Happy Anniversary To Me!

Commemorating my twenty years at the Fletcher School.

As a general rule, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World does not talk a lot about the proprietor’s day job at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Sure, I occasionally muse about my myriad administrative responsibilities, but in my head, my day job is my day job and this is… something else.

This month, however, is a pretty big work anniversary for me, and it is worth devoting one newsletter to why it makes me happy.

In the spring of 2006 I was not in the best headspace. The University of Chicago had denied me tenure the previous fall. Even though I knew I was moving to the Fletcher School in relatively short order, for the next nine months I had to live in the academic fishbowl that was/is Hyde Park. It was not a fun experience. And both the Fletcher School and Tufts University were, at the time, somewhat unknown entities to me.

In the summer of 2006, however, I published a short essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about, well, blogging. It was the first essay I had published with my Fletcher tagline. Now, essays like this in non-peer-reviewed venues went studiously uncommented on by my U of C colleagues. Times have changed since 2006, but twenty years ago — at least in Hyde Park — the notion that a junior scholar would publish anything in a non-academic venue was thought to be disreputable. And I implicitly assumed that this reflected a wider professorial consensus.

So I was surprised to receive an email from the Tufts University provost the day my Chronicle essay ran. He thanked me for writing it and expressed great pleasure at my move to Tufts. And that was the moment when I realized I might have found my found my intellectual and professional home.¹

My first semester at Fletcher confirmed this instinct. The warmth and enthusiasm I received from my colleagues and students from the moment of my arrival eased my transition from a political science department to an international affairs school.

This month marks my twenty-year anniversary of starting at Fletcher. It’s been a productive time and place for me! I have developed at least five new courses, including some on timely and unusual topics. This coming academic year I’ll be teaching a brand new course on ethics in international affairs that seems super-relevant.²

Beyond the classroom, the combination of tenure and Fletcher has radically enhanced my writing productivity. I have written five books and edited two more, and published more than 55 articles. That does not include the op-eds and blogging for Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and now Drezner’s World.

In other words, it’s been a pretty awesome twenty years. And I’m now a distinguished professor and a dean!

If this all sounds self-congratulatory, well, guilty as charged — but really it is me trying to express my gratitude to Fletcher for providing such a vibrant home for me to play with ideas every day. The Fletcher community is dedicated to the proposition that even in a complex, fragmented world, it is possible to make a difference through people and ideas. And every day I engage with Fletcher students, I am continually reminded of how much of a difference that proposition can make.

So as Fletcher retools its degree names, I look forward to matching the enthusiasm and curiosity of my colleagues, my staff, and my students.

Here’s to another twenty years!

1. Given that I spent the first ten years of academic career living and working in all four continental time zones, this was a pretty big deal!

2. Philosophy — it’s not just for Marco Rubio to bash anymore!