In the past decade, issues of intellectual diversity at elite universities in the United States have resurfaced after years of dormancy. If students are to become literate within their field, they need to become aware of the multiple epistemological underpinnings inherent in the discipline, and the ways these influence the discipline. Questions on the nature and limits of knowledge, therefore, need to be prioritized in political science education. They oscillate between different epistemic beliefs and they have an unclear understanding of the nature of knowledge in the discipline. Results show that students give contradicting answers regarding values and impartiality in political science teaching. Interviews were conducted with students after one semester of political science education, focus-ing on their experiences of values in teaching. This field of research concerns students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge in different disciplines beliefs that are central to learning disciplinary knowledge. In this article, we report findings of students' conceptions of values and impartiality in political science teaching in relation to research on epistemic beliefs. We wish to add to this literature a broader focus on students' understanding of knowledge and knowledge production in the discipline and to explore if they see the nature of knowledge in the discipline as something problematic and if so, how they deal with these problems. When epistemological issues have been discussed, it has generally been done in relation to fear of a biased education that, for example, only allows certain perspectives to serve as 'truths' (Dey 1996 Horowitz 2007 LaFalce and Gomez 2007 Peters and Droddy 2003) or that education is not able to cultivate the right kind of knowledge, a political knowledge that may shape the political values and standpoints of the students in a preferable way (Hildreth 2006 Kelly-Woessner and Woessner 2008 Latimer and Hempsen 2012 Martin, Tankersley and Ye 2012). The importance of focusing on political science students' understandings of knowledge and knowledge production is due to lack of research in this area, and thus, how students experience conflicting epistemologies, what challenges this poses, and, how it potentially affects learning, is important.

The last bastion 1984