Jim Sleeper is a journalist and alumnus of Yale, as well as a lecturer there. He published an enlightening article about the role of Yale University in forging the Grand Strategy, a strategy of American imperial power to safeguard the world (and American interests). For those of us who came of age in the 1950s, it seemed like the American Colossus was invincible and profoundly moral. But since the debacles in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the Grand Strategy no longer looks so grand, and America’s role as the “world’s policeman” appears to be a fruitless enterprise. To understand the Grand Strategy and Yale’s role in shaping it, read Sleeper’s article.
Sleeper urged me to post a larger portion of his excellent essay. Here it is.
When a new leader of the Grand Strategy program tied to change its focus, she was forced out.
Sleeper begins:
Yale history professor Beverly Gage has been praised widely for defending academic freedom from donors’ meddling by announcing her resignation (effective in December) from the directorship of Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which she took over in 2017 from Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. But there are more politically urgent, and arguably profound, questions at issue here beyond professors’ right to design their courses free of outside interference.
Since the program’s inception more than two decades ago, Grand Strategy’s intensive seminars have engaged undergraduate as well as graduate students with close readings of classical works on strategy, stressful crisis decision-making simulations, and meetings with accomplished policymakers. In 2010, David Petraeus, at the time the four-star Army general commanding U.S. military operations in the Middle East (and later to become director of the CIA), visited the seminar, as did former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, observers from the CIA, and U.S. Military Academy cadets.
That the program, prior to Gage’s arrival, nudged students toward embracing the U.S. military and national security state was hardly a secret. “A Yale Class Seeks to Change the World … Before Graduation,” read a headline on a Columbia News Service report in 2004, when Grand Strategy was directed by Gaddis. “We are looking for leaders,” the late Charles Hill, a program co-founder, career Foreign Service officer, and Yale’s diplomat-in-residence, told the reporter. “This course gives us a great opportunity to get our hooks into them early. We are not … looking for the kind of person who would be protesting the [World Trade Organization] at Davos,” the World Economic Forum.
But Gage wanted students to scrutinize foreign-policy elites, not elevate them. She welcomed social movement activists in civil rights, environmental, and other domestic causes, expanding Grand Strategy’s horizons to include people who challenge the dominant world arrangements that other visitors defend. Soon she was “second guessed and undermined,” as she put it, by the Yale administration’s failure to resist a demand for a conservative board of program overseers made by Grand Strategy’s benefactors: former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, a former director of the Mitre Corporation and manager of federally funded research and development projects for the Defense Department; and Brady’s billionaire business associate Charles B. Johnson, an overseer of the conservative Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. The two had endowed Grand Strategy with $17.5 million in 2006.
In an essay for the recently published anthology Rethinking American Grand Strategy, Gage writes that “as a citizen, I have, for better or worse, been as likely to be a protester as a policy maker,” and she urges anyone drawn to the latter “to pay more attention to voices bubbling up from below.” To Grand Strategy’s emphasis on foreign-policy decision-making, she added “the art of … channeling collective grievances into effective action.”
Gaddis, Hill, and other original faculty had sided generally with the powerful. “We hauled the entire Grand Strategy class down to New York to meet Henry Kissinger and hear about his sense of the great deficit that exists in grand-strategic thinking,” Gaddis told a large assembly of Yale alumni (including me) at a reunion in 2004. “A student was outraged by Christopher Hitchens’s book accusing Henry of war crimes. So I said, ‘Why not do a senior essay on Kissinger’s ethics?’ I saw a draft, called Henry, and he said ‘Bring him in.’ He hired him on the spot, … to fact check Christopher Hitchens.”
Many alumni swooned, not least over Gaddis’s exhibition of first-name familiarity with the famous and powerful. This was how things had been done at Yale in their time, and by God, Gaddis was bringing back the old elan! But nobody stopped to ask how that fits with a college education for undergrads, or whether intermingling national security professionalism with liberal education prematurely narrows their intellectual and moral development.
Yale College has often been a crucible of U.S. national statesmanship and espionage: Nathan Hale, class of 1773, was hanged for spying on British-colonial troop movements; the CIA was founded at Yale during World War II; and the State Department and its diplomatic corps have been instructed and advised by Yale professors for decades. Yale’s president from 1951 to 1963, A. Whitney Griswold, a descendant of colonial Connecticut governors and an “establishment” figure par excellence, abolished Yale’s Institute for International Studies, which had been funneling students into murky foreign missions with help from conservative alumni, but even then the university continued to serve as a recruitment grounds for the foreign-policy establishment.
We cannot safeguard the world and American interests. Those are mutually exclusive. It’s like saying you have a nice house, so I’m going to safeguard you and my interests in your house. How safe do you feel with me guarding you?
Our hyper-focus and dependence on the Ivey League, particularly Yale and Harvard, has created an intellectual myopia that results in a plethora of policy “rabbit holes”. This has not only been evident in foreign policy but other areas such as economics and education. US universities have an outsized reputation for entrepreneurial dynamism and innovation. Yet, Washington is seen returning to the Ivey leagues for over representation in leadership, policy making, and bureaucratic management. When 8 of 9 of our Supreme Court justices, 5 of the last six Presidents, and a gaggle of ultra conservative members of congress all hail from the same intellectual culture the scholarly diversity necessary to sustain a healthy vibrant polity is in peril. Whenever we face calamity it is often opined that we lacked the imagination to see it coming. We have a great deal of talent throughout this country that is being wasted because we keep going back to the same well.
Jobs in government policy development should be limited to public school graduates and the appointees should reflect both geographic and demographic diversity.
U.S. senators and representatives, including Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, shouldn’t appoint education advisors from private colleges especially those located in D.C. Brown’s adviser is a Georgetown Catholic University grad.
Thanks for posting a link to this great article.
Wow. What a peek behind the curtain!
“Gage’s resignation raises complex questions
about free expression and the influence
donors exercise on University campuses.”
“But there are more politically urgent,
and arguably profound, questions at issue
here beyond professors’ right to design
their courses free of outside interference.”
Urgent,Profound?
When has the “state” NOT overseen
notoriety via licensing, or certification?
When did the notoriety, defined by certification,
stand in the way, of the interests being served,
as defined by the state?
What institutional mechanism established
by the “state”, hobbled the state, beyond
words?
When has our nation’s foreign policy–our “Colossus” not been guided by a “grand strategy” in the service of our largest business/corporate interests–often developed at Harvard or Yale. Think of Theodore Roosevelt and the Harvard folks–think of Yale and the Bush’s. We have not so much have been “making the world safe for democracy,” as making it safe for business interests. Woodrow Wilson’s use of our forces to attack Russia in 1917, in an effort to abort socialism there, or “the business of America” is business,” of his Republican opponents. With a few exceptions–FDR & Carter for e.g.–we’ve been about “policing” other lands for our own corporate interests, not to protect the peoples of other lands. (Making HUGE dollars for the “military-industrial complex” along the way). Suggest folks read “Overthrow,” by Kinzer–a history of American foreign policy from Hawaii to the Middle East of our time. Also, “Desert Mirage,” by Martin Yant, about our initial attack on Iraq. And even as we pull our troops out of Afghanistan, we attempt to control the area through other lands nearby, and by drones, etc. Too bad we can’t let other countries run themselves and spend the money on education, etc. here in the states. As a former Ex. Director of NEA said, “I look forward to the day when schools get all the money they need, and we hold a bake sale to buy tanks.”
The vast majority of the investment of Yale’s $42.3 billion endowment is done by outside private money managers and is completely opaque..
And although Yale has a widely publicized PR stance against investment in retailers selling assault rifles to the general public, Yale has no stated policy against investments in the companies making the assault rifles or any other military contractors.
So it’s a pretty good bet that they have benefitted from the business of war, which has been very good indeed over the past half century — the same time period over which Yale was “advocating for” the nation’s military strategy. Coincidental, of course.
This is an extremely interesting article. I am reading Gaddis’ Grand Strategy now, and I find him an engaging author. His biography of George F. Kennan was superb.
Jim Sleeper has a talent for dropping metaphoric neutron bombs on anti-liberal citadels…gently annihilating the inhabitants with radiating ideas without destroying the surrounding superstructure.
Though i am often in sympathy with Sleeper’s sentiments, i find it remarkable that he is never wrong, nor does he entertain that possibility. I’d guess he has an equally convoluted and self-satisfying explanation for why he has been teaching at Yale for so many years.
key point
Surely you know the distinguished political philosopher Michael Walzer’s term, “connected critic”? I was an undergraduate at Yale (Class of 1969) and, after 30 years as a journalist in New York, I returned there to teach for 21 years, eight of them living full-time in New Haven, because my wife, Seyla Benhabib, Yale’s Eugene Meyer Prof. of Political Science and Philosophy, had left Harvard for Yale and was teaching there during that time. (We retired in 2020 but, naturally, we’re still engaged to some extent.)
Some have wondered if I’m trying to earn Yale’s Thorn in the Side Award. Maybe Walzer’s term encompasses that. But really, sort-of like Camus’ feeling for Algeria, it’s a relationship compounded of love and regret.
Here’s the love: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-apr-04-bk-sleeper4-story.html
and here’s the regret: https://newrepublic.com/article/155939/tragedy-yale-commons-stephen-schwarzman-private-equity
Yale’s Grand Strategy has always been about making money.
Last year was a very good year in that regard.
While most Americans were trying to make ends meet, Yale was making a killing. Yale’s endowment grew by $11.1 billion in just one year.
But like all good billionaires, Yale balks at paying taxes.
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/investigations/new-haven-looks-to-recoup-millions-as-tax-exempt-properties-grow/2404243/
Since the link below does not work, please remove me from your distribution list. Thank s
I don’t know what link you’re referring to “below” or who you’re addressing. I do recommend supplementing my Foreign Policy magazine piece, which is the subject of Diane’s post above, with this short column on the matter that I was invited to write for the Yale Daily News, which posted it yesterday:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/24/sleeper-grand-strategy-cant-be-grandiose/
Adding to your analysis, it would be great if a faculty member at one of the D.C.-located universities examined the schools’ over-sized influence in creating conservative public policy. If that story was written, the public would learn that almost all of the major universities in the D.C. area are Catholic. The public might learn that policy makers have positioned Catholic organizations as the 3rd largest U.S. employer. The public might learn that the conservative SCOTUS jurists are all Catholic. The public might learn that Leonard Leo and William Barr each received an award from Catholic organizations for what they did to the country. The public might learn that the conservative Catholic SCOTUS jurists opened the door for forced tax funding for religious schools and that they exempted religious school employers from civil rights employment law.
The public might get the opportunity to learn about Trump’s John Eastman and about Robert P. George’s National Organization for Marriage, whose attorney was Cleta Mitchell (Koch-linked). The public might learn about the relationship between Charles Koch and the Board of the D.C.-located Catholic University of America. The public might learn that the author of the recent WSJ article against public schools, in favor of private schools, has links to Koch (Sourcewatch identifies Koch as a $3,000,000 funder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance). Not surprisingly, Catholic organizations are the primary religious beneficiary of tax funding for private schools. Research showed that some parishes generate more revenue from education vouchers than from worshippers. Btw- The WSJ article’s author is at the elite Columbia.
The public might have the opportunity to learn about the almost 50 state Catholic Conferences created to influence state legislatures and their uniform promotion of school choice. The public might learn that Bishop Hebda prohibited his priests from voting in the 2020 Democratic primary and cited the state’s Catholic Conference as his authority to do so.
The public should learn Jefferson’s quote- in all times, in all countries, the priest aligns with the despot.
Thanks for writing your article.