I’m one of the two representatives from political science to GPSC, the graduate student council here at Duke. It’s a strange job given our disciplinary views on politics. Everyone knows that investing the time necessary to learn about politics is irrational in an economic sense, so no one cares what we do and there are no defined preferences for us to represent. And it doesn’t matter anyway since the other rep and I know that our votes are almost never going to be decisive. So what are we doing? We’ve decided that we’re basically the fire alarm for the department — there to make sure something bad doesn’t happen that our constituents would object to. It’s a strange role since the other GPSC reps are very gung ho. Sometimes I feel like a shirker, but I’m doing what my department wants — surveillance, and not much else.