As a new academic year begins at Harvard, professors may face many challenges, but adrenaline withdrawal usually isn't one of them.
One of the few scholars who has experienced this is political scientist Joseph Nye. For decades, he moved between academia, where he invented the concept of soft power, and government, working in the administrations of both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
Professor Nye, currently a professor emeritus at Harvard University, said: times higher education The biggest difference between the two worlds is time and power.
“In academia, time is a secondary issue, if at all,” he says.
“If you're writing a paper to send to a peer-reviewed journal, you want to get it right, even if you're publishing it next year instead of this year.
“Time is everything in government. If you're preparing a memo for the secretary of state before he meets with a foreign ambassador at 4 p.m….4:30 p.m. is an F.”
While serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Clinton Administration, Professor Nye visited 53 countries in 52 weeks while maintaining a schedule in Washington.
Although he had more time on his hands, his return to academia as dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004 presented its own challenges.
“One of the problems is adrenaline withdrawal,” said the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “When I returned to academia, my first reaction was a relaxed sense of relief, but after a few weeks I felt like a meeting about a new way of grading such and such a course was so much more than that.”Interesting.
“After a while, you start to miss the excitement of what you used to do.”
But Professor Nye acknowledged that the opportunity to discuss with academia, particularly intelligent graduate students, gave him a chance to better understand his ideas compared to the government's unrelenting schedule.
“Governments don't have time to think about ethics,” he says. “You're like drinking from a firehose with people flooding in with information, visits, testimonies, travel.”
Along with soft power, Professor Nye is also credited with co-founding the theory of neoliberalism, but he believes this is an oversimplification.
Professor Nye said academics can influence policy from outside the Washington bubble, either indirectly through their students or directly through the “trickle-down” effect of what they write.
In his new book, life in the american century, He writes that proposing policy ideas from outside government is like “dropping a penny into a deep well.”
One way to influence things from the outside is to work as a public intellectual. They write opinion pieces in newspapers, appear as pundits on television, and more recently, use social media to promote ideas without the need for peer review.
But as Professor Nye discovered when he was trying to oppose the invasion of Iraq, keeping the pennies dropping can be a frustrating task.
“When you're trying to influence things as a public intellectual, sometimes you hear a splash, but other times you're just joking,” he said.
He concluded that the most important way to influence policy was to be in government and “hold the levers,” but he said that would still draw on accumulated academic capital.
“I think the back and forth between government and academia is beneficial in both directions,” he added.
When Professor Nye worked for President Carter, he was in charge of nuclear nonproliferation policy, a title that meant people in the government wanted to attend his meetings.
This was partly due to the “academic capital” he had built up over his career, but also partly because they were drawn to and motivated by it.
“We found that a lot of things depend on charm to get things done. This ultimately led to what we call 'soft power,' the ability to get what you want through charm rather than correction or payment.” “It inspired me to create a term,” he said.
Professor Nye is interested in seeing how soft power theory, an analytical concept he outlined while working from his kitchen table in 1989, has become popular and twisted as it spreads in the outside world. He said he had.
Many commentators have treated the concept as any form of power other than military force, but Professor Nye says this is a careless interpretation.
“The analogy I use is that you can discipline your children when they are young and your ideas are new, but you can't really control them or your interactions with them as they grow older.
“That's strange. Google 'soft power' and you'll see millions of entries. I've never tried to assess how many people are using it accurately or inaccurately. In most cases, there's not much you can do about it. ”
patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com
