Teaching the Modern Presidency on the Internet
Russell D. Renka
Professor of Political Science
Southeast Missouri State University
Carnahan 211-L, Mail Stop 2920
Cape Girardeau, MO 63701-4799
e-mail: rdrenka@semo.edu
Presented at the 99th
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, PA;
Short Course 15 - Challenges and Innovations in Teaching the Presidency,
August 27, 2003, 1:00 p.m.
Paper website location:
http://cstl-cla.semo.edu/renka/teaching_presweb.htm
Note:
This paper is written for both web use and print form. Accordingly, the text contains
numerous web links with underlining, for recognition on printed copies of this
file. Print readers can use my Web Links at end of the paper to find their corresponding URL
locations. Remember that with passage of time, URLs often disappear; but
their accompanying filenames can still be used on a search engine to find the
new URLs.
For web readers, I recommend that access to nested links be
done by highlighting the link, right-clicking the mouse, and (in Internet Explorer)
choosing whether to "open" the link in the parent browser or "open in new window."
The default position is to open in the parent browser.
Russell Renka
Several years ago, a former student of mine created a website of source materials for his political science students. He prompted them to use it by insisting that "the web is here to stay." He was correct. It is here for keeps, will grow yet greater in importance, and will demand adaptations to its use by college faculty in practically every discipline.
The modern American presidency lends itself exceptionally well to being taught online, but that's not to say every aspect of the office and its occupant is comparably amenable to website courses. This paper shows that there is wide variation in what is available, in quality control, and in usability. It provides a synopsis for anyone looking to teach about the presidency via extensive use of website materials. It is designed not solely for those who teach on line, but rather for any classroom course that has web access.
The web basis for this paper is my file entitled U.S. Presidency Links - Russell D. Renka (henceforth called Presidency Links). This lengthy annotated links file covers all modern presidents, first via subject-area files, and second through material specific to each of the 12 modern presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through George W. Bush. It has been created as a byproduct of teaching the modern presidency for the past decade-plus with a host of very cost-averse and web-friendly students. It is currently a pure public good, meaning it is free to all users, is available simultaneously to any browsers in the neighborhood, and is not cordoned against those who don't pay for its use.
The Open v. The Closed Web Next down; Top
The first issue with finding usable web resources for classrooms is open site availability. The open web has the characteristics of a "pure public good" with nonrivalrous consumption, nonexcludability, and typically a lack of congestion in supply (Weimer and Vining 1999, 80ff; see Figure 5.2). Put another way, open web resources such as my Presidency Links do not fence anyone out, and are provided at zero marginal cost of consumption for those who access them. The cost of upkeep is fixed, no matter the turnstile count of browsers; I make one "copy" and leave to customers the decision of how many duplications are needed. The only marginal cost linked to usage or congestion is for website servers associated with downloads. To my knowledge, even that cost for non-music files is very low, save for some streaming audio/video applications. Even while open to all, site congestion at my non-streaming Links has not been a problem. That will probably remain so--unless the site somehow achieves public recognition akin to the access-challenged Starr Report of September 1998 impeachment season fame.
But any open public good site like mine can be converted readily to a "toll good" via creating barriers to entry such as fee demands enforced by passwords. University on-line courses routinely do this. Passworded course entry is a typical example of charging a toll for web access, which otherwise remains nonrivalrous and (with very high likelihood) uncongested for its paying customers.
These jargon-larded distinctions are not minor, but rather are crucial to the enterprise of using the web for teaching the presidency. The general openness of web resources is an extremely valuable public good for all of us. If all sites close, the game is over. That has never happened on the web. However, sites put up barriers one at a time. When one valuable site converts itself from public good to toll good, my web practice is to shut off reference to it unless the barrier is readily handled under fair use. That asserts the community's stake in keeping the web open rather than closed. It affirms that a privatized site will see a serious drop in customer traffic. It resembles the music recording industry's problem that privatized music downloads come at expense of volume of customer traffic.
This issue is not a question of copyright, since that falls under 'fair use' doctrine permitting one to link and refer to a site in a way that retains all attribution to its originator and/or proprietor. Rather, the problem is accessibility of material without paying a fee to obtain it.
Fortunately, in 2003 most presidential website materials are still under open access. That is why we do not see wholesale copyright violation via copying material from one site to another. It is far simpler to set up straightforward links to the original site, in confidence that it will remain available indefinitely under the same file name and URL (or with an auto-forward to the newer URLs when target sites are revamped).
Available Web Resources Next down; Top
Audio, Video, Photography, and Artwork
The modern rhetorical presidency, dated from Franklin D. Roosevelt, is exceedingly well represented on the web. For example, the historical presidency prior to the second Roosevelt in 1933 provides few materials enabling students to directly hear the presidents.1 By contrast, every modern president is extensively heard on line via audio files (with FDR), or heard and seen with streaming audio/video files (from Truman onward).
This is a superb opportunity for students, whom I find are consistently enthusiastic about directly seeing and hearing recently past presidents in rhetorical action. Video assemblages can be readily imported into a Power Point or web-based presentation under fair use doctrine. Students can directly hear Franklin Roosevelt's first and second inaugurals, see and hear the celebrated 1944 'my dog Fala' speech, watch Truman in the 1948 campaign, hear and watch obfuscations during Eisenhower press conferences, and compare Kennedy pronouncements at the Berlin Wall with those of Reagan a generation later.
Less public documents of importance can also be accessed. For example, considerable portions of Lyndon Johnson's telephone logs, and Richard Nixon's White House tapes, are available for on-line eavesdroppers. The public C-SPAN site is excellent for entree to these and other resources (LBJ White House Tapes & Nixon White House Phone Calls, at C-SPAN).
Although these resources are sometimes technically inferior to traditional audio and video presentations of the public or the private rhetorical president, the wide array of low-cost online streaming source materials has great advantages in accessibility and cost. Public institutions in the current climate of radical reductions of state support can find solace in substituting web materials for aging videotapes and fair use television excerpts. New video compilations from commercial sources are often prohibitively expensive. Careful judgments so far on use of server space for streaming files are underway, so estimates of true costs to the server-sponsoring institution will doubtless become accurate fairly soon. Meanwhile, subsidization exists via institutional servers, leaving user's monetary and queue costs at near-zero so long as site congestion is not high.
The audio/video side is supplemented with interesting photographic and graphic art galleries associated with modern presidents. Some of these are closely aligned with suitable textual material for apt instruction. For one example, any student seeking insights to modern presidential campaigns can take an historical perspectives from Harry S. Truman's famous 1948 'Whistle Stop' Campaign of train stops throughout much of America (1948 Campaign Campaign Strategies and 1948 Campaign sites). There are many primary-source documents for perusal, including the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" front page headline of the Chicago Tribune, held up for ridicule by Truman on 3 November 1948 after his 1948 election was evident to the world.
These materials are more suitable for classrooms with web access than with traditional blackboard approaches. But even in the latter, assignments using such material provide excellent groundwork for understanding this office and its occupants.
Graphics Top
So what is the web worth to presidency teachers? It's a very rich source of primary visual documents that lend themselves well to classroom teaching. For example, website access in the classroom lets one employ Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections to highlight the State of Florida in 2000 down to the level of congressional districts and counties (at 2000 Presidential Election Results - Florida). Or one can employ two browsers to highlight the county-by-county presidential vote among the 3051 American counties in 2000 compared to 1960 (2000 Presidential Election Results and 1960 Election Results). They are strikingly different despite the rather similar national popular vote outcomes.
One can do somewhat comparable illustrative teaching about elections and voting trends with traditional atlases on visual display. For example, I have employed Kenneth Martis' outstanding Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789-1989, to show congressional election results in something like the manner described above. But this non-web approach suffers considerably. Martis' book is an expensive private good that I don't own but temporarily borrow from the library's public Reference holdings. Therefore I can use it only briefly, and cannot pull it forth on impromptu basis to answer a question or nail home a point. Students also cannot access Martis the way they can Leip. Leip's Atlas is a highly valuable pure public good (currently) yet Leip is not paid for its use, except in reputation via spread-the-word accolades offered by proselytizers like myself.
Data Sources on the Web Top
Audio, video, pictures, and art are charm factors for all students, but for graduate students, access to data is fundamentally important. What is the web's status with respect to this? In brief, it is modest--but getting gradually better.
A strong suit is the presence of basic historical and biographical data about presidents and their administrations. Many students seriously lack the necessary context of time, place, events, and principals to understand a particular administration's incentives and behavior. The web has made this easier to correct than in the past. Major event timelines, lists of Cabinet officials, election results, and their like are abundant.
By contrast, standard data sets such as those richly profiled by Lyn Ragsdale in Vital Statistics on the Presidency are often lacking. And when they are present, it's often in truncated form. For example, The American Presidency Project's data section (americanpresidency.org - Data Archive) has "Presidential Vetoes" divided by president, by regular v. pocket vetoes, and by proportion of overrides against each president. That matches Ragsdale's Table 8-13 (1998, 402) but lacks the contextual statement she employs (p. 372) to give some life to this data. Graduate students may not need this statement, and faculty certainly will not; but undergraduate students often do.
A similar situation prevails on other standard data sites, including The Roper Center's Presidential Job Performance Page, which contains downloadable presidential approval ratings from as far back as Roosevelt in the late 1930s. This is raw data, very interesting in itself but not analyzed at all. For those seeking interpretation of how approval works, go to texts and journals, or directly see Paul Gronke's Web Site for several recent interpretive recent journal papers from Gronke and colleagues.
There are likely to soon be many more fruitful combinations of unprocessed data together with sophisticated interpretations such as Gronke's work. That will be a boon to future graduate students and upper-division research-minded undergraduates alike.
Other Web Assets
Space does not permit adequate coverage of all materials
here, to say the least. Some, including
Welcome to the White House, are
sufficiently well known to require no introduction.2 Others,
like
Search the Public Papers of the Presidents, are limited to the Clinton and
current Bush Administrations once the web became publicly established.
These will eventually be valuable in on-line form, but meanwhile traditional
library uses of these are also essential.
The Wild Wild Web and Quality Control Next down; Top
This "www" term is shorthand for the notorious problem of informational quality controls on the internet. Every presidency scholar and teacher has to recognize that web searches encounters material of highly mixed quality. The special problem for presidency courses is that the subject invites an unrestrained assortment of hobbyists, enthusiasts, and plain crackpots to vet their ideas through personal websites and blogs. A Google search of a few dozen "Kennedy assassination" sites will prove this point.
There is no central authority on the web save the student's instructor. Central control of non-web materials is almost a given since student access to traditional materials is largely vetted through university librarians and the faculty who authorize what books and journals to subscribe. But the web, most obviously, has no such constraint.
Herein lies a certain opportunity. Skilled amateurs and hobbyists are bulwarks of knowledge in many fields, and they can be so here. But when students are cut loose to tour these sites without explicit cautions, trouble is sure to follow. Any instructor who turns students loose here is advised to vet their source citations by requiring something like a short annotation on the source name and affiliations. For example, if the source is a personal hobbyist, students should indicate so.
A corollary problem of quality control is the ideological website. A vast number of these are available on recent presidents. This is shown with the search term "Reagan" or "Reagan+Cold War." Either is enough to draw forth dozens of sites devoted to proving that the 41st President was the ultimate savior of postwar America. For diversity's sake, a good many Kennedy sites are similarly inclined with an ideologically different hero figure. For enemies in lieu of heroes, scan among the Nixon and Clinton sites to find a host of hate-you devotionals.
These sites are often the property of knowledgeable amateurs and hobbyists. Many have extensive web links and valuable interpretive material. However, nearly all are hazardous to students for encouraging severe ideological self-selection of source materials for term papers, oral briefings, and other class assignments. Students should be advised to stipulate the ideological slant of any cited web source that they employ.
My own experience shows a woeful tendency for web-adapted undergraduate students to rely entirely too much on the web for assembling material for course papers. Their idea of a resource search is to write a couple of search terms on Google and Yahoo. Some, especially in web classes where students may never see the professor in habeas corpus, never visit a college or university library. The fact of ready web access to professional journals does not impede this minimal effort criterion. Many students actively resisted journal perusal before the web appeared, and this new open resource has only made that pathway clearer and more enticing.
My recommendation is to partially but not completely fight this tendency. Set up a separate list of web and non-web source requirements, with each being comparable in importance. Web reliance by students is a fact of life, isn't going to go away, and is likely to grow.
Despite these pitfalls, students can be taught good habits via ready access to the web. For instance, the easy access to original documents such as court decisions, White House proclamations, legislation, and presidential speeches is unprecedented. Students can now be expected to back up their evidentiary claims to a far greater extent than in the past. Faculty with classroom web access can employ the web on site to demonstrate how it's done. Students can be expected to back up claims with original-source citations more readily than in the past.
The Weakness of Website Coverage Next down; Top
The primary weakness of presidential web coverage is in readings for students. Unless a syllabus be largely based on journal articles available through JSTOR, the web in 2003 never provides adequate mandatory reading. This section addresses why, and suggests a means of reconciling the problem.
Journals and journal articles are largely treated as public goods, and are available on the web. Published books and readers are private goods, not available on line. So long as this market continues to flourish, there is little to no incentive for leading publishers or scholars to emphasize web material.
Presidency books are not on the web, and barely acknowledge the web's presence as a source of pertinent information. I conducted a survey of 15 primary presidency texts and readers published with copyright years of 2000 or newer.3 All are published by established scholars with highly reputable presses, and many are in multiple editions. Most take the customary topical approach, and two do a chronology of presidents or modern presidents. Every one shared in common that website materials on the presidency are almost totally absent from any citation or discussion.
This informational dearth contributes to a problem cited earlier, of unsupervised student searches on Google and its ilk. These searches are prone to both Type I and Type II errors, leaving students without material they should have and with some material they're better off avoiding. Since Google and all other search engines dredge up sites on the basis of a network of cited references, the presidential academic community has a powerful stake in fostering sites that accomplish this. So far that has not been done to a high degree. If presidency book publishers and presidency syllabi were on line in full hypertext fashion with extensive reference links to good sites, there is a high likelihood that student searches on Google will become far more fruitful.
Books are still strictly in the realm of printed private goods rather than public goods or toll goods. There is some incentive for writers to circumvent that for sake of a website audience (akin to many musicians using web freeware to spread the word), but unrestricted downloading of freeware inhibits the profit motive enough to leave dim prospects for website textbooks and edited readers. Until that is resolved, the weakness will remain.
Once a presidential web book is published, it should meet two criteria. First, it will be a toll good, available only to paying customers. The web is perfectly amenable to this practice, and many organizations have lavish web resources available only to their paying customers (be they individual ones or institutions).
Second, it should incorporate a wealth of links to on line materials on the presidency. To do so, books must escape the confines of strict print form. The leading print form for web material now is the PDF Acrobat file. This is highly effective in skirting the problem of wholesale low-cost downloading and text theft. But it forfeits all the inherent assets of hypertext, including working links to other hypertext. There is never a good reason to read a PDF file on line rather than in print form; PDF is the printer manufacturer's natural ally. For on line books and readers to be truly useful to students, they should take standard hypertext form.
One must grant that books in hypertext form invite the current jeopardy associated with downloaded popular music files. Students may get one copy of the book and file-swap it to others who avoid paying a charge. But academic books are far from the mass-appeal items that popular music files are, so the untested prospect of file-swapping is only a remote future hazard. Also, institutions control access right now to on-line courses by vetting who is properly enrolled and who is not. That could incorporate access to the books for that course, as they reside behind this firewall. It is a challenge, but not an insuperable one.
And once all that is done, faculty and students will have a true wealth of on line material to employ for teaching and learning about the American presidency. That will be a good day for our shared profession.
1. Vincent Voice Library's U.S. Presidents of the Twentieth Century has one sampling for presidents from Benjamin Harrison through Herbert Hoover.
2.
But one is advised to remind students to run current White House
information through a filter to detect political flackery. The White House
is a prototypical "chamber of commerce tour" site in the sense of placing only
favorable interpretations upon events.
This characteristic also pervades the former White House
sites associated with the Clinton Administration. A Clinton flackery site
is seen at
President William J. Clinton - Eight Years of Peace, Progress and Prosperity.
The former Clinton White House site has moved to NARA at the home site of
Welcome To The White House.
3. The text/reader authors are Cohen and Nice; Cronin and Genovese; Edwards and Wayne; Genovese; Greenstein; Kessel; C. Jones; Milkis and Nelson; Nelson; Pfiffner; Pfiffner and Davidson; Pika, Maltese, and Thomas; Roper; Thomas and Pika; and Waterman, Wright, and St. Clair. Publishers are Addison Wesley Longman; Bedford St. Martin's; Chatham House; CQ Press; Edinburgh University Press; The Free Press; McGrawHill; Oxford University Press; and Westview.
Website References: Next down; Top
American Presidency Project, americanpresidency.org Audio - Video Archive at URL: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu (henceforth, the prefix http:// is dropped from URL citations)
Annual Meeting Preliminary Program Meetings American Political Science Association (APSA) - Short Course 15,"Challenges and Innovations in Teaching the Presidency," Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003; URL: www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/program.cfm?event=1429601Clinton White House (now located at NARA site): President William J. Clinton - Eight Years of Peace, Progress and Prosperity at URL: http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-index.html; parent site is Welcome To The White House located at NARA-linked URL: http://clinton5.nara.gov/.
Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections at URL: www.uselectionatlas.org/; also 2000 Presidential Election Results - Florida at URL: www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/GENERAL/PE2000/pe2000FL.html; also 2000 Presidential Election Results at www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/GENERAL/pe2000.html ; and 1960 Election Results at www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/GENERAL/pe1960.html.
Google and Overture - The search engines www.google.com and www.overture.com provide a good pairing for web Searches. I recommend using the same search term concurrently on both sites, in separate browsers, to vet sites and locate promising material.
LBJ White House Tapes & Nixon White House Phone Calls, at C-SPAN; URLs: www.c-span.org/lbj/homepage.asp and www.c-span.org/apa/nixon.asp
Paul Gronke's Web Site at URL: http://www.reed.edu/~gronkep/papers.html
Presidency Research Group, Presidency Links at URL: cstl-cla.semo.edu/Renka/PRG/PRG_links.asp
Presidential Job Performance Page from The Roper Center; URL: http://roperweb.ropercenter.uconn.edu/cgi-bin/hsrun.exe/roperweb/PresJobRatings40/PresJobRatings40.htx;start=HS_presapproval_home (or go to my U.S. Presidency Links - Russell D. Renka and look up "Approval Ratings of Presidents")
Project Whistle Stop (Harry S. Truman): 1948 Campaign at URL: www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/1948campaign/large/docs/1948campaign_baseold.htm; and 1948 Campaign: Campaign Strategies at URL: www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/1948campaign/large/docs/campaign_strategies.htm
Public Papers of the Presidents, at Search the Public Papers of the Presidents; URL: http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/pubpaps/srchpaps.html
Starr Report at URL: thomas.loc.gov/icreport/
Syllabus - Spring 2003 from Russell D. Renka, "The Modern Presidency," at URL: ustudies.semo.edu/ui320-75/course/syllabus_2003.htm
U.S. Presidency Links - Russell D. Renka at URL: cstl-cla.semo.edu/renka/PresidencyLinks.htm
Vincent Voice Library's U.S. Presidents of the Twentieth Century at URL: www.lib.msu.edu/vincent/presidents/
Welcome to the White House (Bush Administration) ; URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov
References outside the Web: Top
Martis, Kenneth C. The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789-1989. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
Ragsdale, Lyn. 1998. Vital Statistics on the Presidency. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Weimer, David L., and Aidan R. Vining. 1999. Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice, 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
TopCopyright©2003, Russell D. Renka