Categories: GSI Online Library, Teaching Effectiveness Award Essays
By Maxwell Lindquist, Sociology
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026
In my discussion sections for Political Economy of Silicon Valley, the main teaching challenge was not getting students interested in the course material. They were already interested. Most came in with strong opinions about tech companies, founders, AI, and inequality in the Valley. Some of my seniors had job interviews at prominent tech firms throughout the semester, and several others aspired to found their own startups. A handful of students had also grown up in the Bay Area and spoke from personal experience about gentrification and the housing crisis shaped by the growth of the tech sector. What students found harder was something more difficult and, I think, more important: how to hold onto their moral and political commitments while also being analytical, empirical, and fair to the material in front of them. I did not want them to think the goal was either to suspend their values or to simply rest in them. Instead, I wanted my students to learn how to thread the needle of making normative judgments while also doing the hard work of specifying mechanisms, weighing evidence, and taking competing explanations seriously.
That challenge mattered because the course asked students to understand Silicon Valley’s institutional foundations, scrutinize its mythologies of meritocracy, and communicate arguments about its past, present, and future. Early in the semester, I noticed that section discussions could slide in one of two directions. Sometimes students made broad moral claims that were persuasive in tone but not grounded in the readings. Other times, they seemed to think that being “fair” meant avoiding judgment altogether, as if analysis required detached neutrality. The midterm made this problem even clearer. In both short- and long-form responses, many students had strong intuitions and clear positions, but were not yet consistently grounding those claims in evidence from the readings, lectures, or course cases. Some answers moved too quickly from judgment to conclusion without fully specifying mechanisms or weighing competing interpretations.
To address this, I structured discussion sections around a concrete case tied to the week’s material—a company policy, founder narrative, labor dispute, or contemporary news item—and asked students to work in small groups through three questions: What is being claimed here? What concept from the reading helps us make sense of it? And what is the mechanism connecting the concept to the case? This slowed discussion down in a productive way. It pushed students beyond saying that a company or founder was simply exploitative, innovative, or hypocritical and required them to explain how power was operating through labor control, venture capital incentives, monopoly dynamics, the culture of meritocracy, or forms of state and university support. It also made discussion more precise, more accountable to the readings, and more inclusive for students who were less likely to speak immediately in the full room.
To assess whether this approach was working, I looked most closely at the contrast between the midterm and final exam. By the final, I saw a real shift. Students were better able to make analytically clear arguments, ground them in empirical or textual evidence, and engage competing interpretations fairly rather than simply asserting a moral position. Their strongest answers were still critical, but they were also more disciplined, more persuasive, and more intellectually serious. That, to me, was the clearest sign that the approach had worked.
As a sociologist and political economist, I do not think the alternative to moralism is value-free detachment. Following the great critic of value-free sociology, Alvin Gouldner, I believe scholarship is often guided by moral and political commitments, but those commitments become stronger when they are made more reflexive and accountable through evidence. That was ultimately what I wanted students to practice: not abandoning their values, but learning how to turn them into sharper, fairer, and more rigorous arguments.