Election fever is in the air.
From candidates’ commercials and up-to-the-minute news flashes to profiles of election issues and “Donate Now” messages on political parties’ websites, information about the 2004 presidential election is everywhere.
In an attempt to infect Duke students with this political fever, several Duke professors have incorporated the spirit and substance of the campaign season into their classes and campus-wide events.
Peter Feaver, professor of political science, has structured his American foreign policy seminar around the current presidential candidates’ foreign policy platforms. Feaver said the importance of world events in this year’s election presents a unique opportunity for his students to analyze the role foreign policy can play in political campaigns.
“Foreign policy wasn’t nearly as central to the campaign [in 2000] as it is now,” Feaver said. “It was a manageable load of information. Now it’s a fire hose.”
For the first half of the semester, Feaver has divided his class into two teams—one to support President George W. Bush, the other to support his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. The groups are responsible for examining the candidates’ foreign policy platforms on both political and substantive levels, he said. The students are currently gearing up for their midterm exam, which will take the form of a public debate open to the entire school Oct. 6.
After Election Day, Feaver said his students will write a transition memo to the victor, advising him on how to either fulfill a campaign promise or “walk the cat back” and retreat from a campaign promise.
Feaver said he hopes his course will help his students “have some sympathy” for the challenges candidates face in any political race. Senior Scott Lemmon said the seminar has already highlighted the candidates’ struggles to balance their policies with the need to keep campaign rhetoric concise.
“The policies are 100 percent more complicated and complex than the statements that any candidate can make on an issue [in a campaign],” Lemmon said.
Joseph Harris, associate professor of English and director of the Duke University Writing Program, has also made the partisan wranglings of the current campaigns the focus of his course. The purpose of the freshman seminar, “Framing the 2004 Election: Media and Metaphors,” is to encourage students to examine the language of the election rather than a particular candidate or party.
His students are reading George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. In his book, Lakoff asserts that differing views of the ideal family underlie political differences in the United States and shape partisan disagreements about how to create a moral society.
“What I’m assigning students to do is use the ideas in that book to read one of the discourses in the campaign and the election,” Harris said. “My point is not to suggest that [Lakoff] is right but rather to engage students in testing out his ideas against the evidence in the election and the campaigns.”
Each student in the class is tracking a specific campaign issue, bringing in weekly updates in the form of newspaper articles and brief written assignments that evaluate the language used to describe the issue with Lakoff’s theory in mind. Freshman Alexandra Dupont said the class assignments have brought to light the ideological, partisan divide between the candidates that intensifies each one’s criticisms of the other.
“It’s really given me an understanding that both of the candidates are doing what they truthfully believe is morally right,” she said. “Each sees the other as ridiculous and themselves as the way to help the country out the most.”
Harris said his primary goal is to help his students “become more critical readers and more effective academic writers.” The election, he explained, is an excellent vehicle for achieving these goals. “People learn best when they are reading and talking and writing about issues that matter to them,” he noted.
Assistant Professor of Philosophy Andrew Janiak has taken a different approach in trying to shine the campus spotlight on the upcoming election. He is organizing a public forum called “The Voting Event” that will focus on the logistics and importance of the voting process rather than the candidates and their platforms.
“Our hope is to convince students—particularly after the last election that was so close in so many states—that their votes are significant,” Janiak said.
Janiak added that student-age voters should also take particular interest in this year’s election because they have a stake in many of its central issues, including the economy, military operations in Iraq, social security, health care and education.
At the Sept. 26 event, several faculty members will discuss the history and significance of voting in the United States and compare the nation’s electoral system to voting methods in other countries throughout the world. Students will be able to ask questions, register to vote or pick up information about absentee ballots from all 50 states.
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