The University of Oxford announced this month that it had received a pledge of £75-million, or about $117-million, from Leonard Blavatnik, a Russian-American industrialist, to develop a new school of government. Oxford wanted to create something like Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, only as Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford, told The Independent, the school will have a more global outlook than its American counterpart. “For Oxford,” he told the newspaper, “the world is bigger than the country.”
The air of resentment against the United States seems pervasive among the leaders of the project. Andrew Hamilton, vice chancellor of Oxford, suggested that the “Blavatnik School,” as it is to be called, will help to “correct the imbalance” caused by the majority of international schools of government being housed in the United States.
Before Mr. Collier and his colleagues hop onto their high horses and gallop away, they might want to know that the Kennedy School is not where Americans train their “leaders” anyway. It is where we send old politicians to spend their dotages and write their memoirs. You would be hard-pressed to find many governors, members of Congress, let alone occupants of the White House, who got their start at the K-school.
And there’s a reason for that. Americans don’t think that training in the finer points of getting elected and navigating government bureaucracy are qualifications for office. The Kennedy school offers courses in “Interest Group Activism and Representation” or “Internet Organizing: Theories and Practice” and “Presidents, Politics, and Economic Growth: From World War II to Obama,” but Americans don’t think acing those courses should get your name on a ballot. We don’t mind if our politicians attend some elite schools, but we put a lot of stock in people who have experience starting businesses or running nonprofits, or people who have engaged in other professional fields—from law to medicine.
Just like the Kennedy School, Oxford will offer budding leaders a curriculum that is at once too broad and too narrow to be of much use. In a one-year master’s-degree program, students at Blavatnik School will take courses in “the humanities, law, science, social science, technology, health, finance, energy, and security policy.” How much is one likely to learn about any of these subjects in a year?
But no less a figure than the former president Bill Clinton echoed this message of the importance of a broad leadership education in a video address at the announcement of the school. He told the audience that “Oxford’s reputation as an international powerhouse of research will help students and the global community to better understand not just politics and economies, but also public health, environmental science, development, genetics and the humanities.” Take it from Bill Clinton, who knows just how useful a year at Oxford can be.
If a school wanted to create experts in any of those fields, that would seem like a worthy contribution. And a number of universities do just that. The School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University focuses on four core areas of study—international relations, regional studies, economics, and language. But students don’t just take a smattering of each. Moreover, they’re required to come in with a significant background in at least the latter two. The recently opened Dubai School of Government offers a master’s degree in public administration. The school’s mission seems straightforward and, well, manageable. Dubai seeks to “train students in the modern theory and techniques of public-sector management, and to help them better understand the political and social context in which public policies are designed and implemented, and public services are provided.”
But Mr. Collier, who is also an adviser to the International Monetary Fund, argues that such programs are outdated. “The 21st century demands a new skill set for dealing with public policy than the skill set taught in public-policy schools.” In response to the announcement, one commenter on the Times Higher Education Web site pledged to “donate an even greater sum to a school for the ‘Leaders of Yesterday.’” Which might be just as good a use of one’s money. If you actually believe that the education needed by leaders changes at such a rapid pace, then why bother with any such education at all?
Mr. Collier suggests that “knowledge of climate change” and how to deal with health scares are an important part of the needed skill set. Leaders who don’t have that, he warns, will take “leadership decisions which are very, very damaging.” And so, according to The Independent, students will be taught “how to approach issues such as climate change and to tackle health crises like the potential flu pandemic.” Is there really advice we can give 20-somethings about tackling a flu pandemic that on the one hand is specific enough to help them when one comes along and on the other hand is broad enough to require a graduate degree?
Instead of creating efficient bureaucrats or reasonably knowledgeable diplomats, though, Oxford will be producing a lot of moderately informed cocktail-party guests. And, in fact, that’s probably the area in which Mr. Blavatnik will be guaranteed to succeed. The Oxford government program will be a great way for dilettantes to do some networking. They will meet the people whom they will eventually work with at the Clinton Global Initiative. The Blavatnik school will be a sort of glorified model United Nations.
And just as the U.N. inevitably seems to confer legitimacy on petty tyrants and oligarchs, so Oxford will use its stellar reputation to do the same. It is not hard to predict that in a few short years, the student body will include a few Arab princes and the sons of a couple of African dictators. Just as Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s possible leader in waiting, is always referred to with the words “Swiss educated” before his name, so other young politicians will soon be able to claim the Oxford mantle.
If Len Blavatnik and his friends across the pond really wanted to teach future leaders of other countries something useful and beneficial to the rest of the world, they could skip over the global-warming sermons and the “what to do in case of flu” instruction and instead offer courses in the importance of democracy and self-governance. They could expose their charges on the intellectual traditions that have helped to produce economic prosperity and protect human dignity in countries like Britain and the United States. But I’m not holding my breath.
