We asked faculty from the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities at Haverford to give us their thoughts about the upcoming year by responding to the following question: "What do you think will be the most significant development or trend in your field of study in 2004 and why?"
Sid Waldman is a professor of political science who has long been interested in the American political process: policy making in Congress, the American presidency, and selected problems in institutional, behavioral, and public policy analysis in the American political system.
“There are a number of questions and concerns that political scientists should be addressing in 2004. Among them are:
1. Understanding why 'they hate us.'
2. How we can more effectively get foreign aid to people.
3. How we can be more open and less ethnocentric in thinking about and conceptualizing democracy.
4. Better understanding the limits of force.
5. How can we get people to see those they don't see, both in our own country and the world.
6. Seeing the ways in which the arts can help us see things more clearly and how that can supplement social science and journalism.
7. Understanding what's involved in seeing and in that seeing/hearing that makes a difference.
8. Understanding how a shallowness of living can breed and maybe even require more shallowness. Seeing how this is demonstrated in contemporary life and what allows people to begin to get out from under this. Realizing the importance of mortality, that life is limited in duration, in affecting what we can come to see.
9. How we can free ourselves from the superficial coverage of American and world politics. Realizing this will require entrepreneurs of analysis and imagination.
10. Understanding the significance of modern technology for our security or rather the threats to it. Trying to understand what that means for our ability to control our fate and what the limits of that control mean for how we need to be in the world."
