Steve Saideman recently blogged about how he conceived of his teaching mission, when teaching undergraduates: adding to an informed citizenry. This is is a noble endeavor.
It is precisely the need to be a better informed citizen that sent me on a now an 8 year journey towards a change of career, all inspired by Charles Hill’s excerpt from Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order in the Review Section of the Wall Street Journal.
After reading that article, I realized I was too ignorant to be an effective citizen of the republic in matters of war and peace and trade. And after learning he taught in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a non-degree program for training diplomats and would-be heads of state, a quick Google search yielded the syllabus for the program and I began to read.
The intellectual joy in studying the grand themes of the literature in IR had me thinking about a career change, which meant collecting a credential. Thus, I landed at Troy University for a masters degree and now University of Leicester for a PhD. My research interest, peacekeeping and civil war, came out of two courses at Troy. One on international organizations, a requirement, and one on Sub Saharan Africa.
I whole-heartedly agree with the value of undergraduate education in international relations, I wish I had been forced to take IR as part of breadth requirements as an undergraduate. UCSB at the time required a US government course in Political Science, but nothing dealing with relations among states.
Digression: If I had one criticism of the Brady-Johnson Program, it is that the syllabus I read from was too heavy on the diplomatic history approach and too light on theories. What I found most useful at Troy were the introductory course and the required ‘theory and ideology’ course, which prepared us for the exit exam. Those two courses gave me a large toolbox with which to conceptualize a given issue. (International political economy was less useful, mainly because I already had a background in micro and macro economics, accounting, finance, trade, supply chain management, and banking from an MBA. Although, I did appreciate the way the professor stressed the contradictions built into canonical developmental economics and the consequences for individual liberty in the standard policy prescriptions–i.e., Easterly’s critique.)
Diplomatic history is useful for context, but in the hands of policy maker–exactly whom they are training–it can lead to dangerous facile analogies. This is not to say that a policy maker needs Theory with a capital T, which is mostly useless academic abstraction, but an understanding of the claims of realism, liberalism, constructivism–although that ‘magic idea wand’ (Snyder 2002) can be rather dangerous in the hands of policy maker–will provide ways of conceptualizing issues.
Digression 2: The Brady-Johnson Program syllabus did include a book that became one of the most influential on my own thought: Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, which included a really helpful typology for understanding American foreign policy.