Jeremi Suri

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.