In The Classroom at the Woodrow Wilson School

WWS course offerings at both the graduate and undergraduate levels offer a diverse look at today’s world of public policy. Topics include the standards such as international diplomacy, labor economics, democracy, land use policy, and election issues, but also have broadened to include health economics in developing countries, development challenges of infectious diseases, universal healthcare, Internet privacy, energy economics, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.

This past spring, two writers sat in on WWS courses to report on what is going on in the classroom. Taught by full-time faculty, visiting lecturers, and public policy practitioners, these classroom experiences are where many WWS and Princeton students get their first taste of how public policy affects our daily lives.

Instructor: Edward Felten, Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs

by Hilary Parker 

Since marketplace economics have led to dangerous gaps in Internet security and left everyone vulnerable to cyberattacks, what should the U.S. government do? This is the question Ed Felten put to the 10 students gathered around him in Bendheim Hall on an unseasonably warm April afternoon. The conversation was likewise heated.

Impose rules on Internet service providers, suggested Princeton senior Sam Grossberg. Penalize people who spread computer viruses, offered another student. Set standards for software security, posited yet another.

“But who’s going to decide what is good security software?” asked Hart Montgomery ’08, a computer science major. “Do we let government bureaucrats decide?”

Felten kept up with the flow of student responses, jotting a rapidly growing list down on the board, every so often entering into the conversation.

“As for standards, the argument is often made that so many people use the same software that it gives attackers a big target,” said Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy and professor of computer science and public affairs at WWS. “But there’s a counterargument that says if you assume everyone uses Windows and you make a deal with Microsoft about security features, it will protect more people.”

There was a brief pause in the conversation as students pondered what Felten just said, and then they were off and running again. The suggestions continued—offer bounties for hackers to report other hackers, give vouchers for purchases of security software.

Felten again interjected. “Let me throw one more monkey wrench into this discussion. We’ve been focusing on software, but another thing that controls the security of a system is user behavior. Most people just click ‘yes’ and ‘ok’ when those security download boxes pop up.”

There was a shift in focus. Suddenly, they were talking about educating consumers and funneling more money into research.

The discussion was not likely to end even with the conclusion of class. Each student in Felten’s class was required to submit 11 pieces to a course blog throughout the semester. They often chimed in about class discussions on subjects ranging from privacy and intellectual property to the regulation of broadcasting and telecommunications.

“The topic of information technology and public policy is very big and broad—you can’t cover it fully in a semester,” said Felten, a renowned security expert who has testified before Congress on related issues on multiple occasions. “I try to give students a flavor of interesting topics and an opportunity for them to learn about other disciplines. I want them to get a sense of the scope of these problems and especially to see more clearly that the connection between information technology and policy is something that affects people’s lives.”

In the twice-weekly course, students hailed from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, with roughly half on the technology side and the other half from the humanities and social sciences. This is the perfect composition to serve one of Felten’s goals—having students from different disciplines teach their classmates to consider problems from unfamiliar viewpoints.

“I learned quite a bit about government and the legal system in this course, especially as it pertains to technology,” Montgomery said. “The course’s greatest strength was that it pulled people who were proficient in computer science together with people who were very knowledgeable about public policy and law. This led to some very interesting discussions and certainly helped me to gain a different perspective on how laws regarding technology are made.”
 

Instructor: Princeton Lyman, Visiting Lecturer in Public and International Affairs

by Hilary Parker 

Instructor Princeton Lyman and the 15 graduate students that surrounded him were deep in conversation in New Jersey, but their focus was thousands of miles away—in Africa.

Gathered in the basement of Robertson Hall on a Friday morning, the group was taking a critical look at influential organizations and nations that have power over the fate of democracy, development, and security on the African continent. Using historical examples as case studies, their goal was to explore what major players—including the African Union, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, and China—could, should, and might do about the current political crisis over election results in Zimbabwe.

Graduate student Emerson Sykes MPA ’09 started the discussion with a brief overview of the African Union and the organization’s response to other conflicts, including the negotiation of a deal between the AU president and rebels in the Côte d’Ivoire in 2005 and an ongoing mission to protect civilians in Sudan.

Sykes had barely finished his presentation when his classmates began their questions: Are the member nations actually equal, or do wealthier nations in the African Union hold more sway? How are decisions really made?

They wanted to know more—they were eager for an insider’s view. Lyman, former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria and former assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, was able to give it to them.

“South Africa and Nigeria were major players in shaping the African Union,” he explained. “It’s going to be interesting to see how that dynamic changes when their leaders are off the scene next year. And there is always some tension between the chairman of the commission and the heads of state. It came up in Côte d’Ivoire—there was a struggle to find out who was in charge of mediation.”
As for decision making?

“There’s a great reluctance to take a position short of consensus,” Lyman continued. “If there’s no consensus, you won’t see a very strong statement out of the AU.”

Lyman, at the Woodrow Wilson School as a visiting lecturer in 2007–08, is an adjunct research fellow from the Council on Foreign Relations. In teaching his seminar on Africa, which met for three hours every Friday morning this past spring, his goal was to help prepare students academically and professionally for a world in which Africa is becoming increasingly important in international politics.

“He often told stories that casually included references to back-room negotiations with some of the most influential political figures on the [African] continent,” said Sykes, who intends to pursue a career in African political development. “His humility while sharing these phenomenal experiences endeared students to him.”

Lyman supplemented the course with visits from distinguished guest lecturers, including David Crane, the former chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone, and Joyce Leader, U.S. deputy chief of mission in Rwanda for three years prior to the 1994 genocide.

And the students themselves added even more diversity to the mix.

“This class is striking because so many of the students have direct experience in Africa,” Lyman said. “You have a wonderful blend of people with different backgrounds and experiences coming to the table, including members of U.S. and foreign governments, diplomats and seasoned aid workers.”

Among the ranks was Taya Weiss MPA ’08, a graduate student who had lived in South Africa from 2001–2007. During that time, she worked at the Institute for Security Studies, conducted fieldwork in countries including Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and helped pioneer regional police training in southern Africa on violence against women and children.

Weiss noted, “The United States’ relationships with many African countries are changing, and this course provided much-needed, varied perspectives to understand what’s happening through more than just the usual lens of aid and development.”
 

Instructor: Lee M. Silver, Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Affairs

by Phyllis Spiegel 

Professor Lee Silver says he’s “blown away” by the speed of progress in the field of genetics. “Geneticists have unlocked all the doors; there are no barriers to what is possible,” he said. Ten years ago, when he began teaching Human Genetics, Reproduction, and Public Policy, Professor Silver expected it to be decades before the technology evolved to where it is today. “If I’d described then what is happening now, it would have been regarded as pure nonsense,” he said.

As a visitor to the class, I realized that here, on Monday and Wednesday mornings in Robertson Hall’s Dodds Auditorium, the undergraduate students were learning a great deal about life and the decisions they would have to make in their own futures.

Professor Silver’s lectures, which covered a span of millions of years, from before the beginning of life as we know it to the creation of life in the laboratory today, were supplemented with a collection of pop songs that indirectly taught a few lessons about human relations and inspired discussion. Titles included Meat Loaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light, John Lennon’s Imagine (with riffs from Lou Reed’s Take a Walk on the Wild Side), ’80s New Wave number She Blinded Me with Science, Weird Al Yankovic’s I Think I’m a Clone Now, and Christine Lavin’s Biological Time Bomb. And bringing science fiction to the screen, there were Monday evening movie showings of Brave New World, Contact, Blade Runner and Frankenstein, all of which include fantasies that have become reality.

Offered every spring, the course is constantly updated with rapidly emerging technologies and discoveries. Some of the recent breakthroughs under discussion were the ability to create a 100 percent human genome without human parents, men having babies, babies with five different parents, and implanting human cells into the brains of monkeys. “As scientists do these amazing things with genetic manipulation,” said Professor Silver, “society will have to make the rules about the ethics and politics in areas such as egg procurement, and embryo and cloning research.”

In his classes, Professor Silver does not present ethical conclusions. “My students have a broad range of opinions and diversity. I learn a lot from them,” he said.

Jake Bornstein WWS ’09 appreciated Professor Silver’s “clarification of the scientific perspective of the biothethical debate.”

“The nineteenth century was the century of chemistry,” Bornstein said, “the twentieth of physics, and in the twenty-first, I expect biology will come into its own. The debate over biotechnology will become increasingly intense, and as a policymaker or working in the private sector, it will be important for me to understand the underlying technology,” he noted.

Another student, Amy Margaret Liang ’09, a molecular biology major and a WWS Certificate student, said she was familiar with the biology but was glad to study “the history of how the science developed along with the sociological background and new perspectives.” Liang, who is considering a career as a transplant surgeon, foresees growing organs, rather than what she calls the “disconcerting process of cutting organs out of bodies barely cold.” Liang feels that the new reproductive technologies will be “good for society.”

The revolution in genetics will continue, Professor Silver said. There are three billion bases in the human genome and while scientists predicted all mapping would take to 2020 or 2030, Craig Ventner—with eight technicians and 200 robots did it from—1997 to 2000. Now it’s possible to obtain your personal genetic analysis, tracing ancestry and vital health factors. “And the price is going down,” he said. “It’s now about $1,000. That breakthrough has opened so many new possibilities for disease control and the future of the human species.”