The most interesting and useful class I had in graduate school was Ira Katznelson’s seminar called Lineages of American Political Science. As far as I know, he only taught it once, and I was lucky enough to be part of it during my first year as a PhD student at Columbia. I had been something of an oversocialized undergraduate student—my advisors and professors had already filled me in on what I might find in the profession—so I already had some sense of the deep methodological and vocational divisions within the discipline of Political Science when I entered my PhD program. So on that first day, when people were introducing themselves and talking about their interest in the seminar, I said that I was interested in taking this class so I could figure out how the heck we got ourselves into this mess—with “this mess” being the overall state of Political...

You do not currently have access to this content.