While some professors teaching government at Clemson have not encountered issues with coursework and curriculum from the 43-day United States government shutdown, others have.
Lecturer George Fields found that the shutdown has “directly impacted” his courses.
The longest government shutdown in the nation’s history began on Oct. 1 and ended on Nov. 12 after the House of Representatives voted to pass legislation to reopen the government, according to NBC News.
Fields teaches POSC 4210: Public Policy and POSC 4030: United States Congress in the political science department at Clemson.
While he spent time revising his semester-long assignments, Fields found himself spending a “good deal of class time explaining what the shutdown is” while also explaining to the students why it had happened.
The outcomes gave “great conversations and learning opportunities,” but ultimately led to pressure to meet the “curricular goals of the courses,” Fields told The Tiger in an interview.
Fields requires students who take his courses to track government activity throughout the entire semester. In his policy course, students select a federal agency and follow its policies, which they then work on in correspondence with Congress and the government as a whole. In his congressional course, students select a congressional committee and follow its work through journals.
Fields noted that within his public policy course, it’s hard to “track agency actions when the shutdown brings to a complete stop most administrative activity.”
In his congressional course, Fields explained that it’s difficult to track Congress’s committee actions when one chamber has been “in recess for almost two months.”
His goal in both classes has been to teach students how these agencies and committees operate in real time.
However, Fields believes that adaptability is important, so he had students in each course conduct a deep dive into the shutdown and its impact on the agencies and congressional committees.
Students in his classes have come to him with frustrations related to the coursework.
These frustrations are related to completing assignments, understanding what the shutdown is, why it happens and how it could have been avoided.
From an academic perspective, Fields finds frustration in the shutdown’s impact on his ability to execute the curriculum. He told The Tiger that it’s difficult to show “students how Congress is supposed to function when it hasn’t for the last month and a half.”
He also noted that an “upside to the shutdown … is that at least students have something relevant to talk about!”
Other professors in the political science department, such as Alfred Bundrick and Jeffrey Peake, have not had any issues with the government shutdown in relation to the courses they teach.
“I have not had a specific class on this issue, but we do address it in class and discuss its ramifications,” Bundrick told The Tiger. He explained that his class does not “receive federal funds” and has not been impacted by the shutdown.
Further, Peake noted that his students “discuss it like other current events.” The shutdown was an “Exhibit A” in the class discussion of “dysfunctional Congress.”
