Professor George Shambaugh, the incoming director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program, is no stranger to the Hilltop. He first came to Georgetown in 1994 as a jointly-appointed faculty member in the Government Department and the School of Foreign Service, and has been teaching MSFS students since the very beginning of his SFS career. Now, as MSFS Director, he hopes to build on the program’s reputation as one of the world’s top international affairs graduate programs to develop MSFS into a hub for students, faculty, policy makers and researchers to collaborate on some of the biggest issues facing us today.
“MSFS is a jewel in the crown of Georgetown; it is one of our many extraordinary programs, but it stands out, both within the School of Foreign Service and the broader Georgetown community,” Shambaugh says. “Enhancing our outreach to Washington and the world beyond in the post-COVID-19 environment will be an exciting challenge.”
Vision for MSFS
For Shambaugh, one of the MSFS program’s biggest strengths is how it facilitates interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to international affairs issues. “MSFS is all about linking theory and practice. It is all about applying substantive expertise, analytical tools, historical and contemporary knowledge to the challenge we face today,” he says.
In a program that trains graduates to tackle real-world global problems, it is imperative that MSFS equips its students with a full range of skills and analytical tools to help them become leaders in problem-solving and policy, he stresses. Committed to interdisciplinary learning, Shambaugh hopes to create new opportunities for MSFS students to learn from multiple academic disciplines and methodological approaches by strengthening relations between MSFS and other programs and centers in SFS and across the university.
Shambaugh’s belief in the benefits of cross-discipline collaboration stems from his own experience as an undergraduate studying government and physics. While students in each major often did not recognize the usefulness of the other, studying both subjects enabled Shambaugh to see the benefits of examining real-world problems from multiple perspectives.
“It is possible and extraordinarily beneficial to build linkages across different programs,” he says. Shambaugh has carried this principle with him to Georgetown, where he worked with colleagues to create the interdisciplinary Political Economy major in Georgetown College and International Political Economy major in the SFS. He is also a member of the International Political Economy working group which brings faculty members from the SFS, the Government and Economics Department, McCourt School of Public Policy and the McDonough School of Business together for monthly research reviews.
Building on MSFS excellence
Shambaugh held a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship for tenured international relations faculty from the fall of 2017 through the summer of 2018 and worked as a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Todd Young, where he was responsible for the Senator’s work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That experience reinforced his appreciation of the impact that MSFS has on the policy community. “The halls of power in Congress and around Washington are filled with students from the MSFS program and from other master’s programs at Georgetown,” he remarks. “They are stellar ambassadors for the MSFS program and Georgetown University.”
Shambaugh recently helped to lead a review of the MSFS curriculum. Through that process, he gained deeper insights into the program’s academics, which he says were impressive. “Thanks to the superb leadership of [outgoing MSFS Director] Nancy McEldowney and the excellent faculty and staff of the MSFS program, the program is in great shape. Therefore, my task is not to fix something that’s off-kilter. Rather, it is to make something that is good even better,” he says.
As MSFS Director, Shambaugh wants to increase opportunities for students, faculty, alumni, policymakers, think tanks and NGOs to come together to explore some of the most pressing issues of today’s world. “I would like to expand the program’s areas of concentration into centers of excellence. That is, make them focal points that bring students, faculty, and practitioners who are seeking to understand and manage common challenges together,” he says.
Taking on real-world issues
Shambaugh recognizes that the MSFS program and its students will face major global challenges in the coming years. Globally-spread disease, rising nationalism and xenophobia, financial inequality, international rivalries, security issues and environmental changes are all issues that MSFS students will confront when they graduate. “There are some substantive policy problems we know about and will train people to address. There will be others we do not yet anticipate. Our goal is to give our students the substantive knowledge and analytical tools to become adaptable problem solvers so they take on today’s problems and lead us boldly into a future we may not yet foresee.”
While international affairs “tools of the trade” have not gone out of fashion, Shambaugh is also excited to see how new perspectives and approaches can inform his work at MSFS. “I’m curious about the different approaches, ideas, and ways of looking at the world that students from different backgrounds, faculty with training in different disciplines, and practitioners with different types of careers bring to the table,” he explains. He is looking forward to working with the diverse students, faculty and staff that make up the MSFS community. He says, “Working with intelligent people who see things from different perspectives is what makes leadership positions interesting.”
While the world faces an uncertain future, Shambaugh is hopeful that by working together, sharing best practices and exploring new ideas, the MSFS and wider Georgetown community can develop bold solutions to the problems threatening the international community. He teaches the Machiavelli Seminar for a two-week study abroad program at Villa Le Balze, Georgetown’s study center just outside Florence, Italy. He borrows a concept from the Italian diplomat and philosopher to emphasize his optimism about leading the MSFS program in turbulent times. “Fortune is like a raging river: you can control about half of it, and the other half is out of our control,” he says. “But the key is that, with the help of a good team, you can control half of it. The trick is to learn how to navigate the currents. Doing so will be an exciting challenge.”