Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger

has recruited tenured faculty to teach selected spring seminars. Before he accepted a teaching position at Columbia in the fall of 2015, this included Adam Tooze, a charismatic professor of modern German history, who was a regular guest. Other notable Yale professors who have made frequent appearances include Scott Boorman, a member of the sociology department known for his expertise on the Chinese board game wei-ch’i, Bryan Garsten, who chairs Yale’s Humanities Program and teaches political science, and Beverly Gage, an expert on twentieth-century American history and the department’s director of undergraduate studies, who is currently writing a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

      Taking Hill as its model, the program has brought in additional nonresident practitioners experienced in government and journalism who can describe firsthand the constraints that often surround decision making. John Negroponte, whom Gaddis introduced as “the ambassador to everywhere,”¹ was the US deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush and, before that, the first US director of national intelligence. Paul Solman is the longtime business and economics correspondent for PBS NewsHour. Besides writing for the Times, David Brooks is the author of four books, including the bestselling The Road to Character, and works as a commentator for PBS NewsHour. Former practitioners include Walter Russell Mead, whom the New York Times Book Review described as one of the “country’s liveliest thinkers about America’s role in the world,”² an editor-at-large for the American Interest and a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College, and Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist and bestselling author who first came to the public’s attention for her eloquence as Ronald Reagan’s presidential speechwriter.

      Putting practitioners and scholars in the same room is unusual in undergraduate education at major research universities. Those involved cite among its benefits the potential for sparks between the professors who focus on scholarly research on the one hand and practitioners who bring their real-world experience on the other. But besides differences in experience and perspective, there’s little, if any, distinction in the way the scholars and practitioners function in the GS program. In addition to coteaching the two-hour class each Monday afternoon, the practitioners preside over miniseminars on such topics as writing and economics, hold regular (and irregular!—Solman has given media training from nine thirty to eleven o’clock at night) office hours, and grade papers, creating a teacher-to-student ratio unheard of even in the most rarefied graduate seminar. At times there can be as many as five scholars and practitioners to twenty-two students in a GS classroom. “One of the tough challenges is to manage how many adults there are in the room,” Brooks said.³

      As with the full-time professors, Brooks explained, “Mentoring is in some ways the most important thing I do.” Traveling to New Haven every week from Washington, he holds office hours on Monday nights in the bar of his hotel. Once a semester he commandeers a table at Yorkside Pizza and meets with each student an hour at a time to hear about their lives. The advice he gives can be searingly personal. He helped one student cope with a parent’s death and counseled another to take a job against her parents’ wishes. “You owe your parents honor and love,” he said, echoing Hill, “but you don’t owe them your life. It’s their job to get out of the way.”

      He also dispenses more generic advice. On whom to marry, he tells students, “You can’t know, ‘Will I love them in thirty years?’ It’s a fifty-year conversation,” he said. “But you can at least answer, ‘How well do we communicate?’” And on coping with life after college? “The first couple of years out of college suck,” he said. His recommendation is typically grand strategic. It’s the time “to widen your horizon of risk.”⁴

       Recruiting Students

      Grand Strategy is not the most popular course at Yale. “That’s the wrong category and misses the complexity of the situation,” Hill said. “A popular course at Yale is when five hundred students cram an auditorium for Sexuality Studies 371: Bodies and Pleasures.”¹ But while GS is not the university’s most titillating class, it is among the most prominent. With an acceptance rate that averages 40 percent—it was 38 percent for the 2015 class—competition to lock in one of the seminar’s forty-four spots (the size of the program doubled in 2010) is intense.² “Getting in was not easy and required a grand strategy of its own,” Casey Verkamp (GS ’09) said.³ This exclusivity contributes to the program’s appeal, especially at an elite institution like Yale where, as Deresiewicz puts it in his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, students “have been conditioned, above all, to jump through hoops.”⁴ One of the best ways to increase a course’s popularity is “make entry to it competitive.”⁵

      Admitting high-caliber students means high demands can be made on them. It’s what Negroponte calls “a virtuous circle.”⁶ It also makes GS self-selecting. At a fall briefing for prospective GSers, as students are known inside the program, about a dozen of the two hundred or so attendees left mid-session.⁷ It takes chops to commit to a program that occupies two semesters and the summer between as well as to the massive amount of reading assigned each week and a stream of extracurricular activities. Hill’s biographer, Molly Worthen, describes the course as “the Blob” that seeps into everything from “friendships” to “career plans.”⁸ It’s the reason that some students characterize GS as more a “lifestyle” than a class.⁹ “It is clear to me,” Hill said, “that the desire to take the course by the most impressive and inventive and highly aspirational students at this university where all students fit those categories is the best evidence of its significance and power.”¹⁰

      Beyond the program’s “all-star teaching talent,”¹¹ the chance to be with the “smartest and most ambitious students at Yale”¹² is another major pull. As Danielle Kiowski (GS ’09) put it: “The class format facilitated relationship building, and discussions of deep topics taught us more about each other than you learn about other students in other classes or casual friendships. I felt that I knew the character of my GS classmates.”¹³

      GS is one of the few Yale courses open to undergraduates, graduate and professional school students, postdoctoral fellows, and a growing contingent of midcareer military officers. Students are selected from a range of disciplines and the professors encourage eclecticism—Jeremy Friedman, who became associate director in 2012 (he left in 2015 to become an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School), successfully broadened the applicant base, reaching out beyond the traditional channels to include undergrads in the hard sciences and students in the Forestry School.¹⁴ Under other circumstances the unorthodox mix of ages, experience, and divergent interests could potentially set up fault lines. But some alumni said the heterogeneity was part of the program’s appeal. Others said the shared language they developed in class and the amount of time they spent together, especially under the fire of the fall semester Marshall Briefs, provided common ground. “Don’t forget the fellowship that comes with a small group of similarly interested students over a full calendar year. I still keep in close touch with many