Three ways political scientists shape the real world

As a political scientist, I am always asked by students, “How can political science contribute to real world politics”?  It is not only an academic question but also a practical question. It is understandable that students are eager to know how to transform their knowledge from the university to the real world. Although some political scientists like to live in the ivory tower of academia, political science as a discipline has a natural connection with “real” politics.

There are three ways that political science can have an impact on real politics. First, knowledge and theory derived from political science research can guide real policies. For example, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was a political scientist before running for president. His idea of internationalism, or the so called “Wilsonian” ideology, not only led the United States to fight for democracy in the twentieth century, but also guided U.S. foreign policy until today. Political scientists’ findings regarding “democratic peace theory”, i.e., democracies are less likely to wage war with one another,” is reported as a major guideline for America’s “promoting democracy” after the Cold War.

Second, political science scholars can actively engage public debates and contribute to public discourse. Many political scientists publish op-ed articles in leading newspapers and participate in TV shows to help improve the public’s awareness on different political issues. For example, Stephen Walt, a leading International Relations scholar at Harvard University, hosts an influential blog at the Foreign Policy website. At USU, political science professors are often interviewed by the local media about various political issues, such as the North Korean crisis in 2010, the current economic crisis, and the coming general elections in the United States.

The third channel for political science professors to have an impact on politics is the most important one—through the classroom. The major educational goal of political science is to equip and educate the next generation of leaders with knowledge, inspiration, and their responsibilities. In the Department of Political Science, we are proud of many alumni who are working for the government and serving the country and the larger community.  

My research interest within the field of political science is foreign policy analysis. I came to academia after working in governmental and non-governmental organizations as a researcher and negotiator. From participation and observation of bilateral and multilateral negotiations, I was exposed to the rich differences in negotiation and mediation styles of diplomats from different countries. My interests grew with these working experiences: Why do diplomats from different countries display such different cultural styles? Why is it so difficult to reach any agreement if we are all calculating like human beings? How do diplomats (decision-makers) make decisions? What is in their mind?

My interests in the cultural impact on behavior and beliefs on foreign policy decisions led me to my major research area of foreign policy analysis with a focus on leadership studies using political psychological analysis. However, even when I turned to be more academically focused on theory and analysis, I was very much aware of the importance of making my research relevant by asking policy relevant research questions about topics such as China’s leadership transition and its foreign policy changes and the future of U.S.-China relations.

Many people believe that future conflict between the U.S. and China seems inevitable because of the strategic competition between the two nations in world politics.

From my research, I suggest that any linear predictions about either China’s continuous economic rise or America’s seeming decline are all academically flawed and analytically biased. Strategic competitions among states are normal in international politics, but competition does not equal conflict. It is political leaders who make decisions for both countries. How to make both Chinese and American leaders fully informed and how to reduce misunderstandings between the two nations are the keys to maintain a good, healthy, and peaceful relationship between the United States and China. 

- Huiyun Feng, assistant professor of political science

Learning languages - a critical skill for a globalized world

I started my career as a teacher in Brazil when I was 23 years old. I have been working in an educational setting for 18 years. The only reason I start by saying this is to highlight that, even after all those years, I still find passion and significance in what I do as an educator. 

In Brazil, I had the privilege to start working with kids, the equivalent of 5th grade here in the United States. At this level, you develop one very important skill as a teacher: students will learn if they are interested in the subject, and more importantly, if you find ways to make the subject relevant for them. This means that developing pedagogical strategies is essential. Especially today, relying only on the professorial authority is a strategy that will take you only half way down the educational road.

 But my time with the little kids is long gone, and I am grateful for that. After some time, I began to believe that I didn’t have the physical energy to run with them and keep up with their energy level, and for that matter, it was good for me to move on up the educational structure. So, I went to work with college “kids.”

I worked at three universities in Brazil, one public and two private. Although they were very distinct institutions, they all provided me with the expertise to work with a completely different body of students. It was only after my master’s degree that I moved to the U.S. I went to the University of Minnesota to get my PhD and I had one of the most significant experiences: to teach Portuguese as a second language. My whole expertise had been developed to teach Portuguese to native speakers and some of the goals for that enterprise are completely different from teaching Portuguese as a second language. Again, I had to reconfigure myself to be in the classroom, and a new set of skills had to be developed.

My professional journey brought me to USU in 2010.

Here, I have the opportunity to teach and research Brazilian Literature. At USU, unlike any other place that I have worked in the U.S., the majority of my students come to my classes with 2 years of experience in Brazil. This is a very positive linguistic background. My students also come to my classes without being specialists in literature or even in Humanities.

When I think about the role of higher education and the importance of the Humanities in this context, I’d like to believe that this is an essential part of the mission of any respectable university. In this sense, my goal here is to transform Brazilian Literature into a subject that will help my students to continue to improve their linguistic abilities in a second language (very important in an increasing globalized world), and to develop critical skills that will allow them to be more sensitive to cultural differences and to become good citizens in a democratic society. And I am proud of it!

                                                             - Marcus Brasileiro, Assistant Professor of Portuguese

Using folklore to examine backward thinking

Steve Siporin, director of USU's folklore program, teaches
students to examine folklore for traditional wisdom.

I teach in USU’s Folklore Program, so it is no surprise that during office hours, my students and I discuss folklore.  They quickly and adeptly get beyond such misconceptions of folklore as being merely colorful superstitions of ignorant Ozark hillbillies, “dancing with your elbows out,” and the fakelore of Paul Bunyan. 

Rather, in discussions, my students join me in trying to understand what a Navajo story means to Navajos, what an Arab folktale means within its own culture, or why hazing won’t disappear. We decode the time-tested solutions to humankind’s enduring problems that folklore’s traditional wisdom offers.  And we marvel at the creativity and ingeniousness of supposedly backward thinking.

 I find myself hoping that students will not just learn about folklore but that they will carry its wisdom and creative thinking into their own lives.  These lessons are too valuable to be left in the classroom.  Even the most cliched of traditional English and American proverbs, like, for instance, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” has value in students’ demanding lives.

But it’s not just our students who could benefit from serious attention to common sense and traditional proverbs.  Most of us at USU have been suffering (like the rest of the country) from a sustained financial crisis for several years now.  Yet if you look around—literally look around—you might think we’re in the middle of an economic boom.  New construction on campus appears to be at an all-time high.  But when resources are so limited, is the choice to build really in the best interests of students who have come here to learn?

Compared to 5 years ago, most students walk into larger classes (more students, less faculty, resulting in less individual attention) and most professors and staff earn lower salaries (because of no raises coupled with inflation).  We have lost experienced faculty, operating budgets, and funding for special programs and lectures.  Key enriching elements in USU’s intellectual life—humanities graduate programs and the USU Press—remain under siege.  Departments are cutting back on the requirements for majors, and while pedagogical arguments rationalize these reductions, such arguments sound like so many versions of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  We know that the reason we are compelled to cut back is because we don’t have the faculty to provide the courses.  This “reform” is fiscally, not pedagogically, driven.

At the same time there is a building boom on campus, and money flows to buy furniture, paint, art for the hallway walls, as well as to maintain the lawns and flower beds.  Common sense says that such expenditures are secondary to the purpose of a university.  Surely administrators are tired of explaining to seemingly thickheaded professors that these items come from different budgets and that funds cannot be transferred from one budget to another.

But something else cannot be denied:  when there are no raises year after year, yet large, expensive buildings can be funded throughout the campus, and when our classrooms and offices are often unnecessarily fixed-up with new carpets, paint, and artwork annually, students, faculty, and staff can’t help but feel devalued, and morale can’t help but decline.  That is common sense, too.  Today there is nowhere on campus one can go without seeing a new building emerging, as if to say “this campus is a construction project, not an educational institution.”

Something is very wrong, and to say that that’s just the way budgets work is to accept what needs to be challenged.  I don’t have the answers, but I know we need more creative thinking and creative problem solving.  What we claim to teach our students needs to be practiced by our leaders and by us.

No university ever thinks it has enough funding, and choices always have to be made.  I remember a research visit I made a number of years ago to Stanford University, where I’d been an undergraduate.  Since I was going there to work in the library for one week, and it was summer, I asked if I could stay in a dorm to save on my expenses.  As it turned out, I got to stay in the same dorm I’d lived in as a student—more than 20 years earlier.  At first I was shocked at how rundown my old dorm had become.

It seemed as if only minimal maintenance had been carried out over all those years:  the furnishings, the lamps, even the worn-out mattress in the old iron frame bed, appeared to be the same objects that weren’t new even twenty years earlier.  Yet this was Stanford!  A university of enormous wealth!  But of course, Stanford is known for its academic excellence, not its accommodations.  Budget choices had to be made, even at one of the country’s richest universities.

And then I recently saw an article about Dr. Hussam Haik, a young Arab Israeli molecular biologist who conducts research at the Technion in Haifa, Israel.  He and his 26-member team are well on their way to perfecting a small, inexpensive mobile device that can detect cancer in its early stages through olfactory analysis of a person’s breath.  What a breakthrough this is going to be.

Haik contradicts stereotypes in a most delightful way:  he is an Arab doing cutting-edge research in Israel, and he turned down opportunities in the United States in order to work in Israel, which he considers his home.  Dr. Haik says, “Israeli universities all suffer from shortages in funds.  But the Technion spends its budget in a very effective manner.  While some universities splurge on beautiful buildings and facilities, Technion invests in a young, dynamic, and prestigious staff.  This is an investment which will surely pay off.”

In spite of arguments about the separateness of state budgets, Utah laws cannot be as immutable as the biological laws that lead to cancer.  If we can find success in redirecting those unyielding natural forces, why can’t we be more creative with the institutions that we ourselves have made?  Common sense says this challenge can’t be as difficult as cancer.  Folk wisdom says “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  I ask, “Is there a will?”

 - Steve Siporin, Director Folklore Program

Introducing a new world view

When my colleague, Charlie Huenemann, professor of philosophy, invited me to contribute to the new alumni blog “Office Hours,” I welcomed the opportunity. What now can I say about myself, my position here at Utah State and my students, as I am about to start my fourth year as an assistant professor of French? Foremost, I should say that the department of Languages, Philosophy, and Speech Communication, which now also comprises the Intensive English Language Institute, is a true gem of collegiality that provides a fertile breeding ground for interdisciplinary research.

My research and teaching interests encompass transnational Francophone literature and cinema from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. I am particularly interested in the intersections between colonial and postcolonial metropolitan French and North African Francophone literature, and the ways in which these literatures and discourses continue to cross-fertilize one another. This is particularly fascinating against the backdrop of the ongoing Arab Spring that has been sweeping the Arab world and which we discuss in my classroom.

These past two summers, it has been my privilege to lead a group of students on a five-week study abroad trip to Paris and to the beautiful town of Annecy, which is located in the Haute Savoie region, about 50 kilometers south of Geneva, Switzerland. In Paris, we stayed in a hotel in the popular St. Michel quarter, just a few steps away from Notre Dame. We indulged in a number of museum visits (Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée de Cluny, Orangerie, among others) and hit some of the obvious highlights, such as the Eiffel Tour, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysées, Sacré Coeur, and many other sites. We also took the train to Versailles, to visit Louis XIV’s famous Château de Versailles, which students found pretty awesome. The real challenge began in Annecy where students were separated and placed individually in French-speaking host families.

As a French German national born in the heart of le pays des trois frontières, also referred to as Saar-Lor-Lux (Germany, France and Luxembourg), I am used to cultural diversity to the point that it has become part of my identity. Utah being rather mono-cultural in many ways, it has been a very fun and rewarding experience to introduce my students to a new culture, a new language and, most importantly, a new world view during the study abroad trip.

While at first, they appeared rather intimidated by cultural difference such as bread with jam and espresso-style coffee for breakfast, they were able to adapt rather quickly to the French way and felt empowered by their experience. In Annecy, I spent many times talking on the phone to a furious guest mother, clearing up misunderstandings with regards to dinner times—dinner being a sacred time of the day. On one occasion, I even went to the police station to report a student as missing after talking to his panicked host family. Luckily, everything turned out to be just fine.

Once students settled into their routine schedule made up of intensive French, free/fun time and family time, they really started enjoying themselves. They took advantage of Annecys beaches, the pedalo boats, and the free film screenings at the Annecy Animation Festival—the largest in the world. They also took to the culinary side of France, indulging in many ice creams, crêpes Nutella, Kebaps, Tartiflettes and fondues savoyardes, and baguettes.  I was glad to see that some even dared to try some of the particularly runny, moldy and stinky cheeses such as the Reblochon and survived to tell about it!
                                                        - Christa Jones, assistant professor of French



Versailles



Lac Annecy



Student in front of Oscar Wilde's Grave



An immediate impact

Amy Bailey is an  assistant professor
 of sociology at Utah State.

I joined the USU faculty last fall.  During that first semester, two of the students in my undergraduate class were combat veterans.  In spring semester, another student approached me to let me know that his National Guard unit had been called up, and he would be deployed to Iraq over the summer.  He would miss three weeks during the semester for training, and wanted to work with me to make sure he didn’t fall behind.

Earlier this summer, a Salt Lake Tribune article outlined the difficulties facing students who also happen to be combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.  That these students face unique challenges should come as no surprise.  A recent RAND study finds that of the more than 1.6 million Americans who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, 30% returned with traumatic brain injury, mental health issues (including post-traumatic stress disorder), or both. 

These students also bring unique strengths and experiences with them to the classroom, which may help them excel at balancing the stresses of college life.  This fall, with the support of a grant from the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station, I begin a project that will assess how well student veterans in Utah fare.

This question matters not just because we owe our veterans the opportunity for success once they leave the armed forces.  Since the launch of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in the fall of 2009 (officially called the Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007), the number of veterans enrolling at institutions of higher education in our state has skyrocketed.  This new source of funding, introduced by Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia), retroactively provides universal educational benefits for all veterans, including Reservists and members of the National Guard, who spent at least 18 months on active military duty since September 11, 2001.  (Earlier versions of the GI Bill were essentially employer matching programs.  Enlistees had to sign up for the benefit when they joined the armed forces and consistently make monthly payments during their first year of service, so only a fraction of veterans qualified).

The number of veterans responding to this opportunity suggests that we may be able to do something to tangibly improve the life chances of the men and women in our armed forces.  However, it also threatens to overwhelm the ability of colleges and universities to effectively serve them.  At USU, for example, the number of new veterans more than doubled between the fall semester before and the fall semester after this new source of funding became available.

My project will collaborate with the veterans’ offices at several institutions of higher education across Utah, to help them sift through and analyze data on the students they serve to determine how veterans fare academically compared to other students.  I plan to examine grades, credit hours, major course of study, the likelihood of leaving school without a degree, and the average time to degree completion.  The preliminary work was completed with a graduate research assistant and one of the student veterans from my fall semester class.  This research will have an immediate impact, since it will provide Utah’s institutions of higher learning with information on the ways in which educational experiences of student veterans and nonveterans differ, equipping them to better serve their veteran student populations. 

Given the limited information that exists on this rapidly expanding group of students, this research may, in fact, provide the first statistical snapshot of the student veterans in our state.  As a sociologist, I am keenly interested in making sure that our shared resources – both the economic resources being used to fund these students’ educations, as well as the human resources that student veterans promise to provide to Utah – benefit us all.

Amy Bailey is an assistant professor of sociology at Utah State. Her research focuses on race and social inequality. Bailey earned her doctorate from the University of Washington in 2008 and spent two years as an NIH-funded postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University before joining the faculty at USU.