Jesuit Starts America’s First Foreign Service School

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, the first school in the United States for diplomatic training. The school’s founder was a young Jesuit recently appointed to the university, Father Edmund A. Walsh (1885-1956). A huge success from the start, the SFS had the first complete academic program geared toward foreign service. Before then, diplomacy was something learned on the job. But the SFS wasn’t intended merely to be a vocational school. Within the context of Jesuit education, it aimed to form leaders inculcated with a sense of moral responsibility, dedicated to influencing the growing field of international affairs for the better. Father Walsh’s rationale was that the world was becoming a much smaller place, and what happened in one part of it inevitably affected the rest. In a 1929 speech he said:

Peace on earth can be maintained… only if international relations rest on something more basic and permanent than… increased armaments [and] the predominance of force… International law based on purely utilitarian ethics, to the exclusion of natural and divine law, is a house built on the sands of delusion, destined to crumble under the storms of human passion.

Other such schools followed in rapid succession, and by 1930 there were about seventy in the United States. In 1958, the SFS was renamed in honor of Father Walsh. Its alumni include former President Bill Clinton, the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor, and King Abdullah of Jordan. Faculty have included former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former CIA Director George Tenet. If Georgetown has achieved international status, it’s due in large part to the school founded on a shoestring budget ninety years ago. If you’re interested in reading more about the school’s founding, check out the Walsh biography by a certain diocesan archivist.