Is a joke. This isn't a knock against students of international relations in any sense, in fact with hindsight it's an amazing display of fortitude that any of us end up graduating.
Why do I make this claim, and with what information do I make this claim? Certainly I'm not saying this after some massive study of the way that international relations is studied. However I have a large number of friends who study international relations from places as disparate as Grinell, American, SIS, Tulane, and the SUNY system, and this criticism is a product out of conversations I've had with those students and my experience in SUNY Purchase and looking through the International Relations tag on tumblr.
The first problem with the way that IR is taught comes at introductory classes, and these introductory classes introduce an endemic problem with IR teaching: read any tumblr post on an IR intro class and you will be confronted with a dichotomy: the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism.
Anyone familiar with modern international relations theory would recognize that this dichotomy is ridiculous and decades old. For one, no one calls themselves 'idealists' anymore. The modern counterparts to political realism, going from liberal institutionalism to the English School to Critical International Relations, all have deeply developed methodologies and ontologies far beyond the blind faith that the moniker 'idealism' suggests, and many of these schools are so different from the methodology of idealism that to suggest that they are 'growths' from the school is to grossly oversimplify modern theory.
While I realize that introductory level classes must oversimplify by their very nature, but we need to ask if IR classes are oversimplifying why are they giving us a simplistic depiction of 40 year old theory rather than modern theory?
Part of this is simply due to the tenure system. Professors who graduated 40 years ago are far more likely to be teaching with tenure than an international relations student who just got their PhD, even if the tenured professor hasn't read a single book on theory since they graduated.
But there is another, more problematic reason for teaching theory in a realist-idealist dialectic: IR is taught this way to the benefit of realism. In fact the dichotomy was made by realist theorists as a way to disparage anti-realist theories. There's nothing wrong with teaching realism to students, in say a class that deals explicitly with realist theory, but when a professor is teaching a supposedly inclusive theory class and is using a dialectic that benefits realism, then we get into the realm of indoctrination.
How many Freshmen students have I spoken to who have said "well I don't want to be a realist, but it make so much more sense than anything else"? How many students have I met who have left international relations because they are sick of being taught a stale dichotomy that isn't relevant to our generation or our century? The problem I've seen, of students (especially female students) leaving IR or polisci programs for another program that offers interesting methods of analysis?
In my experience, this phenomena actually gets worse the better the school you go to is. The higher up schools, especially the prestigious universities in Washington DC, have even more incentive to teach in an overly scientific way because it makes the ridiculous amounts of money that they charge seem worth it. Furthermore, the fact that you're going to an insanely prestigious college with authoritative professors has in my experience discouraged individual study in all but the most studious. At Purchase, all of the students who survived the polisci program to senior year are writing their senior projects based on theory that they were not taught in class. I thought that this was a problem specific to Purchase until I started talking to my friends from Geneseo and Binghampton.
Self-teaching isn't wrong. It is an important part of anyone's learning and is necessary regardless of how you're being taught and how good the teacher is. But self teaching shouldn't be the majority of one's education, especially when you are going tens of thousands of dollars into debt in order to fund your education.
With all of this said, we need to ask ourselves a question
Is the purpose of international relations to teach the next generation of international relations analysts, or is it to teach the next generation of political realists?
In my experience as a poli sci major, intro to IR was fun, but it could've been my professor. I had Jon Pevehouse: http://polisci.wisc.edu/people/person.aspx?id=1093 , who also wrote the textbook. He divided the perspectives into Realism, Liberalism (broken down further by Institutionalism and Internationalism) and the Constructivist perspectives (broken into 3, feminist, radical and I forget the third). My specialization was Comparative Politics, so that was my only real core IR course that I took (I took some IPE courses, an EU course, a Latin American course, a Political Theory course on imperialism, and a bunch of American gov courses).
ReplyDeleteAhh, fun times. Poli Sci courses..
My biggest problem with my program was that the number of regional studies classes meant that we were essentially an extension of the History program. Then I realized that this is a problem that comes out in a lot of schools: we get 'philosophy' classes instead of theory classes and even then we don't deal with the last 100 years of studies
ReplyDeleteMy particular concern with my sole IR class is that it still had a war emphasis, and particularly a Great War emphasis: WWII and WWI were huge deals, the Indian Wars and the persistent occupations of Latin America in the early 20th century were non-issues. Particular attention was paid to Vietnam, with much less concern paid to Soviet-US relations in general during the same time period.
ReplyDeleteIn short, more telling a narrative about the US, rather than a concrete analysis of the foreign relations.
It's amazing, though, how many people say again and again that their undergraduate education hardly scratched the surface of their field. I do wonder why that is? To some extent, yes, they need to simplify it, but not so much that students have a WORSE idea of what the field is about than when they came into it.
How would you improve your IR classes?
Perhaps that's a major criticism of IR - that it's too USA-centric. As I said, I have no complaints with my intro to IR course (The professor was awesome, though he went to and from U of Chicago), but that was my only one I took. I suppose I have no idea how bad IR courses are at other institutions.
ReplyDelete