Subject: Heinz Fellowships Awarded

From: Bill Weber [mailto:bill.weber@edgedev.com]
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 10:26 AM
To: Rick Collins; Stewart Hampton Cole; Sasper Elliott; Sasper; Barney Stewart (Off); Barney Stewart (home); Al Durfee; Bob Bose
Cc: Peter Knudsen; Rob Hanke; Linda DeLaurentis

Colleagues,

Yesterday, a glorious spring day in New Haven, Al Durfee, Bob Bose and I met with 5 remarkable finalist candidates for the Heinz Fellowships.  In the end, we awarded a total of $18,350 to Anna Smith, Amila Golic, Jasmine Dyba, Gang Chen and Noah Kazis. 

Earlier in the day, Al and Bob and I had lunch at the Graduate Club with Linda DeLaurentis and Roy Tsau '91 and Harry Blair (Roy and Harry are the faculty team that reviewed all applicants and distilled them down to the semi-finalists whose dossiers we all reviewed).  In addition, John Vrolyk '08, one of last year's winners, regaled us with tales of ethnic minorities in the Vietnam highlands.  (Sasper, he's just starting to read your book and he's read Mai's;  and Rob, he's certainly appreciative of your continuing interest in him.).

All in all, another successful round for the Heinz.  I think Jack would certainly have approved.

Thanks once again on behalf of our Class for the time and attention you give to this worthy undertaking.

All best,

Bill Weber

Class of 1960 Les Aspin Fellowship Selection Committee

March 31, 2009

Subject: Report of 2009 Selections

              A three-man (Guiler, Mazadoorian, Schmitz) quorum of your full Committee (Owen Cylke, John Dwyer, Doug Guiler, Harry Mazadoorian, Bill Martin, and Chuck Schmitz) convened at Luce Hall on March 27 to consider eight finalists for the Class of 1960 Les Aspin Fellowships.   We were joined by Nancy Ruther, Associate Director of the MacMillan Center, who provided needed perspectives on students, faculty, classes, and projects.  Two observers from the Class of 1985, Jonathan and Anne Diamond, were present for a portion of the day.  Nancy Phillips and Alice Kustenbauder of the MacMillan Center gave us important logistical support.

              Over Yale-catered luncheon sandwiches in classroom 202, we reviewed policies and strategies, while last year’s Aspin Fellow Catherine Cheney (no relation to Dick), enthusiastically told us how her work in rural Mexico had confirmed and magnified her interest in grass-roots economic development through creation of personal capital savings.

Our eight 2009 finalists were pre-selected by an International Relations faculty committee from 23 original applicants.  We were impressed by the high quality of seven of the eight, and your Aspin Committee authorized grants to three candidates and designated two others as alternates, in case any of our first three would turn out not to require the full allocation of Aspin funding (there are quite a few other Yale fellowships that can be used for summer international research, and some candidates have access to non-Yale funding).   As an indication that Yale’s effort to globalize Yale College is proceeding, a German and a Turk were among the eight Aspin finalists.

The Aspin portion of Yale’s endowment provided us a bit over $13,000 for use this year.  [We were put on notice that investment returns this year will likely not be as generous to the endowment, so we should expect to take a haircut in 2010.]  We allocated up to $13,000 for our awardees, with final numbers to emerge from the faculty “Overlap Committee.”

The candidate whose aspirations and project struck us a most akin to Les’ own career is Levent Tuzun, a native of Istanbul, who plans to run for elective office in Turkey, beginning with Mayor of Istanbul and not excluding Prime Minister of Turkey.  His poise, demeanor, and logical responses to our questions suggested to us that he might just succeed.  Levent will work this summer in London as Parliament Intern for Labour Party MP David Lammy, whose Tottenham constituency is composed of 40% ethnic communities, including Cypriot and Turk. 

Alyssa Bernstein is an Arabist spending her current, Junior year in Cairo and Amman.  She aspires to enter public service, perhaps diplomacy, and plans to work in the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington, focusing on Afghanistan.

Dina Grossman is an advanced economist who wants to work this summer with a Columbia University project in Uganda to provide individual public health counseling in small villages.  Her job will be to train, monitor, and evaluate how public health workers collect data as they visit their clients and to recommend how data collection can be improved.

Alternate Christina Constantini wants to work with a well-respected Ugandan MP to improve conditions in refugee camps in northern Uganda.  Alternate Jeremy Avins wants to compare treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Macedonia (Albanian) and Israel (Palestinian).

As in previous years, your Committee was highly impressed by the articulate and persuasive responses we got from most candidates to our most probing and occasionally skeptical questions and by their determination to contribute something to make the world a better place.  We are proud of our awardees for 2009 and think that Les would be, too.

Respectfully submitted,

Chuck Schmitz

Chairman, Aspin Fellowship Committee

Branford Fellowship Report

2008 Recipient: Yingrui (Ray) Wang

" I cannot even start to express how grateful I am to individuals behind the Class of 1960 Fellowship. This summer has taught me much about life and myself and about what it means to be living."

For over ten weeks this past summer, I worked for Ghana Health and Education Initiative, a small grassroots NGO based in Humjibre, Ghana. Humjibre is a small village of around 3,000 people in the Western Region of Ghana. There, I taught two computer education camps for middle school students. I also tutored 30 fourth grade students in basic arithmetic. Finally, I interviewed more then 20 individuals in the village to understand how GHEI has changed their community and to hear their life stories.

Each computer camp lasted for two weeks. In each session, I taught about 10 students how to type, how to use Windows operating system, and how to use MS Word and PowerPoint. I took both sessions to an internet café 45 minutes away from the village because the village computer center did not have internet access. The field trip was the furthest many of my students had ever been away from home. During the trip, I tried to explain what the internet is in 2 hours to students who had only recently learned to type. In the end, I could only introduce my students to the concept of the internet. It was incredibly frustrating to not have the time and resources to allow my students to understand what the internet is. In many ways, the trips to the internet café represented my experience of teaching in Ghana. Although English is the official language of Ghana, only educated individuals could speak it well. My students were still middle school students. They were still learning English as their second language. Thus, I was not only their teacher for computer but also their English teacher.

I also ran 2 one-week-long math camps. I came up with the idea because of Joyce. Joyce is 13-year-old girl who lived right behind my house and was a regular guest during the afternoons and evenings. She is a remarkably independent and strong girl for her age. Her English is better than most of the adults in the village. She is insightful and intelligent. But one afternoon, she asked me to check over her math homework, I was shocked to find out that she could not do basic addition and subtraction without the use of her fingers. Joyce made me realize that there were so many other children who were just like her—extremely smart but unable to do even basic arithmetic. I targeted the two public primary, or elementary, schools in the village. For each school, I picked 15 fourth grade students. I wrote and printed assignment sheets for every class. I wanted to give them an opportunity to practice a large number of arithmetic problems while being constantly supervised and tutored. After a week of intense practice, most of my students significantly improved their arithmetic skills. However, in teaching these students, I learned the difficulties and challenges of Ghana’s education system. Several of these fourth graders could not do multiplication without a table. Some did not even know what multiplication was even though the teacher had already covered the topic in class. I eventually found out that many of them had developed simple but effective cheating methods. Since the class size was very large, their teacher did not know about the cheating. And by cheating, some of these students had been able to advance through the grade levels. In addition, there were also students who could not even do addition and subtraction even using their own fingers. One girl, in particular, could not write the Arabic numbers 11-20. I gave these students pebbles and managed to teach them how to add and subtract by the end of the session. Like the computer camps, the two math camps were incredibly frustrating to me. I often came home from my classes exhausted and dejected. The classes all showed me the problems that hindered the students’ education, but I neither had the time nor the resources to solve these problems.

Finally, I interviewed many individuals in the village and the surrounding areas because I was helping plan GHEI’s 5th anniversary. In addition, I wanted to know how GHEI has changed the village. I met with the village chief and elders, principals, teachers, doctors, nurses, and students. I also interviewed many farmers because the majority of Humjibre’s people are subsistence farmers.

A week and a half before I left Ghana, I went on a week-long backpacking trip around Ghana by myself. It was long, adventurous, lonely, and eye-opening. I first went up north to Tamale and Mole National Park. There, I ate fowl kebabs and went on a two-hour safari jeep ride into the National Park. Afterwards, I traveled down the eastern side of Ghana. I hiked up the highest waterfall in West Africa and visited one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world. The trip taught me many lessons, but one stands out above all. I learned that everyone is capable of kindness. It is a trite phrase. But I learned its importance when I was stranded in a tiny village for an entire day because the bus I was riding broke down. Instead of treating me as a curiosity, the local people understood my worry and helped me find my way to my next destination. It was the small acts of kindness that I will remember forever. I made many friends and acquaintances along the way. I may never see them again, but each one of them taught me that if you search hard enough, you will always find a sense of humanity in every person you meet. 

Aside from my busy teaching schedule, I slowly immersed myself into the life of the village. I learned to carry on a basic conversation in twi, the local ethnic language. I learned to cook and eat plantains, rice, and yam for every meal. I learned to catch when a seller charged me an obruni, or foreigner, price. I played soccer with the local schoolchildren every afternoon. I read more books than I ever have during a single summer. I also ran a lot. One of the most meaningful but simplest things I have done this summer was running in the morning. Every other morning, I ran 7 miles on a country road that connects Humjibre with a nearby market town.

I left Humjibre three months ago, but I can still feel the sticky, humid air on my skin and I can still hear the packs of schoolchildren playing by my house. I am not sad that I left because I know I will return to Humjibre in the future. This summer has been absolutely incredible. I cannot even start to express how grateful I am to individuals behind the Class of 1960 Fellowship. This summer has taught me much about life and myself and about what it means to be living.

Bente Grinde

Class of 1960 Summer Traveling Fellowship

Summer 2008 Project Summary

My time aboard the Robert C. Seamans in the Pacific taught me quite a lot about the

ocean and how it works and it also taught me quite a lot I didn’t expect to find out

about life on the ocean.

The ocean is all there is out there.  Nothing exists but the sounds of wind and water and

the creak of the ship’s beams, the hum of the generator and the shouts of the First Mate, the clamor of the kitchen and the songs and whispers of shipmates.  It’s hard to remember

what it feels like to stand on solid ground.  The world is 135 feet long and skimming the

surface of an incomprehensible deep, from which one can sometimes pull a familiar tuna.

The only personal time is that which is stolen for sleep.  The only personal place is that

six-foot-long rack where I lay.

This summer I had the chance to experience some elements of what it must have been

like to have lived a life at sea during the Golden Age of Sail.  I learned how to set and

handle sails, plot the ship’s course on navigation charts, calculate the ship’s location on

the earth’s sphere using observed elevations of celestial objects, and conducted research

on the abundance of microscopic plastic particles that find their way into the Pacific

Ocean.

Our research showed that there are few methods for determining which small particles

are made from plastics and which are wood, dust, plankton, crustaceans and other flecks

of material such as ship’s paint.  Nevertheless, small plastic pellets between 1 and 5 mm.,

occurring in a multitude of colors, were found in nearly every sample taken from the

waters between Hawaii and the California Coast.  The general conclusions are that

plastics of all sizes, shapes and colors exist in the ocean; some large synthetic objects

actually provide a substrate on which miniature ecosystems establish themselves; plastics

of all sizes may be a threat to animals, particularly birds, fish and jellyfish, which

confuse plastic with prey; and since there are already laws prohibiting the dumping of

plastics in the world’s oceans, there may be little that can be done in terms of cleanup,

owing to the sheer scale of the affected areas.

I learned a great deal on this trip about an ecosystem I have never had the opportunity to

study and about a blue ocean sailing culture I had only heard of in the abstract.  While I

don’t plan on pursuing ocean studies, I now recognize that all environmental studies are

deeply tied to ocean studies: climate, ecology, evolution, global trade, geography.  It is

impossible for me now to overlook the significance of the ocean, and that is the most

valuable thing I could have hoped to glean from this experience as an Environmental

Studies major concerned with big picture patterns of environmental systems. 

Catharine Axley

John Heinz Fellowship Report

Department of State Intern

American Embassy

Santo Domingo

Dominican Republic

              This past summer I had the fortune to return to the Dominican Republic for the 5th time within my Yale years so far. My previous trips had revolved primarily around projects in a small community of Haitian immigrants, where I was able to gain insight into local consequences of national and international issues of immigration, citizenship, and human rights. This time, however, as an intern at the American Embassy in Santo Domingo, I was able to experience these ideas the other way around; I learned about national and international issues in the Dominican Republic from the perspective of the national and international governments and how these decisions affect local communities and people. My goal in working for the Department of State this summer was to better understand foreign policies and the consequences and benefits of international governmental intervention and support, and I was able to do this and have a fun and exciting summer through the help of the Heinz Fellowship.

              My first day of work, I walked from my one bedroom apartment located in the old colonial zone district about 20 minutes to one of the eight compounds of the American Embassy, where I first began to realize the immense privilege one has in possessing an American passport. The compound was the Consular Section where hundreds of Dominicans, Dominican-Americans, Americans, and a variety of other international visitors with American citizenship line up everyday to apply for, interview for, receive, or be denied an American passport or visa. Monday through Thursday, this was my workplace along with about 20-30 American foreign service officers, a handful of American foreign service officials, and about at least 100 Dominican employees.

              As an intern assigned to the American Citizen Services section, I worked mostly on passport processing, naturalization act processing, and occasionally as a receiver of documents from applicants to verify that they had all of the required materials with them, while in the office. One of the most interesting aspects of this work was the trends I would find in the people’s information and circumstances. Most of the children who were seeking citizenship and a passport through a parent were children whose father was Dominican, but naturalized American after working in New York. There were very few cases where the mother passed down citizenship, suggesting a greater trend of male migration to the States and a return to the Dominican Republic to start a family. Another trend with these cases was the age gap between the mother and father of the children. It was common to come across age gaps of 20 years (the father, being older), and I counted at least 15 cases in which the age gap was closer to 40 years. This seemed to me to reflect a phenomenon where naturalized men are valuable in that they automatically pass down citizenship, and thus, easily can marry much younger women who recognize the advantages in their fathering their children.

              Besides working in the office at the Consular Section and processing documents, I was also given the opportunity to learn about what the American Citizen Services unit provides for those people who are living in, residing in, or just visiting the Dominican Republic and have an American passport. Almost twice a week, I traveled around the country in an Embassy vehicle with an Embassy chauffeur to provide support and assistance to American citizens in prison, participating in court cases, and involved in child custody disputes. Many of these citizens were not “born and raised in America” American, but rather, Puerto Rican, or again, naturalized Dominican citizens. With citizenship, they are guaranteed the support of the Embassy in making sure that they do not undergo any sort of physical or legal abuse while in custody or in trial. While the Embassy in these situations acts as a presence rather than an active participant, having representatives from the American government observing a trial, for example, does seem to cause substantial influence. Subtle political influence rather than outright legal and diplomatic intervention was something that I saw to be more common than I would have expected throughout the Embassy’s departments.

              The Consul General invited me to a few diplomatic meetings with the Dominican secretary of tourism and the Dominican Foreign Affairs secretary. These meetings took place in the Dominican government offices, some of which used to be the estates of Trujillo, the terrorizing dictator who reigned until his assassination in 1961. It was also in these meetings that I recognized the advantages of subtle political pressuring rather than intervention. Besides addressing the issues that we needed to discuss (which involved the recent release of travel report on the US Dept of State website that wasn’t very favorable to the country), the Consul General and I also brought up topics, such as recent immigration legislation, to discuss our concerns about their consequences. Rather than release a report on the Embassy’s perception of these legislations, we told him off-the-record what we saw as problematic and encouraged an open discussion to get on the same page. Whether this type of diplomacy actually works is not quite clear, but it avoids creating tension between our government and theirs, allowing for smoother and more amicable relations.

              On Fridays I worked at the Embassy Department where the Ambassador was located to help collaborate on the Human Rights Report that the Embassy releases every year in March. This was one of my most exciting projects, as I was able to learn about International Human Rights laws and violations, and use this knowledge in analyzing current Dominican practices. The treatment of Haitian immigrants both legally and socially was again where most of my interest lay, and I was thus able to focus on these issues as well as prison conditions, based on my prison visits, to contribute to this coming year’s report.

              Socializing with fellow Embassy employees was also an interesting experience. While many of the Foreign Service Officers were friendly with the Dominican employees, there was clearly a division among the American and Dominicans, which was reflected at the cafeteria at lunch as well as in the office. The fact that the Dominican employees have been working at the Embassy for years and have no plans of moving while the American employees tend to rotate around the world every 2-3 years has a lot to do with this division and tension that exists. I tended to work more closely with and socialize more with the Dominican employees, as I was interested in understanding their perception of International diplomacy as well as national issues. It was also very interesting for me to interact with Dominicans who were well off and in secure careers, rather than the very poor and unemployed Dominicans and Haitians whom I had met in my previous visits to the country.

              After this summer’s experience, I am now better able to see where I want to eventually end up after Yale. While I am not certain whether I will be directly working for the Department of State, I do know that I would love to continue working in an international field, and hopefully, in an international legal field. Immersing myself in a different culture, using the language, meeting the people, and creating dialogue among people from a variety of socio-economic levels are ways that I see myself understanding international issues better and thus becoming better equipped to address them and ideally, effect some kind of change. I want to again thank the Class of 1960’s generous John Heinz Government Service Fellowship contributors and committee for their providing me the means to make this past summer possible. I recognize the value and honor that accompany government service and am very proud to see that I was able to participate in it this summer. Because of this summer’s experience, I hope to continue collaborating in some shape or form with people in government service, and am very excited to see what will lie ahead in the future. Thank you again for an amazing summer experience!

Class of 1960 John Heinz Government Service Fellowship Report

Carl Kubler

Trumbull College 2010

This summer I interned for ten weeks with the U.S. Department of State in the economic section of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). AIT has served as the representative office and de facto embassy of the United States on Taiwan since 1979, when the U.S. established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.

I came to Taiwan at a critical juncture in the island’s recent history: after an eight-year period of rule by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, the March 2008 election of Kuomintang Party candidate Ma Ying-jeou to the Taiwan presidency had just begun a series of substantial bipartisan changes in the Taiwan-PRC relationship. President Ma advocated neither independence nor reunification but rather peaceful economic cooperation as the underlying principle of his administration. Official cross-Strait negotiations were resumed for the first time since 1993, direct weekend civilian charter flights across the Taiwan Strait were agreed upon and instated (cross-Strait flights previously had to be rerouted through Hong Kong or other ‘third-party’ areas), and decades-old trade barriers and business investment caps were lifted to facilitate economic cooperation. In this way, much as the 2008 Summer Olympics were giving Mainland China an opportunity to showcase itself to the rest of the world, these rapid changes were giving Taiwan a similarly unique opportunity to present the best elements of its society, history, and culture to the thousands of Chinese tourists, businessmen, and politicians who began traveling en masse to Taiwan while I was working at AIT.

As AIT’s summer intern, I was given the responsibility of tracking, investigating, and reporting on these developments from the ground up. Every one of my mornings at work began with a half-hour front-to-back scrutiny of the New York Times, Taipei Times, Taiwan Daily, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, after which I’d log into the classified computer system to familiarize myself with the day’s Taiwan-related cables sent from U.S. embassies around the world. I attended meetings with representatives from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, met with economic analysts from think tanks such as the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) and the Chung-Hua Institute for Economic Research (CIER), made trips to Chiang Kai-shek and Songshan Airports to investigate preparations being made for cross-Strait flights, and surveyed storeowners in the Taipei 101 building, SOGO shopping plaza, and other retail areas for their opinions of the ongoing cross-Strait developments. I had lunch with Paul Wolfowitz (former President of the World Bank and current Chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council) and helped host an eight-person U.S. Congressional delegation. I put my Chinese skills to good use welcoming Taiwanese visitors to AIT, leading small-group tours, and acting as an informal interpreter when necessary at private meetings or conferences. Separately, I also led a research project on the intellectual property rights situation in Taiwan and interviewed hundreds of Taipei college students about problems such as plagiarism and music downloading. Throughout all of these endeavors I was laden with a tremendous amount of responsibility—far more than I had imagined I would have when I first applied for my internship at AIT.

              Perhaps my proudest accomplishment of the summer was the 2008 Taiwan Competitiveness Forum, a joint endeavor among AIT, the American Chamber of Commerce, the Council for Economic Planning and Development, TIER, and CIER that brought together over a hundred official, NGO, and Taiwan and foreign business experts to discuss possible strategies for improving Taiwan’s international competitiveness in ways that would benefit Taiwan and its economic partners. Topics covered ranged from tax reform and state efficiency to public education and health care. Working together with one of AIT’s special summer hires, I helped coordinate and organize almost all of AIT’s efforts for the two-day forum, from general conference logistics to VIP security. Although there were some slight mishaps—many of the Taiwan attendees seemed to have been expecting a formal sit-down dinner instead of an American standing reception afterwards, for example—it nevertheless felt extremely rewarding to pull off what was by and large a successful conference that generated real discussion of some of the problems facing Taiwan in the twenty-first century.

              Of course, in addition to allowing me to intern at AIT, the Class of 1960 John Heinz Government Service Fellowship also granted me the opportunity to explore the many aspects of life in Taiwan. I spent countless hours on the weekends visiting cultural and historic landmarks like the National Palace Museum and Yangming Mountain, befriending local college students, strolling through crowded nightmarkets, practicing my Mandarin, and eating delicious Taiwanese fare. Occasionally I was even able to meet with Yale friends and alumni for dinner.

Living independently, I acquired valuable life skills that will serve me well the rest of my life: I did my own shopping, cooked my own meals, and hand-washed my own laundry. Even the adjustment to crowded city life wasn’t too bad, since public transportation in Taiwan is easy to use and almost startlingly punctual. By far the hardest thing to deal with, however, was the Taiwan weather, and after ten weeks of half-hour walking commutes in coat, shirt, and tie, I can assure you that the scorching heat and intermittent downpours of the Taiwanese summer are nothing to scoff at.

              My experiences in Taiwan this summer have widened my eyes to the unique complexities of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship and reaffirmed my life-long commitment to public service. The issues I examined and assignments I completed while at AIT were challenging, socially relevant, diverse in scope, and intellectually stimulating, and I can honestly admit that there are few things that would please me more than to join the Foreign Service after my graduation from Yale. I now enter my penultimate year of undergraduate studies with a fundamentally deeper understanding of the U.S.-PRC-Taiwan trilateral relationship and a greater appreciation for the critical diplomatic work that thousands of American men and women abroad are doing every day on our country’s behalf. The eye-opening lessons I’ve learned this summer will stay with me for the rest of my life. I am forever indebted to the generosity of the Class of 1960 John Heinz Fellowship Committee for its assistance in allowing me to pursue my internship at AIT, and I would look forward with pleasure to speaking with any of you about my experiences should we have an opportunity to meet again in the future.

John Vrolyk

September 28, 2008

Class of 1960 John Heinz Government Service Fellowship Report

              Arriving in Vietnam was a bewildering experience.  Emerging after thirty hours of air travel, the hot breath of the Saigon night hit with a physical shock.  By the time I had been deposited at my home for the summer, I was sure that we had by only the narrowest margins avoided killing several dozen motorcyclists.  Two days later, after a morning spent in cursory introductions and submitting the clearance forms, non-disclosure agreements, computer-use-agreements, and the other endless paper trail of bureaucracy, I sat down in my cubicle and realized that I had in front of me a desk, a computer, and an almost complete lack of guidance, with all the freedom that implied.  I was told that over the next week, I should read the Mission and Bureau Statements of Purpose, consider my interests and the focus of the Consulate, and decide what I wanted to do with my summer.

              It was quickly clear that “sticking points” in the bilateral relationship tended to center around human rights and religious freedoms.  While the Vietnam-U.S. bilateral relationship grows increasingly closer, Government of Vietnam (GVN) official histories continue to lambast U.S. involvement in Indochina as “imperialist” adventuring intent on creating puppets of the “running dog” South Vietnamese “regime.”  While the office joked about our new role as “dog runners,” the war’s looming shadow makes U.S. attempts to apply pressure in the usual way particularly delicate.  In particular, the Central Highlands stood out to me immediately as a geographic focus within the larger milieu of human rights/religious freedoms.

              The Central Highlands are engulfed in an enormously complex set of issues as nationalist, economic, religious, and educational conflicts play out across a milieu historically characterized by deeply-rooted ethnic and cultural divisions.  Vietnam (officially) recognizes the existence of 54 ethnic minority groups, of which approximately thirty are mostly based in the Central Highlands.  Statistics do not, however, adequately characterize the deep diversity of the area – imagine 34 ethnic groups, all speaking (for the most part exclusively) different languages, with different cultural backgrounds and national identities, living under (what they perceive to be) foreign rule in an area approximately the size of Connecticut.

              Ethnic minorities in Vietnam have resisted Kinh, Chinese, and French domination since time immemorial.  Ethnic minorities under the auspices of the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO) – and organization that grew out of U.S. special forces use of ethnic minority soldiers in the Central Highlands – engaged in guerilla warfare against the GVN until 1992.  While open warfare is now a thing of the past, tensions run extremely high.  While the GVN highlights ethnic diversity as a tourist attraction, after thirty continuous years of war to achieve independence and unification it comes as no great surprise that the Party is deeply concerned with national unity.  However, characterizing the Central Highlands situation as merely another case of ethno-nationalist separatism would be a gross oversimplification – while separatism charges the atmosphere on both sides, all issues by no means stem from separatist logic.

              In particular, the economic development of the Central Highlands remains one of the most contentious issues facing the area.  While corruption among political insiders with respect to land distribution is endemic to Vietnam, it is especially controversial in the Central Highlands due to the Kinh monopoly on political power.  As a result, the (corrupt) use of eminent domain in the creation of large cash crop plantations by the politically-connected takes on the connotations of an ethnic and cultural attack. In the context of the area’s history – less than 20 years ago, the vast majority of ethnic minorities still practiced swidden (roving slash-and-burn) agriculture in the jungle – ethnic minorities are particularly incensed by what they see as unfair practices leading to the subsumation of their culture and livelihood.  Their subsequent exclusion from employment opportunities on such plantations adds insult to injury.  However, the story is not one-sided: land redistribution was accomplished mostly through legal foreclosures on unpaid loans, and ethnic minorities have largely excluded themselves from plantation work because of their unwillingness to adopt regular working hours and accountability.  Economic discontent and land reform protests are a regular feature of the Central Highlands – this unrest is, however, often mis-characterized by both paranoid GVN leadership and U.S.-based Montagnard separatists as “open rebellion.”

My long-term project over the summer was research into GVN and NGO efforts in ethnic minority educational systems in the Central Highlands.  While Vietnam’s educational system is disproportionately successful (greater than 90% literacy in a country with an average annual income of approximately $800), ethnic minorities have fallen behind.  My research focused on public and private initiatives to alleviate this disparity, with a particular emphasis on the long-term potential for educational progress to mitigate or eliminate the effects of some of the other (economic, political, ethnic, religious) tensions.  It is difficult to overstate the incredible importance of education in creating the basic improvements in living standards that allow people to effectively function within society.  On a refugee monitoring trip to Gia Lai and Kon Tum provinces, I had the opportunity to speak directly with a number of ethnic minority people who had fled to Cambodia and been denied refugee status there.

While I obviously value education (it’s hard to end up at Yale not caring about education), it is impossible to understand its importance except through experience of its absence.  I met people who could only describe their decision to go to Cambodia as “following their friends,” adults the age of my parents who fundamentally could not understand what we meant by the concept of “police harassment” (people who would happily tell us that the police came to their house five days a week, for three hours each time, and prevented them from working, but didn’t understand what we meant when we asked if they were being “harassed” or “persecuted”), people who had spent a year’s income to cross the border believing that they would be transported on the same day to a magical America where people do not have to work.  A woman described her joy at learning to read, because she could finally read the price tags and be assured that shopkeepers were not swindling her.  The experience was incredibly eye-opening and totally heart-breaking.  How can you possibly impress upon a parent the importance of attending school – the opportunities available to someone with a high school education – if neither they nor any of their peers have never left their communal village, let alone attended school?  When the crucial decision is to be made – should this child attend school or help with the rice harvest – how can you explain the ultimate economic value of first grade?  Especially given cultural traditions – ethnic minority children traditionally run around with essentially no supervision or adult interaction between the ages of 2-7 – it becomes self-evident why such children enroll in fewer numbers and are less successful in the limited schooling opportunities available to them.

              Nonetheless, enormous progress has been made.  Primary schools are logistically available to the vast majority of ethnic minority students, and primary school attendance rates have skyrocketed.  Ethnic minority boarding schools have become available for secondary and high-school education to the lucky few students who are both talented and politically-connected.  While logistics remain a problem, the solution is both in progress and fairly evident.  The conceptual approach to education, on the other hand, is far more difficult.  The GVN has mandated that all education take place on a single national curriculum with Vietnamese as the only language of instruction.  This decision was made for reasons of national unity – much as America characterized its public schooling as a crucial component of the “melting pot,” the GVN wants to foment a single national identity through national schooling.  Especially with respect to ethnic minorities with their history of separatism, the GVN has been quite adamant on this front.  Unfortunately, such a program inherently systematically disadvantages ethnic minority students.  Arriving in kindergarten, they are exposed to not only what is often an entirely new (and let me tell you – REALLY hard!) language but also a curriculum that was designed originally for middle-class urban ethnic Vietnamese.  It comes as no great surprise, then, that ethnic minority students and parents tend to find education irrelevant to their everyday lives and therefore unimportant.

              UNICEF, Plan International, and Save the Children Alliance, among others, described their efforts at advocacy and capacity-building in an effort to recenter the educational system for the benefit of ethnic minority students.  In the past two years, real progress has been made towards garnering GVN acceptance of ethnic minority languages as at least partial languages of instruction in primary school – UNICEF and Save are both engaged in action-research projects under which bilingual curriculums are being developed and teachers trained.  International organizations push hard to prioritize learning outcomes over national unity.  However, such advocacy is always slow-going in Vietnam – the Communist Party of Vietnam is famously a “black box” and major changes in policy, especially when they concern “sensitive” issues (and all issues are sensitive in the Central Highlands), are usually protracted.

              While a conceptual shift in priority for education from national unity to learning outcomes would be a huge step forward, basic structural problems make even the best of intentions hard to implement.  For example, there are literally zero H’mong ethnicity teachers capable of teaching above the 4th grade level, due to the simple fact that at the moment there are no H’mong people in Vietnam who have graduated from higher than 4th grade.  On a larger scale, ethnic minority teachers are pervasively under qualified – they are the recipients of affirmative-action programs that allowed them to enter and graduate from secondary school, high school, and teaching college without ever achieving a normal passing score on any entrance or exit exam.  When the teachers themselves are barely literate, all the conceptual emphasis on learning outcomes can do little to create real progress.  Even if qualified teachers were available, simple bilingual education is not enough – ethnic minority areas are usually composed of several ethnic minorities mixed in with Kinh students.  In a typical Central Highlands classroom, five or six ethnic minority languages are likely to be present.  While there are proven educational models for bilingual education, multilingual education presents enormous challenges to even the top graduates of U.S. teaching colleges, let alone the under qualified candidates which backward, rural areas of Vietnam can attract as teachers.

              As you might imagine from even this brief description of one facet of the Central Highlands situation, my cable reporting did not identify any turn-key solutions to these problems.  Fortunately, finding solutions was not the point – developing a better, more nuanced understanding of the deep causes behind the unrest in the Central Highlands was.  While U.S. direct involvement in the Central Highlands ended in 1973, we cannot help but be concerned by the fates, opportunities, and dreams of those people.  Especially given the human rights and religious freedom issues that I’ve barely touched on here, the U.S. has a stated interest in the area.

              New Haven is a long way from Vietnam.  Sitting in Bass Library, it is hard to remember myself, squatting under a leaking tin roof in a cataclysmic rain storm, sopping wet with sweat and trying not to drip on my notes as an old man, half-paralyzed by a stroke, tries to explain why he fled to Cambodia, how he and his wife and three children live on $100 a year, how he is afraid to go to the doctor because he had fled, why he doesn’t think his children should attend the school visible 100 yards away.  I wanted to be sent to Vietnam because I am fascinated by the development of the Third World – the way government institutions are created, the relation of economic development and education, the means of ensuring human rights.  But I could only understand that sort of development dispassionately – in Vietnam I had the opportunity not just to see a country in development, not just to meet the people whose lives may or may not be transformed by the process, but to influence it, to write the papers that will form the basis for future USAID operations in the country, to be (for two weeks) the religious freedoms officer for Southern Vietnam.  In my cable reporting, I realized the truth of Graham Greene’s remark in The Quiet American that, “one has to take sides, if one is to stay human;” to describe the situation and push the decision on to someone else (by definition less knowledgeable on the subject) was to fail not just to do my job but morally.  It is one thing to sit on a New Haven windowsill and discuss what U.S. policy should be; it took a whole new kind of conviction and courage to stand in the Consulate and decide what U.S. policy would be.  I cannot thank you, the benefactors of the Heinz Fellowship, enough, for your support, for the opportunity to be put in a situation that demanded of me the courage to make those crucial decisions.

Class of 1960 Les Aspin Fellowship Selection Committee

November 1, 2008

Subject: Report of 2008 Selections

              A four-man quorum of your full Committee (Owen Cylke, John Dwyer, Doug Guiler, Harry Mazadoorian, Bill Martin, and Chuck Schmitz) convened at Mory’s and Luce Hall on March 28 to consider seven finalists for the Class of 1960 Les Aspin Fellowships. 

Our seven 2008 finalists were pre-selected by an International Relations faculty committee from 29 original applicants.  As evidence that the faculty committee did a good job, your Aspin Committee authorized grants to five of the seven and designated the other two as alternates, in case any of our first five would turn out not to require Aspin funding (there are four other Yale fellowships that can be used for summer international research, and all candidates made applications to most of them).   We had $13,832 to allocate, and we allocated up to $13,500, with final numbers to emerge from the faculty “Overlap Committee”.  Any unused monies will be returned to the Aspin Endowment, where we hope that Yale’s prowess in getting massive returns on investment will benefit us again, as the 28% gain surely did this year.

To suggest that our seven finalists were good material for an Aspin Fellowship would be the understatement of the week.   All had excellent academic records, sparkling references, and well-considered summer projects relating to international affairs, which they explained and defended in the teeth of Committeemen’s genial-but-pointed questions.  Project destinations are Mexico, Morocco, Switzerland (2), and Ghana.

Committeemen’s socks were knocked off by examples of poise, confidence, eloquence, and resourcefulness shown by nearly all candidates.   Talking with such talented youngsters is an invigorating experience for old alums and is reassuring of modern Yale’s ability to attract the best and to educate effectively.  The Class of 1960 certainly can be proud of the 2008 Aspin laureates, as would Les.

Following are excerpts from the five reports:

Catherine Cheney, TC 2010: This summer, I worked for the World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) development program in Mexico gathering print, photo, and video testimonies of rural community members now benefiting from formal financial services. This rewarding experience would not have been possible without the support of the Les Aspin ’60 Summer Fellowship, and I am deeply thankful for the support it provided me.

After considering how I might best take advantage of the summer before my junior year, I decided that I wanted to use and improve my Spanish speaking skills, have work experience related to my academic field of study in political science, and produce journalistic pieces for a cause that helps others.

…I was inspired by the mission of [the World Council of Credit Unions] and convinced that an internship with this group in a Spanish speaking country would meet all of my goals.

I… noticed that WOCCU lacked human-interest stories that might draw donations for their development programs. The huge number of people they help immediately impressed me, but I had a hard time locating the success stories, the faces behind the numbers.  I sent an email proposing to intern abroad for one of their development programs, gathering testimonies of the people they help.

My expectations for the internship were surpassed in a number of ways. First, I was surprised by how quickly my colleagues became my friends. I belted Mexican ballads with them on our long drives through the Veracruz mountains, met their families, and ate long lunches with them everyday.  I was also exceedingly impressed with the impact of WOCCU in rural Mexico, owed in part to their emphasis on savings rather than a sole focus on loans.

Lastly, this summer experience confirmed my connection with Mexico. I now aspire to work in the country in the future, and at Yale I plan to explore human rights law, international development, foreign policy and foreign correspondence as potential avenues.

Katherine Kendrick, SY 2009: When I gratefully accepted the Les Aspin’60 Summer Fellowship last spring, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to do a ten-week internship at the American Embassy in Rabat and pursue independent research on U.S. public diplomacy broadcasting in Morocco. The summer surpassed my already high expectations.  I begin my senior year having had a professionally rigorous, intellectually challenging, and culturally enriching summer in Morocco.  I can truly say that it was a transformative experience.

I arrived in Morocco with a keen interest in public diplomacy, a field which combines my passions for diplomacy and journalism. I was excited to accept the Embassy internship and be exposed to the Foreign Service, a career I have always considered.  Moreover, the summer promised to be an unparalleled opportunity to observe public diplomacy on the ground through independent research on the U.S. sponsored Arabic-language radio station, Radio Sawa.  Founded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) in 2002 and funded by the United States Congress, Radio Sawa was designed to replace Arabic-language Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts with catchier programming to reach Arab youth in the Middle East and North Africa. A controversial and under-researched initiative, I was eager to get beyond the statistics on Sawa and hear from its listeners. My internship and research complemented each other more than I could have imagined, leaving me with a nuanced understanding of public diplomacy in theory and in practice.

The Foreign Service Officers I worked for were very invested in making my internship a substantive experience for me and for the Embassy. There were only four interns, and I was over ten years younger than the others—yet I was treated as a peer and given equally challenging work. Every day I edited and translated a Moroccan news summary to be used internally and externally by the Embassy. Soon after my arrival, I drafted a confidential cable to Washington on eroding press freedoms in Morocco—a hot topic after a rash of incidents of media censorship and journalists detained

While the former USIA employee called Sawa nothing more than a “sleeping pill” for greater problems in the region, a teenager from a poor area of Casablanca raved about not only its music but also its news broadcasts, saying that all of her friends talk about the programs. When my media-savvy colleague in Rabat insisted that everyone was aware of—and skeptical of—Sawa’s American roots, the Moroccan teenagers I spoke to in a more remote area of the country did not know of the connection until our interview. I cannot offer a concise conclusion on Sawa, but that was precisely the value of my research—debunking the simplicity (and suggested success) of Sawa’s official audience statistics and delving into the messy realities of its reception on the ground.

This experience would have been impossible without the support of the Les Aspin Fellowship. It not only enabled me to accept an unpaid internship and assume living costs abroad, but it also allowed me to travel beyond Rabat to research—which was particularly essential in a country where cities only two hours apart differ significantly in culture and demographics. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity—not only for the complexity it has leant to my senior thesis work, but for the clarity it has given me as I apply for jobs next year. After this summer, I will most certainly be considering the State Department. Even if I do not end up in a federal job next year, I know that I will bring to my job firsthand perspective on the inner workings of diplomacy abroad.

Haley Nix, Silliman 2009: This summer, I completed a State Department internship with the U.S. Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament.  The internship involved a ten-week stay in Geneva, Switzerland beginning in mid-June and concluding in mid-August.  

                  Within the Conference on Disarmament (CD) itself, I was responsible for accompanying the delegation to all meetings, both formal and informal, taking notes, and writing reports to be sent back to Washington.  The Conference was in session in June and August.

                  During the month of July, I was the CD’s liaison to the U.S. delegation negotiating an additional protocol to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).  I sat in on all convention meetings and several bilateral negotiations, taking notes to provide a definitive record of the proceedings to the delegation.   As such, I was also responsible for writing and submitting the Presidential Report and other letters as official documents to the CD Secretariat.

                  At the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva, the global purpose is arms control.  Yet each member has a different understanding of the ideal balance of arms, and a different philosophy on how to achieve that balance.    Particularly on an issue as pressing as security, a member state’s stance in deliberations is heavily influenced by perceived national interest.  In that way, deliberations on the instruments produced by the CD or CCW resemble the deliberation that resulted in the U.S. Constitution.

                    My observation of diplomacy taught me that personality often matters, and that the course of negotiations can be significantly affected by cultural differences that hinder or facilitate understanding.  A skilled diplomat should be able to perceive, predict, and accommodate these differences, and these skills are best acquired through direct exposure.

                  None of this would have been possible without the assistance of the Les Aspin Award.  The internship was unpaid, and while housing was provided, my travel and living expenses were extensive (particularly living in a country as expensive as Switzerland).

Aniket Shah, Saybrook:

African Elections and International Security:

Case Study of Presidential Elections in Ghana and Kenya

For decades, Africa has been known as the continent of conflict. Civil wars, military coups and genocide have all contributed to a widespread feeling of hopelessness, both within and outside the continent. At the same time, however, many African countries have been marching towards democratic, representative government. As a result, election processes in Africa have received much attention, with the hope that free and fair elections can help nations begin moving towards peace.

My research this summer was the first step in writing a comparative study of the 2007 Presidential Elections in Kenya and the 2008 Presidential Elections in Ghana.

I spent the first part of my trip researching the political climate in Ghana in the lead-up to their General Elections.  I was given accreditation by the electoral commission to monitor the voter registration process, which was very important for my research. During the span of those two weeks, I traveled throughout Ghana to observe how the voter registration process was going. This process was very important for the election, as it was the first part of the national voting exercise. In fact, there was already widespread suspicion because it was delayed due to lack of equipment for the 2500 voting booths.

              Unfortunately, the registration process did not go well. Significant chaos and confusion surrounding registration led to widespread suspicion from the opposition party, the NDC. In particular, the NDC felt that the ruling party, NPP, was not enforcing the electoral laws and was allowing their supporters to register when they were not allowed to do so. The first election-related deaths have already occurred and many fear that the election will be an excuse for ethnic tension to develop into large-scale violence. Reports by local newspapers claim that the voter registry is “bloated” by at least one million votes – that is to say, there are a million people (out of a total electorate of 12 million) that are either too young to vote, have already registered in other regions, are registering under multiple names etc. I observed many of these issues during my monitoring experiences. In many polling stations, especially in the Northern regions of the country, there were instances of violence and brutality, including gun shots and kidnappings. It was certainly a fascinating process to observe and shed light on the complexities of mobilizing an entire nation for a competitive election.

In addition to monitoring the voter registration process, I had the opportunity to attend various conferences and conduct many interviews with leaders, from civil society and the government. From August 4-6, I attended the Daily Graphic Conference on Governance and Transparency. This conference brought together over 600 delegates from various spheres to discuss topics of governance and transparency in the lead-up to the Presidential Elections.

Case Study of Bawku:

the Kussasis, two ethnic tribes who have been fighting due to chieftaincy and land ownership conflicts. Unfortunately, my trip to Bawku came at a very sad time in the conflicts history, as a “mass” grave of ten women and children had been found by local authorities. For the first time, families of political opponents and supporters had been targeted and I had gone with delegates of Amnesty International Ghana to investigate.

              After conducting various interviews with local leaders and families, we realized that much of this wave of violence had to with the upcoming election. The Mamprusis leaders said that they suspected dubious intension on the part of the Kussasis politicians who were mostly the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) members of parliament. They said the opposition political leaders were doing everything possible to sustain the violence in the area until the Voters Register is opened. That would mean most Mamprusis who have fled the area and those who live in Kussasi areas would not be able to register to enable them vote in the December National elections. This would give the opposition the upper hand. Parliamentarians were also exploiting the situation to their advantage, making wild promises to their members on issues relating to the conflict.

My experiences in Ghana and Kenya have reaffirmed the importance of studying African elections in more detail. Elections in Africa cannot put nations constantly at the risk of near-genocidal violence, as they have in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and thus must be conducted in a safer manner.

Mary Goodings Swartz, Yale 2010

The Les Aspin Award allowed me to fulfill my summer plans and to have a wonderful time without having to constantly consider the state of my finances.  I was also grateful to have received an award in memory of a man who was so prominent in international affairs, the field in which I myself hope to work.

              As I described in my application and during my interview, I spent the months of June and July as an intern at the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in Geneva, Switzerland.  While working as a research assistant for two Political Science professors at Yale, I had originally discovered the IPU through their database on parliamentary elections, which stretches back to 1966, and, because of this, I did my internship in the Resource Division of the IPU.  This division compiles information, responds to queries and produces documents pertaining to parliaments, parliamentary structure and the IPU.

My internship, however, gave me a much more comprehensive understanding of the different forms of parliaments, and the different models that governments draw from when creating these legislatures.

My first task was to completely reformat the two questionnaires [to Parliaments] concerning the presidency and the parliamentarian mandate….To simplify and streamline these questionnaires to garner more responses, I read books compiled by the IPU on the subjects, consulted the previous questionnaires, and then formulated new questionnaires.  Following this, I used information available online, such as standing orders and constitutions, to test and further hone the questionnaires.

Another part of my internship included research in the IPU Archives, which date back to the IPU’s founding in 1889.  The Resource Department often receives queries from parliamentarians and private individuals concerning information in the IPU archives: in fact, it was through a query that I began my correspondence with Andy Richardson.  While at IPU,… I used the archives to respond to … queries, including one concerning a 1935 meeting of the IPU.  This also allowed me to explore the archives, which have fascinating files on diverse subjects, such as a conference held during World War II for parliaments in exile.  During my internship, I also attended two sessions of the Human Rights Council at the UN, and acted as the IPU’s representative at the Eighth Workshop of Parliamentary Scholars and Parliamentarians in Wroxton, UK. 

This internship was truly a wonderful and educational way to spend my summer.  I had the occasion to gain a more thorough understanding of the often complex rules governing the functioning of parliaments, see the different areas in which the IPU functions, and to experience the work environment at an established and well-regarded international organization…..  I am extremely grateful for the support of the Les Aspin Award in helping me increase my work experience and advance towards my career goals.  

CLASS OF 1960 BRANFORD COLLEGE  FELLOWSHIPS:  2008

From: ARVIN MURCH [mailto:arvinmurch@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 2:08 PM
To: susannah.kemple@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Fwd: Branford Class of 1960

Hi Susannah,

Thanks for this report.  I enjoyed attending your final performance of Faust last Saturday evening.  I was particularly intrigued by the way that you incorporated elements of your research into the production and how you handled the figure of Mephistopheles (aided by a remarkable performance by the actor who played him).

Congratulations on your success.  I am pleased that the Yale Class of 1960 was able to help support this most creative project.

If I may, I'd like to take you up on your offer of a set of production photos (as email attachments, if possible).  We may want to find a way to share them with other members of the class.

Very best wishes,

Arvin Murch

susannah.kemple@yale.edu wrote:

Oh dear, my own carelessness and dubious spelling talents have kept this from you for far too long . . .

----- Forwarded message from sek36@pantheon.yale.edu -----
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2008 02:26:13 -0400
From: sek36@pantheon.yale.edu
Reply-To: sek36@pantheon.yale.edu
Subject: Branford Class of 1960
To: alvinmurch@sbcglobal.net

Dear Mr. Murch

Oh my goodness, please accept my sincere and slavish apologies for not e-mailing you sooner! Alas, the challenges of preparing for this "Faust" performance have turned my mind to Swiss cheese (or perhaps Allgäuer Emmentaler cheese would be a better analogy, given the Germanic roots of my project); had I not run into Agnes this evening, I no doubt would have forgotten for three more weeks.

Below is the summary of my project which I wrote at the beginning of this year, and further down the page is the information for my production of "Faust," which goes up this weekend. (Yikes!) Should any Class of 1960 Board members so desire, I'd also be glad to mail them a video of the performance, or send a set of production photos. And should any truly dedicated members be so inclined, I can certainly mail copies of my senior essay on the subject as well!

Without further ado (as there's been far too much on my part already):

I had a wonderful Faust adventure this summer in Germany, thanks to the
generosity of the Branford Class of 1960 Fellowship committee. The research I completed overseas was not only immensely educational, but is also currently proving invaluable as I make plans for my senior project, a production of Goethe's Faust, Part I.

The grant enabled me to visit Berlin, Leipzig, Weimar, Munich, and Frankfurt am Main, all cities with rich theater histories dating to before the Goethezeit and/or strong connections to Goethe himself. I typically completed archival research at three archives in each city I visited; among the collections I was able to explore were the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Deutsches Theater Berlin Archiv, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Albertina Bibliothek in Leipzig, the Deutsches National Theater Archiv and Stadtarchiv of Weimar, the Deutsches Theater Museum, and the Goethe Haus Bibliothek. I found that the most helpful materials fell at both ends of the spectrum: 19th century accounts of Faust productions in provincial theaters across Germany were just as novel and fascinating as video records of avant-garde late 20th century performances. Throughout, I focused my attention largely on the representation of the supernatural in Faust, a tricky aspect of the play which has metamorphosed greatly as theater technology has advanced. In general, I found that the portrayal of Mephistopheles has evolved along traditional lines, with many iconic details intact, but that the representation of lesser magical creatures
and events has altered significantly, incorporating first an embrace and then a rejection of technological advancements.

It bears saying that the full weight of this fellowship?s gift to me can never
be quantified, nor expressed in purely academic terms. The freedom to explore archival materials and historical locations in Germany was invaluable, and in my travels across the country I learned things that I would never have known without the support of the Class of 1960.Two Leipzigers showed me how to brew Bowle. I was able to view Peter Stein?s ten-hour-long production of Wallenstein, the masterpiece written by Goethe's protégé Schiller. I talked, in person and at length, with the dramaturg of the Deutsches Theater Berlin about his deep distress at the DDR's censorship of the theater's 1968 production of Faust. I sincerely feel that such experiences, which would not have been possible without the Branford Class of 1960 Grant, broadened my horizons not only intellectually, but personally as well. I am intensely grateful for the opportunities provided me by this fellowship.

Faust
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Translated by Martin Greenberg
Directed by Susannah Kemple
Produced by Alyssa Simmons

The Whitney Theater, Yale University
53 Wall Street, New Haven

April 24th, 8 pm
April 25th, 8 pm
April 26th, 2 pm and 8 pm

And, coincidentally, I believe that one of our cast members, Elizabeth Ralph, is
one of this year's Class of 1960 recipients!


Again, many apologies and allbest,
Susannah Kemple
Yale College Class of 1960
919-622-0002

  The Branford College Fellowships committee again included classmates Peter Cooper, Arvin Murch, Nick Storrs and John Wilkinson. The fellowship process began in early March when each member of the committee was asked to evaluate all applications received (from Branford College Sophomores and Juniors) and to submit their top five choices to the Branford Master’s office. This year we received 24 applications, up from 18 last year.

   On Tuesday, March 25 the committee and Master Steven Smith, along with Peter Knudsen, met for lunch at Mory’s with our previous year’s awardees, Agnes Rec and Susannah Kemple.       Agnes and Susannah described the work they accomplished last summer and then responded to  questions about their projects and their future plans.  Agnes was able to complete most of her archival research on St. Isidore of Poland, and this work forms the basis of her Senior essay.      Susannah successfully completed her intended study in Germany of archives and performances related to Goethe’s Faust.  One interesting discovery was the flexibility of interpretation of the figure of Mephistopheles.  Susannah is producing and will perform in a student-driven production of Faust at the Whitney Humanities Center later in April.  Both awardees clearly gained a great deal from their experiences.  Agnes plans to go on to graduate work in Mathematics, while Susannah plansto join a theater company in New York and eventually apply to a top Drama program.

    The committee then reconvened at 6:00 p.m. for dinner with Steven Smith at the Branford Master’s House.  After dinner we moved to the Master’s living room where we interviewed this year’s five finalists.  Needless to say, all five presented impressive proposals. Starting at 7:00 p.m. we spent 20 -30 minutes talking with each candidate about themselves and their proposed projects.  After the last candidate we had a round-robin discussion that focussed especially on our second choice, and finally we selected two awardees.  One, Bente Grinde, will spend the summer aboard a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean  measuring and analyzing plastic resin and waste material in the North Pacific Gyre.  The other, Yingrui Wang, will spend ten weeks in Ghana helping to establish a computer literacy program for secondary students and adults and also performing other services for a grassroots health and education initiative there.  Both students were awarded $4000 toward their expenses.

    Thanks in large measure to the superb cooperation and support of Master Steven Smith and of his assistant, Alicia Heaney, we successfully completed another Branford Fellowships cycle.  Once again the committee found this to be a very rewarding, and as one committee member put it, a“refreshing” experience.  Our hope now is to share this experience with more members of the Class.

Arvin Murch

Committee Chairman

Fellowship Report From Branford Awardee

The Cult of St. Isidore the Laborer in Early Modern Poland

With the funds from my fellowship I traveled to Poland to pursue research on the cult of St. Isidore the Laborer.  As a peasant living in twelfth-century Spain, Isidore is a particularly interesting figure as early medieval saints were drawn almost exclusively from noble or wealthy families. For many years the object of local devotion in Castile, St. Isidore was officially canonized in 1622.  By that time, Isidore's cult was being promoted internationally by the Jesuit Order with particular success in Poland.  By examining the documents found in a number of libraries and archives in Warsaw and Krakow, I was able to investigate the development of Isidore’s cult over several centuries from it’s introduction to Poland in the year of his canonization to the early 20th century.

In the 17th century, social changes in the countryside had greatly increased the power of the nobility and turned a substantial proportion of the formerly free peasantry into serfs.  St. Isidore was introduced into this context as the ideal peasant, ever devoted to his lords, both the Heavenly and the earthly and was thus used as a stabilizing force in this society.   The Polish peasants were encouraged to learn from his example by devoting themselves to their earthly duties in hopes of finding redemption in the next life. 

My initial intention was to investigate the earliest days of Isidore’s cult in Poland, relying heavily on A Short Collection on the Holy Life of St. Isidore written by the Pauline priest Andrzej Goldonowski in 1629.  The origins of the cult in Poland are uncertain, though it is possible that the priest played a significant role in its introduction – Goldonowski published a brief life of St. Isidore in the year of his canonization as part of a collection that included the lives of the other, now more famous saints canonized with him, namely Philipo Neri, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola.  From this initial interest in Goldonowski’s work, I was able to consider the develop of the cult, rather than just it’s beginning, as collections in Krakow and Warsaw held books covering nearly three centuries of the cult’s history – the most recent of these having been published in 1911.  

The most notable change in the social conditions of the Polish countryside from Goldonowski’s time was the abolishment of serfdom.  Without the presence of feudal lords, the cult no longer needed to encourage peasants to obey their masters and justify their subjugation, so two trends develop within the later literature.  In some works, Isidore continues to be valued as a symbol of the hard-working and obedient peasant, though now he encourages a free population to voluntarily endure the hardships of country life.  In others, the message shifts to a call for peasants and farmers to include God and religion in their duties as peasants and abandons the emphasis on obedience to superiors. 

Agnieszka Rec

Yale College 2008 Humanities and Mathematics

agnieszka.rec@yale.edu

Subject: Aspin Fellowship 2007 Selection Committee Report

Chuck Schmitz, Acting Chairman

 Herewith a summary report of the work of your Committee on March 30, 2007:

 We selected three and a half laureates:  The three are Sean Jackowitz

(International Effects on the Rule of Law in Kazakhstan), David Kasten (The

Effects of Iraqi Refugees on Jordanian Politics) and James McSpadden (German

Landtag roles in Foreign Affairs).   We granted each of them $3,000 of Aspin

Fellowship money towards their projects.  Your Committee was unanimous in

its judgment that all three met completely the Fellowship criteria and set

themselves clearly above the other candidates in the planning and

formulation of their projects.  Thus, we committed $9,000 of the $12,000

available for awards in 2007.  In addition, we selected a back-up candidate,

Samantha Amodeo (Internship in U.S. Embassy Athens in the Regional Security

Office), to be funded up to $3,000 in the event that one or more of our

Three wind up being fully funded by other grants and do not require Aspin

funding.  We consider that Ms. Amodeo's internship and aspirations (to be a

language  interpreter for government or NGO) are sufficient for Aspin

criteria but are on a different plain from that of the First Three. 

     Now for a bit of color:

    The three last standing Members of the Aspin Fellowship Selection

Committee met at Mory's shortly after 11 AM to re-meet each other and to

agree on how we would proceed.  On the dot of 11:30 we were joined by the

three awardees of 2006 (Avi Feller (U.S. Dept. of State, Bureau of Oceans

and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and now Rhodes

Scholar), Danielle Gilbert (Divided town on Israel-Palestine (sort of)

border, who is showing Arabs and Israelis each other's humanity), and

Jonathan Menitove (U.S. Consulate General Belfast, recently admitted to

Harvard Law for next year and a sure-fine candidate for Congress in a few

years).  As expected, they knocked our socks off with brief recaps of their

summer experiences, their poise, polish, articulateness, and general charm.

We gather that at least one of them will join the Reunion in Boston so that

more Classmates can experience some of the gratification we have had of

participating in the Aspin program.

    Beginning at 1:30 and joined by Nancy Ruther at Luce Hall, we worked in

25-minute segments through the remaining six Aspin applicants (Elizabeth

Hanly withdrew for personal reasons).  The faculty readers had done a good

job in selecting the finalists for us:  they all had good stories, well

told.  David Kasten is the debater of the Century.  Sean Jackowitz

apparently can do anything and is totally uncowed by complexity or enormity.

James McSpadden is disarming affability itself.  Your Committee

deliberations were thoughtful and harmonious, marked by considerable

deference to each other's opinions and aforesaid unanimous judgment at the

end.  We finished at 5 PM.

    A rumination or two during the day:

    Bill Martin proposed that Yale keep track of the Aspin alumni awardees

over the years so that they might be somehow involved in the work of Aspin,

particularly as we 60ers accelerate our inevitable dilapidation.  At Bill's

prodding, Nancy discovered that the International Affairs Council of the

MacMillan Center on International and Area Studies (whew!) has already

posted on its website briefs of our previous awardees, so at least we all

know who they were and what they did.  Perhaps the potential engagement of

such alumni should be a matter for deliberation in our Committee or other

lofty Class organs. 

    John Dwyer suggested that we might consider asking one or more of our

eminent Classmates to make himself available to be "shadowed" for a time by

an Aspin Fellow. 

    Bill noted that Class policy has capped Aspin awards at $3,000 but that

it might make sense to have a bit of flexibility in the award number so

that, for example, we could have awarded Sean Jackowitz the full $3,430 he

required instead of sending him out on the street to raise the rest. 

    When we asked the 2006 grantees at lunch what they liked and did not

like about the way the Aspin program is run, they said that they really

appreciated the amiable way Aspin conducted its interviews, so unlike other

(unnamed) grant-making institutions, which tended towards Inquisition.  We

three thereupon resolved to tighten the screws during the afternoon

interviews so that we would be more exigent, like the other institutions.  I

think, in that respect, we failed.. 

Respectfully submitted,

Chuck Schmitz, Acting Chairman

Summer report for Tristan Perlroth Prize and Les Aspin Fellowship by Samantha Amodeo

This summer I spent ten weeks in Greece, interning at the American embassy in Athens during the week and traveling around the country as much as possible on the weekends.  I must admit that I was incredibly nervous at the start, since living in a foreign country and working for the Department of State both seemed suddenly much more intimidating once I was actually on my way.  Now, though, I can unreservedly say that I am glad I went, and that I learned a lot about Greece, about what it’s like to work in an embassy, and – probably most of all – about myself and my capabilities.

My internship, while it had some positive aspects, was actually the least rewarding part of my experience.  I was assigned to the Regional Security Office, and they didn’t have nearly enough for me to do.  I spent the majority of any given day surfing the internet, and I would go begging from office to office for some papers to shred or documents to scan.  …  I did complete a few smaller projects, such as developing housing clusters to help in securing personnel in case of a city-wide disaster, doing an inventory of emergency supplies and equipment, and preparing the semi-annual Security Environment report.  I also went to the shooting range one day, accompanied security details for Tipper Gore and for a four star NATO general, and sat in on interviews with walk-in informants.  ....  Overall, even though the job was less than challenging, talking to Foreign Service Officers and being directly involved in the daily life of an embassy was very valuable in helping me to think about the kinds of things I do and don’t want out of a career and out of life in general.  I realized that I’m not the kind of person who would be happy moving to a new country every three years, and I didn’t really like the work atmosphere at the embassy, so the Foreign Service is probably not for me.  I’m glad I found that out now, at least!

Evenings and weekends were much more enlightening, challenging, and fun than the workdays, and this was also when the money I received from the Les Aspin and Tristan Perlroth fellowships came in handiest.  Thanks to these sources of funding I had the resources to visit the ruins at Delphi, Delos, and Knossos and the monasteries at Meteora, see the sunsets at Santorini and Cape Sounio, and hike Crete’s breathtaking Samaria Gorge.  And, of course, to explore Athens from the ruins to the museums to the open-air movie theaters to the cafés and nightclubs.  …  I feel like I made the most of the possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drink in as much of Greece as is possible in a summer.  Without the support of the Les Aspin Fellowship and the Tristan Perlroth Prize I would have been largely confined to Athens, assuming I could have afforded to go at all, and I think it would have been a great shame to go all those miles and then not be able to go all the way.  So, thank you.    

Sean Jackowitz

From May 30 to July 28 2007, I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan, supported by a Les Aspin ’60 Research Fellowship. My time in Kazakhstan was meant to accomplish two goals: first, I wanted to collect interviews and statistical material for a senior essay on the rule of law in the former Soviet Union; second, I wanted to answer the question: what effect does foreign business have on the rule of law in Kazakhstan?

              In both regards, I was successful. Living in the dormitories of the Kazakh Institute of Management and Economic Research, I held an unpaid internship with the law firm Michael Wilson and Partners. The law firm allowed me to spend my time as I chose, granting me access to all of their case files, computer system, and research software. I also conducted interviews of several of the lawyers at the firm and used their contacts to find other individuals to interview as well. Finally, the law firm allowed me to observe court proceedings as court rules allowed.

              ….

                            I also went through government statistics to cultivate data on government corruption. Since the government must, by law, report the results all but the most secretive tenders, I found that I could look through procurement records to observe patterns in government spending. The result of this research was to compile a database of the transactions of several major government bodies and national companies. …

What do these statistics say about corruption? Taking a random sample from this database and researching the companies that won the tenders, I found that certain companies simply were not qualified to supply the goods or services requested. … Such tenders, which I marked as “questionable,” accounted for about a third of the transactions by quantity in my random sample. There was no significant difference in the number of foreign or domestic companies in this category. They did, however, have one thing in common: oil. Most of the transactions in my “questionable” category had won tenders from a government body or national company concerned with oil.

My research question upon going to Kazakhstan was look at the effect foreign companies have on the rule of law in Kazakhstan. It appears that, although most mean well, the attraction of oil is too strong to stay away from engaging in questionable practices just as domestic companies do. Further research is necessary, however, to prove that these questionable practices are in fact examples of corruption, and not just incompetence, poor record keeping, or a statistical anomaly.

David Kasten

Les Aspin Fellowship Report

14 September 2007

The Effects of Iraqi Refugees on Jordanian Politics

This summer, I traveled to Jordan on funding from the Les Aspin ’60 Fellowship to conduct research on the impact of the Iraqi refugee crisis upon NGOs, the Jordanian government, and Iraqis themselves.  ....  This experience impacted me in three main ways: First, I uncovered a fair amount of surprising information about the Iraqi refugee situation. Second, my understanding of Jordanian and Islamic culture and daily life expanded dramatically. Third, my proficiency in Arabic is qualitatively different.

              …  I am very thankful to Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division’s willingness to let me sit in on their annual retreat in Amman; I received amazing access to high-level discussions between them, Jordanian NGOs, civil society activists, and academics… 

              I also engaged in other interviews with representatives of international NGOs, such as the UN High Commission on Refugees, IOM, and ICS,  that deal either with Iraqi refugees in Amman and/or are located in Amman for security reasons but work on internally displaced persons issues in Iraq itself.  ...

              Another part of that research consisted of interviewing Iraqis and Jordanians. I became acquainted with several areas of Amman with high concentrations of Iraqi refugees, and interviewed several Iraqi asylum-seekers. Forming initial contacts proved to be easier than expected; an Iraqi family lived in my building, and other contacts were easily formed simply by going to Iraqi-owned restaurants for dinner several times and building bonds of trust. 

              …

              The Jordanian government’s treatment of Iraqis remains mixed.  One of my main interviewees was a Shia Iraqi, who fled Iraq with his family after being threatened with death for working with the U.S. forces in Iraq.  As of the time of this submission, he remains in jail, as a result of an immigration sweep looking for Iraqis who had overstayed their visas or were working without work permits.  Several of my other sources work at a clearly Iraqi restaurant that is within sight of a police substation, and weekly have to flee out the back door to avoid being deported. (In fact, one menu item is a codeword to alert the restaurant staff to run)  On the other hand, Jordan has engaged recently in some steps to accommodate its Iraqi population, such as letting 50,000 Iraqi children into Jordanian schools, despite the overcrowding this causes, and it has opened some small-scale Red Crescent stations in Iraqi neighborhoods.  These two ways of treating Iraqis make their future unclear in Jordan; whether this provision of civil services represents a new era of openness, or merely a means to ensure social control of young Iraqi men and women, remains to be seen.

              Second, my understanding of Arab culture, and all its variations, expanded dramatically.  ... Some of the most memorable moments include taxi cab conversations with Jordanians, watching football games with Saudis, sipping tea with Iraqis at an Iraqi restaurant next to the Israeli Consulate (Their rent was, understandably, quite cheap), going to Amman’s astoundingly modern Mecca Mall, and walking through the rose-red ruins of Petra. I will never forget this summer.

              Third, my Arabic has improved to an almost unbelievable degree.  …

              I am very thankful for your support; this summer has changed my life.  While before I felt that studying the Middle East, and working on issues related to it, might be my calling, I now am certain that it is.  I learned not only specific facts or Arabic language skills, but gained a qualitative understanding of a region of the world in a way that I didn’t expect.  This summer was the most rewarding academic experience I’ve had outside of Yale’s walls, and I cannot wait to go back to the Middle East in the future.

Les Aspin ’60 International Public Service Fellowship Report by James McSpaned, 2 September 2007

As a result of the generous support of the Les Aspin fellowship, this summer I worked as an intern at the Landtag Mecklenburg in June and July.  At the Landtag, I had an official triple assignment to the administration of the Agrarausschuss, Europa- und Rechtausschuss, and the Bildungsausschuss (Agriculture Committee, European and Law Committee, and Education Committee).  My office was with the agriculture committee and my official boss was Dr. Wolfgang Röhl who was the chief civil servant assigned to the agriculture committee.  However, the majority of my work and research dealt with international cooperation and relations between the Landtag and the other German Länder and the rest of the European Union.

              My actual duties were quite varied from day to day and week-to-week.  The largest part of my internship involved translation and research.  … I specifically worked on translating two documents on the state of the Baltic Sea vis-à-vis eutrophication and ammonia and nitrogen oxide emissions.  Although I was not a scientist, I quickly learned the appropriate vocabulary and the basics of the health of the Baltic.  ….  I helped the Landtag draft into memos and communiqués for upcoming international engagements related to the Baltic Sea (these documents were usually in English, so the officials at the Landtag took advantage of my abilities as a native English speaker).

              The most interesting experience I had was at a meeting of the drafting committee for the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference.  The chairman invited me as the English “expert,” since none of the representatives of the parliaments were native English speakers and the resolution they were drafting was in English.  He invited me to participate in the committee’s deliberation just as the actual members of the committee did.  This was really a very interesting experience because I was able to see how much language matters to diplomacy.  The representatives would argue for almost an hour over one sentence of the draft resolution.  …  In helping to craft sentences and give advice, I actually influenced the final draft resolution that was presented at a conference in Berlin.  This was hands-on diplomacy that I was an active member with rather than a simple intern. …
              In large part because of the generosity of the Les Aspin fellowship, I was able to complete this fascinating hands-on internship that exposed me to European politics and diplomacy.  I saw how politics works in another country and could compare that to my background in American politics…

Report for Class of 1960

By Peter S. Knudsen, Jr., Fellowships Coordinator

Avi Feller

Les Aspin ’60 Summer Fellowship

              The Class of 1960 Les Aspin Summer Fellowship enabled me to have an incredible experience at the State Department, though one that I was not expecting.  In my fellowship application, I proposed to study the interrelationship between science and policy and international relations, an issue I still believe to be of tremendous importance.  As is the way with State Department bureaucracy, I instead found myself in the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science’s (OES) Office of Policy Coordination and Initiatives (PCI), which focuses on issues of sustainable development but also handled regional issues, funding, and inter-agency cooperation.  Though I encountered little science policy, I found the office to be a great fit, opening doors to countless new opportunities.

              In my first few weeks at the State Department, I received training in nearly every aspect of the office, from organizational structure to recent advances in renewable energy.  Starting my second week, I was able to take part in the two-week training course for outgoing Environment, Science, Technology, and Health (ESTH) Officers.  This course was certainly a highlight of the summer, with an on-site inspection of a nuclear power plant, a table top exercise on Avian Flu, and presentations from high-ranking government officials.

              Armed with this basic knowledge of the field, I soon found myself neck-deep in the State Department’s massive restructuring of US foreign assistance, known as the F Process.  In a quirk of management, the office director also served as the Lead for Global and Regional Programs, coordinating programs that did not fall under the bilateral umbrella that has since become the mainstay of foreign assistance.  This provided me with a unique opportunity to learn more about the bureaucracy of the State Department and the massive scope of US programs abroad.

              At the same time, this budgeting process meant that it was our bureau’s responsibility to bring environmental and sustainable development issues to the table.  This meant preparing environmental progress reports on virtually every country receiving US foreign assistance, of which there are well over 100.  Even though this process was tedious at times, I quickly put my statistical skills to good use and compiled massive databases of quantitative environmental data, especially on water and energy.  Eventually, these figures entered the final country reports and were approved by the Secretary—a very exciting conclusion to my first project.  In fact this work, in conjunction with follow-up studies that I performed later in the summer, earned me the commendation of the bureau’s Assistant Secretary.

              My next major project came up in a roundabout way.  PCI had spent much of the Spring preparing for a US-China bilateral conference entitled the “Global Issues Forum” (GIF), focusing on environmental issues especially.  As is the case with large organizations, however, a senior regional officer retired and a close associate went maternity leave, with no one left to cover the responsibilities.  Thus, in the space of a few days, I was given the same responsibilities as most mid-career Foreign Service Officers (FSOs), quite a daunting task!  At the same time, this was a tremendous opportunity to not only learn more about environmental issues in China, which are staggeringly complex, but also to play a more significant role in policymaking related to the conference.  The culmination of this came in my last weeks at the State Department, when I was fortunate enough to write two speeches for the Assistant Secretary outlining US-China environmental relations.  Though this proved an arduous process, the speeches were very well received and I hope contribute to bettering the state of China’s environment. 

              While I could go into detail about my other projects—from Math and Science education in the Muslim World to a Google Water database—the most important development of the summer was the reassurance that statistics and politics can complement each other.  Simply because I was not afraid to “get dirty” in large data sets, I was able to have a small, albeit significant, influence on US foreign policy.  This realization has led me to apply to postgraduate fellowships for statistics and politics, including the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships.  As the committee posted on the website, I indeed explored the “operational possibilities in combining [my] international relations studies with [my] background in mathematics and science,” and found those possibilities to be endless.

              Finally, I would like to thank the Class of 1960 for allowing me to have an incredible experience this past summer; it certainly would not have been possible without your support.  I especially look forward to discussing my summer experience with the committee members when they return to New Haven.

                                                               Danielle Gilbert

                                                       Les Aspin ‘60 Fellowship

Research Summary

A House Divided: Explaining Variation in National Identity in an Arab Border Community

              From May 23 to June 27, I traveled with the Les Aspin ‘60 fellowship to the village of Barta’a, on the border between Israel and the West Bank.  This small Arab village, composed of the Kabaha family clan, had been divided into two sides in 1949; the Muslim, Palestinian family has been divided up until the present day.  In Barta’a, I sought to collect a vast amount of anthropological research, to help analyze the determinants of national identity and explain the rift in loyalties between the two sides of the village.  While in Israel, I worked closely with representatives from the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace at Givat Haviva to travel the area between the fence and the 1949 border, now the Green Line, and establish contacts inside Barta’a.  Once I became acquainted with the subject village, I interviewed members of the city council and representatives from the school system, and I was able to have nearly 90 residents of Barta’a fill out the 28-question survey I created to probe different aspects of identity.  This questionnaire proved the hallmark of my research project, as it combines a qualitative and quantitative approach to mapping out the shifting identities of the two sides of Barta’a.  In addition, I was able to interview several prominent scholars related to this conflict including Professor Moshe Brawer, professor emeritus of the Geography Department in the University of Tel Aviv; Professor Arnon Soffer, Geopolitics Department at the University of Haifa and military consultant; Professor Yossi Shain, Political Science Department at the University of Tel Aviv; Professor Gideon Biger, Geography Department at the University of Tel Aviv and academic inspiration to Knesset Member Avigdor Lieberman; General Uzi Dayan, considered the “architect” of the separation fence.  By the end of my visit, Riad Kabaha, Head of the Municipality that includes West Barta’a, and General Uzi Dayan requested my presence when discussing the future of the security fence, the village of Barta’a, and the precarious situation that affects so many Arabs in the Wadi Ara region.

In the near future, I hope to open a photography exhibition with images from my time in Barta’a, comparing the division between the two sides of the village and the separation fence.  This visual arts show will potentially take place in the Morse College Guard House Gallery, and will acknowledge the Les Aspin ‘60 for both financial and intellectual support.  Additionally, I have been asked to write a brief article for the Yale Israel Journal describing my summer research and presenting arguments based on my observations.  Beyond these short-term projects, I hope to formalize my data and conclusions into a completed academic article and policy piece within the next few months.  As I researched Barta’a, the complex situation of this anomalous place inspired two divergent paths for conclusions: the study of pure national identity across the village and political implications for citizenship, or, the study of the separation fence near Barta’a. 

For the former, I spent much time this summer compiling and analyzing the data that is relevant to identity formation.  Below I have included two of the many charts created with relevant information from my surveys; collectively, these data sets serve to illuminate trends within the population as well as possible associations between various factors prevalent in Barta’a with competing identities.  These data sets explore the relationship between factors such as religion, education, and income and national identity (See below).

In terms of the latter, I would like to further explore reasons for designing the separation fence as diverging from the Green Line in the Wadi Ara region, including Barta’a.  The Palestinian citizens of East Barta’a are trapped between two borders—the Green Line and the separation fence.  For all legal intents and purposes (hospitals, post office, urban centers), this population must enter the West Bank through a checkpoint in the fence, and cannot use facilities in Israel or attend Israeli schools.  The people of this region are caught in a sort of limbo, and there has been no clear plan to modify this situation.  Using the case of Barta’a as a microcosm of the situation of 200,000 residents of the Wadi Ara region, I hope to suggest policy implementation to rectify these circumstances with a variety of possible strategies.

              The generous Les Aspin ‘60 fellowship helped me achieve my objective in my research not only by allowing me the finances to travel, rent, and use transportation overseas, but also lent the respected Les Aspin name, important in seeking connections for my research.  Entering Barta’a and explaining to the community that I was there with the support of a special funding program from my American university to study the situation of their village, I was greeted immediately with appreciation and willingness to participate in my work.  The professors and professionals who were so eager to provide guidance did so with the knowledge that a prestigious Yale program had already put faith in my work.  Upon my return and completion of this project, I hope that the eventual outcomes of my writing can give back significantly to the fellowship that provided me with the life-changing opportunity to examine in depth the village of Barta’a. 

Free Answers, Self-Identification, Barta’a (E & W)

Jonathan Menitove, Ezra Stiles College ‘07

Les Aspin ’60 International Public Service Fellowship

State Department Summer Internship, US Consulate General Belfast

              For eleven weeks during the summer of 2006, I served as an intern with the US State Department at the US Consulate General in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  My experiences during those extraordinary three months constitute one of the highlights of my college career and I believe my time in Ireland will serve as one of the defining moments in my education.

              When I applied for my summer internship with the State Department in November 2005, I expected my work primarily to involve immigration issues.  I even specifically requested being placed at a US consulate rather than an embassy in the hope that my internship would primarily involve the visa process.  Accordingly, for the initial two weeks of my internship, I worked exclusively with the consular bureau, learning the details of visa procedure and how post-9/11 visa regulations have affected various nationalities disproportionately.  Belfast was a wonderful place to work in consular affairs on account of the wide range of nationalities present in Northern Ireland.  Immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and the Balkans have all flocked to Belfast to capitalize on the growing number of jobs available in Northern Ireland’s rapidly developing economy.  My experience in Belfast afforded me the opportunity to see how individuals from the EU enjoy a tremendous advantage in obtaining visas while Filipino applicants face more difficulty on account of more rigid background checks by the Department of Homeland Security.

              While I enjoyed my work in consular, the most interesting duties this summer involved the political bureau.  Northern Ireland’s Troubles dominated all work conducted by the political officer.  While Northern Ireland has been relatively quiet since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, for the preceding thirty years, a low-level civil war engulfed the country with frequent murders and violence perpetrated by competing paramilitary organizations.  The timing of my internship could not have been better, as the Consulate’s political officer position was in rotation for six weeks during my internship and I fulfilled the duties of the political officer.  The most fascinating project during my summer internship involved an effort the US Consulate was promoting to encourage reconciliation among the competing factions.  As part of this effort, I helped organize a series of meetings between two groups of widows—one Protestant who had lost their husbands to the violence of the IRA, the other Catholic whose husbands had been killed by RUC policemen—hoping that an open dialogue between these two groups might bring them closer together.  By the end of the third two-hour session, women who initially attended these meetings by sitting on opposite ends of the room now chatted comfortably with each other.

              While my work with the political bureau provided some hope that Northern Ireland was on its way to recovery, my work with the economic bureau was less encouraging.  Working with Invest Northern Ireland, a UK government sponsored initiative to promote foreign investment, I compiled a database of American firms with operations in Northern Ireland and discussed with these firms the benefits and detractions of doing business in the North.  My research exposed me to some disappointing realities as a negative public perception of Northern Ireland, an older and decreasing workforce, and high corporate taxes (double than the corporate taxes of the Republic of Ireland) all served to discourage foreign investment.

              While my work in the consulate was truly a unique experience, I also learned a tremendous amount by simply being immersed in the Northern Irish culture.  I found that while many neighborhoods—particularly those of South Belfast—have made great progress, other neighborhoods in North and West Belfast remain largely segregated.  Protestant and Catholic children still attend separate schools and, even in the few schools that Her Majesty’s Government has integrated, Protestant and Catholic children refuse to play with each other during their free hour.  Violent and sectarian murals dominate the cityscape while graffiti displaying violent messages can be seen along any main road.  Being present in Belfast for the Orangemen Festivities of July 12 further exposed the deep-divisions that plague the environment.  Every July, in commemoration of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne when Protestant King William of Orange defeated Catholic King James II, the Protestant neighborhoods amass wood, old furniture, and even caravans to burn in massive bonfires throughout the city.  The Pope, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and the Irish tricolor are all burned in effigy and Catholics are encouraged to remain at home.  The Consulate closed down for July 12 and July 13 and many of my co-workers planned to be out of down during those days.

              I feel privileged to have lived in Belfast at this moment in its history.  While Northern Ireland has progressed tremendously over the last ten years, the scars of Northern Ireland’s tumultuous past remain.  I had the unique chance to witness a country at a turning point with a rapidly changing economy and political system.  November 24, 2006 will be an important day in Northern Ireland, as it marks the date by which the Secretary of State Peter Hain either will recommend power devolution to the Northern Ireland Assembly or will request that that Her Majesty’s Government administer the province directly.  I intend to keep up with my friends and colleagues in Belfast to learn more about the nation’s progress as this deadline approaches.

              My eleven weeks in Belfast were an experience I will never forget.  I wish to thank the Les Aspin’60 Public Service Award committee with my utmost gratitude for its support, without which my summer experience would not have been possible.  In closing, I will admit that my trip to Ireland did bring me to the occasional pub, where a friend of mine shared with me a well-known Irish blessing he recommended for those who made my summer possible: “May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.”  It was a pleasure meeting you all and I thank you for your support.

Report for Class of 1960

By Peter S. Knudsen, Jr., Fellowships Coordinator

The fellowship panels with coordinators - Aspin (Matt Gardner), Branford (Arvin Murch) and Heinz (Matt Freeman) - have completed the awarding of fellowships.  I was very pleased that about one half of the thirteen participants on the panels were first timers.  Uniformly, they enjoyed the experience.  We have the objective of involving more new panel participants next year and would like to encourage classmates to volunteer.

This year panelists supplied brief biographical sketches to the awardees, so that they could call on us for career advice.  Several have already done so, and we think that this activity will expand next year. 

The applications were evaluated on three bases – the quality of the proposal, including the budget; the relevance to a serious world problem; and the passion for the mission or objective of the summer’s efforts.  During lunch with the prior year’s awardees on the day of the interviews, the suggestions of those previous winners were elicited. 

Panelists found their participation to be stimulating and very rewarding.  Overall, I think that the fellowships that the Class of ’60 supports should be and are becoming the most sought after ones available to members of Yale College.

April 25, 2006

Heinz Fellowship Committee

Representing the Yale Class of 1960

The mission of The Heinz Fellowship is to honor the memory of our beloved classmate, Jack Heinz, by encouraging Yale sophomores and juniors to follow Jack's footsteps into Pubic Service through the provision of funds for deserving candidates who have crafted a summer project that will contribute to progress in an important area of the Public Sector.

2006 represents the fourteenth year of these fellowships which means close to fifty Yale undergraduates have taken an important first step toward a career in Public Service. Each year, we award two to four fellowships, each averaging $4,000.00 to cover the cost of travel, room, and board for these volunteer projects. The winners go through a three-step process. First, about twenty candidates formally apply with a 700 word description of his/her project, their GPA, and one letter of recommendation from a knowledgeable professor. Second, these twenty are screened to a single digit number by a faculty committee, and these finalist packages are mailed to the class of 1960 Heinz Committee which, this year comprised Bill Weber, Rob Hanke, Ben Erdreich, and Matt Freeman. Finally, this group rank orders the finalists, invites the top five or six to an interview, and selects two or three winners.

This year was another outstanding group of young men and women. We picked three winners. One young lady is going to work for the U.S. Embassy in The United Arab Emirates. She speaks perfect Farsi, and her project involves helping a team better understand the cultural differences between the West and the Middle East. A second young man is going to work for the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. While he is from New Canaan, CT, he speaks fluent Turkish, and he will be on a taskforce anticipating possible Turkish reactions to different Iraq scenarios. Finally, a young man is going to work for the U.S. Embassy in Belfast. Northern Ireland. His passion is Immigration, and he will be working on a taskforce trying to simplify and make more secure the emigration process from Northern Ireland to the U.S.

Our 1960 Heinz Committee reached two conclusions form this experience. First, none of us could get into Yale today. Second, the Heinz Fellowship program is feeding some incredible talent into the Pubic Service funnel, and we are sure Jack is proud of his college.

Matt Freeman

April 23, 2006

One of the Heinz Fellowship Recipients

Marshall Scholar Daniel Weeks, a Yale Political Science and International Studies double-major from Temple, New Hampshire, is founder of Students for Clean Elections and director of the DemocracyFund PAC, for which he has developed and testified for campaign reform legislation at the local, state and federal levels. Weeks is a volunteer around education and economic development issues in New Haven, where he has taught literacy in the public schools, served as a moderator for community forums, and developed neighborhood revitalization and capacity-building initiatives. Prior to enrolling at Yale, he served as an assistant teacher and program director for AmeriCorps in Washington, D.C. and English teacher in Guongdong Province, China. As a high school student, Weeks co-founded the non-partisan New Hampshire Youth Voter Alliance to engage fellow students in the political process, and has appeared on state and national media discussing youth political engagement and campaign finance reform. He has been a director of Americans for Campaign Reform, New Hampshire Citizens Alliance and New Haven Action. For his continued activism, Daniel has been honored with selection to Boys Nation, the U.S. Senate Youth Program, and the McKinsey Summer Leadership Summit. He is a recipient of the President’s Public Service Fellowship, the Sen. John Heinz Government Service Fellowship, the John C. Schroeder prize for public service, and the Coca-Cola Scholarship, for which he was featured in the 2005 edition of the foundation’s national magazine Quest. Weeks sings in the Yale a cappella group The Baker’s Dozen, which has frequently performed at the White House. He has served as a church organist in Peterborough, New Hampshire; participated in intra-mural athletics and independent circus arts; and written on public policy issues for the Yale Herald. He has maintained regular employment in order to pay his way through college. Weeks will use his Marshall Scholarship to pursue an M.Phil. in Political Theory at Oxford.

Branford Fellowships 2006

On the whole, I would say that things went quite smoothly and resulted in two very worthy fellowship recipients. We enjoyed good cooperation from the Branford Master's office throughout. Joining me on the committee this year were classmates Peter Cooper, Nick Storrs and John Wilkinson.

We received eighteen applications from Branford underclassmen.  Everyone on the committee, including the Master and one Branford Fellow, evaluated them all and submitted rankings that resulted in four finalists.  We all met (absent the Fellow) to interview them on Friday, April 7th.  Prior to these interviews we had lunch with three previous fellowship winners at the Branford Master's House. We all felt that this was a useful and enjoyable exercise, and one that we should continue.  The students also enjoyed the opportunity to talk about their projects and to meet some interested alumni.  Somehow it seemed appropriate to offer ourselves as resources to them, as we would later to the finalists for this year's fellowships.  They seemed pleased.

We moved on to interview the four finalists individually in the Master's sitting room.  Master Steven Smith presided.  We asked each candidate to briefly describe her project and then we opened the floor up for questions, which ranged from matters of scholarship and personal growth to budgetary issues.  Everyone on the committee was actively engaged. After the last interview we went around the room asking for evaluations of all candidates and for our top two choices.  We were in fairly close agreement on the two winners, Katherine Rostkowski and Rachelle Orozco.  Rostkowski's project will take her to El Rosario, Honduras, where she will conduct a scientific analysis of water quality. This project continues her already impressive studies in environmental engineering. Orozco will spend the summer as an intern at a South African sanctuary for HIV-infected children.  This is her first overseas experience, although not her first experience in assisting low-income communities.  The committee was impressed by the opportunity our fellowship could provide for her personal and intellectual development.  We agreed to award each winner $3,500.  This will meet most if not all of Rostkowski's needs.  Orozco's budget was slightly higher ($5,100), but she probably has other support options, including her parents. 

At the end of each interview I mentioned that we classmates stood ready to serve as resources to the student, and we gave them a copy of the bio-sketch that each of us had prepared.  Again, this was well received. Shortly afterward, I was contacted by Katherine Rostkowski, and Peter Cooper got feedback from both fellowship winners.

In sum, I would say that all classmates on the committee enjoyed their interaction with these very impressive students and appreciated the cooperation that was provided by the Branford Master's office.  In my opinion, widening the opportunity to have this experience can only benefit both the Class and the program.  Widening the opportunity to serve as a resource or mentor also would have this effect.

Arvin Murch

April 24, 2006

Yale Class of 1960

Les Aspin International Public Service Award

Interim Report – 2006 Awards

Program Objective

Provide grants to sophomores and juniors in Yale College for internships on international affairs or national security.  Projects may be with a U.S. Government agency, a non-profit corporation, or other non-governmental organization.  Preference is given to students in the International Studies major.

The Committee

Owen Cylke (Bethesda, Maryland)

John Dwyer (Atlanta, Georgia) – unable to attend, but contributed to process.

Matthew (Matt) Gardner, Chairman (Yarmouth, Maine)

Peter Knudsen, ex officio (Hamden, Connecticut)

William (Bill) Martin (Fairhaven, New Jersey)

Charles (Chuck) Schmitz (Bethesda, Maryland)

Yale Liaison

Richard Kane, Associate Dean, Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS)

Alice Kustenbauder, Registrar, YCIAS

Dr. John Gaddis, Chair, Council on International Affairs, Application Reviewer

Dr. Pierre-Francois Landry, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Application Reviewer

Chronology of Process

February 24              Fellowship applications due at YCIAS

42 applications copied and forwarded to faculty application reviewers

March 20              Applications rank ordered and returned to YCIAS

Top seven applications copied and forwarded to Aspin Committee

March 31              Committee luncheon at Mory’s

Discussion with three of four 2005 Aspin Fellows

Whitney Haring-Smith, Department of Defense, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs;

Jacob Leibenluft, freelance reporting in India on development issues (recently designated Luce Scholar);

Daniel Weisfield, Department of State, U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Office of Press and Public Affairs.

                            Interviews with seven finalist applicants for Aspin Fellowships

                            Determination of recipients

Les Aspin International Public Service Award

Interim Report – 2006 Awards

Page 2

Awardees

Avi Feller ’07 – U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Office of Policy Coordination and Initiatives.

Mr. Feller will explore the operational possibilities in combining his international relations studies with his background in mathematics and science.

Danielle Gilbert ’08 – Israel.  Ms. Gilbert will pursue her research interest in the national identity of the Palestinian village of Barta’a, divided between Jordan and Israel in 1949, and between Israel and Palestine in 1967.  She brings prior experience in Israel and the study of Islam and the Hebrew language to her project.

Jonathan Menitove, ’07 – U.S. Department of State, U.S. Consulate General, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.  Mr. Menitove will pursue his interest in European-American affairs through participation in offices engaged in public diplomacy, political and economic and consular affairs.

Finances

Due to overlapping awards, $6,100 of $8,700 was awarded.  The remaining $2,600 will be “rolled over” to 2007, providing approximately $12,000 in Aspin Fellowships.

Mentoring

Committee members prepared biosketches with contact information which were distributed to the seven students interviewed, inviting them to contact us if we could offer advise and assistance in their futures.  The student reaction seemed both one of surprise and gratitude.

Matthew Gardner ’60

Chairman

FELLOWSHIPS FUNDED BY OUR CLASS TREASURY

                                   YALE UNIVERSITY

                            CLASS OF 1960

                        FELLOWSHIPS REPORT                                                                                       2005

Respectfully submitted by Carol Schaller

John Heinz Government Service Fellowship

Les Aspin International Public Service Fellowship

Y’60 Branford Travel Study Fellowship

John Heinz Government Service Fellowship

This Fellowship’s campus liaison is the Office of International Education and Fellowship Programs.  The faculty assigned to our Fellowship is Professor Douglas Rae.  We were presented with seven semi-finalists and the Class Selection Committee chose five to be interviewed. This year the funds generated $10,177.00 in disposable income. We made four awards.

Richard Ludlow SM  ’07 was awarded $3000 to fund his internship with the Division of Transplantation within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  One of his objectives is to help the government’s ability to raise organ donation rates.

Alissa Stollwerk SY ’06 was awarded $3000 to fund her internship in the Office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in the Communications and Internet Depts., Washington, D.C.

Usha Chilukuri PC ’06 was awarded $2,125 to fund her internship at the U.S. Dept. of State with the U.S. Diplomacy Center a new museum.  The museum will track the history of American diplomacy and involvement in foreign affairs.

Noel Pascal TD ‘06 was awarded $2000 to fund his internship with the Director of Western Hemisphere office in the International Security Affairs Agency at the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.

Y’60 JHGSF Selection Committee: Peter S. Ness, Charles A. Schmitz,

James W. Trowbridge, William D. Weber, Charles M. Weymouth, John A. Wilkinson, Carol V.C. Schaller, Chair

Les Aspin International Public Service Fellowship

This Fellowship’s campus liaison is in the Yale/Luce Center for International and Area Studies. The faculty component consists of a screening committee and Asst. Professor Richard Kane. The faculty committee arranged to have us interview seven semi-finalists and we awarded four stipends.

Whitney Haring-Smith was awarded $2500.  He will assist Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Western Hemisphere to coordinate state capacity-building in Latin American countries for the Department of Defense.

Jacob Liebenluft was awarded $2500.  

He will conduct a two-part, long-term reporting project under the auspices of Foreign Policy Magazine that examines the impact of international development policy on the smallest scale. He will travel first to the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Maldives. For the second project, he will travel to a village in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Daniel Weisfield was awarded $2500.  He has secured an internship in the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to the United Nations, Press and Public Affairs Section.

Alexander Dadok was awarded $500.  He plans to travel to Ghana for eight weeks and intern for the United Nations Development Program to study the effect of governance institutions on private enterprise development in Ghana.

Les Aspin Fellowship Committee:  Richard F. Banbury, W. Wilson Keithline,

Edward J. Leavitt lll ,  Carol Schaller, Chair

Y’60 Branford Travel/Study Fellowship

This Fellowship is based at Branford College, the affiliated residential college for Yale ’60. The program was organized by Albert C. Pergam and others and dates back to 1988. It is our oldest Fellowship program.  Professor Steven B. Smith, Master of Branford College, is our faculty component. Students are invited to submit proposals for summer plans that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to pursue. More tolerance is given to personal development and imaginative goals than in our service oriented fellowships. Nevertheless, this Committee has looked upon Service with favor.

Laura Warren was awarded a $4000 stipend. She intends to spend the summer at the University of Washington in a virology research clinic studying sexually transmitted diseases. Without funding it would not be possible for her to accept the internship.

Santiago Suarez was awarded a $3000 stipend. He will travel to Chennai India to head a pilot project that aims to establish individual lending in two Indian villages. The final stage of the project will consist of actually working with a microfinance institution on underwriting the first individual loans.

Y’60 Selection Committee: Peter B. Cooper, Barry R. Schaller, Prof. Steven B. Smith,   Carol Schaller, Chair

REPORTS FROM PAST FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS

Les Aspin '60 Summer Fellowship: Pascal Noel
Les Aspin '60 Summer Fellowship: Matthew O. Harsha-Strong
 
Les Aspin '60 Summer Fellowship: Pascal Noel

With the generous help of the Les Aspin '60 Summer Fellowship, I was able to undertake a successful internship with the Economic Strategy Institute (ESI) in Washington, D.C. ESI is a private, non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization dedicated to assuring that globalization works with market forces to achieve maximum benefits rather than distorting markets and imposing costs. ESI believes that because security and national welfare will increasingly depend on performance in the global marketplace, it is important to develop national and corporate strategies to assure that globalization takes place on a level playing field and that the reality is mutually beneficial.

I went in hoping to broaden my understanding of important issues in international affairs and national security, focusing on the political impact of international economic policy. That is precisely what I accomplished. At ESI I was one of only a handful of interns interacting with the President of the institute, Clyde Prestowitz, in an intimate setting. My main responsibilities throughout the summer were twofold. First, I served as a research assistant for his upcoming book, The World Turned Upside Down, that will come out early next year. In line with the objectives of the Institute, this book focused on new socio-politico and economic trends that are reshaping the world we live in. These range from the rise of East Asia, to the aging demographic of the West, to the perils of the current economic system. The point of the book is to explore these trends, extract their meaning and show what their effect would be. In this way, the proper reaction for ensuring continued security and prosperity was pinpointed. My research focus was on the chapter dealing with the global financial system. I endeavored to discover how the changing nature of global society was reflected in the financial markets of the world. This research significantly broadened my knowledge of the subject, and put the financial system in perspective of global problems.

My second major focus during the summer was to write a full policy paper for the Institute. My topic was the diminishing rate of U.S. savings. In this study I traced the historical roots of the decline in U.S. savings rates, noting that the U.S. was not always a chronic low saver and explaining how it became one. The study showed how the U.S. savings rate is adversely impacted by its own domestic, trade, and international economic policies, as well as by those of other countries. Finally, and most significantly, my paper spelled out the likely consequences of staying on the low savings course, including possible U.S. budget problems (for example, the failure of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), a weakening of the domestic economy, and a collapse of international investment supporting our current account deficit. Writing this paper was the highlight of my experience at ESI for two reasons. First, I gained valuable data compilation and data analysis skills, learning how to analyze economic data and synthesize the results. Second, I learned of a fundamental issue in the world that will need to be addressed by adequate policy today and into the future.

The Les Aspin '60 Summer Fellowship was essential to helping me meet my objectives. I had to take a part-time job after the workday at ESI in order to get the extra money I needed to fund my studies this year, but this extra job would have taken more time, and eaten into my experience at ESI, had I not received such generous funding. Because of this generosity, I was able to gain the experience and the tools necessary not only to make me a better student, but also to make me a better public servant and policy maker in the future. I would thus like to express my gratitude to Les Aspin and the Committee that carries on his legacy.

Summary
This summer, I undertook an unpaid, eleven-week internship in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere policy units in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. My responsibilities included: preparing policy briefs and reports for senior-level DoD officials, facilitating and observing meetings run by DoD officials, and, in the Western Hemisphere policy office, directly assisting the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. A successful experience by all measures, I am deeply indebted to the Les Aspin '60 International Public Service Fellowship committee for their generous assistance in making the summer internship possible.

Internship Description
My internship began the day after Memorial Day, on Tuesday, June 1st. I remember approaching the Pentagon on the first day with awe; the building is massive ­ the largest office building in the world ­ and so many important national security activities are run from within. I took most of that first day to wander its labyrinth: peeking into Secretary Rumsfeld's lively office, admiring the portraits of our past Secretary of Defenses, mourning the victims of September 11th in the Pentagon's new wing, and marveling at the replete, high-tech gym. The second day I began my internship.

For the first seven weeks of my internship, I assisted in the Middle East policy office. I was assigned to the desk officers for Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar; and Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. My own computer and desk enabled me to contribute substantively to the formulation of DoD policy toward the Middle East. I prepared materials for various meetings addressing topics from bilateral military talks to country policy, I wrote memos authorizing the transfer of troops from one military command to another, I drafted policy memos that eventually found their way up to the Deputy Assistant Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Under Secretary for Policy, Deputy Secretary, and Secretary of Defense. One project I spearheaded while working in the Middle East policy office was a compilation of each Middle Eastern country's contributions to the War on Terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The spreadsheet and accompanying analysis was later forwarded to the Secretary of Defense. The Assistant Secretary of Defense used talking points I prepared word-for-word in a meeting with one ambassador. I was privy to many developments in the region during an especially tense time, and I was extremely grateful to have had that opportunity. While working in the Middle East policy office, I had the chance to meet and observe meetings run by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter Rodman. In addition, the Office of the Secretary sponsored a seminar series featuring candid talks with each of these senior Defense Department officials. I felt privileged to work in an office at the forefront of so many US national security developments.

My contributions during the last four weeks of my internship rivaled those of the first seven weeks of my work at DoD. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Western Hemisphere Roger Pardo-Maurer took me under his wing to show me the inner workings of DoD policy. For these last four weeks, I directly assisted the Deputy Assistant Secretary and pursued projects assigned by him. One of these projects involved engineering a public relations strategy for a new regional maritime initiative in the Western Hemisphere. I drafted talking points for Secretary Pardo-Maurer and wrote an op-ed that he hopes to publish in a major newspaper. He brought me to a policy formulation meeting at the State Department where I learned how the State Department and DoD cooperate in matters of foreign policy and where he used my talking points verbatim. I also spearheaded a "Southern Cone" science project, which aims to increase research and development funding and build scientific cooperation between the United States and three other countries in the Western Hemisphere. In planning this project, I cooperated with several offices within and without the DoD, including an office at the White House. I felt like a desk officer while working in the Western Hemisphere policy unit and value the contributions I made there the most.

Leaving the Pentagon in mid-August was difficult for me. I felt satisfied that I had made the most of my internship and that I had impacted DoD policy, but I regretted seeing such an awesome opportunity end.

The Les Aspin Fellowship's Contribution
Without the Les Aspin '60 International Public Service Fellowship, I would have been forced to turn down this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or, at best, find a second job for the weekends to fund substantial housing, transportation, and food costs. I am eternally grateful to the Les Aspin Fellowship Committee for selecting me from so many other worthy candidates and awarding me the amount it did.

My objective in accepting the internship at the Pentagon was to explore the inner workings of foreign policymaking, absorb the DC summer experience, and attempt to make as large a contribution to DoD policy as a lowly intern can make. As one might suspect from reading my internship description, my most precious moments in DC occurred when the Deputy Assistant Secretary or some other official used something I worked hard to produce in a meeting. Any intern should feel grateful at just having the opportunity to discover how Washington works; to directly impact policymaking, though, is an opportunity that few interns come across. I was very privileged to work in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere policy offices this past summer, and I have nothing but gratitude to Les Aspin, a former Secretary of Defense himself, and the fellowship committee for enabling this experience.

To top off the summer, I am currently studying abroad in the country with which I dealt most over the summer: Egypt. I have had the chance to see firsthand in Egypt, and in other countries to which I have traveled (Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan), how policy made in Washington, DC affects the rest of the world. This combined experience ­ the summer at the Pentagon, and the fall in the Middle East ­ has had quite an impact on my personal, professional, and academic development. I hope to return to Washington, DC at some point in my future.