Escape Only by Thinking: Reinventing the Fred Friendly Seminar for Faculty-to-Faculty Learning at ISA

The original Fred Friendly Seminar was a Socratic dialog intended for expert debate on issues of ethics and public policy. I wanted to apply the format to inter-faculty learning on issues of international relations and foreign policy, so I proposed a type of hybrid scenario, combining the detail and self-reflection of a traditional seminar with the forward motion and iterative learning potential of a war game. I recruited my fellow faculty members at five International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Conferences and ran faculty participation scenarios on topics from water security to pandemics and public health to global warming and energy in the Arctic. This unique type of roundtable allowed faculty to familiarize themselves with the unique format and experience the scenario from the inside, as their students do. In this article, I will outline how and why Fred Friendly constructed the seminars, discuss how I modified them into the seminar/war game hybrid used for ISA, and discuss the lessons my fellow faculty and I learned from participating in the seminars.