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It’s the first Saturday in December, three weeks before Christmas, and the president is having a hard day.¹ The Oval Office calendar was purposely light so the president could focus on a nationally televised policy address scheduled for 4:00 p.m. But by midmorning crises have jammed the mostly ceremonial agenda. Overnight, during a surge in protests by the Hong Kong pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, Chinese police took an American citizen with possible CIA or Taiwanese ties into custody at an undisclosed location. Also overnight the US Central Command confirmed that an American shoulder-launched AIM-92 Stinger missile downed an Iranian air force F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber conducting airstrikes against ISIL positions in Iraq, potentially jeopardizing the tenuous, unspoken non-aggression pact between the United States and Iran. Dire financial news coming out of Ukraine and Georgia has this morning’s Financial Times insisting the United States take responsibility for the fall-out from sanctions against Russia “that it pushed so actively.” Even an Oval Office grip-and-grin with the young athlete of the year threatens to backfire. The soccer star attends the University of Virginia (UVA), the setting for a recent Rolling Stone article recounting an alleged brutal gang rape of a female student by members of a local fraternity who, this week, disputed the allegations. “I’m going to avoid any comment on sexual assault like the plague,” the White House’s new press spokesman, Arthur Knoop, says minutes before his first-ever daily briefing.

“Right,” a presidential adviser agrees. “The way to dodge it is to say we’re not going to comment on an ongoing investigation.”

As Knoop walks in, the briefing room is crowded with members of the press corps, forty strong, seated in hastily arranged rows of stackable chairs. No one asks about UVA. But the reporters intend to hold the president accountable for other events, and Knoop, standing behind a podium at the front of the room, is scrambling to keep up.

“Can you tell us about North Dakota?” a journalist demands.

“North Dakota in what sense?” Knoop asks.

“There’s been an oil spill in the capital,” the reporter says, referring to news reports that a four-vehicle tanker convoy exploded south of Bismarck, halting traffic and spilling oil into the nearby Missouri River. “Congress is saying it’s the president’s fault.”

“What’s the president’s policy on Keystone XL?” another reporter demands.

“Um . . .” Knoop hesitates.

“What about the hostage in China?”

“The president believes in free speech,” Knoop answers.

“Why didn’t the president bring this up in China?”

“When was the president in China?” Knoop asks.

“Last month.”

“Aw crap.”

Knoop’s profanity quickly turns into a public relations disaster for the White House. “Even this hardened, jaded, seen-everything media community was . . . shocked by . . . Administration Press Spokesman [Knoop’s] expletive at this morning’s press conference,” a Washington Post editorial comments. “The question must be asked: is this the image [the president] wants to present to America’s public?”

“Perhaps it’s time for a Press Spokeswoman,” tweets Foxes & Hedgehogs, a moderate political news outlet.

Calling for a congressional hearing, the Republican House majority leader tells conservative news agency Justice Now that Knoop’s behavior “is just ineptitude, left and right, back and forth, diagonally.”

Even German tabloid Bild-Zeitung joins in: “Oh Scheisse: ‘Aw crap’ crosses the Atlantic!” The newspaper continues: “Let the Americans pay for the c*** they deposited on our doorstep in Ukraine and Georgia. Why should Germany pay for the fallout from another act of aggressive American policy?”

The president’s intentionally light calendar seems to be shredding.

But none of this is real.

It’s part of an elaborate crisis simulation run by Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. The Oval Office is a second-floor classroom in Linsly- Chittenden Hall (LC), a nineteenth-century Romanesque Revival brownstone, on High Street in New Haven, Connecticut. The president and vice president, both women, were elected by their classmates a couple of weeks earlier. Other students have been appointed to play cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, White House aides, or bloggers. What happens next depends on the professors and staff sitting around a scuffed oak table in the “control room”—another LC classroom—and a stack of handwritten cards laying out various fictional disasters.

Sometimes the note-card scenarios have closely paralleled subsequent actual events.

The two-day crisis simulation caps the Grand Strategy program’s (GS) yearlong, admission-by-invitation, interdisciplinary course—a class in four acts that includes a spring semester spent mastering great books on statecraft and diplomacy; a summer experience that’s supposed to be an “odyssey” in the Patrick Leigh Fermor tradition;² and a fall semester featuring military-inspired “murder boards,” more delicately known as “Marshall Briefs” after soldier-statesman George C. Marshall’s demand for brevity on some of contemporary society’s most urgent issues. The year also includes a full schedule of extracurricular lectures, workshops, and off-the-record dinners with government officials, journalists, authors, poets, ambassadors, and other dignitaries—usually including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

GS was established in 2000 by Professors John Lewis Gaddis, Yale’s Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History and founding director of the program; Paul M. Kennedy, the university’s J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of British History and founding director of Yale’s International Security Studies Program (ISS); and Charles Hill, a “practitioner” professor who distinguished himself as a career Foreign Service officer before coming to Yale to teach full time. At a cost of $1.4 million annually,³ the program is expensive. It’s also an attention grabber. Two years before he joined its faculty as a practitioner professor in 2013, New York Times columnist David Brooks described the seminar as “the best course in America.”⁴ The class has been the subject of articles and blog posts in the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, and the New Republic. Most significantly GS attracted the notice of Nicholas F. Brady (Yale, ’52) and Charles Johnson (Yale, ’54), who endowed the program in 2006.

Brady, the longtime senior partner at a leading Wall Street investment banking firm, US senator, and treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, is best known for the Brady Plan, which resolved the 1980s international debt crisis. He went on to found Darby Overseas Investments, a pioneer in emerging markets private equity investment. Johnson is the retired chairman of Franklin Resources, a money management company that he led for nearly fifty years. One of the largest single-gift donors in Yale’s history—for the construction of its two new colleges⁵—Johnson also underwrote renovations in Yale’s athletic facilities and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, which supports research in the Kissinger papers at Yale. The two men believe that the Grand Strategy course fills a void in American higher education. “Colleges are turning out hothouse flowers,” Brady said. “These overstudied, underexposed students need a course in common sense.”⁶ As he wrote in a monograph on common sense (defined as “sound, practical judgment in everyday matters”) it’s “a key ingredient in the best leadership.”⁷ “If you don’t teach leadership and people aren’t exposed to it,” Johnson added, “they don’t even know what they missed.”⁸

Kissinger saw a similar gap. “I think one of the empty spaces in our country . . . is the study of strategic issues,” he commented. “We lack [the] preparation of a young leadership group . . . That is, how you assemble the issues that are relevant to national decision making and develop a habit of thought that you get to automatically. The American tendency is to wait for a problem to arise and then to overwhelm it with resources or with some pragmatic answers. But what you need is a framework of decisions that helps you understand where you’re trying to go.”⁹

Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill, each of whom is now a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, built GS in response to Kissinger’s observation that “the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”¹⁰ Unlike the performance-driven approach that’s the subject of most motivational business books, their leadership model is character driven. “Education used to prepare people to think about the biggest and most complex questions of the human condition,” Hill said. “That preparation was through literature and philosophy and classical texts, not through political science or psychology. You got psychology much better from great books than from the psychology professor who was working on a tiny corner of something.”¹¹ The GS faculty anticipated, by more than a decade, higher education critic William Deresiewicz’s complaint that what prestigious universities “mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.”¹² Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus in Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It, echo the thought: “To our mind, leadership refers to a willingness and ability to rouse people to a party, a purpose, a cause,” they write. “We’re not convinced that what happens in classrooms or on campuses nurtures leaders more than other settings—than, for example, back roads of the Mississippi Delta or lettuce fields in California.”¹³

A GS applicant’s 4.0 grade point average, by itself, doesn’t impress the professors. “We consider those people more drones than leaders,” a former GS administrator said. Neither do enticements. One student application was personally delivered with an expensive box of chocolates, and another applicant’s parents offered a “substantial” donation in exchange for their child’s acceptance into the program.¹⁴ Both efforts had the opposite effect. The selection committee aims to identify young people with eclectic backgrounds and a capacity for resilience¹⁵ who will succeed at high levels—and provide them with tools to use when they get there. This is why the Yale Herald facetiously writes that GS is “also known as ‘How to Rule the World: A Few Quick Tips.’”¹⁶

But the Brady-Johnson Program doesn’t offer quick tips. Or quick anything. The course emphasizes students’ ability to speak and think on their feet and to understand how parts relate to the whole. They are asked to consider how lessons of the past—successes and failures—may apply to the present and the future. Instead of handing out easy answers, GS inures students to uncertainty, based on the understanding that decisions, particularly in positions of responsibility, almost always have to be made before all of the facts can be gathered. We’re trying “to equip young people to deal with the unforeseen,” Gaddis said. “There’s no way that we can predict what they’ll be doing or what problems they’ll be confronting.”¹⁷ And as Brady and Johnson recognized, common sense must be at the core of such preparation. It’s “like oxygen,” Gaddis remarked. “The higher you get the thinner it becomes.”¹⁸

In its sixteenth year, the Grand Strategy Program is as recognizable to Yalies as the letter Y and the school’s bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. High school students often hear about the program even before they apply to Yale. Along with cultivating leadership skills the Brady-Johnson Program offers students a worldview. Many of the approximately five hundred women and men who have completed the program and are ascending the ladders of government, nonprofits, the US military, universities, and the corporate sector describe it as one of their most formative Yale classes—influencing them not just professionally, as might be expected, but also, personally. As Christopher Wells (GS ’02) said: “For me, [GS] is a fundamental part of my mind and personality—it shapes my interpretation of most events I experience in my life.”¹⁹ Alumni single out the program’s rare combination of theory and practice, with some calling for even more “real-world immersion,”²⁰ such as more elaborate crisis simulations.

Ironically this is one of the aspects that often draws criticism from academics outside the program, who view GS as being too vocational. They take a church and state approach, believing that scholars should study and interpret the great thinkers but not extrapolate policy or strategy from them. Practical applications are the job of people in government and think tanks, they say. In a 2013 interview in his office, then Yale president Richard Levin weighed this argument: “We don’t have business courses, we have economics courses, [which] is a more rigorous approach to how the economy works. Sure, many of those people go on to business careers. But they’re not learning finance, accounting, marketing tools the way you would in a first-year business-school curriculum. So the argument would be, why are we giving people preprofessional training in statecraft of diplomacy?”

Levin continued: “I think that the intellectual content of [the Grand Strategy course] is very high. It’s not doing something vocational, it’s learning about it, and it’s learning about it by juxtaposing the great classics of political thought with the practical realities of contemporary diplomacy.”²¹

Yale’s current president, Peter Salovey, approached this question from a different angle: not whether GS is too vocational but in what ways it embodies the values of a liberal arts education. “When you talk to people recruiting for banks, for policy positions, for NGOs, but even in tech, they often say, ‘We want students who can think clearly, think creatively, think critically, communicate clearly in writing and in the spoken word, who can work as part of a team, who can collaborate,’” he explained in a 2015 interview. “Often specific technical knowledge can be learned on the job, but these general skills are very hard to learn on the job. They have to be nurtured, and often the best way to nurture them is through a great liberal arts education. The Grand Strategy program . . . because of the nature of the subject matter as well as the style of teaching and because it’s interdisciplinary is a great basis for learning all of the skills I just ticked off . . . It’s not just the content but the way in which the education is delivered. As an educator, I’m with John Dewey in that the process of getting a great liberal arts education is the education and that the packets of content are just the vehicle by which we [substantiate] that process.”²²

With the recent creation of a Brady-Johnson professorship in grand strategy, the program is at a major turning point. Grand strategy has always been the realm of history scholars and international relations practitioners, both at Yale and more broadly. But in January 2016 Elizabeth Bradley, director of the Yale Global Health Initiative who founded a version of GS in the School of Public Health, became the professorship’s first chairholder, also succeeding Gaddis as GS director. “We want this to evolve, bringing along the very best of what has been achieved but modernizing it so it stays current and flexible for developing students’ critical thinking and leadership for a wider set of global problems,” Bradley said of the seminar whose intellectual roots date back to Thucydides’s time.²³