Curriculum

This course is designed to introduce the student to the law and legal system in healthcare as to both the theoretical and practical determinants of legal decision making.

Sport Law examines the legal environment in which professional and amateur sports presently operate. Included will be aspects of tort, contract, labor, and antitrust law as they apply to the sport industry.

This course will focus on the main themes of the philosophy of law: the nature and limits of the law, the relation between legal and ethical reasoning, the notion of rights, the justifiability of punishment, and the law’s role in establishing and upholding justice, freedom, and equality. Special emphasis will be given to the acquisition of ethical reasoning skills.

This course provides an overview of the government structure, organizational mission, and policies associated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other key federal agencies and metropolitan areas with homeland security functions. Together these agencies constitute the homeland security system. From the founding of DHS post-September 11th and the expanded missions and resource allocations to other key federal, state, and local agencies, the roles of DHS and other agencies in overseeing aspects of intelligence, emergency management, border security and immigration, transportation, and public health are described, analyzed, and evaluated. This course will provide students of homeland security with an overall understanding of the system’s vast role in the United States.

This course introduces an understanding of U.S. public policy making and public administration including identifiable steps in the policy process such as political policy openings, policy stream convergence, policy implementation and the administration of policy ideas. Students will learn how to identify a policy problem, map the political opportunity, incorporate evidence-based social science research to address the problem, and assess the positives and negatives associated with a particular policy adoption.

This political science course provides information and analysis on U.S. health care policy. Major topics to be covered include federal and/or state government funded health programs including Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP (the State Children’s Health Care Program), health policy reform initiatives (The Affordable Care Act, as well as, other major initiatives), and health policy implementation stumbling blocks, such as the debate over quality versus cost. Contemporary topics such as the role of the pharmaceutical industry in health care, the opioid epidemic, the changing dynamics of private insurance, and access to health care will also be covered. In addition, a global health policy unit will allow students to understand the U.S. Health Care System within a global context.

This course is designed to strengthen a student’s theoretical and practical understanding of public management and leadership so that they might be better positioned to create public value for their community. Designed to introduce the student to public management from a political science and public administration perspective, they will learn leadership principles via a public manager’s interaction with various institutions, the public manager’s ability to course various constituencies, and the public manager’s entrepreneurial inclinations to solve problems.