Mark Williams
Lots of reading and papers. Williams is pretty unforgiving in both discussions and grading, and will call people out for not knowing stuff or being wrong. He's also pretty unclear in what he wants for certain projects or assignments and acts like you should have known.
This course is required if you want to take any other IR courses, and can be brutal with how fast it goes. But if you do the readings and pay attention, you will find it is one of the most valuable courses at Midd. Williams is a tough grader, largely because he expects a full essay compacted into 500 words, but aside from that he's a fantastic lecturer.
DO NOT TAKE CLASSES WITH PROF WILLIAMS. An incredibly difficult course, Prof. Williams went out of his way NOT to accommodate students. He would frequently ridicule students for broad questions of personal-opinion in any way other than the one specific answer he was looking for. He would laugh at members of the class for wrong answers, and then when the toxic environment of the class led to nobody talking, would yell at us for a lack of participation. I don't know anybody who got an A in the class, and not for a lack of trying: his paper assignments are extremely broad and he is looking for you to mention a number of specific things (that he wont tell you about) in order to get the best grade possible. He will not read more than 1200 words, so you have to cram information into small essays and hope he doesn't publicly shame you for it. He held elementary school style "grammar lessons" in class one day after a few people accidentally wrote Columbia instead of Colombia on their papers. I have never felt more uncomfortable in a learning environment.
DO NOT TAKE CLASSES WITH PROF WILLIAMS. An incredibly difficult course, Prof. Williams went out of his way NOT to accommodate students. He would frequently ridicule students for broad questions of personal-opinion in any way other than the one specific answer he was looking for. He would laugh at members of the class for wrong answer …Read more