Let's hope their endowments were all invested with Madoff!
Portion below; whole thing (via Angry Arab Newservice) here: http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122973925559323583.html?mod=article-outset-box
At the conference, Mr. Hertog announced that he was willing to spend money to fund scholars willing to develop Grand Strategy programs at their own schools. While he didn't detail how much he was willing to spend, those familiar with the situation estimate that the cost could add up to more than $10 million in the coming years.
It was a remarkable moment for a program that had begun only in 2000 with donations mainly from conservative foundations. Buoyed in 2006 by a $17.5 million, 15-year endowment from Yale alums Nicholas Brady, the former Treasury secretary, and Charles Johnson, the chairman of the board of Franklin Resources, Grand Strategy has become a breeding ground for aspiring policy makers, with students going on to plum jobs with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet the program is now at an important crossroads. It must grapple with tensions over its expansion to other schools, while the Yale program continues to develop. And while the course is nonpartisan, it is not clear yet what kind of cachet it will have with the new administration.
The Yale program was conceived and taught by three well-known professors, the pre-eminent historians John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, along with Yale's diplomat-in-residence Charles Hill, who served under George P. Shultz in the State Department and Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the United Nations. They argued that universities had become too specialized, focusing on narrower and narrower topics without offering students a general, big-picture view of the world or an intellectual framework for understanding how the different pieces fit together.
The three professors represent a range of political views -- center right, left and neoconservative respectively -- and the professors say they urge students to try to evaluate ideas without labeling a person. Still, the class attracts a large percentage of conservative students, and all the students have benefited from the ties and contacts the men have in Washington.
Henry Kissinger is known to enjoy greeting the new class, which requires an essay and interview to get in. Students have intimate dinners with prominent officials like Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte, whose visit entailed heavy security -- helicopters circled above the restaurant while the participants ate. Students also met for an off-the-record session with one of the authors of the 2002 National Security Strategy a week after it was publicly released.
When they discussed George Packer's book, "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq," with cadets at West Point, the students decided not to record the discussion because they did not want to have "views expressed in the spirit of intellectual debate be used against them at a Senate confirmation hearing" some day, said Minh A. Luong, the program's associate director.
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