Stanford University

News Service


NEWS RELEASE

6/11/98

CONTACT: Kathleen O'Toole, News Service (650) 725-1939;
e-mail kathleen.otoole@stanford.edu

Holloway, Blacker chosen to lead Institute for International Studies

David Holloway, the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, will become director of the Institute for International Studies (IIS) at Stanford on Sept. 1 and Coit Blacker, senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies, will become deputy director.

Provost Condoleezza Rice announced the appointments at the Faculty Senate on Thursday, June 11.

Holloway will succeed Walter Falcon, the Helen C. Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, who led the institute through a six-year building period. Holloway is currently associate dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences and will retain that position until Dec. 31. During autumn quarter 1998, Blacker will oversee the institute's day-to-day activities.

Holloway, a professor of political science and history, is an expert on international security issues. He has previously served as chair and co-chair of the university's International Relations Program and as co-director of its Center for International Security and Arms Control, one of the component research centers of the interdisciplinary institute. His most recent book, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956, won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association of Slavic Studies. His current research is on the role of ethnic conflict in international security and on the international consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In addition to his appointment at IIS, Blacker, who first came to Stanford in 1977, holds a courtesy appointment in the Political Science Department. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the university's Center for International Security and Arms Control. In the early 1980s, Blacker worked as a legislative assistant to then Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado. In 1995 and 1996, he served as President Clinton's principal assistant for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council.

The Institute for International Studies hosts scholars, government and business leaders from abroad and brings faculty, staff and students across Stanford's schools together for work on a variety of international issues. Holloway attributes its many cooperative arrangements to the careful leadership of both Falcon and the institute's founding director, President Emeritus Richard Lyman.

Falcon led efforts to raise funds to renovate Encina Hall so that the institute and its affiliated programs can be housed in a single, state-of-the-art facility next year. He also played a crucial role in the establishment of the institute's Global Environmental Forum, its Asia/Pacific Scholars program and, most recently, the Bechtel Initiative on Global Growth and Change.

Holloway said he looked forward to directing the institute at an "extraordinarily important time" for universities to be involved in international issues. "The Cold War is over. The shape of the international system isn't so clear now. A great deal is going on, but how it all fits together isn't clear, at least to me," he said.

This is also a challenging time for international perspectives, he said, because public opinion polls suggest Americans are not as interested in foreign affairs as they were during the Cold War. "There are so many ways in which our lives are affected from outside the borders of our country. That is obviously true with respect to environmental issues. It also true with respect to security issues, nuclear proliferation for example; and it's true of economic issues, the globalization of the economy."

The institute, he said, will continue to foster work on international issues at Stanford through appointments and by serving as a "conduit between research and policy or public action on issues." Its strengths, he said, are in its older component centers, such as the Asia/Pacific Research Center and the Center for International Security and Arms Control, but also in connecting people in different centers and schools. "International issues are not simple and you need to bring to them a lot of different skills."

Holloway, who was born in Dublin, Ireland, was educated at Cambridge University and taught at the universities of Lancaster and Edinburgh before joining the Stanford political science faculty in 1986.

Blacker, who earned degrees at Occidental College and Tufts University, is the author or editor of seven books and monographs, including the 1993 book Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev and Soviet Security Policy. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1993 for his work on U.S.-Russian relations and the promotion of peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region.

"David and I are inheriting a strong and vibrant institution," Blacker noted. "Our principal task, it seems to me, will be to take IIS to the next level, both intellectually and programmatically. It'll be quite a challenge. But I think I speak for both of us in saying we're eager to get to it."

A search committee chaired by William Perry, professor and senior fellow at the institute, and Charles Kruger, vice provost and dean of research, met over several months to discuss the role of IIS in the university and to develop a list of potential candidates for its leadership. The committee's final report said that "the basic mission of IIS is to increase the quality and quantity of international activities at Stanford. It does this by working with the departments, assisting the faculty in conducting international programs in their field; by serving as a bridge between different departments, programs and centers, thereby improving the quantity and quality of their international activities."

The committee discussed IIS with nearly all of the relevant department heads, center directors and program directors and said it "found universal support for the proposition that IIS had played a significant role in their efforts to achieve these goals."

Other members of the search committee, representing international interests throughout the university, were Russell Berman (German studies), Alan Garber (medicine), Judy Goldstein (political science), Steve Haber (history), Terry Karl (political science), Jeff Koseff (civil and environmental engineering), Steve Krasner (political science), Gail Lapidus (IIS), Lynn Orr (earth sciences), George Shultz (Graduate School of Business and Hoover Institution) and John Taylor (economics).

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By Kathleen O'Toole


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