What the f*** is Livonia?

“The European Court of Justice was going to decide what EU law was. Not only that the EU law is supreme, but also the EU decides that supremacy…” (1)

Fuck this. This was never about Politics, but about being a Politics major. The humble Political Science Major.

Anyone who is taking Professor Josh Tucker’s class this fall probably knows what struck us this past week. It was Livonia and the fate of eight millions Livonians whose destinies were subject to the designs of an undergraduate taking Introduction to Comparative Politics class.

What the f*** is Livonia?

The paper required us to choose a form of Presidential System, have our modifications on it, predict how party systems might evolve and put all of it in the Livonian context. And the Livonian context had three pages of things in the assignment to consider.

Think about it.

For those seven pages, you were to Livonia what Alexander McQueen was to Gucci, Alistair Campbell to New Labor and Frank Lloyd Wright to Fallingwater. You were the shit

A neat contrast to the kid who looked forward to weekday evenings for the three-dollar drafts, and almost thought an obscenely fake I.D from Minot, North Dakota was legitimately cool.

Everything was not that hunky dory though. Apart from to you, your grades, and an overworked TA, Livonia did not really exist to anybody. And because Livonia ain’t real, it ain’t on Wikipedia.

This means you have to develop your political idea yourself. And that means going back to the assigned reading, which you have not been doing, from Shepsle and Bonchek to Jeffrey Sachs, and a thousand pages in between

What this implicates? Your paper is pathetic. NYU gets some slack. The Professor gets bad grades on www.ratemyprofessor.com. You hook up with a girl in the library who’s writing the paper too, and you bond over Dalton’s Partisanship and Electoral Behavior.

Told you, Political Science is where it is at.

Eight million Livonians can wait.  

1- Professor Martin Schain, European Union and the 21st Century  Lecture on December 4