One Political Scientist's List of Giant Problems that Deserve our Attention...

When I was an undergraduate student at DePauw University, of the first professors I had was a professor by the name of Dr. Robert E. Calvert. His Introduction to Political Theory class was the most intellectually engaging course I have ever taken. It was in his class that I think I first experienced the joy of intellectual rigor. I would go on to take every single class that Calvert offered. He was a big reason I was a political science minor.

At any rate, Calvert recently gave a lecture at Indiana University, and though I'm not at liberty to post his entire speech, I did want to post his introduction.

The speech was given to a small college within the general population of IU. This school is filled with students who want to go out and make a positive social change in their world. Calvert was there to cheer them on, and in the process, listed what he saw as some of the biggest problems in modern American, after spending 40 years being a political science professor. His list is interesting, and ideally will prompt discussion.

1. that the American family is said to be the weakest, least cohesive, of any in the modern, industrialized world;

2. that in this most affluent society that ever existed, there is a large and growing gap between rich and poor, with what we once called “pockets of poverty” resembling what one finds in the third-world, while our middle class is said to be disappearing;

3. that America has the largest percentage of its population in prisons of any other modern nation in the world;

4. that Americans are more and more divided between those who are religious and those who are not, with consequences that ripple throughout the rest of American life, and especially our politics;

5. that American corporations struggling to make it in a global economy are abandoning what used to be their “social welfare” obligations to their employees and their families;

6. that when it comes to scandals and corruption, the American corporate world easily matches that of politics and government;

7. that the U. S., though ostensibly democratic, is governed in most matters more and more by judges and bureaucrats than by elected officials;

8. that in the name of business and presumably privileged levels of consumption, we have become the world’s largest debtor nation, and also addicted to oil;

9. that America in the world today has lost its good reputation and is distrusted or hated by peoples elsewhere, even by some of our former friends;

10. and finally – but I could go on – there is sharp disagreement among us over whether our future as a nation is somehow already foreordained by what is called globalization, or whether we still have important choices about the larger contours of our national life.

That's his list? What's yours? Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know.