The School of Comparative Jurisprudence and Diplomacy, 1898–1905

An expanding view of vocational objectives accounts for some of these name-changes. For example, the study of international affairs in the 1890s was deemed suitable principally for training future diplomats or international lawyers while by the 1920s those who taught the field intended, as well, to prepare students for careers in international business. At least one name-change resulted from a crisis in University finances and another from the faculty’s insistence on having a school of their own. But whatever the reason for re-naming the host institution, each incarnation was typically greeted with fanfare and optimism. So it was in the 1898.

Celebrities are easy to come by in the nation’s capital. Just as James Monroe and his cabinet turned out for GW’s first graduating class in 1824, William McKinley and much of his cabinet were on stage when President Benaiah Whitman proudly dedicated the new School of Comparative Jurisprudence and Diplomacy in November 1898. (Here for the sake of accuracy it might be noted that Monroe knew us as Columbian College; and McKinley, as Columbian University. We didn’t take the name of The George Washington University until 1904.)

The Jurisprudence-Diplomacy School got off to high-profile start in more ways than one. The 90-odd law graduates who signed up that fall undoubtedly looked forward to the unique opportunity to sit at the feet of two moonlighting justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and a former secretary of state. Career-conscious attorneys, after all, could hardly pass up the chance to say they had studied comparative constitutions under Justice John Harlan and taken international law from Justice David Brewer. And for those who hoped to hear how the international system really worked, John W. Foster would tell them of his days in Grover Cleveland's State Department and perhaps persuade them that arbitration treaties (all the rage at the time) held the key to world peace.

Despite its initial luster, the School gradually lost enrollments as these would-be attorneys began to harbor doubts about the vocational utility of ingesting large doses of comparative jurisprudence. Like profession-bound students in all eras, they had a discriminating sense of what they thought “relevant” to their education. Understandably perhaps, hearing too much about Hammurabi and his law-giving successors turned them off. As enrollments declined, President Charles Needham admitted as much. In November 1904, he told the Trustees that the School's law students had become disenchanted with the jurisprudence and diplomacy because they believed these studies were “not of advantage to men … in the ordinary practice of law.” Reluctantly, but with Trustee approval, Needham put the jurisprudence courses back in the GW law school and planted the banner of international affairs in a newly created School of Politics and Diplomacy.

Before leaving GW’s first experiment in I.A. programming, however, one should note how prophetically its origins spoke to its historical context. In 1898 the United States had just fought a war with Spain and, having acquired her overseas empire, would soon be thrust into the international politics of the Far East and the Caribbean as never before. In sum, the country had just taken the first step toward becoming a major world power. That the study of international affairs would flourish in lockstep with the spread of America’s global influence was perhaps only dimly seen in 1898, but it might also be noted that the University’s short-lived School of Comparative Jurisprudence and Diplomacy anticipated by more than twenty years the founding of Georgetown University's “oldest” School of Foreign Service.

The Jurisprudence School also prefigured the role of the major players in all subsequent I.A. programs. Besides enlisting the “big names” of Harlan, Brewer, and Foster, it established a permanent presence for the I.A. Big Three, i.e. those professors of history, economics, and political science whose academic disciplines today form the core of international studies. Here, then, were the historians, long accustomed to chronicling relations among the great powers now joined by the economists and political scientists whose analytical specialties would gradually add to a greater understanding of those relations. Starting with the particulars, one might note that the history of European diplomacy, taught today by the distinguished and much-published scholar, Howard M. Sachar, was first offered to students in Jurisprudence-Diplomacy School by a minor (one-book) historian named that David J. Hill1. The American side of diplomatic history—except for what Foster may have said about the Monroe Doctrine—would have to await the arrival of the late great Samuel Flagg Bemis, arguably the modern founder of this sub-field, who taught it at GW in the late 1920s. The economists in the first I.A. school were largely part-time faculty drawn from government offices. Their courses, however, approximated today's departmental offerings in money and banking and international economics. Political science at the time consisted meagerly of a course in “politics” taught by President Whitman himself. Not until 1919 would GW launch a course in international politics, an offering so central to today’s I.A. curriculum that one can scarcely imagine doing without it.

¹ In 1899 the University published Hill’s Course in European Diplomacy: Synopsis, a copy of which is in the Gelman Library’s Special Collections.

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