If a cell phone rings during class, Associate Professor Daniel Drezner says he’ll make the student stand up and sing a song. The threat from The Fletcher School’s newest and youngest faculty addition is not an idle one. Less than two weeks into the fall semester, one student had already violated Drezner’s code of classroom conduct and swiftly paid the consequences. Reflecting on the disturbance, Drezner said, "It was a Turkish student and I thought, well, I’ve never heard the Turkish national anthem before."
"I’m pretty sure a cell phone’s not going to go off in that class again, which was the idea," Drezner, 38, said during an interview in his office in Cabot.
Sitting in on Drezner’s class – Global Political Economy – provides an opportunity to witness an energetic professor challenging and feeding off the opinions of his students, from their thoughts on the stagnant Doha round of WTO talks to well-argued speculation on what international trade will look like in 20 years. While pacing the room for 75 minutes, Drezner elicits thoughts from students and engages them in discussion instead of giving a straightforward lecture. The result is a forum in which Drezner comes across as being as inquisitive of his students as they are of him.
"I like Professor Drezner’s style," says Jeff Kubiak, a PhD student at Fletcher. He adds that Drezner’s "somewhat unique classroom demeanor…made me curious as to how he would be presenting the material."
And with Drezner’s persona as a self-described public intellectual, there is plenty of material out there allowing students to form an opinion of the sometimes controversial professor before they even set foot in his classroom.
Atop the results of a Google search for Daniel Drezner is a link to his Web blog, http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog. But with the popularity of the blog comes criticism. Some detractors, including members of the old guard in the ivory towers of academia, are not necessarily critical of Drezner’s opinions expressed on the blog, per se, but they do take issue with the blog’s mere existence. In an article published in the July 28 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Drezner notes that some of his colleagues at the University of Chicago, where he taught before coming to Fletcher, overestimated the amount of time he devotes to the blog, arguing his time would be better spent on more scholarly pursuits. For the record, Drezner says he spends anywhere from ten minutes to three hours a day on his blog, usually averaging about 90 minutes on a daily basis.
Drezner established his blog on September 11, 2002. Looking back, he describes the impetus to do so by saying: "When 9/11 happened there was a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about what was going on in terms of foreign policy, but very few of these people had any type of expertise in international relations or politics. I thought there was a niche I could fill."
And fill it he did. The site now receives about 5,000 hits a day.
"I really did think that I would do it for a year as a pedagogical exercise and then publish a small piece in International Studies Perspectives saying whether blogging helps your teaching or something. And what I honestly didn’t expect is that people started reading the damn thing," he says.
Claims that Drezner devotes too much time to his blog are hard to justify when one considers the list of articles appearing in prominent periodicals such as Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs Journal, as well the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Then there are Drezner’s books.
His most recent book is US Trade Strategy: Free Versus Fair, a primer on trade policy commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations, where Drezner was a fellow from 2000 to 2001. "The conceit of the book is it’s a policy memorandum to the President saying, ‘Mr. President, this is the current lay of the land, and I think you’ve got a free trade option and a fair trade option. Here are the pros and cons of both.’"
While handing out free copies of the book to students after class, Drezner quips, "If I see any of these on eBay..."
The kind gesture did not go unnoticed by the recipients. "It’s the first time at Fletcher I’ve had a professor hand out a book for free," remarked one student.
Drezner says the reason he got into the political science field in the first place was because "there are questions that I think are interesting and hopefully I can come up with some interesting answers." In his forthcoming book, All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes (Princeton University Press), expected in February 2007, Drezner continues that line of provocative inquiry.
"In a world where it’s regulatory standards that are the remaining residual impediments to economic integration, under what circumstances are you going to see those regulations coordinated at the global level and when will there be disagreement?" Drezner asks.
"How should we treat labor? What are the minimum standards by which labor should be treated in terms of employment? What are the environmental standards? To what extent should banks be supervised? Is there content on the Internet that should be censored? These are questions that are what I call the politics of daily life. When you talk about global political economy, most people think about these abstract trade negotiations that don’t affect them, but the regulatory questions do affect them in a lot of ways," Drezner says. He goes on to add: "Global civil society is very active on questions of labor standards or environmental standards. They’re less active on issues of, let’s say, financial codes and standards, which in some ways are just as important. They’re more arcane regulations."
Drezner was born in Syracuse but spent little time there. By the time he was ten, he had moved about six or seven times. His father was still in medical school when Drezner was born and the moves coincided with an internship, residency and other career advancements. After that Drezner grew up in Avon, Connecticut. He strengthened his New England roots by receiving a BA at Williams College in western Massachusetts.
As the father of two children – a six-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter – Drezner now lives with his wife and kids in Newton. He says that in addition to Fletcher’s reputation one of the reasons he decided to move to Medford was because of the school’s proximity to his family in Connecticut.
"Given that we wanted to live in New England, there weren’t a lot of schools at this level," Drezner says. "I think the fact that I do both scholarly and more policy-oriented work was an attractor."
Drezner is keenly aware of his professorial role at an institution focused on fusing theory with practice. He says that while some students come to graduate school thinking they need to accumulate facts, such as the nuances of international trade statutes and how they’re applied, "anybody with a decent Internet connection can figure out those things. The value added of the Fletcher education is getting the analytical toolkit to tell you which facts are salient and which facts aren’t. And my job is to teach them the toolkit."
Having worn many hats – an economist in the Treasury Department and an academic from his first teaching position at the University of Colorado at Boulder – Drezner describes himself first and foremost as a political scientist. "I’m a political scientist who knows a thing or two about economics," says Drezner, who has an MA in economics and a PhD in political science from Stanford University. "I originally was going to get a PhD in economics and then switched after two years in the program because I liked the tools that I learned in economics but I thought the questions they asked were boring. I thought power was much more interesting to study."
Drezner says his thinking has been influenced by the likes of Stephen Krasner, his dissertation adviser at Stanford, and the economist Albert Hirschman, noting, "Every time I read him I’m sort of blown away by the extent to which what a lot of us are doing now is simply an elaboration of what he came up with."
On the surface, Drezner’s politics are difficult to pigeonhole, especially when one considers he’s a libertarian and registered Republican who voted for Democratic hopeful John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential election.
"I’m a libertarian who studies international relations which leads to certain contradictions because a classical liberal is someone who generally believes the state should probably get out of most of the public’s affairs," Drezner says. "On the other hand, if you study international relations you learn to very quickly respect the power of states in world politics and the ability of states to crowd out any threat to them in world politics."
He added that while his politics have remained steadfast over the years, the only thing that has changed is the degree to which the Bush administration infuriates him. Drezner was an informal advisor to the Bush campaign in 2000.
With his outspoken comments, Drezner acknowledges it can sometimes be difficult to appear impartial and keep his politics out of the classroom. "It used to be the case that I always felt I kept them separate," he said. "The blog has sort of made that a little tougher in that I know people read it, and so it’s obviously a way in which people can find out how I think about things."
Still, Drezner said he doesn’t let his views outside the classroom affect his performance inside it. "My goal is if I see the entire class agreeing on something and I don’t think they’ve come to that agreement without having thought about it then I’m going to adopt the opposite position, and any good teacher should do that."
The approach sometimes has unexpected results. During a classroom discussion about the merits of neorealism versus neoliberal institutionalism, Drezner argued for the other side, causing one student to label him liberal. After a pause and a smirk, he relished the moment and replied, "That’s one of the first times I’ve been called a liberal in class."
Like the cell phone going off in class, such comments will likely become an anomaly as students get to know Professor Drezner.
