Teaching Public Administration, Spring 1997, Vol. XVIL No.

1, pp 73-78

SEEKING THE HOLY GRAIL? UTOPIAN NOVELS AS AN AID

TO TEACHING AND ASSESSING THE POLITICAL ANALYSIS
COMPONENT OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COURSES1

ALISTAIR McCULLOCH
Edge Hill College ofHigher Education

There are times when teaching public administration to undergraduates is

very rewarding. Equally, there are times when it can be downright
painful. Among the more pleasurable experiences are the times when a
student suddenly sees the connections you have been trying to point out
for the previous ten weeks, or reading an essay which shows a depth of
understanding normally associated only with advanced postgraduate
students. Among the least pleasurable are discovering that a student has
committed plagiarism or reading the 65 essays written by students in
answer to your carefully crafted question only to discover that they all
say more or less the same thing in more or less the same order. After
seven years of teaching a second year course on the BA in Public
AdministrationlPublic Policy and Management at the Robert Gordon
Universitl and suffering more of the less pleasurable and rather less of
the more pleasurable, I decided that the time had come to do something
about the situation. 3

The course in question is entitled 'Political Analysis' and it is a

compulsory course for all students taking the degree. The content has
carried slightly over the years, but the intention is to introduce students
to basic concepts in political science and to the ways in which these can
be used to analyse socio-political structures and behaviours as well as
specific situations. Accordingly, the course syllabus has usually included
the following components in more or less this order.

• Introduction to political analysis: the relationship of political analysis

to the policy process: normative, institutional, rational choice and
empirical approaches.
• Marxist analysis.
• Power, authority and legitimacy.
• Models of the distribution of power.

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• Democracy.
• The state: its development and nature.
• Culture, ideology and political socialisation.
• Participation.
• Oligarchy and Michels.
• Utopianism.

Student reaction to the course is fairly typical and will not surprise any
teacher. A small minority take to the subject in the same way that ducks
take to water and these do not usually present much of a problem. The
more problematic students fall into three groups. First, there are those
who have the perception that they are following a professional or
vocational course and find difficulty in seeing a course which examines
ways of thinking about structures and behaviours (as opposed to
'common sense' interpretations of the structures and behaviours) as
being in any way relevant to their chosen career. Second, there are those
who find it difficult to get to grips with the relatively abstract nature of
much of the material with which they are asked to engage. Third, there
are those who will do anything to minimise the amount of work which
they are asked to do and who will attempt to do this by any means
possible, whether fair or foul.

Setting assessments for a course such as the one described can be

problematic. For each of the topics a standard set of questions presents
itself and it can be difficult to move away from this. Thus, to take the
example of democracy, questions on which students can be asked to
produce essays tend to revolve around the following issues: an
assessment of the classical model of democracy; Schumpeter's
reformulation of it; a comparison of the two models; or, a question
asking whether a particular state or society is in fact as democratic as it
claims to be. The problem with asking these questions is that they have
already been answered, generally very well, by the writers of the texts
which the students are asked to buy as complementary reading for the
course. Additionally, in all probability these questions will have been
addressed at least in part by the teacher during lectures and/or tutorials.
The consequences of this are mUltiple.

First, the weak student who draws heavily on a text unknown to the
teacher (and these are not hard to find in today's environment of
competitive publishing) finds it relatively easy to match or outperform
the dedicated students who try to think through the issues for themselves.

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 A. McCulloch/Seeking the Holy Grail?

By doing this, the dedicated student runs the risk of getting it wrong and
thereby dropping marks - a risk not taken by the weak student producing
highly derivative work. Once it becomes known within the student body
that this is the case, the temptation is for all students to follow the same
practice. The consequence is a demoralised class, a reduction in learning,
a general mistrust on the part of the teacher that any very good piece of
work which is submitted is in fact the student's own work, and a pile of
written work which must be assessed, most of it written in a similar style,
covering much the same ground and not including very much of the type
of writing which makes marking enjoyable.

Having tried a variety of strategies to overcome these tendencies, I

decided to take a radical look at the problem. I began by identifying a
number of objectives for the coursework assessment. These were:

1. To try to incorporate in a single piece of coursework an assessment

of as much of the material covered by the course as possible.
2. To reward students for the amount of work which they put into the
exercise.
3. To reward students who demonstrate that they can correctly apply the
concepts to which they have been introduced in the course.
4. To encourage the students to think.
5. To encourage students to read.
6. To discourage plagiarism.
7. To encourage the students to produce work which I would enjoy
marking.

The most obvious way of trying to meet the first objective would have
been to utilise the 'Using the analytic tools with which you have been
provided, undertake a political analysis of the United KingdomlUnited
States of America/any society with which you are familiar' type of
question. My main concern with this type of question was how I could
give the students access to the material which would allow them to
undertake a political analysis of a society without leading them to texts
which addressed directly the question I had set. Unless I could do that,
this type of assessment question would be unlikely to achieve the other
objectives which I had set for the course, particularly objectives 2,4, 5
and 6. To achieve these objectives would require that the students
complete a piece of coursework for which a political scientist has NOT
provided a ready-made answer in a textbook. What I needed was a
society which had never been the subject of a political analysis, but

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which had been described in some considerable detail in texts which

were reasonably accessible to a second year undergraduate. Given the
ubiquity of political science, this was likely to be a tall order.

However, all was not lost. There is a class of societies which have been
described in an accessible way, which have not been the subject of a
comprehensive political analysis, which are described in texts which
have remained in print across the years, and which are described in ways
which most students find interesting to read. These societies are those
which are described in utopian novels.

Accordingly, in the academic year 1995-96, I introduced the political

analysis of a utopian novel as the major piece of coursework required of
students taking the course. Students were allowed to choose one of the
following four novels:

• Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: A Novel (first published in 1975).

• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (first published in 1932).
• Aldous Huxley, Island (first published in 1962).
• George Orwell, 1984 (first published in 1948).4

To guide them, students were given the following instructions about their
task.

'Book Review: The books which you are offered are 'utopian' novels.
Each of these well-known books has been written with the aim of
presenting the reader with a vision of a society in which things are 'better
than' (a utopia) or 'worse than' (a dystopia) the society with which you
are familiar. I would like you to use the concepts and other tools of
analysis with which the course has provided you to assess your chosen
book. Your assessment could usefully give consideration to the following
aspects of the society described in the book you choose:

• Nature of the power which is exercised in the society.

• Nature of the political system.
• Distribution of power (both formal and empirically).
• Nature of participation in society/politics.
• Nature of social relationships.
• Nature of the integrative structures in the society.
• Role played by ideology in the society.

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 A. McCulloch/Seeking the Holy Grail?

You may introduce other elements as you feel appropriate.

Please back up your observations with evidence in the form of either

page references or quotations with page references. '

In order to prepare them for the coursework, one lecture was dedicated to
a political analysis of a little-known Christian Socialist utopian novel set
in Scotland in the early years of the twentieth century (Watt, 1913) and
verbatim copies of the lecture were made available to the students
through the university library.

The chosen form of assessment met all of the objectives which had been
set for it. First, in order to complete the coursework and gain good
marks, the students had to read a complete book, something which many
undergraduates manage to avoid throughout their entire student career
(objective 5). Second, because no political analyses of these novels have
be~n undertaken using the dimensions students were asked to address,
they are likely to be rewarded for the amount of effort which they put
into the exercise (objective 2) and also for the correct application of the
concepts to which the course has introduced them (objective 3). The
problem of plagiarism is also much reduced because the only texts which
are available on these novels are those which analyse them from the
perspective of English Literature. Any clever students who are tempted
to plagiarise from these sources soon realise that they do not offer a
political analysis of the utopian societies and any less clever students
who do plagiarise from these sources fail to answer the question set and,
as a result, get a low mark (objective 6). The coursework encourages the
students to utilise elements drawn from all sections of the course
(objective 1) and has the wonderful benefit of meeting the seventh
objective, that of providing coursework which, because it is individual
and demonstrates the application of thought, is very interesting to both
read and mark.

An added, and unanticipated, benefit to emerge from this approach to

coursework assessment has been the sheer quality of some of the
analyses which have been undertaken. Because there has been nothing
upon which students can draw heavily, they have been forced to rely
largely upon their own abilities. This seems to have released the creative
talents of many of them and, while the lower end of the spread of marks
is much the same as in previous years, the upper end extends higher up
the scale and contains a larger proportion of the marks that was hitherto

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the case. In order to reflect the difference in quality between the top and
bottom of the range of work submitted for assessment, I have found
myself having to give a number of marks in the high 80s and 90s (per
cent), a hitherto unheard of situation. It seems to be the case that forcing
students onto their own intellectual resources can help them achieve their
potentialities rather than better than does providing them with potted
answers.

Notes

1. I would like to thank my colleague John Moxen for his comments on

an earlier draft of this article.
2. To reflect changes in the overall syllabuses taught in the degree and
in response to changes in the academic and public sector
environment, in 1992 the name of the degree was changed from
Public Administration to Public Policy and Management. The
Political Analysis class remained substantially the same.
3. A similar motivation seems to have laid behind the innovations
reported by John Seitz (1996).
4. These titles can be changed regularly to avoid staleness or the
passage of essays from one cohort of students to the next.

References

Callenbach, E. (1997), Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William

Weston, New York: Bantam Books.
Huxley, A. (1955), Brave New World, Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin.
Huxley, A. (1976), Island, St. Albans, UK: Triad.
Orwell, G. (1954), Nineteen Eighty Four, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.
Seitz, lL. (1996), 'Mission Impossible: Making a Political Science Final
Exam That's Fun to Grade', PS: Political Science and Politics, 20, 3:
pp 525-6.
Watt, F. (1913), Allanforth Commune: The Triumph of Socialism,
Manchester, UK: The National Labour Press. .

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