Slaughter ’80 returns to Wilson School

Slaughter will return to a professorship at the Wilson School and with the politics department, and she remains the Bert G. Kerster ’66 University professor of politics and international affairs. She will also stay with the State Department as a consultant.

“Slaughter approaches her work with great enthusiasm and dedication and, as her work at the State Department illustrates, she is firmly committed to the mission of the Woodrow Wilson School,” current Wilson School dean Christina Paxson said in an e-mail. “As dean, she showed great leadership in revitalizing the school’s capacity in international relations.”

At the State Department, Slaughter directed the first “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review” in 2009, a comprehensive study that laid the foundation for major reforms at both the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development with the goal of elevating development as a pillar of American foreign policy.

Slaughter’s course this spring, WWS 480: National Security Policy, will focus on that review.

“I had a superb policy planning staff of between 35 and 40 people,” she said in an e-mail. “Together we had input on virtually every foreign policy issue that crosses the secretary’s desk.”

In addition, Slaughter said, her time at the State Department allowed her to develop and promote five major ideas: elevating development; the empowerment of women and girls; Internet freedom; using 21st century technologies to communicate and contribute to solving national and global problems; and public-private partnerships and larger collaborative networks.

“I leave the State Department with a sense of deep accomplishment,” she said. “I learned an enormous amount about how government works and about how to get things done in a bureaucracy.”

Slaughter is one of three returning faculty members who will rejoin the Wilson School after public service leaves. Professor Alan Krueger returned in November after serving as the U.S. Treasury Department’s chief economist, and Professor Alex Mas is returning after serving as the chief economist at the Department of Labor.

“I’m excited about the wealth of experience these faculty members will bring back to Princeton and expect that their public service leaves will enrich their teaching and research,” Paxson said.

Slaughter, however, said she was most excited to have the chance to return to a normal life after two years of commuting between Washington and Princeton.

“Ordinary things like making breakfast for my sons seem quite wonderful at the moment,” she explained.

After graduating from Princeton, Slaughter earned a master’s degree in international affairs at Oxford before graduating from Harvard Law School in 1985. She then completed a doctorate in international relations at Oxford in 1992.