OWLS

A Two-Day Short Course

What holds a nation together — and what happens when people disagree about who belongs? What role should the United States play in the world, and why do thoughtful people reach such different answers to that question? This course takes a step back from the headlines to ask something more fundamental: how do we think about America itself, and how does that shape what we expect from it?

Day One: Who Are We?

A nation is not the same thing as a state. Borders and constitutions can be written down; a sense of shared belonging cannot. Drawing on the idea of the nation as an “imagined community,” we examine what holds the United States together — and what strains that bond. Americans have long debated who counts as fully American and what the conditions of membership are. Two competing visions have run through that debate from the founding to the present: one rooted in common ancestry and cultural continuity, the other in shared principles open to anyone who embraces them. That tension sits at the heart of today’s arguments about immigration, diversity, identity, and polarization.

We ask: what do we know from history and social science about building and sustaining national solidarity across difference? When does emphasizing shared identity help — and when does it backfire? What can the American experience learn from comparable struggles in other democracies? And what does the changing ethnic and political composition of the country mean for its future cohesion?

Day Two: What Should We Do?

If Day One asks what America is, Day Two asks what America should do in the world — and why that question has become so fiercely contested. Since 1945, most Americans imagined their country as the essential defender of a Western-led international order. But that consensus has frayed, and the arguments that were once at the margins — “America, Come Home” and “America First” — are now at the center of politics.

We examine how Americans think about the country’s role in the world: the assumptions embedded in those judgments, where they come from, and why people who look at the same evidence reach such different conclusions. What has the United States actually done abroad, and how does that look from inside versus outside? What are the real costs of global engagement — and of stepping back? As American power and American society both change, how should the country’s role in the world change with them?

The questions are real. The answers are yours.

This course doesn’t offer a verdict. It offers analytical tools for thinking more clearly about questions that will define American politics for a generation. Participants will come away not with a fixed picture of what America is or should be, but with a sharper understanding of why the debate is so hard — and how to navigate it with more clarity and less noise.

October 5 and 6

Richard K. Herrmann is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at The Ohio State University, where he directed the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and chaired the Department of Political Science. He has written widely on international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and political psychology, with research appearing in International Organization, World Politics, International Security, the American Political Science Review, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, among others. Over the past fifteen years his work has focused on how national identity and group attachments shape political judgment — how people decide what they believe about the world and why. His most recent work, a new manuscript titled Making Hard Questions Easy: Identity, Motivated Reasoning, and Political Judgment in a Divided World, extends that research into the terrain this course explores. In the policy realm, he served on Secretary of State James Baker’s Policy Planning Staff and led second-track diplomatic initiatives across the Middle East and South Asia.