Why we're starting this blog

We have a mission for the political science program here at Anderson University. We want our graduates to be people who can understand, evaluate, manage, and shape political events and governmental actions in a manner consistent with a Christian faith perspective. We don’t believe that this can be done without engaging the world beyond our classroom in a variety of ways, including social media. This also means that we on the faculty need to model the sort of engagement we want our students to emulate.

As this site develops you’ll see posts from faculty addressing issues, events, and research related to political science, and readers will learn about what political scientists do in their field, as well as what we we’re about specifically in our program here at AU.  We also hope that you’ll see students sharing their own research and experiences with things like internships and study abroad in their own words.

So, what are the ground rules?

What you won’t see is a discussion that is not moderated. As part of our mission we have high expectations for our behavior. Commenters will be registered and comments that engage in personal attacks, electioneering, unprofessional or abusive comments about groups of people, or language that we wouldn’t allow in our classes will not be permitted. All posts and comments will be moderated, going through the political science faculty for review.

We will at all times attempt to model civil discourse, knowing that reasonable minds can disagree and that multiple perspectives on public policy may be consistent with a Christian faith perspective.

We won’t endorse candidates, political parties, or platforms. You won’t see us take stances in opposition to university policies. But, we may discuss specific decisions made by elected officials, for example, or internship experiences that students have had with political leaders. AU values an atmosphere of free and open inquiry, meaning you’ll see a wider degree of freedom compared with some faith-based institutions in terms of what we research and discuss. But, we don’t take sides against our church family.

People who violate our ground rules may be blocked from posting comments by the authors.

If you have any questions about how we do things, suggestions about what you’d like to see here, or are someone in the AU community wishing to contribute ideas, please let the authors know.