Mission Statement
The Department of Political Science creates knowledge and insights through cutting-edge research and educates students for responsible citizenship and for a diverse range of fulfilling careers. We engage in research using a variety of theoretically-informed and rigorous methods to credibly communicate evidence and identify new puzzles related to themes of global and transnational challenges, identities and group competition, democratization and development, and representation and accountability. This research informs state-of-the-art teaching through a skills-oriented curriculum that emphasizes the analytic, communication, disciplinary, and research tools distinctive of political science. We accomplish these goals by fostering collaborations among faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students both within and outside of the department.
Commitment to Inclusivity
The Department aims to create and sustain a scholarly community, inclusive and welcoming of all those who seek to better understand politics. While we implement specific, proactive measures to overcome barriers to inclusivity posed by historical and structural inequities, we also foster a general ethos of respect for all viewpoints, especially those that might challenge us in our quest for disciplinary excellence and departmental comity. We seek to promote inclusivity through encouraging diversity of thought and perspective, even and especially when doing so might generate discomfort.
As political scientists, we understand how differently situated people are differentially affected by laws, norms, policies, and institutions. We also recognize that those differences in experience are highly correlated with social positions constructed by race, ethnicity, and national origin; gender and sexual orientation; income and social status; age, ability, and professional history/veteran status, among other factors. Therefore, we appreciate that achieving inclusivity and diversity of thought results in part from the diversity of experience that exists among faculty, students, and staff. We are therefore committed to implementing strategies designed to help us achieve inclusivity by recruiting, hiring, and retaining diverse faculty, students and staff.
While these strategies must be continually evaluated and adjusted, certain core principles guide our approach. We believe it important to have a comprehensive faculty recruitment strategy that begins with how we define positions and assess disciplinary excellence, involves active, concerted outreach efforts, and follows through with sustained mentoring and retention programs. While we are concerned with all dimensions of diversity, we particularly recognize the need to hire Black scholars in multiple fields of study as part of a broad, intersectional strategy for recruitment.
We also understand that the same historical and structural inequities that make explicit attention to inclusivity necessary affect each of us as individuals and as scholars, and we are committed to identifying and addressing such biases in our intellectual and departmental work. One way we do so is through proactive attempts to overcome the effects of biases in our hiring, admissions, and promotion decisions and in our evaluation of scholarly work. We have established a departmental committee on Equity and Inclusion, and members of that committee will work with hiring and graduate admissions committees to improve recruitment processes. We commit to holding regular implicit bias, anti-racist, and decolonizing the curriculum workshops for faculty and graduate students, and to creating an ombuds mechanism for the Department.
Our commitment to inclusivity through diversity entails that we work, jointly and individually, to cultivate an environment of mutual respect and appreciation and of constructive disagreement in the Department. As colleagues, we commit to uphold and defend academic freedom, to show respect and appreciation for the opinions of others as we exchange and criticize ideas, to acknowledge academic debts, to be professional in our evaluations of one another’s work and of the work of students and staff; to avoid discrimination, harassment, and demeaning behavior; to refuse to tolerate such behavior; and, to respect the privacy of all members of our community.
As teachers, we commit to diversifying our syllabi to include more works by women, Black, and Latinx scholars and voices from other underrepresented groups, which are often overlooked, whenever doing so is consistent with the pedagogical goals of the course and mindful that doing so will often advance the pedagogical goals of a course. We also commit to rethinking how we teach by questioning the construction of knowledge in our discipline and challenging familiar assumptions, concepts, measures, ideologies, and values. We pledge to make our classrooms more inclusive by using examples in our teaching that are respectful and illustrative of a variety of life experiences, to promote gender balance in class discussions, and more generally to enable classroom participation from all students. We will also work to identify Black and Latinx students and students from other underrepresented and minoritized groups who show promise as scholars and to encourage them to pursue and achieve their scholarly and professional goals.
(This statement was approved by the faculty of the Department of Political Science on September 16, 2020. We gratefully acknowledge our reliance on the best practices shared by the Dept. of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder.)
Posvar Hall
The Political Science Department is located in Wesley W. Posvar Hall on the southeast corner of Pitt's Oakland campus. It is adjacent to Hillman Library and the Katz School of Business Administration. In addition to the Department of Political Science, Posvar Hall also houses the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, History, and Sociology. It is also home to the School of Education, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), the program for Africana Studies, the Undergraduate College of Business Administration, and the program for Urban Studies.
Posvar Hall is also the largest classroom building on campus. At 74,695 square feet, its floor area is equivalent to that in the Cathedral of Learning. Posvar Hall was built on the site of the former Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1909-1970. Babe Ruth hit his last two home runs at the ballpark. It is also the site of the 1960 World Series pennant win by the Pirates over the New York Yankees, with the tie-breaking home run hit by Bill Mazeroski in the final inning to propel the Pirates to victory. The spot at which the ball left the outfield is marked with a commemorative plaque, and the actual home plate from Forbes Field has been preserved under glass in the floor of Posvar Hall. The last two games played on the field—a double-header against the Chicago Cubs—were won by the Pirates, 4-1 and 3-2.