Political Science

Overview

Unlike many undergraduate programs in political science, our faculty’s background and our location near New York City offers our political science majors and minors the chance to interact with every level of politics imaginable.

Students regularly attend public lectures and conferences on global affairs at NYC-based international organizations such as the United Nations. Professors organize special visits and theme-based class trips to the United Nations Development Program, the UN Security Council and UN-linked advocacy groups. An exciting part of the political science curriculum, the Harvard Model U.N. permits students to gain first-hand experience at the processes of conference diplomacy and negotiation that characterize international politics.

And our Guarini Institute for Government and Leadership regularly brings top names from global, federal, state and local politics to campus for lectures and workshops.

From local advocacy to world affairs, at Saint Peter’s you can master the road from political theory to practice.

Mission

It is the mission of the Political Science program at Saint Peter's University, broadly stated, to prepare our students to be knowledgeable, politically active, and ethical citizens not only in their local community, but also their country, and as members of an increasingly global society. To prepare our students to attain this goal necessitates the teaching of a science of politics; i.e., a rigorous, questioning, and probing analysis of what Madison (See quote above) right calls “the common affairs of the people”. While the faculty of the department recognizes that the life paths of our students are likely to lead them into professional fields which are not viewed as being closely related to the specific study of politics, we seek to give our students a basic foundation in the four disciplines of the study of politics. – American politics, comparative politics, international politics, and political theory and social justice. It is the shared view of the department’s faculty that through this scientific grounding we can best assure the completion of our mission.