10 questions for Christopher Arterton: dean, Graduate School of Political Management.

Christopher Arterton is the dean of the Graduate School of Political Management at the George Washington University. A native of Washington, D.C., Arterton is a graduate of St. Alban's. He holds a B.A. from Trinity College in Connecticut, a master's in international relations from American University, and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught at Wellesley College and at Yale University. He is married to Janet Bond Arterton, a federal district judge in Connecticut.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

1. What kind of experience do you think students can get at a political graduate school that they wouldn't get otherwise?

"We recognize that field experience is an essential component of learning the skills of politics. In fact, it is required in our degree program.... When students graduate from this program or one of our sister schools, they have learned how to read a poll, how to capture a message and put it in 30-second commercials, learn their rights with television stations, and organize field apparatus...."

2. What is the most rewarding part of your job?

"Seeing students succeed, unquestionably."

3. What do you think is the most important class in your program?

"The course that we have on leadership in politics, which involves some ethics and some strategic thinking. I think that it's possible to give people the tactical and day-to-day sense of skills needed in a campaign. But in order for someone to be successful, they need a strategic, conceptual way to think and reason out a plan for how a campaign should develop."

4. What is your answer for the naysayers who say that experience is the best way to learn?

"I'm quite certain that before schools of law, medicine or business were established critics said the same thing about those fields. We have never said that classroom instruction alone is sufficient....."

5. What do you think political graduate schools do for the greater good of politics?

"One of the critical things a school can do is gather developments in the field and transmit to a broader audience of people working in the field. Schools can be a critique for the way working practitioners in the field are going about doing their job and looking at their professional responsibilities,... with efforts to suggest to people that there are better ways of doing things."

6. What is the most frustrating part of your job?

"The management and administration of the school."

7. What is the most important piece of advice you would give to someone considering a political graduate school?

"One needs to be clear that this is a career that one wants. It's a very entrepreneurial though highly mobile career. Meaning that people who are good at it tend to succeed rather dramatically."

8. How did you get involved?

"I was a professor at Yale University, and I did polling for Democratic candidates for state Senate races and some U.S. Senate races, gubernatorial races and polling for Newsweek magazine for a decade. I was always much more interested in helping students who wanted to go into working in politics than I was interested in training people to be political scientists.... When the graduate school of political management first started in 1987, they asked if I was interested in joining the school. I thought it was a great thing."

9. How can professors without campaign experience teach it?

"I think that one can teach some of the quantitative methods and some of the theory about polling and survey research, but I think all of the faculty here have both academic and practitioner credentials. I think we would not look seriously at someone without practical experience."

10. What is the most common type of student: some work experience or straight out of school?

"It's about half and half. Although I would say that the half of students who move to Washington to attend this program and are relatively recent graduates of undergrad, most of them have had experience working in campaigns as volunteers or in campus politics. Very rarely do we get a student that has had no direct involvement in a campaign.... The other half of our students tends to be older and have three to four years of experience."