| WEB NEWS | Thursday, June 14, 2007
SIS recalls ’57 groundbreaking

BY SALLY ACHARYA

On June 9, 1957, the president of the United States stood on the AU quad, where nothing but grass marked the spot of what is now the largest school of international service in the country.

“The waging of peace demands the best we have,” Dwight Eisenhower told the Cold War crowd, “the best young men and women that we can find to put in this great effort which must go on around the world all the time.”

Then he thrust his shovel into the ground where AU’s School of International Service (SIS) would rise.

Fifty years later, the school marked the occasion with a ceremony that recalled the past and anticipated another groundbreaking in the near future. Ground is expected to be broken for the new SIS building this fall.

Members of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission, faculty, and administrators were at the commemoration and reception, along with a number of alumni, including a member of the class of ’57 and a number of 1967 graduates of SIS who recalled the school’s intimate early years.

“We were very tight knit,” said John Litchfield, SIS/BA ’67. “We literally knew all the faculty, and they knew us.” The entire class of around 80 fit into the SIS Lounge, which then as now was a place for forums, speeches, and events. Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie talked with students there; so did the foreign minister of the Soviet Union.

Litchfield, of Massachusetts, gestured toward the Davenport Lounge, the coffeehouse that has been a place for passionate conversation and casual gatherings for several decades. “It really doesn’t look all that familiar,” he confessed.

It wouldn’t. In his time, it was a chapel. Litchfield recalled the regular religious services, led by the school’s founding dean, Ernest Griffith, where students of all faiths would gather.

One of his fellow students was Carla Seaquest, SIS/BA ’67, who flew in from Washington state for her 40th reunion and reminisced about the SIS of the mid-60s at the commemoration of the building’s groundbreaking. “It really expanded my horizons,” said Seaquest, who had never traveled overseas before coming to SIS.

She is now a playwright, freelance writer with political op-eds in the Christian Science Monitor, and the winner of the National Organization for Women’s Susan B. Anthony Award for courage and hard work on behalf of women and minorities.

Chatting with her near the SIS steps was Sylvia von Bostel, SIS/BA ’68, whose trip from Hawaii to Washington, D.C., to attend the new school was her first flight on an airplane. Their experience was quite different from today’s globe-trotting students, many of whom bring considerable international experience to their studies.

Even at the time, though, SIS drew students such as Henry Fossung, SIS/MA ’68, who was a diplomat from the newly independent nation of Cameroon when he attended AU. “Some of those things we discussed in our classes became tools to apply in my work,” he said.

Fossung later served as Cameroon’s chargé d’affaires to the Soviet Union, ambassador to Guinea, Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Central African Republican, and at the United Nations. He has recently been prominent as a political dissident.

The alumni at the ceremony also greeted their former professor: Abdul Aziz-Said, who remembered each of them. Said spoke at the ceremony along with Dean Louis Goodman, Interim Provost Ivy Broder, and retired Big. Gen. Carl Reddel, executive director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission.

SIS had its genesis in a suggestion by Eisenhower at a White House dinner that a school of international service be founded that would focus not on conflict but on peace.

“I can imagine how special it would be to Eisenhower to see the memorialization of his legacy in SIS,” Reddel told the crowd at the commemoration. Reddel and Susan Harris, WCL/JD ’79, of the Eisenhower Commission represented the family of the late president.

To Eisenhower, Reddel pointed out, “international service and peace had become inseparable.”

One of the alumni in the audience felt those words keenly. George Divine, SIS/MA ’57, had earned his graduate degree in international relations from AU’s downtown campus while serving in Eisenhower’s White House. A veteran of World War II campaigns in North Africa and Italy, the retired international economist recalled the horror of the battlefields and the need for those who go into international service and policy to understand how crucial it is to promote peace.

Eisenhower would have agreed—which is why, in 1957, he came to AU to break ground for the school he inspired.