Mary Alice Haddad is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government, a Professor of Environmental Studies, and a Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. Her current research focuses on city diplomacy and environmental politics in East Asia. She is the author of four books, the co-editor of two, and has published work in multiple journals. The Argus sat down with her to talk about her newest class, what the United States can learn from local governments in Japan, and her hobbies outside of work. 

The Argus: The first question I have for you is about the new class you’re teaching: “Experiments in Public Life: Introduction to Effective Local Political Action” (CSPL209). Could you talk about why you started this class and what you hope Wesleyan students will get out of it?

Mary Alice Haddad: My current research project is around city diplomacy, so I’m really interested in how cities can work with other cities to do stuff. Part of that research led me to find examples in which universities sign MOUs (Memoranda of Understanding) with cities, and the city essentially serves as a lab. It’s a win-win collaboration in which the university researchers and students can investigate some of their theoretical ideas in the city, and the city can direct university scholars and students towards public problems that they have. And I thought that was really intriguing. I also like the idea of having some of the research that I was doing—you know, books that I was publishing, papers, etc.—actually link very directly to both my teaching and to create an opportunity for students to make positive change on the ground, since that’s sort of like our practical idealism motto, right? 

I [have] taught this “Comparative Urban Policy” (GOVT308) class for a number of years. At the end of every semester, I ask students, “What did you learn, and how could things be improved?” And every year, students in that class, who are mostly juniors and seniors, say something to the equivalent of, “I wish I had a class like this freshman year. I had no idea that it was so easy to get involved in Middletown. I had no idea there was so much interesting stuff going on in town. If I had known earlier, I would have done some stuff. But since I’m a second-semester senior. It seems kind of pointless.” And since I’m chair of [the] Government Department this year, it was possible for me to try to teach it. I was sort of trying to create a freshman/sophomore-oriented, hands-on, Middletown-focused class, and this was even before the most recent elections.

I also was really feeling like there’s a lot of emphasis and interest on campus in national-level politics, but only a tiny fraction of our students are going to go on and become involved in national-level politics. But 100% of our students are going to live someplace, and so I would like to make sure that our students leave our university with the skills to be good citizens in their local communities, wherever that is.

A: What inspired you to focus on city diplomacy and local government in your research?

MAH: My last book project was on environmental politics in East Asia and effective advocacy strategies. You create a project, or whatever it is that you think is going to work in environmental politics, and it sort of disseminates horizontally and then vertically to make a big change. There was this great example in Kitakyūshū, Japan, and their sister city, Surabaya, Indonesia. Kitakyūshū helped Surabaya come up with a household composting system, in which the city worked with a woman-led nonprofit organization that trained mostly women—but basically neighborhood people—on how to do backyard composting. So 40–60% of municipal solid waste is usually food waste, all of which can be composted, usually. This system gave the household composting training. They also got paid two cents a kilo or something like that, but it was enough to incentivize people to do it. And so that system worked spectacularly well. And it spread. The last time I checked, it was in 31 different countries. 

It’s a social win because the woman’s nonprofit organization is involved. It’s an environmental win because it pulls all this stuff out of the waste stream. It’s an economic win because the households get money. It’s a health win, because what used to be these big piles of refuse, which people just threw into empty lots, are now parks. So it was a great project which grew, and it grew not because of global politics, not because of national politics, but because local mayors on the ground worked with other mayors to solve the problem. So that was the sort of origin story for the current project. And I thought it was going to be mainly environmental. But actually, it turns out that any urban issue that you can think of, there are international city networks trying to deal with the issue. 

A: What inspirations can the United States take from East Asian countries in regard to our own approaches to local government?

MAH: Just last week, I was in The Hague in the Netherlands, presenting a paper about subnational diplomacy from Japan. I’m also on a U.S.-Japan working group. Japan does local civic management exceptionally well. They live the longest, have good public transportation, very low unemployment rates, and very low homelessness rates. All these problems that are around the world, Japan has fewer of them, and a lot of it is because their local government works pretty well. They also have very high rates of civic engagement, like volunteer organizations that work with local governments. So Japan, internally, has systems where local governments learn from each other, and when they get something that works really well, they copy it. And so that’s one of the reasons why [in] Japan, the local governments work well.

A: To turn to more recent political matters in the past couple of years, conservative proponents have been pointedly attacking higher education, especially liberal arts universities. What do you think will happen between the Trump administration and universities such as Harvard, which have most recently sued the administration after their federal funding was frozen? 

MAH: I have no idea—hence my studying local politics and not the United States. I find national politics at the moment, in general, quite crazy. It’s alarming to me that I’m finding my class on Chinese politics and looking at the way Xi Jinping operates to be a more informative predictor of how Donald Trump moves than my course in Japanese politics.

A: What is your approach to teaching, and has it changed over the course of your time here at Wesleyan?

MAH: It has changed. One would hope you get better at your job, right? I think the research shows that students will forget 90% of the stuff that you tell them, [but] will remember 90% of the stuff that they say. Maybe it’s 80%, I can’t remember. Basically, they forget most of what you say, and they will remember what they say. So I try to use pretty interactive teaching methods: active learning, lots of student group work, local projects from the students, lots of student-driven, student-motivated activities.

I think the things that have changed the most in my teaching more recently are finding more ways to help students engage with the Middletown community. So the connection between what they’re studying in their classroom or in their dorm room is connected a little bit more directly to where they live and the people that they’re talking to. I have become more committed to making sure that is positively balanced. I think it’s probably a decade ago that I had a student in an environmental politics class that I was teaching, and he said to me, you know, Professor, sometimes I think the most useful thing I can do for the environment is to go in the backyard and compost myself. We all laughed like we were meant to, but that really stuck with me.

I do think there’s a [tendency] in the academy and in Wesleyan in particular, where we teach students that the problems are too big and they’re too complicated and there’s nothing you can do. I do not want a student to leave my class feeling like the best thing that they can do is good compost; that is horrible. Student empowerment has become a core learning goal in pretty much all my classes in a way that it wasn’t when I first started teaching: making sure that students have the skills and the motivation to try to think about what kind of problems are in their communities and in the world, and to find ways that they themselves can move the needle, even if it’s just a little bit on those issues.

A: What is your favorite class to teach, if you have one?

MAH: I love all my classes, but it’s usually whichever class I just finished teaching. So I just came from “Japanese Politics” (GOVT296), and they’re doing presentations on their final papers. I have an amazing set of really interesting projects that the students are doing. And then this afternoon, we’re going to have our class [“Experiments in Public Life: Introduction to Effective Local Political Action” (CSPL209)], and then it’s gonna be like, wow, this is the greatest class ever. I think because the local politics class is probably my newest class, I’m, at the moment, feeling quite enthusiastic about that one. But I like all my classes. If I don’t like them, I stop teaching them, and I’ll teach a new one.

A: That’s a good approach.

MAH: It’s helpful because the world is always changing. Technically, I’ve taught something called Japanese politics for around 20 years. This semester is super different than any other iteration. And the same thing was true for my Chinese politics class. Even though the titles were the same and the basic subject matter is kind of the same, the world is really different, so it keeps [the classes] fresh and interesting.

A: My last question for you is: What do you like to do outside of work? What are your hobbies?

MAH: My youngest son is currently a senior in high school, so I’m able to do more hobbies because I’m like, half empty-nested. I am part of a ceramics guild. I like to work with clay. A second one is the Ultimate Frisbee team, which is extremely fun because I’ve never played before. I’ve always done sports and athletic stuff, but it’s very fun to be part of something brand new. I think I’m the worst on the team, which is unusual. Usually, I’m one of the better players in whatever sport I have done, but I have a lot of fun with that sport.

And then another group that I commit time and energy to is my local church, Hancock United Church of Christ in Lexington, Mass., where I now live. I’ve been very active in an anti-racism task force in that church. Lexington just finished its 250th anniversary, and thousands of people showed up for celebrations and reenactments. Our church is on the green, and it’s named for Reverend Hancock, John Hancock’s grandfather. We put these banners of Black patriots of Lexington on the front of the church. I’ve been working with a local organization, the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington, which has done extensive research and has a documentary film series, because that’s a component of the history of the American Revolution…that’s often ignored or not told. Like I didn’t know until this project that 20% of the Revolutionary Army was people of color. This group has been a fun, positive, local project for me to engage in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Julia Podgorski can be reached at [email protected].