College Parlays Bush Ties to Build a Name in National Security

By Judy Mathewson

June 8 (Bloomberg) -- Missouri State University got its start a century ago producing schoolteachers. These days, it has a new specialty: turning out acolytes of President George W. Bush's foreign policy.

Taking advantage of ties with former Bush administration officials, the Springfield, Missouri, school has planted its Defense and Strategic Studies program in Fairfax, Virginia, just outside the Washington Beltway. The goal is to compete for students -- and influence -- with such established Washington policy powerhouses as the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Missouri State's concentration of Bush veterans includes aides to such foreign-policy heavyweights as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Its director, Keith Payne, worked for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, where he pushed for research on a new generation of nuclear weapons to target underground bunkers.

The faculty includes Robert Joseph, the former undersecretary of state who advised Bush to leave the anti- ballistic missile treaty. J.D. Crouch, the president's departing deputy national security adviser, would be welcome too, Payne said. Crouch was once a faculty member.

As a rule, Missouri State scholars are quicker to favor aggressive military policies than their counterparts at many other schools, said Robert Jervis, a professor at Columbia University in New York who specializes in foreign policy decision-making.

Mainstream

``The program is outside the academic mainstream, but within the policy mainstream,'' he said in an interview.

``I honestly don't believe the program is ideological,'' Payne, 52, said in an interview, noting that at least three faculty members served under Democratic President Bill Clinton. The school currently has three full-time faculty members and ``about six or seven'' adjunct faculty, said Lorene Stone, the dean of Missouri State's College of Humanities and Public Affairs.

Some better-known defense-policy programs -- including those at Stanford, Harvard and Cornell universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- began with money from the Ford Foundation in the 1970s, and tended to emphasize arms- control negotiations with the Soviet Union.

The Missouri program dates from the 1970s too, but it was founded by William Van Cleave, now 71, a defense expert who took a skeptical line toward arms talks and served as the head of President Ronald Reagan's defense transition team after the 1980 election. Van Cleave, then on the faculty of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, brought the program with him when he moved to Missouri in 1989.

`A Variety of Ideas'

Stone, who hired Payne in 2005 as department chief, said he has complied with her request to offer ``a variety of ideas and perspectives.'' Assertions that the defense-studies program is hawkish were ``truer in the past'' than now, she said in an interview.

Payne, who was Rumsfeld's top official in charge of nuclear weapons strategy in 2002 and 2003, describes the school's aim as hands-on preparation for government work. The pitch appeals to prospective students: Enrollment is expected to be about 60 in September, up from 32 when the program moved to Virginia two years ago.

Graduates work at the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

Practical Aspects

``The availability of internships and the practical aspects of the program are what sold me on it,'' said Jennifer Bradley, a 28-year-old student from Oregon who describes herself as a conservative on defense and wants to be an intelligence analyst.

The Virginia program is funded by a combination of public and private sources. Payne estimates that as much as 15 percent of the program's budget comes from defense contractors; Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp., the world's largest defense company, gave about $50,000 last year and offers internships. Lockheed is impressed by how ready graduates are ``to be involved in the policy process,'' said William Inglee, Lockheed's vice president for plans and policy.

By contrast, MIT's Security Studies Program caps defense- contractor contributions at about 5 percent, according to Owen R. Cote Jr., that program's associate director.

In the seventh-floor suite that houses the Missouri program, students attend seminars such as ``Space and Information Warfare'' and write essays with titles that include ``Transitional Government for Post-Communist China.''

Next week, they can start a course on nuclear proliferation taught by Joseph, who left the State Department in February. He favors deployment of anti-missile systems of the type Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin are sparring over.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, a Republican whose Missouri district includes the university's 20,000-student home campus, told graduates in an address at the Fairfax program last month that they are now ``part of the discussion'' on U.S. foreign policy.

To contact the reporter on this story: Judy Mathewson in Washington at jmathewson@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 8, 2007 00:09 EDT

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