Dear Matan,
Thank you for your help and for making the time to talk over the phone.
The process, to participate in the National Security Policy Center in the University of Virginia (in the City of Charlottesville) currently takes 2 years, but they are hoping to reduce it to 15 months. The participants will be awarded a Master's degree at the end of two years. Each course will have 25 participants.
Please find attached a sample of the agreement they signed with the Japanese.
Let me know of your upcoming visit to DC. If it’s ok with you, I can introduce you to Philip Potter via email, for further coordination and information.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Shimrit
Shimrit Goldberg, Directot
Academic Exchange
Shalom Nofar,
As I mentioned during our telephone conversation earlier today, my name is Shimrit Goldberg and I am the director of the Academic Exchange (AE) organization.
AE is an independent non-profit organization, with a primary mission of strengthening the academic community’s understanding of Israel's vast array of communities, perspectives and issues, via education-based missions.
Every year during the summer months, AE hosts and coordinates multiple delegations in the fields of political science, international affairs and international law, comprising academics from leading academic institutions, worldwide.
The program facilitates meetings and open dialogue with leading Israeli and Palestinian figures, both public and official, along with academics, journalists, civil servants and military leaders, covering a wide range of issues.
Two professors whom participate in our program, Allan Stam (Dean of the Batten School of Leadrership and Public Policy) and Philip Potter (Associate Professor at the Department of Politics, Batten School Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia), have established the National Security Policy Center at the University of Virginia. The Center will serve as the hub of activity for a new national security cohort, which will receive rigorous training in strategy, analysis and substantive security threats and responses. The cohort will include mid-career officials from a variety of countries (two per cohort) and they would very much like to have Israeli representation.
Following a conversation with General Baidatz, I understand that the inclusion of the Military College would be the best way to involve Israelis in this Center.
Please find below Prof. Stam and Prof. Potters' bios, the original proposal for the Center, along with the handout they used for recruiting.
Allan C. Stam is Dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and Professor of Public Policy. Previously he was the Director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the dynamics of armed conflict between and within states. Dean Stam has worked on several survey-based projects including surveys conducted in Russia, Rwanda, India as well as Web based surveys in the United States. To help support a household survey in Rwanda, Stam and his colleagues developed a GIS sampling system based on randomly selecting residences from known geographic points distributed randomly throughout the country space. Stam is currently assisting the Navsarjin trust that operates in Gujarat, India to help them conduct both a community attitude census as well as a household census in roughly 120,000 households in approximately 1,800 rural villages in Gujarat. In addition to tracking discriminatory behavior, Stam and his colleagues have been assisting the NGO design community surveys to allow the NGO to track violent behaviors directed towards members of the sub-caste population.
Dean Stam’s work on war outcomes, war durations, mediation and alliance politics appears in numerous political science journals including the American Political Science Review, International Security, and the British Journal of Political Science. He has received several grants supporting his work, including five from the National Science Foundation. His books include Win Lose or Draw (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Democracies at War (Princeton University Press, 2002), The Behavioral Origins of War (University of Michigan Press, 2004). His latest book, Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge University Press, 2015), co-authored with Michael Horowitz and Cali Mortensen Ellis, examines 2,400 world leaders and their decision to engage in armed conflicts.
He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2007 he was a residential fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is the recipient of the 2004 Karl Deutsch award, given annually by the ISA to the scholar under the age of 40 who has made the greatest contribution to the study of international politics. Stam holds a US government Top Secret Clearance and has worked on several consulting projects for the Department of Defense and the US Navy’s Joint Warfare Analysis Center. Before completing his undergraduate degree, he served as a communications specialist on an ‘A’ detachment in the US Army Special Forces and later as an armor officer in the US Army Reserves.
Professors Stam and Potter would be pleased to come to Israel for a meeting with General Hayman to introduce themselves, as well as hear from the General regarding the possibilities to lay the ground for this intiative.
I am very much looking forward to hearing back from you and available for any further information.
Please let me know how you would like to proceed.
Best wishes,
Shimrit Goldberg, Directot
Academic Exchange