‘Soft power’ expert Joe Nye reflects on decades-long Harvard career
Life stories from Annette Gordon-Reed, Martin Karplus, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and many more, in the Experience series. Though a farm boy at heart, talking politics and traveling to faraway places always fascinated Joseph Nye. When he graduated from Princeton in 1958, Nye figured he’d fulfill his military obligation in the Marines and then perhaps enter the Foreign Service. But a chance encounter with a professor in the college library led to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics. Then it was on to Harvard for a Ph.D. More than 50 years later, Nye is one of the country’s most important scholars in American foreign policy and international relations, and among the Kennedy School’s most popular and respected teachers. Over that long career, Nye’s intellectual curiosity has taken him to East Africa during the independence movement in the 1960s, to weighing the ethics of nuclear weapons proliferation, to...