Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Newsletter
-Spotlight: Albert Carnesale
Albert Carnesale is a member of the founding staff of the Belfer Center and serves on the Center’s Board of Directors and International Council. He is chancellor emeritus and professor of public policy and of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). There, he researches and teaches courses on public policy issues with substantial scientific and technological dimensions.
“There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell you’ll become a tenured professor.”
This blunt warning was issued to Albert Carnesale, a young professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University, as he considered an offer to join Harvard’s Program for Science and International Affairs – the predecessor of the Belfer Center. For most academics, this would have been sufficient reason to pass up the opportunity. Instead, however, it marked the beginning of a journey that includes some of the highest peaks of university and public service: Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration. Dean of Harvard Kennedy School. Harvard University Provost. Acting President of Harvard. Chancellor of UCLA. Author or co-author of six books and more than 100 articles. Chair and member of numerous blue-ribbon government commissions.
With a Harvard affiliation spanning five decades, Carnesale has personally mentored some of the Center’s most famous alumni. He hired a young physicist named Ashton Carter, current secretary of defense, and he supervised the senior thesis of Daniel Poneman, former deputy secretary of energy. Like his mentor, Center founder Paul Doty, Carnesale brings a rare mix of deep technical knowledge and an abiding interest in public policy. In short, he’s an exemplar of the Center’s unique commitment to science and international affairs. Reflecting on a storied career and the Center he still visits frequently from his home in Los Angeles, Carnesale identified several key lessons.
“Do what you enjoy.”
Carnesale’s career tracked steeply upward not because of naked ambition but because of hard work and unpretentious communication. Case in point: He won a coveted slot on the team working on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I) because a memo he wrote explained in plain English why a program favored by senior officials was mathematically impossible. His boss’s boss saw it and brought Carnesale on board. “But I don’t know anything about weapons or the Soviets,” he protested. “Don’t worry: I read your memo,” said the official. “You’ll learn.” The story shaped Carnesale’s conviction that most opportunities arise because “you’re doing what you really enjoy—and are doing it well.”
“Doing is learning.”
The government task forces Carnesale has served on in recent years range from climate change and nuclear waste to NASA’s strategic direction. Even a polymath like Carnesale is not an expert in all three, so he credits his long experience teaching public policy at Harvard Kennedy School with equipping him to ask the right questions. HKS excels because it teaches students how to think about policy challenges deeply and effectively, he says. One takeaway from his government service: task forces are most effective when client and audience coincide. Government agencies, he says, get defensive about findings from blue-ribbon panels set up by Congress.
“Excellence is expensive.”
Carnesale points out that a person drinking water from a muddy pond could remove most impurities with a 10-cent coffee filter. But removing harmful trace minerals and microbes to a level at which they become undetectable is very expensive. So it is with organizations, he says. Doing B+ work is relatively easy. Doing world-class work—and doing it consistently year after year—requires extraordinary resources. In an era of proliferating think tanks, when media pressures can mean dumbing down research to mere punditry, Carnesale is grateful for the Center’s no-shortcuts approach to scholarship, and for the devotion of donors who make it possible.
Taking stock of progress on the mission of his life’s work—to reduce nuclear danger—Carnesale notes that while the risk today of nuclear terrorism is real, it simply does not compare to the existential threat of nuclear war during the Cold War. From “Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War,” a volume he co-authored in 1985 with Graham Allison and Joseph Nye, to the scholarship that drove the Nunn-Lugar Act and the Center’s deep role in the global nuclear security summits, Carnesale is proud of his and the Center’s vital work to confront this singular challenge. “You may not be able to make things perfect, but you can make them better.” And the Center, he says, has unquestionably made the world more secure.
For more information on this publication:
Belfer Communications Office
For Academic Citation:
Burek, Josh. “Spotlight: Albert Carnesale.” Belfer Center Newsletter (Summer 2016).
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Albert Carnesale is a member of the founding staff of the Belfer Center and serves on the Center’s Board of Directors and International Council. He is chancellor emeritus and professor of public policy and of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). There, he researches and teaches courses on public policy issues with substantial scientific and technological dimensions.
“There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell you’ll become a tenured professor.”
This blunt warning was issued to Albert Carnesale, a young professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University, as he considered an offer to join Harvard’s Program for Science and International Affairs – the predecessor of the Belfer Center. For most academics, this would have been sufficient reason to pass up the opportunity. Instead, however, it marked the beginning of a journey that includes some of the highest peaks of university and public service: Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration. Dean of Harvard Kennedy School. Harvard University Provost. Acting President of Harvard. Chancellor of UCLA. Author or co-author of six books and more than 100 articles. Chair and member of numerous blue-ribbon government commissions.
With a Harvard affiliation spanning five decades, Carnesale has personally mentored some of the Center’s most famous alumni. He hired a young physicist named Ashton Carter, current secretary of defense, and he supervised the senior thesis of Daniel Poneman, former deputy secretary of energy. Like his mentor, Center founder Paul Doty, Carnesale brings a rare mix of deep technical knowledge and an abiding interest in public policy. In short, he’s an exemplar of the Center’s unique commitment to science and international affairs. Reflecting on a storied career and the Center he still visits frequently from his home in Los Angeles, Carnesale identified several key lessons.
“Do what you enjoy.”
Carnesale’s career tracked steeply upward not because of naked ambition but because of hard work and unpretentious communication. Case in point: He won a coveted slot on the team working on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I) because a memo he wrote explained in plain English why a program favored by senior officials was mathematically impossible. His boss’s boss saw it and brought Carnesale on board. “But I don’t know anything about weapons or the Soviets,” he protested. “Don’t worry: I read your memo,” said the official. “You’ll learn.” The story shaped Carnesale’s conviction that most opportunities arise because “you’re doing what you really enjoy—and are doing it well.”
“Doing is learning.”
The government task forces Carnesale has served on in recent years range from climate change and nuclear waste to NASA’s strategic direction. Even a polymath like Carnesale is not an expert in all three, so he credits his long experience teaching public policy at Harvard Kennedy School with equipping him to ask the right questions. HKS excels because it teaches students how to think about policy challenges deeply and effectively, he says. One takeaway from his government service: task forces are most effective when client and audience coincide. Government agencies, he says, get defensive about findings from blue-ribbon panels set up by Congress.
“Excellence is expensive.”
Carnesale points out that a person drinking water from a muddy pond could remove most impurities with a 10-cent coffee filter. But removing harmful trace minerals and microbes to a level at which they become undetectable is very expensive. So it is with organizations, he says. Doing B+ work is relatively easy. Doing world-class work—and doing it consistently year after year—requires extraordinary resources. In an era of proliferating think tanks, when media pressures can mean dumbing down research to mere punditry, Carnesale is grateful for the Center’s no-shortcuts approach to scholarship, and for the devotion of donors who make it possible.
Taking stock of progress on the mission of his life’s work—to reduce nuclear danger—Carnesale notes that while the risk today of nuclear terrorism is real, it simply does not compare to the existential threat of nuclear war during the Cold War. From “Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War,” a volume he co-authored in 1985 with Graham Allison and Joseph Nye, to the scholarship that drove the Nunn-Lugar Act and the Center’s deep role in the global nuclear security summits, Carnesale is proud of his and the Center’s vital work to confront this singular challenge. “You may not be able to make things perfect, but you can make them better.” And the Center, he says, has unquestionably made the world more secure.
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