home - HON2000/PS1010: Citizenship THE BOOK THAT WE COULDN'T REQUIRE YOU TO BUY EVEN IF WE WANTED TO (but it's funny)
America (The Book): A Guide to Democracy Inaction
Jon Stewart et al, 2004 Warner Books.
Note: If you or members of your family hold concerns about the decline of moral values in America, you may wish to have the bookseller remove the naked pictures of Supreme Court justices (page 99) and blacken any offensive words (pp. vii-xi, 1-227). By that point, however, there won't be much of the book left to read.

Other readings. As part of the course, we will also ask you to follow contemporary political developments in the U.S. and elsewhere. To keep you up to date, you may find it helpful to subscribe to theNew York Times Online and to The Economist weekly political review. These are free and they are not mandatory, but they are perhaps the best way to spend your precious media-time.

Schedule
This list represents a minimum set of readings for the overall course. Your senior lecturer may add other readings and we reserve the option to make additions over time, but we promise to inform you about any such changes well in advance.

Week Dates Theme Readings and Assignments due this week
1 January 11 to 15 What should we do?
Problems and opportunities; structures and agents
No readings yet.
Preliminary paper due in sections.
2 January 18 to 22 What should we do, part 2.
No lecture, BUT DISCUSSION AS NORMAL
3 January 25 to 29 Ways of do-ing:
The principles of politics
  • Barbour & Wright, Chapter 1, pp. 1-39.
  • Allen, Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory, Chapter 5, especially pp. 143-153 and 169-183
  • Lindloff, "Eliciting Experience: Interviews," especially 165-169 and 178-195 (see Blackboard, Section 501 or 510)
4 February 01 to 05 The Burger-King effect Revisited:
Our inherited resources, values, and institution.
  • Black, Rebirth: A Political History of Europe since WWII, Chapter 1 (see Blackboard)
  • The Economist, "Perils of Complacency"
  • Wilson, selection from "The Meaning of Public Policy" (see Blackboard)
Do: Take the Political Compass online quiz: http://www.politicalcompass.org/test.
Do: Take the IDEAlog online ideology quiz: http://idealog.org/en/quiz/8467b33
Do: Print out your score sheets for both and bring them to section on Monday/Tuesday Feb. 9-12, and to class on February 15-16
5 February 08 to 12 Resource conflicts:
Mine against Theirs
6 February 15 to 19 Value conflicts:
Lefts against Rights
  • Barbour & Wright, Chapter 11, pp. 333-369
  • Reread Barbour & Wright, Chapter 1, pp 26-31.
Due: Interview papers due in sections.
7 February 22 to 26 Institutional channels for resources and value conflicts:
Republicans against Democrats
8 March 01 to 05 Institutional conflicts at the center:
President against Congress
  • Barbour & Wright, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, pp. 175-241
9 March 08 to 12 Institutional conflicts between center and region:
Feds against states
  • Barbour & Wright, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, pp. 40-100
Break March 15 to 19 No lecture or discussion
  • Optional spring break reading: Barbour & Wright, Chapter 8
10 March 22 to 26 Institutional conflicts between past and present:
The Constitution against Everybody:
  • Barbour & Wright, Chapter 9, pp. 272-303
Due: Policy Analysis papers due in sections.
11 March 29 to 02 How should we do it?
Demonstrations, litigators and actors who (try to) shift values
12 April 05 to 09 How should we do it?
Service, policy and actors who (try to) redistribute resources
  • Barbour & Wright, Chapter 14, pp. 436-463
  • Wilson, selection from "Economic Policy" (see Blackboard)
13 April 12 to 16 How should we do it?
Globalization and the redefinition of agency
Due: Group presentations in sections
14 April 19 to 23 How should we do it?
Presentation of top group projects.
No readings. Reread and re-edit your own work.
15 April 26 to 30 No lecture or discussion. You're free. Due: Site Assessment papers due in Honors office by 4:30pm, April 26.


kdecay
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Anonymous Textbook 1 Jan 9 2010, 10:44 AM EST by kdecay
 
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Is is okay if we have the 2nd edition of the textbook? or do we need to have the 3rd?
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Anonymous After Culture 0 Dec 6 2009, 4:53 PM EST by Anonymous
 
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Can you please put up the reading for this week???
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Anonymous Powerpoint 3 Nov 12 2009, 7:36 PM EST by Anonymous
 
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Where is the powerpoint from Galster?
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