Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger

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       Training Hawks

      GS’s goal, Gaddis has often said, is “to make it okay for people to be generalists again.”¹ The program was on the front end of a push by some academics for more interdisciplinary courses—an antidote to ever-increasing stove-piping that has come to characterize higher education. “As departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less,” higher education critic Mark Taylor has written. “Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems.”² Gaddis added, “If you pick up the history department course listings for undergraduates, there are about 150 courses, but if you look carefully at them most will tend to be narrow. Part of the reason is that professors like to teach their own research specialties. That used to happen only at the graduate level, but it is increasingly happening at the undergraduate level.”³

      Allan Bloom addresses some of the implications of specialization in his 1987 social critique The Closing of the American Mind: “The net effect of the student’s encounter with the college catalogue is bewilderment and very often demoralization,” he writes. “It is just a matter of chance whether he finds one or two professors who can give him an insight into one of the great visions of education that have been the distinguishing part of every civilized nation . . . So the student must navigate among a collection of carnival barkers, each trying to lure him into a particular sideshow. This undecided student is an embarrassment to most universities, because he seems to be saying, ‘I am a whole human being. Help me to form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real potential,’ and he is the one to whom they have nothing to say.”⁴

      Compartmentalization also has broader ramifications. “The [US] president, or whomever, can’t be bound by disciplines,” Hill added. “He can’t say to himself, ‘I’m only going to think about the economics of this, or I’m only going to think about the demographics or the domestic politics of this.’ You’ve got to think about it without any fences. Everything comes at you at once . . . So you have to be multidisciplinary.”⁵

      Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill try to avoid “fences” at every level, beginning with what, exactly, they mean by the term “grand strategy.” “The reason why no one can tell you what it is is because it’s more than one thing,” Hill said. “No two of us are alike in the way we see things.”⁶ While the professors share the conviction that “having a grand strategy is a good thing,”⁷ the course determinedly offers no formal definition, forcing students to reconcile it themselves.

      The way Kennedy defines it is: “The crux of grand strategy lies . . . in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests.”⁸

      Hill hopes students “will come away having learned to become foundationalists”—people who believe that some ideas have been proved true over time and must be assumed before other truths can be known—“but I don’t think that my teaching colleagues necessarily share that,” he said. “I don’t think that’s something they think about much. That’s something I bring up. To me that’s what grand strategy is. My definition of grand strategy is multidirectional, multidefinitional. You need to know what is going on here, which is extremely difficult to get people to deal with.”⁹

      But speaking before a group of Ethiopian government officials at Yale in 2014, Gaddis joked that his definition—“the calculated relationship of means to large ends”—is “the briefest, the most eloquent, and the most correct . . . You can wish for the stars, but your ability to get to the stars is always going to be limited.”¹⁰ He elaborated in an earlier address at Duke University in 2009: “Our knowledge of [grand strategy] derives chiefly from the realm of war and statecraft because the fighting of wars and the management of states have demanded the calculation of relationships between means and ends for a longer stretch of time than any other documented area of collective human activity.”¹¹ Grand strategy “applies to all fields of human endeavor,” Gaddis told the Ethiopian contingent. “We all have things we need and have to figure out how to get them, and that is strategy. The ‘grand’ has to do with significance.”¹²

      “Gaddis’s definition is miniscule, and it’s circular,” Hill said. “Essentially it means don’t do stupid things. If you can’t reach the grapes, get a ladder. That encourages students to do what they want to do, which is to stay away from grand strategy.”¹³ The opposite reflex—going toward grand strategy—would be a tolerance for ambiguity. “Students have been instructed since kindergarten, ‘If you do something this way, this will be the outcome,’” he elaborated. When a situation is uncertain, “they’re at sea. They say, ‘Quick, get me back to land as quickly as possible.’”¹⁴ Similarly Hill believes that most people are so conditioned to think issue by issue, it’s tough for them to step back to see the whole picture. “Whenever they’re asked, they get jumpy and beads of sweat develop.”¹⁵

      After critiquing a fall semester Marshall Brief in which the students got stuck discussing the minutiae of the Ebola virus rather than the overall relationship of the United States with Africa, the assigned topic, Hill emailed Gaddis. “Maybe we should have some kind of joint session between now and the end of the term to go over this with them. They really don’t get what GS is, even allowing for the faculty’s various angles on it. We know that it’s not because they lack intellectual capability; it has to be a very deep cultural-educational conditioning that puts them in a ‘paradigm’ . . . that they can’t imagine themselves beyond.”¹⁶

      Separately, Hill said, “The area where we’re successful is not this year’s class or last year’s. When they graduate, they don’t ‘get it’”—a Hill refrain. “Five years out, if they’ve had real experiences, then they begin to get it.”¹⁷

      When asked to define Grand Strategy, the vast majority of alumni, regardless of when they took GS, did seem to get it. They tended to cite Gaddis’s definition, expounding on it to present a grasp of grand strategy as a compelling model for leadership. Some viewed the concept primarily through the lens of political power: the state’s strategic assessment of economic and military priorities. As Benjamin Klay (GS ’02) remarked, grand strategy is “a nation’s means СКАЧАТЬ