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the Yale Herald facetiously writes that GS is “also known as ‘How to Rule the World: A Few Quick Tips.’”16
But the Brady-Johnson Program doesn’t offer quick tips. Or quick anything. The course emphasizes students’ ability to speak and think on their feet and to understand how parts relate to the whole. They are asked to consider how lessons of the past—successes and failures—may apply to the present and the future. Instead of handing out easy answers, GS inures students to uncertainty, based on the understanding that decisions, particularly in positions of responsibility, almost always have to be made before all of the facts can be gathered. We’re trying “to equip young people to deal with the unforeseen,” Gaddis said. “There’s no way that we can predict what they’ll be doing or what problems they’ll be confronting.”17 And as Brady and Johnson recognized, common sense must be at the core of such preparation. It’s “like oxygen,” Gaddis remarked. “The higher you get the thinner it becomes.”18
In its sixteenth year, the Grand Strategy Program is as recognizable to Yalies as the letter Y and the school’s bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. High school students often hear about the program even before they apply to Yale. Along with cultivating leadership skills the Brady-Johnson Program offers students a worldview. Many of the approximately five hundred women and men who have completed the program and are ascending the ladders of government, nonprofits, the US military, universities, and the corporate sector describe it as one of their most formative Yale classes—influencing them not just professionally, as might be expected, but also, personally. As Christopher Wells (GS ’02) said: “For me, [GS] is a fundamental part of my mind and personality—it shapes my interpretation of most events I experience in my life.”19 Alumni single out the program’s rare combination of theory and practice, with some calling for even more “real-world immersion,”20 such as more elaborate crisis simulations.
Ironically this is one of the aspects that often draws criticism from academics outside the program, who view GS as being too vocational. They take a church and state approach, believing that scholars should study and interpret the great thinkers but not extrapolate policy or strategy from them. Practical applications are the job of people in government and think tanks, they say. In a 2013 interview in his office, then Yale president Richard Levin weighed this argument: “We don’t have business courses, we have economics courses, [which] is a more rigorous approach to how the economy works. Sure, many of those people go on to business careers. But they’re not learning finance, accounting, marketing tools the way you would in a first-year business-school curriculum. So the argument would be, why are we giving people preprofessional training in statecraft of diplomacy?”
Levin continued: “I think that the intellectual content of [the Grand Strategy course] is very high. It’s not doing something vocational, it’s learning about it, and it’s learning about it by juxtaposing the great classics of political thought with the practical realities of contemporary diplomacy.”21
Yale’s current president, Peter Salovey, approached this question from a different angle: not whether GS is too vocational but in what ways it embodies the values of a liberal arts education. “When you talk to people recruiting for banks, for policy positions, for NGOs, but even in tech, they often say, ‘We want students who can think clearly, think creatively, think critically, communicate clearly in writing and in the spoken word, who can work as part of a team, who can collaborate,’” he explained in a 2015 interview. “Often specific technical knowledge can be learned on the job, but these general skills are very hard to learn on the job. They have to be nurtured, and often the best way to nurture them is through a great liberal arts education. The Grand Strategy program . . . because of the nature of the subject matter as well as the style of teaching and because it’s interdisciplinary is a great basis for learning all of the skills I just ticked off . . . It’s not just the content but the way in which the education is delivered. As an educator, I’m with John Dewey in that the process of getting a great liberal arts education is the education and that the packets of content are just the vehicle by which we [substantiate] that process.”22
With the recent creation of a Brady-Johnson professorship in grand strategy, the program is at a major turning point. Grand strategy has always been the realm of history scholars and international relations practitioners, both at Yale and more broadly. But in January 2016 Elizabeth Bradley, director of the Yale Global Health Initiative who founded a version of GS in the School of Public Health, became the professorship’s first chairholder, also succeeding Gaddis as GS director. “We want this to evolve, bringing along the very best of what has been achieved but modernizing it so it stays current and flexible for developing students’ critical thinking and leadership for a wider set of global problems,” Bradley said of the seminar whose intellectual roots date back to Thucydides’s time.23
Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill, each in their seventies, are by far GS’s largest draw, and, according to students and alumni, often what they remember most about their years at Yale. Nicholas Shalek (GS ’05), who took GS as an undergrad, described the course as “an unparalleled opportunity to get exposure to three of Yale’s most accomplished professors.”1 A student who enrolled in GS during law school said, “I had studied [with] Professor Gaddis in college and hoped to enjoy the privilege of learning from him.”2 Jared Jonker (GS ’12), who took GS while working on a dual masters degree in international relations and a business degree at the Yale School of Management, commented that GS “was honestly part of what made me choose Yale over Harvard for my graduate work. The classroom promised a dynamism rarely found even at Yale.”3
John Gaddis, a Texan who favors tweed jackets and sensible shoes, is the world’s preeminent Cold War scholar, a 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient, and the author of ten books. His 1982 Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy is the seminal text on the post–World War II strategy formulated by George Kennan, the first director of policy planning in George Marshall’s State Department. On the April 2012 afternoon that Gaddis was scheduled to lead the GS class on the Cold War, he got word that he’d been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for George F. Kennan: An American Life, a biography three decades in the making. The students gave him a raucous standing ovation, applauding until Gaddis abruptly turned off the spotlight. “All right,” he said, “enough of that,” and got back to the day’s planned seminar.4
Excitable, slightly rumpled, and sounding like a don from Oxford, where he received his graduate education, Kennedy has an electric presence in the classroom. As one student said, “The silence . . . while Professor Paul Kennedy was speaking was the deepest I’ve ever (not) heard.”5 In 2014 he received the Hattendorf Prize for Distinguished Original Research in Maritime History, the most prestigious award in the field given to scholars by the US Naval War College. Kennedy is also the author or editor of nineteen books, including his best known, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, published in 2013.
Hill, who was posted to Hong Kong in the Foreign Service and then moved on to Vietnam and Israel, worked as a senior adviser to Kissinger and George Shultz at the State Department in Washington, and later for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the United Nations. Opinionated