"Originally, the Center was conceived of as a place to bring faculty in from different departments," says Bowie. "Every member of the Center is active in teaching." The Center, he adds, has "actively contributed" to the quality of teaching at the University because the faculty wears two huts.
Likewise, the interaction between the academics and the Fellows and the Center is considered of prime importance as that interaction and exchange "tends to reflect a more valid theory on the part of the theoreticians and better practice on the practitioners' part," Brown says.
"We've found that in an academic setting they can explore each others minds with fewer inhibitions than if they meet each other in diplomatic roles. Here they're free agents," he adds. "The Center contributes to broaden them personally." Just being in the University community, in fact, can have that effect; In the late 1960's and early '70s, Brown says, the Fellows took a keen interest in the student marches and protests, and some of them actually joined them.
"I think those experiences had a profound effect on the thinking of some of them on the Vietnam War, and made them question it," he adds.
Along with the structural growth, the CFIA had expanded the amount and range of its research between 1980 and 1982, income from research grants jumped almost fourfold--aided by a new endowed chair in international economics, a gift from the Frank Boas Foundation. Research expenditures grew by 171 percent. And all of the Center's approximately $2 million in this year's budget is--and always has been--independent of the University.
Individual research by Fellows at the Center has continued to be extensive. A Fellow in 1980, former Secretary General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry Mordechai Gazit, published his analysis of U.S.-Israeli relations in the Partisan Review. Current projects include John G. Keliher's analysis of ground force weapons and arms control in Central Europe, and an examination by Korean journalist Don-Shik Choo of relations between North and South Korea and the U.S.
The number of Faculty affiliated with the Center has also increased from four in 1958 to 10 in 1978, and then to a high of 34 in 1982. Since 1978, the number of research scholars has grown from 29 to 56. Only the Fellows Program is being held at a level of 20 Fellows, as well as four Associate Fellows who, for various reasons, cannot commit themselves to a whole year.
Critics of the center say that this numerical expansion has cast the Center the cohesiveness it once had. But Huntington stresses that there is still an emphasis on interaction and that the expansion has added a welcome breadth to the research carried out. The increased size has, however, brought some logistical problems: more than 35 percent of the staff has already overflowed from the offices in Coolidge Hall, which the Center has occupied since 1979, into "annexes" on Kirkland Street.
Though change and expansion have brought "a different, more complicated sense of mission," Huntington says, the essential focus of the center is still research. Brown agrees "The issues have become more complex," he says. "and while that involves some puzzlement. It makes it very exciting."