September 27-October 4, 1999 | Volume 28, Number 6

Gus Ranis forging unions, exploring borders at YCIAS

Even before he was appointed director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS) in 1996, Gus Ranis brought a decidedly global perspective to his work.

The German-born economist — who as a boy immigrated with his family to the United States to escape the Third Reich — has spent his career studying the development of economies in regions throughout the world. He is highly regarded for his comparative studies and theoretical analyses.

Ranis, who is also the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics, was recently reappointed director of YCIAS. His establishment of a number of new programs at the center emphasizing interdisciplinary studies reflects his ardent support of research that crosses departmental boundaries.

A member of the first graduating class of Brandeis University — and the school's first valedictorian — Ranis received his B.A. in 1952. He earned a master's degree from Yale in 1953 and a Ph.D. from the University in 1956. He has spent all of his academic career at Yale.

Outside Yale, Ranis has held numerous administrative positions, including an appointment by Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. Department of State's Agency for International Development; he took a leave of absence to serve with the agency from 1965 to 1967. After returning to Yale, Ranis was tapped to direct the Economic Growth Center from 1967 to 1975 and 1992 to 1993, and the Yale–Pakistan Project from 1970 to 1971.

Located in Luce Hall at 34 Hillhouse Ave., the Yale Center for International and Area Studies serves as an umbrella for 17 councils, committees and special programs designed to foster interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding of international affairs through teaching, research and public service. Among these are councils focusing on major regions of the world outside the United States and associated programs examining specific themes, such as the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.

Following is edited text of a recent conversation with Ranis about YCIAS.

What are some of your major endeavors at YCIAS?

One of the major endeavors of the last year or two, and one that we will continue into the future, is to try to move area studies into new areas of activity. Instead of studying each region of the world for its own sake, we want to compare the responses in several regions to similar problems. So we're becoming more problem-oriented and more comparative than were traditional area studies programs, which were a product of the Cold War. During the Cold War, the emphasis was: Know your enemy; know what Japan is like, what Germany is like. We are now moving into a new way of looking at local knowledge. We want to compare local knowledge in different areas — how it relates to global knowledge — and think in terms of comparative regional analysis.

For instance, we now have seminars focusing on three dimensions: One is a comparative analysis of development and the environment, let's say in Africa and India. The second one is the question of migration, diasporas and the nation-state. People are migrating, and different societies have very different views on who their diasporas are and how they behave. The Chinese diaspora is viewed very differently from the European diaspora. We want to look at what has happened to the nation-state, which is being nibbled at on the one hand by global forces, and on the other hand by ethnic fragmentation. And a third dimension has to do with language and culture in a comparative setting — again, across different regions.

Several of your recent initiatives have made quite an impact outside academic circles.

Yes, one project we have at YCIAS is the study of Cambodian genocide through the Cambodian Genocide Program [which, since being established in 1994 by the U.S. Department of State has documented over 1.5 million killings by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 through interviews with survivors, ferreting out of original documents, and other methods]. That's coming to an end in the near future in terms of our contribution to the fact-finding analysis of what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime. We'll hopefully have a tribunal — to determine who did what to whom and how they should be punished.

But this activity has now led to a next step, which is to look at genocide in a comparative setting. Unfortunately, we have quite a few cases of genocide in the 20th century, and we hope to undertake a comparative study of genocide activity, which would include Rwanda, the Holocaust, Armenia and others. We would look at issues such as how you define genocidal activities, how you prevent them from happening in the first place, how you deal with them once they do happen, and how a society sanitizes itself after the event — so it's a rich and important area.

Another activity which has come to us recently is the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. It is going to — again in a comparative sense — look at the Atlantic slave trade which led to the transport of many millions of Africans to the Americas. To my surprise, I found out that, in that context, only five percent of those slaves came to the United States. Ninety-five percent went to the Caribbean and Brazil. Also, we're going to undertake a comparative study between the trade itself and internal trade in these three areas.

Has YCIAS been, or does it wish to become, an advocacy organization? For example, does the center create position papers on, say, the crisis in Kosovo, for formal presentation to an international body such as the United Nations?

No, not as a center. Individuals associated with the center may be consultants and give their opinions, but as a center we don't take a formal position on issues. We do sponsor policy roundtables on controversial issues, where people can find out what the views of our members are, along with those of invited outsiders — but the center doesn't take positions. YCIAS is an advocacy group only in the sense that we firmly believe in the internationalization of Yale, and we advocate that, within Yale.

How have you gone about doing that?

We've contributed ideas and proposals to the Yale Corporation, which had a retreat about two years ago on the internationalization of Yale. There also was an AYA [Association of Yale Alumni] meeting this past spring that focused on internationalization. And in a recent speech about Yale's upcoming fourth century, one of the things President Levin mentioned is the interconnectedness of Yale in facing an increasingly global environment. I should mention also that the President has agreed to establish an advisory committee on international activities. Moreover, a couple of years ago I set up something called the Consultative Group on International Activities at Yale, CGIAY — which includes the deans of Yale College, the Graduate School and the various professional schools — so we can talk about the international dimension of what goes on at Yale: How we can better work together; what concerns and opportunities we share in common; how we can handle our foreign visitors more effectively. I'm glad to see that one of the initiatives the administration has taken is to revamp the whole set-up for foreign scholars and students through the new Office of International Students and Scholars.

Speaking of students, one of your goals is to attract and maintain a high caliber of young scholars interested in international studies. What do you look for in your students?

Well, first of all, quality. International studies, for example, is not a free-standing major, it's a double major. That makes it harder, and you get higher-quality students. The majority of students seem to be majoring in economics and international studies. Political science and international studies represent the next largest pool. Then, we manage four free-standing majors: African studies, Latin American studies, East Asian studies, and Russian/East European studies. We also have a new major: Ethnicity, Race and Migration. It's now a couple of years old, still a relatively new program, but with a lot of interest. In addition, we manage a variety of programs at the M.A. level. The biggest one is the International Relations Program, which usually takes in about 30 master's degree students a year. This year we took in 50 students, since our matriculation rate exceeded historical ratios — a good sign.

Why do you think study across disciplines is so important?

I think the world is increasingly becoming inclusive. One of the things I'm very interested in is to push on the borders of the disciplines. Yale, like most universities, is strongly oriented to the individual departments. Those departments are usually focused on the core of what's going on inside each of their individual areas. But intellectual challenges and real-world activity are increasingly at the borders between departments or schools — for example, between political science and economics, or between law and environmental studies. Increasingly, I see as necessary an area of connectedness among the disciplines — most often among the social sciences, but also between arts and sciences and the professional schools — which needs to be cultivated. More and more students want joint degrees. It's not just to put things on the wall, have two degrees, but because of the demands out there, the problems out there, which are increasingly interdisciplinary as well as international.

I'm a development economist and in my own career I increasingly have come to realize that institutional issues matter, not just the pure economics. My own work has gone more to the borders just because development economics is more on the borders — it's more of an applied field rather than pure theory or a domestically oriented branch of economics. I've been gradually moving toward the realization that even though you have to have a firm base in a discipline, you also have to be willing and able to go out to those borders. Otherwise, there is the problem of the missing colleague, where you stop here and the other guy stops over there, and there's a gap that nobody goes into. It's a no-man's land. And that's a tragedy because that's where really important issues often are — the no-man's land between the disciplines.

You've recently eradicated one border at YCIAS — the one that separated the Council on Russian and East European Studies from the Council on West European Studies — by merging them into the newly established Council on European Studies. What was the rationale behind the change?

There is a realization in the academic world, among both teachers and researchers, of the importance of what happened in Europe 10 years ago, i.e.: the wall came down, so we're talking about Western Europe joining with Eastern Europe and many of the ex-Soviet Union countries. It is necessary to think in terms of the political, economic and security dimensions of a broader Europe. While I'm not particularly in favor of NATO expansion myself, NATO is expanding; the economic European Union is expanding. Many people, including myself, believe the European Union is more a political than an economic animal. But whatever your views on that, it's clear that we're talking increasingly about Europe — Euroland — rather than Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

What other changes are taking place at YCIAS?

We're initiating a lot of work on Central Asia, which holds a substantial amount of interest for us, both from the point of view of those countries' economies — they're very oil-rich nations — as well as their politics and the democratization of that region. We've started a series of workshops on Central Asia. The first one, on democratization, was held here this summer with about 25 participants from that area. Next summer I'll be involved in a second seminar in the region on the economic dimensions of Central Asia. And there'll be a third one, again back at Yale, the following year. We also have an exchange program with that part of the world. So, that's another area of growth for us.

I notice that much of your own recent work seems to focus quite heavily on Asia.

South Asian studies have been a point of growth and interest for me as well as for YCIAS. We now have a Committee on South Asian Studies. I should mention here that what we call a committee is a council in development. A council has stronger faculty support than a committee, which is an early-stage council. My hope is that we'll convert — graduate, I should say — the Committee on South Asian Studies into a council. We've already taken one step, which is getting Hindi language accepted in Yale College. It's not yet a language that can fulfill the foreign language requirement — it's an elective right now — but it has been very successful this past year, and I hope to build it up to the point where it fulfills one of the language requirement possibilities at Yale. We also have a Canadian Committee, which at the moment is mainly focused on visiting faculty from Canada. But again, that's something which, if we get the financial support, I hope to build up.

You're also introducing a couple of new programs this fall.

Yes, we're very pleased that through the support of some Yale alumni, we are starting a Program on International Political Economy, which is focused in part on political science and economics. This will give us a chance to move in a direction to build more bridges among the social sciences. It's something I've been working on over the last three years. I started it as a workshop when I first came in, independent of any department. It is now well imbedded in the political science department, with some rumblings as well in economics. We're also starting a Program on European Union Studies. We have a visitor from the European Union here this year and expect to make this program a major growth activity. We also hope to apply to house one of the European Union centers that the European Union is establishing in the United States.

You also have an outreach program at YCIAS.

Yes, we're very happy with that. It's a program that works with high school teachers in Connecticut, particularly those in New Haven. The point is to spread the word to school systems about the rest of the world so we have some ability to affect what Main Street America thinks, not just what Yale students think. This has been going on for some years, and I think it's a very successful program. We also work closely with the East Rock Magnet School. We have summer institutes, and I'm happy to say that we've received high praise from these high school teachers for what we're doing.

You've just been reappointed director of YCIAS, a post you first assumed in 1996. Have most of the goals you set for the center three years ago been met to your satisfaction?

Well, you never get everything you want. The human condition is that you always fall short. But I'm satisfied. I think we've made a lot of progress, and our team has worked hard to make it happen. Of course, the fact that we have inherited this new building [Luce Hall] has made a big difference. It's a beautiful facility, and it attracts attention. It attracts faculty; it attracts students. The administration has, in general, been supportive. So, while I wouldn't say that everything I wanted to do has been accomplished, I'm quite satisfied — otherwise, I wouldn't have signed up again.

— By Felicia Hunter