Today we are starting a new feature at Via Meadia: our StratBlog. At Bard College I’m teaching a modified version of the Yale Grand Strategy curriculum developed by John Gaddis, Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy to a group of undergraduates this semester and the students have been generous enough to agree to share this experience with the online world. Interested online readers can follow the readings in the syllabus week by week, and each week students in the class will be posting at least one reader response and a rapporteur report on the class. I will post some thoughts each week about our reading on the main Via Meadia blog; it will also appear on Stratblog. A comment section will allow readers online and the students in the class to respond to each other, to my posts and to student reports on the class.
As is usual at Via Meadia, all comments will have to pass our strict tests regarding civility and propriety. Those who wish to be vulgar and rude have the whole internet in which to play; here at Via Meadia we believe that our interchanges will be more lively, more interesting and more genuinely free if we enforce a few basic guidelines. I’ve encouraged the students to blog under assumed noms de guerre; your undergraduate years should be a time when you can experiment with different ideas and voices without undue fear that intellectual and political opinions you express on the web at 19 will be brought up at future job interviews or indeed Senate confirmation hearings many years hence.
Here’s how it will work. There will be a link on the Via Meadia page that allows you to click through to Stratblog, or you can access it yourself. From there, you can access the course syllabus and past posts by students and by me. You are welcome to join in, to agree, to disagree, to raise questions or to take the discussion in a direction of your own. While our class discussion will be largely focused on understanding these texts in the light of history, discussants on the web are welcome to relate the themes of the books to current events.