Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • This Just In: A Political Commentator is Wrong about Political Science

    Via Henry Farrell at the Monkey Cage, I came across an essay in the Weekly Standard entitled “Is Political Science Dying.” Stephen Hayward, a visiting fellow at Pepperdine Law School, makes the case that political science is too divorced from politics, too mathematical, too model-based and abstract. The motivating observation is a good one: given massive interest in contemporary politics, why aren’t students flocking to political science?

    one reason is that the fundamental questions of justice have either gone missing from most political science curricula, or more often are only anemically discussed. This is the plague of the social sciences, where issues of justice are reduced to the category of “normative” questions, which, being subjective, are not treated seriously. They are not even much discussed in many classes. It might be more accurate to call them the “anti-social sciences.”

    Farrell takes him to task on the evidence that he brings to bear: there’s not a lot of evidence that declining enrollments at Stanford are representative of the discipline, his sample of anecdotes is skewed, and there are plenty of other good explanations (like the collapse of the legal job market) that might explain the same trend.

    One might also wonder what exactly a political commentator with a PhD in American studies who teaches(?) at a law school knows about what happens inside of the undergraduate political science classroom. Or puzzle at the claim that students “flock to radical courses.” Our humanities friends would be delighted if this were true.

    Those points aside, here is another view.* What if the problem is that political science as taught isn’t technical enough?

    Here is how this argument would work. College students understand (albeit imperfectly) the labor markets that they face upon graduation. College is expensive, loans are burdensome. This creates an incentive to obtain skills in college. Model-based disciplines that teach abstract thinking in a technical framework have the benefit of conveying the perception that there are skills to be learned, and that those skills are marketable in the knowledge economy. The issue with faculty such as me is that we keep prattling on about justice on the anniversary of the Indonesian killings, and students think they need to develop some hard skills. We should to be giving them courses with titles like Strategic Thinking and Non-Market Strategy in Asia, and exposing them to coding, data management, and analytics.

    I can’t test this argument in a way that Henry Farrell (or I) would prefer, not in a way that supports a causal argument. But I can give impressionistic evidence, in the form of three questions.

    1. Do we live in a higher education landscape where technical training (STEM, etc.) is viewed as legitimately and self-evidently the route to both individual career success and national prosperity?
    2. Is economics collapsing in enrollment?
    3. Are the critical humanities rising in enrollment?

    If the answer to these three questions is YES-NO-NO, then Hayward is, plausibly, exactly wrong about political science. It’s not proof, and I am in no means in favor of actually turning political science into economics. But it might help us to diagnose exactly why Hayward has the impression that political science is in trouble.

    NOTE

    * This view is by no means representative of the department where I teach, or of my employer.

  • Write Like You Imagine That You Talk

    Via Chris Blattman, I came across a post by Paul Graham called “write like you talk.” The advice here is sound in spirit, but is a bit misleading.

    I know this because in a previous life I took a course in sociolinguistics, taught by one of the world’s great demolishers of the idea that anyone ever utters anything that actually makes sense. One of the most memorable class activities was to record and then transcribe actual conversation. And then, upping the stakes, to record and then transcribe a formal lecture. I recorded and transcribed a conversation among my friends about a tamagotchi (all the rage at the time), and then a formal lecture by a professor widely regarded as being one of the best lecturers on campus.

    When you do this, this is what you learn. People do not talk in complete sentences. They certainly do not talk in paragraphs. People rarely have a point, and almost never build up to that point in any systematic way. A good lecturer (unlike a pleasant conversationalist) will have an overall structure, yes, but actual delivery comes with asides, anecdotes, incomplete sentences and stutters, and ums and buts, and my new enemy, “so, …”.

    Graham’s advice should not be to write like you talk, but rather to write like you imagine that you talk. Here is the distinction. You imagine that when you talk, there is structure to what you are saying that can be broken down into a series of component claims that flow naturally from one to the next. You imagine that you use proper grammar and clear language that is just precise enough but never obscurantist. You imagine that you have a point. Imagine if your writing did the same!