PLEA as Interdisciplinary Social Science

Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis (PLEA) has been a standout major at Mills for decades.  Of late, though, many of us feel it is something of an orphan with lots of potential.  It has historically had lots of majors and even though it has few analogs at other schools or in the minds of high school students or counselors it ranks high in terms of what attracts prospective students to Mills.

What is PLEA and What Could It Be?

Around the world the boundaries between the various social science disciplines are being crossed, broken, and re-defined.  Very few interesting or important real world problems respect the 19th and 20th century disciplinary lines along which we organize undergraduate education in the social sciences.

Our PLEA major offers a fantastic opportunity build into the curriculum a new and cutting edge approach to trans-disciplinary social science without completely tearing up our existing structure.  Our various disciplines address the four major forms of social organization that dominate the modern world: markets, networks, organizations, and voting and the related activities of law, legislation, collective action.

At present PLEA serves, perhaps primarily, as a pre-law surrogate.  To a lesser extent it functions for some students as a pre-MBA or pre-IR program.

Among the potentials here are for it to serve as the integrative program in the social sciences.  It can gather, in one room, so to speak, students who might go on to joint degrees in law and the social sciences.  Complement rather than competitor to PPOL and the other social science majors.  The pedagogical territory on which faculty across the social sciences meet.  It could help to lead us into a sort of three or four sector social science trajectory where we locate a core of sociology, government, economics, and government (with philosophy and history and women/gender studies in the picture around these) and a cluster of graduate school destinations above these and then careers beyond that.  It might look something like this: