New UCSD School Will Fill Void for Training Experts on Pacific Rim

The stories are legion by now of the American corporate officials who go into Japan or China to compete for key contracts but fail to land any business because their companies had ill-prepared them to understand the way such countries approach international relations.

As the Pacific Rim grows in economic and political importance to the United States, deficiencies in the policy-making skills of both public and private institutions become ever more noticeable.

Now, in a little more than a month’s time, UC San Diego will inaugurate a major effort to redress the lack of professional training in Pacific affairs. Thirty-nine graduate students will enter the University of California’s first professional school for careers in international affairs, and the nation’s first to specialize in Pacific studies.

For the past two years, a small group of academics has been working almost non-stop to recruit top professors nationwide and draw up a curriculum with few precedents elsewhere in order that the school have an immediate strong reputation both in the United States and across the Pacific. Building any new graduate school presents a host of problems to a campus; the additional challenge of creating what is essentially a new field makes the challenge unique.

Eyes on Latins, East Asians

The new school, formally known as the UCSD Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, results from the growing importance to the United States--and particularly California--of Latin America and East Asia during the past several decades, best symbolized by the economic prowess of Japan. Officials from UC President David Gardner on down expect the school to graduate a cadre of professionals who will guide both private and public institutions in conducting business and public policy more intelligently and competitively in the region.

For example, a banker would understand not only the financial dos and don’ts of a particular nation but the political risk involved in such investments. Government policy planners urging tax reform in Japan as a way of stimulating imports from the U.S. would not be surprised as they might otherwise be at additional economic effects.

The school’s architects believe that too many American specialists in Asia are oriented toward cultural, rather than business or political, topics, resulting in Ph.D. holders fluent in 18th-Century Chinese literature but with no knowledge of balance of payments and therefore unattractive as employees to international businesses.

In addition, school officials hope that seminars and other outreach programs will help steer the American public toward more realistic attitudes toward the Pacific region. The ambitious tasks that officials have set for themselves reflect in no small measure the prominent status of UCSD in the American educational community today.

“There’s really nothing totally analogous existing in the U.S. to what we are doing,” said Peter Gourevitch, UCSD professor of political science since 1979 and dean of the new school.

The school’s curriculum must tie together elements of Pacific regional and individual nation studies, typical business school subjects of finance and banking, and traditional public policy school concentrations of diplomacy and economics.

Teachers Must Change

The school’s professors must alter their teaching styles from those appropriate to training researchers and academics to other methods better-suited for students anticipating professional careers. The first year’s class will all be candidates for master’s degrees in Pacific international affairs. And while subsequent classes will include doctoral candidates, their numbers will always be a small percentage of the total student population.

“For everyone, it’s unquestionably the attractiveness of creating a new school,” said Lawrence Krause, an expert on Pacific trade and economics who left the prestigious Brookings Institution think tank in Washington to join the faculty.

Krause was the first among several prominent faculty from around the nation lured to the UCSD school. The school is beginning with 11 full-time faculty and will add about five professors a year until it reaches between 30 and 40. Numerous faculty from UCSD academic departments with Pacific rim specialties will be tapped from time to time.

Krause told Gourevitch that he “was wasting his time” when Gourevitch first called him back in late 1985 to feel him out about coming to the school, which at that time was only a concept and not approved in final form by the UC Board of Regents.

“But this turned out to be different from previous recruitments,” said Krause, who is a third-generation Washingtonian along with his wife, and who left Yale University for Brookings in 1975 because of the chance both to merge economic theory with public policy and to return to his hometown. “If UCSD had been trying to recruit me for the economics department, I would have given it not a moment’s notice,” he said.

Krause had previously served as a senior adviser to the Council of Economic Advisers under President Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s, when he first began specializing in Asia.

“I made my first trip to Asia in 1968 and found out how little understanding of Asia there was (in the United States), based on what I learned on the trip compared to what I saw every day in the government’s normal intelligence flow.”

That led to numerous studies over the year, first at Yale and then at Brookings, linking the American and Asian-area economies.

Not Intellectually Isolated

Krause’s initial skepticism about the Gourevitch offer vanished after he visited UCSD several times, assuring himself that faculty members in the economics and political science departments could work well with the new school, and dispelling concerns that San Diego was too isolated from the nation’s intellectual pulse.

“And they made me a nice (compensation) package,” Krause said, adding that other university international affairs schools, including Columbia, jumped into the bidding once they learned Krause was willing to leave Brookings. The average range for a full professor in the UC system is between $42,400 and $71,200, but those recruited for the new school have been offered substantially higher salaries.

Another key hire, sociologist Peter Evans, left Brown University in Providence, R.I., after 15 years at the Ivy League institution. “I had talked to UCSD previously about a possible appointment in the area of Latin American studies so I already was impressed with the growing strength of the campus, in particular the Political Science Department . . . I had become impressed that UCSD was becoming a major, powerful intellectual center.”

Equally important, Evans said, his own research was moving toward issues of comparative studies, such as his ongoing work comparing the way Korea and Brazil have developed competitive computer industries.

“So when I heard about the new school, it seemed to fit almost perfectly into my own sort of evolving intellectual agenda,” Evans said. “A real advantage is that it will be an interdisciplinary kind of environment,” working with economists, political scientists, business experts and the like.

“And new schools just don’t come along every day at this level.”

Gourevitch said UCSD officials learned much about the campus’s standing in the U.S. from its ability to attract top-ranked professionals to the school, receiving more than 800 applications for the first openings.

“We found out how high we rank, and not just in science (UCSD’s traditional strength) . . . we’ve all been irritated at the public’s inability to see what goes on on this campus in the non-science areas,” Gourevitch said.

Most School on East Coast

All but one of the nation’s academic international affairs schools in the U.S. are on the East Coast, geared in large part to training diplomats and other public-service professionals concentrated in Washington, and with a heavy emphasis on U.S.-Europe issues. (The small Jackson School at the University of Washington was set up in 1984 as an outgrowth of an existing Pacific studies program.)

“The North Atlantic has been the traditional area in which to do work on international affairs and the historical body of academic work has been in that area,” said Evans.

“And just in terms of our carving out a new geographic focus, we are going to have to use different kinds of intellectual resources and innovations that are not altogether clear at the moment. The emphasis on the Pacific has to be considered an effort to catch up on the way the world has moved over the past 40 years.”

Gourevitch spent the better part of 1986 examining existing international affairs programs at several eastern universities.

“In all cases, we found things we liked and didn’t like,” Gourevitch said

Miles Kahler, a Yale University economist recruited by UCSD, said, “The international relations school models have strong social studies and area studies programs but although their students increasingly are going into the private sector, we found the training is still heavily weighted toward the public sector.

“So there should be more attention to management and other subjects found in business schools, although the typical business school has little international emphasis.”

Gourevitch said the result is a new version of a field with traditional academic features.

“We’ve spent and continue to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about how to set up a curriculum which on the one hand takes advantage of the skills and expertise that we professors have and yet, on the other hand, does not attempt to inculcate in students things that they don’t really need to know,” Evans said, “The students do not want to be efficient researchers and producers of academic output for the most part, but rather people who will have different kinds of jobs and who will look at the world in a different way than we do.”

Historical Differences Cited

As an example, Kahler cited a planned course comparing the way different Pacific nations carry out economic and political policies according to historical and cultural patterns.

“We’ll teach about the politics of each society in practical ways that will assist students in understanding how to make policy decisions” as if they were working for a company or institution dealing with the particular country, Kahler said. “It’s a challenge to try and make the topics both theoretical and practical. This is more than just designing recipes as in a cookbook. It’s uncharted territory in a way.”

The professors say that they will use both existing textbooks and individual case models, where students are given contemporary problems and asked to discuss how they should be handled based on theories and other reference material.

“Cases help professors make the transfer of material from (normal graduate training) to a professional school,” Kahler said. “Take a case of political stabilization in Latin America where the balance of payments are out of kilter. A case study will work in both theory and applicability on a very tough question that a banker must know something about even when the answers are not 100% certain.”

Added Evans: “The trickiest thing is to be able to teach the universally applicable skills that you need, such as accounting and finance, but to keep our distinctive identity and usefulness by providing more than a little patina of Pacific rim examples grafted on to what is otherwise a standard business school or public service-oriented program.”

In large part, the curriculum will and should be student-driven, Krause said.

“We’ve had the concept of dividing up the faculty according to subject matter, with specialists in various fields,” Krause said. “But if students decide they want more international management than we envision, for example, then down the line we’ll move in that direction.”

Gourevitch was pleasantly surprised that the school received more than 200 applications for the 40 some spots available in the first class, and that a high percentage have some prior experience either with Asia or with an aspect of international relations.

Most Students From California

Of the 39 students now committed to come in September, 14 are entering directly following completion of undergraduate work with 25 having first had some work experience. A majority are from California, and about one-third will ultimately specialize in Latin American areas, a third in Japan studies, and the remaining third in other Asian areas.

“A lot of people don’t know we yet exist,” Gourevitch said. “We’ve found that there are so few schools of this type except in the East that a lot of students in the West don’t know the opportunity exists for these careers. They might end up in law, or business, or Pacific area studies instead, whereas in the Northeast, students tend to be familiar with the international focus.

“I think we’re going to expand the total pool of students to go into the field.”

The school will also place strong emphasis on placing its students after they complete the masters program.

“Where they get jobs will determine how good the student body will be that we ultimately attract,” Krause said. “It’s critical that the first graduates get placed well.”

Krause, with his many contacts built up during a quarter-century at Yale and Brookings, has been in the forefront of those promoting the school at professional forums and in private meetings.

Krause is helping to set up the Pacific Rim Financial Forum, a mix of private businessmen, public officials and university researchers who will meet twice a year or so to talk about research topics under way at the school that are of interest to forum members.

“You get high-level people together to discuss issues of current interest and it’s a chance for firms to get to know the faculty and students interested perhaps in working for them,” Krause said. He said, for example, an equity fund manager doing business in the Pacific could profit from hiring students initially as interns.

“We already had the U.S.-Japan Committee on International Monetary Policy meet on campus here in February as part of its twice-a-year meetings,” Gourevitch said. “And we are up front when we talk to them that part of this is a recruitment tool, that they are likely to be the future employers of our students and we want to build relationships.”

Gourevitch said the school would also like to hold seminars with the state Legislature, members of which already are seeking advice from the school on specific matters.

“We will have a major public service component,” he said.