Honoring Joseph Nye’s legacy of ethical leadership

We've lost a voice that has influenced generations of policymakers and was an early mentor in my career. Joseph Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, has died at age 88

I was first exposed to Joe Nye as a junior faculty member at the Kennedy School. I had heard he had served in government, which appealed to me, but the area he was interested in, foreign and national security policy, was far-removed from my government management and domestic policy interests.

What caught my eye was that he was doing work trying to apply ethical theory from academic political science and philosophy to national security policy.

This approach was, to put it mildly, very uncommon among national security academics. Separate from the substantive views on national security issues of these folks, the culture of national security academia was very bare-knuckled and dog-eat-dog, aping the bare-knuckled world of national security policymaking itself.

Many were quick to say that nations were driven only by narrow self-interest and to belittle the role of values (including human rights) in our country’s behavior. In addition, these scholars often got into fights that were more brutal than those normally occurring in academia, with harsh statements and recriminations, reflecting this dog-eat-dog culture.

Nye brought this more values-based and ethics-based approach to his work from the time I first knew him, long before he developed his ideas about “soft power.”

But his views on soft power are of a piece with them. Just as he thought that our values and not just our might are important in making American national security policy, he believed that America’s soft power and not just our might was a crucial source of our influence in the world. Here again he was an outlier in a milieu of toughness.

I would note two examples about which I am personally knowledgeable of his consideration and kindness.

When I was a non-tenured junior faculty member, he was assigned to be in charge of my promotion review from assistant professor to non-tenured associate professor (For my readers in academia, Harvard is one of the few institutions that tenures faculty only at thne full professor level and not at associate professor).

Although his research area was far away from mine, he read pretty much all of my work (more than a chair for this kind of promotion review normally would do) and provided me with helpful comments.

Shortly after I was tenured, my former Chinese teacher, then working as a newly named Washington correspondent for a Hong Kong television channel, was hoping to interview him for her network. He agreed, though she was a junior reporter for an outlet he had probably never heard of, and he proceeded to grant her a very long interview that was important for her standing at her network.

Nye was dean of the Havard Kennedy School during the 1990s, an era when Wall Street and venture capital were becoming more attractive to many of our students at the Kennedy School than government service. 
In those days he frequently said, “We don’t want to be the second best business school at Harvard.” He strongly kept alive the school’s original vision of government and public service and established scholarships at the school for students who made a commitment to several years of government service upon graduation.

At a time when the Kennedy School could easily have lost its way, he kept us on mission and on track. He was also a popular teacher of our executive education students, most of them GS 15s or colonels, and always did a lunch Q&A with the participants, which was above and beyond his call of duty.

I honor Joe Nye as a public servant, as a scholar, and as a human being. His lessons are as important today as they were at any other time in his career.