New Wednesday Lunchtime Forum Encourages Debate: USG Community Shares Viewpoints (and Sandwiches)
Every Wednesday, Sunil Dasgupta, Program Director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Political Science Program at USG, has been inviting students and faculty members from all nine partner universities as well as USG staff to join him for a noontime current affairs discussion group. Initiated in February of this year, Dasgupta facilitates each session to engender more free-flowing debate, create a healthy dialogue and help promote an engaged and vibrant USG campus, he says.
Dasgupta, who was formerly a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at George Washington University, has been on the UMBC faculty since July 2009.
“Student and faculty interaction is generally limited to the classroom but I want our students to have greater contact with their professors,” Dasgupta explains. “At these discussions, we model how to have an informal academic debate. It’s never personal, but it can be quite heated, which is what we want,” he says. The concept is to focus on ideas, rather than individuals. Recent discussion topics have covered everything from the new American populism to Iran-US policy and relationships with Pakistan and China.
Members of the USG community are welcome to bring their lunches to Room 4124 in Building III. Dasgupta has humorously titled the sessions “Wednesday Wipeout!” The alliterative name derives from the press conferences held by the U.S. military command during the Vietnam War that wartime reporters tagged the “Friday Follies.”
The UMBC Political Science Program at USG currently has more than 35 students, and continues to grow. The number of political science courses at USG is expected to nearly double by this fall. A Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science gives students a wide range of rewarding career options in government, law and the public policy sector, among some of the possibilities.