The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2014 43 out to the wider public and to catalyze a global dialogue among students, scholars and practitioners of diplomacy. Beyond the curricular and research agendas we are already pursuing on our campus, there are several avenues of potential collabora- tion. We could, for example, form a consortium of top-tier public policy schools, which would offer seri- ous academic training in diplomacy and statecraft. This could be done under contract to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute and listed as an FSI course—perhaps through its existing National Security Executive Leadership Seminar. The goal would not be to duplicate the FSI curriculum, but rather to focus on areas where public policy schools have a comparative advantage. A more ambitious model might “go global,” by partnering with leading public policy and international relations schools around the world so that American diplomats (and other foreign policy professionals) could study alongside their counterparts from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world, in seminars and workshops taught by an international faculty. There are, of course, obstacles to be overcome. But as the creator of the State Department’s yearlong master’s program for mid-career Foreign Service officers at Princeton University, a program that has been running successfully for 15 years now, I know that such obstacles can be overcome—as long as there are willing partners with sufficient imagination on both sides. n It is a strange irony that international relations scholars from around the world speak a common professional language— but their statesmen and diplomats do not.