Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.
UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download [...]

Treasure trove of courses at UCSD

University of California San Diego is offering a record 63 courses available for free download on its podcast website this quarter, enough to fill your mp3 player for months to come. But carpe diem, seize the day. Most of these riches will only stay on the website until the end of the quarter (roughly mid-December), [...]

Justice course from Harvard

You’ve probably seen the Socratic method at work in the give-and-take of a small classroom. The teacher asks provocative questions and then synthesizes the responses into new insights. It’s a great way to learn and think about complicated problems.
But can this method worked in a large lecture hall with thousands of students? Harvard political philosopher [...]

Fall quarter 2009 at UCLA and UCSD

Classes start Sept 24 at UCLA and UCSD, and now you can check out the rosters of new courses here and here.
Some of my favorite professors will be back. Historian Matthew Herbst will be teaching Making of the Modern World 4 (feed), which covers world history from 1200 to 1750. And political science [...]

It’s time to grab summer courses at UCSD

It’s time to check out the UCSD podcast website again, and quickly grab any courses that tickle your fancy, before UCSD erases them.
There are 12 courses from the recently ended Summer Session I, and Summer Session II is underway, with 8 courses.
I especially recommend Victor Magagna’s courses, East Asian Political Thought (feed) and Politics and [...]

The ‘Game of Life’ and the 1960s Counterculture

I lived through the late 1960s as a student at UC Berkeley, the epicenter of the counterculture and radical chic. And yet somehow I missed the grand intellectual underpinnings of hippie-dom and the Summer of Love. (The people I knew who championed “People’s Park” and wore dashikis were mainly the lazy kids who’d rather [...]

Machiavelli: not such a bad guy

For almost 500 years Niccolò Machiavelli and his treatise, The Prince, have gotten some pretty bad press. In the popular imagination, Machiavelli is synonymous with the amoral, ruthless pursuit of power.
But seen up close, The Prince is actually much more nuanced and interesting than its popular caricature would suggest. That’s the main take-home lesson of [...]

The Middle East as a game of “Risk”

Want to think about the Middle East in a whole new way? Check out The War in Gaza and Southern Israel: Ramifications for Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East (website, iTunes), a lecture by Tel Aviv University historian Asher Susser, given at UCLA in February 2009 in the wake of the Gaza war.
Susser describes [...]

Time is running out for UCSD winter 09 courses

The last day of class for winter 2009 at UCSD is Friday, March 13. Soon after that most of the course podcasts at the UCSD podcast website will disappear.
Some courses you might want to grab before it is too late:
Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution/1660-1848 (website, feed) Eric Watkins.
This interdisciplinary course covers the philosophy, literature, science and art [...]

You’re invited to free class on global warming

In what may be a first in free open-access education, the University of Pennsylvania is inviting all comers to take part in a course on Sustainable Environmental Policy & Global Politics (website, iTunes, YouTube).
You can download the lectures on iTunes or view them on YouTube and then take part in message boards and blogs at [...]