Courses are Arguments

I get a lot of questions from people about how I structure my classes at W&M. Do you mostly assign books and articles you’ve written? [No, I haven’t published anywhere near enough.] Do you use the same exact syllabus decade after decade? [Actually, my reading lists change a lot every year as new research appears.] Do you really expect us to do all this reading? [Yes, and the purpose of the midterm is to nail you if you don’t.]

My advice to students writing term papers has always been that all writing is argumentation. All of it. Every time their pen hits the paper or their fingers hit the computer keys, they need to advance a thesis and back it up. Same thing can be said about designing courses, I think, at least in the social sciences.

The main claim in my “Introduction to Public Policy” course this fall, for example, is that there is a lot more to policy making than ideological catfights and partisan spin. I don’t care what James Carville and Chris Matthews say. There is a lot of science in politics.

And there are a lot of patterns in the policy-making process. If you make reasonable assumptions about the goals of the main players (ordinary citizens, interest group leaders, legislators, and the like) and carefully consider the opportunities and constraints that they confront, then a lot of what happens in Washington makes perfect sense. It is the logical consequence of rational political actors pursuing some combination of their own interests and their views about what constitutes good public policy for the nation.

The first half of my public policy class basically lays the conceptual groundwork, advances a bunch of hypotheses about the behavior of key players in the policy game, and then traces out the likely implications for the content of policy outcomes. The second half of the course essentially “tests” these hypotheses by focusing in-depth on major issues on the current national agenda – health care reform, social security, immigration, the financial crisis, and so on. Although my students don’t know this yet, the final exam for the class will ask them to evaluate the argument I am advancing in the first half of the semester with the more applied readings they will explore after the midterm.

It is critical that classes about government and policy making be non-ideological and nonpartisan. In my view, academics shouldn’t use their podiums to foist off their political views on students. But that doesn’t mean the syllabus instead should be some passive hodgepodge of concepts or scholarly studies. To be meaningful and relevant, classes should be structured to advance an argument – with the caveat, of course, that students get to argue right back.