The University of Portland’s political science department is introducing three new courses starting fall 2025 in response to student concerns about limited upper-division courses.
According to Jeffery Meiser, associate professor and department chair, these additions aim to support students’ academic and career preparedness while broadening the available political science topics.
Political science majors and minors will have a senior capstone course, which was previously not offered in this department. It will remain optional until the class of 2030. The department will also introduce two new courses on LGBTQ+ legal rights and strategic decision making in politics and policy.
These changes come as the department works to balance student demand with limited faculty availability, a challenge they plan to address by hiring adjunct professors.
Senior Capstone
According to Meiser, the political science department’s new capstone aims to address career readiness, a pressing topic in liberal arts education today due to the rise of funding towards STEM programs.
The class will begin to be offered in fall 2025, and will become a required course for all political science majors in 2030.
In the course, students will refine papers they wrote in previous upper-division courses to include in an academic portfolio along with internship evaluations and fieldwork experience.
Political Science Assistant Professor Laura Zuzan-Golesorkhi is designing the course, and William Curtis, a political science professor, will be teaching it in the fall.
Emma Beadle, a senior political science major, believes the new capstone course will help students as they enter professional fields.
“I do appreciate the career readiness piece,” Beadle said. “There are some questions that you can’t go to the Career Center and just ask. You have to ask those questions of professors, of people in your field and people who have experience in what you want to [do].”
Both Curtis and Beadle were enthusiastic about a course that would be common ground among all political science majors.
“A capstone is supposed to put a cap and ribbon on what they’ve done,” Curtis said.
LGBTQ Rights and the Courts
Elaina Barker, a graduate employee in the University of Oregon’s political science department, will teach LGBTQ Rights and the Courts as an adjunct at University of Portland. The new course is designed to teach students about LGBTQ+ rights and the real-world consequences of legal decisions.
“[I’m really excited] to design it [the course] and for students to engage in the material,” Barker said.
According to Barker, the class content was inspired by her master’s thesis at the University of Oregon, which explored LGBTQ+ rights, specifically marriage rights.
The course will begin at the macro level by studying general legal processes and then transition to covering pertinent legal actors, like judges, activists and government officials.
“At the end, we’ll look at how a lot of these decisions and policies affect these individuals and different aspects of their lives,” Barker said.
According to Barker, the latter half of the course will study LGBTQ+ rights on the micro level, looking at issues such as parenting and relationship recognition, as well as housing, education and policies regarding LGBTQ+ people in the military.
However, because this course will be taught by an adjunct, it is unclear whether or not it will be offered on a continuing basis due to the lack of available faculty to teach courses, according to Meiser.
“The classes taught by adjuncts come and go,” Meiser said. “This is the first time it’s [LGBTQ Rights and the Courts] being offered. It’s an adjunct. We don’t know how long the adjuncts will be teaching with us.”
Despite the uncertainty, Beadle hopes the department will continue considering student voices and opinions on course offerings.
“I hope there is a continued emphasis on student input, as there has been in the past,” Beadle said. “I hope students participate and give feedback to the professors and know how accessible and flexible the department is.”
How to Strategy
How to Strategy, taught by Meiser, will be structured similarly to his Strategies of War and Peace course, but will cover topics ranging from understanding political strategy to creating and implementing it.
“[It’s] really an exploration of ‘What is strategy?’ and how it is useful in our lives across different areas,” Meiser said.
Throughout the course, students will assess political campaigns, social movements and military strategies and then analyze their implementations.
“The big project for the students will be to take pretty much any area of interest to them and analyze the strategy that’s being implemented in that area or create their own strategy,” Meiser said.
Meiser explained that since he and Curtis will teach the senior capstone and How to Strategy courses, students can expect them to be permanent additions to the political science department.
Clara Pehling is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at pehling28@up.edu.
