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Distinguished Speaker Series

The Pi Sigma Alpha Distinguished Speaker Series consists of videotapes of lectures delivered at Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association by eminent members of the political science profession and others.  The Series was instituted in 1996 by Pi Sigma Alpha President David B. Magleby (Brigham Young University) as a way to provide chapters of the honor society with an opportunity to hear from some of the most prominent thinkers in the discipline of political science and to experience the flavor of the APSA convention which draws an attendance of over 5,000 each year.

Chapters are encouraged to use the videotapes as focal points for chapter meetings and to organize larger events around screenings of the tapes.  Chapter Advisors may order a single copy of any tape for chapter use at no charge. 

The series is intended for academic use only.  The tapes may not be duplicated, modified, transcribed, resold or used for any commercial purpose.  Each tape is approximately one hour long.

As of 2004, the series includes five videotapes:

• "The Politics of Equality and Inequality: Facts and Causes in a Normative Perspective," delivered in 1996 by Robert A. Dahl of Yale University.
  
• "What I Wish Political Scientists Would Teach about the Congress," delivered in 2000  by Lee H. Hamilton, U. S. House of Representatives (D-IN), 1964-1998, Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University.
  
• "Supermajority Rule in the U. S. Senate," the APSA 2002 James Madison Lecture by David R. Mayhew, Yale University.
  
• "Democracy and American Foreign Policy," the APSA 2003 Ralph Bunche Centennial Lecture by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek International.
  
• "Reconstructing Brown's Faded Legacy: A New Paradigm for Race, Class and Equality," delivered in 2004 by Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School.

Order Form

• Order Form for Distinguished Speaker Series