As the academic year hits the midway point, the Department of Political Science at WashU is a busy place. Courses are chugging along, undergraduates are working on defending their theses, graduate students, their dissertations, and many of our students are preparing to graduate. Among our soon-to-be graduates are young political scientists with a wide range of political interests and concerns, and with different methods and approaches to studying politics. That variety reflects something important about our department today.

The department is larger than it has been in recent memory and partly as a result, it is more pluralistic than it has been for some time. The many questions our faculty and students pursue run from questions about the causes and consequences of international conflict, to questions about how elections shape political policy in democratic nation-states, to questions about what a just political society would look like. We employ a varied set of theoretical and methodological tools to grapple with these questions. What unites us is not a single set of tools and questions, but rather shared habits: habits of attention to evidence, clarity about concepts, and a willingness to take political disagreement seriously.

It is no secret that, at the present moment, both higher education and democratic politics are under pressure. In that context, I value the steadiness of our department’s commitments: to careful argument, intellectual rigor, and responsibility to students at every stage of their training. Those commitments make it possible for many paths to coexist within one department, and they connect the students who will leave WashU when they graduate at the end of this semester to those who will arrive next fall.

I am grateful to be part of this vibrant, pluralistic intellectual community. I wish our graduating students well and hope the habits of inquiry they have developed here at WashU serve them in the work that lies ahead.