Meet our Chair
Chair’s MessageÂ
There’s an old proverb that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Often that expression comes up when we’re talking about people who’ve read a little bit about something (or listened to half a podcast episode) and then act like they know all about it. The worst version comes with the Dunning-Kruger effect, where a person knows enough about something to feel like they can tell others how to think, but not enough to appreciate the limits of their own understanding. Anyone who’s ever been on social media for more than 20 minutes has seen plenty of this.
There’s another way that “a little knowledge” can be “a dangerous thing.” For many students, the first undergraduate social sciences and humanities classes they take are the first time they’ve been pushed to take a long, hard look at the world, and to recognize how dumb, divisive, dangerous, and profoundly unfair it can be. That can be a real shock to the system, and for many students it can be profoundly discouraging or even debilitating. Many young people dealing with severe climate anxiety, for example, can trace it back to a course they took, a book they read, or a late-night conversation they had while they were in university. Problems like climate change, structural racism, the erosion of democracy, or the prospect of war seem so big, and so deeply embedded, that it’s hard to see what any one of us can do to fix them.
University professors are great at explaining how the world’s political structures are dysfunctional and unfair, and how they got that way. But historically we haven’t been very good at working out how things could be made better, or what specific things our students could do to try to make meaningful change. (We sometimes try to give advice to policy-makers, but are often ignored, and that tends to reinforce the longstanding disconnect between academics and government.) Our professional incentives still encourage us to focus mostly on diagnosing and explaining problems, but we all have personal reasons to think more about actually fixing problems, and to support students who want to try to fix them, because the world’s problems now are so urgent and so all-encompassing that they confront us all with a stark choice between doing whatever we can and just giving up.
So while we’re all still committed to building and improving the theoretical frameworks that can help us understand the world, we also want to go beyond abstract theories, and try to offer more forward-looking, practical guidance and support. But it’s not obvious how to do it; most of us weren’t trained to do that, and there’s not much useful advice about how to give that kind of advice. As with many difficult things, the first thing is just to make a decision to try, and hope we figure things out as we go along. Looking over course syllabi from the last few years, it seems to me that the department—perhaps especially some of our newest colleagues—is moving in this direction, and I’m hopeful that I’ll see even more in the syllabi for 2024-25.
New readings and new assignments are important, but there’s a lot more to do. My hope is that students and faculty will figure all of this out together, and that in doing so we’ll all find a sense of agency and common purpose. Hopefully students who’ve signed up for one or two of our courses to get “a little knowledge” about politics will learn something about the world’s problems, but also get a chance to explore possible solutions, and therefore be less likely to get discouraged or disconnected. Then we can make the case that what they need is to keep going, to get a little more knowledge, in order to work out for themselves how to cope with the world as it is, and find ways to contribute to making it what it could be.