From Foreign Service to Building a Better Internet
How a former diplomat embraced new possibilities in the UChicago MLA.
Master of Liberal Arts student Joe Dickerson will serve as a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. His story, recently profiled in The Guardian, shows how MLA students bring philosophical inquiry into the complex questions they encounter in their professional lives.
Joe Dickerson’s professional life is shaped by contested moments: a tackle, a goal, an offside line, a decision that turns on inches. As he prepares to serve as a Video Assistant Referee at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the Master of Liberal Arts student is also examining another kind of contested terrain: questions of power, ethics, and judgment.
A recent profile in The Guardian explores Joe’s path to one of soccer’s most visible stages, where he will work in the VAR booth during the World Cup. But the profile is not only a story about an official preparing for a global tournament. It is also a story about how Joe thinks, and how his commitment to exploring the human dimensions of decision-making has become central to his work as a student in the University of Chicago Master of Liberal Arts program.
Joe is currently developing a thesis on Machiavelli’s political philosophy and its connections to refereeing. For Joe, philosophy is not separate from the world of soccer. As he states in the article, “I think Machiavelli makes a case for empathy and leadership through some hidden teachings in his otherwise very amoral pragmatism in his writing. I also really like Nietzsche and Confucius. The reason I bring that up is because I think that a lot of these things that we learn in refereeing are very philosophical, and they can apply to many aspects of life.”
That connection between intellectual inquiry and lived experience is central to Joe’s work in the MLA. According to the MLA program director, Tim Murphy, “Joe came to the MLA in the middle of what he called an ‘intellectual reawakening’ after deciding to use his extensive travel time between matches to read and write more. He decided to formalize this self-study in a structured program, and our classes are now enriched with the addition of his voice to our seminar discussions.”
Joe enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts program and quickly became an active contributor to classroom discussions. His experience also reflects one of the defining strengths of the MLA, the opportunity to learn alongside a remarkable community of adult students whose diverse perspectives and life experiences enrich every conversation.
“Joe is the embodiment of what makes our community so unique: our courses attract deeply thoughtful adults from all different professions,” says Tim. “A few days prior to the Guardian article, one of the student speakers at our 2026 convocation ceremony mentioned how fortunate he felt to have been in classes with such a diverse set of adult learners. The speaker mentioned being in a classroom with a lawyer, an oncologist, a bar owner, an imam, and a professional soccer referee. It might sound like the beginning of a joke, but it’s just a cross-sampling of the people who gather in our classes to discuss big ideas together.”
As Joe prepares for the World Cup, his story offers a vivid example of the questions MLA students bring to their studies: How do we make decisions? How do empathy and judgment shape human action? And what can studying philosophy help us see more clearly?
Read The Guardian profile to learn more about Joe’s path to the World Cup and the philosophical questions informing his work.
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