Foreign policy program churns out Bush 'acolytes'
A foreign policy program based outside Washington with close ties to former Bush administration officials is making a name for itself producing "acolytes" of the president's foreign policy, Bloomberg News reports.
The Defense and Strategic Studies program at Missouri State University is "outside the academic mainstream, but within the policy mainstream," Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor, told Bloomberg. Its scholars are quicker than their counterparts at other schools to favor aggressive military policies, according to Jarvis, who specializes in foreign policy decision-making.
The program, based in Fairfax, Va., competes for students with established foreign policy powerhouses like the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
The school's director, Keith Payne, worked under Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, and its faculty includes former Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph, who advised Bush to leave the anti-ballistic missile treaty, Bloomberg reported.
"I honestly don't believe the program is ideological," Payne told Bloomberg, noting at least three faculty members served under President Bill Clinton.
The program includes classes on "Space and Information Warfare," "International Terrorism and Security," and "The Rise of the United States to Preeminence," according to its Web site.
EXCERPTS FROM BLOOMBERG NEWS:
Some better-known defense-policy programs -- including those at Stanford, Harvard and Cornell universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- began with money from the Ford Foundation in the 1970s, and tended to emphasize arms- control negotiations with the Soviet Union.
The Missouri program dates from the 1970s too, but it was founded by William Van Cleave, now 71, a defense expert who took a skeptical line toward arms talks and served as the head of President Ronald Reagan's defense transition team after the 1980 election. Van Cleave, then on the faculty of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, brought the program with him when he moved to Missouri in 1989.
`A Variety of Ideas'
(Dean of Missouri State's College of Humanities and Public Affairs Lorene) Stone, who hired Payne in 2005 as department chief, said he has complied with her request to offer "a variety of ideas and perspectives." Assertions that the defense-studies program is hawkish were "truer in the past" than now, she said in an interview.
Payne, who was Rumsfeld's top official in charge of nuclear weapons strategy in 2002 and 2003, describes the school's aim as hands-on preparation for government work. The pitch appeals to prospective students: Enrollment is expected to be about 60 in September, up from 32 when the program moved to Virginia two years ago.
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