Academics

“Critical thinking breaks down barriers and liberates the individual from conventional thinking.”

To Michael Cairo, learning is a two-way street. It is not, he says, "about the professor telling the students what to think. It's about engaging in a discussion of important issues and learning a variety of ways to investigate and examine these issues."

"I am a believer in active and experiential learning," adds Cairo, associate professor of political science. "Effective education requires engaging the students and giving them a stake in the learning process."

Inside the classroom, Cairo clearly practices what he preaches. Because he is enthusiastic about learning himself, he believes his students are likewise enthusiastic learners. "As a result, I work to maintain a very energetic classroom," he says.

Outside the classroom is no different. In fact, engaging students in important research topics beyond classroom walls is what Cairo enjoys most about teaching. "Good teachers need to be involved in research and need to involve their students in research," he says. "Getting students excited about research cultivates in them a desire to investigate important questions."

That philosophy fits well in Transylvania's political science program, which Cairo says is particularly rigorous. "We hold our students to high standards and, as a result, they are very successful. Many of my classes incorporate graduate-level work and encourage students to excel beyond their own expectations."

This meshes well with the liberal arts approach at Transylvania. "A liberal arts education frees the mind. Aristotle said that it is ‘the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.' Liberal arts is about the big questions and critically evaluating them."

In addition to his work with students, Cairo's first book, about the two presidents Bush, was published in 2012. John Robert Greene of Cazenovia College calls the book "a thoughtful, critical, impeccably researched, and engagingly written study of the foreign policy of the TWO Bushes. In this first joint-study of Bush 41 and Bush 43, Cairo deftly uses both a wide selection of the available literature as well as newly opened material from the Bush papers, to show how these two men defined the policy of a generation."