I was honestly quite apprehensive about taking this class due to all the bad press Professor Apter has received from past reviewers. However, this class was honestly among the best I have taken at UCLA, and Professor Apter was key to this. This is no means an easy class; a lot of the material in both lectures and readings is pretty dense and requires a lot of thought and concentration, especially since the class is pretty fast-paced. The assessments moreover, though comprising just a midterm and a take-home final, are marked pretty strictly. However, don't be put off! I found Professor Apter to be a wonderful old-school sort of academic, exceptionally knowledgeable whilst also fairly eccentric. The class doesn't feel disorganised as all the lectures are very focused (though he doesn't share his powerpoints afterwards), with clear conclusions and key points summarised at the end. If you don't understand anything, he is very personable and helpful both during class and in office hours. He expects you to be motivated to learn and to be focused during class, but I honestly don't recognise what some of the past reviewers say about him being rude/disorganised/angry etc. He never for example shouted at anyone for coming in late, and was even giving out fistbumps by the end of the quarter. He was also very funny at times, and often had the whole class laughing with him when he recalled his past life researching in Nigeria. We memorably spent a whole class learning about and listening to old African pop music whilst he danced away at the front!

This is the first review I've written, and I only do it to correct what I think is a misleading and unfair image. He is a really good professor, and if you're interested in African history you will get a huge amount out of this class provided you put the work in.

I took History 164E and IDS 100A with Apter. DO NOT TAKE ANY CLASS WITH HIM.

Not only is he actually a terrible lecture but he is also a horribly rude person. His lectures are all over the place, no powerpoint, no real theme to take notes on. He goes off on side tangents about his "research" in Nigeria or about how much he hates republicans. He criticizes international development like it is a joke (clearly to the wrong audience, we are all IDS majors...); and hates on international aid but does not offer any alternatives - if you look up the "research" he has done in his career you will see this.

He can't even draw a supply and demand curve (anyone who took this class in Winter of 2015 will tell you that), the most basic principle of economics! That is completely ridiculous and there is no excuse why he should have such a lack of knowledge. And then, of course, he pretends that he knows so much more about economics than we do, and attempts to use fancy words in order to make himself feel smarter than us.

He also has this really annoying habit of yelling at people who walk in right AT 9:30 or even at 9:31, because this class is "the most important one you will ever take and you are being disrespectful by being late". Well i'd like to see his fat a** walk from Veteran to Public Affairs and see if he got there on time.

I learned absolutely nothing of value in this class, and if you have the opportunity to take either of these classes with a different professor, DO IT.

His History 16E class was no better (taken Spring 2014). The best part of that class was I enjoyed one of the textbooks he assigned, but that was it. (learned more from the textbook than I did in lecture - the book is called The Fate of Africa).

Overall he is the worst professor i've ever had at UCLA, and I started off as a south campus major taking classes from Lavelle and Dearicott, which is saying something.