Get Out of Your Lane

Teaching juuuuust out of my specialty

Professors at research universities tend to specialize. Like, really specialize. You might think that all international relations professors know more or less the same things, but in my experience just about all of us have giant gaps in our knowledge. The world’s leading experts on the European Union may not know more than a few members of ASEAN, and experts on nuclear proliferation may have no idea about how international peacekeeping works. Students of post-1945 U.S. foreign policy may know almost nothing about nineteenth-century foreign policy.

One consequence of this is that you may encounter stone-cold, original experts in their domain who immediately fall back on the most cliched and simplistic stereotypes about anything that’s not within the bounds of what they publish about. This is rational ignorance: you aren’t hired or promoted for what you know, but for what you publish. Knowing just enough to keep you at the edge of your specialty is hard enough—why invest in knowing anything else? (“Ah, but the life of the mind!” you object. No, the life of the mind is for retirees and people with 9 to 5s who can read at leisure. Knowledge production is a Stakhanovite trade, not an aristocratic whimsy.)

Forcing mechanisms exist for keeping one abreast of developments outside of one’s narrow specialty. They can be useful, not least because sometimes the laborers in adjacent furrows have developed a technique you can gank for your own projects. Furthermore, academia is both faddish and social, and knowing what others are doing can be useful in innumerable soft ways (oh, that’s how we’re presenting regression coefficients now?). And, of course, despite all the professional incentives to focus on the task at hand, academics are selected from a herd disproportionately drawn to learning for its own sake.

Among those forcing mechanisms are the departmental or field seminar and teaching. The former is a subject for another time. The latter is more familiar anyhow, so I’ll talk about that.

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It might seem odd to identify teaching as a forcing mechanism so that the professor can learn. After all, isn’t the point of teaching the students’ learning? (Looks around, sees this is a public newsletter.) Of course it is, so we’ll describe the benefits to the professor as a happy side effect rather than one of the points of teaching.

Teaching something means you have to learn it. And when you’re teaching something just out of your lane, something where you kind of know what’s going on, you’re going to experience the best possible part of learning—lifting the fog of kind of.

That’s one of the reasons I was happy to teach a course on Congress this term. I know a lot about Congress by contrast with most folks, even most political scientists. I’ve written about Congress; I was a Congressional Fellow; I’ve jogged with Richard Lugar. (Really!) And I’ve taken multiple graduate-level courses about Congress and congressional politics. The rule of thumb is that taking one such course qualifies you to teach at the undergraduate level, so it’s not like I was striking off into the wild when I developed the course (syllabus is here).

Photo by Kendall Hoopes: https://www.pexels.com/photo/reflection-of-gray-mosque-on-water-616852/

And yet—there’s a difference between having read a lot and having tried to explain it to someone who doesn’t have the same vast amount of shared knowledge that another political scientist does. Crafting a syllabus is an exercise in organizing knowledge in a way that someone who doesn’t know something will be guided toward knowing it—at least kind of. That’s one reason why it’s sometimes a good idea to intentionally undershoot on readings, or at least mix engaging descriptive work in with more challenging theory stuff.

What did I learn from the experience? I learned that I was pretty good on parties and committees, but not really all that great on the specifics of lobbying (ironically). I learned that congressional history is just a hard sell—if you want to understand Congress now, there’s a lot of ways in which understanding the “textbook” bipartisan, regular-order Congress will confuse you more than enlighten you. I learned that there’s been some genuine and exciting advances in the theory of representation. And I learned that we need more work on how whiteness works in Congress—instead of focusing on race as something that’s a deviation from the norm. I also learned that we’re getting pretty good on understanding congressional staff and legislative effectiveness—even if I think there’s more to be done to conceptualize that idea.

I read a lot more than showed up in the syllabus. That’s the other reason it’s good to branch out a bit: you will learn something because for every reading that goes on the list two more will never make it (at least). And I think the students benefitted—certainly by the end of the class their work was a lot more sophisticated than it was in the beginning, which is all you can ask. (And that wasn’t chatGPT because my assignments are based on very recent developments that require actual engagement and observation.)

The other benefit to teaching just outside of your lane is that you find out how what you know can benefit what specialists are working on. In my case, that ended up being contributions about mainstreaming Indian (Native American) politics and foreign policy and national security and Congress. There’s a lot written on both, but my sense is that neither are really considered core parts of the typical course by Congress specialists, and I think there’s reasons to rethink that—not least because Indian politics should be much more common in American political science courses and because we should discuss more about how the First Branch plays a constant role in foreign policy and security. (My own intro lectures have changed on this as I’ve learned more!)

Going just outside of one’s expertise isn’t always good short-term advice, but in the end stretching is the only way to stay flexible. It’s good to change lanes sometimes.