Teaching Common Sense

The Grand Strategy program at Yale was founded in 2000 by Professors John Lewis Gaddis, Yale’s Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History who became director of the program; Paul M. Kennedy, the university’s J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of British History and founding director of Yale’s International Security Studies Program (ISS); and Charles Hill, a practitioner professor who distinguished himself as a career Foreign Service officer before coming to Yale to teach full time.In 2006, Nicholas F. Brady (Yale, ’52) and Charles Johnson (Yale, ’54) endowed the Grand Strategy program in the belief that it was already filling an enormous void in American higher education. “If you don’t teach leadership and people aren’t exposed to it,” Johnson wrote, “they don’t even know what they missed.”Now Grand Strategy is as recognizable to Yale students as the letter Y and the school’s bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. By offering students a new way of viewing the world around them, its curriculum has proven formative for the more than five hundred men and women who have completed it. Under the leadership of its new director, Professor Elizabeth H. Bradley, who holds the recently established Brady-Johnson Professorship in Grand Strategy, the program is poised for many more years of producing effective, knowledgeable, and versatile leaders.