"I enjoy opportunities to engage with students about the work that is happening in Washington, D.C., and critically analyze issues that are important to our democracy."
As a newly-named senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, representing Rhode Island’s First Congressional District, will teach a Master of Public Affairs (MPA) class this spring, Public Policy and Politics in Partisan Times. He joins other political leaders who are Watson senior fellows, notably Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee and Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, and Tom Perez ’83, chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Obama administration labor secretary.
Cicilline is no stranger to teaching graduate students, an experience he finds enjoyable and meaningful. Earlier in his career, he taught Advanced Problems in Constitutional Law and co-taught Advanced Trial Practice at Roger Williams University Law School. A former Rhode Island House representative and two-term mayor of Providence before being elected to the U.S. House in 2011, Cicilline has long been interested in politics and public policy. As a Brown undergraduate, Cicilline, along with the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., and William Mondale (son of former vice president Walter Mondale), co-founded a College Democrats chapter.
Cicilline created the curriculum and chose the assigned texts for the six-week course, which will explore the consequences and causes of partisan polarization, focusing specifically on how polarization impacts the development and implementation of U.S. national policy. Using historical and contemporary examples of successful and failed policy-making in our splintered environment, the course will examine how effective political leadership and entrepreneurship can promote widely-supported policies and overcome barriers to adopting such policies. As a Member of Congress serving in a Republican-controlled and Democratic-controlled House, the newly-named chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, member of the Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees, and incoming chair of the Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee, he is ideally suited to analyze how polarization can negatively impact issues of national importance.