Hagel's No Hegel

Hagel the Academic Hack

Dan Drezner, a noted zombie scholar, grades Sen. Hagel's academic merits by studying syllabi from Hagel's Georgetown classes. Shockingly, Hagel's light on the substance:

[A] quick perusal of Hagel's syllabi reveals a far deeper concern: Hagel is addicted to... hackery. The Friedmans make too many appearances in these syllabi, for example. He assigned Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat, which is pretty bad. He also assigned George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, which is far, far worse (don't take my word for it, take Philip Tetlock's). He also assigned liberal portions of Parag Khanna's work, which is unfortunate.

Now I'm not above assigning the occasional hack piece in a class to let my students chew up and spit out. That's actually a useful pedagogical exercise. Hagel, however, seems to think that the hack stuff is actually quite good -- at least that's what he told C-SPAN. For a graduate seminar at Georgetown, the chaff-to-wheat ratio is disturbingly high.

Besides the hack addiction, is there anything else to be gleaned from Hagel's syllabi? If there is a theme that runs through Hagel's syllabus choices, it's a pretty realpolitik one. Writers like George Friedman and Robert D. Kaplan don't really care about human institutions as much as geopolitics. He also assigned some interesting work by Joseph Parent & Paul McDonald, as well as Micah Zenko & Michael Cohen, on strategic restraint and threat inflation, respectively. That's what should terrify neoconservatives -- not the bogus anti-Israel charges.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Justin Green

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.