Call to All APSA Members: APSA Presidential Task Force on New Partnerships

APSA President-Elect Rogers Smith has appointed a Task Force on New Partnerships, chaired by Robert Lieberman of Johns Hopkins University, to propose new initiatives in the areas of research, teaching, and civic engagement. The task force seeks your input as it develops proposals to be implemented, with Council approval, during the 2018-2019 academic year. Deadline for submissions is June 15, 2018. 

Higher education in America today is embattled on many fronts, and the discipline of political science is often singled out for criticism. The roots of these challenges are deep and broad and cannot be addressed by APSA alone. The Task Force on New Partnerships, with members drawn from a variety of higher education institutions across the country, seeks to identify ways APSA can form, stimulate, and aid new partnerships—nationally, regionally, and locally—that can strengthen the contributions of our profession to public discourse and make them more visible. It particularly seeks to enhance APSA aid to scholars at non-R1 institutions. The Task Force has located substantial funding to enable APSA to institutionalize desirable initiatives.

These initiatives might include APSA support for national, regional, and local research on public issues collaboratively prepared by scholars of different political perspectives, showing that many vital facts can be agreed upon, even if policy differences remain; APSA efforts to promote the sharing of teaching expertise between scholars at different institutions, with R1 political scientists conveying the newest developments in their fields, and community college scholars providing insights into teaching first generation students; and APSA recognition for many forms of civic engagement that can help scholars persuade their institutions of the value of this work.

And they might include better ideas from you! Please communicate suggestions to Task Force members, to APSA staff, and to President-Elect Smith. All suggestions may be sent to this e-mail address: partnershipstaskforce@apsanet.org. If you wish to contact individual members of the Task Force, their e-mails are:

Keith Gaddie, University of Oklahoma, rkgaddie@ou.edu
William Galston, Brookings, wgalston@brookings.edu
Hahrie Han, University of California Santa Barbara, hahrie@ucsb.edu
Tyson King-Meadows, University of Maryland Baltimore County, tkingmea@umbc.edu
Jennet Kirkpatrick, Arizona State University, jennetk@asu.edu
Peter Levine, Tufts University, peter.levine@tufts.edu
Shelley Rigger, Davidson College, shrigger@davidson.edu
Cammy Shay, Houston Community College, cammy.shay@hccs.edu
Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Purdue University, vsc@purdue.edu
Renee Van Vechten, University of Redlands, renee_vanvechten@redlands.edu
Sophia Wallace, University of Washington, sophiajw@uw.edu

Task Force Chair: Robert Lieberman, Johns Hopkins, rlieberman@jhu.edu
APSA Staff to Task Force: Laura Leddy, lleddy@apsanet.org

APSA President-Elect: Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania, rogerss@sas.upenn.edu