Ford School Public Events

'Winter Heating or Clean Air? Unintended Impacts of China's Huai River Policy.' Avraham Ebenstein, Hebrew University

Harold Ford, Jr. is Executive Vice Chairman of Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

From his bio:

Previously, Ford served Tennessee in the United States Congress for 10 years. Described by President Bill Clinton as 'the walking, living embodiment of where America ought to go in the 21st century,' Ford is now chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a news analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and a distinguished practitioner in residence at the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

Spring Preview is designed to give newly admitted students all the information they need to make a decision about pursuing a Masters in Public Policy here at the Ford School. Admitted students will meet with our faculty, staff, students, and alumni and get a chance to tour the campus and the city of Ann Arbor. Admitted students will receive specific event details with the decision letters they receive from the school in March.

Spring Preview is designed to give newly admitted students all the information they need to make a decision about pursuing a Masters in Public Policy here at the Ford School. Admitted students will meet with our faculty, staff, students, and alumni and get a chance to tour the campus and the city of Ann Arbor. Admitted students will receive specific event details with the decision letters they receive from the school in March.

In 2007, the U.S. Army introduced its newest counterinsurgency weapon into Iraq and Afghanistan: civilian social scientists. As members of the Human Terrain System (HTS), the social scientists are embedded in combat brigades, where they provide commanders with research and advice. HTS has been controversial from the start; many social scientists attack it for melding academia and national security and for violating research ethics codes. In this talk, I historicize HTS within the broader context of the relationship between social science and national security policy since the 1950s. By examining the cases of the Special Operations Research Office and Project Camelot, I argue that HTS is simply the most recent example of the national security state's decades-old effort to use social knowledge to bureaucratically and technically manage complex problems of foreign and military policy.