History

For the last six years, the Institute has been pursuing an educational "civil-military" collaboration with the United States Military Academy at West Point - a collaboration which in 2006 expanded to include the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. It has done so to enlarge the debate over security to include non-traditional definitions of security and to increase interaction between students receiving a liberal arts education and those receiving a military education.

Since 2000, the U.S. Military Academy has hosted students in the Institute's China program for a day at West Point and has engaged them in open-ended seminars at the USMA. The USMA has also sent delegations of faculty and 10-20 cadets to participate fully in both the China and Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) symposia each year. Reciprocally, Institute students have routinely been asked to represent Tufts at the USMA's annual Student Conference on United States Affairs. USMA cadets are selected competitively and the visit to Tufts is considered a reward for their top academic students. Their delegations have typically included East-West Scholars and Marshall Scholars, and one year a Rhodes Scholar from Singapore. Moreover, the China program hosted ten cadets at Tufts over several days in the fall and organized a two-day seminar on China's foreign policy with scholars, security analysts, and journalists.

In 2004, 16 USMA cadets participated in the EPIIC international symposium on "The U.S. Role in the World." The Institute organized an intensive briefing on lessons learned from the invasion of Iraq by Col. Hugh Fontenot of the Command and Control College of Fort Leavenworth, one of that year's panelists. The cadets also participated in sessions on the role of the military in nation building during the Institute's "Voices from the Field" workshop.

Faculty from West Point and Annapolis have participated in a variety of the Institute's forums, including Gen. Russ Howard, a former commander of the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) and the new director of The Jebsen Center for Counter Terrorism Studies at The Fletcher School when he was the head of social sciences at the USMA, and Cdr. Art Gibb, the Associate Chairman of the Political Science Department at USNA.

A representative from the USMA also participated in the concluding roundtable of the Fund for Innovation in Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant to evaluate EPIIC and study its potential as an educational model. Building on the recommendations from that discussion, the Institute continued to develop its relationship with the USMA and began its outreach to the other academies as well. In 2005, both the USNA and the United State Air Force Academy sent an individual student to participate; and in 2006, both the USMA and the USNA sent a delegation of five students accompanied by a faculty member.

This collaboration with the academies has developed the scope of dialogue and debate and expanded the academic and personal perspectives of all students involved. With the creation of ALLIES in 2006, there is now official mechanism to formalize, integrate, and build upon these previously established ties.