Members of the Brown Corporation weren’t the only leaders who wholeheartedly backed Brown’s plan: The institute’s inauguration drew former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former Sen. J. William Fulbright, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost. More than 5,000 people in the Brown and Providence communities turned out to hear those leaders engage with Brown scholars on topics spanning arms control, South African apartheid and world hunger. Cheers erupted when Carter argued for “rigid and punitive sanctions on the government of South Africa” and called on “great universities like Brown… to uphold the moral standards of our nation.”

1991: Celebrating the institute’s fulcrum

From its earliest days, the study of international and public affairs at Brown had one crucial proponent: Thomas J. Watson Jr.

A graduate of Brown’s Class of 1937 and former IBM president, Watson was serving as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union when Swearer first convened the Council for International Studies. When he got word of the plan, Watson invited the Brown president to Moscow to discuss the creation of a “think tank” where scholars and practitioners could work together on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Soviet relations. As the council expanded into a center, Watson became president of its board of directors. The proud alumnus’ sustained and generous financial support, combined with that of other backers, enabled the center to thrive. 

In 1991, Brown President Vartan Gregorian rededicated the Institute for International Studies in the name of Thomas J. Watson Jr. The official keynote during the Watson Institute dedication came from former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze: “I hope everyone understands what an extraordinary man you are,” Shevardnadze said to Watson from a podium on the College Green with 9,000 looking on. “[You saw that] even the most brutal kind of terror couldn’t throttle the will of the people, that night was not eternal…”

1997: A raw reckoning

Could the Vietnam War have ended sooner? Could it have been sidestepped altogether? Maybe so, concluded a group of U.S. and Vietnamese leaders at a no-holds-barred conference convened by the Watson Institute, held more than two decades after the controversial conflict ended.

The so-called Missed Opportunities conference was, one New York Times reporter wrote, “one of the more unusual efforts in the history of warfare.” For the first time since the Vietnam War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came face to face with former North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, along with a group of Vietnamese and American officials, diplomats, generals and scholars, for a four-day dissection of both countries’ viewpoints at the time and key junctures in the war. The event, McNamara said, underlined how a misperception of Vietnamese culture and history had driven much of his decision-making.

“More than 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war, and the United States lost 58,000,” McNamara said. “I believe each nation could have achieved its geopolitical objectives without that terrible loss of life. There were, I believe, missed opportunities during the years 1961 to 1968 for either avoiding the war before it started or for terminating it before it had run its course.”

2011: Calculating the costs of war 

Warfare always comes at a price — but it’s more than just money and lives. Thanks to scholars at the Costs of War project, the world now knows exactly how much collateral damage war can bring to environments, economies and societies, even generations later.

Founded in 2011 at the Watson Institute, Costs of War first aimed to quantify the toll of America’s conflicts in the Middle East. Its inaugural report, authored by Brown Professor of International Studies and Anthropology Catherine Lutz and Class of 1985 graduate Neta Crawford, estimated that the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan had cost a staggering 225,000 lives and up to $4 trillion in U.S. spending. Costs of War research has since earned massive national and international media attention and has catalyzed conversations in Congress about financial, social and political costs of military spending on wars.

2014: Investing in public affairs

With the world becoming increasingly globalized, driven in part by the ubiquity of the internet and the rise of social media, the University set out to merge the Watson Institute for International Studies with the Alfred A. Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions, which was founded in 1984. In Fall 2014, the Taubman Center became a semi-autonomous entity within the renamed Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

“Integrating Watson and Taubman more closely recognizes that in today’s globally interconnected world, the boundaries between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ policy are blurred,” said Richard M. Locke, then-director of the Watson Institute. “The major challenges facing society — and the possible solutions to these challenges — do not stop at geographic borders. In fact, the very best policy-focused research is comparative in nature.”

As Brown worked to integrate national and foreign policy scholarship, it also sought to break down future policymakers’ barriers to completing a graduate degree. Moving away from the traditional two-year model, Brown launched a one-year master of public affairs degree, offering students three action-packed semesters of courses, workshops, real-world experience and immersion programs. It remains the only one-year residential MPA program in the Ivy League.

2018: An expanding footprint

The Watson Institute’s home on Thayer Street had become crowded. With 10 centers and initiatives, dozens of public events happening every semester and growing student interest in its undergraduate and master’s degree programs, the institute needed to expand. So it did: to the newly built Stephen Robert ’62 Hall next door.

Purpose-built for the institute — and enabled by a consortium of long-time Watson Institute supporters — the airy, glass-paneled building soon became a favorite study spot, a hub for discussions with the likes of author Salman Rushdie and musician Questlove, and a home for engaging student seminars with household-name policymakers such as former Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez. For many, the highlight of the building was its two-story open “agora,” where Brown and Providence community members mingle, study and attend a wide range of events.

“There’s so much change embodied in this phenomenally open and artistically beautiful space,” former Watson Institute director Edward Steinfeld said at the building’s dedication. “But in a very fundamental way, something hasn’t changed, and that’s our commitment to the vision that Howard Swearer and Tom Watson laid out almost 40 years ago. To put it differently, we remain absolutely committed to the realization of a more peaceful and just world. We remain absolutely committed not just to the idea, but the reality of the university as a center for global knowledge and learning. And we remain absolutely committed to the idea of service.”