Recent Graduates

Julianne Downing, a recent graduate of the Master of Arts Program in Social Sciences, discusses her studies, her UChicago experience, and her favorite aspects of being a MAPSS student.

Julianne recently connected with Audrey Weckwerth, a rising 4th year and SSD Communications intern. These are excerpts from their exchange:

MAPSS at UChicago is my second master’s degree, my first was a Master of Science in Higher Education from the University of Oxford, in England. I went to the University of Notre Dame for undergrad (go Irish!) where I studied American studies and peace studies.

My MA thesis this year is titled: “Consolidating Control: Recent Republican Anti-Democratic Strategies in Higher Education.” It examines the ways right-wing actors are infiltrating college campuses in the United States as part of a larger project to control election outcomes, control courts, and ultimately control the country. Since this is such a massive partisan phenomenon, my research is intentionally exemplary and not exhaustive. I focus on just three instances—voter suppression at Spelman College, academic freedom at UChicago, and civic education at Occidental College.

My data comes from primary source analyses. Because the topic is so contemporary, many of these sources are no more than ten years old—I think my most recent citation was a Supreme Court case which began in February 2024. I would largely group my sources into five types: periodicals, legislative/judicial sources, official university statements, educational resources, and published primary sources.

• Periodicals include higher education trade journals (like Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Ed), opinion pieces and op-eds (including from the online Democracy Journal, the LA Times, and Twitter threads), and student journalism (like The Chicago Maroon).
• Legislative and judicial sources include close readings of laws (like a voter identification law from Georgia, GA Code § 21-2-417) and Supreme Court rulings (especially Shelby County v. Holder)—this area also includes data collected by pro-democracy watchdog groups, like the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, Tufts CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), or the global democracy index from the Global State of Democracy Initiative.
• Official university statements or presidential statements include letters from President Mary Campbell Schmidt to the students at Spelman College, online webpages/resources from the office of Student Leadership, Involvement, and Community Engagement (SLICE) at Occidental College, and the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression” at UChicago.
• Educational resources primarily come from Project Pericles and iCivics, two civic education nonprofits.
• Published primary sources include foundational texts to the field of [higher] education, like John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916), Hanna Holborn Gray’s Searching for Utopia (2011), Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University (1963), and John Henry Newman and Frank M. Turner’s The Idea of a University (1852).

I began my research with extensive background reading of secondary sources which sit at the intersection of higher education and democracy. Beginning questions were why is higher education an important player in the pro-democracy movement of the 2020s? How are higher education institutions meeting or failing to meet their imperatives to protect American democracy? Why are Republicans so keen on invading this space?

After completing my review of the literature, I turned to these primary sources to start close readings and to look for patterns across my three chosen areas (college student voter suppression, the way academic freedom has been dragged into the culture wars, and civic education).

Here in MAPSS, we are working in diverse disciplines, and some of us are doing interdisciplinary projects. Just being surrounded by different kinds of thinking and ways of knowing stimulates everyone’s creativity and broadens our horizons.

I am also a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Chicago Center on Democracy. This is an on-campus research community of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, and other organizations who are working on non-partisan, pro-democracy topics.

Outside of life as a grad student, I am a volunteer writing coach with the national project Write to Vote. We are also a non-partisan, pro-democracy group, and we work to help undergraduates across the country author op-eds on democracy and voting rights broadly construed. (If you’re writing with us, you might write about a local proposition to protect parks, or your experiences as a young voter, or why your state constitution should be amended, etc.) The goal is to teach students the skills they need to compose opinion pieces, and then submit them to local papers or any other publication outlet related to their topic. We are currently in the middle of a three-month/three-session Zoom series with fifty students from all across the US (and we have two international students right now!) who are each writing on a topic related to voting rights that they are passionate about.

I have two favorite parts of MAPSS: (1) the choose-your-own-adventure style of the coursework, and (2) my peers.

The design of the program means that outside of one required Perspectives in Social Sciences course and one methods course (which you still get to choose what KIND of methods), all your coursework is up to you! That’s seven course slots you can fill with whatever interests you, supports your research topic, or teaches you practical skills like language or coding. That wide menu of coursework opportunities is a unique feature of our program, and it encourages each student to build their own version of the program that meets their academic interests and sets them up for whatever’s coming next—be that a doctoral program, a career, a creative venture, or a year of service.

My peers are easily the best part of MAPSS. It was immensely easy to make friends and bond over a shared love of niche research interests, and the realities of being adult nerds in Chicago. In such an interdisciplinary and diverse program, you frequently meet students from fields of study that you have probably never taken coursework in yourself—that makes friendships and conversations in class (or at Jimmy’s) very exciting! Most master’s programs, including my last program, are very narrow disciplinarily speaking, so all your peers are taking similar classes and working within similar boundaries. Here in MAPSS, we are working in diverse disciplines, and some of us are doing interdisciplinary projects. Just being surrounded by different kinds of thinking and ways of knowing stimulates everyone’s creativity and broadens our horizons.