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As the World Turns
International boundaries continue to crumble, taking with them many traditional ideas of how to address the subject of foreign affairs. With the addition of a new home for the Center for International and Area Studies, Yale is making a major commitment to facing the new global realities.
May 1993
by Marc Wortman
Gone from the
standard maps of the world’s nation-states: the USSR,
Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia. New on the maps:
Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovenia, and Croatia.
Borders are
shifting faster than cartographers’ ability to keep up. So much is change the
order of the globe that, according to the Harper’s Magazine “index” for
March, a California bookstore now offers a 30 percent discount on maps or guides
to any country that has “recently disappeared.” But booksellers and mapmakers
are not the only ones who have had to unload or reorganize their international
inventory due to the global shakeup. All those “recently disappeared” nations
have forced scholars of international affairs to redraw the academic map as
well.
Since the end
of World War II, most American universities have studied international
relations largely as a way to prevent, avoid, or win wars with the Soviet Union
or its allies. The abrupt end of the Cold War left few of those institutions
prepared to deal with the new geopolitical issues that have resulted. As
fortune would have it though, Yale—which had long shied away from the
high-profile and frequently lucrative academic industry of international
security policy studies—finds itself uniquely well placed to embrace the new
realities. Just last year, the College launched a long-anticipated
undergraduate major in international studies that proved so popular that it
must turn students away. And in March ground was broken for Henry R. Luce Hall,
which will provide a new home for the Yale Center for International and Area
Studies (YCIAS).
The new
undergraduate major, which is offered through YCIAS,
is designed specifically to deal with the rapidly changing global picture.
Unlike traditional international studies programs, most of which focus on
contemporary and historical foreign policy issues, the Yale program also
requires an extensive knowledge of foreign languages, earth sciences, and statistical
analysis. And because the program will have its headquarters in Luce Hall,
students will have easy access to YCIAS faculty members, who are drawn from several of Yale’s graduate and professional
schools including Forestry, Public Health, Law, and even Divinity. By linking
the undergraduate and graduate programs in one building with an extensive
telecommunications network, common rooms, and clustered “pods” of offices for
scholars visiting from abroad, Yale intends to make a symbolic as well as a
programmatic commitment to studying world affairs in a new international
environment.
Such an
integrated approach marks a major change in the way most universities have
handled such matters in the past. Throughout the Cold War, federal and
foundation support flowed most heavily to universities and research centers for
international affairs that focused on military policy. Faculty and research
fellows at many leading international studies programs—such as those at
Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins—shuttled back and forth to the
Pentagon, federal and NATO security agencies, and think tanks like the Rand Corporation. “The schools were
stiff with colonels and lieutenant generals,” says Paul Kennedy, the Dilworth
Professor of History and director of Yale’s International Security Programs,
which is part of YCIAS. The
courses the faculty members taught and the publications they produced
concentrated to a large degree on containment of the Soviet Union. Their
bipolar world vision virtually excluded the far more complex kinds of
international security questions that have been raised by the small-scale,
ideological, ethnic, and nationalistic conflicts now raging from Central Europe
and Africa to Southeast Asia and South America—and ignored altogether the
interlocking global issues of economic development, famine, disease, population
change, and threats to the environment.
The
precipitous collapse of the Soviet Union radically altered the perspectives of
scholars and policymakers on international security. Kennedy, whose 198’ book The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, forecast many of the challenges the
world now faces, says with evident delight, “Now the old Cold Warriors have
become anachronistic. This left foundations with considerable problems about
what to do with their funds. We have enjoyed a very significant surge in
foundation support.”
A sizable
portion of that support—$10 million—is going into building Luce Hall. Those
funds were donated by the Henry R. Luce Foundation as a memorial to its
founder, a member of the Class of 1920 who was also a cofounder, with his
classmate Britton Hadden, of Time, Inc., and a strong supporter of United
States involvement in world affairs. The gift, the largest single donation ever
made by the foundation, covers design and construction costs and includes $2.5
million to cover ongoing maintenance of the building. The 30,000-square-foot,
three-story, brick-and-limestone structure, which is being built on the site of
a former parking lot that stretched between Prospect Street and Hillhouse
Avenue, was designed by New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and is
scheduled to open in December 1994. It will replace the badly outmoded warren
of offices at 85 Trumbull Street that has served as home to YCIAS for 15 years.
Kennedy was one
of the prime movers—along with former President Benno Schmidt—in persuading the
Luce Foundation to support the new center. “When I came here in 1983,” Kennedy
says, “there was a groundswell of interest in things international. Now it’s
absolutely infectious.” He recalls that five years ago he, along with Bass
Professor of History and former Dean of the College Donald Kagan and YCIAS director and Larned Professor of
History Gaddis Smith, ’54, ’61PhD, developed a unified, multipart plan to meet
the growing interest in international studies at Yale and what they envisioned
as a need for a new type of globally oriented leader.
From the
undergraduate international studies major to the increasing numbers of
postdoctoral fellows coming to Yale to pursue special projects, the planners
sought to integrate each part into a larger network of faculty, students,
alumni, and the wider public. Kennedy, whose most recent book, Preparing for
the 21st Century<, has amplified the reputation he established with The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, has been besieged with requests to
speak in this country and abroad. His DeVane lectures at Yale this spring on
post–Cold War international affairs drew consistent audiences of 250
undergraduates and 300 members of the public. But he is hardly alone. Other
international affairs courses in the College, such as Smith’s “Diplomatic
History” and Jonathan Spence’s “Modern Chinese History,” typically enroll up to
600 students. “The demand is strong and getting stronger,” says Kennedy. “I’ve
never been so busy in my life.”
For the
moment, meeting that demand is still directed out of the old Trumbull Street
building. Smith is on leave this year and has left YCIAS in the hands of William Foltz, ’63PhD. A political
scientist specializing in African politics and ethnic conflict (“business has
been good lately,” he says), Foltz served as director from 1983 to 1989 and
believes Luce Hall will be a major boost to the University. He recalls with
embarrassment that “when Germany’s former chancellor Helmut Schmidt visited to
deliver a series of lectures sponsored by the Center in 1985, we contrived to
keep him out of 85 Trumbull—and succeeded. It will be nice to have a building
where people will want to come.”
Luce Hall will
also give YCIAS a strong public
identity for the first time. Although it is a member of the Association of
Professional Schools of International Affairs—which includes Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government, Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,
and Princeton’s Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—YCIAS is not an independent school at
all. In fact, it has no faculty of its own. What it does have is a network of
interdisciplinary programs under its direction that encompass more than 150
affiliated faculty members. It directs four programs granting master’s degrees
and another four undergraduate majors as well as several affiliated research
centers. The programs range from the new and immediately popular international
studies major, which will graduate its first class of seniors this month, to
support for international affairs and foreign–language curriculum development
efforts in New Haven-area schools. (Those programs have helped attract suburban
school children into integrated city magnet programs.)
In addition,
the center sponsors numerous professional scholarly programs for Yale faculty
and students (including annual exchanges with Moscow State University) who wish
to study or do research overseas. It also brings in visiting fellows to teach
or undertake special projects at Yale.
The program
graduates about 30 students each year with master’s degrees in international
relations. Despite its small size and relatively low profile, the master’s
program continues to attract record numbers of applicants, 289 this year for
next year’s class. Many of the students will also receive joint degrees from
the Law School, the School of Public Health, the Forestry School, and the
School of Organization and Management. “Those are the most sought-after
students on the job market,” says YCIAS associate director Nancy Ruther.
This network
of interlocking programs, which on the surface appears unwieldy, has actually
proved to be a remarkably flexible structure. “We may be cumbersome as
constituted,” says Ruther, “but we work.” In fact, the move towards
internationalization of the University (which has been aided by Corporation
member and United States senator David Boren, ’63, of Oklahoma, who helped push
through a bill in Congress to support programs like YCIAS with funds carved out of the federal intelligence
budget), has made the network model particularly useful at a University long
resistant to freestanding enterprises. Explains Foltz: “We see our mission as
promoting international and area studies at Yale, whether we do it or somebody
else does it. If somebody else does it, that’s terrific. There would be some
publicity advantages in having a separate school of foreign affairs, but that’s
not the way Yale works. We’re not continuously involved in this week’s policy
issue. We’re more reflective and theoretical.”
The fact that YCIAS exists at all represents a major
change from the way things were done at Yale in the 1950s. From the 1930s until
then, Yale and its alumni were intimately involved in American foreign policy.
Among the most prominent alumni were Henry Lewis Stimson, Class ßof 1888, Dean
Acheson, ’15, Averell Harriman, ’13, Ellsworth Bunker, ’17, William, ’39, and
McGeorge, ’40, Bundy, Cyrus Vance, ’39, ’42LLB, and George Bush, ’48. Within
the University there were such renowned international affairs faculty members
as Nicholas Spykman in government, Samuel Flagg Bemis in history, George A.
Kennedy in languages, and Karl Pelzer of the geography department.
Together,
these people constituted a peerless coterie of national leadership in foreign
policy and international studies, and provided both moral and financial support
to Yale’s own efforts, which were concentrated in what was then known as the
Institute for International Studies. The Institute, founded in 1935 by political
scientists Arnold Wolfers and Frederick Dunn, coalesced during World War II
into one of the nation’s first and most vaunted policy-study centers. It
published the periodical World Affairs, which remains the foremost
journal of international studies. However, that publication and the core
faculty of the Institute decamped en masse to Princeton in the early 1950s when
President A. Whitney Griswold, himself an authority on American foreign policy
in Asia, decided that the “think-tank” approach was not appropriate for Yale
and shut the Institute down.
“Griswold,”
says Foltz, who arrived at Yale shortly after the demise of the Institute, “didn’t want Yale to be like Harvard, with all its independent fiefdoms. In
retrospect, it was an appallingly dumb decision.”
There are
those who would disagree with Foltz’s assessment, if only because Griswold’s
decision ultimately led to the reorganization of the international studies
program into something called the Concilium on International and Area Studies.
Established in 1961 under the direction of Arthur Wright, a professor of
Chinese history, the Concilium gave Yale exceptional flexibility to respond to
changing global and scholarly needs. It also reinforced the University’s
interdependent academic strengths without creating the competing institutional
centers Griswold feared.
The Concilium,
renamed YCIAS in 1983, sought out foundation and private
funds to endow permanent positions and programs rather than the grants and
contracts favored by most free-standing institutes that support short-term
projects. Largely through endowments created by the Ford Foundation, YCIAS now controls nine academic chairs
and has partial funds for five others, which it assigns to regular departments
to hire faculty in areas that YCIAS deems important. The faculty members associated with the program include Foltz
and intelligence specialist H. Bradford Westerfield, ’47, as well as Robert
Thompson, ’55, ’65PhD, a specialist in African art, international law professor
Michael Reisman, economist Willem Buiter, and a new appointment for next year
in the history department, Latin American historian Gilbert Joseph, ’78PhD.
Some of the nine area councils also have their own endowment funds for similar
departmental-based appointments. East Asian Studies is especially strong
because of Yale’s longstanding ties to East Asian countries. YCIAS has a current annual operating
budget of around $3 million, about $1.1 million of which comes from federal
funds. The program, says Foltz, “is a money-making enterprise for the
University.”
In keeping
with the network pattern, ycias launched its international studies major in the
College as a dual major. Students must fulfill the requirements of a regular
departmental major as well as the steep demands of international studies. “You
couldn’t get more committed and more intense students,” says Diane Kunz,
’89PhD, a historian of economic diplomacy and the director of the major. The
major requires double the College’s language coursework, extensive earth
science classes, as well as a selection from anthropology, sociology,
economics, political science, and history. All majors take one year-long senior
seminar ranging in subject matter from environmental politics to economic
diplomacy, and write senior research projects. Despite the stiff demands, this
year 85 sophomores applied for the 39 available slots. “International Studies
gives you an intellectual framework,” says Kunz. “It gives you all the
different pieces and an intellectual synergy you wouldn’t have without the
major. It also helps on the job market.”
Kennedy
agrees, arguing that graduates of the program will be highly attractive to
global organizations, especially the United Nations. UN special consultant Charles Hill, who has met regularly
with international studies seminars this year and will return to teach a course
of his own next year, is working with Kennedy and other faculty members to
launch a United Nations Studies program, which will provide UN officials with a refuge from the
hurly-burly of their New York City headquarters, while providing Yale students
with access to UN activities. “The
Secretariat,” says Kennedy, “says there is a desperate need for academic
institutions to think through a large number of the facets of the United
Nations’ fundamental structures. The UN hasn’t time to think about itself and its future. We’re in a wonderful
position: close by but far enough away not to be sucked into the bureaucracies
and the crises.”
As Yale pushes
strongly into international studies, some question whether it is shortchanging
the University’s traditional commitment to national service. The response of
Kennedy and his colleagues is that Yale’s greatest service to the country would
be to become a truly global institution, reflecting a world in which most
social, environmental, and health issues eventually prove borderless. That
process is at least partly underway. Foltz notes that while only 3 percent of
Yale’s undergraduates come from abroad, one-fourth of the master’s degree
students in international studies are foreigners, many of the program’s
undergraduates have lived extensively overseas and spent some part of their
College years abroad, and most visiting fellows are also from foreign
universities. Foltz recalls a meeting he had earlier this year at the Central
Intelligence Agency: “Some people were grousing about universities keeping
their distance. I pointed out that the agency is an American institution and
serves it appropriately as such. A university cannot; we have to serve American
interests by being a multinational institution. It would serve the purposes of
neither institution to have close CIA ties again. I am as happy to lecture to the KGB as I am to meet with the CIA.”
Although Luce
Hall will not be ready for occupancy for a year and a half, all of the space in
the building is already spoken for, leaving some would-be tenants still looking
for a home. Indeed, the two largest YCIAS research centers—the International Security Program and the Program in Agrarian
Studies—cannot be accommodated. But it’s a start. “Luce Hall will bring us into
the mainstream,” says Nancy Ruther. “It will change the landscape of
international and area studies at Yale.”  |
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