The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 27 Who is a diplomat in today’s world? The di erences between the academic’s and the practitioner’s approach to teaching diplomacy point to some answers. BY DONNA MAR I E OGL ESBY Donna Marie Oglesby spent more than 25 years as a Foreign Service o cer with the United States Information Agency, serving in ai- land, Paraguay, El Salvador, Austria, Brazil andWashington, D.C. She capped her career by serving as USIA counselor, the agency’s highest-ranking career position. While in the Service, she received the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange Award for Outstanding Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Public Diplomacy. Since retiring from the Foreign Service, Ms. Oglesby has taught at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her articles on diplomacy have been published by the United States Institute of Peace, e Foreign Service Journal , e SAIS Review and USC’s CPD Perspectives. T he concept of diplomacy has long lacked cultural resonance in the United States. e late R. Smith Simpson, a career U.S. Foreign Service o cer credited with stimulating the creation of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in 1978, was said to have been an “absolute pit bull” on making the intricacies of diplomacy a key component of the curriculum. He left ISD in 1992, when the curriculum strayed from that objective. “Diplomacy was a neglected eld. It wasn’t sexy,” Dean Peter Krogh noted at the time of Simpson’s death. “Everyone wants to talk about what we want to do in the world; not a lot want to talk about how to get it done.” at is still true today. Diplomacy has been squeezed out of the course catalogs in American higher education by the two master frames driving American views of how to deal with the world: defend against it, or transform it. Americans are far less interested in managing international relations through perpetual systemic engagement. ey want either to avoid or to x problems, transcending the never-ending compromises of diplomacy, which seem to many both old-world and old-hat. Yet, while they are few and far between, courses on diplo- macy do exist. After an extensive search in 2013, I found and reviewed more than 60 diplomacy course syllabi, with a subset on public diplomacy, and conducted lengthy interviews with a majority of the teachers. e courses are found occasionally in DIPLOMACY EDUCATION Unzipped FOCUS ON TEACHING DIPLOMACY departments of international relations and history, most often in member institutions of the Association of Professional Schools of International A airs, and they are taught by both academics and practitioners (mostly retired FSOs). Course content varies widely, based on the personal experiences and the disciplines of those teaching. I could not nd a common core. Whereas academics traditionally teach an understanding of what the international institution of diplomacy is and how it changes over time, FSOs emphasize how American foreign affairs institutions are organized, how foreign policy is deter- mined and conducted, and what the speci cs of foreign policies are. But beyond that distinction, I found greater patterns of di erence between courses designed by academics and those created by American practitioners than would be expected from a close reading of the literature on the gap between international