Christopher W. Ray

Training future policymakers is a critical part of the policymaking process

Teaching Philosophy

I see the underlying goal of policy education as helping students to engage with difficult questions. My courses tend to focus not just on the subject matter itself, but also on developing key skills that students can use to better engage with the complex reality of the policy world.

I generally build lessons around three main concepts:

1. An underlying question, tension, or puzzle.
2. A popular political narrative that we will scrutinize/complicate.
3. A “connection” piece: How the topic can be informed by one of our key course skills, how scholarship can help us answer key questions, or how it mirrors content from elsewhere in the course.

Influenced by my background in psychology, I encourage students to see education as a process of introspection: To understand our own processes of perception and judgement, and critically examine the narratives on which our own worldviews depend.

Courses

Political Science 2300: U.S. Foreign Policy

A survey course examining the sources, conduct, and consequences of U.S. foreign policy. The class begins by considering a series of key questions/debates central to the topic: How do we balance principles versus interests? How do we assess the motivation of other states? Do our historical experiences suggest that the U.S. should be more engaged with the world—or pull back closer to home? We explore these issues using a series of key historical episodes (the American Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, etc.), which serve as a kind of “training set” for students to leverage the aid of hindsight as they learn to engage with challenging policy issues.

The second half of the course explores the dominant foreign policy topics of today: Globalization and trade, the War on Terror, great power competition with China and Russia, development and aid, and emerging issues like cyberwarfare and climate change. Students employ core course skills (counterfactual reasoning, identification and deconstruction of policy narratives) to engage with contrasting arguments around these issues—now on much firmer footing to contend with politicized arguments that often seek to oversimplify complicated questions. Throughout the process, we highlight how scholarship in history, political science, and other fields can be brought to bear on the practical challenges confronting policymakers.

Teaching Experience