RELG 3605

This is by far the worst class I have ever taken at UVA. Sure, Jerry White is a Nobel Laureate but his teaching strategy is BS. The class is basicallly for third graders. Because it's also a "leadership seminar" he talks about leadership and growth which is a complete waste of time. But you're also expected to write a 15 page research paper even though he teaches you absolutely nothing. Oscar is also really rude. Don't take this class!

This class can be what you make of it. You have to buy the fact that Professor White has his own way of teaching that is super theoretical, to an almost hilarious extent. He tries to teach you to be a problem-solver, which is also can be amusing, as he teaches you his own terminology and steps to "creating change in the world". This class has a decent amount of reading, some of which is extremely interesting, and other readings will put you to sleep after the first two pages. There is also a large group project at the end of the semester where you have to try and solve a problem related to religious violence based on a certain geographic region or country. If you show up to class, do some of the readings, participate once every class, and put some effort into the group project, then you will get anywhere from a B+ to an A.

Very bizarre class in a not good way. Professor White does indeed have an interesting history for his global campaigns and huminatarian achievements, but he isn't a good professor. To sum it up briefly, RELG 3605 is on how to be a leader/strategist in solving global problems dealing with religious violence. It was interesting to read about White's campaigns and life stories, but the other assigned readings were boring and had little substantive content. Furthermore, White shares his expertise through using his own abstract vocabulary and "class concepts" that in reality have no concrete meaning outside of this class. It almost feels as if he's teaching us from some useless, philosophical self-help manual that charges you $50 for a bunch of gibberish.

I respect Professor White and I think he's a passionate activist, but the whole "groundbreaking" giStrat software (look it up) that he boasts about is really a useless, pretentious toy. He purports that it is a highly-analytical program that uses the intricacies of "game theory" and "stakeholder theory" to calculate the probabilities of certain outcomes in a geopolitical crisis. In reality, you input a bunch of outcomes into the software, assign those outcomes your own values (which means you can bias the results if you want to), and the software computes some programmed algorithm to spit out some numbers and graphs. I have some CS background, and I know this thing is a load of bullcrap. Yet, when you write your final paper on a strategy to solve a crisis, you have to input the factors into this dumb program and analyze the results in your paper. This is one of the dumbest things I have ever done in a college class.

The TA (Daniel) is awful and his grading is super arbitrary. You have a number of papers to write and a presentation. You can go to his office hours and dissect your work entirely with him, and he will greatly approve of it only to wreck your grade and give the same, general feedback for every paper (literally, I compared my feedback with another student and we had the same comments with a few altered words). I genuinely try pretty hard in this class, but I've only received one good grade from Daniel.

I would not recommend this class to anyone, even for a politics/public policy major. The grading criteria is too vague, the class meets for 3 hours every Monday night, you learn a bunch of boring, meaningless political/philosophical jargon that no one else in the entire world uses except Professor White, and if you are scared of presenting or participating, your grade will tank. Professor White is a nice guy to have a coffee with if you are interested in his personal experiences, but stay away from anything he teaches because he is kind of in his own world.