This new half-semester course takes its inspiration from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.” In his essay, Coates employs a mix of writing modes—the statistical and the anecdotal, as well as the journalistic and even the biblical—in order to argue for a policy idea that might be otherwise all too quickly dismissed. In our course, students will choose a policy topic they care deeply about and make a case for it. To steal a line from Luke Schaefer, students will write the paper they came to grad school to write.
