By Patricia H. Kushlis
In a provocative Op Ed in The New York Times on April 27, 2009, Mark Taylor, Columbia University religion department chair, likened American graduate school education to Detroit. In the piece, he argued that “most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market.”
All too true in far too many cases.
Or the product simply does not have the skills needed to fulfill the realities of the market. Nevertheless, the student is too often encouraged by the graduate department or by his or her own wishful thinking to think otherwise.
Unless, of course, the graduate student wants to become a university professor and continue the tradition of writing articles couched in obscure jargon for publication in obscure journals that few practitioners read because they are unreadable and irrelevant in the real world. This at least is what I’ve observed over the years in the fields of political science and international relations. It’s the rare professor who has spent his or her entire life in academia who is capable of bridging the gap between theory and practice. This role is increasingly left to think-tanks and their versions of highly politicized policy studies where those out of government seek refuge until they can return to government once more.
The same problem is emerging in the newly minted “field” of public diplomacy – a hybrid “discipline” that draws upon the social sciences, journalism, foreign language and cultural expertise. Public diplomacy is foremost a skill, like it or not, that is most effectively learned from practitioners and best acquired on the job.
Elbow grease - not theorizing - is the key
David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times column that much of what is called intelligence or genius is, in reality, grounded in the hard work of practice. For Jane Austen fans, remember when Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice observed that she would be far more proficient at the piano if she practiced more? More practice with an experienced teacher, I’m sure, would also make me a better oboist, skier, photographer and writer.
To cede public diplomacy training to the theoreticians is not only a disservice to students but a vacuous undertaking that does not serve the country well.
The dilemma
Unfortunately, there haven’t been that many public diplomacy jobs available since the end of the Cold War. This means on-the-job training has been accessible to a shrinking few. The State Department – after its takeover of the US Information Agency in 1999 - has made a hash of public diplomacy for far too many reasons to recount here. This, in my view, is why others – from academia’s theoreticians to the lap top computer-toting information warfare savvy military - have stepped in and attempted unsuccessfully to address America’s-image-problem-void created by bad management at Foggy Bottom.
One outcome of State’s mismanagement is the increasing decline in the number of State Department public diplomacy specialists or more accurately people who have actually practiced public diplomacy long enough to practice it proficiently let alone know of what they speak.
A Dangerous Confusion
Meanwhile the military which became the largest beneficiary of State’s public diplomacy ineptitude has consistently confused public diplomacy with what it calls strategic communications. Strategic communications unfortunately includes a Genghis Khan type of PSYOPS that emphasizes the warfare nature of the beast – something that, in reality, is antithetical to public diplomacy.
Public diplomacy is, after all, about a government connecting openly with the people, primarily civilians, of other countries. Public diplomacy puts a country’s best foot forward, it makes the best case for a government’s policies and the country’s culture and values, but it does not do so by telling lies. PSYOPS, in contrast, is all about confusing and demoralizing an enemy. Lying and subterfuge are an integral part of the game.
How many of the 1,200 new positions which I understand the Obama administration expects to bring to the State Department in the coming year will be devoted to public diplomacy is a mystery to me but even in the best of times a numbers increase won’t initially matter much.
Neither the military nor the private sector can fill the gap
Not only will these new officers be marginally productive because they will lack not only the requisite learned-on-the-job expertise but they will spend their first several years stamping visas in a Consular Section – an experience that bears no relation whatsoever to acquiring the skills needed for public diplomacy.
I have to wonder, therefore, if the State Department and its endemic head-in-the-sand approach to public diplomacy shouldn’t also be seen as a kind of Detroit on the Potomac.
The problem, however, is that unlike the auto industry no competing institutions have produced the public diplomacy equivalent of Japan’s Toyota or Honda to step in and fill America's public diplomacy void.
If this were the private sector, one or more such institutions would already exist and be thriving. But this is a unique task for the civilian public sector. There are things the private sector can’t do alone. Public diplomacy is one of them. Since public diplomacy is foremost a government talking to foreigners most of whom are civilians, neither America’s private sector nor the Department of Defense can redress America’s serious Detroit-on-the-Potomac gap.