Associate Professor Robert Gulotty, from the Department of Political Science, researches the relationship between national governments and global markets. As a rule follower, Professor Gulotty was initially attracted by potential careers with structure and stability. However, he found the life of the mind and the freedom of learning anything much more appealing in college and eventually decided to dive into academia. Tune in to hear more about Professor Gulotty's career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Associate Professor Robert Gulotty, from the Department of Political Science, researches the relationship between national governments and global markets. As a rule follower, Professor Gulotty was initially attracted by potential careers with structure and stability. However, he found the life of the mind and the freedom of learning anything much more appealing in college and eventually decided to dive into academia. Tune in to hear more about Professor Gulotty's career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Lee 00:01
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Lee, and I'm speaking with associate Professor Robert Gulotty from the Department of Political Science. His research examines the relationship between national governments and global markets. Particularly how the competitive interests of local and global firms undermine economic cooperation, how the design and operations of the global trade regime reflect the political goals of leading governments and how politicians evade accountability.
Professor Gulotty is here to talk to us about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor. Welcome to the course, Professor Robert Gulotty. It is a pleasure to have you with us today.
Robert Gulotty 00:47
Thank you for having me.
Lee 00:48
So Robert, let's start off with an overview of your career path. Take me from your undergraduate college years, all the way to your current role at the university.
Robert Gulotty 01:00
Well, as an undergraduate, I was at Ohio State University, a very large public school. And I was studying political science and philosophy with the intention of working for the State Department. My idea was that I really wanted to do something international relations, and I was growing up in an environment where what you did with your career was something practical, something with a career associated with it.
The nice thing about government work is that they have a well-defined pathway where you join up early on in your life, and you get promotions based mostly off seniority, and so that sounded very stable, and something that was attractive to me, even as an undergrad. But, you know, that was my idea prior to getting college.
Once I got there, I quickly discovered that the life of the mind was attractive to me. The life of the professor was particularly good. And so I embarked from there on an effort to try to get a faculty position, basically. During my junior and senior orienting myself to take graduate courses, and then I applied myself to the GRE and other testing in order to get into graduate school.
And so I went off to Stanford University to get a Ph. D. in political science. I saw political science as a field where jobs were available relative to philosophy, my other area of interest and an area where I saw myself excelling. Now, once you go off into graduate school, they basically you're basically set for 6 years.
I, you know, knew that that was going to be the path that I was going to be on prior to trying to get a faculty position somewhere. But, halfway through my graduate training, I took a year off. Went off to the World Trade Organization to both test out ideas and also to get a sense of what the real world was a little bit like, and then I came back and finished my PhD.
With a new dissertation topic obtained from that experience and then start applying for faculty positions and was lucky enough to get an interview and an offer from the University of Chicago where I've been ever since. I took a year prior to starting my faculty position as a postdoc, the university and increasingly universities are giving graduate students who have assistant professor positions available to them a year to do research where they're not required to teach. And they often use that as a postdoc year.
I spent my postdoctoral year back at Stanford at CPER, an organization for the study of international economics and policy research. And then, after that year, I started teaching here at the University of Chicago and in the college. And I spent my tenure track years at the university teaching in both international political economy and in the methods program here in the political science department.
And then, and I was promoted to an associate professor as of last, June. And now I'm here, so the career path is a relatively straightforward one in the sense that I kind of got a sense. Once I'd experienced college at college or something the life of the professor that services those college students was a life that I really saw an attraction to, and that was that sort of combination of the academic life that I found attractive as well as some sense of a stable career that led me into political science, graduate study, and eventually into a faculty position here.
Lee 04:17
Thanks for that, Robert. Can you tell me a little bit about your particular expertise? Like, what do you research under the umbrella of political science?
Robert Gulotty 04:27
So, my area is called international political economy, and it is a relatively new area of study. It's a sub field within international relations, and it generally covers basically all relations between states that are not at war that can include the day to day workings of negotiations at the IMF or the World Bank or the World Trade Organization. And outside of government, the flow of people, goods and services and ideas in the marketplace. And the relationship between those flows and politics.
So the people that study how China's, rise and competition with the American workers has affected the rise of right wing populism in the United States are often working in my area of international political economy as well as people studying the inner workings of trade agreements and how firms are influencing outcomes.
And I do work across all of those areas. And one of the things that's always attracted to me, attracted me to political science in particular, is its ecumenical and sort of Catholic perspective, allowing you to use a wide variety of techniques and methods to apply to political life.
You know, the reason I love, or was so attracted to academic life in the first place is because of its freedom and political science. I always saw as being one of the most free fields. In the sense of its openness to other methodologies and questions, so long as you spoke somewhat to politics, and I've taken advantage of that in my own work.
I have work on, right now, the relationship between democracy and oversight institutions. A traditional, what we call comparative politics question or internal politics question of work on the trade war and U.S. subsidies to the farming community after being damaged by U. S. competition with China. And I also have work that's more of a historical basis on the origins, the global trade regime and how it relates to contemporary efforts to destroy that program on both the left and the right. So, I've been lucky to talk about a lot, a wide variety of areas in political science, but my expertise tends to come draw directly from the political economy tradition and what the political economy tradition is either the study of markets and its relation to politics, so that's a substantive area.
Or a particular set of methodologies generally important from economics to study political questions. And I use a combination of both of those things, drawing on my training in economics, I have a master's in economics that I obtained while I was in graduate school, as well as my substantive interests in the workings of the global trade system, leads me to be at the intersection of those two areas in international political economy.
Lee 07:14
Thanks for that explanation. So, Robert, I imagine, you know, you didn't always know that you wanted to be a political science professor. What did you think you were going to be when you were younger? Like, when you were in middle and high school?
Robert Gulotty 07:28
Right, so growing up, I grew up with, my mother's a non-American, she's from the Netherlands, and so we were always a little bit set apart from the rest of our community in mid-Michigan, and I found a strong desire to try to get out of Michigan to do something like out in the world. You know, somewhere, somewhere beyond the boundaries of the county. And in those efforts, I would read a lot about other places.
I would read a lot about, you know, social and political and historical life outside of my community. And one way you do that is through activities that you have at the high school level. And I was lucky enough to join a debate team run by Amy Bushey teacher at my high school at Dow High School.
And she gave me a book about international relations, about a theory of politics where states were, governments or countries were modeled as billiard balls, and the billiard balls were only differentiated based off their size and maybe how fast they're moving. And I was always interested in science, but the idea that you could come up with a scientific model of politics was totally new to me.
And so it was through my experience in a high school debate with Amy Bushey that led me to be exposed to ideas like John Mearsheimer's ideas, he’s here at the University of Chicago, that led me to think that international relations was a field that could be studied scientifically. Now, since then, I've been exposed to a lot more political science, and I can see the limitations of those billiard ball models.
But it was that early exposure in high school that got me excited about it. And I know a lot of high school students even today are inspired by their exposure to this work. So. going to college, I was like, ready to do political science, and what political science meant, if you read a political science, like, manual, is that you're going to go work for the government, and if you're interested in international relations, you'll work as an international bureaucrat.
So that's what I saw myself doing, because I'm a rule follower, I'll look at the thing, I'll be like, alright, that's, I guess, what you do if you have this major. But I found myself a little bit dissatisfied with the idea of being an international bureaucrat, not because I don't like the bureaucracy or the idea of the rules, but rather that it felt a little bit intellectually narrowing. I'd have to focus on one specific area. If you're in the State Department, you often have to regional expertise.
But I was more interested in sort of abstract, theoretical questions. And I also found that when I talked to people in the State Department, or the CIA, or other government agencies, they didn't really have much to say that was positive about academic life, or about academic political science. They saw it was too removed from anything that really mattered. But I loved that abstract stuff and so for me, it became clear that maybe the bureaucracy wasn't going to be a good fit for me, which I probably could have guessed from before, because as a high schooler, middle schooler, I was always well behaved, but I also would get in fights with authority figures.
So by contrast, the life of the professor was immediately attractive. They got to say or teach whatever they wanted, it seems. I took a course from a great advisor of mine, Michael Neblo, on the political context of magical realist novels in the political science course. The idea that you could put together whatever idea came up to you and learn about it and work on it whenever you want it seemed to be super attractive to me.
I also met a professor, Daniel Verdier, who's teaching himself game theory and decided the way he was going to do that is teach a course to undergrads about game theory. The idea, you know, you could at any time just learn new skills and do so in an unstructured way, free from your own curiosity and interests, and that was an incredible draw for me.
And political science in particular had this amazing thing that unlike every other field and discipline that I was looking at the college level, I was allowed to take whatever course I wanted within the field of political science so I could start with all the fun advanced courses and skip over all the introductory boring courses.
And that meant that, like, now ex, post, I realized that the lack of structure has a lot of costs to it, but at the time it was exhilarating. I could take courses where I was reading speeches by Castro or like actually reading real research and I could do that when I just started, it was exciting, it offered a synthesis of different perspectives that I thought was useful. And it seemed like an open area for doing work. Now I was also, because I was interested in abstract stuff, I also got interested in philosophy. Analytic philosophy and formal reasoning and logic and that sort of thing.
But the problem there was that the people who were really amazing at it were just incredible writers, incredible thinkers. And there are very few of them that managed to survive and excel. It seemed to me that it was just a really rough market and the humanities in general were suffering. And so I decided for a career concern reasons to really emphasize the political science direction. And I would say looking back on it, that was the right move, although, you know, I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I ended up being a philosopher.
But as soon as I basically discovered what it was like to the, what I saw political, like what a professor could do with their day when I was in college, I was like, that's the career that's what I wanted to be able to do. I saw Michael Neblo teaching about, you know, Jose Saramago or whatever, that attracted me, that intellectual freedom attracted me to the field and to the academic community as a whole.
Lee 13:08
So I'm curious about what you think is the most fun part about being a professor.
Robert Gulotty 13:15
Obviously, I enjoy the intellectual freedom, right? So when I was in grad school, I had this tendency, I would go to all the workshops, the workshops on political theory, the workshops, comparative politics, international relations, in which there'd be people coming in at the cutting edge of their various fields, presenting their best ideas for you to just consume, and that is just so much fun.
To engage with people who are thinking hard about their problems and coming up with new ideas and you get to see them every week from all over the world and engage with the top minds in the world and they give you the time of day. It's the openness to the conversation about ideas. You would never, like, you go to a library, when I was a kid, I would go to the library and read these books and be like, wow, it's great that I have all these books. I wish I had more of them. It never occurred to me that you could talk to the authors and the process of producing this work.
And the idea that you can engage with people who are at the top of their game and thinking about all these really hard things and you get to think about them too, and maybe help them a little bit. It's just, it's really, really exciting. I would say that's the most fun.
So I love the workshop culture. It's really strong here at the University of Chicago. The political science department has a number of workshops, there's also workshops, collaborative workshops in the other parts of the other parts of the University and Law School and then the Economics Department, Booth Business School, and Harris Public Policy School. All these communities of just the smartest people at the planet working on the most cutting edge stuff that they can come up with, from all over the world, it's just so exciting. And so, I would say that's probably the most fun that I have on a weekly basis.
Lee 15:07
On the flip side of that, what is your least favorite part of the job?
Robert Gulotty 15:12
So I would say the, my least favorite part of the job. Well, let's put it the most stressful, is that, you know, I, when I teach, which I find to be, I'll talk about this later, probably, you know, extremely gratifying. I take it as a very heavy responsibility to be fair. In the evaluation of students.
And I find the fact that people need to balance their, it's very difficult to help students balance their, the incentives necessary for them to actually invest in material by creating grades and tests and that sort of thing, versus the reality that these tests are designed to rank and sort, and the establishing and evaluating of students when I know that this is going to determine their future careers is a big burden. And I find it to be challenging, but I also find it to be very important. So it's not something I shy away from, but I would say it's, it's definitely the, the least fun part of the job.
Lee 16:26
And what advice would you have for. people who are interested in following a similar path to yours.
Robert Gulotty 16:34
I would say, you know, continue investing in the things that you enjoy about the field because you're never going to succeed unless you're getting something out of it, intrinsically. So, you know, there are no, when you write papers and you write books and you engage in the academic life, it can be a very lonely experience and one in which there's very delayed feedback for anything that you do. You can write a paper, and it might be a long time before you hear from anybody whether it's any good or not. And so, you have to be able to obtain gratification from your day to day participation in the field. And that is to say, you have to find things, you don't have to find things. It better be the case that you're enjoying it. Because there's nothing else that's going to make this worth it for you, right?
You have to enjoy the fact, the things that you, the freedom that you have been afforded to you. Because otherwise it can be quite stressful. It can be quite challenging, a lot of delay gratification, a lot of patience is required. And so I would say, make sure that you are enjoying it because there's lots of other ways to spend your life that are as valuable and as rewarding and offer other ways to, you know, indulge your curiosity and that sort of thing outside the academy. I'm sure. So that that's my main piece of advice and make sure that you're actually getting something out of it as you do it.
And then my other advice is, you know, I was always interested in everything. You know, I was reading and engaging in all of the things associated with it. But at the end of the day, you're going to be talking to a community. And so my other bit of advice, find that community and ensure that you're part of it, participate in it, make sure your work is responsive to the other people in your field and make sure that you, that it's part of your career that you are aware that there's not a thousand people that will be engaged with you, but rather maybe 100 or even less. And those are your peers and colleagues, they'll be reviewing your work, they'll be part of your life for a long time. And so make sure that that's a community that you choose intentionally, that you enjoy participating in and that you fit in or you feel welcome to be in, and make sure that you get there, because otherwise again, there's a lot of downsides in terms of the isolate the individual isolation and the delay on any sort of like response to your work that can be very discouraging.
Lee 19:14
I appreciate that answer, Robert. I'm curious about what your professional goals are for yourself. Like where next? What are you aiming for at the moment?
Robert Gulotty 19:24
So, as I've said, I have been interested in international political economy, for a while. I think that, I really enjoy that community and I want to continue to develop it. But I think that what I would like to do is to try to ensure that that community survives and thrives by making a concerted effort to improve access to this subject or this sub field.
I feel that, there's been some really great work out at Berkeley by Ryan Brutger, showing how you can reach underserved communities that would otherwise not go into graduate training, by mentoring and facilitating that sort of thing.
But I also think that as a field, we don't do a very good job of marketing ourselves, and I think if, in the future, maybe not immediately, but in the medium run, I would like to make sure that my area and the community of people that I interact with, survive and thrive and that's going to require new participants and new memberships.
And I have a sense that this will involve other countries, students from around the world and not just the United States, but also from communities within the United States that otherwise would not be exposed to this sort of research. That's a broad idea that I have that I would like to improve the field.
Now, in terms of my own research area, I've been doing work that's increasingly methodological in the sense that I'm doing work that I hope could have affects on how people study political science more generally, and that is in particular an attention to the theoretical models that we use to write down our ideas about how politics works.
And I think we've moved in the recent era, there's been a move away from sort of theoretical statements of our, of things because of an attention to credibility of claims, the use of experiments and other technologies that have developed that allow us to make fewer assumptions of the world when we make inference, and those have been really positive. But there hasn't been a similar, attention to what we're doing when we do our work, like, does the quantity that we estimate mean for the real life?
On the policy side, that's less of an issue. So people who study policymaking, they have a clear connection between the things that they care about and their studies. They, there's a policy that they wanna know whether they should do it or not, whether it's worth it or not, and they do an experiment that tries to approximate what it would be like if that policy were in place.
Political science questions or more academic question are dependent more on a particular social and political model, and we don't yet have a good way of connecting those areas. There's been an effort called the empirical implications of theoretical models (EITM), it was funded by the NSF for a decade and while that has made a lot of progress in some areas, it has not had a sort of popularizing effect because of the technical demands on both sides of both doing empirical work and theoretical work. And so that's another area that I would like to try to make a dent.
Lee 22:57
And finally, Robert, what do you find most fulfilling about the work that you do?
Robert Gulotty 23:01
So hopefully, everyone who is a professor for a living is aware of this, but like the opportunity for teaching and shaping people's minds is by far and away the most fulfilling thing we do. It's not always the most fun because it can be a little bit repetitive sometimes or it can be a little bit tedious or it's work, but in terms of immediate gratification, nothing, nothing is as close.
The idea that you can teach someone something that they've never experienced before, show them a new way of thinking and reveal something that was obscured to them. That's what we're here for. I would say it's both, it is by far and away the most gratifying thing we can do and It's the most important thing that we do from a social standpoint is to shape the minds of tomorrow. So, teaching for sure, is the most gratifying thing that we do.
Lee 24:04
Thank you Professor Robert Gulotty for your time today and course takers. If you enjoyed listening to today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family.
You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.