The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015

12 MAY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Foreign Service Feeder Schools A FSA is very interested in under- standing and distilling the demo- graphics of the Foreign Service. We keep close tabs on specialist/generalist numbers, cone and backstop designa- tions, gender and ethnicity ratios, and share many of these details on the AFSA website at www.afsa.org/statistics. Until recently, we did not have a good sense of which institutions of higher education produce the highest numbers of Foreign Service members. In close col- laboration with the Department of State’s Bureau of Human Resources, AFSA was able to produce the infographic you see on this page. (Our wonderful online com- munications specialist, Jeff Lau, designed the infographic.) The old “pale, male and Yale” image no longer holds, according to these num- bers. In fact, Yale doesn’t crack the top 10 today. The fact that Georgetown Univer- sity holds the #1 spot is perhaps no rev- elation, but we were pleasantly surprised TALKING POINTS to see that a number of state schools are high on the list, as is Brigham Young Uni- versity. (Note that the data is not granular enough to discern nuances; for instance, if one person received a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the same institution, it counts three times.) This information was clearly of inter- est to our members and others—the chart quickly became the most popular social media posting in AFSA’s history. The schools on the list seemed particu- larly interested in sharing it. (Imagine!) We are working with the Office of Human Capital and Talent Manage- ment at USAID to put together a similar infographic about our development col- leagues, and hope to share it soon. —Asgeir Sigfusson, Director of New Media Arab Spring, Arab Winter? T he embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, is the third U.S. mission to close in “Arab Spring” countries in the past three years (the embassy in Syria was closed in Feb- ruary 2012 and one in Libya in July 2014). At the State Department press brief- ing following the announcement of the embassy’s closure, one reporter asked, “Is the U.S. being run out of town in the Arab world?” While perhaps an uncharitable question, the reporter is not the first to draw this conclusion. In an opinion piece published in the English-language Al Arabiya on Feb. 12, Joyce Karam, the Al-Hayat Newspa- per’ s Washington correspondent, wrote: “Evacuating and closing U.S. embas- sies has become a hallmark of the ‘Arab Spring’ since the street demonstrations broke out in 2011.” The Arab Spring and the Iraq war, she writes, “unleashed a Pandora’s box of extremism and military strife across the broader Middle East” that gives the “upper hand” to militias over central govern- ments. When Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010, setting off the massive protests and uprisings that would bring down the reign of autocrat Zine el-Abedin Ben Ali, few expected the movement to spread throughout the region the way it did, to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria. Each of these states has had varying degrees of success in ushering in new gov- ernance. “There was the hope four years ago that we were seeing the beginning of a democratic transition that was spreading across the region,” said MatthewWax- man, a Columbia Law School professor of international law and national security law, speaking on “The Charlie Rose Show” on Jan. 27. Waxman noted that in some Arab Spring countries, there wasn’t “enough of a basic infrastructure of a state to govern effectively,” after the initial uprisings. “When that happens, people are going to JEFFLAU