In the Right: As an Undergrad, Rosen Protested the Protestors

Harvard was a political place in the 1970s, and there were few students who were as political as Stephen P. Rosen '74.

But Rosen, now Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs, wasn't the anti-establishment activist that most college students of the era were.

"I started out right-wing, and I stayed right-wing," he says.

Rosen remembers his undergraduate years as filled with contentious arguments with friends and heated political debates at almost every opportunity. While he originally planned to become a physics concentrator, Rosen was quickly drawn to Harvard's Department of Government.

As a member of the conservative groups Young Americans for Freedom and Students for a Just Peace, Rosen helped plan a pro-war teach-in in March 1971, to which the South Vietnamese ambassador was invited. The teach-in was disrupted when several hundred protesters filled the seats of Sanders Theatre, chanting and holding anti-war banners.

With the support of the groups, the University pressed charges against some of the demonstrators.

"We held that our freedom of speech had been violated," Rosen explains.

And that wasn't the only occasion when Rosen was unafraid to stand by his unpopular political views.

On another occasion, Rosen and several other students formed a human chain around the Center for International Affairs on Divinity Avenue to defend the center against students who were marching on the building to protest its involvement with the war.

"They didn't expect anyone to be there on a Saturday morning, but we were there in a ring around the building," Rosen says. "We just yelled at each other for a while and then went home."

"Thank God they didn't beat us up," he adds.

But defending his political stance was becoming routine for Rosen. When he moved off-campus to a "pretty grungy" house near Central Square his senior year, the most alarming part was not the leaky roof or the dead rat above the ceiling boards.

"We lived upstairs from a bunch of Hell's Angels, and I subscribed to the National Review," Rosen says. "When it was first delivered to the house, we heard them say 'Those fascists upstairs reading their fascist magazines, we're gonna go and stomp them.'"

Kenan Professor of Goverment Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, who has been both a teacher and a colleague of Rosen, commends Rosen's ability to stay away from the mainstream of political thought in his scholarly work.

"He is a man with controversial views who manages not to be controversial," Mansfield says. "He studies politics as it really is...in different countries as they oppose each other."

After graduating from the College in 1974, Rosen became a graduate student in government at Harvard. After five years, he earned his Ph.D. and stayed at Harvard for two years afterwards doing post-doctoral work. During this time, he also helped to organize a fellowship program for national security issues, which has become the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

In 1981, Rosen went to Washington to work on the staff of then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger '38, who is also a Crimson editor.

In 1984, Rosen began working at the National Security Council (NSC), contributing to strategic planning on U.S.-Iran relations. He left the NSC in the summer of 1985, shortly before congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra affair began.

"I'm glad I left when I did," Rosen says. "It was a place where people's careers were getting messed up simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time."

Rosen's career stayed on track though. He taught at the Naval War College until 1990, when he returned to Harvard and applied for a job as an associate professor.

"I knew I wanted to write books, and I wanted to do the kind of research that one needs to write books," Rosen says.

Since becoming a professor at Harvard, Rosen has written books on military technology as well as on the military establishments of nations including India and Turkey. Much of his work focuses on combining analyses of individual psychology and nations' social structures with conventional military theory.

Rosen also teaches several courses, including a Core class, Historical Studies A-12, "International Conflicts in the Modern World," and two government seminars: "War and Politics" and "Political Psychology and International Relations."

Rosen's courses consistently receive very high rating in Harvard's Courses of Undergraduate Instruction Guide. Students polled have praised the clarity and organization of his presentations, and have described his lectures as "enthralling."

Associate Professor of Government Andrew M. Moravcsik, who has taught Historical Studies A-12 with Rosen for the past four years, attributes his colleague's successful teaching methods to several factors.

Rosen exhibits an "exceptional clarity of thought...[and] a bold and incisive mode of expression. He really has an extraordinary grasp of historical detail in many areas," Moravcsik wrote in an e-mail message.

"By the time one teaches such a course, one has learned most of the basic arguments about world politics," Moravcsik added. "Steve regularly surprises me. I am never quite sure what he is going to say."

Wendy Franz, the head teaching fellow for Historical Studies A-12 this spring, also commends Rosen's teaching style, remembering a debate that Moravcsik and Rosen held in class on U.S. involvement in Kosovo.

"He is able to argue either side of a debate equally forcefully," Franz says. "In the Kosovo debate, you could never tell whether the view he was taking was actually his own."

According to Rosen, being a professor has allowed him to spend a lot of time with his wife, two sons, and a daughter who was born this spring.

"My family is the main source of satisfaction in my life," Rosen says. "I'm better at being a dad than anything else."