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In order to meet the challenges of the 21st century, political science needs to come to terms with its exclusive past and make the changes needed for an inclusive future. This paper focuses on the challenges involved in transforming an existing, traditional political science curriculum into a curriculum that addresses the diverse perspectives, issues and problems the world faces and confronts the systemic biases in both the discipline and the world. In this paper, I use examples from my own departments process, as well as examples I have gathered from other departments and from the literature to make suggestions for concrete steps any department can take to develop an inclusive curriculum. These steps are broken down into individual and collective changes and also into the categories of pedagogical change, content change, and faculty reward-structure change.

This article examines how one political science department used data and student feedback to make pedagogical choices about course modalities and pedagogical approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic. This case demonstrates that gathering data from students through surveys and other means and then utilizing that data in decision making is a valuable practice. However, there are constraints on collecting quality data in a crisis. With a need to react quickly and to gather and analyze data in a timely fashion, data-informed and student-empathetic decision making is a more accurate characterization of the outcomes in this case and a more achievable goal for the future than data-driven and student-centered decision making in a crisis. This study concludes that data-informed and student-empathetic decision making may be preferable in circumstances in which the data are inconclusive or support multiple conclusions as well as when there are conflicting needs and preferences among both faculty members and students.