Program Spotlight: Political Science and Human Rights
I’m a current senior majoring in political science and human rights. Here are some of my insights into joint majors, the human rights program, and political science as a field of study!
At Barnard, certain joint majors (like human rights and Jewish studies) require students to complete a full major in another department in addition to fulfilling requirements for their interdisciplinary program. The human rights program offers a joint major that you can combine with pretty much anything else, and which only requires about 6 courses to complete - around the size of a minor!
The human rights program is small, supportive, and extremely customizable to your interests. While the intro classes focus on giving students a strong foundational knowledge of (largely international) legal frameworks that use the post-1948 language of human rights, many other human rights classes focus on rights and justice more generally in areas like immigration, public health, and civil liberty. A huge diversity of classes count towards the major, at both Barnard and Columbia. There are lots of graduate classes at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) that count too! I’m taking a class next semester called Economics of Gender, which I will count towards my major.
Compared to the human rights program, the political science department at Barnard is larger and more structured. The department designates four subfields, and you need to take classes in at least three of them: American politics, comparative politics, international politics, and political theory. I’ve taken about half of my political science classes at Barnard, and half at Columbia; because the two departments closely collaborate, most classes (besides your Barnard-only political science colloquia) will have students in them from both schools. Columbia’s political science department is internationally renowned, and offers classes like Freedom of Speech and the Press (with Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia), but classes tend to be larger. Barnard’s professors are absolutely fantastic too, and I’ve found them to be very accessible to students and passionate about what they do!
And just a bit of advice on choosing political science as your (joint or single) major:
1. Political science is not just about writing policy! Undergraduate academic study is about asking lots of questions, not just learning practical skills to do a specific job - and political science is no exception to that.
Some scholars in political science might write legislation, but most of the professors you will meet are asking why political trends are happening in the way that they are, or looking at political changes in historical perspective, or developing theories of international relations. What would make our political institutions work better? Who has power and why? I think these are fascinating questions, but asking them involves looking at the world through a certain lens. Is this the kind of perspective that you would like to develop? If it is, political science might be right for you!
2. There are lots of ways to do justice-oriented (and even policy-oriented) work in lots of fields.
I was initially drawn to political science because I wanted to do global justice work, possibly in international development. And yet many of the people in my life who are most passionate about social change, or prison abolition, or reckoning with the legacies of European colonialism, are not political scientists. They are studying history, sociology, urban studies, economics, and so much more! Especially at Barnard, social justice and structural change works its way into a myriad of classes and majors. I know that political science and human rights can seem like an intuitive course of study for someone interested in justice, but there are infinite ways to plug into that work, and you don’t have to use a political science toolbox to do it.