Change is coming to the Mead world. On June 30, I will be changing hats. After more than 12 years at the Council on Foreign Relations, I will be stepping down as the Henry Kissinger fellow in US foreign policy to take up a full time position as the James Chace chair in political studies at Bard, commuting between the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens and the rolling hunt country estate in Duchess County.
I am also stepping up my commitment to The American Interest and to the blog. As editor-at-large and director of American Interest Online I will continue to blog and work on developing new ways to use the resources of the internet to bring interesting, fresh and important content to our global audience. We are talking about some exciting new changes here; at a time when journalism is suffering one body blow after another it’s a great pleasure and privilege to be working at a place which is growing and taking on new missions and trying new ideas. I’m also pleased that the redoubtable Sam is coming with me from the Council; I don’t think I could change jobs and change associates in the same year.
I have enjoyed my time at the Council, and as a member of that organization I will continue to participate in its work — and to help support it from the proceeds of the vast Mead holdings and trusts scattered through various offshore banking havens and tax sheltered trusts in the remoter enclaves of the banking world. I will continue to review books on the United States and contribute other essays to Foreign Affairs, where Gideon Rose, one of the most brilliant editors of his generation, will be taking over from my old and much admired colleague Jim Hoge as editor-in-chief. It has been a huge privilege to share in the life of this institution for so long; it is one of the most dynamic members’ organizations anywhere in the world with an enormous and growing impact on debate in the United States and around the world. The United States is fortunate to have a distinguished, non-partisan and intellectually rigorous organization like the Council, and it is a tribute to our cultures of innovation, philanthropy and free political debate that an organization of this caliber and type can flourish here. The rest of the world is currently trying to catch up with the American culture of think tanks and research organizations; the Council on Foreign Relations is the envy of them all.
That said, it is high time for me to move on and to engage more directly with some issues that increasingly concern me. As a society I think we are radically failing to prepare new generations for the world they will live in and the choices they will have to make, and I think that already shows up in the frequently poor choices my own Baby Boom generation has made — and could become an even greater problem as the generations we’ve taught (or failed to teach) come on line. Almost across the board we are giving the next generation an inadequate educational and cultural preparation for its responsibilities at home and abroad. The American establishment is increasingly unable to sympathize with or understand many of the people who live in the United States very well. A depressing large percentage of the establishment’s members have a hard time communicating with the public at large, are sometimes blind to the issues and priorities that move the country outside the Beltway and a handful of urban islands, and are less and less able to interpret the world to America or explain America to the world. They are even less well prepared to deal with the many people abroad whose experiences and ideas are often radically different from the post-historical, post-religious and technocratic value set that our educational system provides.
This needs to change. The next generations of thinkers, analysts, politicians and entrepreneurs will need a different kind of intellectual and cultural formation to craft effective American policy for the 21st century and build support for those policies in public opinion both here and abroad. This has long been one of my chief concerns. The closing section of Special Providence predicted that the intellectual and cultural mismatch between elites and the rest could mean trouble; that prediction has been borne out and the situation if anything is more grave in 2010 than it was in 2001. I want to do more to help the next generation of thinkers and writers understand the world and this country better, and also to help them launch their careers. Neither of these jobs is easy for young people today. Our educational system provides little guidance to help young people figure out what they need to know to understand and to change the world; sometimes I think the American educational system is a complicated and expensive way of hiding the realities of what power is and how it works from as many smart people as possible. I want to think more about how that can change, and that means spending more time on campus. Bard is an innovative, flexible liberal arts college with a dynamic president, a top notch faculty and, as I know from past teaching experience, it has some brilliant students who want to change the world. I’m looking forward to spending more time with them.
But, much as I love teaching and much as I’m looking forward to doing more of it, I want to do more. The public conversation — in print, on line, and in the other new media coming down the pike — is changing in ways that I find both stimulating and frightening. I’m exhilarated by the way that new technology is opening up the world to more people with more points of view. The MSM conversation had grown stale and out of touch; the winds of change blowing through the media are blowing away an awful lot of stale air. As a writer, I welcome the freedom and spontaneity of a form like this blog. Writers used to have this kind of direct relationship with their audience. The old media world isn’t just ideologically stale; the power in the ‘old’ media world tilted dramatically away from writers toward editors. I love the chance I have on this blog to choose my subjects, choose the length, choose the days on which I will or will not post, and otherwise to be a little bit more the master in my own house.
But the news isn’t all good. The old media organizations might have been cumbersome and opinionated, but they were also rich. Writers for magazines like Time in the old days might not have had bylines and they might not have controlled the slant that the magazine put on their stories — but they had paychecks, health insurance, pension plans and money to travel around the world to cover complicated stories. Moreover, kids just out of college could start at news organizations like that and work their way up the ranks, gaining experience and insight as they went.
It’s not easy to see in today’s conditions how media companies can provide the kind of incomes and resources that even seasoned writers need to cover the news in an intelligent way; it’s even harder to see how young people can build careers in an industry caught between the collapsing old world and a new world that hasn’t quite taken shape.
This has profound consequences for the state of the public conversation and even for the health of democracy. We need a lively, vibrant and informed public discussion of events and ideas; how do we teach, train and support the talent that can help make that happen? The old style of magazine journalism helped me spend fifteen years traveling the world while still having the leisure to study American history and culture; that kind of experience gives me insight into countries from Chile and South Africa to Russia, Thailand and Japan that would be hard to get in any other way and the reading I did in those years continues to serve as intellectual capital for the work that I do today.
The American Interest is a place that is deeply committed to the kind of public discourse I believe in. We want the best minds to take their best shots at explaining the world to the United States and the United States, and we want them to do that in a way that is accessible and inviting for the intelligent lay reader. I hope that continuing the blog and helping to build out an on-line presence for the magazine that helps foster the emergence of a new generation of first rate talent will make a difference. You, the readers, will have the last word on that. Your support and engagement so far has been enormously encouraging to me and to the rest of the TAI staff.
I’ve always thought Max Weber best expressed what it means to be an intellectual. Someone once said to him, “Dr. Weber, what is your field?”
“I am not a donkey, and I do not have a ‘field’,” he replied.
I want to be like Weber: I don’t want to have a ‘field’. I don’t think of myself as a ‘foreign affairs specialist’; I am a generalist and American foreign policy is one of the things I think about. Regular readers of this blog know there are many other subjects that engage me; Bard and The American Interest are among the shrinking numbers of American institutions who still believe in that kind of approach to the world. Moving forward, I’m looking forward to more adventures, new friends and colleagues, and new ways to engage with a new generation and a changing world.
Meanwhile, watch this space and the rest of The American Interest Online for a series of changes and new ventures we will be rolling out over the next year. We are redesigning the website and planning to do much more on the internet. We want to be one of the most innovative and engaging sites on the web, advancing the core American Interest mission in exciting new ways.
Addendum: I’ve already heard from Yale students wondering about next semester. I will continue to teach at Yale through the end of the fall semester to finish out the current Grand Strategy seminar. Working on that seminar has been a seminal experience for me; and there is something very special about being invited back to your alma mater to teach. I will also teach the US foreign policy seminar this fall. If there were a way to continue part time at Yale while teaching at Bard I’d be happy to do it, but to teach in two places while stepping up my commitments to The American Interest would require more drugs than I’m willing or able to take.