One of the most attractive aspects of any interdisciplinary major is the freedom afforded to students in terms of course selection. This is abundantly clear from a visit to the Web site of the International Relations (IR) program - the most popular major at Tufts. As the program is currently designed, two IR students could graduate with the exact same diploma while having only two courses, Political Science 61 (Intro to International Relations) and Economics 5 (Maco/Microeconomics), in common.
While the freedom to design one's own course of study can surely enhance an academic experience, the IR Program is dangerously close to turning this freedom into academic anarchy. Because of its general, and perhaps intentional, lack of focus and structure, the knowledge acquired through the IR course of study will not necessarily be relevant to the student's future career, academic or otherwise.
As the Director's Leadership Council (DLC) and the IR faculty have recognized, a drastic restructuring of the curriculum is called for. This is an opportunity to redefine what International Relations is at Tufts, and it should be approached boldly and with a sense of responsibility to future generations of students and scholars.
The most important shift that the IR Program can make is to go back to the basics and reaffirm that International Relations is a subfield of political science. While cultural studies, economics and history are all integral parts of the study of international politics and relations among states and transnational entities, they should be treated as secondary to the political science aspect.
Currently, an IR major can receive a degree while only taking one very general and introductory course in political science. This means that some IR majors will have only very briefly been introduced to the theoretical underpinnings of international politics before they leave Tufts, ostensibly able to make sense of interstate relations. At the same time, students are required to take eight semesters of a foreign language. The IR Program would do well to treat political science more like a foreign language, and insist that students become fluent in the theoretical aspect of international relations.
Another very basic yet extremely important change the IR Program should make is in line with the suggestions of the DLC. In general, the curriculum must become more focused. It must become less horizontal and more vertical, delving deeper into fewer topics in order to increase specialization. This can be accomplished, as the DLC suggested, by increasing the number of thematic cluster courses and by asserting more control over the type of cluster classes that students take. International Relations should also either cut the number of core requirement areas, restrict the number of classes that satisfy these requirements, or pursue both of these strategies.
The approved course offerings, especially for the Theories of Society and Culture area, the U.S. Foreign Policy area and the Historical Dimension area are so broad that it may not be an exaggeration to say that many students fill these requirements without even realizing it. Classes should meet a minimum standard of relevance to the student's overall understanding of international politics if placed on the approved list, and it is not at all clear that such a standard - while published at the top of each list of classes - is currently applied to course approval, particularly when a perusal of the IR Web site reveals that virtually every history class not focused on the United States is deemed valuable to the IR major's course of study. It may in fact be of greater utility to simply cut one or two of the above areas and add a second required course in one of the remaining core areas.
International Relations is Tufts' largest major because so many Tufts students have an interest in studying and working in the field (although it is possible that this popularity is due to the fact that it is very difficult to study at Tufts for four years without accidentally completing half of the IR Program's requirements). While some students are currently able to pursue a coherent, deep course of study in IR of their own volition, the IR Program should make sure that no majors fall through the cracks of its overly broad and focus-deficent curriculum. The faculty has a duty to protect the study of International Relations at Tufts from a future of incoherent irrelevance.
