Intro, I suppose, is an outgrowth of the olden-days requirements (still found in some states) that universities and colleges teach some sort of civics course, and thus the materials out there for teaching it fit that template. I’m not at all sure, though, that it’s all that important a course in the grand scheme of things. It certainly shoehorns poorly into the Millsaps curriculum; as a social scientist (first and foremost), I can’t think of any course that fulfills our social and behavioral sciences requirement more poorly than American government does, and shudder to think what impression of the social sciences is given by our choice to make Intro an exemplar of them (I suppose it gets better when we mosey into the more behavioral material, but the first month feels more like teaching a bad history class).

I guess the key question is: how do I fix it? This is the fourth time I’ve taught the class, and I don’t know specifically what to do, beyond adopting Yet Another Textbook (Fiorina, Peterson and Voss, 2nd ed.) and seeing if that one works better. Maybe I should pull in stuff from the magical mystery tour (I assure Mungowitz it’s only coincidence that his syllabus is the first Google hit I found for “classics in american politics”—I was actually looking for this). Damned if I know.