Schools of international affairs in the United States: a historical sketch

Abstract

Although disciplines are but one element of the institutional matrix of higher education, historians of International Relations (IR) rarely explore the field beyond its disciplinary context. To redress this lacuna, I sketch the history of professional international affairs (IA) schools in the United States. IA schools employ many IR scholars and train numerous practitioners, constituting a crucial interface between the IR academy and the policy world. When the social science disciplines were institutionalised at the turn of the 20th Century, the mission of training IR scholars momentarily eclipsed, but never extinguished, the commitment to training practitioners. During the 20th Century, this commitment increasingly found expression in interdisciplinary professional IA schools. I survey the emergence of IA schools, the growth of terminal master’s programmes within their walls, and the rapid growth of enrollments in these programmes. The expansion of IA education mirrored the spectacular growth of professional education on US campuses in areas such as law, business, nursing, and social work.