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THINKING GLOBALLY: Diamond
helped write the Iraq constitution.
Rod Searcey |
Hoover senior fellow Larry
Diamond had four telephone messages waiting from national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice when he returned from
a business trip last fall. He was pretty sure he knew
why his former colleague in the department of political
science was calling.
Indeed, Rice asked Diamond, ’74, MA ’78,
PhD ’80, a specialist in democratic development,
to go to Baghdad as a senior adviser to the Coalition
Provisional Authority. “I decided almost instantly,”
Diamond recalls. “I’ve always been a strong
advocate of academics contributing their expertise on
the ground.”
Diamond is a professor, by courtesy, of political science
who has advised burgeoning democracies in Ghana, Kenya,
Korea, Taiwan, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand and Turkey.
In the several months he spent in Iraq, he consulted
with civic, student and women’s groups, and with
religious mullahs, telling audiences that “Iraq
now has the opportunity to do what no other Arab country
in our time has yet done: establish a genuine democracy.”
By the time he left in early April, he had helped write
the Iraqi interim constitution. One of its provisions
guarantees that women will hold 25 percent of seats
in a transitional parliament.
In another crisis-plagued part of the globe, Terry
Karl has been working with local investigators in Chad.
In that oil-rich but wretchedly poor West African nation,
the political science professor has shown people living
along ExxonMobil’s 600-mile pipeline how to document
rising rates of infant leukemia, polluted water sources
and the loss of revenue-producing mango trees—all
evidence, she says, of the devastation that can result
from resource exploitation.
Like Diamond, Karl, ’70, MA ’76, PhD ’82,
is a specialist in comparative politics. She speaks
five languages, and her work on oil-exporting nations
takes her to Africa, the Caspian Sea region and Latin
America. She also collects evidence against human-rights
violators and studies how countries transition from
authoritarian rule to democracy.
The mileage that Diamond and Karl have accumulated
this year is one measure of what political scientists—who
sometimes are accused of ivory-tower diffidence—can
bring to an increasingly complex and volatile world.
Their boots-on-the-ground contributions also point to
a widening methodological divide in their field between
those who value case studies and those who think countries
can best be understood through statistical models. Moreover,
faculty interviewed by Stanford say the boundaries increasingly
are blurring between the four traditional subfields
of their discipline: international relations, American
politics, comparative politics and political theory.
“One of the reasons that it’s a fun time
is that it’s a really intellectually messy time,”
says department chair Paul Sniderman, a specialist in
American politics who has done research in Italy, France
and the Netherlands. “When you can’t predict
the subject matter of the papers your colleagues are
going to show you, it’s a good time.”
Some faculty describe the political science department
as a doughnut: no single methodological core, and faculty
spread all around campus. Six professors have joint
appointments at the Hoover Institution, two at the Institute
for International Studies, one at the Graduate School
of Business and three in other departments within the
School of Humanities and Sciences.
Michael McFaul is a comparativist and Hoover fellow
who worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, D.C., for three years. He returns
to the nation’s capital every six weeks or so,
to testify before congressional committees and meet
with administration officials. In recent years, he says,
he has noticed a growing divide between policy making
and the academic discipline of political science, as
well as declining student interest in government service.
“There aren’t many professors in the Bush
administration right now, and
that, to me, is a concern,” says McFaul, ’86,
MA ’86. When State Department recruiters come
to Stanford, he adds, they find it a hard sell. “A
lot more students are going off to work for [nongovernmental
organizations] if they’re looking for a first
job, rather than working for the State Department or
the CIA.”
Students who major in political science often have
a history of interest in social issues and volunteering,
and they are typically good at math, their faculty mentors
say. Many undergraduates are pre-law candidates who
think an understanding of government and the Constitution
will help them in their graduate study. Others want
to know how to think about nuclear proliferation, or
understand how Japan became an economic juggernaut in
the 1980s.
“Our students want a field that allows them to
be able to say something about contemporary problems
of the world,” says Judith Goldstein, a specialist
in international relations who serves as Humanities
and Sciences’ cognizant dean for undergraduate
and graduate studies. “Political science has deep
theoretical traditions, but a lot of our classes are
applied, and you can talk about real things.”
Even in political theory, the subfield that has always
seemed a bit apart from the other three, there’s
a practical orientation these days. “One of the
suspicions a lot of scholars and students have about
political theory is that you read a political theorist
like Plato or Aristotle, and you’re supposed to
get a blueprint of how society ought to be organized,”
says assistant professor Robert Reich. Reich, MA ’98,
PhD ’98, teaches Children’s Citizenship:
Justice Across Generations, and Ethics and Politics
of Public Service, an introductory course for students
who are doing local volunteer work. “My own approach
is to start with the real world and illuminate the boundaries
of what’s morally permissible in public policy.” |
