A New Strain of Thought
William Inman
The accolades just keep piling on Peter Lindsay, Georgia State's resident political philosopher.
In 2005, the associate professor of political science and philosophy won Georgia State’s College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award, the Georgia State Distinguished Honors Professor Award and the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha Citation Award for Outstanding Teaching in Political Science.
Most recently, he was named a winner of the 2006 University System of Georgia Board of Regents Teaching Excellence Award, which acknowledges a superlative teaching record. Unwilling to take all the credit, Lindsay says much of the praise belongs to his curriculum.
"They are all great honors," he says, "But whoever is asking these questions is going to have a roomful of students."
Lindsay says his classes deal with the normative side of politics, and the questions bandied about in his class ask: What is justice? Who’s responsible if a nation goes to war irresponsibly? What is a good life? Why is democracy good or bad?
Lindsay has created a new focus area of courses in political philosophy during his seven years at Georgia State, including developing new upper-division courses that promote critical thinking in feminist political thought and theory, modern political thought and economic justice.
"He's the department's only political theorist," says William Downs, associate professor and political science chair. "And as such, has the instructional responsibility for developing and teaching nearly all the department's political theory courses."
Downs says the undergraduate enrollment in political theory has climbed from 25 students for two undergraduate courses in 2000 to 60 students for one course in 2005.
"He has almost a cult-like following among his students," Downs adds.
A native of Boston, Lindsay knew coming out of college that he wanted to teach. During graduate school at the University of Toronto, he took time off to become an instructor of history in a Boston high school "to learn how to teach," he says.