The Faculty
The Department of Political Science was founded in 1974 and currently has 41 faculty members and 11 adjunct faculty who represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds, methodologies, and approaches. Ours is a young department and yet it has skyrocketed to prominence among political science departments in the United States. The most recent National Academy of Sciences study ranks us among the top ten graduate programs in political science in the country.
When asked to identify the most important qualities of our program, we come up with a list of characteristics that make UCSD's department an unusually congenial place to be, for faculty and students alike. Members of our department are bound together by our commitment to theoretically informed research; our individual projects may be empirical case studies, philosophical investigations, or formal theory, but they all contribute to the major theoretical developments in the discipline. In addition, we value the collegial community of scholarship in which intellectual differences are not battle lines, but points of fruitful exchange, the informal environment in which faculty and graduate students can easily involve themselves in each other's research, and in which opportunities for independent work are made available to undergraduates; and the devotion to excellence in teaching.
Graduate Program
Consistent with our NAS rating, the most recent US News and World Report survey ranks our graduate program as 7th in the nation. Another study, completed at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, ranks us as 6th in the world. The department also ranked 1st in the nation in overall graduate student satisfaction in the most recent NAGPS National Doctoral Program Survey. Another recent survey, published in Foreign Policy, ranks our department in the top 10 International Relations schools for both academic and policy careers.
We believe these impressive rankings are a reflection of our commitment to building a program in which our students benefit from and contribute to the intellectual vitality of the department not only in their dissertation research, but also through their work with faculty on collaborative research projects.
Our doctoral program encompasses four broad sub-fields: American politics, comparative politics, international relations, and political theory. The department and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies also offer a joint PhD which builds on the considerable strengths that each unit currently possesses and offers a distinct focus. The department enrolls approximately 15-20 new graduate students each fall.
Graduate placements include appointments at leading government agencies and research institutions and assistant professorships at California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Duke University, Harvard University, Notre Dame, UCLA, University of Minnesota, SUNY, and other prestigious universities.
Undergraduate Program
Political Science is the sixth largest concentration on campus, with over nine percent of UCSD students graduating from our department. Our department offers a general political science major along with six areas of concentration - American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory, public law, and public policy. In recent years, many of our students have been admitted to leading graduate programs in political science, international business, and law.
The heart of the UCSD campus belongs to its six undergraduate colleges - Eleanor Roosevelt, Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, John Muir, Revelle and our newest college, Sixth. Our college system combines the friendly intimacy of a small campus with the academic advantages of a major research university. Each of these colleges has a unique educational philosophy and different graduation requirements. Each faculty member is formally affiliated with one of these colleges. Departmental courses are open to students of all colleges and we have a single set of major requirements.