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ABSTRACT
The relationship between Strategic Studies and the American academy has always been a tenuous one. Tolerated when fully funded, the field quickly lost its place on campus when it failed to attract grant money. Only with the support of philanthropic foundations did it manage to gain a foothold in American universities. What emerges from our investigation is how the field has feasted during times when foundation money was available and suffered periods of famine when these funds were withdrawn. In addition, we show that during and immediately after the Cold War, the political interests of philanthropic foundations were broadly balanced. By contrast, over the last two decades, the field has been increasingly linked to financial support provided by politically right-leaning foundations. This is happening while funding from more centrist and left-leaning foundations has become much less prominent. When looking ahead at the field’s future health, we cannot but help be concerned about the implications of this development.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Francis J. Gavin, ‘Blame it on the Blob? How to evaluate American Grand Strategy’, War on the Rocks, August 21, 2020. Article available at: https://warontherocks.com/2020/08/blame-it-on-the-blob-how-to-evaluate-american-grand-strategy/. Accessed 4 February 2022.
2 Justin Logan, ‘In US Foreign Policy, Is It Time to Kill All the Lawyers?’, The National Interest, December 4, 2021. As Logan notes, the overwhelming majority of senior US foreign policy officials are lawyers.
3 Jeremy Youde, ‘The role of philanthropy in international relations’, Review of International Studies 45/1, 39–56.
4 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106/3 (1977), 49–50.
5 Robert O’Neill, ‘A Historical Perspective on International Security Analysis’, ITEMS 42/1–2 (1988), 15.
6 See, for instance: Katharina Rietzler, ‘Fortunes of a Profession: American Foundations and International Law, 1910–1939’, Global Society 28/1 (2014), 8–23.
7 Joan Roelofs, ‘How Foundations Exercise Power’, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74/4 (2015), 654–675; Donald Fisher, ‘The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundations and the Social Sciences’, Sociology 17/2 (1983), 206–233.
8 Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, ‘International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field’, International Security 12/4 (1988), 5–27. The authors note that their survey emerged from a Ford Foundation-sponsored conference in February 1987 on ‘The Past, Present and Future of International Security Studies’.
9 Kevin R. McClure, Leah Frierson, Adam W. Hall and Kara L. Ostlund, ‘Philanthropic Giving by Foundations to Higher Education Institutions: A State-Level Social Network Analysis’, Philanthropy & Education 1/1 (2017), 5.
10 McClure, Frierson, Hall and Ostlund (Citation2017).
11 Lawrence Freedman explained that the expansion of the Department of War Studies in the late 1980s was principally due to a change in UK Government policy that lifted the cap on student numbers, leading to an increase in teaching staff and a further expansion of the range of Master’s degrees. See: Lawrence Freedman, ‘Strategic Studies in Britain and the Cold War’s Last Decade’ in Daniel Marston and Tamara Leahy (eds) War, Strategy and History: Essays in Honour of Professor Robert O’Neill (ANU Press 2016).
12 Charles King, ‘The Decline of International Studies: Why Flying Blind Is Dangerous’, Foreign Affairs 94/4 (2015), 88–98.
13 Roger L. Geiger, ‘American Foundations and Academic Social Science, 1945–1960’, Minerva 26/3 (1988), 315–341. See also: Tim B. Mueller, ‘The Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science and the Humanities in the Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies 15/3 (2013), 108–135.
14 Francis Fukuyama, ‘How Academia Failed the Nation: The Decline of Regional Studies’, Saisphere, Winter 2004; Guido Franzinetti, ‘The Strange Death of Area Studies and the Normative Turn’, Quaderni storici 50/150 (3) (2015), 835–847.
15 Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Area and Regional Studies in the United States’, PS: Political Science and Politics 34/4 (2001), 789–791.
16 Brian J. Phillips, ‘How Did 9/11 Affect Terrorism Research? Examining Articles and Authors, 1970–2019’, Terrorism and Political Violence (2021).
17 Michael Krepon, ‘Time for a Big Philanthropic Bet’, Arms Control Wonk Blog, July 27, 2021.
18 For a discussion of this point in relation to the emerging field of ‘American studies’ in European universities, see: Walter Hölbling, ‘Coming into View: European Re-Visions of “America” after 1945’, American Studies International 3/2 (1999), 24–42.
19 Tom Bateman, ‘Security Studies: A Distinct Subfield?’ International Studies Notes 10/3 (1983), 16–19. Despite Bateman’s reference to ‘security studies’, the definition he provides essentially duplicates the essence of strategic studies.
20 Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers 1965), 8. The research for this book was funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, X.
21 Richard K. Betts, ‘Should Strategic Studies Survive?’, 10.
22 Edward A. Kolodziej, ‘Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector!’, International Studies Quarterly 36/4 (1992),437.
23 Ibid.
24 Strategic Studies is rarely used in the American academy. Instead, international security studies, national security affairs, defense studies, grand strategy and military studies are more common. In this study, however, we are using the term ‘Strategic Studies’ to refer to the inter-disciplinary study of the use, threat and control of military force in international affairs.
25 As Earle described the field: ‘Our job is to relate a study of military affairs to statecraft, and particularly to tie up military policies with foreign policies’. See: Record of a Conference on Military Studies Held Under the Auspices of the War Studies Committee of the Social Science Research Council at the Hotel Carlton, Washington DC, May 25, 1945, Edward Mead Earle papers 1894–1954, Princeton University Library.
26 Ekbladh, ‘The Interwar Foundations of Security Studies’, 40–53.
27 Edward Mead Earle, ‘The Princeton Program of Military Studies’, Military Affairs 6/1 (1942), 21.
28 See Earle’s comments in: ‘Record of a Conference on Military Studies’ cited in Fn 25.
29 Ekbladh, ‘The Interwar Foundations of Security Studies’, 41.
30 Ibid., 52–53.
31 ‘Record of a Conference on Military Studies’, 1945.
32 Ekbladh, ‘The Interwar Foundations of Security Studies’, 44.
33 Michael P. M. Finch, ‘Edward Mead Earle and the Unfinished Makers of Modern Strategy’, The Journal of Military History 80/3 (2016), 781–814; David Ekbladh, ‘Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression-Era Origins of Security Studies’, International Security 36/3 (2011/12), 107–141.
34 Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, 47.
35 For details, see: Frank N. Trager, ‘A Brief Survey of Contemporary National Security Studies in the United States’, Aambeeld: Opinieblad van die Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit, Kwartaalblad Jaargang 8/3 (September 1980), 15; Memo from Frederick Sherwood Dunn entitled: ‘The growth of the Yale Institute of International Studies’, November 7, 1950, Rockefeller Foundation Digital Archive.
36 Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, 40–41 and 118–119.
37 ‘Report on the Defense Policy Seminar 1959–1964’, Henry A. Kissinger papers, part II, Series I. Early Career and Harvard University, Box 129, Folder 1, Yale Digital Archive (YDA).
38 ‘Report on the Defense Policy Seminar 1959–1964’, YDA.
39 Letter from Alan Pifer to Henry Kissinger, December 13, 1963, Henry A. Kissinger papers, part II, Series I. Early Career and Harvard University, Box 129, Folder 1, YDA.
40 Letter from Henry Kissinger to Franklin L. Ford, 19 April 1965, Henry A. Kissinger papers, part II, Series I. Early Career and Harvard University, Box 129, Folder 1, YDA.
41 Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, notes that surveys from this period had identified relevant centers at: Berkeley, UCLA, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Stanford, Ohio State, Washington, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth and Wisconsin. Funding for these institutions derived mainly from politically centrist foundations. Absent from this list, however, are the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown, both of which received funds from politically conservative foundations. After 1967, New York University was also supported by the conservative-backed National Strategy Information Center. See 118–120.
42 Lyons and Morton, 4–5. As Betts further elaborated: ‘In the 1950s and 1960s the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Committee on National Security Research under William T. R. Fox built a network of academics. University programs sprang up at: Princeton’s Center of International Studies, where Klaus Knorr theorized about war potential, economic mobilization, and NATO strategy, and which produced works on deterrence by Glenn Snyder, William Kaufmann, and Herman Kahn; Columbia’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, which sponsored research by Kenneth Waltz, Samuel Huntington, Paul Hammond, Warner Schilling, and others on causes of war and defense policy-making; Ohio State’s Mershon Center, which supported not only mainstream research on security, but critics as well, such as Philip Green; Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, where Henry Kissinger continued to make his mark; and MIT’s Center of International Studies (and later its Defense and Arms Control Studies Program). See: ‘Should Strategic Studies Survive?’, 13.
43 Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2009), 120–121.
44 Gene M. Lyons, ‘The Growth of National Security Research’, The Journal of Politics 25/3 (1963), 504.
45 Trager, ‘A Brief Survey of Contemporary National Security Studies in the United States’, 16.
46 Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, 83–84.
47 Lyons, ‘The Growth of National Security Research’, p. 504; Eric Stevenson and John Teeple, ‘Ford Foundation: Research in Arms Control and Disarmament, 1960–1963’, September 30, 1963, I-23-24. Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, p. 142; Trager, ‘A Brief Survey of Contemporary National Security Studies in the United States’.
48 Steven and Teeple, ‘Ford Foundation’, I-1,2.
49 James Allen Smith, Strategic Calling: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1962–1992 (Washington, DC: CSIS 1993), 45.
50 Richard C. Snyder, ‘The Mershon Center at the Ohio State University’, PS, 12/4, (1979), 456–459.
51 Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy, 171.
52 Eric Stevenson and John Teeple, ‘Ford Foundation: Research in Arms Control and Disarmament, 1960–1963’, September 30, 1963, I-1, RAC.
53 Ibid., I-36.
54 Ibid., I-36. Two decades later, McGeorge Bundy would lament: ‘A very large part of what is done … is done within the government or with governmental funds, and, to put it gently, agencies of government do not always encourage or reward research findings they find unwelcome’. ‘MacArthur/Carnegie Group on International Security – Bundy’, 1984, Frank Sutton Papers, Series: 2 (Ford Foundation), Box: 36, Folder: 337, Rockeller Archive Center (RAC).
55 International Affairs Program Discussion Paper Concerning Proposed Arms Control Analyses Group in Washington D.C., August 1960, Ford Foundation, RAC.
56 Memo from Eric Stevenson to the International Affairs Program of the Ford Foundation, ‘Arms Control and Disarmament Research’, October 7, 1963, RAC.
57 Enid C. B. Schoettle, ‘Special Paper: FF Programs in International Security and Arms Control’, March 1979, Ford Foundation records, International Affairs records, Arms Control, 1969–1979, RAC.
58 ‘Ford Foundation Meeting on Arms Control and International Security’, July 31, 1974, RAC.
59 ‘Arms Control and International Security: A Need for University Centers?’, October 1972, Ford Foundation, p. I., Ford Foundation records, International Affairs records, Arms Control, 1969–1979 RAC.
60 Recommendations for a National Program in Support of Research and Training in Arms Control and Related Subjects, Report by an Ad Hoc Committee of Consultants: Carl Kaysen, Richard L. Garwin, Allen Whiting, Harold Feiveson, July 1973, Ford Foundation, 6, RAC.
61 ‘Arms Control and International Security: A Need for University Centers?’, 8, RAC.
62 ‘The Foundation’s Programs in Arms Control and International Security’, Information Paper, #002003, Ford Foundation, December 1972, Ford Foundation records, International Affairs records, Arms Control, 1969–1979, RAC.
63 Steven E. Miller, ‘International Security at Twenty-Five: From One World to Another’, International Security 26/1 (2001), 5–6. See also: https://www.belfercenter.org/about/overview/history.
64 The Ford Foundation also sponsored four non-US university centers: Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; the Universities of Aberdeen and Lancaster in the United Kingdom; the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Schoettle, ‘Special Paper’, 12–13.
65 Frank A. Blazich Jr., Fifty Years of Interdisciplinary Scholarship: A Brief History of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, February 2009, 13.
66 Stephen M. Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 35/2 (1991), 221.
67 Ibid., 230.
68 ‘Report to Congress on Arms Control Education and Academic Study Centers’, US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, January 1979 cited in Schoettle, ‘Special Paper’, 3–4.
69 Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, 211–213.
70 Ibid.
71 Nye and Lynn-Jones, ‘International Security Studies’, 20.
72 O’Neill, ‘A Historical Perspective on International Security Analysis’, 14.
73 ‘MacArthur/Carnegie Group on International Security – Bundy’, 1984.
74 Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Interdisciplinary Research and the Future of Peace and Security Studies’, Political Psychology 9/3 (1988), 507.
75 It was then replaced by a new program on ‘Cooperative Security’ that lasted until 2004, followed by the program ‘Preventing Deadly Conflict’, which lasted until 1997.
76 Patricia L. Rosenfield, A World of Giving: Carnegie Corporation of New York – A Century of International Philanthropy (New York: Public Affairs, 2014). See Chapter 7. At the time these grants were awarded, Joseph Nye, Graham Allison and Albert Carnesale ran the Harvard program, Alexander George and John Lewis were in charge of the Stanford program, and Jack Ruina led the Defense and Arms Control Studies Program at MIT.
77 Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, 221 Fn 24.
78 Robert Latham, ‘Moments of Transformation The SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Program in International Peace and Security on the Eve of its 10th anniversary’, Items 48/1 (March 1994); Kennette Benedict, ‘Funding Peace Studies: A Perspective from the Foundation World’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 504 (July 1989), 90–97.
79 Catherine McArdle Kelleher, ‘The Postwar Evolution of the Field of Strategic Studies: Robert O’Neill in Context’ in Daniel Marston and Tamara Leahy (eds), War, Strategy and History: Essays in Honour of Professor Robert O’Neill (ANU Press 2016), 100.
80 Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, 230. According to Walt, ‘Within the field, the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation are usually seen as left-wing in orientation, the Ford Foundation is centrist, and the Olin Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Scaife Foundation, and Smith-Richardson Foundation are seen as right-wing’. Fn. 44.
81 Enid C.B. Schoettle, The Ford Foundation’s Program in International Peace, Security and Arms Control, Paper prepared for the human Rights, Governance and International Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees, June 23, 1982, 19.
82 ‘Foundation has a Taste for Harvard, Conservatism’, Harvard Crimson, November 30, 1990.
83 Mitchel B. Wallerstein, ‘Whither the Role of Private Foundations in Support of International Security Policy’, The Nonproliferation Review (Spring 2002), 86.
84 Text available at: WHAT IS GRAND STRATEGY (indianstrategicknowledgeonline.com).
85 ‘MacArthur Announces New Initiative in International Peace and Security’, Press Release, July 22, 2002.
86 Beverly Gage, ´The Koch Foundation Is Trying to Reshape Foreign Policy. With Liberal Allies´, The New York Times, September 10, 2019.
87 Linda Kulman, Teaching Common Sense – The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University (New York: Prospecta Press 2015).
88 Amy Docker Marcus, ‘Where policy makers are born’, Wall Street Journal (December 20, 2008).
89 William Alden, ‘Mutual Fund Billionaire Gives $250 m to Yale’, The New York Times Blogs, September 13, 2013.
90 Aaron G. Jakes, ´A Yale program drew fire over donor meddling. Its real problem was promoting war´, The Washington Post, October, 11, 2021; Molly Worthen, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin 2006).
91 Kulman, Teaching Common Sense, quote found in the forward by Henry Kissinger.
92 Amy Docker Marcus, ‘Where policy makers are born’.
93 Rich Fink, ‘The Structure of Social Change’, Philanthropy Magazine, October 1996. Article available at: https://kochdocs.org/2019/08/19/1996-structure-of-social-change-by-koch-industries-executive-vp-richard-fink/. Accessed 23 February 2022.
94 Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of The Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs 2007), 410.
95 Ibid., 408–409.
96 Gage, ‘The Koch Foundation Is Trying to Reshape Foreign Policy’, 2019.
97 Ibid. As Gage observed: ‘The foreign policy scholars who have received Koch grants have used them not just to finance their own research but also, as at Harvard and MIT, to help fund campus programs and centers in the fields of “international security”, “strategic studies”, “statesmanship”, “grand strategy” and other variants of Great Power politics. … They generally espouse a “realist” perspective in their work’.
98 Jennifer Schuessler, ‘Leader of Prestigious Yale Program Resigns, Citing Donor Pressure’, New York Times, September 30, 2021. Article available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/arts/yale-grand-strategy-resignation.html. Accessed February 11, 2022.
99 Beverly Gage, ‘The Blob and the Mob: On Grand Strategy and Social Change’ in Elizabeth Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, Andrew Preston, Rethinking American Grand Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press 2021), 49–62.
100 Ibid., 49.
101 Schuessler, ‘Leader of Prestigious Yale Program Resigns’.
102 Susan Searls Giroux, ‘From the “Culture Wars” to the Conservative Campaign for Campus Diversity: or, how inclusion became the new exclusion’, Policy Futures in Education 3/4 (2005), 314–326.
103 Donald Alexander Downs, Ilia Murtazashvili, Arms and the University: Military Presence and Civic Education of Non-Military Students (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012), 382–383.
104 Rebecca Friedman Lissner, ‘What is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield’, Texas National Security Review 2/1 (November 2018), 52–73.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jeffrey H. Michaels
Dr. Jeffrey H. Michaels is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. Earlier experience included working as a Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London, as well as serving as an official with NATO and the US Defense Department. He also holds Visiting Fellowships with the Department of War Studies at King's and the Changing Character of War Centre, Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the co-author, with Sir Lawrence Freedman, of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (4th Edition).
Matthew C. Ford
Dr Matthew C. Fordb is an Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm. Matthew is the author of Weapon of Choice – small arms and the culture of military innovation and (with Andrew Hoskins) Radical War: data, attention and control in the 21 st century, both published by Oxford University Press.