The Foreign Service Journal, September 2018

44 SEPTEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL How do we find them, keep them, grow them? I recently attended a retirement ceremony for one of our most senior and respected officers. He addressed this question, not in terms of the official “competencies” but in terms of “core principles,” which came down to knowledge, ideas, impact and integrity, along with a pas- sion to serve. Who Are They? In the decade and a half since I left the Service, I have under- taken a wholly unscientific study of those we seek to recruit and those who seek to serve. In more than 15 years, including 18 months as a diplomat in residence at the University of California Santa Barbara and a writ for the entire state, I have met hundreds of students, former military members, lapsed lawyers and others interested in careers with the Department of State. While my work has been primarily at schools along the east coast, with travel to institutions well beyond that, the students themselves come from across the country. They come from geo- graphically diverse undergraduate institutions and represent the best of this diverse experiment called America. My “study” has spanned three administrations and several Secretaries of State. Granted, there was no control group. I have not spent compara- ble time with those who have no interest, not even idle curiosity, in the department. They may come to an information session, but there is no follow-up. Who, then, are these people who want to join our ranks? The simple answer: they are overwhelmingly millennials. This technically accurate term for those born roughly between 1981 and 1996, however, is a distorting generalization—reductionism, in the jargon of the academic world—and one that millennials themselves find disparaging, conjuring up images of entitled, gadget-addicted, avocado toast-eating snowflakes, unable to make a commitment and more than a little whiny. While I’m certain there are some who fit this profile, the stereotype misses the unique realities of these remarkable people. They do share some common world views shaped by shared world events. Like most coming-of-age adults, they believe the world began the day they became politically aware; still, there is little naiveté about the world in which they grew up. They are of the post-9/11 world. My most recent test sub- jects—otherwise known as undergraduates—were still in diapers at the time of the attack. They are a generation that has known nothing but endless and inconclusive wars. They are also the generation for whommass school shootings and lockdowns are all too common. They understand the world can be a dangerous and sometimes hostile place. For them, the Soviet Union and the threats of the Cold War era are so far back in the rearviewmirror as to be meaningless. This generation understands the dangers posed by serving their country abroad. Those we seek to recruit and need to retain are not put off by the challenges of living abroad. Such challenges are to them a given. They have firsthand memories of the Great Recession. They saw within their own families the betrayal of promises made by employers to lifelong employees, homes lost, and retirements deferred. They are less likely to assume that there is a reciprocal set of obligations between employer and employee and, thus, less likely to think of any career as forever. That trust has been broken. They have grown up in a world where established institutions are suspect if not discredited. Diversity and Entrepreneurship Millennials have come of age in an increasingly diverse America and are aware of and connected to this diverse world. A security clearance investigator askedme if my student “knew any foreign- ers,” and was explicit that he saw that possibility as a bad thing. One does not laugh in that circumstance; it may hurt the student seeking clearance. But the reality onmost campuses, especially in schools of public policy, international relations or the like, is that a sizable percentage of students and faculty will not be native-born Americans, andmay very well be non-white and non-male. The old “male, pale and Yale” no longer exists—not even at Yale. These aspiring members of State, like their classmates and professors, may be immigrants, first-generation Americans. Others will be international students on academic exchange programs. They are or have friends who are LGBTQ, and friends who are Dreamers. Diversity of all sorts is the norm, not the exception. The schools and professions fromwhich we seek to find the next generation of civil servants and FSOs are now at least half women (though this is less so for military veterans coming in, Too often the repairs at State focus on the wiring diagrams; too infrequently on the mission, the funding and, most important, the people.