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Grand Strategy is not the most popular course at Yale. “That’s the wrong category and misses the complexity of the situation,” Hill said. “A popular course at Yale is when five hundred students cram an auditorium for Sexuality Studies 371: Bodies and Pleasures.”¹ But while GS is not the university’s most titillating class, it is among the most prominent. With an acceptance rate that averages 40 percent—it was 38 percent for the 2015 class—competition to lock in one of the seminar’s forty-four spots (the size of the program doubled in 2010) is intense.² “Getting in was not easy and required a grand strategy of its own,” Casey Verkamp (GS ’09) said.³ This exclusivity contributes to the program’s appeal, especially at an elite institution like Yale where, as Deresiewicz puts it in his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, students “have been conditioned, above all, to jump through hoops.”⁴ One of the best ways to increase a course’s popularity is “make entry to it competitive.”⁵

Admitting high-caliber students means high demands can be made on them. It’s what Negroponte calls “a virtuous circle.”⁶ It also makes GS self-selecting. At a fall briefing for prospective GSers, as students are known inside the program, about a dozen of the two hundred or so attendees left mid-session.⁷ It takes chops to commit to a program that occupies two semesters and the summer between as well as to the massive amount of reading assigned each week and a stream of extracurricular activities. Hill’s biographer, Molly Worthen, describes the course as “the Blob” that seeps into everything from “friendships” to “career plans.”⁸ It’s the reason that some students characterize GS as more a “lifestyle” than a class.⁹ “It is clear to me,” Hill said, “that the desire to take the course by the most impressive and inventive and highly aspirational students at this university where all students fit those categories is the best evidence of its significance and power.”¹⁰

Beyond the program’s “all-star teaching talent,”¹¹ the chance to be with the “smartest and most ambitious students at Yale”¹² is another major pull. As Danielle Kiowski (GS ’09) put it: “The class format facilitated relationship building, and discussions of deep topics taught us more about each other than you learn about other students in other classes or casual friendships. I felt that I knew the character of my GS classmates.”¹³

GS is one of the few Yale courses open to undergraduates, graduate and professional school students, postdoctoral fellows, and a growing contingent of midcareer military officers. Students are selected from a range of disciplines and the professors encourage eclecticism—Jeremy Friedman, who became associate director in 2012 (he left in 2015 to become an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School), successfully broadened the applicant base, reaching out beyond the traditional channels to include undergrads in the hard sciences and students in the Forestry School.¹⁴ Under other circumstances the unorthodox mix of ages, experience, and divergent interests could potentially set up fault lines. But some alumni said the heterogeneity was part of the program’s appeal. Others said the shared language they developed in class and the amount of time they spent together, especially under the fire of the fall semester Marshall Briefs, provided common ground. “Don’t forget the fellowship that comes with a small group of similarly interested students over a full calendar year. I still keep in close touch with many GSers, undergrad and grad, in and out of my degree program,” a GS ’11 alumnus said.¹⁵ Laura Wheatley, the 2014 crisis simulation president, said: “As an undergrad you don’t have the opportunity to have this intense experience and to [talk about it] . . . with grad students on a somewhat level playing field. It’s a group of incredibly accomplished and incredibly talented people.”¹⁶ Interviewed while he was an undergrad, Ben Daus-Haberle, the crisis simulation vice president (GS ’11) said: “I was expecting to walk into a class full of people with big egos. Everybody instead [was] willing to listen to each other. What I’m going to miss is not having the automatic chance to see them.”¹⁷

Besides the ties forged in the classroom, GS alumni acknowledge the program’s “unique access to senior policy practitioners,” the promise of being “a way to get into high level work in Washington,” and the ability to make “plum connections” they couldn’t otherwise get.¹⁸ Students’ email inboxes are kept full with articles of interest from the professors, notifications of job openings and internships, and announcements of public lectures. Dinner invitations— off-the-record “conversaziones,” in GS parlance—are extended every couple of weeks, with Yale president Peter Salovey and GS benefactor Nick Brady; author and former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky; Canadian author, academic, and former politician Michael Ignatieff; author and former New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus; Jake Sullivan, former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, director of policy planning at the State Department, and deputy chief of staff to then secretary of state Hillary Clinton, to name only a few. “Network,” Campbell Schnebly-Swanson (GS ’13) mentioned as one of the lessons she took away from the course. “Not in strictly a professional sense. GS taught me how important meeting interesting people and simply engaging with them is to any experience. You can’t just read and be tested. Meet people, cultivate relationships, and learn from their experience.”¹⁹ Verkamp also recalled a singular evening she had when representatives from the marines came to campus for a special conference with GS. “I ended up talking with one of the generals at dinner, and he awarded me one of his commemorative coins, because he enjoyed hearing about my senior essay topic, which related to military history,” she said. “It was an unforgettable honor, and I was aware at the time that most of my peers elsewhere on campus who were not in GS were not having anything close to this experience.”²⁰

Given its small size and exclusivity, GS is often compared with another venerable Yale institution: secret societies. It’s a resemblance the program perpetuates, albeit without the oath of silence or macabre rituals that come with membership in Skull and Bones or Book and Snake. At the end of their final semester, GS graduates are given a silver lapel pin in recognition of the elite fraternity they’re part of. And once, in 2011, an email went out to the class advising students to dress appropriately and be prepared to meet someone important. The details were divulged only as forty-odd neatly clad young men and women boarded a bus in front of the Hall of Graduate Studies for Betts House. They were to attend Levin’s and Henry Kissinger’s surprise announcement that Kissinger would be donating his papers to Yale—a coup for the university given the former secretary of state and National Security Council director’s longtime association with Harvard, both as a student and a faculty member. Kissinger’s remarks made it clear that his decision had been strongly influenced by his close relationship with the Grand Strategy professors and his strong belief in the program. Two young lawyers—Edward “Ted” Wittenstein (GS ’03), then special assistant to Levin; and Schuyler Schouten (GS ’02), then Kissinger’s executive assistant and a senior director at Kissinger Associates²¹—had spent a year negotiating the arrangements, on behalf of their respective bosses.

GS’s prominence, and the mystique that cloaks it, inevitably lead to misinterpretations by outsiders. As one alumnus said, “GS was respected but poorly understood on campus. People knew that it was highly selective, so they were often impressed or intimidated, depending on their preconceptions. Some used it as a proxy for their indignation toward established social systems. Others reacted with humor, professing to believe that all GS students were training to be spies.”²²

But the overwhelming majority of students approach the program with a sense of intellectual curiosity and fascination with the material presented in the course. John Frick (GS ’07) cited GS’s “groundbreaking” method of teaching political and military history as the program’s main attraction,²³ while David Gilford (GS ’06) commented on the unique opportunity “to think” about the world’s toughest issues.²⁴ “Academia has a habit of forcing people to pursue smaller and more segmented questions,” a GS ’11 alumnus said. “I wanted to pursue bigger, more integrated issues.”²⁵ Others maintained that it was unlike any other course the university offers. According to alumnus Wells, the class “was the most fascinating and rigorous program I could take at Yale.”²⁶

Students who had been introduced to the Western canon in Directed Studies, the university’s highly competitive freshman program of literature, philosophy, and historical and political thought, seemed to hunger for another course that crossed boundaries. “Students develop a passion for the interdisciplinarity and aren’t comfortable later on being circumscribed by the departments and the disciplines,” said Norma Thompson, who teaches DS and is director of undergraduate studies for Yale’s Humanities Program.²⁷ Others were eager to encounter great books for the first time. “As a math and science person, I saw this as a good opportunity to round out my education,” said Randall Wong (GS ’11). “It exposed me to great thinkers of the past. I don’t know if I would have picked up the texts otherwise.”²⁸ A GS ’14 student who took the course in graduate school said: “I love the subject material. Not only do I get pleasure from reading history but trying to learn from history—challenges, opportunities, how things have happened, what are the threads that we can pull at and learn from—so it’s great that they get us studying the classics and then how . . . are [the lessons] applicable to contemporary challenges? What should we be thinking about?”²⁹