February Joint Yale-Harvard Luncheon: Prof. Paul Kennedy
If you're an ambitious Yalie and you want to be President or Secretary of State, it has become a thing that you have to take Grand Strategies. Kennedy teaches this cult among cult classes. John Negroponte helps and Kissinger drops in.
About “Studies in Grand Strategy”
At Yale, “Studies in Grand Strategy” has become, as the historian Paul Kennedy puts it, “a cult among cult classes.” The course is co-taught by John Lewis Gaddis and Charles Hill, a onetime Reagan adviser. This year, John D. Negroponte, a former deputy secretary of state, is helping out. Henry Kissinger makes annual visits.
“If you’re an ambitious Yalie and you want to be president or secretary of state, it has become a thing that you have to take this class,” Dr. Kennedy says. Each year, around 100 undergraduates compete for 15 spots (nine go to graduate and professional students). This year, Dr. Kennedy says, he and his colleagues expanded the class to two groups of 24.
It takes a strategy to get into Grand Strategy — but this year, it takes an especially grand one.
The year-long seminar received a record number of applications for 2010, according to Minh A. Luong, associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. Luong and the course’s professors attributed the increase to the addition of new faculty and to greater outreach efforts.
“It’s a surprise,” John Gaddis, one of the course’s professors and a member of the history and political science departments, said. “It’s the highest we’ve ever had.”
The program, open to graduate, professional and undergraduate students, received 88 undergraduate applications and 40 graduate applications this year, both increases over last year’s pool.
The seminar delves into canonical works on security policy and strategy from Thucydides to Kissinger in the spring semester, and the fall semester focuses on applications of strategy to real-world simulations. During the summer between the two semesters, students are required to pursue a relevant internship. Since its establishment, the program has been a launching pad for aspiring policy makers at Yale, both undergraduate and graduate students, to jobs in the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
Luong attributed the rise in applications to the faculty who teach the seminar. Paul Solman, economics correspondent for the NewsHour on PBS, and John Negroponte ’60, a former ambassador and the nation’s first Director of National Intelligence, will join Walter Russell Mead, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as the original professors of the course: Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, and Charles Hill.
“It’s possible that may have made a difference,” Gaddis said of Negroponte’s participation in particular.
Negroponte joined the Grand Strategy faculty team in September 2009 after more than 40 years in the foreign service. As director of national intelligence from 2005 to 2006, he briefed President George W. Bush ’68 every morning on intelligence matters.
J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History
Paul Kennedy, the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Director of International Security Studies at Yale, and Distinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, coordinates the ISS programs funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation. He is internationally known for his writings and commentaries on global political, economic, and strategic issues.
Born in June 1945 in the northern English town of Wallsend, Northumberland, he obtained his BA at Newcastle University and his DPhil at the University of Oxford. He is a former Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, and of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Bonn. He holds many honorary degrees, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.) in 2000 for services to History and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in June 2003.
He is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many foreign-language newspapers and magazines. His monthly column on current global issues is distributed worldwide by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media Services.
He is the author or editor of nineteen books, including The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, The War Plans of the Great Powers, The Realities Behind Diplomacy, and Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. His best-known work is The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House), which provoked an intense debate on its publication in 1988 and has been translated into over twenty languages.
In 1991, he edited a collection entitled Grand Strategies in War and Peace. He helped draft the Ford Foundation-sponsored report issued in 1995, The United Nations in Its Second Half-Century, which was prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of the UN. His latest book, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations, was published in 2006 by Random House.
Prof. Kennedy has finished a book on operational history of the Second World War and is beginning a study of Rudyard Kipling.