Fort McNair, Washington, DC –
The partnership between the State Department and NDU has an important history, and an equally important future, writes NDU's 16th President VADM Fritz Roegge in the July/August issue of Foreign Service Journal.
One initiative introduced this year incorporates the State Department's participation in the annual NDU Scholars Program. Incoming AY 2019 NDU students will have the opportunity to propose their own innovative strategies for a way forward on a "wicked problem" suggested by State for student thesis work. In this way, the university's partnership with State incorporates "real-world problems into the curriculum," making the educational experiences of both military and diplomatic students "even more relevant and meaningful," and producing useful results for policymakers, says Roegge.
NDU's partnership with State began in 1946, when Ambassador George Kennan served as the first deputy commandant and international adviser at the National War College. Throughout the years, the State Department has made invaluable contributions to preparing NDU's military and civilian students to become strategic thinkers and to serve as national security leaders.
NDU's State Department students "bring to each discussion a diversity of experience and perspective that exposes us all to a wide range of viewpoints and provides an increased awareness of the uses of all the instruments of national power," Roegge writes. Such diversity of thought is important in both the classroom and the real world "because the ways in which the United States and our partners work together to improve security are joint, interagency and international," he notes in the article.
Five ambassadors and 62 other State Department and USAID personnel were assigned to NDU as students, faculty and senior leaders in AY 2018. See the link below for the full Foreign Service Journal article.