According to the Times-Picayune, Tulane is on-track to enroll 1400 freshmen in the fall, some of whom will doubtless fall into the clutches of my nefariously evil Introduction to Political Science seminar. The course is still very much on the drawing board, although I think it’s going to include big chunks on electoral systems and democratic competence*—and maybe not much else, since it’s apparently not supposed to be a field survey but more of a “wrestle with a few big questions while you write a bunch of stuff” course.

* This class will be a nice counter-balance to Politics of the American South; I get to teach one class that says “democracy sucks, and Ken Arrow proved it” and another that says “it's really important for everyone to have the right to vote, because that's what makes democracy work.” Woe betide anyone trying to take both classes at once; the cognitive dissonance would be painful. How I manage to survive simultaneously believing both of these things is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out.

I think I’ve become lenient on grading in my young age. Maybe it’s just the non-tenure-track faculty member’s equivalent of senioritis (perhaps vistoritis?), but I’m pretty sure I’m a softer touch in the spring than in the fall. I’m just waiting on a few stragglers and my Congress class’ final exams before I can officially put a nice bow on this semester, except for the bits where I dress in fancy regalia.

Tomorrow’s project: figure out what to submit for my useR! proposal. It’s scheduled at a positively icky time for me, as I expect to be moving right around August 1st, but if I can squeeze it in it’d be both a good experience and nice CV fodder. Ideally I’d figure out a way to repurpose my methods meeting proposal, but I’m not sure it’ll work for useR! (boy that punctuation is annoying) very well, so plan B is to get my R package with epcp and friends into working order and write a paper on that.

I also owe a 900-word encyclopedia entry to Ken Warren by next Tuesday.