Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.
During this summer’s FIFA World Cup, Joe Dickerson was carefully tracking the action on-field from a booth in an enormous convention center in Dallas.
Dickerson was a video assistant referee (VAR) during the tournament, supporting the officiating crew on the field by reviewing incidents on a wall of screens. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
“When your decision can impact a whole nation’s psychological well-being for at least a short period of time, yeah, that’s a significant amount of pressure and responsibility,” he said.
A long-time soccer referee, Dickerson is now applying his expertise on the pitch to a whole new field: studying Machiavelli’s philosophy of leadership in the University of Chicago Graham School’s master of liberal arts program.
Dickerson became interested in Machiavelli’s provocative ideas through a class on the philosophy of leadership he took during a residential seminar in Hyde Park. These weeklong sessions give remote students like Dickerson a chance to explore campus and connect with each other.
He was captivated by how “appalling” Machiavelli’s vision of leadership in The Prince is—characterized by cruelty and manipulation. However, Dickerson became interested in what a less literal reading of the text might yield.
By showing that this leadership style leads to revolt and disorder in the long term, Dickerson believes, Machiavelli might actually be making the case against it.
Dickerson is using refereeing as a case study in his master’s thesis to tease out this nuance in Machiavelli’s writing. A referee could lead through fear and deceit, “and this might work in certain situations, it might work in the short term,” Dickerson said, “but I suspect it does not work in the long term.”
Taking Ralph Waldo Emerson to FIFA
Dickerson’s journey to the World Cup started early. He officiated his first soccer game at age 10, inspired by a coach who insisted the whole team train in the laws of the game. It was a great way to make a little money and learn responsibility—“something my parents definitely enjoyed that I was doing,” he said—so Dickerson stuck with it throughout his teens.
In college this work took a back seat to his involvement with the University of California, Davis, crew team and cycling. After finishing there, as he pursued a professional cycling career, he continued refereeing on the side to support himself and eventually became a full-time referee at the highest level. In 2017, he began officiating with Major League Soccer and, since 2023, has worked for FIFA. In 2025 he was named U.S. Soccer Male Referee of the Year.
As his career progressed, Dickerson developed some clear ideas about what makes a referee great. On one of the long flights required for his job, he began seriously trying to articulate them. Reflecting on the confidence and autonomy needed in refereeing, he was reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which he had read in high school, and pulled up a copy on his computer. He spent the rest of the flight reading and taking notes.
After that, eager for a meaningful pursuit outside of refereeing, he dove into the study of philosophy and decided to return to school to gain a deeper understanding of the field.
He first took classes through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program before applying to the Graham School, where he was attracted to the balance between rigorous, personalized study and a flexible, affordable program.
“I could build my own personalized master’s experience,” he said.
The way students bring their diverse life experiences into the classroom is a key piece of what makes the Graham School’s master of liberal arts program so effective, said its director, Tim Murphy, AB’11, AM’14.
“Fascinating conversations” happen when you have “very intellectually curious, very intellectually serious people from those different perspectives in a room discussing big ideas,” Murphy said. “It’s kind of a magical dynamic.”
‘Refereeing through the lens of philosophy’
Dickerson has learned from experience that building trust on the field is crucial to managing players and coaches. This comes from a combination of body language, communication skills and empathy.
In a sport where the laws of the game leave a lot of room for interpretation, referees rely on what they call “football understanding,” an ability to take the broader context of the game into consideration when making calls.
“If you’re making decisions that don’t make sense to the players, to the coaches, to the commentators, to spectators, you have no ability to control the match, no matter how good you are at communicating with players,” he said.
Maintaining the level of intense focus that decision-making and player management requires is draining, he said, even more so than sprinting up and down the field for 90 minutes: “When I was working the Under-20 World Cup in Chile last year, after each match, I was lying on the locker room floor.”
In a way, he said, working in the VAR booth can be even more challenging, because when you’re on the field, people understand that there will be some level of human error; “but nobody accepts excuses for mistakes from the VAR, because how could you make a mistake when you’re looking at a video screen?” he said. On the field, he has the VAR as a safety net. “When I’m the VAR, I have no parachute.”
Despite the pressure, he got to have fun at the World Cup, too, attending six games and getting swept away by the fans’ enthusiasm and the surprises of the tournament.
“My expectations of how I would feel fell short of how massive the tournament is, how big of an impact every single incident has on entire countries,” he said. “Getting to experience that and seeing the cultures, especially some of these smaller countries that are there for the first time, was really incredible.”
It’s an experience he hopes to repeat in four years. When he steps on the field now, he does so as a philosopher.
“I can’t help but see some of the philosophy through the lens of refereeing and some of the refereeing through the lens of philosophy,” Dickerson said. “My studies have certainly broadened the way I think about how I interact with players, how I lead on the field, because at the end of the day, the best referee is undoubtedly the best leader.”
—A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall/26 University of Chicago Magazine.
