Teaching Common Sense ― The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University

The Grand Strategy Program at Yale was founded in 2000 by Professors John Lewis Gaddis, Yale’s Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History and director of the program; Paul M. Kennedy, the university’s J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of British History and founding director of Yale’s International Security Studies Program (ISS); and Charles Hill, a practitioner” professor who distinguished himself as a career Foreign Service officer before coming to Yale to teach full time.

Two years before he joined its faculty as a practitioner professor in 2013, New York Times columnist David Brooks described the seminar as the best course in America.” The class has been the subject of articles and blog posts in theWall Street Journal, the Nation, and the New Republic. Most significantly GS attracted the notice of Nicholas F. Brady (Yale, ’52) and Charles Johnson (Yale, ’54), who endowed the program in 2006.

Brady, the longtime senior partner at a leading Wall Street investment banking firm, US senator, and treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, is best known for the Brady Plan, which resolved the 1980s international debt crisis. He went on to found Darby Overseas Investments, a pioneer in emerging markets private equity investment.

Johnson is the retired chairman of Franklin Resources, a money management company that he led for nearly fifty years. One of the largest single-gift donors in Yale’s historyfor the construction of its two new colleges Johnson also underwrote renovations in Yale’s athletic facilities and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, which supports research in the Kissinger papers at Yale.

Brady and Johnson believe that the Grand Strategy course fills a void in American higher education. Colleges are turning out hothouse flowers,” Brady said. These overstudied, underexposed students need a course in common sense.” As he wrote in a monograph on common sense (defined as sound, practical judgment in everyday matters”) it’s a key ingredient in the best leadership.” If you don’t teach leadership and people aren’t exposed to it,” Johnson added, they don’t even know what they missed.”

Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill, each of whom is now a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, built GS in response to Kissinger’s observation that the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”

In its fifteenth year, the Grand Strategy Program is as recognizable to Yalies as the letterY and the school’s bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. High school students often hear about the program even before they apply to Yale. Along with cultivating leadership skills the Brady-Johnson Program offers students a worldview. Many of the approximately five hundred women and men who have completed the program and are ascending the ladders of government, nonprofits, the US military, universities, and the corporate sector describe it as one of their most formative Yale classesinfluencing them not just professionally, as might be expected, but also, personally.

One former student related the GS model back to Carl von Clausewitz’s idea of leverage”applying a small amount of force to make a difference. You invest all this, and this group of people will then go off and change the world. The teaching is not the end in itself. In order to do that well, you can’t take people who don’t have a natural inclination to leadership. It’s not making leaders out of nothing. It’s accelerating that. The idea is that we’ll have a community within ourselves and develop each other.”

The big thing it does is scope. It takes [students] five feet off the ground and puts them at five hundred feet.

Linda Kulman, an award-winning journalist and author, was a senior writer atU.S. News & World Report, where she covered politics, consumer culture, and religion. Her work has been anthologized inPerspectives on the Passion of the Christ: Religious Thinkers and Writers Explore the Issues Raised By the Controversial Movie and Ending Government Bailouts, and her essay Land,” on earth’s disappearing natural resources, anchoredNational Geographic’s acclaimed Visions of Paradise.

Kulman, a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, has contributed to several publications, including theHuffington Post, National Geographic, and the Washington Post. She has written a number of nonfiction books, including twoNew York Times bestsellers, for some of the leading political and cultural figures of our time.Teaching Common Sense weaves together on-site reporting, archival research, and original survey data.

Kulman lives in Washington, D.C., with her family.