More than Dostoevsky
QUOTE/OMOUOTE "I knew this was the path I wanted. Despite doing everything possible to convince myself otherwise, putting in my time is what my gut told me I need to do—for both selfish and idealistic reasons." —WAR AND PEACE FELLOW MATTHEW MCKNIGHT '05, WHO WILL BE COMMISSIONED AS A MARINE OFFICER THE DAY BEFORE GRADUATION
WHEN GOVERNMENT PROFESSOR Allan Stam learned two years ago that he was to be the new coordinator of the Dickey Center's War and Peace Studies Program, the first question he asked associate dean Mike Mastanduno was, "Where's the operating manual?" "There isn't one," Mastanduno replied.
Founded in the late 1960s by renowned professor emeritus Elise Boulding, then a visiting lecturer who went on to become a Nobel Prize-nominated icon of the peace movement and remains very active, Dartmouth's War and Peace Studies Program has always been more organic than structured. Under no department and offering no major—it is now an interdisciplinary minor—it was without a home before the Dickey Center was created in 1982 and took it in.
Stam, recruited in 2000 from the political science department at Yale, says he found a well-funded but totally ad hoc program when he took over. "People were using it to get speakers onto campus that their own department budgets wouldn't allow," he says. The former U.S. Special Forces communications specialist worked with students in the War and Peace Fellows Program to institute a set of bylaws and formal rules.
The not-for-credit fellows program seeks "students from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities to engage each other, Dartmouth faculty and outside guests in an ongoing discussion of the social, political, moral and technological dimensions of international conflict and cooperation," as spelled out on the Dickey Center Web site. It's now a student-run organization with 40 to 50 applicants for 15 slots. Program activities include a discussion group that gathers weekly to discuss movies and world events and to plan a "culminating experience" that includes private meetings with journalists, scholars, NGO executives and military and government leaders.
In May the fellows will be part of an exercise at the National Strategic Gaming Center in Washington, D.C. They'll get private tours of the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency, complete with a lunch briefing by an officer attached to the Iraq working group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They will also discuss humanitarian intervention in crisis situations with Jana Mason of the International Rescue Committee and attend a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations called "The Making of National Security Policy: Dartmouth Young Professionals in Foreign Policy." On the panel will be former War and Peace fellows Josh Marcuse '04 and Claire Superfine '04 and three of their classmates.
