All four of these processes converged in a recent discussion about the Serbian democratic revolution and the first U.S. presidential debate. A brief consideration of both events was followed by a discussion about the apparent discrepancies between democratic thought and practice. The students felt that our overwhelming support of the Serbian democrats overthrowing Milosovic was in conflict with the fact that the exclusion of Ralph Nader from the presidential debates was all but ignored by an unelected, corporately financed debate commission. After my students stumbled upon this comparison, they debated the meaning of democracy as an ideal versus democracy as a practical form of governance. They also produced a laundry list of possible solutions to what they perceived to be a situation in which democratic rights had been usurped by non-democratic forces.
Teaching is only one part of how faculty are awarded tenure.
There also are scholarship and service. Aside from the way I teach, I try to practice what I preach in other dimensions of my professional and public life. In terms of research, the subject matter I write about and the approach I take to writing remain true to these values. Studying democratic transitions affords me ample opportunity to look at how people practice democratic rights and the problems they face when creating a democratic regime from a non-democratic one. My dissertation on the Czechoslovak democratic social movement, Charter 77, ends by suggesting its peaceful, inclusive and grassroots approach to fighting social and political injustice as a model, not only for potentially democratizing states, but also for improving the quality of established democratic states.