Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo
Students gather on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, August 22, 2021.
Back in the early 1980s, I thought I might become one of those “grand strategy” academics, and so I went to graduate school for international relations at Yale. There, I was fortunate to be able to study the subject with professor Paul Kennedy and also the late conservative historian of ancient Greece, Donald Kagan. I wrote about thinkers like B.H. Liddell Hart, and Carl von Clausewitz, as well as more contemporary topics, even got a few of my term papers published—one in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College and another in the Fletcher Forum (and in French on the front page of Le Monde diplomatique). I also learned a great deal.
Over time, I moved on to other things. Part of it was my own changing interests, but I also decided that “grand strategy” was sort of bullshit. It was fun to debate in scholarly journals or seminar rooms, but it had no relevance to real life. I’ve spent a great deal of time examining the career of Henry Kissinger, allegedly the great grand strategist of our age, in the histories I’ve written. (For the purposes of this discussion only, I’ll put aside his all-but-inarguable war criminality—it’s almost impossible to argue straight-faced that at any point did he really know what he was doing.) Yes, Kissinger thought he had big plans—but God laughed at all of them. Almost without exception, his would-be Machiavellian machinations made whatever problem he was seeking to address worse. This was true, of course, for the millions of victims of his hubris all around the globe, but also from the narrow perspective of even medium-term U.S. interests.
And Kissinger was no dope. A number of the people who followed him in office, however, really were. By far the worst of these was America’s most recent set of secretaries of state under Trump, with Mike Pompeo taking the prize for worst ever. So the challenge facing Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan is akin to the job of the guy in the Shriners hat who follows the horses on a little cart in a grand parade and cleans up the deposits they leave in their wake. That leaves them not much time for grand strategic thinking, much less the implementation of policies that reflect that thinking across literally dozens of agencies, to say nothing of a consistently meddling Congress, lobbyists, think tanks, and quite a few pundits who believe with all their hearts that their opinions ought to matter.
Recently, however, I started seeing a great many references to a new collection of essays published by Oxford University Press entitled Rethinking American Grand Strategy. As there wasn’t much going on my pandemicized social life, I attended a few Zoom discussions organized around it. To my surprise, I discovered that the entire field had been remade to include all kinds of issues and questions that would never occur to Henry Kissinger—issues like reproductive rights, “whiteness,” immigration, and climate change, together with the way these problems reinforced one another and therefore complicated any nation’s ability to address them.
This is the intellectual transformation that Yale historian Beverly Gage, director of Yale’s shockingly well-funded Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, was clearly addressing with her plans to update its focus. The program was founded in 2000 by my friend Professor Kennedy, together with John Lewis Gaddis, a famous Cold War historian who by and large blamed the Soviet Union for everything that went wrong during that conflict, and the now-deceased former Republican foreign-policy official Charles Hill. Under their guidance, the curriculum stuck pretty carefully to the traditional stuff that I had been studying there a decade and a half earlier. But under Gage, who took over in 2017, things began to change. Her syllabus included not only Thucydides, Clausewitz, Kissinger, and the like, but grassroots social movements, like the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and the U.S. civil rights movement.
These wealthy Republican funders were accustomed to a program that supported the kind of U.S. imperialism and forever wars of yore.
The pushback from the funders, as one can glean from Jennifer Schuessler’s eye-opening Times article, appears to have comprised multiple parts. One was political censorship. Nicholas Brady, a former Republican Cabinet official and a donor to the program, saw an opinion article entitled “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump” by Bryan Garsten, a Yale political scientist who teaches in the program. Brady called Gage to complain that “this is not what Charlie Johnson [the billionaire who put up the real money] and I signed up for.” (They wanted, alas, “grand strategy” taught “the way Henry Kissinger would.”) These wealthy Republican funders were accustomed to a program that supported the kind of U.S. imperialism and forever wars of yore. Under George W. Bush’s presidency, some of its faculty members, most prominently Gaddis, had helped to provide a specific albeit deeply misguided intellectual rationale for W.’s policies. Aaron G. Jakes, a graduate of the Yale program, describes that process and especially Gaddis’s role here. (And feel free to catch up with just a few of Gaddis’s spectacularly misguided arguments here.) Perhaps most fundamentally, these old-guy donors just didn’t understand that the world had passed them by. What they thought constituted “grand strategy” no longer did, and so they gave the program and the university an ultimatum: our way or the highway. They believed that once they gave their money to a university, they got to decide upon whom and what it would be spent.
Alas, they were right about the last one: Yale chose their way. But Gage, after what the Times called “four months of wrangling,” chose the highway. She would not accept what she termed a “form of surveillance and control” over the program’s curriculum and, as she told the Times, “It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not protected.”
“This is not a pay-to-play institution,” she told the Yale Daily News. “That is not how you get to influence the curriculum—you want people who have expertise, pedagogy, skills making those kinds of decisions.”
Now, it’s no secret that many colleges and universities, desperate for funding, do this all the time. To take just one, for instance, when the Taub Foundation’s Fred Lafter explained that he had donated the $3.5 million to get NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies up and running in 2003, he did so in order to fill the “void” he identified within Middle Eastern studies departments that he believed were “cast in an Arabic point of view.” (Its “advisory board” failed to include scholars in the field, but did include right-wing Jewish funders like now-disgraced billionaire Michael Steinhardt and the extremely hardline pro-Israel former head of CBS and funder of right-wing academics Laurence Tisch.) Examples like Taub’s lead many rich folks investing in academia to believe that they can expect to get their way so long as their donations meet expectations.
Theoretically, this should be less true at Yale. NYU’s endowment is a relatively paltry $4.7 billion. Yale, on the other hand, is walking around with a more than $31 billion endowment in its back pocket. This is what a more vulgar person than your author might call “fuck you” money. Sure, Johnson’s $250 million contribution to the school—Yale’s largest ever—was hardly insignificant in material terms, but compared to Yale’s endowment, it did not even constitute 1 percent. And no matter how much money was on the table, job one of any university president is to defend the right of faculty to determine the content of their courses, irrespective of attempts at outside interference. Yale President Peter Salovey failed in this fundamental responsibility. (To their respective credit, both Kennedy and Gaddis stood with Gage.)
In a letter to the university community, Salovey admitted that Gage “did experience more unsolicited input from donors than faculty members should reasonably be expected to accept.” He reported that he had “heard from many faculty members and alumni” who insisted that Yale needed to “take great care to ensure that gifts we receive do not infringe on the academic freedom of our faculty.” He also admitted that he “should have tried harder to improve the situation.” He did not, however, explain what had prevented him from doing so. His letter closed with a promise that in the future he would “ensure that faculty members are protected from any interference in shaping the curriculum and in setting the course for their research and scholarship.” I don’t know Salovey well enough to say whether the bad publicity this incident has cost him will be enough to ensure what he—to say nothing of other college presidents without $30 billion in their respective pockets—will do in the future. I do know one thing, however: Cancel culture works when it is backed by $250 million. It works so well, in fact, that almost nobody bothers to call it cancel culture.
I wrote quite critically of Professor Gaddis’s decades-in-the-making biography of George Kennan, here, and not long afterward, I wrote this little squib about a ceremony at Yale overseen by Gaddis (which I happened to attend), in which Kissinger was honored for screwing Harvard and giving his papers to Yale. I got into a small, (extremely polite) public discussion with Henry about human rights in China, during which I detected Professor Gaddis’s disapproval over the nature of my questioning. After the item appeared, however, he wrote me a gracious note disputing my belief that he had been “deeply unhappy” to see me—but in fact, the opposite was true.
I went long today. More music next week.
