Congratulations to Brock’s Model UN Club which won a Distinguished Team award for coming in the top 10% of the 350 university teams competing at the annual Model UN competition in NYC.
Teams came from 125 countries to participate.
Click on photos to enlarge.
The Department of Political Science is shocked and appalled by the racist social media comments posted by retired professor Garth Stevenson. The comments do not in any way conform to the values of the department, and we condemn them.
Our department strives to create an atmosphere of respect and inclusion for students and faculty. We understand that President Gervan Fearon and the Senate will soon be discussing the withdrawal of Garth Stevenson’s emeritus status. The department supports this plan.
In addition, we plan to host a public forum in the fall that will address reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
Paul Hamilton, Chair
Department of Political Science
Brock University
The Department of Political Science is happy to announce that one of our own, Associate Professor Livianna Tossutti, has won the 2018 Faculty of Social Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching. In conferring the award, the adjudicating committee highlighted Prof. Tossutti’s commitment to teaching, her work on experiential learning and her embrace of innovative pedagogy in the classroom, as well as student testimonials describing her as “inspiring.” We couldn’t agree more.
Prof. Tossutti will formally receive the award at June Convocation.
Congratulations, Prof. Tossutti!
Thursday, March 1, 2018
10 am
Plaza 600F
In this talk, Dr. David E. Smith, OC, FRSC, will speak to the state of the Senate as a political institution. Specifically, he will discuss whether the Senate is in crisis and what makes the Canadian Senate different from others.
David E. Smith is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University and Professor Emeritus, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. He has taught in the Department of Political Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, from 1964 to 2004, and is a previous President of the Canadian Political Science Association. His publications include a trilogy of works on each of the parts of Parliament, as well as books on political parties, the constitution, and federalism. The People’s House of Commons: Theories of Democracy in Contention (University of Toronto Press) won the Donner Prize for the best book in Canadian public policy in 2007, and Across the Aisle: Opposition in Canadian Politics (2013), won the Canada Prize in Social Sciences in 2014. His most recent book (2017) is The Constitution in a Hall of Mirrors: Canada at 150 (University of Toronto Press).
For further information, please contact Nicole Goodman, Department of Political Science.
It is hard for me to imagine the Brock Political Science Department without the presence of Bill Matheson, even though he had been retired for many years. I came to the Department more than thirty years ago, and Professor Matheson exemplified for me everything that was good about Brock University. He loved the university. He gave most of his professional life to the university, and we are all better for his contributions. Professor Matheson’s accomplishments are many, and they bridge university teaching, university administration, scholarship, and community leadership. Surely, though, his greatest legacy is in the thousands of students he taught at Brock.
A word of advice that Bill Matheson gave to me as a young novice professor: “be careful what you say and what you do: after a decade here, everywhere you go in the Niagara Region, there will be students, present and former, who greet you and remember you.” It was good advice, although almost none of us in the Political Science Department has had as many students travel through our classes. For generations of Political Science students, Professor Matheson’s legendary first year lectures were their introduction to the discipline. The great political thinker Hannah Arendt commented on more than one occasion that for some individuals the ‘who’ of a person – his presence – is greater than the sum of his accomplishments. Think of those lucky thousands of Brock students who got to experience the ‘who’ of Professor Matheson.
– Leah Bradshaw
“Bill Matheson’s legacy was anything but common,” The Brock News, December 12, 2017.
