Masahiko Aoki has been engaged with Stanford University for over four decades. He has witnessed the roots of Silicon Valley grow and seen the many successes of students who formerly passed through his classroom. Selected academic papers written over his 40-year academic career have recently been published.

Aoki is the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi professor emeritus of Japanese Studies in the department of economics and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), in residence at Shorenstein APARC.

You have been at Stanford since 1967 in different capacities – what has changed since then? Can you share some memories with us? 

I first came to Stanford as an assistant professor in 1967. Campus and the surrounding environment were different then – there were series of apricot orchards along El Camino to the south and my office was located in a wooden building – the old president’s house where the engineering buildings stand today. Changes at the university and in Silicon Valley have been fascinating to witness. I was away from Stanford in the 1970s, but when I came back in the 1980s, I had over 200 students at a time in my classes. This was because of widespread interest in Japan’s economic performance, which was then challenging American industries. Now students are inclined to be more interested in the rise of China. I share the same interest.

What has been most interesting for me is collaboration with graduate students and faculty to develop institutional studies. In the 1990s, I worked with Paul Milgrom, Avner Greif and Marcel Fafchamps among others, to initiate the field of comparative institutional analysis in the economics department. Greif and Fafchamps now have appointments in FSI like myself. Our research worked to understand why and how institutions matter to economic performance. However, my interests have expanded since then. I aim to understand relations between economic and demographic variables as well as institutional complementarities between economic institutions, social norms and political governance. As for my former students, many of them can now be found in important academic, government and private sector roles across the world.

What particular “lens” do you use to conduct your research?

Some influential economists understand that the nature of polity determines economic performance. They say this correlation is obvious if we compare the exploitative political regime like North Korea with that of a democratic political regime like South Korea. But this “lens” is a bit too simplistic for me. Why do ‘bad’ political regimes persist in some countries?  The relationship between political governance and economic performance is more complex than “the former simply causes the latter.”

To understand the relationship between political governance and the economy, I use game-theoretic concepts. While I am not a game theorist, I still believe that human interaction – whether economic, political or social – is a kind of game. People form beliefs based on how others play societal games. One of the important insights derived from these ideas is that political governance and economic institutions actually co-evolve. Furthermore, we need to look at the historical context to understand the present.

How have you applied these theories to the cases of Japan and the United States?

One of my major research interests has been the comparison of corporate governance across countries. Financial economists view the corporation as the property of stockholders. But we can also view the corporation as a system of distributed cognition. That is, the corporation is a group of people who have different cognitive roles and capabilities. Individuals can be organized to achieve economic value using physical assets as tools for respective cognitions.

By looking at corporations in this reversed way, we can identify different types of organizational architecture and their comparative advantages. In short, my research has found that managers’ cognitive assets are prioritized in U.S. corporate model, while workers’ entrepreneurial cognitive assets are prioritized in Silicon Valley’s model. In contrast, Japan favors a model where manager and workers’ cognitive assets are more interdependent.

You emphasize the connection between economics and demographics. What can be done about Japan and greater Asia’s rising demography problems?

Human capital is very valuable, but cultivating human capital is quite costly. Due to this constraint, the total fertility rate of women has declined as the economy develops. Scholars call this phenomenon the demographic transition. In addition, as economies further develop, people live longer and the working age population in the total population declines. Japan, Singapore and Taiwan are experiencing this phenomenon. Korea will follow this trend soon and at an even faster rate than Japan. Even if China modifies the one-child policy, the demographic dilemma cannot be escaped. And even for California, which is typically considered to be the youngest state in the U.S., a study predicts it will become the oldest state around year 2030.

So, what can be done to cope with this phenomenon? One option to raise the retirement age. Over two decades ago, Japan started this policy and has seen noted, positive effects. Another option is to increase and secure participation of women in the workforce. Across Asia, total populations are still rising due to immigration. Japan should consider liberalizing immigration. It is interesting to note that in the past 1,500 years Japan’s cultural development benefitted greatly from migration and assimilation of people, such as monks, political refugees and artists from Korea and China. 

With the recent execution of Abenomics, what performance can we expect to see from Japan’s economy in year 2014?

Abenomics has only been assessed in terms of short-term effects on the economy. Instead, my view is that Japan is now in the process of longer-term institutional change. Lifetime employment was the core of Japan’s overall institutional arrangement until some twenty years ago. The main banking system and government-industry relationship complemented and mutually reinforced lifetime employment. Though, with the demographic transition, the Japanese government has found it increasingly difficult to sustain. However, Japan’s institutional arrangements are normally very resilient. I think institutional transformation fitting this new demographic phenomena will require the duration of one generation. Institutions cannot be changed overnight by a revolution or government decree.

Of course, Abe could accelerate institutional adaptation by expanding the roles and opportunities for women and young people and creating more open foreign policy. This policy agenda may be related to the so-called “third arrow” of Abenomics, a period of structural reform following monetary easing and fiscal stimulus. But what Abe can do and has the willingness to do has yet to be fully seen. Thus, if we believe that Japan started the process of institutional change in the early 1990s and requires one generation to attain visible outcomes, the next several years are crucial. Tokyo has been chosen as the host city for the 2020 summer Olympics. I hope this event will act as Japan’s opportunity to display its changes to the international audience. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

Here is Gerhard Casper, standing before 7,000 people gathered in Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater to hear him deliver his first speech as the university’s president.

It’s 1992, the second day of October. Stanford is embroiled in a federal lawsuit over indirect research costs. It is struggling with campus-wide budget cuts and saddled with $160 million in damages caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. University officials are wrestling with controversies over affirmative action, sex discrimination, free speech and diversity.

“What was I to say at my inauguration,” Casper asks in “The Winds of Freedom: Challenges to the University,” a newly published book of selected speeches and extended commentary about those addresses.

“What was I not to say? What were my tasks?”

Casper spent months wrestling with those questions, writing and rewriting his inaugural address. Rather than focus on the university’s troubles with a promise to make them disappear, he instead emphasized Stanford’s role as an institution devoted to teaching, learning and research. He grounded his remarks in Stanford’s motto – translated from his native German as “the wind of freedom blows” – and charted the freedoms most important to a university.

There are eight, he tells his audience.

Among them: an unrestrained pursuit of knowledge, an ability to challenge long-held beliefs and new ideas, and the “freedom to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point.”

“The research enterprise can easily be smothered by internal and external politics, pressures, and red tape,” he tells the crowd. “The wind of freedom has been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for making our great universities the envy of the world. Without that freedom, that greatness is imperiled.”

Humor and heft

Academic freedom was a recurring theme during his eight years at the helm of Stanford. It was a time in which he navigated the university through turmoil and debates not only faced by Stanford and other American universities, but by the entire country.

With “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper presents seven speeches from his presidency, along with a commencement address he delivered at Yale in 2003. They delve into free expression, campus diversity and affirmative action. They cover the university’s role as a place of research and its relationship to the politics of the day.

A book launch celebration and discussion will be held Feb. 25 at Encina Hall.

The big, weighty ideas often come wrapped in a sense of humor – sometimes self-deprecating – that was the hallmark of a popular and seemingly very accessible president who surely never spoke to the same audience twice.

Casper has done more than merely dust off and repackage his favorite or most important speeches into a book. These are addresses tied together by those notions of academic freedom. And in detailed commentary following the text of each speech, Casper explains what was on his mind when he was writing them.

“I put a lot of effort into my speeches,” Casper says during a conversation in his office at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he is a senior fellow and served as director from 2012 to 2013. “But if you take the speeches in isolation, you often end up with an abstract notion of what was happening at time. I wanted to use these speeches as an example of the complexity of issues and questions that I had to deal with as president.”

Diversity, identity and valid arguments

So here is Casper welcoming an incoming class in 1993, one year after delivering his inaugural address. It includes white and black and American Indian students. Some are the American children and grandchildren of Mexican and Asian immigrants. Only 5 percent are foreign students, but they hail from 37 countries.

The president is talking about diversity. He shares his own story about coming to America, telling the students about growing up in Germany in the wake of the Nazi regime and moving to California as a 26-year-old in 1964. He pokes fun at the accent he never lost, but reminds the students that “I have acquired an American `cultural identity.’”

He tells them they will all develop their own sense of cultural identity, adding that diversity makes the university a richer place.

“If we at the university were not committed to interactive pluralism, education would become impossible,” he tells the newcomers.

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“No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an individual and can speak and will be listened to without regard to labels and stereotypes,” he says.

Read out of context today, passages of the speech tuck into the timeless tropes of America as both a mosaic  and a melting pot. It’s OK to assimilate, he tells us. We can still maintain our own identities.

But In Casper’s rearview mirror, the speech becomes a history lesson, a reminder of the American landscape 20 years ago.

“The early 1990s was probably the decade during which multiculturalism and identity politics were most prominent in the United States in general and on American campuses in particular,” he writes in his new book. “When I came to Stanford in 1992, I was ill equipped to deal with some of these issues.”

He goes on to trace the steps Stanford took to address diversity and he shares his thoughts – some scholarly, some personal – on the issues of social and cultural identity. He parses the differences between multiculturalism and diversity.

He discusses the adoption of a new policy on sexual harassment, moves made to increase the number of women on the faculty, and the tensions arising from the university’s struggle to support on-campus ethnic community centers. He revisits the political and ethnically charged student protests that unfolded in the early 1990s.

While he was dealing with the daily fallout of those matters in the president’s office, he was also searching for opportunities to convey his positions and address the issues in his public speeches.

Welcoming the Class of 1997 gave him one of those chances.

“In a university nobody has the right to deny another person’s right to speak his or her mind, to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point,” he tells the incoming students.  “In a university discussion your first question in response to an argument must never be `Does she belong to the right group?’ Instead, the only criterion is `Does she have a valid argument?’”

The lines echo those he used in his inaugural address, and they do so intentionally.

“If you have something you believe in strongly, you must repeat it and repeat it and repeat it,” he says now. “I do that. I plagiarize myself – not because I ran out of things to say, but because it was important to re-emphasize points over and over again.”

Defining academic freedom

So here is Casper in 1998, speaking at Peking University during the school’s centennial celebration. The Chinese government used the occasion to bolster PKU’s standing as a key institution that would lead the country into the 21^st Century, and Casper focused his remarks on the role of research-intensive universities and the integrity they must maintain.

“Academic freedom is the sine qua non of the university,” he tells the audience. “Academic freedom means, above all, freedom from politics.” It also means “freedom from pressures to conform within the university,” he says.

Reflecting on that speech in “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper shares an unsettling irony: as he delivered his remarks, he was unaware that a Stanford research associate from China was being held in a Beijing prison under dubious charges of betraying state secrets.

He learned about the matter several months after the event, and writes now about the university’s unsuccessful appeals for the researcher’s release to then-President Jiang Zemin and his subsequent decision not to pursue a plan for Stanford to open a program at PKU at that time.

“I did not think that it was appropriate for me to enter into an agreement with one of China’s most prominent institutions – continue, as it were, as if nothing had happened – while a Stanford researcher was being held in prison without any explanation,” he writes. “I certainly did not take the step to suspend our discussions lightly, since throughout my life, throughout the many years of the Cold War, I had always favored engagement rather than iron curtains.”

“Germans don’t give funny speeches”

Casper gave his first public address at Stanford when he was 53. But he had already spent a lifetime as a speechmaker.

“I had been viewed in high school to have the ability to talk well and address a large audience,” he says. “And clearly, I liked to do it.”

He was elected president of the student council. His principal and history teacher, Erna Stahl, would call him the school’s festredner, or keynote speaker. He was tapped as valedictorian of the Class of 1957.

He discusses his valedictory address – focused on the dearth of German role models – in the preface to “The Winds of Freedom.” He writes about his relationship with Stahl, how he was impressed by her stories of  confronting the Gestapo, and the impact that growing up in post-Nazi Germany had on him.

“We hadn’t done any intensive study of the Third Reich by eleventh grade,” Casper says. “That was due to the fact that the Erna Stahl believed very strongly that going into the politics of the moment – the aftermath of the Nazi period – would not be the best method to teach us the values she wanted us to have. It would have become too quickly biographical and personal and she was very insistent that there needed to be positive values instilled in us to balance against what the Nazis had perpetrated.”

The preface is as close as the book comes to reading like a memoir, and Casper condenses his childhood, education, academic career and personal acknowledgments into 15 pages.

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Photo Credit: L.A. Cicero

While there are only a few lines devoted to his 26 years at the University of Chicago as a law professor, dean and provost, it was in that city where Casper’s innate ability to connect with an audience meshed with his public persona.

“Germans don’t give funny speeches,” he says. “In Germany, jokes undercut your credibility. My speaking style – the self-deprecation, the humor – that was really honed in Chicago. My friends and colleagues had these characteristics, and those elements were brought into my life.”

He learned that a joke does more than solicit a laugh. It can disarm a critic, humanize a speaker and lighten up an otherwise serious speech.

“After all, you want the audience to keep paying attention if you really do have something important to tell them,” he says.

An era begins

So here again is Casper, new to Stanford on that second day of October in 1992 and about to take on the promises and problems of the university.

He opens with a light touch, addressing “fellow members of the first-year class and fellow transfer students.” He suggests with deadpan delivery that he was hired as Stanford’s president because he could properly pronounce the university’s motto as it appears in German on the president’s seal: Die Luft der Freiheit weht.

“Alas, I have bad news for the board of trustees,” he says, turning to look at the board members seated on the stage behind him. The phrase, he says, was originally written in Latin. Not German.

“If, under these circumstances, the trustees would feel it appropriate to renounce their contract with me, I would understand perfectly,” he says, cracking a wide smile for the first time.

“All I ask for is the opportunity to finish this speech.”

And with his first formal words as Stanford’s ninth president, Casper casts himself as a newcomer – an outsider here to lead, learn and speak his mind.

Scholars, policymakers and business leaders from Japan and the United States recently gathered at Stanford to analyze energy innovation and build new bilateral endeavors.

“With rapid economic growth in emerging countries, world energy consumption has been and will be increasing, everyone has been wondering if there are enough energy resources for this growth," said Hideichi Okada, a former vice minister for International Affairs at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Panelists weigh in on the changing energy picture in the U.S. and Japan.

Okada said Japan and the U.S. share concerns about world geopolitical change in energy supply and demand, and nuclear policy. Okada is at Stanford as the Sasakawa Peace Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) this year.

Okada's remarks came during the the New Channels Dialogue, a two-day conference organized by the Japan Program at Shorenstein APARC and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. It is the first of three annual conferences aimed to stimulate debate on 21st century problems faced by both nations. 

“In the aftermath of the disaster at Fukushima, Japan has reinvigorated its search for cutting-edge technologies and alternative sources of energy,” said Yuji Takagi, president of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. In parallel, the U.S. has increased its production of shale gas as a viable alternative of natural gas.

Confluence of national interest and demand, and shared historical connections between the U.S. and Japan, suggest an ideal environment for further partnerships between the two countries.

“We have entered an especially important period in bilateral relations between the Asia-Pacific [and the U.S.] – it is undergoing such rapid change and technology is transforming. In this context, I believe the U.S.-Japan relationship will only become more important,” Takagi said.

Experts and Stanford scholars discuss electricity systems in California and Japan.

Okada cited the joint U.S.-Japan wind power project in Hawaii as an example of recent cooperation. Last December, Maui became the site of a multi-year renewable energy project between the American and Japanese governments.

Other panelists offered different perspectives on energy opportunities from across sectors, included among them were Julia Nesheiwat, the State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Energy Resources; Hirofumi Takinami, a member of the Japan’s House of Councilors and former visiting fellow at Shorenstein APARC; Thomas Starrs, SunPower vice president; Nobuo Tanaka, former IEA Executive Director; and Frank Wolak, Stanford economics professor and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.

Topics discussed included:

• Energy constraints experienced by Japan since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and challenges facing Japan’s electricity industry liberalization.
• Regional implications of China’s rise as a major energy consumer and producer.
• Geopolitical and trade balance effects on the United States and Japan resulting from the shale gas revolution transforming the U.S. into a major energy producer.
• Broad impacts to the energy industry caused by geopolitics and financial instability.
• Lessons learned from California’s experience with electricity industry liberalization.
• Multilateral partnerships for energy technology and innovation.

The second day of the conference was a closed session in which candid, in-depth discussions were held. Participants also went on a site visit to Bloom Energy led by principal cofounder and chief executive officer K.R. Sridhar.

The New Channels Dialogue highlighted energy imperatives and created a network of exchange anticipated to continue beyond the conference. A report that encompasses major points and policy recommendations will be published in the forthcoming months. 

On February 10, 2014, Pascal Lamy, the former Director-General of the World Trade Organization, visited Stanford University as a special guest of The Europe Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

During his two-term tenure at the helm of the WTO (from 2005 to 2013), Mr. Lamy successfully guided the organization through complex changes in the regulation of international trade. Among his many achievements, he oversaw the systematic integration of developing countries into positions of political leadership in the world economic order.

Prior to the WTO, Mr. Lamy served as the European Commissioner for Trade, the CEO of the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, and in the French civil service. 

Mr. Lamy has been decorated with medals of honor from countries ranging from France to Mexico, and has received honorary degrees from eight universities around the world. He has authored several books, including recently, The Geneva Consensus: Making Trade Work for All.

In his farewell statement as the Director-General, Mr. Lamy said in July 2013: “Together, we have strengthened the WTO as the global trade body, as a major pillar of global economic governance. Despite the heavy headwinds and the turmoil in the global economy as well as on the geo-political scene, together we have made this organization larger and stronger.”

Mr. Lamy drew on these experiences to offer insights related to the designing of global governance during his visit to Stanford.

He first participated in a lunchtime question and answer roundtable with undergraduate students. Stephen Stedman, Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, moderated the event. Among other topics, Mr. Lamy spoke about the necessary mix of economic, social, and political policies that determine the efficacy of free trade as an engine of global economic growth. 

Mr. Lamy then delivered a public lecture, titled “World Trade and Global Governance,” before an audience of over a hundred members of the Stanford community.

In this talk, Mr. Lamy outlined a statement of his own thinking about the future of global governance and international trade, and described what remains to be done in addressing the challenges of globalization. Additionally, he reflected on the features of modern politics that create governance gridlock and thwart global oversight, and identified how progress can be made in overcoming impediments to policy action at the international level.

Mr. Lamy’s lecture focused on three overarching points. First, notwithstanding some setbacks, governments and international organizations have achieved major successes in regulating the liberalization of global trade. Tariffs are on average lower than ever before, and governments did not raise tariffs during the recent financial crisis as they did during the Great Depression.

The WTO has played a central role in facilitating regulatory convergence in international trade. Institutional features such as the organization’s dispute resolution mechanisms have deterred nations from enacting unilateral forms of protectionism. Additionally, by “naming and shaming” nations that raise tariffs during economic crises, the WTO has prevented reversals to autarky in the global economy.

These policies have had a salutary effect because free trade and open markets enhance economic competitiveness, generate growth, and raise welfare standards around the world.

Second, despite these successes in the governance of international trade, challenges remain. A new feature of the global economy is that protectionism based on economic objectives has been replaced by “precautionism” based on normative prerogatives. For example, competing national perspectives on product standards such as those related to safety or labor norms thwart efforts to achieve consensus on trade regulation.

Genetically modified foods represent one example of globally traded products that are held to different normative standards by different countries. Disputes over regulating the global production and distribution of these products are therefore less likely to be resolved by traditional negotiation mechanisms.

Third, in order to overcome this governance gridlock and achieve regulatory convergence, we need to bring together stakeholders from the public and private sector to build coalitions that jointly negotiate conflicts in matters of global governance.

For example, the “C20-C30-C40 Coalition of the Working” that comprises the 20 largest countries, the 30 largest companies, and the 40 largest cities in the world is currently striving to overcome regulatory gridlock on climate change. This coalition can define carbon emissions targets, supervise urban infrastructure projects, and evaluate progress on energy and environmental objectives.

Mr. Lamy reiterated that trade can only serve as an engine for economic development if governments and international institutions enact economic and social policies that reflect the preferences of a broad swath of global stakeholders. Only by adapting the governance structures of the twentieth century to respond to the challenges of the twenty-first century, can we overcome new forms of policy gridlock at the international level.

Warning against the “dangers of excessive hubris,” former U.S. Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth emphasized the intricacies and complexity of creating American foreign policy and called for the government to exercise greater restraint and better understand the countries it engages with.

The veteran diplomat and visiting lecturer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies called for the United States to exercise greater self-restraint and better understand the history and current circumstances of countries it engages with. 

“The making of U.S. policy is inherently a very, very difficult enterprise,” said Bosworth, positioned at Stanford for winter quarter.

“The issues tend to be complex, and they frequently pose moral as well as political choices,” he said. “I found that perfection is usually the enemy of the good in the making of foreign policy and is, for the most part, unattainable.”

Foreign policy can be ambiguous and difficult at times; it is a process that can be compared to gardening because “you have to keep tending to it regularly,” Bosworth said, referencing former Secretary of State George Shultz’s well-known analogy.

Bosworth, who served for five decades in the U.S. government and for 12 years as dean of Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, delivered these thoughts in the first of three public seminars this quarter. He is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer in residence at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC).

He cautioned against America’s tendency to revert to military power when crisis occurs. “I believe that when at all possible, we need to choose diplomacy over force,” Bosworth asserted, “although it is sometimes true that diplomacy backed by potential force can be more effective.” 

Citing Afghanistan, Iraq and Southwest Asia, Bosworth noted these among other examples as situations of excessive power projected by the American foreign policy arm. In some cases, pride may have gotten the better of policymakers who sometimes “want to be seen as doers and solvers.”

Bosworth pointed out that the nature of our actions speaks loudly – both at home and abroad – thus sensitivity and sincerity are important in any international exchange.

Since the Vietnam War, American values and the push for democracy are not always well received by other countries. And there’s often good reason for that, he said.

“It is awkward for the U.S. to campaign for more democracy elsewhere when our own model seems to have increasing difficulty in producing reasonable solutions for our own problems,” he said.

Democracy is “not a cure-all” for every nation and this is reflected in the amended model adopted by countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and Burma. However, Bosworth said he remains confident that the American democratic system “will prevail and eventually work better than it seems to be working now.”

Bosworth will explore the challenges of maturing democracies in Japan and South Korea and negotiations and management of relations with North Korea in his two other Payne lectures. The Payne Lectureship brings prominent speakers to campus for their global reputation as visionary leaders, a practical grasp of a given field, and the capacity to articulate important perspectives on today’s global challenges.

Bosworth entered the Foreign Service in 1961, a difficult yet “exciting time to join the government,” he said.

“At the age of 21, I was the youngest person entering my class,” he said, “and of the 38 people, there were only two women…and were zero persons of color and only a handful who were not products of an Ivy League education.” The State Department of then is very different compared to the one that exists today; this signals positive, necessary change in the diplomatic corps.

Bosworth, having served three tours as a U.S. ambassador in South Korea (from 1997 to 2001); the Philippines (from 1984 to 1987); and Tunisia (from 1979 to 1981) and twice received the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award (in 1976 and 1986), has a long established career.

He brings great wisdom on foreign affairs given his extensive engagement as a practitioner and a writer, said former colleague and Shorenstein APARC distinguished fellow Michael H. Armacost.

“To say that Steve has had an extraordinarily distinguished career in the Foreign Service doesn't quite capture the range of his accomplishments, I can’t think of very many Foreign Service officers in this or any other generation that have left a footprint on big issues in three consecutive decades,” Armacost acknowledged. 

During his time at Stanford, Bosworth will hold seminars and mentor students who may be interested in pursuing a career in the Foreign Service, in addition to the two upcoming public talks.

A student seeking this very advice posed a question in the discussion portion following Bosworth’s talk.

Speaking to anyone considering a Foreign Service career, Bosworth said one must “think about it hard, and think again.” He said public service is a privilege, not so much a sacrifice as the typical notion holds. “It can be a great career as long as you have the right perspective on it,” he ended.