Back from Afghanistan

“It’s time,” he said in an interview in Robertson Hall last Wednesday, two days before he officially left the Pentagon job, which involved direct coverage of Afghanistan.

Shinn spent the last five years in Washington. President Bush nominated Shinn to the assistant secretary of defense position, which was created by Congress in 2006. Before joining the Department of Defense, he was the national intelligence officer for East Asia at the CIA and a visiting professor at Georgetown.

Shinn traveled to Afghanistan regularly for his defense job. He said his experiences there have been gripping.

The circumstances there are “tragic, and the roots go so far back … you’ve got these … simultaneous wars that have been fought there, some of which are still going on,” he said.

He added that Afghanistan is still “so beautiful, the Afghans are so impressive in their own way ... They’ve been through a lot.”

Ambassador Robert Hutchings, diplomat-in-residence at the Wilson School, said in an e-mail that Shinn’s return is advantageous for the University.

“Now Princeton can take advantage not only of his experiences as senior policy maker these past five years, but also — and more importantly, in my view — of his exceptional mind and unique perspectives as a scholar and analyst of public policy,” Hutchings said.

Shinn earned his AB from the University in 1973 and his Ph.D. from the Wilson School in 2001. His professors say he was an excellent student during both periods of his Princeton education.

After his undergraduate graduation, Shinn went to Washington to work for the State Department, focusing on East Asian and Pacific affairs. He left after a few years to get his MBA from Harvard Business School, graduating in 1981. He then spent 15 years working with high-tech firms but left before the dot-com bubble burst.

He returned to academic life, concentrating on international relations, a field that had fascinated him since his undergraduate years. He was a senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and returned to Princeton to get his Ph.D. from the Wilson School and learn Japanese. He taught at the University briefly before moving to Washington as an expert on East Asia for the CIA.

Hutchings, who met Shinn when Shinn was a Ph.D. student at the Wilson School, said Shinn was no ordinary government bureaucrat.

“I was enormously impressed that someone could be both a gifted scholar and a hugely successful entrepreneur,” Hutchings said. “This rare combination enabled him to come at policy problems from the combined perspectives of a businessman, engineer and public policy scholar.”

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As he is about to start a third term at Princeton, Shinn is both enthusiastic and nostalgic.

“I’m really looking forward to coming back,” he said. “I like teaching, and Princeton’s really quite a magnificent institution for which I have a lot of gratitude and even more affection.”

Next semester Shinn will be teaching EGR 492: Technical Innovation and Foreign Policy, a class about the relation between technological advancement in the private sector and international disputes.

Shinn’s new course is similar to the one he is currently teaching to Wilson School graduate students this as a visiting lecturer.

In comparison to the course he is teaching now, Shinn said EGR 492 is “more public policy, some engineering and technical stuff … IT [information technology] and life sciences … but involves foreign policy and its real life cases.”

One of Shinn’s current students, Ed Shin GS, said that he enjoys the interactive features of Shinn’s course.

“Instead of [listening to] lecturing, we sort of extract lessons and key points ourselves,” he said. “[We] not only learn the material but … analytical tools as well.”