by Jessica Black '06 and Harrison Greene '05

Featured in this issue:

• Washington DC Program: Spring on the Potomac
• Model UN Team wins Best Delegation
• Class presents research to Senator Dayton
• Seniors honored
• Visiting faculty introduced
• Faculty activities
• 'Talking Politics' radio show
• Alumni news from far and wide

At left: U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) with the students of the 2004 Carleton in Washington Program
Standing:Paul Tewes '93 (Director, National Democratic Senatorial Committee), Graham Zorn '03 (Feingold staffer), Harrison Greene '05, Marcus Jun '05, Brian Page '05, Joshua Mahoney '05, Anne Cary '06, Wells Harrell '06, Rebekah Solem '06, Ben Phillips '05, Brian Marson '04, John Slaight '05, Jessica Black '06, Taylor Valore '06, David Derksen '05, Sen. Feingold, Prof. Schier, Leah Sipher-Mann '06, Karina Hill '06, Andrew Liesch '04, Becca Stark '05
Seated: Colleen Miller '04 and Scott Konzem '06

For those interested in politics, election year is an exciting time, no matter where you are. But the students on the Spring 2004 Political Science Seminar in Washington DC had the fortune of being in the political center of all the action for ten weeks. This year's seminar, led by Professor Steven Schier, was a smashing success. Students lived right across the Potomac in Rosslyn, Virginia, and worked full-time three days a week at internships they had secured before going to DC. The other two days a week were scheduled as seminar days, when students met with 84 different speakers over the course of the term.

At right: Linda Berg, National Political Director of The National Association for Women, addresses Carleton students. Brian Marson '04 in foreground.

Due to the hard work of Professor Schier, the students had remarkable access to many important movers and shakers in DC during the seminar each week. During the first week, students attended oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court before speaking with Justice Scalia. Later in the term, students met with John McConnell, one of President Bush and Vice President Cheney's three main speechwriters. Other seminar speakers included a variety of Senators, House Representatives, lobbyists, economists, academics, diplomats, media outlets and more.

At left: Robert Reischauer, president of The Urban Institute, with Karina Hill '06, Taylor Valore '06, and Marcus Jun '05.

Many students were awetruck by one speaker in particular, David Rehr, head lobbyist and vice president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association. "He was like Gordon Gekko," said rising senior Brian Page, in reference to Oliver Stone's 1980s classic Wall Street. Mr. Rehr wowed the Carleton College students with his razor sharp wit and cutthroat competitiveness. Many viewed him as their best link to what really goes on in Washington. Neil Howe, author of Generations, was another one of the students' favorite speakers. His amazingly accurate comments on generational traits and patterns were quite impressive, and he was able to illustrate many of the trends he studies with events in the political arena, including welfare reform, major tax cuts, and changes in the country's international relations. Said senior political science major Colleen Miller, "Howe's thoughts really exposed how political behavior is really not a function of one's age but rather of one's generation."

Interns also had the opportunity to attend receptions sponsored by many different groups trying to promote their causes, ranging from Taco Bell to the American Zoological Association. Others were held by programs such as Healthy Start, by offices and departments, including the Marine Corps Liaisons Office and many Senate offices, and by Embassies, like the Dutch Embassy. According to Andrew Liesch, life on the Hill "is like college with a tie."

While immersed in the political arena, students realized there is no better teacher than the simple experience of being a part of it all. They witnessed many major political events during the spring term, including the prisoner scandal and beheading of the contractor in Iraq, the March for Women's Lives, the competitive nature of the election campaigns, the dedication of the World War II Memorial, and, in the very last days of the program, the death of President Reagan. Rebekah Solem sums up the program by saying, "no class at Carleton could beat the amazing experience I had in DC. No book can bring you as close to the realities of politics as living and working directly in the political arena."

Final banquet, 2004 Carleton in Washington Program

Class presents research to Senator Dayton

Roy Grow's political economy seminar completed a term-long consulting project for Senator Mark Dayton. The class completed a detailed data-based analysis of "outsourcing" and then outlined the results in a three-hour presentation to Senator Dayton and his staff.

by Jake Hoppe '05

The Carleton College World Model United Nations team took top honors at this year's Harvard World Model United Nations conference in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt. The team, consisting of Charlie Carstens '05, Caitlin Elsaesser '04, Jake Hoppe '05, Colleen Miller '04, Dave Ohls '04, and headed by Rachel Pederson '04, captured diplomacy awards in five of six committees and was awarded Best Delegation.

Photo by Dave Ohls '04

The team represented Peru on committees ranging from the Organization of American States to the United Nations Development Program, discussing topics ranging from sustainable tourism to gender and globalization. And while the team performed excellently during committee sessions, the experience of being on the Red Sea and meeting the other delegates was the highlight of the conference.

WorldMUN is a unique conference that brings together over 800 university students from 6 continents to simulate various organs of the United Nations and other international organizations. To stimulate interaction, social activities are held at nights to bring people together.

Noha Shawki will join the political science department as a visiting instructor beginning in the fall term. She was born in Egypt and attended the German International School in Cairo. She earned an M.A. in political science at the University of Trier, Germany, and is working on her doctoral dissertation at Indiana University Bloomington. Her main field is international relations. Her research interests include global civil society, transnationalism, global government and international policy problems. She is fluent in Arabic, English, French and German.

Her dissertation is concerned with transnational advocacy networks (TANs), which are among the most salient new actors in international politics and global governance. She looks at how and under what circumstances TANs contribute to global governance. More specifically, she asks how and under what circumstances TANs succeed in influencing the delivery of existing governance services or the introduction of new ones, and what are the dynamics and processes that underlie and explain their success or lack of success.

Julian Westerhout, who will teach the IPE class here this winter term, was born in Silver Spring, Maryland and holds dual US and Irish citizenship. He attended Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where he graduated summa cum laude with a major in political science and a minor in history. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in political science at Indiana University Bloomington. His main field is comparative politics, and he is also interested in public policy and moral philosophy. In the spring, he will teach 170 and the Intra-State War course, focusing on African Civil Wars.

Westerhout's dissertation looks at international development aid, using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to analyze the institutional arrangements and incentive structure of the British Department for International Development (DFID) and several of its development programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. The DFID, in recognition of the limitations of the traditional aid models, has embarked upon an experimental approach in some of its programs that is designed to reduce the perverse incentives that have limited aid effectiveness, and to increase the degree of "ownership" of those programs by local end beneficiaries through greater decentralization of the decision-making process and greater involvement of more parties in the planning, implementation, and evaluation stages.

Mr. Westerhout presented his paper, "Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Towards a New Paradigm" at the National Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, April 2004.Westerhout recently presented another paper, "Perverse Incentives and Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa" at the Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society and Economic Science Association in Baltimore. His skills include statistical analysis, advanced computer applications, and web design.

Noha Shawki and Julian Westerhout were married in May 2004. They enjoy traveling, hiking, books, and theater.

Talking Politics

Morgan Weiland '06 and Professor Al Montero hosted a weekly political talk show on KRLX, the student-run radio station, during 2003-04. They created "Talking Politics" to engage students in politics through "rational and non-ideological discourse," according to Montero. The show focused on current events and featured guest speakers on topics such as foreign policy, hate speech, and the economy.

Professor Montero's suggestion for the program captured Weiland's interest. She is the station's news director, and a political science major. She enjoyed capitalizing on the wealth of campus resources on political issues. "I definitely want to do something like this the rest of my time at Carleton. It keeps me informed of what's going on," she said.

Guests and topics included Mary Lewis Grow, Andrew Weiner and Bill Fisher on gun control; Kim Smith and The Carletonian editors on hate speech; Bryan Daves on Israel policy and the Mideast; Greg Marfleet on American foreign policy; Robert Packer on Iraq; Chad Bayse '02 and Blayne Eubanks '04 on "liberal" and "conservative" categories; and Khullani Abdullahi '06 and Ainsley LeSure '05 on that issue with regard to race.

(Photos and interviews courtesy The Carletonian.)

Al Montero and Morgan Weiland in the KRLX studio. Photo by Susan Schnur '07, The Carletonian.

Faculty activities

Barbara Allen received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her work on Martin Luther King, Jr. She gave several public presentations of that work, including a presentation to Carleton alumni at the Weisman Art Museum in conjunction with the Smithsonian exhibit on civil rights.

Professor Allen was program chair for sessions on Tocquevillian analytics on the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (WOW 3), the third five-year meeting of Workshop scholars in Bloomington, Indiana.

Laurence Cooper published an article, "Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and 'The Desire to Extend Our Being,'" in the American Political Science Review, February 2004. He presented a paper, "Platonic Eros: The Effectual Truth," at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia in August 2003. Both are parts of Professor Cooper's book on Platonic and post-Platonic understandings of eros and politics. He will be on leave during winter and spring terms of this academic year, completing the book draft.

Roy Grow continues as a member of a Washington-based task force that is evaluating terrorism, guerrilla warfare and American foreign policy. He also spent a good deal of the summer completing research in Hanoi, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Beijing and Amsterdam.

Richard Keiser was promoted to Full Professor in 2004. He will also be starting a three-year term as Director of American Studies at Carleton, which will unfortunately cut in half his teaching in the political science department. Professor Keiser spent part of the summer of 2004 conducting research in San Francisco on the politics of the construction of Pac-Bell Baseball Park (now SBC), home of the San Francisco Giants. And most unfortunately, the Keiser family's famous frisbee-catching dog, Yogi, passed away in January of 2004.

Kelly Kollman presented her paper, "The Globalization of an Idea: Same-sex Unions in Western Democracies," at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, March 17-20, 2004. She will present another paper, "Re-socializing Firms: The Transnational Dissemination of British Environmental Management Norms" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, September 2-5, 2004.

Alfred Montero continued his field research on the politics of decentralization in Spain with a five-week affiliation (June-July) at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid. While in Madrid, Professor Montero accumulated biographical data on the political career trajectories of the Spanish deputies for all eight legislatures of the democratic period (1977-2004). His study of career trajectories is the subject of his forthcoming article in the journal Comparative Politics. After his research in Spain, Prof. Montero continued his study of the French language in Paris during the month of August. Also, he continues to work on a textbook on Brazil that is under contract with Polity Press. In October, he will attend the Latin American Studies Association meeting in Las Vegas, where he will act as a discussant on a panel focusing on decentralization reforms in Latin America. In December, he travels to Brazil to continue his research on that country.

Robert Packer will be on leave during 2004-05 academic year. He received an opportunity to do research at the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College. He will also be presenting a paper at the 46th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in Hawaii, March 2005.

Kimberly Smith's paper "Black Agrarianism and the Foundations of Black Environmental Thought" was accepted for publication by Environmental Ethics. She attended the Western Political Science Association Meeting in March, and delivered her paper, "Becoming Native: The Concept of Place in Early African American Thought." Professor Smith was also a discussant on the New Books in Environmental Political Theory.

Marek Steedman arrived at Carleton College in September last year, having recently defended his dissertation, "Before Dusk: Race, Labor, and Status in Louisiana, 1865-1900." In the past year he has been at work on a number of smaller projects. He prepared an article on "Resistance, Rebirth, and Redemption: The Rhetoric of White Supremacy in Post-Civil War Louisiana," for a special edition of the journal Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques. Another article, "State Power, Hegemony and Political Memory: Lotman and Gramsci," was published in the June 2004 issue of POROI, an online peer-reviewed journal. In November Professor Steedman presented "Labor, Race, and the South: A Case Study of Louisiana During Reconstruction and Jim Crow," at the Social Science History Association Annual Meeting in Baltimore.

During the year he gave a number of talks based on his dissertation, to faculty and graduate students at the University of Minnesota, Texas A&M University, and (best of all) to the political science faculty at Carleton College. He will present two papers at the upcoming APSA annual meeting in Chicago, one on race in Tocqueville's Democracy in America at the Foundations of Political Theory Workshop on Myth, Rhetoric, and Symbolism, and the other entitled, "Free Labor and Racial Ideology in the United States: An Historical Examination."