CHANGING THE WORLD
How the First Women of SFS Led the Way
SFS Alumni Commit to Exposing the Truth
Global Business Comes Front and Center
Centennial Labs Prepare Students to Solve the World's Biggest Problems
14 Showcasing Alumni
Walsh School of Foreign Service
GEORGETOW N UNIVERSITY • 2017-2018
SFS is published regularly by Georgetown University's WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE , in conjunction with Washingtonian Custom Media, a division of Washingtonian Media (washingtoniancustommedia.com).
We welcome feedback and suggestions for future issues. Please contact Jen Lennon, Director of Communications, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Intercultural Center 232, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20057; by phone at 202-687-5736; or by email at jll87@georgetown.edu. Website: sfs.georgetown.edu
Student Profiles Meet three standout SFS students.
08 Global Reach On three continents, SFS students work together online to study the consequences of borders.
Two alumni fight wrongdoing in important but very different ways.
26 Meet Our Faculty
These two faculty members bring extraordinary experience to SFS.
32 Alumnus Spotlight
An SFS alumnus becomes Japan’s foreign minister.
“Because we are leading up to the centennial anniversary, we’ve been trying to identify the historic impact of SFS, which is the oldest school of international affairs. We have had an imprint on a range of issues that affected the United States and the world. But one thing that kept coming to us was our impact in shaping the role of women in international affairs.”
— DEAN JOEL HELLMAN
10 A New Kind of Learning
In an inaugural Centennial Lab, SFS students went to India to help local experts fight crippling drought.
20 Women at the Gate
Long before other universities were coed, SFS admitted women. Here, for the first time, is their remarkable story.
24 Ready for Business
The first class of global business majors graduate and move into the world.
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COVER Photograph by Julia Birtolo.
CONTENTS P hotograph by Michele Oenbrink/Alamy
LOOKING AHEAD
Universal values combined with innovative new curriculum makes an SFS education more important than ever.
When I joined the Walsh School of Foreign Service as dean in 2015, few predicted how quickly and dramatically longstanding assumptions about international affairs would be seriously questioned—not only in Washington, D.C., but across Europe and in every other corner of the globe. Critical, unanticipated questions have been raised. Internal challenges to national sovereignty, complex non-state actors, disruptive new technologies, unraveling alliances and international agreements, and rising nationalism and protectionism on multiple continents have become the norm.
This dramatically shifting landscape, however, affirms the importance of SFS. It is here, at Georgetown, where so many of the world’s top thinkers and practitioners gather to tackle the new questions and problems presented by our time.
We might have expected that global uncertainty would depress applications to a school of international relations. Precisely the opposite has been true. Undergraduate applications for the SFS Class of 2021 were the most in our school’s history: nearly 4,000 students from all over the world applied for admission, and a brilliant class of 338 new students joined us on the Hilltop.
(SSP‘94), Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command; and our new class of Centennial Fellows who will be working with students, faculty, and alumni: Nasser Judeh (SFS‘83, P‘18), former Jordanian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister; Anne Richard (SFS‘82), former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration; Richard Verma (L‘98), former U.S. Ambassador to India; and Claudia Escobar, former Magistrate of the Court of Appeals of Guatemala and legal scholar. And we were honored to welcome back Bill Clinton (SFS‘68) upon his return to campus this November, marking the 25th anniversary of his election in 1992.
Anniversaries are much on our mind right now, as the SFS Centennial is less than two years away. In addition to our Centennial Fellows, SFS has been busy working on innovative programming to sharpen our impact on the new century. In this magazine, you can read about one of our pioneering Centennial Labs, in which students engage across disciplines to look at a problem or project with partners in the real world. These classes often take students around the world— in this case to Maharashtra, India, where they worked with its government regarding solutions to drought. We also feature examples of how SFS is increasing its effort to provide every student a meaningful global experience—for example, Professor Betsi Stephen’s thrilling “tri-local” class that engaged students in Washington, Italy and Qatar at the same time. We are also developing curriculum that will be increasingly important to international affairs in the 21st century. In addition to engaging more students in science and technology (such as in the course on drought in India), you can read here about our new Global Business major and fellows program in conjunction with the McDonough School of Business.
"SFS is increasing its effort to provide every student a meaningful global experience."
JOEL HELLMAN, Dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at
Georgetown
The fall semester has proven again the vitality and relevance of Georgetown as the international crossroads where crucial conversations take place. Recent visitors have included Former Secretary of State Colin Powell; German Ambassador Peter Wittig (P’20) discussing the German Bundestag election just days after it took place; Admiral Harry Harris, Jr.
Every day as I pass through the front gates of our world-class university, I see the Georgetown seal, reminding me of our universal values, which include: academic excellence, men and women for others, care for the whole person, and pursuit of faith and justice. I hope you will read the article on some of Georgetown’s first—and truly brilliant—female graduates: a part of the SFS story that hasn’t been told before, and a story that reminds us that SFS has been central to Georgetown’s legacy, its meaning and its values. These values will always be front and center as SFS pursues its mission of preparing young people to have a positive impact on the world—particularly at a moment of change and uncertainty. Please enjoy these stories of your school—and I hope to see you on campus in November 2019 for our Centennial Gala, if not before! — JOEL S. HELLMAN, DEAN
SUPPORT SFS
Alumni frequently ask how they can help SFS. Here are a few ideas:
Do we have up-to-date contact information? Make sure your information is correct and re-introduce SFS to your classmates. Email: addup@georgetown.edu
Facilitate philanthropic support of SFS by providing introductions to foundations, corporations and organizations. Email: Becky Pfordresher, Office of Corporate & Foundation Relations, becky.pfordresher@georgetown.edu
Set up a student internship, post job openings, arrange a site visit, volunteer for a career panel or serve as a career resource for resume reviews and mock interviews.
Email: Anne Steen, sfscdc@georgetown.edu
Sponsor a dinner, reception, or lecture for alumni, parents, friends, students, and faculty to foster SFS community engagement.
Email: Eleanor Jones, eleanor.jones@georgetown.edu
Join fellow alumni online for GUAA Alumni Career Services webinars, offered on a variety of professional development trends. Web: alumni.georgetown.edu/careers
Your support of Georgetown University directly benefits thousands of Hoyas every day, enabling them to make a difference in their communities and around the world.
Web: giving.georgetown. edu/#howtogive
Email: Katherine Smyth Haskins, kes34@ georgetown.edu
Suggest additions to the “Prominent Alumni List,” which is posted on the SFS website. Web: sfs.georgetown.edu/prominent-alumni/ Email: sfscontact@georgetown.edu
Apply to join the Georgetown Alumni Association Board of Governors.
Web: bog. georgetown.edu
Email: guaa@ georgetown.edu
SFS Meet Our Students
by CANDY J. COOPER
ON THE RIGHT PATH
A little-known truth lies between the lines of the website William Bilicic created for children facing hospital surgery: he’s an expert.
“When I was little I would go into surgery with my stuffed animal, Spot,” William Bilicic writes. A photo of the floppy Spot fills the home page of www.Spot-Aid. “The doctors would give Spot a hat and name tag. He would be there when I would fall asleep and when I would wake up.”
Bilicic, 20, was born with Hirschsprung’s disease, a misfire of the nerve cells in the colon. On his first day of life, he underwent his first surgery. Forty-odd surgeries followed. At 11, he was diagnosed with familial adenomatous polyposis, a pre-cancerous condition that required removal of his colon.
Today Bilicic is a sophomore in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, navigating his coursework with excellence and resolve. He is ready to declare a major based on a first-year course in international relations with Professor Elizabeth Arsenault, the Director of Teaching in the Security Studies Program. She has become one of Bilicic’s go-to people.
“She helped me realize that I was really interested in security studies and that I could do a five-year major,” Bilicic says. He will apply for the intensive program in his junior year. If accepted, he will begin taking graduate level courses as a senior, then graduate in five years with an MA in
Security Studies.
After academics, Bilicic embraces campus life, first as head of speaker events for the campus branch of the ACLU. Before Georgetown, he worked on the national finance team of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Now he’d like to invite notable speakers like her to campus. He’s also a grillmaster in the Georgetown Grilling Society, flipping burgers with friends every Friday in Red Square.
Bilicic hopes that the normality of his student life can serve as a guide to children facing hospitalizations. “I want to help any patient see a trajectory for themselves.”
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
Her undergraduate experience at Georgetown inspired Emma Stokien to pursue a career in the military. Now, 17 countries later, she’s back for a master’s at SFS.
Emma Stokien’s mother is a teacher; her father is a stock trader, her sister, an architect. She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where higher education paved a path to professions in maybe the arts or sciences. But the military? Not so much.
And yet that is precisely what Stokien did. After getting her undergraduate degree at Georgetown, she became an intelligence officer in the U. S. Marine Corps. Her parents were more than a little surprised.
Stokien says that Georgetown is partly to blame for her military turn. As a freshman she landed by accident in a senior seminar taught by Professor Kathryn Olesko, an historian of physics and an expert in comparative nuclear cultures. Stokien loved the class, Olesko
The normality of his student life, he says, can serve as a guide to children facing hospitalizations. That’s why he talks openly about himself on the Spot-Aid website. I have been there, he seems to say, and you can be where I am now. “I wanted to help any patient see a trajectory for themselves,” he says.
Whether offering tips to young patients or considering a future in international security, Bilicic is guided by a principle. “To help,” he says. “To help people. To help make the world a better place somehow.”
became a mentor, and the mentee signed up for another Olesko class, Math In Society. Stokien grew interested in game theory as it developed during nuclear proliferation.
“It was fascinating that something so uncontrollable could be so quantified,” she says. That led to courses in security, which persuaded Stokien that a true understanding would require field experience.
An invitation to a Marine Corps birthday party on campus revealed to Stokien that an elite education could lead to military service. She admired the selflessness of the people she met and felt a kinship, too.
She graduated with a degree in government and prepared for Officer Candidate School by taking long runs in combat boots. She was sent to Okinawa where she led a team of intelligence analysts on matters related in large part to North Korea. She was later sent to Qatar.
Now she is back in Washington, D.C., once again, this time pursuing an MA in Security Studies at SFS.
“It was very important to me to come back to Georgetown,” says Stokien, 27, who was stationed mostly in Asia, “to be part of the community, to give back to the school and to help to educate my civilian peers.”
Living in 17 countries over four years enlarges anyone’s perspective, and Stokien brings that to her Georgetown homecoming. She works to recreate the tight-knit quality of the Marine Corps on campus. One night after class she invited everyone to her apartment. “We got to discuss nerdy things,” she says. “I love the intellectual camaraderie.”
She sees her future in policy analysis, rather than intelligence. But Stokien will go wherever that work takes her.
STEPPING IN AT A CRITICAL MOMENT
A trip to Soweto brings a surprising opportunity.
Katelyn Shahbazian had always been drawn to literature and languages, on the one hand, and math and science, on the other. Within the School of Foreign Service, she looked to join the two. Last year, she found her major in Science, Technology, and International Affairs focusing on global health. Meeting with her advisor, Professor Emily Mendenhall, she asked about jobs as a research assistant.
“I’m going to South Africa,” the professor said. “You should come with me.”
Shahbazian, 20, was already scheduled for a spring semester in Morroco. After, she went home briefly to Northern California, then flew to Johannesburg to meet Mendenhall and her team.
“Once you leave the interview room you need to put those emotions away. You’re back to being a researcher.”
Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist, was studying low-income people with cancer plus a second disease. Her research is in “syndemics”—the synergy of epidemics—or how two or more diseases interact with social, environmental and economic factors to worsen health. Shahbazian’s role was to manage the data.
But unexpectedly the project manager dropped out, leaving no one to interview
the English-speaking women in Soweto. Mendenhall, who had returned to the U.S., asked Shahbazian to take on the critical role.
The research was thrilling yet “definitely very scary,” Shahbazian says.
She conducted three-hour interviews with 18 women in Soweto, asking about everything from their early lives to their cooking habits. She was glad to keep the project afloat, but was shaken by the stories she heard of violence and sexual abuse.
She learned to cope by listening openly to the women but also, later, by putting their stories aside. “You are the interviewer, you build up rapport, you empathize,” she says. “You don’t want to be flat-faced and cold. But once you leave the interview room you need to put those emotions away. You’re back to being a researcher. Separating the two roles is really important.”
As a senior, Shahbazian will write her thesis using research from Soweto. She is seeking fellowships and internships with an eye toward graduate school in public health. She expects to continue traveling around the world, doing research like Mendenhall’s. Understanding the cultural contexts of illness can lead to better policy and treatment of illness, and alleviate the suffering Shahbazian saw first-hand.
Reach
BORDERS ... WITHOUT BORDERS
A unique online class crosses the world’s boundaries by SARI HARRAR
Undergraduates from Georgetown University campuses on three continents—in Qatar, Italy and Washington, D.C.—are exploring the meaning and experience of geopolitical boundaries and other borders through an innovative online course that’s the first of its kind for the university.
recently, we have experienced the difficulties of Syrian refugees crossing from Turkey into Greece, and then on into other EU countries. Just recently, two ‘countries’ have voted to become separate entities: Catalonia/Spain and Iraqi Kurdistan/Iraq. What will it mean if the elections are seen as valid and we have two new countries carved out of existing countries?”
Recent GU-Q graduate Sheba George (SFS’17) says the class was intriguing because it encompassed three starkly different regions of the world. “While students in D.C. spoke about the proposed wall at the Mexican border and its consequences, students on the Italian campus spoke about borders in the context of the ongoing refugee crisis faced by Europe. Students in the Qatar campus, on the other hand, spoke about borders in their political context—with reference to countries trespassing on the political sovereignty of the borders of other countries.”
NOGALES, MEXICO
At the fence between the U.S. and Mexico.
Artwork shows migrants returning to Mexico.They carry a dead body and a washing machine, representing the lives lost in exchange for capitalism.
Borders and Security Concerns, developed and taught by Elizabeth (Betsi) Hervey Stephen, associate professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, was offered in the spring and fall semesters of 2017. It’s the university’s “first online class for multiple campuses, and the first undergraduate online class offered during the academic year for Georgetown in D.C.,” Stephen notes. The digital class allows a wide range of students to exchange views and collaborate on projects that take a close and often deeply personal look at some of the most controversial walls, fences, checkpoints and lines (both official and unofficial) separating nations and people in the world today. Issues explored include those in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Israel and Palestine; the U.S. and Mexico; and Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The course also expands the notion of borders to include religious, cultural and economic divides.
The world’s border-security issues are a particularly hot-button concern right now. The world is on the move,” Stephen says. “In 2016, more than 5,000 persons died attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe; at least 300,000 migrants did cross. And
Coursework includes extensive reading assignments and plenty of writing, along with lively online discussions, as well as a simulation of a border crisis that requires students to assume various roles and take action. A final project has students creating a virtual museum exhibit around a chosen border issue. George, a current graduate student in public policy who plans to work with refugees in the future, created a group exhibit with other GU-Q students around personal border experiences. Their stories are dramatic illustrations of 21st-century boundary issues and include a Muslim student’s frustration over religious borders in her native India (where “we are often seen as traitors, terrorists or religious fanatics”), a Sudanese student’s heartache when her long-held plans to spend a semester at Georgetown’s D.C. campus were dashed by President Trump’s early 2016 travel ban and a young Palestinian student’s experience traveling from Jordan to Jerusalem. “The trip… that used to be a two-hour drive is now a series of ‘security checks’ that can extend to 12 hours,” she writes. ( View the virtual museum at https://apps.cndls.georgetown.edu/projects/borders.)
For James MacGregor, associate dean for Academic Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, the class provides a unique opportunity. “The student body of Georgetown’s Qatar campus is extremely diverse, currently comprising 252 students from 44 countries,” he notes. “The perspectives that they bring into the classroom are similarly diverse, thereby ensuring that all of the students enrolled in Professor Stephen’s course have a learning experience that can truly be deemed global.” The online component also makes it convenient. “One of our D.C. students is a professional soccer player in Florida,” notes Stephen, who will teach another innovative online course in Spring 2018 focused on sports and diplomacy. Graduate students from D.C. and Qatar will travel with Stephen to the site of the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Doha, Qatar and collaborate on projects.
(LEFT TO RIGHT) Juliette Leader (SFS’20): Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, France; Gina Kim (SFS’18): internship at Skypoint Ventures in Flint, Michigan; Mai Nguyen (GHD’18): internship with GU Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Nick Na (SFS’18): Education and Social Justice Research Fellowship in Sydney, Australia; Leonor Morrow (SFS’19): study abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia; Joseph DiSilvio (GHD’18): internship with Education Development Center in Kigali, Rwanda; Hannah Urtz (SFS’20): internship with Vicente Ferrer Foundation in Anantapur, India; Pete Giannino (MAGES‘18): internship with U.S. Department of Commerce in the Office of Energy and Environmental Industries; Olivia Bisel (SFS’18):internship with GU Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation in Kampala, Uganda; Meagan Dooley (GHD’18): internship with Mercy Corps in Amman, Jordan; Steele Burrow (MSFS’18): internship with health care startup Koe Koe Tech in Yangon, Myanmar; Tipa Attasivanon (LAS’19): study abroad in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
SFS Supports Students in Summer Internships and Language Study
Internships are an integral part of the SFS education and prepare undergraduate and graduate students for careers in the international arena. Internships provide students with the opportunity to enhance their academic coursework; gain professional experience and insight into career opportunities; develop contacts in their fields of interest; and explore the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. SFS students intern around the world for organizations that include the U.S. State and Defense departments, the United Nations, international NGOs, and Fortune-500 companies. Some attend intensive language courses to achieve mastery of their chosen foreign language, or conduct research for their theses.
SFS The Centennial Lab
ON THE GROUND
SFS students discuss water conservation technologies with a local farmer (in white cap) in Gunjalwadi, a village in the Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra.
Bottom: Abraham Fraifeld (SFS‘17) in traditional Maharashtrian headdress at the Maharashtra State Legislative Council.
How many times can you say as a student that you worked on a problem that could affect someone’s life, whether they could pay off their loans, or even survive?” says Nandini Mullaji (SFS’17), who is now working for the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and plans to pursue an MBA and master’s degree in education. “I was lucky that at 21, when I was a teaching assistant for this class, I knew I’d found my dream job.”
Twenty undergraduate students participated in the course, Designing for Droughts. They spent an entire year studying the issues and collaborating with Indian and other government officials, policymakers and NGOs to develop solutions to drought in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Last June, the course culminated in a 10-day trip to the region, during which the students presented their recommendations to experts and officials working on the problem.
The Designing for Droughts course is among the School of
Foreign Service’s inaugural Centennial Labs—so named to honor the school’s upcoming 100th anniversary during the 20192020 academic year. According to SFS Dean Joel Hellman, it creates a new model of the classroom and will be a signature feature of an education at SFS.
“The Centennial Lab brings all the advantages of the SFS education,” says Hellman. “It’s focused on problem solving. It’s hands on. It’s multidisciplinary and it also has a travel aspect in that it brings students to a different part of the world. Ultimately, it’s oriented to our goal, which is helping students to develop real solutions to intractable global problems.”
In the spirit of a new learning model, SFS professors Irfan Nooruddin and Mark Giordano, who led the project, set out to teach an unscripted course that would give students the tools to innovate and think creatively about solutions.
“Most classes, even at an excellent university like Georgetown, follow a script. Professors are the experts, and they come to the
A NEW KIND OF LEARNING
When SFS students signed up for a lab course about drought in India, they expected an innovative learning experience. What many of them found was a calling. by MEGHAN
LEWIT
class with a syllabus,” says Nooruddin, director of the Georgetown University India Initiative. “With this course, every day was an exercise in improvisation. We let our curiosity drive what came next.”
The decision to focus on Maharashtra—the wealthiest state in India, which contains the population centers of Mumbai and Pune—came out of a trip in 2015 when Nooruddin and Hellman met with Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, who cited drought as the most pressing issue facing the region.
The course came together through a combination of the professors’ expertise—Nooruddin in Indian politics and Giordano, director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program, as a leading expert in water issues.
“There are very few parts of the world where Georgetown doesn’t have a strong presence. India until recently was one of them,” Nooruddin says. “India was also a place where our students
wanted to have more expertise and engagement. The university also has a lot to offer India in terms of policy analysis and education.”
In addition to highlighting a part of the world that called for deeper engagement, it was important for the class to focus on an issue that crossed disciplines.
“[Drought] has to do with science, agriculture, finance, gender. There are so many different issues, and we knew there would be multiple entry points to the problem,” says teaching assistant Mullaji.
Students worked in teams to better understand the science behind droughts, their economic and social dimensions, and the intricacies of the Indian political system. Even before arriving in India, the students were able to regularly communicate and meet with U.S.- and Indian-based stakeholders—including the U.S. ambassador to India and leaders from the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and the Environmental Defense Fund.
“Our goal was never for the students to come up with a single idea or solution,” says Giordano. “The concept was that if we could get students to think about problems differently, and present those ideas, it would generate discussion that would break through some deadlocks and change the debate.”
So what did the students come up with?
One group developed a new loan system that would support maintenance of irrigation systems that had fallen into disrepair. Another created a plan for farmer collectives to build self-financed greenhouses to test crops and experiment with water-friendly techniques. A third group proposed leveraging remote sensing technology to link data on farmers’ water usage to loan forgiveness policies.
“While the students who participated came from many different areas of interest, the result was truly a team effort,” says Jaclyn Lee (SFS‘19), a junior majoring in Science, Technology and International Affairs.
“I’ve been in several classes where working individually is much more efficient and productive than being in a group, but in this class I had the opposite experience,” she says. “I got to be part of a five-person team where each individual contributed their own expertise and perspective to some key aspect of our plan. This was the first class I took at Georgetown where you could actually design a feasible, implementable solution to a real world problem.”
“With the Centennial Labs, SFS is at the forefront of a university-wide focus on experiential learning that empowers students to work with stakeholders to confront pressing real-world issues,” says Daniel Byman, senior associate dean for undergraduate affairs.
“It’s not enough to just have the right answer in a seven page paper,” he says. “This is why students come to D.C. and to the School of
Foreign Service. They want to work on these complex problems.”
The school has also recently started a Trade Lab course, where students work with the Office of the United States Trade Representative to explore legal cases about possible trade violations. The new Centennial Labs model opens up many possibilities for students to address a wide range of global issues, such as climate change and the refugee crisis. These kinds of courses also highlight the service component of the School of Foreign Service, Byman says.
During their ten days in India, students spent about half their time in Mumbai, meeting with policymakers and convening in so-called “war rooms” participating in high-level discussions. They also traveled to rural parts of the region where farmers and residents live with the realities of drought every day. Having the opportunity to travel to villages throughout Maharashtra, and speak with those most affected, truly brought the reality of the crisis home.
Maharashtra
Known as the gateway of India, Maharashtra is one of India’s largest commercial and industrial centers. Located in the western region of India, it’s the nation’s second most populous state.
POPULATION
More than 112 million people live in Maharashtra. Mumbai, the capital, is also the most populous city in India. However, more than half the state’s population lives in rural villages, and 64 percent of the state’s population depends on agriculture.
LAND AREA
The state covers 118,800 square miles—an area larger than the United Kingdom, Italy or New Zealand.
DROUGHT CHALLENGES
Maharashtra faced a crippling drought in 2016, and continues to grapple with extreme weather conditions. About 330 million people across India, about a quarter of the country’s population, have been affected by the drought. Maharashtra has developed Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyaan, a water conservation program aiming to make the state drought-free by 2019.
“They were able to see that this was not just a classroom exercise,” Mullaji says. “This was determining whether these farmers would have crops, whether they would be able to sell to market, whether they would starve, whether they would be able to pay off their loans. That was very humbling.”
A quarter of the students were so inspired that they remained in India after the course ended. Three continued to study water issues, working with the International Water Management Institute and publishing a comprehensive report on the Maharashtra drought strategy. One student partnered with a local NGO to develop a workshop helping farmers learn water conservation techniques. Another student returned to the Maharashtra chief minister’s war room as an intern, researching legislative precedents related to drought policies.
Nooruddin and Giordano are leading the class for a second year, this time focusing on public sanitation in Mumbai, which brings together a cross section of issues such as urban planning, public health and behavioral change. Meanwhile, a cohort of students from the previous year are continuing to meet, with a goal of putting into action the drought solutions they developed.
“Our plan is to make the class even more fluid than last time,” Giordano says. “We saw that [this approach] really changed the way students thought about the world and problem solving. Many may stay engaged in India for the rest of their lives.”
Even students who have since graduated, like Mullaji, are continuing their involvement.
“We’ve seen the impact we can have,” she says. “Given our education and talent, I think we have a responsibility to do so.”
LOCAL EXPERTISE. Professor Mark Giordano poses in front of a water balance table in Kumbharwadi village; Jaclyn Lee (SFS‘19) by the WOTR (Watershed Organization Trust) bus; The India Innovation Studio with farmers in a temple in Kumbharwadi village, Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra.
EXPOSING THE TRUTH
Dorothée Myriam Kellou. She started by asking questions. by PEG ROSEN
Freelance journalist and documentarian Dorothée Myriam Kellou (MAAS ‘12) was at work in her Paris apartment one February evening in 2014, when a compelling Facebook message popped up on her smartphone.
It came from a former human resources manager for the Syrian subsidiary of Lafarge, the French multinational cement company. The man explained he’d been abducted in August 2012, had to pay his own ransom for liberation and had never been compensated by his employer. He needed an Arabic-speaking French journalist who could tell his story.
Through a network of Syrian refugees in the U.S., Rochelle Davis director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies had provided Kellou’s name.
Thus began an 18-month investigative odyssey that ultimately exposed far more than Lafarge’s negligence toward its employees in war-torn countries. In a three-part expose that splashed the front pages of Le Monde and aired also on the international news channel France 24, the young journalist outed the cement giant for paying off terrorist groups—including ISIS—in order to keep its Syrian plant running.
Kellou’s work earned her the 2017 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting, which recognizes journalism that uncovers bribery in the business world. It also sparked a French judicial inquiry into Lafarge’s possible dealings with Syrian armed terrorist groups.
Kellou says she didn’t focus on where her investigation might lead when she initially dove in. Nor did she worry about personal risk.
“When you think too much about all the consequences of what you might do, you don’t do anything,” she says. “Being trained as a historian at Georgetown, I felt a responsibility to document wrongdoing. I want to expose the truth because I know how destructive silence can be at a personal and societal level.”
This deep-seated commitment drives yet another—more personal project for Kellou: a documentary about the forced resettlement of her father’s family during the Algerian war for independence from France. It is an outgrowth of her master’s thesis at SFS.
“When I got to Georgetown, my professor, Osama Abi Mershed, told me, ‘Look at your own history and your forgotten side,’” says Kellou, whose French mother and Algerian father met in the 1970s in Algiers. “My father never talked about his experience growing up in a village surrounded by barbed wire. His experience was shared by almost three million other Algerians. Yet very little has been written about it. So that’s what I decided to do.”
To fund her documentary—called El-Rihla, Arabic for “voyage”—Kellou has pursued an independent course, applying for and winning financial awards from filmmaking agencies and running her own crowdfunding campaign.
The money has helped pay for various aspects of film production and, most importantly, for Kellou and her crew to travel with her father to his village of Mansourah—which he left behind 50 years ago. She is seeking more funding to complete the project by spring.
DOCUMENTARIAN
Kellou’s commitment to document wrongdoing won her the TRACE prize for investigative reporting in 2017.
“I remember thinking, ‘He must be a trustworthy source if he’s been sent by Davis,’” says French-born Kellou, who came to SFS as a Fulbright scholar and earned her Master of Arts in Arab Studies in 2012. “I started asking questions.”
In the meantime, Kellou does what she can to make ends meet, freelancing for various media outlets and working a few days each week at France 24.
“It’s a struggle to live while doing this work,” says Kellou. “But being able to express what is important and dear to me is what makes me happy. It’s a wonderful process.”
FIGHTING DISINFORMATION
Jamie Fly. His assignment is to track the Kremlin’s interference with American politics and culture. by SARI HARRAR
When 200 NFL players knelt, sat or raised a fist during the national anthem in late September, Jamie Fly (MAGES ’02) wasn’t surprised by the burst of social media traffic about the controversy from an unlikely source: hundreds of Kremlin-associated Twitter accounts.
“Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are engaged in a widespread disinformation and influence campaign in the U.S. and around the world that goes beyond spreading propaganda and interfering with elections and political campaigns,” says Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Future of Geopolitics and Asia programs at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). “Putin’s aim is to sow division and promote chaos by using one of our greatest strengths our openness against us.”
Fly, who has a master’s in German and European Studies from SFS, is co-director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan project launched this year to publicly monitor Russia’s efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions in the US and Europe and to help craft strategies to deter them, hopefully in time for the 2018 and 2020 elections. The Alliance is currently tracking 600 Twitter
accounts linked to the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation and influence campaign a project that’s gaining national attention through media mentions in The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere.
The tracking tool is called the Hamilton68 Dashboard (http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/). The name refers to this founding father’s prescient writing. “In the Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote of protecting America’s electoral process from foreign meddling,” the Alliance website notes. “Today, we face foreign interference of a type Hamilton could scarcely have imagined.” Hamilton68’s online dashboard charts and analyzes in real time the volume and content of tweets, including hashtags, links and subjects from human users and bots, including Kremlin influence agents, pro-Kremlin individuals, and others influenced knowingly or unknowingly by Russia.
“The common misperception is that Russia is pushing obvious propaganda with a pro-Russian message,” says Fly. “The reality is Putin is promoting all sorts of existing messages and stories already appearing in the media here that sow division, including racial and religious division, and inciting chaos. Many are not about politics or politicians
at all. And they’re not always manufacturing fake news. Often they just grab onto controversies already happening here, then amplify and push it by promoting both sides.” Hamilton68 has documented waves of Twitter activity around a wide variety of issues from Charlottesville to Chelsea Clinton to #ResignPaulRyan. After the NFL incident, for example, the tweets pushed both sides of the debate via hashtags, including #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.
The Alliance’s bipartisanship is key to its hoped-for success in understanding and repelling Russian information attacks
“Putin’s aim is to sow division.”
before the 2018 and 2020 elections. Daily operations are run by Fly, former national security counselor to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Laura Rosenberger, a senior fellow at GMF and director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy who was a senior State Department official in the Obama administration.
An impressive list of former senior national security officials, from both parties and other nations, has endorsed the effort by joining the Alliance’s advisory council.
“The whole conversation about Russia’s influence on the 2016 Presidential election is very polarized along party lines, but there’s nothing partisan about what Russia is doing,” Fly says. “In that sense, their efforts are working by preventing elected officials from working well together in a bipartisan way. And we’re getting closer and closer to midterm elections and to the 2020 presidential election.”
The History of Women at SFS
WOMEN AT THE GATE
Years before most elite colleges became coeducational, the Walsh School of Foreign Service brought women into its student body. They paved new pathways for future generations. This is their story. by ANTOINETTE
MARTIN
Barbara Berky was just 17 when her parents noticed a short note typed onto the bottom of the Georgetown University fall 1954 brochure announcing that women could apply for entry to the School of Foreign Service and told her to do so. Though Berky had other ideas, she acceded to her parents’ wishes.
“I thought it would be interesting,” she recalled in a recent phone interview, “so I was happy to be accepted. I didn’t grasp that it was some kind of big honor—and I definitely didn’t know how hard it would be for us girls.”
Berky—now Berky Evans—became part of the initial group of about 25 women accepted to SFS. She went on to be one of about a dozen who graduated four years later and remembers proudly that she ranked 15th among the total 150 members of the overwhelmingly male class of 1958.
She also remembers that two years later women took first, second, and fourth place in the class of ‘60. “We outshined the men,” says Berky Evans, now an 80-year-old grandmother liv-
ing in Saratoga, CA. “I remember that the only way I gained the men’s respect was I’d do better than they did. The priests—the ‘Jezzies’—were very nice. The military guys, those who were there because of the G.I. bill, those were our friends. They had seen a little of the world, and they were not so privileged. But a lot of the men were just ... ugh.”
To explain, she describes a famous tree with a bench just inside the front gate of campus. “College boys congregated there. Women were not welcome to stand anywhere near the tree. The boys were not interested in socializing with us. The young men, they mostly wanted to date the women from the nursing program—not us.
“But the women got stronger and stronger. We gathered together and set up the School of Foreign Service Women’s Association. I was the first president—and by the time of my senior year, we had a tea at the Alumni House for incoming women. Can you imagine? A tea at Georgetown? This was unheard of, but we did it.”
IN THE LEAD
Barbara Hammes
Sharood, summa cum laude, Class of 1958. Her diploma referred to a “he,” rather than “she.”
As SFS prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2019–2020, Georgetown scholars have begun working to unearth the history of the institution, and one of the things they have discovered is the extraordinary role SFS has played in bringing women into international affairs. That part really gets rolling with the founding of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics in 1949. “Ling-Lang,” as the institute was known, became the entry point for female foreign service students after the end of World War II—but only if they were willing to attend night classes. Day classes were exclusively for men.
“It was a pretty radical act in the late Forties to open up the School of Foreign Service to women.”
—DEAN HELLMAN
“It was a pretty radical act in the late Forties to open up the School of Foreign Service to women,” reflects today’s dean, Joel Hellman. “The U.S. had become a global power after World War II, foreign policy required vast amounts of information from overseas. The leaders of the State Department, the Pentagon and CIA were desperate for people who could work with that information,” says Hellman. “They believed that women would
excel at these skills and came to Georgetown to ask the school to train them. This was before the wave of coeducation of the Sixties and Seventies. The program opened to women in order to meet a need—not out of desire to promote women’s advancement.”
With the power of understatement, he adds, “There was a great deal of reluctance on campus.”
SFS founder Father Edmund Walsh and linguist Leon Dostert (SFS ’28) established the institute. Dostert returned post-war to his Georgetown alma mater as a star, having created a simultaneous language interpretation system for the 1945 Nuremberg Trials (later used extensively by the United Nations). He and Walsh began setting up a lab to train students in that art, wherein a translator hears information in one language through an ear bud and speaks another language into a headset microphone. The program attracted top-notch female foreign language speakers from the first—but until 1954, they could only go to the night classes and then had to go home.
“LING-LANG”
After World War II, the U.S. State Department, Pentagon, and CIA needed vast amounts of information translated, interpreted and monitored from overseas. They asked Georgetown to train women for the job. In 1949, the university responded by founding the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. “Ling Lang” was the first opened door for women at SFS.
When women were finally allowed in the daytime program, there were no female restrooms, and no housing for them until the following year when they were allowed in the upstairs wing of the nursing school dormitory. “Finally,” Berky Evans recalls, “I got to stop racing across campus in a sweat to use the bathroom at the rooming house.”
According to Barbara Hammes Sharood, who had transferred into SFS as a sophomore, “Living in the nurses’ dorm didn’t work out so well for us either though.” Sharood had to take a required class at night, getting her back to the dorm at 10 p.m.—evidently not a typical hour for nursing students. The doors were always locked. “I had to ring the bell to get in. The nun would come down in a dressing gown and robe and be very angry. ‘This is not appropriate!’ she would say stiffly and just turn on her heels and leave.”
The following year, Sharood and several female students decided they’d do better living in an apartment off campus.
Other kinds of discrimination were more direct. In an accounting class, Sharood and one other woman were the only female students in the class. “The professor pulled us aside and said, ‘I want you both to sit in the last row and I do not want you to ask questions or
make comments, because the boys are here to learn.’” When she graduated, it was summa cum laude. “I was thrilled, but the certificate . . . called me a ‘he.’ I guess they couldn’t afford the extra letter!”
Those interviewed for this article about their pioneer days at SFS agreed on this: They received a spectacular education—one they would not have been able to access anywhere else at the time. “I’ve got a master’s, I’ve taught college, done this and that, and nothing ever challenged me like Georgetown,” says Helene Gettler Mallett, SFS class of ’59.
On the other hand, the women who spoke for this piece were also nearly unanimous in naming three things they found exceedingly difficult to tolerate: the housing situation, the traditionally male culture at the university, and the challenge of finding a job in the field of foreign service after graduation.
Paula Wiegerd Tosini, who graduated in 1960, took the foreign service officer exam and passed, then won a Fulbright scholarship for foreign travel at graduation. Tosini says that nonetheless she was able to accept “reality.” If she got married, she would never be posted overseas.
“I worked at AID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) for a while and earned a master’s degree from SFS at night,” Tosini says. She joined the foreign service and began training for a post in New Delhi, but her plans came to an end when she got married in 1964 and had children the following year.
After her kids were established, Tosini went to the University of Maryland for a Ph.D. in economics. She worked for a financial regulatory agency for more than a decade, and after that a nonprofit “futures” organization. Today, she is a proud docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. because she “always loved art.”
Her adaptability is typical of early graduates, but her equanimity contrasts sharply with the attitudes of others who lived through those early years at SFS.
“I passed the oral exam—at least I think I did. When I finished, they patted me on the head, and—I heard this from other girls, too—they said something like: ‘Well, it’s probably going to be a long time before an opening occurs, and looking at you, you look like you might be married by then.’ I kept waiting for the call from the State Department, but it never came.” —
HELENE GETTLER
MALLETT, REMEMBERING HER EXPERIENCE IN 1957
Instead, Mallett became a teacher. She first taught fifth grade, then high school, high school equivalency and college at two universities on Long Island. “I regret not being able to go into the foreign service, but life has many paths.” Now in her eighties, long retired and a widow, she says, “If you find a rock in the way and find a way around it, I think you’ll be happier in the long run.”
She admires the approach taken by Melissa Foelsch Wells, the first female to graduate from SFS. In a 1984 interview, Wells described her “ploy” to disarm the interlocutors at her foreign service exam and slide by the disqualifying marriage question.
CONTINUED
Wells, who grew up around theater people and performed as a synchronized swimmer, understood the value of rehearsing for a performance. She prepared herself for the inevitable scene, which occurred five minutes into the exam.
Q: “Miss Foelsch, may I ask, what are your marriage plans?”
A: “I’m nearly six feet tall and I weigh two pounds more than Sugar Ray Robinson and I just can’t find the right guy.’”
The examining board members laughed and moved on. Wells became a diplomat and four-time American ambassador (See sidebar on Melissa Foelsch Wells.)
But the question for women would not evaporate with a snappy answer; far from it. As late as 1965, four years before Georgetown became fully coeducational, the question of whether women should pursue careers was still debated quite openly. That year, an edition of the now-defunct SFS Courier ran a sarcastic column by a male student (under the pseudonym King Sparrow) who argued that “Women who do continue in the traditionally masculine pursuits of ... professional life often surrender a good part of their female essence.” In rebuttal, Father Joseph Sebes, then dean of the School of Business Administration, said he believed in increasing the number of women at SFS “because education has a value in itself.”
“My family left Hungary when the bombs were falling. I started school in January, 1946, age eight, in Germany. I remember wearing winter coats, copying down the multiplication table. I got pneumonia and this was before penicillin. I didn’t get out of
the hospital until Easter. Ten years later, I started at SFS, and on the day of my first exam in Development of Civilization, the revolution broke out in Hungary. I was praying, fearing for my grandmother and relatives still back there—and I flunked by a few points.” — ERIKA PAPP FABER, CLASS OF ‘60
Faber, now 79 and a resident of senior housing in Connecticut, remembers pleading for a chance to retake the test. “You know,” the professor told her, “you have to put yourself above those things.”
Faber was a scholarship student who held down a job as an assistant proctor at a freshman residence. When the head proctor came down the staircase tipsy and half-dressed at a coed soiree, Faber found herself in charge when she was supposed to be getting ready for oral comps covering seven semesters of material. “My diploma depended on it,” she recalls. “Wouldn’t you know, one of the three professors on the board was the same one who flunked me on that first test?”
The professor tested her with his nasty tone once again. Faber cried when she walked out—but she passed. “I was 23rd out of 122 graduates,” she recalls. “Not too bad for an immigrant girl.”
In fact, she was too recent an immigrant to be eligible for the foreign service, so Faber took a job with an insurance bank, writing fire protection literature for three years. After that, she had a 14-year run as editor of a Catholic magazine. Today, with her husband now gone from Alzheimer’s disease, Papp has reinvented herself once again, editing a monthly web page on Hungarian social and cultural issues (available at www.Magyar.org).
If every dream conjured by the young women of the Fifties
Outstanding Women
Women from SFS became stellar achievers in international affairs and other important fields. Here are a few examples of the legendary women of SFS, past and present.
Wells, the daughter of a physicist and an Estonian opera singer and film star, grew up traveling the world and spoke three languages by age nine. She worked in Las Vegas as a dancer and synchronized swimmer, then performed in a water ballet tour of Europe, after which she went to SFS, starting with night classes. Wells became the first female graduate
of the school and went on to serve as ambassador to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau 1976–77, Mozambique 1987–90, The Democratic Republic of Congo 1991–93 and Estonia 1998–2001. In a series of interviews published a few years ago by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Wells described managing two embassy evacuations, working amidst wars in Africa, leading efforts to bring food to starving people, and working to get child soldiers out of war to safety.
Lancaster spent more than three decades as a revered faculty member at the school from which she graduated in 1964. In 2010, she became the SFS dean. Lancaster passed
away in 2013, at the age of 72. At her funeral, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said, “Her extraordinary passion for this place, for her students and their growth, for the School of Foreign Service, and for our role both in Washington and around the world was inspiring and pushed us all to be better versions of ourselves.” Lancaster hopscotched back and forth between public service and academia. From 1980 to 1981 she was the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, and later directed the African Studies program at SFS. From 1993–1996, she served as deputy administrator of USAID, before returning to the university. In 2013, under Lancaster’s leadership, Georgetown founded its groundbreaking Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
Melissa Wells 1956
Carol Lancaster 1964
and Sixties could not be fulfilled, some of those dreams came true for their daughters.
Years later, when I went to law school at another university, I realized the instructors and professors we’d had as undergrads were at the top of their game.”
Sharood, from the SFS class of ’58, has a daughter who earned a master’s degree from SFS in 1986. And her granddaughter intends to apply to SFS for early admission next year. Berky Evans’ daughter graduated from Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business in 1983. She lived at Copley Hall, which had been “a male bastion” back in the days when her mother was running across campus to pee.
“The professor... said, ‘I want you both to sit in the last row and I do not want you to ask questions or make comments, because the boys are here to learn.’”
Sue Palmieri Keevers (SFS ’59), attended her 50th class reunion the same weekend that her daughter attended her 25th reunion at Georgetown. “Our experiences were entirely different,” says Keevers, age 79, a retired medical malpractice defense attorney. “The infrastructure just wasn’t there yet for women when I was at Georgetown. Ultimately, it was worth it because we were admitted to an academic program that was like nothing else.
—BARBARA HAMMES SHAROOD
“She works for the government, as I wanted to do,” says Berky Evans who stayed home with the kids for 16 years until her husband died at age 49. “That’s when my degree from Georgetown came in handy. I was hired by a West Coast real estate broker, who had taken some classes at Georgetown and knew its reputation. I worked in that business for 22 years. It had nothing to do with international affairs, but…”
At the 50th class reunion in 2008, Berky Evans attended with her daughter, the Georgetown grad. “We went back to look for the tree where I had been unwelcome to stand. The tree was gone, but the bench was still there. I had my daughter take a picture of me sitting on it—and I was smiling.”
Kelly Coffey
1989
After a bachelor’s at Lafayette College and a Master of Science in Foreign Service at SFS, Kelly Coffey took a job at J.P. Morgan’s Investment Bank. She has spent the last 28 years at J.P. Morgan, which has provided a varied career, including a six-year stint in Argentina where she worked in Merger’s and Acquisitions and learned Spanish on the job. After that, she returned to the U.S. and held many leadership positions. She also led the bank’s women’s network. Today, she is CEO of J.P. Morgan U.S. Private Bank, overseeing more than $650 billion in client assets. In 2017, American Banker magazine named her the 14th most powerful woman in finance.
Carmen Twillie Ambar 1990
In March of 2017, Ambar became Oberlin College’s 15th president, and the first African-American leader in the institution’s 184-year history. Ambar came from Cedar Crest College, where she’d been president, and, before that, Douglass College at Rutgers University, where she’d been president and dean. Earlier in
her career, Ambar served as an assistant dean at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. In addition to her bachelor’s from SFS, she also earned a master’s of public affairs at Princeton and attended Columbia Law School. She is married to another SFS graduate, political science professor Saladin Ambar, and they are the parents of 10-year-old triplets.
Stephanie Murphy 2004
Born in Ho Chi Minh City, Stephanie Murphy and her parents fled Vietnam by boat, lived in refugee camps and eventually settled in Virginia, where Murphy’s parents worked multiple jobs to support the family. After a bachelor’s degree in economics from the College of William
and Mary, Murphy attended SFS where she earned a Master of Science in Foreign Service. She worked as a national security specialist for the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and later for the private sector. In 2016, Murphy made history when she was elected to the House of Representatives, representing Florida’s 7th district. She is the first Vietnamese-American woman to ever serve in the U.S. Congress.
The First Class of Global Business Majors Graduate and Move Into the World by JUDI
HASSON
WHERE BUSINESS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS COME TOGETHER
John Ruxton (SFS ’17) had a job offer in his pocket from Facebook by the time he graduated last May. In fact, every one of his 13 classmates who were part of the inaugural graduating class of Global Business majors at the School of Foreign Service had job offers, too.
At Facebook, Ruxton is now part of the company’s Global Marketing Solutions team in Austin, Texas where he helps government agencies and political campaigns leverage Facebook to reach their constituents and audiences.
“I attribute a significant portion of my complex problem-solving skills and business frameworks to my Global Business coursework,” says Ruxton.
The new Global Business degree at SFS—launched in 2015 with a cohort of sophomores—is designed to do precisely this: equip undergraduates to understand business entities in the context of today’s changing global social and cultural forces. In addition to the political, economic, research and cross-cultural skills that have always been central to an SFS degree, students in the Global Business major take five courses from the McDonough Business School (MSB). As part of the core SFS curriculum, proficiency in a foreign language is required.
As a result, SFS undergraduates can focus on such topics as multinational corporations and their behavior; international investments and corporate finance; the interactions of businesses and governments in public sector policymaking, and other issues such as corporate ethics and environmental impacts.
Global Business students develop communication skills through discussion and debate, oral presentations and advanced level writing. They must grasp the complexities of critical international business issues, providing written reviews of the literature, analyzing data and ultimately acquiring the ability to define central questions.
“Trade has always been a major destination for SFS students. But the private sector now plays a more critical role than ever before in nearly every aspect of international affairs, including economic development, global poverty reduction, immigration, cross border flows and even in war,” says SFS Dean Joel Hellman. “We need to be training business leaders with a global perspective and we also need to be thinking about how the private sector can be used in international affairs.”
Theodore Moran, director of the Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy and the field chair for the SFS undergraduate Global Business major, says the students in the inaugural class were “eager to learn about international trade and investment within the context of real multinational corporations.”
Moran says the focus has been on finance, logistics, business-investment negotiations and multinational corporate strategy, with some classes built around the use of case studies on the winners and losers from global trade, investment and technology.
“The students have to be prepared to discuss the cases verbally and to express themselves succinctly on the exams,” Moran says. “I hope to prepare students for careers in the public or private sectors.”
The program certainly worked for Michael Li, born in China and raised in Nashville. Last summer, Li was selected for a 10-week summer internship at PJT Partners, an investment bank in New York. When the internship ended, the firm of -
Developing Strong Interdisciplinary Tools
The same driving factors that led to the development of the Global Business major also led the School of Foreign Service and McDonough School of Business to come together and create the Global Business Fellows program. This joint initiative is a highly selective program available to both SFS and MSB students, who must apply through their respective schools.
“Many of the big issues of our time such as globalization, trade and cyber security are solved at the intersection of business, policy and inter -
national relations,” says Paul Almeida, dean of MSB. “Joint programs like our Global Business Fellows provide our students interdisciplinary tools with which to make a difference in the world.”
In addition to the rigorous coursework, fellows access unique on-the-ground experience evaluating companies.
During their junior or senior year, the fellows participate in a semester-long Global Business Experience course in which they conduct a substantive consulting project under faculty super -
vision for senior members of an international business or organization. The project includes travel to the client country for one week, where the fellows present their findings to senior management.
Fellows in the 2017 inaugural class went to Barcelona, where they were placed in teams and assigned different companies to study.
“It is important to have firsthand exposure to international business, including traveling to meet with executives abroad to present recommendations,” notes Dean Almeida.
fered Li a job as a financial analyst. He started work in July 2017 advising clients on mergers and acquisitions.
Li recently reflected that many of his professors in the Global Business major had worked in the real world, and this added “a depth of nuance and insight that students cannot get from academic textbooks.”
He believes the courses in the major also taught him the business theory that he needed. “I got enough of the technical language of business and developed the necessary tools that help convert that thinking into action.”
Many of the courses provided a much more tangible experience than what one typically expects in college.
Business Strategy and Policy, WTO Dispute Settlements, Business Strategy and Operations, and Philosophical Foundations of a Market Society were the courses that had the most impact on Li. “It was a really good interdisciplinary experience, more about figuring out the role of business in international affairs,” says Li. “The core curriculum really helped me develop reasoning and critical thinking.”
INNOVATING MINDS
In a Global Innovation Strategy course, Emily Ma (SFS’19), evaluated a unique partnership between PepsiCo, Uber and the nonprofit organization Mother’s Against Drunk Driving.
He says the program exposed students to many opportunities, with companies coming on campus to actively recruit.
The mix of business and international relations classes has turned out to be a perfect complement for Emily Ma, 20, a junior who will graduate from SFS in 2019. “What I appreciate about the major is getting education from both worlds, theoretical and practical,” says Ma who is from Bridgewater, N.J.
The major offered me the chance to continue taking the economics and international affairs classes I was interested in while also taking advantage of the business school’s more practical classes.”
-CARSON YATES
Global Business student Carson Yates took six courses at MSB, including accounting and finance. He says, “The major offered me the chance to continue taking the economics and international affairs classes I was interested in while also taking advantage of the business school’s more practical classes.”
Yates describes his classmates as some of the most interesting and most driven people he’s ever met. His professors were excellent as well, he says, “offering extremely challenging classes paired with close attention to each student.”
He singles out SFS Assistant Dean Samuel Aronson, who “built close relationships with each one of the students and went well beyond his basic duties to make sure we received the advice and support we needed.”
One great experience for Ma involved a Global Innovation Strategy course where she picked PepsiCo as her case study. Each week, Ma wrote a one-page analysis of a different element for the company. This included PepsiCo’s organizational and technical resources and its competition in the food and beverage industry. She also studied and evaluated PepsiCo’s partnership with Uber and the nonprofit organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The three organizations teamed up to create a unique campaign built around a highly innovative packaging concept, intended to discourage drinking and driving. PepsiCo, which owns the Frito Lay Company, created a promotional bag of chips that had a special detector sprayed on it. When someone who has ingested alcohol breathes on it, a red light flashes with the message “Don’t drink and drive.” The bag gave users $10 off an Uber ride. Distributed only at a recent Super Bowl, the bags “demonstrated a unique technological innovation of PepsiCo,” she says.
Ma isn’t certain what she wants to do after graduation, but she has plenty of options. “At the end of the day it’s ideal to be able to draw from both a business and humanities education and to find employment in international business consulting, marketing or human resources,” says Ma.
Whatever direction SFS’s Global Business majors decide to take, they will be prepared with the tools and technology they need to tackle the new world of 21st century international business.
Meet Our Faculty
PRINCIPLED CONVICTION
Nancy McEldowney brings new leadership to the Master of Science in Foreign Service program.
by SARI HARRAR
Ambassador Nancy McEldowney’s three-decade career in Foreign Service has had its share of dramatic moments. “I’ve been in embassies during bomb threats and in countries during coup d’états. As Acting Ambassador in Turkey, I was targeted by Al-Qaeda,” she notes. “When you deal with issues like that, you think less about your own safety and more about keeping others safe while accomplishing the mission. As a senior leader in these kinds of circumstances, you must build a high level of trust throughout your team.”
Her leadership roles extend beyond diplomatic postings in Turkey, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan. As the senior vice president of the National Defense University and then as the director of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), McEldowney educated and mentored many thousands of military and civilian officials—which explains why The New York Times recently referred to her as “the dean” of the Foreign Service.
At the White House, she served as former President Clinton’s director of European Affairs on the National Security Council. “Walking into the Oval Office to brief the president and attending NSC meetings where senior cabinet members are making agonizing choices gives you an invaluable perspective,” McEldowney notes. “I came away with critical insights about the importance of having a global mindset—recognizing that what you do in one part of the world has a cascading effect in many other places. I also saw the nexus between foreign and domestic policy. No democratically-elected leader can sustain a foreign policy that is contrary to the norms or priorities of their citizens.”
Now, McEldowney brings her expertise and principled conviction to the
that our graduates can use to address complex problems, craft creative solutions and forge cohesive teams with people completely different than themselves.”
McEldowney entered the Foreign Service in the late 1980s, inspired by the commitment of people she met during a summer internship in the State Department Office of Soviet Affairs. “It was at the end of Cold War, when we thought we’d have a new world order of stability,” she says. “Of course, that did not happen, and now the only thing that’s certain is constant change. In the U.S. and around the world, many people are questioning the fundamentals of how nations and governments work—they’re challenging basic norms and institutions. There’s a compelling need for ethical leaders committed to international cooperation, for people who will dedicate their lives to searching for solutions that are inclusive and sustainable.”
“There’s a compelling need for ethical leaders committed to international cooperation . . . “
Hilltop as director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program. Her goal? “The MSFS program is ranked one of the best in the world. I want it to also be the best for the world. I want our graduates to be ready to grapple with all the dramatic changes coming at them— whether they’re considering a future in diplomacy; international development; science and technology; or business and finance. A master’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown should offer an indispensable set of knowledge and skills
To prepare those leaders, McEldowney says students need a broad perspective and skills in networking with a wide variety of groups beyond government officials and other traditional partners. “We’re looking to revamp the curriculum to include science and technology, such as climate change and global health issues, while also featuring emerging global trends such as artificial intelligence,” she says. “And we want our pedagogy to be as innovative as we expect our students to be in the world.”
Since taking the position in July 2017, McEldowney has experienced how highly graduates value the program. While hosting an alumni reception on campus in September, she notes that, “More than 200 people came—including some who graduated 30 or more years ago. I saw how greatly they cherish the values that underpin this program—ethical service, inclusion, serving the collective good. It was truly inspirational.”
FOREIGN POLICY EXPERT RETURNS
in President Clinton’s first administration—informs his academic approach at SFS whether he’s outlining the historical roots of big-picture foreign policy in his Foundations of Grand Strategy class or encouraging lively discussion in the Debates in International Security seminar. “Spending time in government is a leavening experience,” he says. “The core of the courses I teach remains the same. But I am able to offer a perspective on policymaking and strategy that comes only with time in the public sector.”
After years in the Obama Administration, Charles Kupchan brings a vision of “grand strategy” back to Georgetown. by SARI
Brexit. Ebola. Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. And the war in Syria and the accompanying refugee crisis. As a National Security Council (NSC) advisor to former President Obama from 2014 to 2017, Charles Kupchan had the rare chance to “help bend the arc of history at times, if only in very small steps”—amid an avalanche of headline-grabbing foreign policy challenges.
“The average day involved thinking in 10-second increments because you’re jumping from one urgent task to the next,” he says. Kupchan served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs on the NSC before returning to his post as professor of international relations at the Walsh School of Foreign Service in early 2017.
His government job took him beyond the White House Situation Room to meetings in the Oval Office and briefings in the president’s limousine on issues including the separatist conflict in Ukraine, the rise of populism in Europe and the count -
HARRAR
er-ISIL campaign. Yet Kupchan found opportunities to advocate for the long view—in line with his longstanding interest in grand strategy. “Even when the conversation was very fine-grained, grand strategy was hovering in the background,” he says. “You have to intentionally carve out time and space to think about strategy from a more holistic perspective.”
Kupchan’s first-hand experience— which also includes a previous NSC stint
Now, Kupchan is also overseeing SFS’s upcoming Lloyd George Lecture and Study Series in collaboration with the descendants of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1843–1945). The series honors Lloyd George’s pivotal role in bringing about the Treaty of Versailles (1919) that ended World War I and led to the establishment of the League of Nations—the first forum of its kind for resolving international disputes and a forerunner to the United Nations. “Today is a moment of import similar to 1919 due to changes in international order and in the global distribution of power,” he says. “We can go back and learn lessons from how this ‘Big Think’ was done in 1919 and at other key points in history. We want to create at Georgetown the premiere platform for a searching debate about where the world is headed and how it can best be led and ordered going forward.” The series’ inaugural activities will take place during the 2017–18 academic year, with events continuing through the school’s centennial in 2019–2020.
“We want to create at Georgetown the premiere platform for a searching debate about where the world is headed and how it can best be led and ordered going forward.”
Kupchan has not left the foreign policy arena; he’s a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes op-eds for publications including Foreign Policy magazine and The New York Times. Academia allows him to “make a difference in another way—by educating the people who will go out in the public and private sectors and change the world.” It has also given him more time to enjoy his family— he and his wife have a newborn son and two daughters, ages two and five. “There’s time to change diapers or walk around the block,” he says. Meanwhile, his children are enjoying one perk from his White House days. “I have some M&Ms and Hershey’s Kisses with the president’s name on them in my home office, but my kids are making their way through them.”
Faculty Updates
01 Rochelle Davis began serving as director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) in July 2017. Davis, a 12-year veteran of CCAS and associate professor of anthropology, looks forward to challenges ahead. “Ultimately, our priorities are to continue to graduate excellent students, to provide faculty with the support they need to be top-notch scholars and teachers, to serve our non-GU communities with programming that helps them do their work, and for all of these things to be interconnected and to build on one another,” she says.
02
Daniel Neep was awarded a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) for his book "The Nation Belongs to All: The Making of Modern Syria." Neep, assistant professor of Arab politics in CCAS, challenges traditional and popular narratives of Syria, offering a more nuanced, dynamic look at the forces and people that have shaped the country. This highly competitive NEH program is designed to help well-researched humanities projects to reach broader audiences.
03 Keir Lieber will succeed Bruce Hoffman as director of the Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies Program on January 1, 2018. Lieber's research focus e s on the causes of war, nuclear weapons, deterrence and strategy. He has been a mainstay of the Security Studies Program since arriving in 2009 and has received much recognition for his scholarship. In 2015, he was named to the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program.
04
Dr. Emily Mendenhall, assistant professor of global health in the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) Program, published a series of papers in The Lancet on syndemics. “The concept of syndemics stresses the importance of looking beyond medical factors to see how diseases come together through macro-social forces,” Mendenhall says, “offering a different framework for thinking about—and reacting to—health and healthcare inequities.”
05
John McNeill was elected president of the American Historical Association, the largest professional organi -
Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault authored “How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture,” which explores the decisions and actions that came to threaten U.S. norms on torture policy, and the potential implications this can have for future decision makers of US policy.
David M. Edelstein published “Over the Horizon: Time, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Great Powers,” as an analysis of how rising powers have cooperated with declining powers throughout history, and the impact this can have as current powers try to maintain control.
zation serving historians in all fields and professions. McNeill’s term will run from 2019 to 2020, with significant responsibilities as president-elect in the leadup. “I am pleased by the trust AHA voters placed in me and look forward to doing my best for historians across the country,” he says.
06
Sarah Johnson traveled to Antarctica to conduct research on the possibility of life having existed on Mars. The expedition, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, sequenced DNA from intact cells in ancient Antarctic biofilms to answer questions about the nature of life in extreme adverse conditions. The trip included Georgetown Provost Robert Groves as well as undergraduate and graduate researchers.
07 Michael David-Fox, professor of history at Georgetown, won a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship. His project, “Smolensk under Nazi and Soviet Rule,” studies the exercise of power in the Russian region under German occupation during WWII, seeking to join regional history with a grand narrative. Past fellows have included Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, poets laureates and winners of other internationally recognized honors.
08 Katharine Donato published research on Mexican children crossing the U.S. border in the July 2017 RSF Journal of the Social Sciences. Titled “Crossing the Mexico-U.S. Border: Illegality and Children’s Migration to the United States,” the work examines the conditions that drive child migration. Vanderbilt University graduate student Samantha Perez co-authored the research.
09 Steven Radelet was invested as Knight Officer of the Most Venerable Order of the Pioneers by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in recognition of his work as an economic advisor to the president and the government since 2005. The president noted Radelet's support and advice on a successful four-year effort in which creditors wrote off more than 97 percent of Liberia’s external debt.
Ori Soltes published “God and the Goalposts: A Brief History of Sports, Religion, Politics, War, and Art,” analyzing how these elements have interwoven throughout history, and demonstrating that the strong link between sports and religion has been in existence since the origin of both.
Michael Green authored “By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783,” looking at the concerns, decisions and rationale that drove U.S. foreign policy in East Asia from the eighteenth century to today.
Anna von der Goltz wrote "Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States: Conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s," an examination of the unprecedented mobilization and transformation of conservative movements on both sides of the Atlantic during a pivotal period in postwar history.
Jacques Berlinerblau's "Campus Confidential" was published in June 2017. It is an explanation and expose of the inner workings of college campuses and how they work (and don't work) for students, parents, and professors, calling for a return to engaged teaching.
Events
An impressive array of political and thought leaders visited SFS in 2017.
Clinton 25 Symposium Looks Back on an Administration NOVEMBER 6, 2017
Former President William J. Clinton (SFS’68) spoke as part of a three-day university symposium, examining the vision that drove his campaign and presidency 25 years after he was elected.
“There’s nothing like coming back to Georgetown,” Clinton said before the symposium began. “I’ve often said that I don’t think I could have become President if I hadn’t studied there. I’m grateful for the opportunity to return and continue our discussion on what it means to live a life of public service – I believe it’s more important than ever.”
SFS Professor Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, President Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico, and Strobe Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State, reflected on the administration’s foreign policy at the “Vision for the World” panel. “What he did, that I think was kind of brilliant, was to link domestic and foreign policy. He was the first one to use the term ‘indispensable nation.’ He said it in order for the American people to understand that we had to be engaged abroad; that if we weren’t, nothing would happen. It was a message that our leadership was needed to
protect the American interest and way of life, but he understood that that took place in an international setting. One needed to engage,” said Albright.
The symposium was hosted by the Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) with SFS among other University partners.
Secretary Of Defense James Mattis Visits Proseminar NOVEMBER 2, 2017
SFS students in Professor Mark Jacobson’s proseminar “American Experience of Modern War Through Literature” had a special visit from Secretary of Defense James Mattis
The proseminar examines the human dimensions of modern combat through nonfiction and fiction written by American authors. A key component of the course involves analyzing war’s impact on both individuals and generations of Americans.
Jeff Cirillo (SFS’20) described the conversation: “I am in awe of Secretary Mattis’s wisdom and insight. It was a privilege to share such an intimate space with one of the most important figures of our current era of international affairs, and one of the most thoughtful and distinguished public servants in the United States today.”
GE Chairman Jeff Immelt Shares Experience, Perspective on Global Economic Competition
MAY 4, 2017
General Electric (GE) Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt spoke on globalization and the role of private and public leaders in ensuring the ability of the United States to compete in global markets. His talk was part of a lecture hosted by SFS, the McDonough School of Business Stanton Distinguished Leaders Series, and the Landegger International Business Diplomacy Program. Immelt commented on the economic positioning of the United States with respect to the world, emphasizing the importance of export-led growth and cautioning against the problems of protectionism.
“We believe that the will to compete is the purest American value,” Immelt said. “Instead of moving backward, let’s compete for the world. Let’s try harder. This is true for both the private and public sectors.”
Immelt highlighted GE’s own practices as a way forward, arguing that companies will increasingly need to recognize the value of local capabilities. He noted the role of the government in providing a suitable environment for those capabilities, through appropriate tax laws and trade deals and urged students to get to know the world and develop their own, independent opinions on global competition.
CJC Hosts NAACP President for Discussion on Social Justice
MAY 1, 2017
NAACP President Cornell William Brooks spoke on equality, social justice and the relationship between Jewish-Americans and African-Americans at an event hosted
by the Center for Jewish Civilization. Titled “Blacks and Jews in The Age of Trump,” the evening included a performance from jazz band MBowie and the Blast, a group that examines social issues through music, and evoked the connections between the historic fights for justice of the Jewish-American and African-American communities.
“The NAACP has doubled down on building, deepening, expanding the relationships between African-Americans and Jews. Why? Because we understand that that relationship is not predicated on a transitory sharing of interests in any way that is transactional. It is based upon a canon of social justice, on a shared experience of suffering and exclusion,” Brooks said.
“We understand that the relationship between AfricanAmericans and Jews must be deep, must be profound, must be historically informed, must be theologically inspired, and must be maintained and held as sacred and valuable. The relationship between blacks and Jews cannot be a matter of nostalgia—it must be a matter of a priority.”
MSFS CyberProject
Hosts Conference on Cyber Engagement
APRIL 24, 2017
The Seventh Annual International Conference on Cyber Engagement, titled “Global Issues that Demand Global Solutions,” brought together the perspectives of a globally diverse group of public and private sector experts to consider the critical issues and potential solutions facing the increasingly important world of cybersecurity.
Government leaders from the United States, the European Parliament and the United Kingdom provided insight on
the abilities and gaps of current government cybersecurity efforts, emphasizing growing requirements for cooperation across governments and sectors.
“A zero-sum articulation of narrow self interest needs to be replaced with a new appreciation for an articulation of the interdependence of our globally connected world,” European MP Marietje Schaake said. “Change will require an injection of values and stronger governance in the public interest. It will also involve a much more active engagement of the general public in this discussion.”
The conference also included a variety of panels discussing national cybersecurity strategies, the roles of the military and business in cybersecurity, and the use of cyber in war and peace.
Hillary Rodham Clinton Presents Awards to Colombian Peace Agreement Leaders MARCH 31, 2017
Hillary Rodham Clinton presented awards to leaders of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement at the annual Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards for Advancing Women in Peace and Security ceremony, hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS). Clinton extolled the importance of women’s participation for stable peace and security in Colombia and around the world. Awards were presented to three negotiators and a journalist who played key roles in the peace process. Clinton also delivered remarks reflecting on
previous work at Georgetown, including the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, and looked to the future.
“In Colombia…we’ve seen women organize, agitate and negotiate to help bring to a close more than 50 years of bloodshed,” Clinton said. “While conflict raged and efforts to stop the violence failed, women not only took their places at the table, they opened up the peace process to women across Colombia and urged over and over again that all parties not walk away until they reached an agreement.”
CERES Conference Brings
Together Madeleine Albright and Former Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov
MARCH 24, 2017
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke with her Russian counterpart, former Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov, at the conference “25 Years of US-Russia Relations: From Cold War to New Cold War?” hosted by the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. The keynote panel between the two foreign policy leaders touched on the diplomatic relationship they formed and the power of that relationship, which included addressing the Balkan Crisis— particularly the Kosovo War—and a famous trip to the opera.
Albright and Ivanov also spoke on contemporary issues facing Russia and the United States. Albright called NATO “the most important alliance in the history
of the world,” as it survived the Cold War and became the organizing principle for a new world order. Ivanov extended the themes of trust and respect to the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, calling for consciously and carefully built dialogues.
ISD Honors United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein FEBRUARY 16, 2017
The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) honored United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein as the 2017 recipient of the Raymond ‘Jit’ Trainor Award for Excellence in the Conduct of Diplomacy. Zeid, a career Jordanian diplomat who has held his current position since 2014, gave a lecture on “The Impossible Diplomacy of Human Rights,” detailing the challenges and opportunities facing progress and prosperity in a human rights-respecting, stable international system.
“A new era is unfolding before us,” Zeid said. “We find ourselves in a political earthquake zone. To many of us it appears the international system could become dangerously unstable. Fresh shocks are opening up unsuspected fault-lines; weight-bearing pillars are in danger of collapse.”
In the face of these pressures, Zeid reaffirmed the power of the international system.
“We need—all of us—to defend international law: international refugee law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law,” he said. “For they—and the institutions that uphold them—are the very distillation and sum of human experience.”
Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau Discusses U.S.-Canada Trade Alliance FEBRUARY 9, 2017
Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau visited SFS to speak about the economic partnership between Canada and the United States as part of his trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with economic advisers from the White House and Congress. In his remarks,
Minister Morneau discussed the enduring political, economic and social relationship between the United States and Canada.
“We’ve always had, in Canada, the privilege of watching up close what happens in the United States, and, as you know, we’ve built what is probably the most productive and enduring relationship that the world has ever seen. From our perspective, it’s really because we share much more than a border,” Morneau said.
SFS Alumnus Presents Screening of Documentary on Mental Health in the U.S. Military JANUARY 26, 2017
SFS hosted a screening of “Thank You For Your Service,” a documentary produced by Ilan Arboleda (SFS ’97) and directed by Tom Donahue, that calls attention to the failed mental health policies in the U.S. military and the consequences of those failures. The event included a panel discussion following the film featuring General George W. Casey, Jr. (SFS ’70), chief of staff of the U.S. Army from April 2007 to 2011, Dr. Megan McCarthy, deputy director of the National Office of Suicide Prevention at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Dr. Elizabeth Stanley, associate professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Joel Kupersmith, director of Georgetown University Veterans Initiatives and professor of medicine.
“We have to institutionalize what we have learned in the past fifteen years—and we’ve been off to a very slow start,” Casey said. “But we’ve learned so much that if we do what we’ve done after every war and forget, then we’ve really lost.”
THE FOREIGN MINISTER OF JAPAN
shocked (and disappointed) to notice that Japan was seldom mentioned in the American news, despite the importance of the American-Japanese relationship. He was also not used to being among such serious students. When he asked his classmates for advice about which were the easy classes, he was met with disapproval.
In August 2017, SFS Alumnus Taro Kono was appointed to lead Japan’s foreign policy and foreign affairs. by
WCINDY C.A.PEREIRA
hen Taro Kono (SFS’85) was a young man in Japan, he told his father he wanted to be educated in the United States. When his father asked why, Kono replied that he needed to learn English so that when he became Prime Minister of Japan he would be able to speak to the U.S. President—who most likely wouldn’t speak Japanese.
Kono arrived in the States at age 19. His first stop was a Connecticut boarding school so he could build his English language skills, after which he began as an undergraduate at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
He recalls some surprises. For example, he was
He fondly remembers Dr. Madeleine Albright. After his first day in her American Foreign Policy Process seminar, she confronted him about not contributing to the class discussion. She said that if he was not up to participating, he need not return. When Kono explained that he’d held back because his English wasn’t very good, Dr. Albright replied, “Well that’s your problem.”
After that he spoke during each class and credits Albright with helping him learn a life skill: to be prepared for every meeting and speech. For the last class she invited the students to her home and cooked for them.
After graduating from SFS in 1985, Kono returned to Japan where he worked in international business, first for Fuji Xerox, and later, Nippon Tanshi, which supplied electric components to carmakers. At age 33, he entered politics when he was elected to the Japanese House of Representatives. Over the next 18 years, he was re-elected six more times.
In August of 2017, Kono was appointed Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs.
“We are in the middle of the North Korean crisis...I really need to work hard to protect our country and to protect our international society.”
When asked about the most challenging part of his new job, Kono didn’t hesitate. “We are in the middle of the North Korean crisis,” he says. “I really need to work hard to protect our country and to protect our international society because North Korean missiles can reach not only Japan, but Washington as well.”
Kono says his current focus is working with the U.S., Russia and China to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear free. “We cannot have dialogue for the sake of dialogue,” he says, alluding to prior policies he believes allowed North Korea to attain nuclear capacity. Kono believes that all nations should enforce the U.N. Security Council Resolutions on North Korea, which include severe sanctions for nuclear missile tests.
Kono says, “If North Korea did something to South Korea or to Japan, the United States would retaliate with all the power they have and they never changed that position. So we are very thankful…” He adds, “I think the U.S. administration is doing a great job.”
And his future aspirations? Taro Kono remains as ambitious as ever, noting that one day he hopes to come back to Georgetown for a visit—when he is prime minister.
Scholarship & Fellowship Awardees of 2016-17
Winners of postgraduate funding for a job or graduate school
01 James Pavur (SFS’17) Rhodes Scholarship
02 Devika Ranjan (SFS’17) Marshall Scholarship
03 Cristine Pedersen (SFS’18) Truman Scholarship
04 Daniel Wassim (SFS’18) Truman Scholarship
05 Neil Noronha (SFS’14, SSP’16) Luce Scholars Program
06 Joseph Goodman (SFS’15) Yenching Scholarship
07 Jacob Gladysz (SFS’17) Yenching Scholarship
08 Lynn Lee (SFS’17) Yenching Scholarship
09 Patrick Drown (SFS’17) Princeton in Asia, Nepal
10 Hiromi Oka (SFS’15) Princeton in Asia, Philippines
11 Ibilola Owoyele (SFS’17) Princeton in Africa, Benin
12 Isabella Todaro (SFS’17) Princeton in Africa, Rwanda
13 Annie Austin (SFS’15) Princeton in Latin America Senior Fellow, Mexico
14 Michel Djandji (SFS’12, L’17) Fulbright Academic Fellow, South Africa
15 Yasmin Faruki (SFS’16, SSP’17) Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Jordan; Boren Fellowship
16 Amy Guillotte (SFS’12) Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Jordan
17 Eamon Johnston (SFS’17) Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Colombia
18 Nicolette Moore (SFS’17) Fulbright Academic Fellow, Mexico
19 Crystal Walker (SFS’16) Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Russia
20 Andrea Welsh (GHD’17) Fulbright Public Policy Fellow, Burma
21 Jason Cardinali (SFS’17) Fulbright Academic Fellow, Oman
Winners of funding for study abroad, summer internships or summer research projects
Luke Snyder (SFS’18) Boren Fellowship
Jonah Langan-Marmur (SFS’19) Boren Fellowship
Peter Johnston (SFS’19) Boren Fellowship; Critical Language Scholarship
Aaron Silberman (SFS’18) Udall Scholarship
Mary Breen (SFS’19) Boren Fellowship
Joy Farrington (SFS’18) Gilman International Scholarship
Katherine De Araujo (SFS’18) Gilman International Scholarship
Nena Beecham (SFS’18) Gilman International Scholarship
Carmen Mata (SFS’20) Gilman International Scholarship
Vincent DeLaurentis (SFS’17) Critical Language Scholarship
Jessica Schieder (SFS’12, MSFS’18) Critical Language Scholarship
Jordan Cohen (SFS’17, SSP’19) Critical Language Scholarship
Zoya Waliany (MAAS’17) Critical Language Scholarship
Afras Sial (SFS’19) Critical Language Scholarship
Piyusha Mittal (SFS’18) Critical Language Scholarship
Yasmeen El-Hasan (SFS’20) Critical Language Scholarship
David Lysenko (SFS’20) Critical Language Scholarship
