What hides behind the enclosed glass walls of the second floor is a mystery to many SAIS students.  Many have an image of this space as the executive suite where one needs a special ID badge to enter.  More secure still, one may imagine, is the office of SAIS’s own CEO, Dean Jessica Einhorn, hidden in the back corner of the confined space with two armed guards blocking the entrance.

In fact, I found my visit to be quite the opposite (there were no armed guards).  The Dean was so amenable to our meeting that she even offered me cookies and a beverage upon entrance, and we spent the first 30 minutes talking about me.  Since my biography is well, drab to say the least, compared to that of Dean Einhorn, I will spare you that portion of our meeting.  Moreover, during the final 30 minutes, I listened attentively to the Dean recount details of complex currency swaps, global bonds, and interest rate derivatives with the World Bank and Salomon Brothers.  For me, an avid reader of Euromoney magazine and a self-proclaimed bond junkie, this was sweeter than the girl-scout cookies on the Dean’s coffee table.  However, I realize that a few other people read the Observer as well, so I’ll instead keep the content to the following topics:  SAIS, Washington, World Bank, Wolfowitz, Baryshnikov, and Chávez (in no particular order). 

This is a chance for you to learn more about the Dean as a person, her current perceptions of SAIS and future plans for the school.  Since the SAIS website does a fairly complete job of writing the Dean’s biography, this piece will not broach mere facts but instead try to parcel out anecdotes.  With that, meet Dean Jessica Einhorn:

Dean, you graduated from SAIS in 1970.  How did you end up here the first time around?

SAIS was different then.  It was a much smaller school.  I came from New York City and had graduated from Barnard College young, at the age of 19.  That was much more common in those days.  I had taken my junior year at the London School of Economics when I was 18 years old.  It was my first time away from home, and in those days we didn't have cell phones or email.  When you went abroad you really went abroad.  When I came home, I thought it would be fun to go abroad for another year.  So, I applied for a Fulbright in Venezuela. 

In undergrad, I had been invited to apply to SAIS.  I didn't know graduate schools in International Affairs, but I was impressed with SAIS and accepted the offer to come.  They, of course, were happy to give me a deferral to do the Fulbright in Venezuela.

What made you decide to do the Fulbright in Venezuela?

In applying for the Fulbright in Latin America, I loved skiing, so I wanted to go to Argentina or Chile.   At Barnard, I was taking a Senior Seminar on Latin America, and the professor said to me, “Oh Latin America, you should go to Venezuela. It's this great experiment in democracy, it's so interesting.  You should go there.”  It was not a popular choice for Fulbrights, so I put it down as my third choice, and they gave it to me.  I was one of 5 people who went to Caracas, and P.S. they don't ski in Venezuela. 

You were in Venezuela during the Punto Fijo two-party “democratic” rule, a time where the country’s leadership had a strong rapport with the United States, compared to today, where Hugo Chávez clearly does not.  Can you comment on the cultural difference between then and now?

1967 was before all of the military coups across the Southern Cone, but still this was considered in political science, the great first move because Pérez Jiménez was a terrible dictator.  After him, they were in the start of the two-party system, and it was considered very exciting. 

It was when developing countries did not have mega-cities, but very livable places.  It was before a lot of migration into the cities, though I did see favelas on the outskirts.  The university was on strike much of the year, so there was not a lot of classroom learning.  I did a special project on Andean integration with the newly formed Andean fund, CAF, which was started in 1966. 

I don't think I got to know the political culture at all, but the one experience I had in Caracas was that it felt like there was a tremendous amount of social mobility.  You had students who didn't come from wealthy families who were going to university.  They weren't coming from the real poor either--they must have been coming from the striving middle class, but they were going to university and were becoming the scientists and business leaders.  One of the best examples about the openness of the society was a museum—El Museo de Andrés Bello—very unlike a place like Bogotá.  Instead of having the great pre-Colombian collections, it was contemporary artists shown in the museum.  So, it felt like it was an open socially mobile community.  I didn't follow the local politics and didn't realize that what you had was the beginning of a crony-like two-party system that seemed to work for the benefit of the middle class and elites, but of course didn't do anything for the poor. 

Tell me about your experience as a student at SAIS.

I was at SAIS from 1968-70, when I was 21-23 years old.  My recollection of SAIS is that we had a wonderful time, but it was much less rigorous and demanding than it is now.  It was much more about an introduction to diplomacy, diplomatic history, international affairs, regional studies, and economics.  The neighborhood wasn't so gentrified then, so everyone could afford to live near the school.

There was a good deal of warmth and sharing.  I didn't know much about the campus in Bologna, where some of the students were.  My two years were much more about getting a sense of what the professions were like. 

It was a lot of reading, a lot of good learning, certainly a great deal of grounding in international economics, but it felt more like it was less focused on the education and more an introduction to the whole sensibility of international relations as a profession.  Then, afterwards I went to Princeton for a PhD in Politics on the recommendation of an economics professor who said to me that as a woman I should get the best education that I can get.

What was your favorite class?

A great class given by Edmund Stillman—he wrote books with William Pfaff.  They didn't think the world was made up of people with harmonies of interest, all with good motivations.  He gave a course on American Foreign Policy or International Relations and gave great lectures and wonderful readings.  It was one of the better introductions to a combination of political philosophy and international relations. 

Who was your favorite professor?

I had a great professor of International Law, Stephen Schwebel who went on to become the head of the International Court of Justice.  I also had a professor, Bill Luers, who taught me Soviet politics.  He was later the Ambassador to Venezuela and Ambassador to the Czech Republic.  He also brought me over to the State Department when I was working at the Department of Treasury. 

What was your favorite social event while a student here?

We had no money--it was not a world in which students went to restaurants all the time.  So the social events involved people hosting group dinners and drinking jug wine together.  This notion of going out all the time to clubs and restaurants just didn't exist.  Travel was something that we loved.  One spring break I went to California with a friend and drove from Los Angeles up to San Francisco.  We didn't have things like the talent show or Halloween. 

In Washington, there was very little theatre life.  It was not a cosmopolitan city in 1970.  There were one or two French restaurants.  It didn't have all the ethnic food that it currently has.

From London, I have lovely memories of going to the ballet.  Baryshnikov left Russia and danced with Margot Fontaine.  I have such strong memories of enjoying culture in college—New York and London.  I have no [such memories] of my first stint in Washington.  Now, it's such a rich city in terms of food, art and culture.

Do you like Washington better than New York?

They’re different.  Washington is a much easier city to live in.  You compare New York to London, Tokyo, Rome, or Paris.  You can't compare New York to Washington.  But they say that Washington has the second-best theatre life in the country now behind New York, and now it’s still affordable.

As a PhD in Politics, how did you get a position with the US Treasury?

Well, I always loved finance, and I did my thesis on the fight between the State Department and the Treasury Department on the “bureaucratic politics” of expropriation policy.  Initially, I went into the development office of Treasury.  Then, I got recruited into the monetary office in time for the reform of the IMF articles.  I loved the Treasury, and I loved Monetary Policy.

You had a very extensive career at the World Bank, culminating as Vice President and Treasurer and then Managing Director.  How did you achieve such great success, and why did you leave?

I had gotten to know the people in the Treasury department at the World Bank, and that was the start of my 19 years at the institution.  The emphasis of the World Bank Treasury is on fixed income.  When I became more senior, I oversaw the management of the $10BN pension fund.  I was there for the transformation of fixed income markets.  Looking back, it was technology and globalization that transformed the financial sector.

As for leaving, I was coming on 50 years old, and I had been there close to 20 years.  I felt that I didn't want to spend the rest of my career in the position I was in, but I also didn't want to switch to another field in the bank.  So, it was time to move on to something else. 

Knowing that I loved monetary policy, the heads of the World Bank and IMF, and especially Stanley Fischer (then number two at the IMF) invited me to become a visiting fellow in the research department at the IMF for a year under Chief Economist Michael Mussa.  I was able to think and read for an entire year about international financial architecture. 

In introducing Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson at the recent conference on China’s Financial System Reforms and Governance held at SAIS, you alluded to his successful career in the private sector and now in the public sector, an ideal to which many SAIS students aspire.  You, yourself are an exemplar of this model, dedicating most of your career to the public sector, while you currently serve on the Time Warner Board of Advisors in addition to your role in academia. How have you been able to balance these divergent paths?

Because I was on the Treasury side of the World Bank—even though I was heart and soul working in the public sector—I was working only with the cream of the financial private sector all over the world.  So, I always had one foot in the private sector and one foot in the public sector.  In terms of boards, I started with nonprofit boards.  It was an appropriate mix since you couldn't be on a private sector board while working at the World Bank.  There, I learned the dynamics and governance of boards from nonprofits.  Later, I was able to join a corporate board, and I find the experience at Time Warner to be very worthwhile. 

For many of us that are about to become alumni, how would you describe your experience as an alumnus?

I stayed in close contact with the school because I was in Washington, at the World Bank or in the State Department, so I was around many SAIS grads.  The school has not been as active though as we should be.  We’re hopefully stepping up enormously the facilitating function that we can have of putting alumni in different geographic regions in contact with one another.  Though, if you're in Washington, you can't walk out on the street or go into an institution without running into other SAIS grads. 

When I came in, I don't think there was any tradition that I'm aware of with reunions.  Of course, we had the big 60th anniversary for the school.  We had Colin Powell, and it was a lovely event.  The question, should we have class reunions?  It's a two year school, some of the students were in Bologna—those people intend to stay in touch by class—so calling people from all over the world for a 10th or 20th reunion of their class may not resonate.  Whereas if you think of it as a professional school and try to do it over a subject area or professional interest, the pool becomes the entire longitudinal, so you have a much better chance of getting a critical mass.  The program could be of more interest, and the conversations around the table might be of more interest.  First, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the SAIS/Wharton partnership, the next year we had a year for Energy, and now this year the International Reporting Project was due for a reunion, so we decided to focus the reunion around journalism.  Next year, I'm thinking of centering the alumni program on SAIS couples—people who got married out of SAIS.  We could do it on Valentine's Day.

We're open to doing class reunions though.  I'm not real rigid about a lot of this stuff.  It's just what appealed to me to do. 

What have been some of your major accomplishments during your tenure?

I think my deanship is a work in progress.  I share responsibility for completed tasks with those around me.  What I do hold myself accountable for is building out the community ties that help us to do our jobs for the students.  That is the privilege and responsibility that we have.  I know it may sound like I’m standing on a soapbox, but it's true, and it's what brings me to work every day.

Many students from the Bologna Center have expressed interest in wearing laurel wreaths at graduation like last year’s ceremony.  Is the administration opposed to this?

I love the laurel wreaths—I thought they were beautiful and even touching.  To me, the notion of some students choosing laurels and some students choosing mortar boards is a lovely symbolic representation that we have two campuses, that SAIS is about respect for cultural diversity, and it's about individual choice.

You began your deanship in 2001, shortly after your predecessor Paul Wolfowitz was appointed as US Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld.  Wolfowitz is often associated with neoconservative politics.  Does the “neocon” image of the school resonate in the community even six years after Wolfowitz’s departure?

In the early years I heard more of it.  I hear less of it now, and I think it's because even in our so-called “neocon” community there has been so much criticism of the war effort, that I think it has dissipated.  I have never heard anyone say that Paul Wolfowitz brought politics into the school.  He came from an academic family, and he really loved the school for what it was, not as an instrument for something else.  I used to say, “When I come into the school every day I stand on the shoulders of my predecessor.”  That's what you say if you're in your first year or second year.  Once you're in your fifth year, you better not be standing on anyone else's shoulders.

When Wolfowitz was Dean, he used to have 8AM breakfast with students once a week to build his relationship with the students.  Have you tried to do something similar to reach out to students?

I've tried a number of approaches.  First, I had a time when people could come in to see me, but barely anyone came.  Then, I would go downstairs once a week.  So, the same four students who read their newspaper every morning were stuck talking to the Dean once a week.

What I'm going to do next year is have individual occasions with each of the clubs.  That's going to be a great way to meet a lot of the students.  Once every two weeks I'll try to get on the calendar of a different club and get to know them.  It's a little bit similar to the reunions.  If you see people where they're more passionate, I think you will have more to talk about. 

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing SAIS in the coming years?

We've been doing this big exercise, "Roll Back the Future", an idea that came to us from a wonderful alum that had a very successful career at McKinsey.  It's a concept in which you look out 10 years from now and decide what you think the competitive environment is.  You identify the challenges that you're going to face, how you would need to be functioning to thrive in that environment, and then you roll back the future.  By that you recognize what we need to do in one year, in five years to get there.  In business parlance, it starts with a focus on clients.  In educational parlance, you'd be looking at both the environment of educational competition and the kind of students and the needs that they will have 10 years from now.

We find that the education at SAIS is very strong and the faculty is very strong, and what we're looking at is how to enhance the whole SAIS experience.  So, instead of having two surges of 13 weeks, and then all of these breaks, we will try over time to have a more continuous experience from pre-term through to commencement. 

Some ideas that we are contemplating are:

• Leadership training as well as economics during pre-term
• More trips that are of professional interest during winter or spring break
• Short courses by special people who are only available for a few weeks in the January break
• Enhancing even more the summer jobs that relate to the professional experience that students want to have 
  

So, the whole idea is to try and build up the infrastructure of the professional school around the great academic core that we have.