SFS is published regularly by Georgetown University's WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE , in conjunction with Washingtonian Media (washingtoniancustommedia.com). We welcome feedback and suggestions for future issues. Please contact Ara Friedman, Director of Communications, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Intercultural Center 301, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. 20057; by phone at 202-687-7949; or by email at ara.friedman@georgetown.edu. Website: sfs.georgetown.edu
Dean Hellman reflects on the SFS community and a year of crisis
04 Fast Facts
06 SFS Responds to the Pandemic
Making virtual education work and finding digital connection.
Addressing jobs, trade and climate change in a postpandemic world order.
21 Rethinking the Status Quo
Adopting anti-racism as a core value, and redefining what it means to lead.
Faculty, Staff, Students and Alumni Meet the Moment
A“I have seen a renewed commitment of our students, our faculty, our staff and our alumni to the core value of service.”
t SFS, we know a thing or two about global crises. We were founded a century ago in the aftermath of a world war and a global pandemic. One hundred years later, we have again been put to the test of a truly global crisis. Through it all, I am proud to report that SFS has grown even stronger. The relevance of our mission has never been greater. The commitment of our community to service has never been more evident. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to close campus abruptly in mid-March 2020. In the space of two weeks, we transitioned all of our classes to online learning. Students suddenly packed up and returned home. We arranged to bring hundreds of students back safely from study abroad programs around the world. The public events that keep our community buzzing — including many of our centennial celebrations in different parts of the world — were canceled or shifted to Zoom. As the public health situation continued to deteriorate, Georgetown made the difficult decision to remain largely virtual for spring 2020 and then much of the subsequent academic year, with limited hybrid offerings to graduate students and seniors.
It hasn’t been easy, but this is what the School of Foreign Service was created for. Inside these pages, you’ll learn how our students, faculty and staff have responded to a global crisis by putting the SFS spirit to the test, adapting the ways they engage, teach, study and work and, in the process, reimagining how an SFS education can be accomplished.
I know how our students, faculty and staff struggled to adjust. And I know that the impact of this lost year will linger for some time to come. But I am tremendously proud of how our community has responded.
Our students remained fully immersed in their studies, despite the pressures of Zoom fatigue, the
isolation of missed social interactions and the challenges of connecting across time zones and spotty internet connections. They even worked to reinvent the connections of our community by instituting Zoom dinners, trivia contests and conversations on politics and social justice. During the events of a landmark year in this country — with the summer’s call to action for racial justice, November’s pandemic-marked U.S. election and the assault on the U.S. Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021 — SFS students were engaged and conscientious.
Our faculty and staff also rallied, presenting new classes and experiences at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to work around the compromises of distance learning. We increased the power and frequency of small gatherings such as the Dean’s Coffee Chats, and we hosted large events highlighting the expertise of luminaries, including our own Madeleine Albright in conversation with former CIA Director George Tenet (SFS’76, H’03, P’10) and 36th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army General George Casey (SFS’70). Under the guidance of Dr. Scott Taylor, our newly appointed vice dean of diversity, equity and inclusion, we looked anew at issues including race, gender and identity. Though I don’t believe in “silver linings,” there is one aspect of this crisis that gives me great hope: I have seen a renewed commitment of our students, our faculty, our staff and our alumni to the core value of service. Applications to the school have risen by record numbers. The number of students applying to our prestigious Pelosi Public Service Scholars program — supporting internships in the public sector — more than
doubled. For the second year in a row, Georgetown led the United States in producing Fulbright Student Scholars, with the largest group of awardees coming from SFS. Georgetown also led the nation in finalists for the prestigious Presidential Management Fellows, whose ranks fill jobs across the U.S. government.
Like so many presidents before him, President Biden has recognized the expertise of SFS alumni and faculty in staffing essential positions in his new administration, from Denis McDonough (MSFS’96), the secretary of veterans affairs, to ISD Non-resident Fellow Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. SFS graduates added to the 28-strong contingent of congressional Georgetown alumni: Jon Ossoff (SFS’09) tipped the balance of power in the Senate with his closely watched race for one of Georgia’s Senate seats, and Colonel August Pfluger (IBP’19) was elected to repre-
sent the 11th district in Texas. SFS voices, like that of Representative Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands (SFS’88), have taken center stage in the national conversation. And numerous SFS alumni and faculty have been tapped for senior-level posts across government agencies. Once again, SFS has been called to lead, in keeping with our hundred-year commitment to be in service to the world.
In this issue of SFS Magazine, you can read the story of this tumultuous year, with its achievements and challenges. I trust you will feel, as I do, that brighter days are ahead.
I hope you and your families are staying healthy. I look forward to the day when we can again gather on Georgetown’s campus and around the world.
Joel Hellman Dean, Walsh School of Foreign Service
SFS LEADS THE WAY on SCHOLARSHIPS and FELLOWSHIPS in 2020-2021 PRODUCER
SFS FULBRIGHT AWARDEES DIFFERENT COUNTRIES FROM GEORGETOWN
Henry Luce Scholar
MARSHALL SCHOLARSHIPS
Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship
PRESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT FELLOWS
RHODES SCHOLARSHIP
Charles B. Rangel Foreign Affairs Graduate Fellowship
SCHWARZMAN SCHOLAR
SFS Scholarship and Fellowship Recipients: 1. Alejandro Garcia Escobar Plascencia (SFS’21), Rangel Fellow 2. Anna Landre (SFS’21), Marshall Scholar 3. Harrison Nugent (SFS’20), Henry Luce Scholar 4. Isaac Kim (SFS’20), Rangel Fellow 5. Isiah Fleming-Klink (SFS’19), Marshall Scholar 6. Khansa Maria (SFS’21), Rhodes Scholar 7. Lucia Wei He (SFS’15), Schwarzman Scholar 8. Piyusha Mittal (SFS’18), Pickering Fellow
SFS RESPONDS TO PANDEMIC
Teaching and Learning in Unprecedented Times
by ROBIN WARSHAW
Call it unfortunate alignment. At the beginning of the spring 2020 semester, Professor Cynthia Wei, director of science education for the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) program and associate teaching professor at SFS, began teaching a course on the scientific aspects of world crises. Her first lectures focused on viruses and outbreaks, including the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and its impact.
Outside the classroom, the COVID-19 pandemic was developing. As weeks passed, students asked more and more questions about the coronavirus outbreak. Wei decided to pause the scheduled coursework and talk about what was happening with COVID-19. “It matched up perfectly with what we were already talking about in class,” she says.
Students left for spring break, and Wei redesigned the remainder of the course with new class sessions about the pan-
PHOTO BY CYNTHIA WEI
Professor Wei’s class on the science of world crises was a powerful lesson in experiential learning when it coincided with the most devastating pandemic in one hundred years.
Pandemic
demic. When Georgetown switched to virtual learning after the break, she taught the redesigned classes online.
At the same time, Megan McGuire (SFS’22) was taking a course on emerging infectious diseases. Early in the semester, Professor Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security, told the class they’d be monitoring the coronavirus that was then limited to China. After courses went online, McGuire, a STIA major with concentrations in global health and biotechnology, was living at home in Lake Havasu, Arizona. She was eager to attend the emerging diseases course virtually, even though it started at 8 in the morning — 5 a.m. in her timezone.
“That was not fun,” says McGuire, remembering how early she had to wake up. But the subject compelled her to be on time. “Everything that’s been going on has been what I’m interested in,” she says. “This experience has made me have more of a desire to get involved in the field.”
FIRST STEPS
During the past year, SFS and Georgetown faculty, students and staff have responded with remarkable flexibility, energy and innovation in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic.
Early on, Georgetown administrators, educators and public health experts monitored the growing outbreak and considered actions. They planned how to close campus after spring break in March and bring students home from far-flung programs such as a Centennial Lab trip to the Arctic. “We went into emergency management mode,” says SFS Dean Joel Hellman. “There was a lot of logistics involved in ensuring the immediate safety of our community.”
In just days, nearly all spring classes had to switch mid-semester from in-person to online learning. Students and faculty left campus. Summer schedules changed, too, away from the usual travel and research opportunities. The SFS team developed options for students to work remotely.
Critical to planning for the fall semester: evaluating what worked in the rapid shift to online classes and what changes were needed. That effort overlapped with adjusting to new virtual teaching platforms and methods, reshaping existing courses and even creating new ones.
“We were always moving quickly to deal with the next set of issues,” Hellman says. Throughout the process, he notes, two priorities guided the SFS pandemic response: supporting academic continuity and maintaining a sense of community.
MAKING VIRTUAL EDUCATION WORK
When teaching went online, some faculty already knew how to use Zoom, a video communications platform for real-time, or synchronous, lectures and meetings. Others needed help to become comfortable teaching with the online system. Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), which assists faculty and graduate students in using new educational technology, provided training and other resources. Guidance from CNDLS helped faculty take their classes online and design high-quality courses.
“We had people Zooming in from across the U.S., Peru, South Korea, India and Saudi Arabia,” says Mark Giordano, describing a spring seminar he taught on water usage.
“We were fortunate to have CNDLS,” Hellman says. “At the university level, they designed a deep-dive program into all aspects of the virtual learning environment.” Thus equipped, faculty could decide if they needed to change course content or teaching methods. They learned how to incorporate outside speakers into remote classes, keep students engaged and manage “Zoom fatigue,” exhaustion caused by hours spent attending class on-screen.
“The whole university pulled out the stops to help academics develop the skill set to deliver online learning,” says Professor Alan Tidwell, director of the Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies and SFS professor of the practice. “If there’s any good to come out of the COVID-19 era, it’s the innovations we’ve been able to do around bringing people into the classroom and thinking outside of a very ancient construction of pedagogy.”
Of course, there were difficulties. Time zone and broadband differences posed problems for some SFS students. “We have students in almost every continent of the world and all over the U.S. To the challenges of online learning, we are adding the challenges of time zones, internet connectivity issues and, to some extent, privacy issues, because every country functions differently,” says Professor Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (MSFS’97), co-chair for the Global Politics and Security Concentration in
the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program and a professor in the practice of international affairs.
Time differences were especially problematic in spring 2020 because class times, which had been set for on-campus learning, weren’t changed when courses went virtual. Overall, students such as McGuire were resilient in adjusting, even when they were attending from a location quite distant from campus. “We had people Zooming in from across the U.S., Peru, South Korea, India and Saudi Arabia,” says Professor Mark Giordano, describing a spring seminar he taught on water usage. Giordano is the Cinco Hermanos chair in environment and international affairs, professor of geography and vice dean for undergraduate affairs.
Most of the students in his seminar were able to show up online at the set time. Giordano arranged appearances by experts on water issues who answered students’ questions from their homes in Washington, DC, Washington state and Sri Lanka. Opposite: Professors Jeremy Mathis and Mark Giordano with SFS students on a Centennial Lab field trip to the Arctic that was ended prematurely by the pandemic. Left: Jim Chalmers, shadow treasurer of Australia and a Labor Party member, invited by Professor Alan Tidwell (below) to speak to a seminar on politics in Australia.
Pandemic
Giordano recorded classes for those who couldn’t attend live. Some professors were proficient with Zoom features such as interactive discussions and polls. Others were most successful with straightforward lecture presentations. “In the beginning of fall semester, it took a couple of weeks for professors to find where their groove was,” says Alif Satria (SSP’20). “After a period of adjustment, then it was smooth sailing.”
BUILDING COMMUNITY
For students, shifting to virtual education meant losing the relationships that develop in face-to-face education. After nearly 10 months of online studies, Alana Hendy (SFS’21) says, “I miss office hours in person, getting coffee with a professor. I miss the social aspect of classes and getting a bite to eat with a classmate to catch up on assignments.”
Hendy is one of a small number of students living on campus for the 2020-2021 academic year. Students could apply for those spots if they had difficulties such as housing instability, family concerns or technology problems. Due to COVID-19 precautions, only limited space was available. “They had to decline a lot of people,” Hendy says. She lives in a campus apartment with another student, each quarantined in her own bedroom for pandemic safety.
It’s a very different environment from campus life before COVID-19. Hendy’s classes are online. There are none of the usual gatherings of students at the library, the opportunities to gripe about the academic workload. Hendy and her friends tried catching up on Zoom but soon gave up, weary of online meetings.
Satria points out that Georgetown’s graduate programs, in addition to coursework, are known for offering many chances to make personal connections with others in similar fields. Being virtual reduced that networking. “Having that interaction is crucial to the experience,” he says.
Because students weren’t together in real life, SFS looked for ways to nurture community among them virtually. This was especially important for those who would be starting their college lives in fall 2020. “We tried to replicate a cohort-building experience for first-years,” Hellman says. “SFS has a certain way that we teach and design a curriculum to get students to think about the world differently.”
SFS made one change that would have been unthinkable in previous years. Map of the Modern World, the infamous and mandatory SFS course, received a makeover fueled by the pandemic. Customarily presented in the spring to all first-years in large in-person lectures, the class was given online in fall 2020. Giordano, who usually teaches the course in two sections to about 400 students, prerecorded his lectures as short video segments for students to watch on their own schedules.
The online course offered optional discussion sessions, for credit, led by undergraduate teaching assistants. Giordano chose undergraduates as teaching assistants instead of graduate students, he explains, to connect first-years with someone
they could relate to. The groups talked about course content and helped students bond with each other. More than half of those taking the course joined the discussion sessions.
Giordano also changed the anxiety-provoking test that is the culmination of the class. Segments on identifying all countries worldwide and knowing geographic facts could be taken as many times as needed. “We changed how the final is given so it could be done more easily online, with more chances and opportunities to pass,” Giordano says. “It spread the risk and took the pressure off.”
SFS NETWORKS ENRICH PANDEMIC LEARNING
Classes, seminars and events at SFS have always drawn speakers from the wealth of experts based in Washington, DC. Moving to a virtual environment widened speaker possibilities. Faculty reached out to their contacts and networks and brought global leaders to share their insights with SFS students virtually.
For a proseminar that Alan Tidwell teaches on the people and politics of Australia and New Zealand, he often has had officials from foreign embassies in DC come to campus and speak to his classes. In the fall, when the proseminar was virtual, Tidwell invited Jim Chalmers, shadow treasurer of Australia and a Labor
Above: Cynthia Wei, SFS director of science education for the Science Technology and International Affairs (STIA) program and associate teaching professor. Below: Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (MSFS’97), co-chair for the Global Politics and Security Concentration in the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program.
Party member, to talk with the class via Zoom from the other side of the world. “I wanted the students to have a Georgetown experience that would float their boat,” says Tidwell, who has known Chalmers for years.
The session took place at 9:30 in the morning; in Australia, it was 11:30 p.m. Chalmers talked about the pandemic-related economic challenges that Australia was facing. He answered students’ questions about his working-class constituency and where he and his party stand compared with the Australian government on financial issues, social equity and more. “The look of excitement on my students’ faces was palpable,” Tidwell says. “They were impressed by his willingness to talk.”
A new fall seminar for Georgetown’s MSFS program, Global Challenges: Pandemic and World Order, featured recorded interview sessions with prominent international relations practitioners, leaders and scholars. SFS faculty members invited experts they knew to take part and conducted the interviews.
The sessions looked at pandemic impacts on geopolitics, health, financial markets, racial and ethnic disparities, fragile states, governance and more. Experts interviewed included: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr. Agnès Soucat, director of health systems governance and financing for the World Health Organization; HRH Princess Ghida Talal (SFS’86, MSFS’86), chairperson, King Hussein Cancer Foundation and Center; H.E. Dr. Saad Jaber, Jordanian minister of health; Dr. Jim Yong Kim, co-founder of Partners in Health and former president of the World Bank Group; Dr. Roger Kamba, coordinator of Democratic Republic of Congo’s COVID Response from the President’s Office; and Kelly Clements, United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees.
tify what information is credible. They then looked at wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters that were happening concurrently with COVID-19. Guest experts talked about their work in environmental and pandemic-related issues.
Students separated into four groups, each looking at a pandemic influence on the environment. They investigated effects on air pollution, plastic and PPE waste, food security and waste and impacts on wildlife. In addition, they created a website to present their findings about COVID-19’s environmental effects. The website includes case studies, summaries and reviews in each of the four categories.
LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE
While SFS students and faculty say they are looking forward to returning to in-person education, there have been some pluses to the virtual experience. Online learning seems to help introverted students feel more empowered to participate in classes through platform features such as chat sections, breakout rooms and small groups.
“I miss office hours in person, getting coffee with a professor. I miss the social aspect of classes and getting a bite to eat with a classmate to catch up on assignments.”
“We have so much in-house talent within SFS. We wanted a course that showcased many of the SFS faculty and the networks that we bring,” says Bibbins Sedaca, who taught the seminar. The course aimed to reach beyond those taking the class. Each session was posted on the MSFS YouTube channel, and professors could integrate any of the interviews into their coursework. A symposium on Fridays, led by SFS faculty and open to all students, discussed each weekly topic. “We wanted the entire community to benefit from it,” Bibbins Sedaca says.
USING THE PANDEMIC IN LEARNING
Another new course offered in fall 2020, COVID-19 and the Environment, explored what happens when environmental crises occur simultaneously with disease outbreaks. Classes used a blend of synchronous Zoom sessions and prerecorded lectures. “The goal was to understand how you have intersecting crises and what that means,” says Wei, who designed and taught the course. Students first learned how to assess scientific news and iden-
Wei says she never thought to record her lectures until doing so for pandemic teaching. She plans to do some recording in the future because it helps students review lecture information and allows more time for discussions. McGuire recorded lectures in some online classes and is enthusiastic about continuing the idea. “Being able to go back and watch and hear professors’ exact explanation of a topic is fantastic,” she says. “I really like that accessibility.”
Another pandemic change that might stick is having outside speakers present via Zoom or video, which broadens access to guest specialists and simplifies the logistics of their visits. “I would predict that you’ll find a lot of academics using their connections, reaching out to people and bringing experts from around the globe into the classroom,” Tidwell says.
For some SFS students, being in college during the pandemic helped clarify their next steps. Hendy saw 2020 graduates struggle to find jobs. At the same time, she was experiencing a lot of stress. As a result, she decided to slow her pace by a few months and graduate in December 2021. She says she’ll use the extra time to take care of her mental health, do research, write a thesis and think about what she wants to do after graduation.
Satria now works as a researcher for a think tank in Jakarta, Indonesia. He says the COVID-19 outbreak amplified his academic focus on organizational behaviors in terrorist organizations by showing the importance of governance for security issues. Satria credits his professors with helping him navigate changes to his research plans caused by the pandemic, which allowed him to continue his work and complete his thesis. “Throughout this pandemic experience,” he says, “the people that truly helped me were the professors.”
BY
PHOTO
JOHN THYS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (right) bumps elbows with French President Emmanuel Macron (center) at a European Union Summit in Belgium.
MULTILATERALISM AND GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS
The Future of International Relations After COVID-19
by CADY STANTON
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, and the rest of the world, few could have predicted its long-term impacts on international relations. But more than a year after the pandemic’s onset, SFS faculty have gained insights — albeit tentative ones — into how the virus is shaping opportunities and challenges in global affairs. COVID-19 has exacerbated troubling pre-existing trends in international trade, necessitated a reevaluation of the efficacy of multilateral partnerships and global organizations and caused leaders to think more critically about how their decisions impact the future of the planet.
According to Professor Michael Green, director of the Asian Studies Program and professor and chair in contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy, these challenges aren’t new. “The consensus is that COVID-19 is accelerating trends in international relations that were already there,” Green says. “The trends that are accelerating are trends of entropy and discord and competition, not cooperation.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR WORLD TRADE
When considering the possibilities for multilateralism in trade relations, there are many obstacles to overcome. Professor Marc Busch, the Karl F. Landegger professor of international business diplomacy and host of the podcast TradeCraft, says that while multilateralism will play a vital role in the future of international trade, COVID-19 has also exacerbated the issues that were hampering global trade before the pandemic.
“We ended up with a perfect storm of issues. COVID-19 brought out the worst in trade practices at a time when the multilateral trading system was least capable of dealing with them,” Busch says. “The trade wars that we’ve been witnessing over the past four years have seriously hurt the United States.”
Green says a striking example of these conflicts can be seen in China’s relationship with other trade giants. The country had already embarked on aggressive foreign policy toward other countries — including the United States — and continues to do so during the pandemic. “COVID definitely accelerated the competition with China, and not just because China is insecure,” Green says. “Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership have concluded that COVID is marking the decline of American power and prestige, that we’ve mishandled it. It has accelerated not just U.S.-China competition,
but China’s aggressive stance towards much of the world.”
According to Busch, the United States itself is 30 trade deals behind the European Union, so now is the time to try to catch up. Over the past four years, President Trump’s trade decisions — marred by largely unsuccessful unilateral tariffs, particularly against China — sit in direct opposition to President Biden’s desire to work more cooperatively with allies.
Green says that Biden also faces many related challenges ahead in restoring credibility in American leadership. “The Trump administration’s handling of COVID was so much worse than we anticipated, so the questions of American competence are that much more damaging,” Green says. “Biden has a much deeper hole to climb out of in terms of American credibility.”
This challenge during the United States’ political transition also comes amid instability within the World Trade Organization (WTO) itself, a factor that will also inform U.S. trade policy. The organization has struggled to resolve disputes as its appellate body has been unable to function because the U.S. had been blocking reappointments. WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo, who stepped down last year, left the institution in a bind, and only recently has the United States supported his replacement.
Professor Joanna Lewis briefing policymakers in Paris at COP21.
Amtrak Under Anthony R. Coscia:
PREPARED AND RESPECTED FOR PANDEMIC RESPONSE
As Amtrak faced the pandemic under the leadership of its Board Chair Anthony Coscia (SFS’81), the company was already at the tail-end of a five-year plan to restructure its operations. The railroad service achieved a positive operating number for the first time in its 50-year history in February 2020 alongside its highest
customer ratings and best ontime performance. But when the pandemic hit, this success was threatened: Amtrak lost 97% of its revenue by March 30th. Coscia says Amtrak employees throughout the company were the source of the company’s resilience.
“The one thing that we did do very successfully,” Coscia
says, “is that we had hired, throughout the company, a very, very solid, strong team.”
The company immediately deep-cleaned its trains and conducted emergency meetings with union leaders to clarify its priorities to protect employees and passengers alike. After consulting with experts, the company leadership concluded that cutting service was the best way to mitigate the health effects for those working and riding the trains.
“As a result of our efforts, we had an exceptionally strong ability to protect our employees,” Coscia says. “We were able to dramatically eliminate Amtrak, as a nation-to-innercity rail system, as any kind of a spreading mechanism.”
This quick response and Amtrak’s preceding revitalization period rewarded the company: the first COVID-19 federal relief package granted Amtrak $1.1 billion. Coscia cites the five-year growth as the reason political leaders trusted Amtrak to use the relief money responsibly and sees this reputation as a vital tool for the changes to come as the pandemic continues.
“We’re trying to position the company to provide the kind of mobility that we think an economy post-COVID is going to need, and we think we’re very well positioned for that.”
Under
Adam Norwitt, Amphenol Contributes Vital Manufacturing in the COVID-19 Era
When Wuhan, China, shut down in January 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam Norwitt (SFS’91), CEO of the manufacturing company Amphenol, had no idea that he was facing just the first of many challenges that year.
A major producer of electronic and fiber optic connectors, Amphenol was forced to shut down all 50 of its factories in China when the virus hit. Throughout the three-week shutdown, Amphenol obtained 900,000 face masks for its workers, developed its own in-house temperature scanning systems and met all the Chinese government’s requirements to reopen by the beginning of March, becoming first among both its competitors and customer businesses to return to full strength. For Norwitt, employee safety was and remains his topmost priority.
“You have to be really quick on your feet in a crisis,
and you sometimes have to make decisions without totally complete information. You always have to run a company with compassion. And I think that a crisis is not a time to lose that.”
When the pandemic impacted their operations in California, keeping Amphenol running became even more critical.
“Three of our factories in that area, they all supported very, very critical technologies, we didn’t yet know how critical they were,” Norwitt says. “But two of those factories make pressure sensors that go in ventilators.”
Looking ahead, Norwitt is hopeful for Amphenol post-pandemic based on the constant resilience shown in the face of tough challenges. “We’ve seen corporate America rise to a challenge that is just extraordinary, and we should all be very proud of that,” Norwitt says. “There is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Pressures on Biden also extend to using WTO reform as a method of dampening China’s expanding power. Busch cautions that this approach is not a catch-all solution. “The WTO has no magic bullet that somehow recreates employment in manufacturing in the United States, or elsewhere in the rich world,” Busch says.
But Busch does see the possibility of some repair in the organization through U.S.-led WTO transformation. “The United States has to lead on WTO reform. We’ve created or severely contributed to some of the problems at the World Trade Organization, and the truth is that if the World Trade Organization doesn’t work, neither will agreements like USMCA [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement],” Busch says. “The Biden administration cannot turn a blind eye to WTO reform and expect anything good to happen in our trade relations with other countries. There is no credible plan B.”
REBUILDING A GLOBAL ECONOMY
An additional concern of the post-pandemic world is economic recovery, though the best ways to repair the economic damage caused by global shutdown are not yet clear. A longstanding expert on the European Union, Kathleen McNamara, professor of government and foreign service (pictured below), acknowledges that many scholars don’t know the full effect of COVID-19 on global affairs at large, including in her area of expertise. “It’s still really early to figure out the answer to that question,” McNamara says. “Unfortunately, we’re still amid this pandemic.”
But according to McNamara, a lack of full clarity also does not mean that what we know now is all doom and gloom. McNamara and other scholars’ worst fears from last March on how the pandemic would impact the EU were not reflected in how the institution weathered the crisis. “What has been fascinating
to see is that at the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed that this crisis was going to be yet another thing tearing Europe apart,” McNamara says. “What we’ve seen that was somewhat surprising was a deepening of the European Union, and an increase in the amount of power at the center of the EU across some pretty important dimensions. Most importantly, the end of 2020 saw the EU adopt an unprecedented $850 billion economic stimulus package that includes the creation of taboo-busting European debt instruments and grants for less wealthy member-states.”
Busch notes that a balancing act between the politics of multilateral engagement on trade and a focus on repairing the pandemic’s domestic economic effects are an essential factor in U.S. recovery. But with that a given, these initiatives also aren’t necessarily at odds. “In times of economic recovery, investing more effort in leading international institutions may not seem like a priority to American voters. But in many ways, it is. Our economy thrives on predictability. Our allies are waiting for Biden to signal that he’s going to steer the U.S. back to the fold.”
On the other hand, Green says that unlike previous transnational disasters such as the global financial crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic has not spawned new multilateral, institution-building cooperation. Some of this can be attributed to the
nature of the problem, which is conducive to closing borders and protecting supplies, and the Trump administration’s negative attitudes toward multilateral organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO). But according to Green, while Trump was accurate to identify China as a strategic competitor, his attacks on American allies, NATO and others did severe damage to the U.S. reputation as a country with competent leadership.
Many allies are keen to have the U.S. back in the WHO as an intimidating power in enforcing the organization’s rule-based order. China has expanded its influence over the organization through its growing participation in multilateral alliances. Green says that cooperation and multilateralism are the right tools to compete with this power. These alliances also ensure that the COVID-19 vaccine is distributed fairly across the world and can repair the global economy. “What applies to us applies to the world, because if we all want to start traveling again and doing global business, and having an open economy and society, we can’t afford to have huge swaths of South Asia or Africa ravaged by COVID,” Green says. “That’s where the WHO becomes important — making sure that the whole globe can keep up with the more advanced economies and distribute the vaccines.”
For vaccine rollout in the EU, McNamara says distribution is a
Opposite top: Adam Norwitt talks with SFS students during a virtual Dean’s Coffee Chat with Dean Hellman. Above: Professor Michael Green, director of the Asian Studies Program.
Multilateralism
Culture Catalyst at Gap Inc.: KATRINA O’CONNELL MAKES BOLD MOVES
A 1990 graduate of the School of Foreign Service, Katrina O’Connell assumed her current post as the CFO of Gap Inc. after a sterling career in leadership positions at the company. When she realized that she wanted to shape outcomes and not just predict them, O’Connell was well prepared: “SFS was the culmination of globalizing the way I thought about the world,” O’Connell summarized.
“At the Gap, I felt like I could be a part of driving business strategies.” When she took her seat as CFO in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, she had to spring into action to do just that. “The first thing we had to do was conserve cash. We modeled every possible outcome. Nobody had any idea what was happening,” O’Connell explained. “It was a deep analysis of what the worst-case scenario could be for the company, and how long could that last.”
The culture change O’Connell brought to Gap Inc. set the company up for success. “I think we’ve learned that we used to have a slower, more plodding culture. The new CEO and I aren’t wired that way. We’re wired for action and big, bold moves, and that has been a great culture catalyst for getting people energized to leave the past behind.” The new leadership approach was well-timed to meet the global viral crisis.
“There were a lot of trends that were happening slowly over time, and the pandemic has just accelerated those trends by two or three years. The shift to digital was a slow bleed in the retail industry, but has now passed the point of no return,” said O’Connell. “The good news for us is that we already had a four-billion dollar online business, so we were able to throttle up that online business to win.”
direct trial of the organization’s strength in unity. “The response to the pandemic is such an important test of the kind of ability of the EU as a governance form, as a political community, to respond. The EU is struggling right now to get vaccine supplies and distribute them, so that is the area to watch going forward.”
The other big question mark determining the EU’s future comes from the U.K.’s protracted departure from the multinational union. When Britons voted for Brexit in 2016, McNamara says, many experts were concerned about the domino effect on other member states where Eurosceptic parties calling for a similar departure had gained traction. But, so far, this hasn’t been the result, and many political leaders have actually been deterred by the U.K.’s complicated exit. “I think there’s been a healthy turn towards a discussion on the part of the Eurosceptics around how to reform the EU, how to stay within the EU but make it work better for the people of Europe,” McNamara says. “So I think it’s produced a healthy contestation, healthy politicization.”
The United States will have to strategically navigate these new relationships, particularly with the U.K., as it takes up its new position outside the EU. “I think, ultimately, the U.K. is going to be sidelined, and that [the U.S.] relationship with the EU is going to come to the fore even stronger and more important in the Biden administration,” McNamara says. “There’s a real kind of dovetailing of priorities and interests there.”
McNamara says Brexit may also change the EU’s priorities and consolidate efforts to develop its ‘strategic autonomy’ on military issues. “There’s been much more movement forward over the last few years in a consolidated European foreign policy and defense profile,” McNamara says. “There’s lots of little things happening around integrating decision-making in terms of setting up a common defense fund, in terms of developing a security strategy.”
McNamara sees the current juncture as an opportunity for reflection on prospects for multilateralism. “We shouldn’t be prisoners of this moment in time. We should also try to think about things that are dynamic and changing, and may produce entirely different ways of inquiry, different architectures of international relations and different ways of interacting across borders and in a much more transnational way.”
ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE
Alongside economic recovery, climate change has also emerged as a pressing concern for the world post-pandemic. Professor Joanna Lewis, provost’s distinguished associate professor of energy and environment and director of the SFS Science, Technology and International Affairs program, says that while the two initiatives may seem at odds, there may be more opportunities than limitations in accomplishing both goals.
“I think many countries are looking for green, resilient strategies that will essentially both help with economic recovery and create new green jobs and clean energy industries,” Lewis says. “Climate change doesn’t necessarily mean a big cost to the economy. We see potentially huge benefits to growing these new eco-
nomic sectors: initiatives that can both put people back to work, but also be working towards your climate plan at the same time.”
As with other foreign policy adjustments, Biden launched his approach to climate change by first undoing previous policy under Trump, including rejoining the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement. While the exit was an initial setback, Lewis says the U.N. and its processes are ultimately quite resilient. The
overall architecture of the agreement remains vital for the future. “Having the U.S. back in with an aggressive climate change target is important because that sends a signal to the rest of the world on what the United States is willing to do to act on climate change, and that puts us in a much better position to leverage international leadership on the climate change issue,” she says.
While climate change has traditionally been a partisan issue in the United States, public opinion has begun to change and concern over climate change has grown among voters, even during the pandemic. At least 60 percent of the U.S. public view climate change as a major threat to the United States’ well-being and 65 percent believe that the government is not doing enough to reduce the effects of climate change.
Reflecting these attitudes, the Biden administration has made climate change one of its top priorities. “They’re incorporating climate change considerations across the entire policy spectrum, including within foreign policy and economic policy,” Lewis says. “It’s a very holistic, integrated approach that has never been done before in this way in the United States.”
According to Lewis, the pandemic has highlighted many areas for improving multilateral collaboration addressing climate and beyond. “COVID has demonstrated the limitations of the global system,” Lewis says. “I think the lessons learned from this will spill over into other areas where we need a global approach to solve problems, including climate change and nuclear security, among others.”
UPS Baptism by Fire for CFO Brian Newman
“Things were changing so quickly it was startling.” Brian Newman (SFS’90) had only been the chief financial officer of UPS for seven months when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted across the world. Newman is deeply fascinated by supply chains and e-commerce and joined UPS after 27 years of service with PepsiCo. He was quickly forced to navigate the drastic changes that would upend business as usual in 2020.
Social distancing and lockdowns that affected how Americans buy goods signifi-
cantly impacted how UPS did business. “We were 50% and 50% residential vs. commercial, and in five months [the pandemic] pulled forward the e-commerce progression by 5 years, and the model flipped to 75% and 25% residential to businesses.”
Newman’s baptism-by-fire at UPS meant not only presiding over the rush to fulfill a new demand for residential deliveries but putting its logistical capabilities to use in Operation Warp Speed. UPS has delivered more vaccines than any other company and
advised the government on distribution. “Our public affairs people, our healthcare people and our logistics experts were in touch with Washington, DC We wanted to come together and say ‘here’s everything we know, here’s everything we can do to help facilitate this.’” With a global portfolio of over 220 countries, Newman likened the system of logistics driving UPS to conducting an orchestra. He continued: “the School of Foreign Service gave me a great foundation. It allows you to think in agile ways and deal with stuff as it comes at you.”
Professor Marc Busch, the Karl F. Landegger professor of international business diplomacy.
Georgetown SFS is adopting anti-racism as a core value, and redefining what it means to lead
by SUSANNE FRANK
RETHINKING THE STATUS QUO
Last summer, Dr. Scott Taylor, the new vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at SFS, took his teenage son to a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in downtown DC. It was the height of a painful summer in America, yet Taylor went home feeling more optimistic than he had in a long time.
“I was struck by how everyone — Black, white, brown, old, young — showed up to the rallies. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — the diversity of people standing up to say, ‘This is not right.’ Black people in this country have been saying ‘Enough is enough’ for years, and shouting into the void. So this was a welcome change. Amidst all the horrible brutality that has been visited upon Black people in this country, who could have imagined that George Floyd’s killing would catalyze an interracial, international, multigenerational movement? That keeps me going,” he says.
Taylor was not the only member of the SFS community to find inspiration — and a renewed sense of urgency — during the summer of 2020. In June, more than 800 SFS faculty, staff and students signed on to a powerful call to action, asking the administration to step up efforts to combat systemic racial inequalities at Georgetown University and outside the campus gates. The group specifically asked the administration to create a new leadership position to ensure that anti-racism became a top priority.
Dean Joel Hellman responded quickly, appointing Taylor as the inaugural vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in July.
“The call to action was so powerful because it came from within our community and expressed our common recognition that the SFS needs to do so much more in response to the national and international movement to combat racism,” says Hellman. “I have committed to make global anti-racism a core principle of SFS. Professor Taylor will engage with us to realize the implications of this commitment and support the implementation of concrete actions to foster that commitment. This is critical to ensuring that the education we offer in global affairs fully engages with issues of racism, inequality and injustice.” Taylor stepped down from his role as director of African Studies, though he continues to teach, and began his new job in August.
A long-standing SFS faculty member, Taylor’s research and teaching explores African politics and political economy, with particular emphasis on business-state relations, private sector development, governance and political and economic reform. In his new role, Taylor says, he sees the potential to advance anti-racism in higher education — and to better prepare a new generation to lead in an interconnected and diverse world.
“The events of this summer forced many institutions, including SFS, to look inward — to better understand our institutional failures when it comes to race and inclusion as well as to appreciate the transformational role a school like SFS can play. As noted in the call to action and amplified by Dean Hellman, the next generation of global leaders will not be served by the status quo,” says Taylor.
Left: Elena Scott-Kakures (MSFS’21, left) and Menty Kebede (MSFS’21, right) at a Black Lives Matter protest on Capitol Hill on June 2nd, 2020.
Diversity
WHERE TO BEGIN?
How does one begin the process of shaking up the status quo in a hundred-year-old institution? And how does one mitigate the damage of centuries of institutionalized racism? The short answer, Taylor says, is to keep listening to faculty and students and to build on the work that’s already underway. Taylor’s challenge is to coordinate efforts and to focus on strategic priorities.
Georgetown faculty and students have been campaigning for diversity and equity for many years. Notably, the Georgetown University Working Group Report on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation represents the culmination of years of student, faculty and alumni efforts to address Georgetown’s legacy of slave ownership and offers more than a dozen recommendations for how the university can move forward.
“There are so many people across Georgetown and SFS who have been doing excellent work already in this area,” says Taylor. “I am leaning on these people, our students and colleagues, and I continue to benefit from their counsel. It continues to be a steep learning curve, but we’re making progress.”
Taylor and his SFS colleagues are part of a university-wide effort to confront the school’s historical shortcomings. Provost Robert Groves is taking the lead on addressing hiring issues; the Graduate School is leading on scholarships and Vice President for
Institutional Diversity and Equity Rosemary Kilkenny is coordinating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the university. Working closely with the administration and faculty and student groups, Taylor has defined three basic priorities: recruiting diverse faculty and students; developing a more inclusive school culture and incorporating diverse scholarship and perspectives into SFS curricula.
REDEFINING MERIT
Ja’net DeFlorimonte, admissions director in the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program, sees last summer’s reckoning on race as a pivotal moment. “When BLM came to the forefront, I was excited, because I knew it would bring more attention to diversity and inclusion,” she says.
Long before the 2020 protests, DeFlorimonte and her admissions colleagues across the school were taking steps to increase applications and admissions from underrepresented communities. “We want the student population to be closer to the diversity of the U.S. population. But it’s not just a numbers game — we want to bring more diverse opinions into the classroom,” she says.
Like many selective schools, Georgetown aspires to admit more students from traditionally marginalized communities but struggles to do so. With the understanding that there’s no single, simple answer to increasing diversity, DeFlorimonte and her colleagues focus their efforts on reaching out more widely and taking down barriers to entry. They already are seeing success.
RECONSIDERING REQUIREMENTS
Sometimes admissions barriers are structural, like the Graduation Record Examinations (GRE) requirement. Long viewed as an important indicator of achievement and future success, many people now question the test’s usefulness.
“GRE scores do not, in general, accurately predict academic performance in graduate school,” DeFlorimonte says. “And they are financially burdensome for low-income applicants.”
The general test costs $205, of which only 50% can be waived. Add on the $27 fee for each school students send their scores to, and it adds up to hundreds of dollars. More affluent applicants can afford test prep services to improve their scores, further tilting the advantage.
In 2019, MSFS was the first of the SFS graduate programs to drop the GRE requirement. That same year, the school increased the number of applicants who qualified for application fee waivers. The results were significant.
“In the first year in which the GRE was optional, we saw a 17% increase in applications. A large contribution to this increase was from applicants from sub-Saharan Africa, which were 10% of the applications that year,” says DeFlorimonte.
ACKNOWLEDGING PRIVILEGE
Sometimes admissions barriers are subtler. While some applicants start preparing in high school for a career in foreign service,
Above, left: Tracy Kapezi (GHD’21). Right: Ishanee Chanda (MSFS’21) chose SFS because she considered it to be one of the best programs in the world for creating global leaders.
with trips abroad and unpaid internships, low-income students are more likely to work part-time jobs and remain at home.
“If you haven’t already studied abroad, or done community service, or have a passport, it’s going to be harder to get into our program. Consider the fact that less than 10% of students who study abroad are African American. We need to take that into account. Overseas travel is a privilege,” DeFlorimonte says.
Some of the loudest advocates for change are SFS students — both graduates and undergraduates. Before the pandemic, Amanda Feldman (SFS’22) and Adam Shaham (SFS’22) spearheaded a petition, signed by more than 630 students, alumni and faculty, asking Georgetown to abolish the practice of legacy undergraduate admissions. Shaham and Feldman’s view is that legacy admissions policies give an added advantage to those who already enjoy privilege. “At Georgetown, a legacy student is two times as likely to be admitted. Nationwide, 90% of legacy students are white,” says Shaham.
He sees diversity on campus as crucial to all students’ development: “We all know the value of different perspectives. More diversity is going to make a better scholar and stronger future leader.”
FORGING NEW RELATIONSHIPS
In order to offer an SFS education to a broader array of students, the school is actively seeking applications from students who attend historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) through site visits, information sessions and advertisements, and by working with organiza-
tions like the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute and National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. SFS also is partnering with organizations that provide scholarships to underrepresented communities, like the Rangel Fellowship, Payne Fellowship, Pickering Fellowship, Truman Scholarship and Public Policy and International Affairs Fellowship.
OFFERING MORE
“Heterogeneity is increasing, and the costs of inattention to diversity are growing.”
Carla Koppell is the senior advisor for diversity, equity and inclusion at SFS. She sees DEI as crucial to continuing leadership in foreign affairs education.
Persuading more people to apply is one hurdle; the next is ensuring that accepted students actually choose SFS. Need-based aid and scholarships are often the deciding factor.
“We have been able to increase applications from qualified minority students, and this has resulted in an increase in minority students being admitted into the program. However, we have lost students to other institutions who have been able to offer higher scholarships,” says DeFlorimonte.
While it will take time and additional resources before all selected students can afford to attend, MSFS is making progress. In mid-December 2020, the program announced the MSFS Futures Scholarship, a full-tuition graduate scholarship and stipend that will be awarded to an MSFS student whose background or experience, when evaluated holistically, suggests that they are uniquely able to contribute to the diversity of MSFS. Thanks to philanthropy from the MSFS Board of Advisors, this spring they will select the first recipient, who is expected to enroll in the 2021-22 academic year.
The newly established McHenry Fellows pro -
Dr. Scott Taylor (left), near the base of Mt Kilimanjaro, Kenya, 2017, with Professor John Kraemer (right).
Diversity
gram, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, attracts applicants from diverse domestic and international backgrounds who are committed to careers in transformational global public service. The program provides five SFS graduate students across programs with tailored personal and professional development opportunities, as well as a full-tuition scholarship.
To better reflect the world, SFS has also been striving to attract a wider range of international students. A number of SFS graduate programs offer regionally-focused scholarships to students from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Alumni have generously funded many of these, including the Carol Lancaster Scholarship, which honors the former SFS dean and alumna by providing full-tuition scholarships to Global Human Development (GHD) graduate students from sub-Saharan Africa. Scholarships like these are critical for increasing geographic representation and socioeconomic diversity within the SFS student body.
RECOGNIZING THE GAPS
The need for more diversity is not limited to the student body — SFS has also committed to hiring faculty with a wider range of backgrounds. “Students from diverse backgrounds enrich the institutions they enter. However, their very presence highlights a contrast between their characteristics and the demographic mix of faculty,” says Provost Groves. “Because of a disproportionately small representation in academic professions of the same groups, these students struggle to find mentors from their own groups. This can limit the ability of the institution to fully support the intellectual development of these students. Further, having faculty from diverse backgrounds enriches the research and scholarship of the institution because they bring new perspectives to traditional areas of research inquiry.”
Taylor notes that increasing faculty diversity may be a long process. “SFS has been quite successful in improving gender diversity among the faculty. It has been a long-term process, and we still have work to do — women still remain underrepresented among our most senior faculty. But it is truly inspiring to see the changes since I arrived over 20 years ago. At the same time, we have failed to meaningfully diversify our faculty on ethnic and racial lines. The benefits of diversity are well known; SFS needs to do better.”
The current faculty hiring freeze limits what can be done now, but once the freeze is lifted the school plans to craft job advertisements in a way that maximizes applications from people of diverse backgrounds, advertise searches more broadly, require diversity statements from all applicants and take diversity into account when evaluating applicant pools.
“Our network of universities from which we draw faculty tends to be quite small,” Taylor says. “By networking more directly with HBCUs and HSIs [Hispanic-serving institutions], for example, we can ensure a better pipeline of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] scholars. We are also looking forward to working with the provost’s office and its exciting new initiative for attracting junior faculty from diverse backgrounds.”
EVALUATING THE CHARACTER OF OUR CONTENT
Carla Koppell is the senior advisor for diversity, equity and inclusion at SFS and a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. She also leads the national University Leadership Council on Diversity and Inclusion in International Affairs Education, which shares best practices for promoting diversity and inclusion in graduate studies programs.
Koppell sees DEI as crucial to SFS’s continuing leadership in foreign affairs education.
“Heterogeneity is increasing, and the costs of inattention to diversity are growing. To go out into the world as negotiators, entrepreneurs and development leaders, our students need to understand that different cultures and identities groups hold different views and priorities and respond to varied incentives,” she says.
For SFS, that means not only taking a closer look at students and faculty but also reassessing curricula and syllabi. Koppell is overseeing efforts aimed at bringing a broader range of voices into international courses. For example, last fall, a group she leads launched a resource portal on diversity, equity and inclusion in international affairs education. The portal includes syllabus guides, research summaries and a list of DEI strategies and plans for American universities.
MSFS Admissions Director Ja’net DeFlorimonte meeting with a prospective student.
LEFT: PHOTO BY ROBERT LYONS; RIGHT: PHOTO COURTESY OF ADAM SHAHAM
“I would like to see everyone come out of graduate school with the understanding that DEI matters — that there are different perspectives to allow in. Our job is to develop a new generation of professionals who understand how critical equity and inclusion are to peace and prosperity, who elevate different voices, and who provide equal opportunities to all those who want to work in international affairs,” she says.
Dr. Elizabeth Grimm is an associate teaching professor and the director of teaching in the Center for Security Studies. Drawing on her background in the intelligence community, Grimm views diversity not just as an asset but as a prerequisite to success.
“One of the things that I do in my syllabus is to make sure that every single week of reading includes some scholar who is not considered to be the majority representation in our field,” she says, “whether that’s a person of color, a person from a non-Western background, a female scholar or a queer scholar. For me there’s both an implicit signaling that happens to the students — where students who ascribe to that identity can then look at the syllabus and be inspired and say, ‘Oh, this is a pathway to me too’ — but it also answers questions better. It goes back to that intelligence training I received: If everyone’s been socialized into that same community, they’re all going to look at those problems in the exact same way.”
STEPPING UP TO LEAD
Ishanee Chanda (MSFS’21) chose SFS because she considered it one of the best schools in the world for creating global leaders. She believes that DEI is profoundly important to the future of the field.
“If you are going to be training people to work in a field that deals with people with other identities and backgrounds, you need to understand how to meet them where they are. Whether you are making policy decisions, analyzing history, providing background for a senior advisor — the situation is almost always deeper and more subtle than you know,” she says.
Chanda has already demonstrated her leadership capacity. In addition to her studies, she works as an assistant to Vice Dean Taylor, holds a seat on the MSFS DEI committee and is president of the student group Diversity and Inclusion at Georgetown. Before the pandemic, Chanda and her classmate Amanda Suárez (MSFS’21) created a variety of DEI materials that they hope to integrate into MSFS and SFS programming at large.
Chanda believes that the core values underlying DEI work translate into any situation — personal, professional, domestic or international. “Think carefully about when your voice needs to be loud, and when it should be quiet. DEI is about humility, patience and empathy,” she says.
Like Chanda, Tracy Kapezi (GHD’21) is developing her leadership skills. Kapezi has lived all over the world — Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, Switzerland — and she works as a social justice student assistant in the GHD program,
where she collaborates with classmate Samera Yousuf (GHD’21). In 2020, Kapezi and Yousuf developed a survey to investigate how current students and alumni perceive racism and bias within their program. Once campus closed because of COVID-19, they led their classmates in online discussions that addressed race and other complex issues — and how to move forward.
In the process, they gleaned insights that they are using to better prepare first-years coming into the program. “The next generation of development professionals is learning to tread lightly,” says Kapezi. “They are asking questions like, ‘How do we center race, gender, sexual orientation and intersectionality in our work? How do we dismantle the savior complex and its effects? How do we listen more to local communities when addressing complex societal problems? How can we contribute to the reimagining of the way development work is done?’ ”
LOOKING FORWARD
Like many other elite schools in the U.S., SFS is awakening to the needs of historically marginalized students. Students are finding their voices and speaking out in ways that promise to change the school’s climate, admissions policies and curriculum. Faculty are making changes too, advocating for change and pursuing opportunities for training and dialogues to make SFS a better, more welcoming and more inclusive place to work. The work is in its infancy.
Taylor relates the new emphasis to Georgetown’s core values: “We must be at the forefront of scholarship and practices that respond to structural inequalities. Indeed, our school’s founding creed insists on a dedication to justice, to conscience and to morality, so that we can achieve a more peaceful and equitable world. By standing for racial justice, we honor that commitment and empower the future global leaders we seek to educate, including those who have been excluded for too long.”
Before the pandemic, Amanda Feldman (SFS’22) and Adam Shaham (SFS’22) spearheaded a petition asking Georgetown to abolish the practice of legacy undergraduate admissions.
Q&A WITH SCOTT TAYLOR
The longtime professor and former director of the African Studies Program talks about his new role as the first vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Q. You started your new position in August 2020. How do you begin setting an agenda for such a broad set of issues?
A. We started by acknowledging that there’s a pretty stark lack of diversity in our faculty, student body and curricula. Georgetown is no different from other U.S. universities in that respect but, as one of the top schools for international affairs, we have to do better.
The questions we’re asking will keep evolving, but we have defined several priorities: recruiting diverse faculty and students; developing a more inclusive school culture and incorporating diverse scholarship and perspectives within the SFS curriculum.
We’ve had a tremendous response from students, faculty and leadership so far. They are eager to do something substantive.
Q. Why is it important for SFS in particular to embrace diversity and inclusion?
The events of 2020 prompted SFS to look inward and ask, “What are our institutional failures when it comes to race and inclusion?”
Put simply, if you look at a syllabus for international relations and all you see is white male authors, you have to ask, are we really teaching students what they need to know about international relations today? The same goes for the student body and faculty — are we bringing people together with diverse points of view?
History shows us that when you exclude diverse perspectives, you replicate national and racial hierarchies in what we do, think and write. We are the premier educator in the field — we must be at the forefront of scholarship and practices that
respond to structural inequalities. Indeed, our school’s founding creed insists on a dedication to justice, to conscience and to morality, so that we can achieve a more peaceful and equitable world.
Q. How will you measure success?
There’s a lot of good will right now, but measurable progress will be slow. I’ll call it success when we more fully realize the school’s founding principles, when we have embedded practices and proce-
“We are the premier educator in the field — we must be at the forefront of scholarship and practices that respond to structural inequalities.”
The SFS community has taken this on, and it’s downright impressive and inspiring. DEI committees have sprung up across the school, not as mere window dressing, but as meaningful efforts at self-examination and toward the enactment of a truly anti-racist agenda. Individual faculty members are revisiting their syllabi and courses, discovering the gaps on race, diverse authorship and perspectives and realizing, at long last, that inclusion does not mean the dilution of intellectual content, but the enrichment of it. Centers and programs in SFS are instituting robust efforts to diversify their student bodies, their curriculums and their programming. We are awakening, slowly, and newly sensitized to the needs of historically marginalized students. Students are organizing, too, in impressive ways to effect changes in the school’s climate, admissions policies and the SFS curriculum. Staff members are pursuing opportunities for training and dialogues to make SFS a better, more welcoming and more inclusive place to work.
dures that ensure fairness and genuine inclusion. When people of all backgrounds feel welcome and safe in our community. And when we embrace diversity in practice, not just rhetorically. I don’t know if there’s a quantifiable metric, but I will be happy when we can say, yes, our students, staff and the content of our courses reflect the country and the world.
I’m really pleased that I am not in this alone; there’s been a sustained response across campus and a commitment from the dean. The biggest challenge will be to organize and direct all the various activities. We’ve had to say “slow down” sometimes, people are so eager. The only thing I am concerned about is sustaining the energy (without people getting exhausted), maximizing limited resources and gaining some economies of scale.
SFS IN GOVERNMENT
SFS Alumni and Faculty Take Congressional Office, Join New Administration
In a historic election year, and as the United States and the world grappled with a global pandemic, SFS alumni, faculty and fellows stepped up to serve their nation through leadership roles in the U.S. government.
By running for office and taking on key appointments in the Biden-Harris administration, these SFS community members continue a legacy of SFS service in governments of both parties and will use their SFS training to find innovative solutions to the complex global problems facing our world today.
“We are extremely proud of all the members of our community who are taking on these leadership roles at such an important and challenging moment for our country. These faculty members and alumni embody the very mission of our school and set an excellent example for our current students,” says SFS Dean Joel Hellman.
The 2020 election saw 16 SFS alumni run for office at the national and state levels. Two SFS challengers joined their incumbent colleagues in Congress: Senator Jon Ossoff (SFS’09) of Georgia and Representative August Pfluger (IBP’19) of Texas’ 11th Congressional District. Colonel Pfluger previously served as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, as well as in the Pentagon and NATO Command. Ossoff joins the Senate after serving as CEO of an investigative documentary production company based in London as well as a national security Congressional staffer. Ossoff’s January run-off in Georgia was instrumental in deciding the balance of the U.S. Senate during the first half of President Biden’s administration. He became the youngest Democrat to serve in the Senate since Biden’s own tenure began in 1973.
SFS alumni, faculty and fellows also joined the incoming Biden-Harris administration to lead key agencies and departments, roles that will draw upon their extensive experience in foreign policy, the public and private sectors and scientific leadership. More than 25 members of the wider SFS community will lead and advise their colleagues in public service as the nation navigates the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, global efforts toward racial justice and the mounting threat of climate change.
Nancy McEldowney,
SFS
GRADUATES ELECTED TO THE NEW CONGRESS
1. Representative Henry Cuellar (SFS’78), TX-28th 2. Representative Debbie Dingell (SFS’75, S’98), MI-12th 3. Senator Richard Durbin (SFS’66, L’69), Illinois 4. Representative Mike Gallagher (SSP’12, G’13, G’15), WI-8th 5. Representative Mike Garcia (SSP’98), CA-25th 6. Representative Stephanie Murphy (MSFS’04) FL-7th 7. Senator Jon Ossoff (SFS’09), Georgia 8. Representative August Pfluger (IBP’19) TX-11th 9. Representative Stacey Plaskett (SFS’88), Virgin Islands 10. Senator Dan Sullivan (MSFS’93, L’93), Alaska 11. Representative Lori Trahan (SFS’95), MA-3rd
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, non-resident fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD), takes on a new role as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Her appointment follows after her decades of service in the U.S. Foreign Service, including as ambassador to Liberia, and diplomatic posts in Switzerland, Pakistan, Kenya, The Gambia, Nigeria and Jamaica.
Ambassador William Burns, ISD advisory board member, is the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He builds on more than three decades of experience in the U.S. Foreign Service, where he achieved the highest rank in the Foreign Service, career ambassador. He was only the second career diplomat to serve as deputy secretary of state.
Another former career foreign service member and ISD affiliate, Ambassador Nancy McEldowney, was appointed national security advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. At Georgetown, McEldowney led the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program as director from 2017 to 2020. In the Foreign Service, she served as director of the Foreign Service Institute, ambassador to Bulgaria and in U.S. missions in Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Denis McDonough (MSFS’96) returns to government service as secretary of veterans affairs. McDonough was previously the 26th White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama and worked in various roles in the National Security Council and for Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in Congress.
PROVIDING GUIDANCE FOR PANDEMIC CHALLENGES
worked in the mid-2000s as a State Department health security consultant under John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former national security advisor in the Trump administration. The coronavirus pandemic “would have been a crisis no matter what,” she says. “But because of governance decisions, it’s become a tragedy. We are in the middle of the worst public health crisis of our lives.”
Early on, Katz was involved with Georgetown’s coronavirus response, including the decision to move most classes online. She is a member of the Public Health Advisory Committee, formed to create a structured university system for pandemic plans.
Katz received her MPH from Yale University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She came to Georgetown in 2016 from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, drawn by the opportunity to teach at SFS. Her interest arose from her State Department work, she says, when diplomats and other foreign policy experts said the security implications of global outbreaks were only a side issue in international relations training. “What I took from that was maybe we should make this part of our core IR training,” she says.
AROBIN WARSHAW
SFS Faculty Member Rebecca Katz Works at the Intersection of Disease Outbreaks and Security by
s the world becomes more globalized, the risk of spreading infectious diseases increases. That threat turned into awful reality in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic reached every continent.
Rebecca Katz, SFS professor in the Science, Technology and International Affairs program and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security (CGHSS) at Georgetown University Medical Center, has long studied emerging outbreaks, governance in health crises and pandemic preparedness. She takes a no-nonsense view of the need for global health security: “Diseases don’t respect borders,” she says. “We are all one connected population.”
In March 2020, Katz’s expertise in pandemics, effective media commentary during the spring and work with CGHSS was recognized as she was named a public health advisor to the Biden for President campaign. After the November election, she became an advisor to President-elect Biden’s coronavirus task force.
Pandemic planning and health security include political issues but, until COVID-19, had been largely nonpartisan matters, Katz says. For example, she
“It became important to me to teach undergraduates, to get them early as they’re studying at SFS, to integrate these concepts,” Katz says, so that students can apply that understanding to security and policy problems. She teaches SFS courses that include global health and diplomacy, and emerging infectious diseases.
As director of CGHSS, which focuses on preventing, detecting and responding to public health emergencies, Katz has overseen a frenetic pace of pandemic work in addition to projects on other health threats. Partnerships have grown with cities, states, tribes, health ministries, foundations, companies and universities. CGHSS helped create online tools to gather and analyze pandemic information. The COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (AMP) provides access to more than 20,000 policies and plans implemented globally. A frontline guide helps local decision makers with pandemic governance. Other projects include a contact tracing data tracker, with biweekly updates for more than 60 jurisdictions.
In 2019, Katz was a co-convener of the First International Scientific Conference on Global Health Security and is involved in planning the second conference.
“We are continuing to build out what comes next,” she says. “This is all about creating a community of practice and expanding. There’s been so much innovation over this past year. How do we capture that for good as we move forward?”
Professor Charles Kupchan’s New Book Traces the History of American Isolationism
He argues it’s in the nation’s DNA and on the rise. So why is it still a dirty word? by EMMA FRANCOIS
Dr. Charles A. Kup chan just published a book on American isolationism. But he’ll be the first to tell you: “I’m not an isolationist.”
Still, Kupchan might be the person best suited to study the phenomenon. He served on the National Security Council during both the Clinton and Obama administrations, where he witnessed both presidents struggling to weigh the de cision of intervening abroad. He is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and, of course, a professor of international affairs at the School of Foreign Service and government department at Georgetown.
turn” in the 1990s, when he noticed a drop in media coverage of foreign affairs. That changed after 9/11, when suddenly it seemed as if all of America gazed outward.
was to step back and take a serious look at America’s relationship to the term and how it can help us understand today’s electorate.
But the moment didn’t translate to a renewed interest in internationalism. Instead, Kupchan says, Americans grew weary, reeling from the effects of “political overstretch.”
When he started researching America’s ideological beginnings in the Founding Era and into the 19th century, Kupchan says, his head “exploded,” as though he were studying an entirely new land. “What country am I reading about?”, he kept wondering. America then looked nothing like it does today.
Or so he thought.
Released on October 1st, 2020, by Oxford University Press, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World tracks isolationism’s influence, from the Founders to the Trump administration, finding it as critical to, and pervasive in, the American narrative as exceptionalism — even though it’s considered a loaded term.
“I’ve taken heat for using the word ‘isolationism,’” he says. “It drives people crazy. It’s used largely as a political cudgel.”
But Kupchan’s book is not meant to be explosive. Quite the opposite, his intent
“This was a book aimed at leavening debate,” he said, “and at trying to foster this searching national conversation I think we need at this point.”
Kupchan defines isolationism as the relative unwillingness of the country to “take on and endure strategic commitments” beyond North America.
In other words, isolationism asks which seeds to sow, and where.
“Are we going to tend our own garden here in North America?” he asks. “Or are we going to go out and do more?”
The book might sound like a Trump-era explainer, but Kupchan says he began watching “a potential inward
In 2016, when Donald Trump’s “America first” rhetoric began to resonate with voters who felt they’d been left behind, Kupchan realized that the America from the history books wasn’t limited to the pages of the past.
“Suddenly, everything I’m reading about — the isola tionism, the unilateralism, the
protectionism, the undercurrent of racism — all of these historical aspects of American grand strategy suddenly are front and center,” he says.
Somewhere between running away from the world and trying to run it, there’s a sustainable middle ground, the same pastures Kupchan argues for in his book and believes President Biden will seek.
But first, he recommends, difficult conversations need to take place. Kupchan suggests starting, just as he did, by looking back: read the Federalist Papers, Washington’s farewell address, William Borah’s 1919 arguments against the League of Nations. “If we do not get ahead of that isolationist calling, it could get stronger,” he said. “I’m trying to inoculate the country against a dangerous isolationism.”
Which means it can no longer be a taboo topic.
“Are we going to tend our own garden here in North America? Or are we going to go out and do more?”
Our Alumni
GURBIR GREWAL PUTS COMMUNITY NEEDS AT HEART OF POLICING OVERHAUL
The First Sikh Attorney General’s Ethos of Service is Producing a National Model for Police Reform by BY HERB
SCHAFFNER
Above all else, Gurbir Singh Grewal has dedicated his career to the service of others. A 1995 graduate of the School of Foreign Service, and the first Sikh attorney general in the United States, Grewal is the architect of what The Atlantic called “the nation’s most ambitious police reform.” He previously served as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, the chief of the Economic Crimes Unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey and eventually led the Bergen County Prosecutor’s office before being tapped to serve as the state’s attorney general.
Discussing his non-linear career path, Grewal says: “I like being on my feet. I like talking. I thought I would like to be a litigator. Then 9/11 happened, and it forced me to rethink what I was doing with my
career. How I could use my work as a lawyer to promote understanding, that people could look and believe differently but still be part and parcel to this thing we call America.”
Coming into his role as attorney general in January 2018, Grewal was acutely aware of the tensions between communities and the police. The killing of George Floyd and subsequent wave of national
“We’ve revamped all our use of force policies, in a way that is focused on the dignity and sanctity of all life...”
protest only accelerated his plans for comprehensive police reform. “This is the most important thing I’ll ever do as an attorney general,” says Grewal. He continues: “New Jersey is a national model because we’ve revamped all our use of force policies, in a way that is focused on the dignity and sanctity of all life, and focused on officers having a duty to de-escalate and intervene when they see excessive force.” Grewal’s office also instituted a police use-of-force tracking portal, including a version available for the public planned to go live at the end of the first quarter of 2021.
When Grewal entered office, he drafted three top priorities. These were to treat gun violence as a public health emergency, fight the opioid epidemic and improve community-police relationships and build trust. Grewal credits his Georgetown education with preparing him for the difficult task of navigating a police reform process involving many passionate stakeholders, from police unions to social justice organizations and citizen groups. “What we’re doing is diplomacy at its core,” he says. “What I always think back to, in my School of Foreign Service education, is learning about how you can use dialogue to promote understanding. That was my biggest takeaway from my Foreign Service experience.”
Time for Big Change
Margaret Huang and the Southern Poverty Law Center Answer History’s Call in 2020 by HERB SCHAFFNER
MARGARET HUANG’S career has been far-reaching. A 1991 alumna of the School of Foreign Service, she has fought discrimination and advocated for justice and human rights with the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. She has worked against caste discrimination in South Asia, facilitated international women’s rights programs and helped develop curricula to educate American students on racial injustice. And, in the spring of a tumultuous 2020, she became president of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
“I think that the extraordinary events of 2020, both the global pandemic and the global protests around Black Lives Matter and racial justice, have reaffirmed the mission of the SPLC. It’s made us double down. The focus of the Southern Poverty Law Center has always been to advance the work of the civil rights movement,” she says.
Founded in 1971, the SPLC was born of the movement’s victories in the previous decade. Even after the major legislative and cultural strides of the ’60s, it became clear that litigation would be needed to win more battles and advance the cause of civil rights in the South. In its
early days, the organization represented people who had faced racial discrimination in the workplace and housing, as well as women who faced discrimination in various forms. Starting in the late 1970s, the organization set its sights on the Ku Klux Klan, marking a new phase of the SPLC’s work: understanding, monitoring and publicizing the activities of white supremacist and other extremist entities. “To put them out of business, frankly,” Huang says.
“Extremism has been around from the beginnings of this country. It’s not new, but there’s no question that
the last four years have encouraged both more open declarations of affiliations with extremist ideology as well as an embrace of violence as a political tool in ways that we really haven’t seen for quite some time. Particularly in the last year,” she says, “the number of groups that have encouraged a violent response to elected officials and policies, particularly directed at the left but also sometimes directed at the right, has been pretty alarming to us.”
Huang credits the School of Foreign Service with sparking her interest in international human
rights. “I did quite a bit of Model U.N. work while I was at Georgetown, both as part of Georgetown’s team and then separately. I ran the national high school Model U.N. in New York my senior year. That conference set my interest in the U.N.’s work, but human rights more specifically,” she says. Having advocated for human rights abroad, Huang says she now sees the field as “a continuum,” spanning foreign and domestic policy. “The way we handle human rights here at home has much more impact than any of the rhetorical commitment to human rights that we’re espousing at the United Nations or the Organization of American States. They’re watching to see what we do, and words don’t matter as much as actions in many of these circumstances.”
Huang credits the School of Foreign Service with sparking her interest in international human rights.
Meet Our Students
A PLURALITY OF PASSIONS IN DIALOGUE
M.A. in Security Studies Student Jacob Zack Finds Ties Among All of His Interests, From Academia to Playwriting by CADY STANTON
As with many Georgetown students, Jacob Zack (SSP’21) is constantly exploring his passions from various angles. While pursuing a certificate in diplomatic studies, Zack focuses on the destabilizing effects of climate change and its impact on U.S. national security.
A graduate of Emory University with an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern studies, Zack spent a few years in the private sector as a management consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers. He later worked as an academic research coordinator, helping his mentor at Emory, Dr. Kenneth Stein, with a book about the Carter administration.
At Georgetown, Zack has focused on the role diplomacy and peace building can play in practically addressing environmental conflicts in countries such as Israel, Jordan and Palestine.
“I kept coming across this thematic area where the environment is going to play an increasingly important role with water conflicts and natural resource conflicts, and actors understanding their security in terms of how they can feed their population with crops,” Zack says. “I identified that as something that will be relevant now and increasingly so.”
During his graduate studies, Zack is gaining experience as a research assistant for Dr. Kimberly Roberts, director of graduate studies at SSP, and is a columnist for the Georgetown Security Studies Review, writing on Palestinian politics and environmental issues.
He also works part-time as a graduate research assistant at the United States Institute of Peace, focusing primarily on governance reform in Burkina Faso with
the institute’s governance, justice and security team. In this work, he looks at how the justice system functions in the country and works with local stakeholders to improve it.
Beyond security studies, Zack leads a creative second life as an accomplished playwright. He has written seven plays
Zack focuses on the destabilizing effects of climate change and its impact on U.S. national security.
that have been produced across the country and in Washington, DC, many of them dark comedies about foreign policy. His full-length absurdist comedy on totalitarianism, “A Proclivity for Kiting,” won the B-Street New Comedies Festival in 2019.
“I usually write plays in my free time and attend different theater-related events, and I’ve had a few of my plays produced in theaters around the country. The pandemic has given me more time to dedicate to playwriting and to work on some new plays that will hopefully be produced once everything gets back to normal,” he says.
While these many commitments keep him busy, Zack says, his plurality of passions is made more exciting by the opportunities for crossover.
“I’m learning things related to development and peace building and conflict mitigation during the day, and then I’ll go to classes at night and bounce ideas around about my day job with a professor who works high up at USAID. It’s been really cool to have those things in dialogue with each other.”
Beyond the What to the Why
Grad
Student Catherine Haseman Aims to Examine Curriculum Choices in Diplomatic Instruction as
a
Future Foreign Officer by CADY STANTON
IN A TIME RIDDLED WITH uncertainty, Arab Studies graduate student Catherine Haseman (MAAS’22) knows exactly what she’ll be doing next year. As a State Department Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow at Georgetown, she will begin a career as a foreign service officer after completing her degree.
Haseman, who grew up in a small Midwest town, says she was introduced to geopolitics when tasked with reading The Economist for her high school international relations course.
“We started getting very interested in the Middle East through a lens of conflict, which is unfortunate, because I think I’ve spent
a lot of the rest of my academic career trying to deconstruct that and understand that the Arab world is so much more than conflict and resources and all the things that Western foreign policy makes it out to be,” she says.
As an undergraduate, Haseman participated in the State Department’s Virtual Student of Foreign
As
Service program for two semesters, pairing up with political officers at the U.S. Consulate General in Peshawar, Pakistan, and at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. She also spent a year teaching English as a Fulbright Fellow in the West Bank, Palestine, before undertaking her master’s degree.
At Georgetown, she
a State Department Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow at Georgetown, Haseman will begin a career as a foreign service officer after completing her degree.
spends her time at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) as one of two diversity, equity and inclusion student workers involved in the center’s subcommittee for community accountability and culture, which strives toward a diverse student cohort and encourages students to reflect on how their positionality influences their understanding of Arab studies courses.
Her work at CCAS and as a media coordinator at the Arab Studies Institute in Washington, DC, has inspired Haseman to inquire about the context and motivations behind study of the region, asking important questions not only about what she is learning but why. She hopes to explore the role of knowledge production — how institutions select what topics and ideas will be emphasized in educating future diplomats — in instruction on the Middle East and North Africa. Haseman says that unpacking the assumptions that inform this teaching can help the U.S. arrive at a more progressive foreign policy.
“What narratives are produced and reproduced by universities and other American think tanks, and why?” she asks. “Is it because of power dynamics of interested parties, because of money or power? I want to discern what these narratives are and understand why they exist or what merit they have.”
Meet Our Students
Jacob Bernard Cultivates Community Through Political Communications
With Plenty of Experience in Hand, Sophomore Bernard Works for Ideals of Service, Diversity and Inclusion by CADY STANTON
Growing up in Pitman, New Jersey, Jacob Bernard (SFS’23) was raised by a single mom and attended class as one of very few Black students in the school system. Finding his niche in history and political science, Bernard says he put a lot of pressure on himself to exceed expectations and expand his learning into critical analysis debate skills.
Now, just two years after graduating from high school, Bernard has joined his town council’s task force for diversity and inclusion as its youngest and only Black member, assisting with recommendations regarding community outreach and educa-
tion and addressing the town’s racial history as a former site of Ku Klux Klan rallies.
“I think it’s incredibly important that, when we address events that have happened, it’s not meant to be negative — it’s meant to be reflective,” he says. “It’s really to point out that that’s not who we are now. Now, we are certainly much more ac-
cepting of all different types of people, and we’re really just trying to cultivate that.”
Bernard plans to major in Regional and Comparative Studies with a concentration in Latin America, a region he says is underrepresented in U.S. foreign policy discussions. He serves as press secretary for the Georgetown University Student Association’s executive administration, working on outreach and response for campaigns on student housing during the pandemic and promoting racial equity on campus. He is also a teaching assistant for Map of the Modern World, a required geography course for first-year SFS students.
Before arriving on the Hilltop, Bernard was engaged in political organizing in his home state. In 2018, he worked on the campaign of local U.S. House candidate Tanzie Youngblood, who ran to represent New Jersey’s 2nd Congressional District but lost in the Democratic primary. Bernard also interned at the district office of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, where he worked with constituents to get support from caseworkers.
He also managed social media for the DC Democratic State Committee as a communications intern, and has since completed a communications internship with 2020 Congressional candidate Amy Kennedy, for whom he wrote social media content and op-eds.
Bernard says he is keen to learn more about his passion for political communications and sees messaging as vital for engaging audiences.
“The biggest draw for me is why certain candidates will use certain phrases, and which statements people find more impactful. I’ve always been fascinated by what goes into communication strategy and how you do engagement on social media,” he says. “It just helps cultivate the community a little bit more.”
“I think it’s incredibly important that, when we address events that have happened, it’s not meant to be negative — it’s meant to be reflective.”
SFS WELCOMES NEW ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS
The School of Foreign Service welcomes five new Advisory Board members. The cohort brings decades of international experience in government, journalism, business, law and technology to their new roles. “Our new board members represent the wide breadth of career paths that our students aspire to and they bring a rich diversity of experience and impact that serve as an example of our mission in action. I thank them for their service to the SFS community,” says Dean Joel Hellman.
01 Alma Caballero (SFS’13, LAS’15) serves as regional director at McLarty Associates, where she advises clients on issues of strategic planning, government relations and transaction management in Latin America. Previously, Caballero was the Latin American policy advisor at Covington & Burling LLP., where she provided risk assessment and consulting services to international clients with connections to Latin America. She currently serves as an advisory council member of the U.S. Mexico Foundation and the vice-chairman of the Board of Directors for love.futbol.
02 Brionne Dawson (SFS’02) serves as senior advisor in the U.S. Department of State in the Bureau for Economic and Business Affairs, where
she supports the Bureau’s engagements on U.S. jobs creation, enhancing economic opportunity and improving shared prosperity. Dawson previously served as senior director of East and Southern Africa at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and in leadership roles at the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Dawson is a Truman national security fellow, an International Career Advancement Program (ICAP) fellow and is named by New America as one of 35 Black American experts in U.S. national security and foreign policy.
03 Lulu Garcia-Navarro (SFS’94) is the host on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and one of the hosts on the Up First podcast. Previously,
she served as an NPR correspondent based in Brazil, Israel, Mexico and Iraq. She was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, work that earned her a 2011 George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Alliance for Women and the Media’s Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement. She contributed to NPR News reporting on Iraq, which was recognized with a 2005 Peabody Award and a 2007 Alfred I. duPontColumbia University Silver Baton. Garcia-Navarro and her team also received a Gracie for their coverage of the #MeToo movement.
04 Nick Talwar (SFS’95) is president and CEO of CircleUp, an investment platform to help entrepreneurs thrive. He has 25 years of experience as an operator and investor at
the intersection of technology and financial services. Prior to CircleUp, Talwar was a partner at Apis Partners, a growth equity investor, and global head of vehicle supply at Uber. He has worked at Amazon, Visa and Citi. Talwar has served on the boards of Accion, Shuttl, Rapido, Baobab, Payjoy and Alt. Bank. In 2013, Talwar was nominated into the Young Global Leader program of the World Economic Forum.
05 Zaid Zai d (SFS’97) is the lead for North America, U.S. politics and U.S. elections on the strategic response policy team at Facebook. The former U.S. Foreign Service political officer recently served on the Biden-Harris administration agency review teams. He has nearly 20 years experience in technology, policy, law, foreign affairs, national security and international development. Zaid served as special assistant to the president and associate White House counsel in the Obama administration. Previously, he worked at USAID, in private practice at WilmerHale and completed three federal clerkships. Zaid is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Truman National Security Project fellow, an ICAP fellow at the Aspen Institute and a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. He serves on the Board of Directors of iMMAP and the Board of Governors of the Georgetown University Alumni Association.
SFS Faculty Updates
01 Bruce Hoffman, SFS professor, became the director of the Center for Jewish Civilization in July 2020. He succeeds Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who served as director beginning in 2006. “My foremost responsibility is to preserve the CJC’s core values of diversity and inclusiveness,” Hoffman says, “as well as its long-standing commitment to social justice and tikkun olam — repairing the world.”
02 Rodney Ludema, professor of economics in the School of Foreign Service and the Department of Economics, became the director of the Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy in July 2020. Ludema took over from founding director Professor Theodore Moran, who led the program beginning in 1978. Ludema says he plans to build on Moran’s legacy of practical student training by equipping Landegger students with the skills necessary for sound decision-making in an increasingly data-rich networked world.
03 Mark Giordano, professor of geography, became SFS vice dean for undergraduate affairs in July 2020. He succeeds Professor Daniel Byman, who filled the role beginning in 2015. Giordano previously was director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs program. In his new role, he is working with faculty and students on updating the SFS undergraduate curriculum and how it is delivered, as well as creating greater linkages between the SFS program in DC and at Georgetown University in Qatar.
BOOKS
Madeleine K. Albright, Michael and Virginia Mortara distinguished professor of diplomacy, recounts her post-State Department career in a memoir that takes the reader through Albright’s various roles since completing her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State. In Hell and Other Destinations (HarperCollins, 2020), Albright describes her experiences as an author, professor, businesswoman, advocate, advisor and more, and recommends how to tackle some of the great challenges of our times.
Joanna Lewis, associate professor and director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs program, explores the models East Asia offers for environmental politics, advocacy and policy in Greening East Asia: The Rise of the Eco-developmental State (University of Washington Press, 2020). Lewis and her co-editors advocate for environmental sustainability as a vital part of economic growth.
Katherine Chandler, assistant professor in the Culture and Politics program, traces the creation and evolution of unmanned aircraft and their place in theaters of war in Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers University Press, 2020). The book examines the U.S. history of experimental pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992 and reframes the drone as having precedent in U.S. military strategy long before the war on terror.
Keir Lieber, professor in government and foreign service and director of the Center for Security Studies, highlights opposition between theory and reality in The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Politics in the Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2020). Lieber and co-author Daryl Press caution nuclear instability may be the result of technological change in the 21st century.
Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J., distinguished professor of ethics and human development and senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, and Dr. Carole Sargent, director of scholarly publications at Georgetown, explore the historic events of the Vatican disarmament conference in A World Free from Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament (Georgetown University Press, 2020).
Kristen Looney, assistant professor of Asian studies and government, published Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020), which compares the rural development experiences of Taiwan, South Korea and China over a six-decade period. The book provides a case study-based analysis of historical state-led development initiatives and agrarian change.
Marwa Daoudy, Seif Ghobash chair in Arab studies and associate professor, combines her expertise in environmental politics, critical security and Middle East studies in her book The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Daoudy reviews debates around the concept of environmental security, exploring perspectives on climate, water and food security and climate-induced migration in the context of the Syrian civil war.
John McNeill, university professor, published The Webs of Humankind: A World History (W. W. Norton, 2020), which explores the contours of global history from 1400 to the present, examining linkages among communities crossing time and space. A teaching tool for introductory world history courses, the textbook offers original ideas on how to understand the shared global past.
Toshihiro Higuchi, assistant professor of history, published Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environment Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), which examines the history of the environmental impact caused by nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War, when global superpowers detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
Daniel Nexon, SFS professor, investigates the decline of the U.S.-dominated international system and seeks to find signposts for hegemonic decline in Exit From Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). With his co-author, Alexander Cooley, Nexon argues that erosion of the liberal international order predates the 2016 election by more than a decade.
Diana Kim, SFS assistant professor, explores the history of opium in Southeast Asia, from its widespread trade to prohibition, in Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020), her book about governance and colonial legacy.
Matthew Kroenig, professor of government and foreign service, published The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China (Oxford University Press, 2020). Kroenig makes a case for American optimism in the face of recurring great power rivalries with Russia and China based on a historical analysis of superpower competition from ancient Greece to the Cold War.
Arjun Shankar, assistant professor, published Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) with co-editor Perry Zurn. The book collects research from scholars in a dozen fields to understand curiosity. Contributors address the practice of scientific inquiry, the contours of human learning, the stakes of social difference and the potential of radical imagination.
Sarah Stewart Johnson, associate professor in biology and the Science, Technology and International Affairs program, published The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (Crown, 2020), which explores the effort to understand Mars and presents a natural history of a place where no human has set foot. It also examines the scientific and existential stakes of the search for life.
SFS Events
SFS hosted an impressive array of political and thought leaders in 2020.
SFS Takes Centennial Celebrations to London for a Weekend of Special Events
JANUARY 24-27, 2020
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
Steven T. Mnuchin delivered the Lloyd George Centennial Lecture on the Future of the Global Order at an event sponsored by SFS and Chatham House. The January 25 gathering in London featured introductory remarks from Chatham House Director Dr. Robin Niblett, a conversation with SFS Dean Joel Hellman, and closing remarks from Lord Jim O’Neill, chair of Chatham House. That evening, SFS alumni and friends joined German Ambassador to the United Kingdom Peter Wittig (P’20) at his residence to mark the school’s centennial. On January 27, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, attendees gathered for a special performance of the Global Lab for Performance and Politics play “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.” Georgetown theater professor Derek Goldman, who wrote the piece with Clark Young (COL’09), directed Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn in the role of the Holocaust witness Karski. Afterward, journalist Razia Iqbal of the BBC World Service moderated a discussion with Strathairn, Goldman, Human Rights Watch South Asia Director Meenakshi Ganguly and Queen Mary University of London Professor Penny Green.
SFS
Students, Alumni, Staff and Their Families Cheer on Georgetown Men’s Basketball at SFS Centennial Day at Capital One Arena
FEBRUARY 8, 2020
SFS Centennial Day at Capital One Arena featured a pre-game reception starring university mascot Jack the Bulldog on court plus on-screen recognition for members of the SFS community, and a nail-biting 76-72 victory for the Hoyas. Georgetown University Alumni Association President Richard Hluchan (SFS’71, P’08, P’09) and Class Leader Deborah Hluchan (SFS’71, P’08, P’09) presented the game ball to Michael Williams (SFS’98, L’01, P’22) and Julin Williams (P’22), who received the Walsh School of Foreign Service Recognition Award at center court in acknowledgment of their long-standing and vital support of the Georgetown Scholarship Program. SFS alumni and current students highlighted on the arena’s big screen included retired General James L. Jones Jr. (SFS’66, H’06), a former basketball player at Georgetown, who shared memories of his time as a student athlete.
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch Receives the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy’s 2020 J. Raymond “Jit” Trainor Award for Excellence in the Conduct of Diplomacy FEBRUARY 12, 2020
Delivering a lecture on “Diplomacy Today,” former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch accepted the Trainor Award while making the case for the enduring importance of international institutions and outlining reforms she believes could bolster U.S. diplomacy overseas. The event included intro-
ductory remarks from ISD Director Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Trainor Endowment Frank J. Hogan and distinguished U.S. diplomat Ambassador Thomas Pickering, each of whom commended Yovanovitch for her dedication to public service. The evening also featured a discussion between Yovanovitch and Ambassador William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which touched on U.S. foreign policy in post-Soviet Europe and how diplomats manage the inevitable risks of their work.
SFS Takes Centennial Celebrations to San Francisco
MARCH 2, 2020
Chairman Emeritus of the SFS Board of Advisors Paul Pelosi (SFS’62) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (H’02) hosted conversations to mark the SFS centennial at the San Francisco
War Memorial and Performing Arts Center. Attendees listened as SFS Dean Joel Hellman and Jason Matheny, founding director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and Paul Pelosi and Marc Benioff, chair, CEO and founder of Salesforce, talked about the future of technology and international affairs. Benioff, who fosters a culture at Salesforce where business outcomes are geared toward positive social impact, encouraged business leaders in San Francisco’s tech sector to apply their skills to addressing challenges in their city.
Georgetown Security Studies Program and GIWPS Host Conversation About a Diverse Security Sector
SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 Ambassador Melanne Verveer, director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, moderated a discussion between Professor Travis Adkins, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Admiral Michelle Howard that explored how diversity strengthens perceptions of the U.S. overseas and how the U.S. can live up to its values on the issues of diversity and inclusion. “Diversity represents one of the greatest strengths that the United States has. ... It’s a representation of our values. It shows our tremendous leadership and it gives a sense of moral authority to what we do and what we say overseas,” said Thomas-Greenfield.
Former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright Join Ambassador Melanne Verveer to Mark 25 Years Since the UN’s Historic Fourth World Conference on Women
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
Hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, the anniversary event
explored the impact of the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing — where Clinton gave her “Women’s rights are human rights” speech — and discussed progress still to be made on women’s rights and empowerment.
Albright and Clinton recalled preparing for U.S. participation in the conference, which faced both domestic and international opposition, and the response to the former first lady’s now-famous speech. Both leaders discussed areas of progress on women’s rights since the conference, such as in education and health care, and emphasized the need for improvement in areas including politics and government, business and economics and security.
SFS Hosts Discussion Among Four Decades of Black SFS Alumni
OCTOBER 20, 2020
Judge Cheryl Long (SFS’71, L’74), Professor Saladin Ambar (SFS’90), Kaya Henderson (SFS’92, EML'07, H’12), Zaid A. Zaid (SFS’97) and Brionne Dawson (SFS’02) attended SFS at different times between
The BMW Center for German and European Studies and Georgetown’s Global Irish Studies Program Host Annual Symposium Exploring U.S.-Irish Relations
NOVEMBER 17, 2020 Former president Bill Clinton (SFS’68), Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, Ireland’s Ambassador to the U.S. Daniel Mulhall and co-chairs of the Congressional Friends of Ireland Caucus Rep. Richard Neal and Rep. Pete King were among the speakers and panelists at the Bridging the Atlantic symposium. They analyzed key issues affecting the relationship between the United States and Ireland, covering everything from Brexit and the election of Joe Biden to the legacies of civil rights leaders in both countries in the fight for peace and democracy around the world.
1968 and 2002. In a conversation with Professor Scott Taylor, SFS vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, the alumni reflected on their experiences as Black students at Georgetown and spoke about how to confront race and racism in the SFS community.
Madeleine Albright, George Casey and George Tenet
Return to SFS to Discuss the Future Role of the U.S. on the Global Stage
NOVEMBER 17, 2020
In November 2019, as part of programming during the SFS Centennial Gala Weekend, former U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright (P’87, P’94, H’99), 36th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army George Casey (SFS’70) and former CIA Director George Tenet (SFS’76, H’03, P’10) met to discuss the role of U.S. diplomacy. Albright, Casey and Tenet returned a year later for a virtual event to share insights on the future role of the U.S. in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and other foreign and domestic challenges.
H.E. Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Former President of Chile, Discusses Human Rights and Women’s Leadership in Latin America in the Age of COVID-19
DECEMBER 1, 2020
Graduate student leaders from SFS, along with the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the McCourt School for Public Policy, hosted a discussion of human rights with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. Responding to questions from
moderator and CLAS Director Fr. Matthew Carnes, Bachelet spoke about the pandemic’s amplification of hardships faced by vulnerable groups — including women, Indigenous people, people of color and the poor — and outlined how her U.N. team was responding to the pandemic.
Walsh School of Foreign Service
In a year defined by unprecedented challenges, our mission to prepare new generations for global leadership and service is more crucial than ever before. Building on our legacy, we continue to develop the people and ideas that will address the world’s most complex issues. Please join us by making a gift to the SFS Centennial Fund, which will help us strengthen our impact as the world’s leading school of international affairs: sfs.georgetown.edu/give THANK YOU for YOUR ONGOING SUPPORT!
