The Ruth Collier Method: Teaching Scholarship with Courage and Clarity

When I reflect on what shaped me most as a scholar, one seminar stands out: Ruth Collier’s dissertation writing workshop at Berkeley. Though she was technically semi-retired, her influence was unmistakable. Her course wasn’t heavily promoted, but everyone knew its reputation. If you were serious about writing a strong dissertation, you found your way into that room. Some students even came from other departments to take it.

I took it twice: once early on, and again later in the dissertation writing stage. I wasn’t alone. Many of the best dissertations, award-winning papers, and eventual books passed through that seminar. Among Berkeley political science alumni, there’s a quiet fan club of Ruth Collier. Last year, I co-organized a happy hour at APSA just so we could swap Ruth stories.

Her pedagogy was rigorous and remarkably consistent. Ruth cared deeply about her students—kind, generous, and attentive in ways that mattered—but she didn’t let you off the hook. Each student was expected to sign up to present at least twice per semester. The presenter would circulate a 5–6 page paper draft in advance, and everyone else came prepared to read it closely and provide comments. Ruth read everything—every footnote, every endnote—and let you know, clearly and directly, if something didn’t make sense. You would get the most honest and demanding feedback, and also the most clear-eyed and generous encouragement. She saw the potential in drafts you were ready to abandon and pushed you toward it without letting you take shortcuts.

A good scholar, she modeled, must be curious, dedicated, and deeply caring for the craft. And as Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, she helped us go deeper within ourselves and find strength there we didn’t know we had.

One of the most distinctive parts of her method was what happened when you couldn’t explain your idea clearly. If you were struggling—mumbling through a mechanism, circling around a concept—Ruth would stop you. “Go to the board,” she’d say. At least once per semester, each of us had to stand up and diagram our core argument. “Draw the idea. Show me how it works.” It was the ultimate test. If you couldn’t diagram it, you didn’t yet understand it. The exercise was uncomfortable, sometimes even humbling—but it was clarifying. It forced us to confront the fuzziness in our thinking. It sharpened our ideas and made our arguments more honest and more our own.

Over time, many of us developed what we jokingly called our “inner Ruth”—the voice that told you when a sentence wasn’t clear enough, when a claim wasn’t grounded, when a paragraph was faking it. That voice didn’t go away after the course ended. It became part of how we wrote and how we thought.

Ruth’s brilliance wasn’t just in her intellectual depth, although she studied at least three world regions (Latin America, Europe, and Africa) and could move fluently between them. It was in how she trained us to think with precision and write with integrity. She asked us to tell the truth, in our own voices, to the audiences that mattered. She didn’t just teach us how to write better. She taught us to know what we were trying to say—and why.

In doing all this, Ruth created a space that was both rigorous and supportive, demanding and caring. It was a place where it was safe to take risks, and expected that you would. Her workshop trained us to write dissertations, yes—but more than that, it taught us how to do scholarship with clarity, honesty, and courage.

Looking back, I’ve often wondered why her class was so influential. In graduate school, you learn theory, methods, and cases from many people. But it’s not easy to find an intellectual role model. Ruth was that for me—and for many of us.

Perhaps that’s also why I won’t, and couldn’t, forget her lessons. She didn’t just tell us what scholarship should be. She showed us.