Professor Kenneth A. Oye, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, was appointed director of the Center for International Studies (CIS) on July 1, succeeding Professor Myron Weiner, who had served as director since 1987. The appointment was announced by Dean Philip S. Khoury of the School of Humanities and Social Science.
Professor Oye is a specialist on international political economy and American foreign policy. His major study of international economic cooperation and conflict during the great depression and in the eighties, Economic Discrimination and Political Exchange, was published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. The book challenges conventional wisdom about the role that bilateral bargaining and diplomacy played in the evolution of the crisis of the thirties.
Dr. Oye may, however, be best known by students and senior scholars alike for the Eagles series: four volumes on American foreign policy which he has edited and which track US policy from the end of the seventies, Eagle Entangled, through the Reagan era, Eagle Defiant and Eagle Resurgent, and most recently in the years after the end of the Cold War, Eagle in a New World.
Professor Oye came to the Department of Political Science in 1990 as a tenured associate professor after positions in the political science departments of Swarthmore College and Princeton University. He has a BA degree from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Harvard University. At MIT Professor Oye serves as housemaster at East Campus, together with his wife, Willa Michener. He also played a major role in planning and carrying out the recent survey on sexual and racial harassment at MIT and has been active in organizing discussions of the findings on campus.
According to Dean Khoury, "Ken Oye has assumed the leadership of CIS on its 40th anniversary. He is the kind of scholar-administrator with the vision to lead CIS out of the Cold War era in which it was born and into new, exciting areas of research that cut across the disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences and humanities."
A version of this article appeared in the October 7, 1992 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 37, Number 9).
