Founded in the midst of the Vietnam War with the vision to use political science to make a difference in the lives of people, MIT’s Department of Political Science remains true to that vision today, according to alumni, faculty, and other speakers featured at the department’s 50th anniversary symposium on November 6.
Titled “50 Years of Rigor and Relevance,” the symposium drew more than 200 people to MIT’s Wong Auditorium for a daylong series of panel discussions that explored the department’s distinctive strengths and its influence on the nation and the world.
Those strengths, as highlighted by speaker after speaker, include: asking big questions, collaborating across disciplines, conducting field research, and applying analytical rigor to draw connections between political theory and policies that have real-world impact.
The political science faculty is vital to the Institute’s educational mission, as MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a message to salute the anniversary. “At MIT, we aim to produce not just scientists and engineers, but citizens — educated human beings who appreciate the complexities of the world around them and are committed to making a difference. That is MIT — and achieving that vision depends on MIT Political Science,” he said.
The event began with greetings from Professor Andrea Campbell, head of the department, followed by a welcome from Melissa Nobles, former department head and current Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
By way of proof, the first panel focused on the contributions of MIT Political Science to national security, health care and social policy, American elections, and US industrial policy.
Next, Campbell, who is also the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, discussed her role in groundbreaking work on health-care policy, which was cited in the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act. Charles Stewart III, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science, followed by outlining MIT’s work on the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which was launched to prevent a repeat of the 2000 election’s vote-count fiasco.
“We were brought together and told the job was to build the perfect voting machine, and we discovered very quickly that this was a dumb idea,” Stewart said. “We were approaching this problem like a bunch of engineers, but we quickly concluded the problem was a system problem.” The project has contributed to changes in both laws and technology that have significantly improved the election system, restoring the vote to millions of Americans who had effectively been disenfranchised by faulty ballot designs, voting machines, and voter registration procedures, Stewart said.
Suzanne Berger, the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, rounded out the first panel by providing a snapshot of MIT’s Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) project, which she co-chaired. Sparked into being by the US financial crisis of 2007–2008, PIE was a multidisciplinary effort to determine the future of American manufacturing.
First to speak was Roger Petersen, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, who credited MIT — particularly its ethos of tackling big questions — for inspiring his groundbreaking research into the roots of ethnic violence in Eastern Europe. “We take the first step of the scientific method very seriously, and that is observation,” he said. Having noticed that multinational areas had disintegrated, and that major ethnic groups had risen up to become nation states, Petersen asked why. The answer, he found, centered on the powerful influence of fear, hatred, and resentment.
Associate Professor Vipin Narang next detailed MIT’s work on nuclear strategy from the Cold War through today. “We are at the vanguard now of studying the second nuclear age…[which] is in some ways more dangerous,” he said, noting that weak states and non-state actors have raised the risk of nuclear confrontation.
Assistant Professor Richard Nielsen proceeded to describe his work trying to answer a big related question: “Why do some clerics turn to teaching violent jihad when most of them don’t?” Nielsen has spent years crunching Internet data to discover which clerics become jihadists and why. “When I think of what MIT is trying to contribute, I would say basic facts that are really, really hard to come by,” he said.
The two midday panels centered on MIT’s distinctive approaches to political science and on what’s unique about conducting research at the Institute. Speakers ranged from Archon Fung PhD ’99, acting dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to Associate Professor Chappell Lawson, head of MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives and former executive director of planning and policy for US Customs and Border Control.
Speakers also stressed the department’s interdisciplinary bent. “What I think is so distinctive about MIT is that … people are working across methods and approaches, often blending them together,” said ichard Locke PhD ’89, former head of MIT Political Science, and now the Provost of Brown University.
Steve Wilkinson PhD ’98, chair of Yale’s Department of Political Science, joined others in noting that MIT stands out for making fieldwork a real priority. “It’s very important to go out and interview people and open yourself up to things you don’t expect. That’s where real innovation comes from,” he said.
Fittingly, the symposium concluded with a panel focused on some of the major contributions made by MIT Political Science to the real world of policy practice. This panel featured Ivo Daalder PhD ’90, the former US ambassador to NATO; Susan Shirk PhD ’74, former deputy assistant secretary of state at the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs; William Durch PhD ’88 who served as project director for the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on UN Peace Operations; and Kathleen Hicks PhD ‘10, the former principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy.
“It’s a true privilege to serve one’s country and if you get lucky enough to get that chance, grab it, and the good news if you’ve been here at MIT you can probably do it in a way that’s successful,” said Daalder, who credited MIT with providing three keys to his success: expertise, analytical rigor, and a theoretical framework for how the world works.
Hicks, who came to the Institute on a temporary assignment from the Department of Defense, said she particularly appreciated the MIT Political Science Department’s respect for practitioners and its appreciation for history. Her experience at MIT gave her a strong understanding of analytical frameworks, analytic rigor, and subject matter breadth, she said.
“The reality for policymakers is that you are pulling from many disciplines, and MIT does a good job of forcing you out of your comfort zone and into complimentary fields that can help you out,” Hicks said.