Taylor Fravel, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and recently appointed director of the MIT Security Studies Program (SSP), CIS has served “as a welcoming incubator for new programs.” SSP, which began in the Cold War as the Defense and Arms Control Studies program, has “grown significantly under Samuels’s leadership of CIS,” says Fravel, an expert on China, East Asia, and international relations. A design competition, “Just Jerusalem” invited entrants to imagine ways of bridging differences by addressing the physical, economic, civic, or symbolic infrastructure of the city.Īccording to M. “CIS, under Dick’s leadership, supported the Department of Urban Studies and Planning-led campus wide effort to envision what Jerusalem could be as a city,” says Sanyal. “He’s like an orchestra conductor, building off of people with deep interests and capabilities.”įor Bish Sanyal, the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and CIS research member, Samuels played an integral role in bringing to fruition a 2007 project, “Just Jerusalem: Visions for a Place of Peace,” spearheaded by Sanyal and Diane Davis, then associate dean of the School of Architecture and Planning.
“Dick has been a wonderful promoter of good ideas, always getting behind the efforts of his colleagues,” says Suzanne Berger, Institute professor, who led the MIT-China and MIT-France Programs, and was a founding director of MISTI. On the eve of his departure, colleagues reflected on the evolution of CIS under Samuels. Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa and current director of MISTI, will take on the leadership of CIS.
He will remain an active faculty member in the Department of Political Science and its Security Studies Program. He has broadened the center’s scope, embracing education and public outreach, while deepening its storied roots in security studies and research in science and technology policy.Īt the end of June, after a two-decade tenure at CIS, Samuels plans to step down.
MISTI exemplifies Samuels’s larger enterprise at CIS to make international scholarship and experience not just relevant, but essential, across the Institute and beyond. With his support, additional programs were created for China and India, paving the way for MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), which at last count provided opportunities for nearly 1,000 students a year to research and collaborate in 20 nations. Samuels’s novel concept of “applied international studies” lit a fire. This insight sparked the MIT-Japan Program in 1982, an entirely new approach to international undergraduate education that emphasized Japanese language study and hands-on application of expertise in companies and university laboratories in other countries. With the rapid emergence of Japan as a global economic powerhouse, Samuels, now the director of the Center for International Studies (CIS) and Ford International Professor of Political Science, had realized that “only by working and learning abroad, will MIT scientists and engineers fully appreciate that not all the world’s science and engineering starts and ends in 02139,” he recalls. In the early 1980s, Richard Samuels PhD ’80 was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, specializing in Japanese politics and public policy.
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