The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) is a division of Johns Hopkins University based in Washington, D.C., United States, with campuses in Bologna, Italy; and Nanjing, China. It is generally considered one of the top graduate schools for international relations in the world. The institution is devoted to the study of international affairs, economics, diplomacy, and policy research and education.
Among the political scientists and economists based here are former World Bank chief economist Anne Krueger; and military historian and former counselor of the U.S. Department of State Eliot Cohen. Its students are selected from a large pool of applicants from all parts of the world.
The SAIS Washington D.C. campus is located on Massachusetts Avenue's Embassy Row, just off Dupont Circle and across from the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and next to the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute. The school is a preeminent center for public debate in international affairs, hosting world leaders on a regular basis.
History
Tour of SAIS DC - Rebekah Lipsky, a second-year master's candidate, leads us on a tour of SAIS DC and talks about her experiences in Bologna and Washington.
The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) was founded in 1943 by Paul H. Nitze and Christian Herter as a standalone graduate school and became part of The Johns Hopkins University in 1950. The school was established during World War II by a group of statesmen who sought new methods of preparing men and women to cope with the international responsibilities that would be thrust upon the United States in the postwar world.
The founders assembled a faculty of scholars and professionals (often borrowed from other universities) to teach international relations, international economics, and foreign languages to a small group of students. The curriculum was designed to be both scholarly and practical. The natural choice for the location of the school was Washington, D.C., a city where international resources are abundant and where American foreign policy is shaped and set in motion. When the school opened in 1944, 15 students were enrolled.
In 1955 the school created the Bologna Center in Italy, the first full-time graduate school located in Europe under an American higher-education system. By 1963 Johns Hopkins SAIS outgrew its first quarters on Florida Avenue and moved to one of its present buildings on Massachusetts Avenue. In 1986, the Hopkinsâ€"Nanjing Center was created in Nanjing, China, completing the school's global presence.
Organization and academic programs
Johns Hopkins SAIS is a global school with campuses in three continents. It has nearly 700 full-time students in Washington, D.C.; 190 full-time students in Bologna, Italy; and about 160 full-time students in Nanjing, China. Of these, 60 percent come from the United States and 37 percent from more than 70 other countries. Around 50% are women and 22% are from U.S. minority groups. SAIS Europe is home to the Bologna Center and the only full-time international relations graduate program in Europe that operates under an American higher-education system, and the Hopkinsâ€"Nanjing Center, which teaches courses in both Chinese and English, is jointly administered by Johns Hopkins SAIS and Nanjing University.
The school offers multidisciplinary instruction leading to the degrees of master of arts for early and mid-career professionals, as well as a doctor of philosophy program. Approximately 300 students graduate from the Washington, D.C., campus each year from the two-year master of arts program in international relations and international economics. Unlike most other international affairs graduate schools that offer professional master's degrees, Johns Hopkins SAIS requires its master of arts candidates to fulfill the International Ecopass a one-hour capstone oral examination synthesizing and integrating knowledge from the student's regional or functional concentration and international economics. The oral examination and international economics requirements of the master of arts curriculum have been the signature aspects of the school's education.
Reputation
A study conducted in 2005 examined graduate international relations programs throughout the United States, interviewing over a thousand professionals in the field, with the results subsequently published in the Foreign Policy magazine. 65 percent of respondents named Johns Hopkins Universityâ€"SAIS as the best terminal master's program in international relations. SAIS received the most votes, followed by Georgetown University (Walsh), Harvard University (Kennedy), Tufts University (Fletcher), and Columbia University (SIPA). The latest edition of the study was produced in 2014, with the master's program at SAIS ranking second globally after Georgetown (Walsh).
Since 1990, SAIS and the Fletcher School have been the only nonlaw schools in the United States to participate in the prestigious Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. Competing against full-time law students, SAIS generalists have performed very well. SAIS has twice placed second overall out of 12 schools and advanced to the "final four" in its region. In head-to-head competitions, SAIS has defeated elite law schools such as Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Maryland.
SAIS students have also demonstrated their versatility by successfully competing in the Sustainable Innovation Summit Challenge hosted by the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. Two different SAIS teams won first place in both 2007 and 2008, besting teams of MBA students from some of the world's top business schools.
A joint team from SAIS and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business received second place in the first "Global Challenge" competition, a first-of-its-kind competition that challenged teams of MBA and other graduate students to develop a publicâ€"private venture to support development and the tourism industry in Asia. The competition was organized in 2010 by the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Annual themes
From 2005â€"2012, Johns Hopkins SAIS dedicated a substantive theme for each academic year in order to encourage its students, faculty, academic programs, policy centers, and alumni to examine the role of the particular theme within international affairs. These specific themes provided opportunities for the school to review scholarship and exchange views through special lectures, conferences, and guest speakers. The school hosted public events during the following themes of Energy (2005â€"06), China (2006â€"07), Elections and Foreign Policy (2007â€"08), Year of Water (2008â€"09), Religion (2009â€"10), Demography (2010â€"11), and Agriculture (2011â€"12) and enhanced its fundraising with high-profile public events such as the lecture delivered by thenâ€"vice president of BP, Nick Butler, during The Year of Energy in 2005.
Child Protection Project
In June 2009 The Protection Project at SAIS partnered with the Koons Family Institute of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC), creating the Child Protection Project, to draft a model law focusing on the issues of child protection; in particular: "neglect, abuse, maltreatment, and exploitation". The primary objectives of the Child Protection Project are to "research existing child protection laws in the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN); convene a series of regional expert working group meetings to establish a common definition for 'child protection'; create a database of national legislation and case law on child protection issues from around the world; and draft, publish, and globally disseminate model child protection legislation".
The drafting process included six expert group meetings, held in Singapore, Egypt, Costa Rica, Spain, Turkey, and the U.S. The final version of the Child Protection Model Law was published in January 2013. It was presented to the members of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child during its 62nd Session in Geneva, Switzerland, in January 2013. It was also presented before the 129th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in Geneva in October 2013. Accompanying the Child Protection Model Law, ICMEC and The Protection Project published a companion "100 Best Practices in Child Protection" guide in 2013.
Research centers
Publications
In addition to the different books and periodicals edited by SAIS programs or research centers, several school-wide publications are to be mentioned:
- 38 North â€" A blog maintained by the U.S.-Korea Institute about North Korean affairs
- SAIS Review â€" A journal on leading contemporary issues of world affairs, founded in 1956
- SAIS Observer â€" A student-written, student-run newspaper founded in 2002, the official student newspaper of the global SAIS community
- SAIS Reports â€" A newsletter that highlights new faculty, research institutes, academic programs, student and alumni accomplishments, and events at the school, published bimonthly from September through May
- SAIS Europe Journal of Global Affairs (formally the Bologna Center Journal of International Affairs) â€" A student-run journal on scholarly contributions to international relations, published online and annually as a print version
- Centerpiece â€" The alumni newsletter of the Nanjing Center
- Working Paper Series â€" A series of papers managed by the PhD students
Notable alumni
Johns Hopkins SAIS has nearly 17,000 alumni working around the world in approximately 140 countries. Over 130 SAIS graduates have become ambassadors for various countries.
- Mahamat Ali Adoum â€" Former Foreign Affairs minister, Chad's Ambassador to the United Nations
- Madeleine Albright â€" Former U.S. Secretary of State (attended SAIS, but did not earn degree)
- Peter F. Allgeier â€" Deputy U.S. Trade Representative (2001â€"09) and former acting U.S. Trade Representative
- Mark Andersen â€" Washington D.C. based activist and author. Co-founded punk activist group Positive Force and senior citizen support and advocacy organization We are Family.
- Cresencio S. Arcos â€" U.S. Ambassador to Honduras (1989â€"93), Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (1993â€"95), and Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for International Affairs (2003â€"06)
- Nancy Birdsall â€" Founding President of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.
- Robert O. Blake, Jr. â€" U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia (2013â€"present), former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs (2009â€"13), former U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives (2006â€"09)
- Wolf Blitzer â€" CNN journalist and television news anchor
- Adam Boulton â€" Sky News political editor
- Jeremy Bowen â€" BBC journalist and presenter
- Gayleatha B. Brown â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Benin and current Ambassador designee to Burkina Faso
- R. Nicholas Burns â€" Former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and Greece
- James Cason â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay
- Herman Jay Cohen â€" U.S. diplomat, former Ambassador to various countries in Africa
- Cui Tiankai â€" People's Republic of China's Ambassador to the United States of America, former Vice Foreign Minister
- Jean-Maurice Dehousse â€" Former Belgian Minister-President of the Wallonia region, Former Mayor of Liege
- Anne E. Derse â€" U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania, SAIS '81
- John Caspar Dreier â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States
- Hermann Eilts â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, worked with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat throughout the Camp David Accords
- Jessica Einhorn â€" former Dean of SAIS, member of the Board of Directors of Time Warner, former Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former Managing Director of the World Bank
- Robert Stephen Ford â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Algeria and Syria
- Jeffrey Garten â€" Former U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, and former Dean of the Yale School of Management
- Timothy F. Geithner â€" Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- April Glaspie â€" American diplomat, first woman to be appointed U.S. Ambassador to an Arab country, best known as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in the runup to the 1991 Gulf War
- Gabriel Guerra-Mondragón â€" U.S. Ambassador to Chile (1994â€"98)
- Geir H. Haarde â€" Former Prime Minister of Iceland (2006â€"2009)
- John J. Hamre â€" President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense
- John E. Herbst â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and Uzbekistan, current Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization as a career member of the Senior Foreign Service
- John J. Hicks â€" Intelligence officer, second Director of National Photographic Interpretation Center
- James Howard Holmes â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Latvia
- Hans Hoogervorst â€" Netherlands former Minister of Public Health, former Minister of Finance
- Tracey Ann Jacobson â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan and Tajikistan
- Angela Kane â€" UN Undersecretary General for Management
- Malcolm H. Kerr â€" American University of Beirut President and Academic, assassinated
- Bert Koenders â€" Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Former Special Representative of the UN for Mali and Côte d'Ivoire
- Anthony Kuhn â€" NPR Correspondent in Beijing, China, Hopkins-Nanjing Center Certificate '92
- Lousewies van der Laan â€" Former leader of Democrats 66 in the House of Representatives of the Netherlands
- Frank Lavin â€" U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore
- Jim Leach â€" Chairman of National Endowment for the Humanities, former U.S. Representative from Iowa, former Chair of U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, former faculty and trustee at Princeton University
- Lee Tae-sik â€" Former Republic of Korea's Ambassador to the United States
- Samuel W. Lewis â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and U.S. Ambassador at the Camp David Accord talks in 1978
- Dennis P. Lockhart â€" President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
- Gabriel Silva Luján â€" Colombia's twice Ambassador to the United States, and Minister of Defence
- Peter Magowan â€" Former owner of the San Francisco Giants and former CEO of Safeway (attended SAIS, but did not earn degree)
- Sir David Manning â€" British Ambassador to Israel (1995â€"1998), Foreign Policy Adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (2001â€"2003), British Ambassador to the United States (2003â€"2007)
- John E. McLaughlin â€" Former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
- Christopher Meyer â€" British Ambassador to the United States during the Second Gulf War
- Ana Belen Montes â€" Spy for Cuba working at the Defense Intelligence Agency and arrested in 2001
- Loretta Napoleoni â€" Bestselling author of Terror Incorporated and Insurgent Iraq. She is an expert on financing of terrorism and advises several governments on counter-terrorism
- Pat O'Brien â€" Television personality
- John E. Osborn â€" Former commissioner, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy; affiliate faculty in law and international studies, University of Washington; senior executive with life sciences companies Cephalon and Onyx Pharmaceuticals
- Suyoi Osman â€" Bruneian Health Minister
- Claudio Pacifico â€" Italian diplomat, Italian Ambassador to Egypt
- Ronald D. Palmer â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia
- Gerhard Pfanzelter â€" Secretary General of the CEI, Former Permanent Representative of Austria to the UN, Ambassador of Austria to Syria, Senegal, Gambia, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Mauritania
- Nicholas Platt â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Philippines, and Zambia; former President of the Asia Society
- Charles P. Ries â€" U.S. Minister for Economic Affairs and Coordinator for Economic Transition in Iraq (2007â€"08), U.S. Ambassador to Greece (2004â€"07)
- Marcie Berman Ries â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Albania, Former U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria
- Jauhar Saleem â€" Pakistani diplomat
- Arturo Sarukhán â€" Mexico's Ambassador to the United States
- David Shear â€" U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam (2011â€"present)
- Kevin Sieff â€" Africa Bureau Chief at The Washington Post, former Afghanistan Bureau Chief (2012â€"14)
- Bandar bin Sultan â€" Saudi Arabia's former Ambassador to the United States
- Levi Tillemann â€" Advisor to the Department of Energy, author
- Tomicah Tillemann â€" Senior Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State for Civil Society and Emerging Democracies (MA, Ph.D.)
- Michael G. Vickers â€" Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Department of Defense
- Jacob Walles â€" U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia (2012â€"2015), U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem (2005â€"2009)
- Wang Guangya â€" People's Republic of China's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations
- Juleanna Glover Weiss â€" Political consultant and lobbyist
- Clifton R. Wharton, Jr. â€" Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State
- Jody Williams â€" Nobel Peace Prize recipient for her leadership of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines
- Lois Wolk â€" Member of the California State Senate
Past and present faculty
- Fouad Ajami â€" Professor of Middle Eastern Studies
- Lucius D. Battle â€" Former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and Africa, and President, Middle East Institute; founded SAIS Foreign Policy Institute
- Peter Bergen â€" CNN terrorism analyst and author of Holy War, Inc
- Zbigniew Brzezinski â€" Former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter
- Edward B. Burling â€" Partner of the law firm Covington & Burling
- David P. Calleo â€" Former Director of European Studies Program, author of Rethinking Europe's Future
- Erik Jones â€" Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy and Director of the European and Eurasian Studies (EES) Program
- Rajiv Chandrasekaran â€" Associate Editor, The Washington Post; former SAIS journalist-in-residence for the International Reporting Project, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
- Eliot A. Cohen â€" Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Strategic Studies Program, former Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, author of Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War and Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime
- W. Max Corden â€" Trade economist, developed Dutch disease model
- Francis Deng â€" Former Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons
- Luis Ernesto Derbez â€" Mexican Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs
- David Dodge â€" Former governor of the Bank of Canada
- Eric S. Edelman â€" Former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, former U.S. Ambassador to Finland and Turkey, visiting scholar at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies and Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
- Jessica Einhorn â€" Former Dean of SAIS, member of the Board of Directors of Time Warner, former Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former Managing Director of the World Bank
- Francis Fukuyama â€" Former Director of the SAIS International Development program, and author of The End of History and the Last Man
- Grace Goodell â€" Professor of International Development
- Jakub J. Grygiel â€" George H. W. Bush Assistant Professor of International Relations
- Christian Herter â€" Former U.S. Secretary of State and Governor of Massachusetts
- Josef Joffe â€" German journalist
- Majid Khadduri â€" Professor of Islamic Law and Middle East specialist
- Kenneth H. Keller â€" Former Director of the SAIS Bologna Center, former President of the University of Minnesota system
- Pravin Krishna â€" Chung Ju Yung Professor of International Economics and Business
- Anne O. Krueger â€" Professor of International Economics, former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF and World Bank Chief Economist; former President, American Economic Association
- David M. Lampton â€" George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Director of the China Studies Program, and former Dean of Faculty
- Paul Linebarger â€" Former Professor of Asian Studies, best known as a science fiction author under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith
- Marisa Lino â€" Former Director of the SAIS Bologna Center, former U.S. Ambassador to Albania, and former Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
- Michael Mandelbaum â€" Professor of American Foreign Policy
- John E. McLaughlin â€" Former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
- Robert H. Mundell â€" Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, 1999
- Kendall Myers â€" Former U.S. Foreign Service Officer and SAIS part-time faculty member who was arrested in 2009 on charges of 30 years of espionage on behalf of Cuba
- Azar Nafisi â€" Iranian-American academic and author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and "Things I've Been Silent About"
- Paul H. Nitze â€" Drafter of NSC 68 creating the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment
- Don Oberdorfer â€" Journalist, Korea expert
- Robert E. Osgood â€" Third Dean of SAIS, former Director of the American Foreign Policy program and co-director of the Security Studies program, and former member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Policy Planning Council from 1983 to 1985.
- Henry Paulson â€" Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Bernard Schwartz Forum on Constructive Capitalism
- Riordan Roett â€" Professor of Latin American Studies
- Stephen M. Schwebel â€" Former Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Organization at SAIS and former Judge and President of the International Court of Justice, currently leading international arbitrator and counsel in Washington, D.C.
- András Simonyi â€" Former Ambassador of Hungary to the United States
- Robert Skidelsky â€" Economist, biographer of John Maynard Keynes
- R. Jeffrey Smith â€" Former journalist-in-residence, Pulitzer Prize winner
- Stephen Szabo â€" Former Professor of European Studies, current Head of the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund
- Shirin R. Tahir-Kheli â€" Former Research Professor, former Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations
- Nate Thayer (Visiting Scholar) â€" Investigative journalist who interviewed Pol Pot and Kang Kek Iew
- Dale C. Thomson â€" Director of the Center of Canadian Studies, author, Secretary/Advisor to Canadian Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent
- Robert W. Tucker â€" Former Professor of American Foreign Policy, and co-author of The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose
- David Unger â€" Journalist, Member of the New York Times Editorial Board, author of The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs
- Ruth Wedgwood â€" Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, and Director of the Program in International Law and Organizations; U.S. member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee
- Paul Wolfowitz â€" Former President of the World Bank, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, former Dean of SAIS
- I. William Zartman â€" Former Professor and Director of the SAIS Conflict Management program
- Alejandro Toledo (Visiting Scholar) â€" Former President of Peru
See also
- Professorial Lecturer, a specialised title used for an academic expert at the school
- SAIS Bologna Center
References
Further reading
- Wheeler, Norton. Role of American NGOs in China's Modernization: Invited Influence (Routledge, 2014) 240 pp. online review, on Nanjing Center
- Gutner, Tammi L. The Story of SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies, 1987). ISBNÂ 978-9990530568.