Message from the Executive Director

Branding the GSPM

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A major initiative we have to embrace here at GSPM is a marketing/communications/branding effort. We have talked about it in both community forums so far, and it is clear from those discussions that we need to raise the visibility of our programs and our people if we want to have the impact we aim for here at GSPM. There are already a few things in motion to make this happen:

Distinguished Lecture Series
We are very pleased to announce the launch of this series, which will bring major practitioners to GW to speak about their experiences with the GSPM students, alumni, and faculty. These events, to be held at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium in our MPA Building, will showcase GSPM’s connection to the field, and will give the GSPM community the chance to learn from the most successful players in professional politics. It also allows us to bring in media to follow this series, and to get our name out there much more effectively. I thank Prof. Larry Parnell of the Strategic Public Relations program for putting this event together, and I look forward to many more of these.

Marketing Director Search
We have received a pile of resumes from interested people and the search committee is already at work reviewing the candidates. We hope to have interviews shortly, and a candidate soon after that. We are looking for a director who can build on the innovative marketing campaign launched in the past two years, which has brought in excellent students – and we want more of them. In addition to the increased use of social media and a more targeted approach to student recruiting, the strategy sent GSPM people to participate in key conference and meetings where likely students gather, to raise our profile and give people a chance to talk to us in a no-pressure environment. One of the most interesting of these efforts is sending GSPMers to the big SXSW conference in Austin, TX. Kyle McClellan is going this year to be a presenter, which is great for him and for us – he will be an excellent representative of what we do at GSPM, and that helps get our name out there some more.

We will keep working on raising our visibility, and if you have ideas, or want to help, please let me know!

Evaluating Academic Rigor

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Last week we talked about a theme that was part of last month’s community forum – how GSPM fits into the GW community. I hope that was useful and informative; we will be more successful if we fully embrace our role as a team player in GW.

This week I want to follow that up by discussing another of the themes that came up: The academic programs at GSPM, and how to improve them. With a small full-time faculty and a heavy reliance on adjuncts, this is one of the most important efforts we make at GSPM – and I know that we cannot do it without the advice and ideas of the whole GSPM community.

Academic Rigor: A Student Initiative

One of the most interesting and valuable recent efforts to make GSPM better came from a group of students in the legislative affairs program. They put together an excellent report on ways to increase the academic rigor of their program, and I think their ideas apply to all of our programs. The four main recommendations the group made were these:

1. Set the Academic Bar Higher: While many of our students are here straight from their undergraduate days, many of them come to class with extensive professional experience already. We need to make sure to teach at a level that challenges them, and calls on the younger classmates to rise to that level, too. GSPM must get past the intro-level material quickly and work on more advanced topics earlier.
2. Connect Classes: Is there a logical and obvious connection between the core courses? There is, on paper – but we could do better to make the classes link in a coherent way in practice.
3. Good Balance of Theoretical and Practical: The GSPM’s goal is to provide a real-world educational experience with a practical focus. We have to make sure that the balance between frameworks or models and application to real issues stays solid.
4. Basic Course Standardization: With several faculty teaching many of the core courses, are the different versions covering the same material? Are the assignments similar, and the grading equal across different sections? This is a very tough one, and demands more work from us to make sure there is a clear, set version of each of the core courses, regardless of who teaches a particular section of the class.

The students also had many other good suggestions that we are using to improve the program. I like their work so much that I am using it in political management too. Two suggestions for political management were to offer an opposition research class (we will do so this summer) and to create a class on website design for causes/issue campaigns (I am still looking for faculty on that one).

Improving Rigor: Initial GSPM Responses

Legislative affairs is taking the lead in developing ways to make our programs more rigorous. The students in that program made the first comprehensive recommendations, and the program is just starting an eighteen-month process of program review, which all academic programs do every five years at GW. The other GSPM programs are learning from this process and adapting it to their courses as well.

Dr. Steve Billet, the director of legislative affairs, worked from the student report to produce new guidelines for the program that he has already put into effect. He is reviewing every syllabus to see that the core courses do follow a similar pattern, and that each course in the core sequence builds on the others without too much overlap. He has also tasked the faculty with writing their own end-of-course evaluation for each class, which he reviews along with student evaluations. This is going to give him a better sense of how each course has been conducted, and how we can improve each of them.

Legislative affairs is also beginning to work on developing rubrics to guide assignments and grading, and those will be used across the whole program once they are set. This is especially helpful in classes where many faculty teach – it helps to keep the classes more consistent.

The students who did the report deserve all of our thanks for thoughtful recommendations and a great deal of work. I appreciate that effort and promise to equal it in bringing these recommendations to life in PMGT, following the example of legislative affairs.

I bet there are other great ideas like these out there – please keep sharing them, and helping us make the GSPM serve our students better.

George's Vision In Action

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One of the themes that floated around in our community forum was a question about our place in the broader GW community, and in the profession of politics. I have been thinking a lot about that theme over the past few years, and I think we should all do some pondering on that score. I think we are well-placed as members of the GW community, and I think we should celebrate that fact more than we do – we should also call on GW to share in that celebration.

What we are doing at the GSPM is the distilled essence of GW’s mission, and we should be proud of that – and we should be talking that up, everywhere, with everybody...

George Washington’s Vision

In his farewell address, President George Washington called on the Congress to sponsor a national university. He knew that the major universities already in existence all had strong ties of heritage and tradition that bound them to their regions – Harvard was a New England school, King’s (now Columbia) was a New York school, and William and Mary was a Virginia school, to name a few. As long as the nation’s leaders continued to come from schools like these, they would always look to regional interests over a national interest.

To create a cadre of national leaders with a national perspective, the United States needed national universities. The Military and Naval Academies would be founded to provide soldiers and sailors to defend the country, but there needed to be a university in the nation’s new capital to create American leaders. That school, chartered by Congress in 1821, would become The George Washington University.

GW and GSPM

I cannot think of another set of programs at GW that embodies Washington’s vision for a national university better than our programs in GSPM. With our mission, we embrace Washington’s vision:
The Graduate School of Political Management seeks to make politics better by educating its students and professionals in the tools, principles and values of participatory democracy, preparing them for careers as ethical and effective advocates and leaders at the international, national and local level.
We live the vision of President Washington, and we can be the model for the rest of GW in keeping that vision alive. That will be a key theme in building our brand in Washington and worldwide, and in making ourselves more visible and more effective in shaping the profession.

How can we make this connection more visible to GW and to the public? Please share your ideas, questions, or comments with us!