I began taking classes with Dean Grier in the spring semester of 2005, enrolling in the "Fundamental Texts of International Affairs" class. The course included close readings of Metternich, Churchill, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Kennedy, among many others.
The class included all kinds of writing assignments, most of which would come back to us repeatedly with multi-colored suggestions for improvement, rather than corrections. The philosophy behind deadlines was that the assignments were written -- and rewritten and rewritten -- until they were complete. I once wrote five versions of an assignment before it was acceptable to both myself and DAG.
In that first class, he laid out two ground rules:
- Undergraduates don't have first names. I believe this was intended to help us differentiate between our identities as social individuals and critical thinkers, allowing us to be bold in our assertions. It also provided for comedic encounters on the street when we ran into one another and realized that we didn't know each others' first names.
- We were not allowed to say "I think," because he didn't care what you thought -- he cared to know what you had reasoned, had concluded. This rule was later explicitly adapted to include making definitive statements in a weak or quiet voice, as I often did. This rule was designed to make us defend our positions clearly and concisely in front of the class.
My second course with Dean Grier was "Globalization and Industrialization" and once again, he challenged us to push ourselves by creating a comprehensive book proposal. We wrote prospectuses, tables of contents and sample chapters before being asked to pitch our books to the class in a 2-minute presentation. Some broke out in hives while giving their pitch, others confessed that their books felt muddled and they would like advice from the class on refining the central ideas. The focus was honest intellectual discourse in front of our peers.
I believe that my third formal course was entitled "Difficult Texts of International Affairs." Following that class, I participated in my final class informally, a class entitled "Obscure and Difficult Readings in International Affairs." Perhaps Dean Grier hoped to deter enrollment in those last two courses by scheduling them for two and a half hours on Friday afternoons. I will never know if that's the case, however, because there were about 10 of us enrolled in the course during the last semester of my senior year at GW. (I once saw a Hatchet article about course professors using catchy course titles to encourage enrollment. It struck me as odd that the last sentence of the article mentioned Dean Grier's class on Fridays, even cited the number of students enrolled, but the author didn't see the story there.)
Dean Grier most frequently refers to Henry Adams, one of his favorite authors and historians. Henry Adams believed that traditional education had failed him and he wrote The Education of Henry Adams, a reflection of his self-education, of his experiential learning. Now, having graduated and kept in touch with Dean Grier, I understand more clearly his methodology.
He used to ask us all the time, "So what?" trying to get at what is really being said in even the most diplomatic and nuanced speeches, the most seemingly confusing poems or embellished accounts of history, like Herodotus.
Well, "So what?" I understand now that his courses, reflected by his methodology, were about teaching students how to read, how to think and how to learn for themselves instead of relying on commentary of others, as we often do in the international affairs realm. Henry Adams went to Harvard and believed that the process of learning was most important, not his formal schooling. Dean Grier, whose background is also rather varied, believes the same.