Jeremi Suri

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Newspaper article about my research and teaching

April 11th, 2010

UW History Professor Takes Students on a Cold War Ride

By Bill Glauber
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/90547059.html

April 11, 2010
Page B1

Madison — It’s 8 a.m. and historian Jeremi Suri is working the room.

He’s on a 75-minute tear, taking students just back from spring break on an intellectual journey, “Cold War Society and Culture.”

He might as well subtitle the lecture: Your Grandparents’ World.

The trip is riveting, from China to the Soviet Union to Wisconsin, from Mao to Stalin to Joseph McCarthy. It’s a stem-winder of a lecture delivered by a rising academic star, the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History who writes, teaches and focuses on America’s place in the world. He used pluck and scholarship to land a series of off-the-cuff discussions with the subject of his first big biography, Henry Kissinger.

Suri is into it now, and so are the students. You can hear the furious clicking of computer keyboards and see the students sit up straight in hard wooden chairs.

And then, Suri brings the journey full circle, right into the bare-bones lecture hall.

On a large white screen, he projects a 19th-century photo of the University of Wisconsin – three buildings surrounded by farmland.

And then, he puts up another photo of the university in the present day, a rich assortment of buildings that sprawl for as far as the eye can see, the growth fueled during a post-World War II boom of enrollment, scholarship and federal funding.

He calls it the “Cold War University.” From Harvard to Stanford to other major colleges, Suri says that the American university system was long ago placed on a Cold War footing to advance American causes through scholarship and leadership, especially during a perilous time when the U.S. faced off against the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union is gone, but the Cold War University remains.

“We are all part of a Cold War apparatus,” he says. “This is not an academic story. It is a personal story. It is all a part of our lives.”

Connecting with students
Suri is the historian who wants to make history. He’s not merely content to write books, he wants to serve up provocative ideas, challenge students and help create the leaders of tomorrow.

Most of all, he brings the past to the present, ties it together in a way that is understandable even to students not majoring in history.

“Students have a hunger for narrative,” Suri says. “They don’t want sound bites. They want someone to tell them an extended story. That is what history is. You’re telling meaningful stories.”

At 37, Suri has already told his share of great stories. And he also has lived a great American story.

Suri’s father is an émigré from India and his mother is Jewish. Suri identifies himself as a “Hin-Jew,” part Hindu, part Jewish.

His accent and his attitude are pure New York: energetic and a little brash.

Raised on Roosevelt Island in New York, Suri’s love of history was fired at Stanford University, where he studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy. History is often a springboard to law school, which was Suri’s original goal. But he was hooked on the possibility of following in Kennedy’s footsteps.

“I looked at his life. I said, ‘Wow, this is the kind of life I’d like to have,’” Suri says. “You get to be a professor around interesting people doing research on interesting stuff. You get to do some informal policy advising but you’re not a politician.”

Suri’s rise has been fast, earning a master’s degree at Ohio University, a doctorate at Yale and coming to Madison as a professor in 2001.

His wife, Alison Alter, is the associate director of the Center for World Affairs and Global Economy at UW-Madison. They have two children, Natalie, 7, and Zachary, 5.

Besides teaching, he directs two centers that aim to bring together scholars and policy-makers, the European Center of Excellence and the Grand Strategy Program.

“History is old, the individuals who teach it are not,” says Paul M. DeLuca Jr., UW-Madison provost. DeLuca says Suri is one of those individuals “who take a campuswide perspective. They look to do scholarship that cuts across areas.”

Suri is a big thinker about a lot of things. He uses a blog to spread his opinions on subjects as varied as creating an ROTC-type program for the U.S. State Department to cultivating the creative leaders for a new century.

By referring to UW-Madison and other major campuses as Cold War universities, Suri focuses on research money that comes from federal grants “designed to produce things that will make the country stronger internationally. The university is seen as an extension of that enterprise.”

In previous decades, that meant creating area studies focused on the world’s potential hot spots, such as Russia and South Asia, creating language programs, and cultivating student and faculty overseas exchanges.

Eye toward the future
Suri says a post-Cold War university “should rethink the way we organize knowledge and money.”

“Why is it we have scientists on one side of campus and social scientists on the other?” he says.

He says universities “need to train young people to be more independent, take more initiative, to be free and nimble thinkers, less professionalized, less on particular tracks.”

“We don’t need to measure how many engineers we create relative to the Soviets in the way we did during the Cold War,” he says. “We should be measuring how many innovative creative thinkers we’re creating and sending them off to do their own thing.”

Suri’s focus is America’s place in the world. The book “Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente,” put Suri on the map and marked him as a serious thinker about superpower diplomacy during the 1960s, a decade of tumult and change.

He followed that work with a provocative look at one of history’s most controversial diplomats in a book called, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century.”

Suri analyzed Kissinger’s career, trying to strike a middle ground between those who view Kissinger as a diplomatic hero, and those who view him as a villain. Born in 1972, Suri was able to achieve some distance from Kissinger’s diplomacy in places that ranged from Vietnam and Chile to the Soviet Union and China.

But he also had a pipeline straight to the source. Kissinger talked with Suri periodically during the project.

“It’s a strange story, a Woody Allen story,” Suri says about his initial contact with Kissinger. The former U.S. secretary of state reached out to Suri when he heard the historian was embarking on the project.

“He does this sometimes,” Suri says. “He is acutely sensitive about his reputation. We had this very uncomfortable meeting for an hour and a half in his office on Park Avenue in New York.”

A surprise meeting
After the meeting, Suri figured it would be one and done, that there would be no further contact with Kissinger.

But in the summer of 2004, the two met again. Suri was doing research in the Jewish archives in Kissinger’s hometown of Fürth in Germany. It turned out that Kissinger also was in town, visiting with the mayor. The two met again in front of Kissinger’s boyhood home.

“He never thought I understood him, but I think I won his respect,” Suri says. “I was there, speaking German. I was there, doing research. To him, this symbolized the serious work in the Germanic tradition. It didn’t symbolize what he calls journalism. He thinks journalists are out to find embarrassing things.”

Over several years, they had around six meetings, Suri says. After the book was published, the two men appeared on the same New York stage to discuss the work.

Next up for the scholar is a book called “A Nation Building People.” The book will detail America’s role in nation building, not just in places such as Germany, Japan, Iraq and Afghanistan, but at home, in the original founding of this country.

He says the manuscript is due to his publisher at the end of this year.

A lot of writing remains for this young historian on the rise.

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Meetings, Speaking events, Teaching, history |

Tags: Cold War, Foreign Policy, Kissinger, Leaders, Leadership, Suri, Teaching, UW, Wisconsin |

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20 Years Since The Fall of the Berlin Wall…

November 8th, 2009

FROM THE COLD WAR TO A COMMON EUROPEAN HOME

Published in German: Aargauer Zeitung (6 November 2009)

The leaders of nations built the Berlin Wall in Central Europe, and the citizens of those societies tore it down. Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill first spoke in 1946 of an “Iron Curtain” dividing the free half of the continent from its communist counterpart. Addressing an anxious American audience in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill warned his listeners that they must be prepared to reconstruct and defend the rich soil of democracy in Western Europe from the dark Eastern menace.

Churchill’s Iron Curtain became a nuclear “trip wire” in the 1950s that kept West and East apart, threatening nuclear war if either side intruded upon the other. In August 1961, as East Germans and other East European citizens sought to flee from the tyranny in their societies, the Soviet-supported government in Berlin made the metaphorical Iron Curtain into an ugly concrete wall. Eastern Europe was now a permanent prison for its populations. In response Western Europe fortified itself for war and public displays of cultural and economic superiority to the Soviet-dominated lands. Cold War politics froze European citizens in divided, militarized circumstances that they could not control.

Widespread dissatisfaction with this depressing state of affairs motivated efforts to improve East-West relations in the 1960s and 1970s. Citizens on both sides of the Berlin Wall wanted to improve their lives; leaders sought new sources of stability through cooperation rather than conflict. Exhausted from their international adventures and embattled in their own countries, Cold War adversaries began to see more in common. Like growling tigers in a cage, the United States and the Soviet Union learned, eventually, to live by some basic rules. They curtailed threats to one another and they collaborated to improve social conditions across Europe.

This era of détente changed everything. It opened space for West and East European citizens to assert a powerful voice. Willy Brandt, the first Social Democratic Party Chancellor of West Germany, led this process through his “Ostpolitik.” He accepted the political division of his country, but he pushed for new social and economic connections with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. France, Great Britain, Italy, and eventually all the states of Western Europe followed suit. The East-West connections that they built were about more than peace and stability. They encouraged attention to human rights, economic reforms, and a discussion of atrocities committed in the wake of the Second World War. Remembering the difficult past inspired a search for creative alternatives in the present. The Vatican did perhaps the most to encourage this process of connection and reform when it chose the first Polish Pope, Karol Józef Wojtyła, in 1978.

Through new human rights “watch groups,” memorial societies, arts clubs, and the Catholic Church, Europe gained a voice that transcended the Cold War. Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev recognized this development earlier than most other political leaders. He attempted to reform the Soviet Union by making it a part of a “Common European Home.” No phrase could do more to challenge the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall.

European citizens enthusiastically embraced this vision and they deployed it en masse to destroy the Cold War hindrances to its realization. The process began with increased public activism in 1987 and 1988, and it reached a peak in 1989. The momentum for a Common European Home overwhelmed Gorbachev and his followers who sought to control reform. By 9 November 1989 citizens no longer believed they had to accept a divided European continent.

Cold War leaders had built the Berlin Wall, but they could only watch as citizens tore it down. Politicians deserve credit on all sides for allowing this process to take shape and facilitating it once it began. Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and Francois Mitterand adjusted wisely to an emergent Europe. Their successors have not fared as well. A Common European Home, built on the ashes of the Cold War, confronts a new set of economic, social, and political challenges that will occupy the next generation of leaders and citizens.

Posted in Awards, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Meetings, Speaking events, Teaching, history |

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Trying to Change the World…

November 5th, 2009

Photo credit: Eric Tadsen

Isthmus Newspaper

Madison, Wisconsin

11/5/09

by Jennifer A. Smith

Jeremi Suri is on a mission. He wants the UW-Madison, where he’s a rising-star history professor, to be bolder, more daring, more adept at reaching out. Unafraid of controversy.

More, come to think of it, like Suri himself.

“We should be a place that takes risks [and] pushes boundaries between disciplines and in the way we teach,” says Suri in a tone that is both friendly and urgent. “I’m frustrated by the fact that, for all we talk about being on the cutting edge here, we are very resistant to risk-taking, very resistant to thinking about our mission as citizens and intellectuals.”

Suri pushes himself hard to live up to those standards, whether he’s delivering provocative lectures to a large intro course or teaching online for military officers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as he did this past summer.

On campus, there is much talk about the Wisconsin Idea — making the boundaries of the university as wide as the boundaries of the state — and plenty of good work that does happen. Yet there’s also institutional conservatism in some quarters, a sense that coasting on tradition is good enough.

For Suri, “good enough” doesn’t cut it.

At 37, Suri is young for a full professor who holds a named chair. (Officially, he’s the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, and he also directs the European Union Center of Excellence and the Grand Strategy Program.) In conversation, he’s animated and quick to smile. Dressed casually, he could pass for a grad student rather than a professor.

Suri has three well-received books, the most recent of which is 2007’s Henry Kissinger and the American Century. That same year, Smithsonian Magazine named him one of America’s Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences. He’s received numerous teaching awards.

But Suri is also known for having ruffled feathers as a dissident voice on the UW’s Athletic Board, from 2005 to 2008. He sought to hold the athletic department more accountable for its actions, financial and otherwise.

He brings the same scrutiny to the UW’s role as a large, public, Big Ten university. He believes it needs to serve a broad public in new ways, through real innovation and action.

Suri himself reaches out via a frequently updated website (www.jeremisuri.net), Twitter and appearances on media outlets like Wisconsin Public Radio. He’s given public lectures for the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters; the Wisconsin Veterans Museum; alumni groups and others. (For upcoming events, see below.)

While many professors do these kinds of things, few match his frequency or gusto. More than anything, Jeremi Suri wants the university to matter.

“It seems to me that what makes us great is that we are public,” says Suri. “We believe that what we’re doing is a higher calling, and it should serve the public.”

Here’s how one student summed up his impressions of Suri on the popular website RateMyProfessors.com: “Extremely competent. Heavy workload. Fascinating perspective. Very thorough. Suspicion: Jeremi Suri does not sleep.”

Suri’s energy level does seem a little superhuman (“I get very little sleep,” he admits. “It continually worries my wife.”) But that drive has its rewards.

When he was hired by the UW as an assistant professor in 2001, Suri was still wrapping up his Ph.D. at Yale. His rapid ascent to full professorship attests not only to his contribution to the field of history, but also the university’s desire to keep him on the faculty.

With his academic star shining brightly, Suri, who lives in University Heights with his wife and two young children, could probably work anywhere. Other respected universities have tried to lure him away. But he’s made a personal commitment to remain at the UW.

“We [professors] shouldn’t seek outside offers unless we’re serious about leaving, and I’ve never been serious about leaving,” he says. “The university has been good to me.”

A New York City native who attended Stuyvesant, a high-pressure public high school for top students, Suri has come to appreciate Madison.

“I love living here,” he says. “It’s a community where you can be involved in serious work, but in a comfortable place to raise kids, free of a lot of pressures and dangers of other areas. It’s filled with intellectual energy.”

Suri’s wife, Alison Alter, also works for the UW. A Harvard Ph.D., she’s the associate director of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy.

It’s in part because Suri expects to spend his career here that he’s driven to articulate his vision of what the UW can be. That’s not to say he thinks there is only one answer to that question; Suri’s opinionated and confident, but he’s no egomaniac.

“We shouldn’t have one vision of what a better place is,” he says. “We can have many visions, and at our best moments, we did. Let’s have that discussion.”

Suri, for instance, thinks the UW should strive for excellence on its own terms, instead of comparing itself to peer institutions.

“We’ve spent too much time over the last 10 years trying to be like everyone else, instead of being the best but different,” he says. “We should be more creative. We shouldn’t just follow the pack.”

The tension between proponents of the status quo and advocates of change is a central theme in Suri’s work. His 2003 book, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente, looked at the 1960s through leaders and protesters on three continents.

The ’60s left a lasting sense of skepticism toward authority. It’s a skepticism Suri seems to share, though his concerns are presented in the careful and measured (yet not dispassionate) manner of an academic.

Institutional resistance to change and a perceived lack of accountability are at the core of what bothered Suri about the UW athletic department. He argues that it fails to operate as part of the university as a whole, with its larger best interests in mind.

For example, he cites the financial obligations taken on by the department, such as significant building costs and large salaries. “They claim they’re financing themselves, but they’re not. Every contract they sign is guaranteed by the university. The more they spend today, the more [the UW] is obligated down the road.”

Suri’s criticisms of the athletic department are sharply disputed.

“Not only is the athletic department self-sufficient, it contributes substantial money to the university,” says Walter Dickey, a law professor and the Athletic Board’s chair since 2005. “The athletic department’s budget and the underlying financial model are reviewed yearly and have been approved annually by the board, campus administration and, finally, by the Regents.”

Dickey says all of these bodies “are keenly aware of the importance that athletics be closely aligned with the overall mission of this university, as is the department itself.”

But Suri feels that the board — composed of faculty, academic staff, students and several nonvoting alumni –- acts more as a rubber stamp than a monitor.

“Why on earth does so much money go in that direction?” he asks, a tinge of anger in his voice. “Those are resources the university has. Every part of the campus should ask, ‘What is the public-ness in what we’re doing?’ And it’s not enough to say that we’re doing the same thing we’ve always done.”

When he was on the board, Suri regularly asked such questions. It’s not a typical role for academics, and Suri thinks he knows why.

“[Faculty] are afraid people aren’t going to like them,” he says. “As you move up, you start interacting with powerful people who…can determine whether you continue to move up. People who have those ambitions are concerned about not being seen as troublemakers. You’re always told, ‘Do this for the team.’ There is this sense that you’re not being collegial.”

In his career as a historian, Suri has faced more formidable foils than powerful administrators or athletic department honchos. He engaged in a series of tête–à–têtes with Henry Kissinger, interviews that helped form the basis for Henry Kissinger and the American Century.

Of course, there’s no shortage of books by or about Kissinger, now 86, who was President Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. But what set Suri’s book apart was his approach — less “What did Kissinger do?” than “What forces made Kissinger who he is?”

Suri explored the experiences that molded Kissinger and his ideas of power: his life as a German-born Jew who spent his early years in Weimar and Nazi Germany, his time in the U.S. military and Harvard, and so forth. “I was trying to understand rather than condemn or valorize,” says Suri of his nonideological approach.

Wrote The Atlantic, “Probing thoughtfully into Kissinger’s background and character, Suri sees the secretary as the Cold War’s ultimate statesman. Eschewing polemics… this work explores what shaped and nurtured the phenomenon that was Henry Kissinger.”

Niall Ferguson, writing in London’s Times Literary Supplement, called it “surely the best book yet published about Henry Kissinger.”

But Suri’s even-handed treatment of Kissinger has drawn criticism. One reviewer clucked, “Most of the time, Suri appears to be a subtle, but sympathetic, convincing apologist for the life and career of the national security adviser and secretary of state.”

Suri met with Kissinger eight or nine times, each for more than an hour. “He wanted to talk. He’s definitely an egotist, but he’s also an intellectual in the true sense of the word,” says Suri. “I could never come up with a question he hadn’t thought of.”

Since he wasn’t allowed to take notes or record during these sessions, Suri would feverishly scrawl what he could recall following the interviews, only attributing to Kissinger quotes he was certain about. Says Suri, “He’s read it, but he has not questioned any of the evidence.”

Throughout his career, Suri has embraced innovative teaching strategies. This summer, he led a graduate section of an online course for 22 Army, Navy and Air Force officers stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Every one of them said they wanted more of these courses offered.”

A different section of the same online course was targeted at UW undergrads. Of 100 students, over half were not physically in Madison, some because they needed to move home and earn money over the summer. Asks Suri, “How are we going to reach those students who, because of economic challenges, aren’t able to spend as much time on campus?”

This fall, Suri is teaching an undergraduate seminar in which all students are being provided with the free use of a Kindle, Amazon’s e-book device, thanks to funding from the UW’s Parents Enrichment Fund.

The DX-model Kindles, which currently retail for $489, have been loaned to the students preloaded with course readings by Tolstoy, Thucydides, Sun Tzu and others.

Suri and others in the pilot project are hoping to discover whether this new technology enhances or distracts from learning, and if it can cut down on the use of paper on campus. It’s part of his commitment to quality teaching.

Typically, it is also part of a larger critique.

“Universities do a very poor job of evaluating teaching,” says Suri. “We hire a professor, they arrive, and we just throw them in the classroom and assume they know how to teach.”

In the end, “innovation, excellence and relevance” is Suri’s mantra. He’s even got these words on a Post-It in his office as a reminder.

Jeremi Suri appearances

Friday, Nov. 6, 10 am: Suri will lead a public seminar with Dr. Peter Feaver, one of the key White House policymakers behind the “surge” in Iraq. UW Ingraham Hall, Room 336.

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 11:30 am: Keynote lecture on Contemporary American Foreign Policy for the Madison International Trade Association. Sheraton Madison Hotel.

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2 pm: Lecture on Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. Karl Junginger Memorial Library, 625 N. Monroe St., Waterloo, Wis.

Friday & Saturday, Dec. 11 & 12: Suri will participate in a conference he co-organized on the Military and American Society. Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison.

For more information, visit Suri’s website at www.jeremisuri.net or follow him on Twitter (@JeremiSuri).