Reflection
Reflecting on my past two years. Banality is the word I would use to characterize many of the classes.
Performative loop of elite political science: It creates language for its own sake, not for action. Two tendencies emerge:
- Self-referential theory — Dense writing about discourse, identity, or norms that often avoids measurable consequences or practical engagement. Meant more for impressing peers than informing policy.
- Wordplay over substance – Terms like “governance,” “stakeholder engagement,” or “epistemic community” dress up simple ideas. They give an illusion of insight but rarely help you change the material world.
The trope that somewhat-aware students seize on is the liberalism vs. realism debate. The topic lack not substance, but quickly deteriorated when trigger-happy IR teens — thinking they’re Kissinger tossing out hot takes — start spewing nonsense.
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Quickly, it becomes a back-and-forth of: “You’re too naive.” “You’re a complicit human rights abuser.”
That is the state of the top policy school.
A Middlebury IR major with a hydroflask the size of her neck thinking she’s the next Madeleine Albright. A sulking teen from Georgia convinced he’ll be the next top military chief of staff. A Latin American human rights advocate turned full-time social justice warrior. And of course, a silent section of Chinese FOBs — too scared to speak from generational fear, also genuinely befuddled by debating, a foreign concept to them.
It’s a hodgepodge of personalities, a microcosm of contradictions: performers of ideology, identity-fueled rightenousness, and silent skeptics.
It’s amusing that someone has to pay £40,000 and sit through a parade of star lecturers to learn what any civic-minded teenager could tell you: that politics involves compromise.
“Politically realistic goals” is framed as a revelation, but it’s a truism any moderately observant person would know by 18.
Elite policy schools brand such banalities with prestige, while charging a fortune and credentialing conformity.
