Retired Green Beret and Afghanistan Expert to Teach Politics at Howard University as Chamberlain Fellow
By Sholnn Z. Freeman
After 25 years as an elite Army soldier and a high-ranking White House official responsible for setting Afghanistan policies, retired Colonel Fernando Lujan is gearing up for his next major assignment, a year teaching politics at Howard University as a Chamberlain fellow and visiting professor.
The Chamberlain fellowship program gives recently retired military people opportunities on college campuses.
Lujan, a graduate of The U.S. Military Academy West Point, said he chose Howard University to ensure public affairs knowledge is dispersed to minority students. Lujan said the Chamberlain fellowship program gives him the opportunity to pass the lessons he’s learned to students. The program places a small number of officers at universities to engage with the student body for a year; the purpose is to improve dialogue between the military and higher education communities.
Lujan said he was attracted to Howard because of the work of Bernard Fall, one of the most famous chroniclers of the Vietnam War and a past Howard professor. Lujan said he had always been impressed by “Hell in A Very Small Place,” Fall’s account of the battle of Dien Bien Phu which brought an end to French rule in Vietnam.
Lujan, 46, grew up on the rougher end of west side San Antonio. His parents were Mexican immigrants. Inspired by GI Joe action figures and movies, Lujan was drawn to the idea of serving in the military. In high school, a junior ROTC instructor who was a Green Beret inspired Lujan to dream of also becoming a Green Beret. Hard work, ambition, and good luck earned him a spot at West Point.
“I was lucky enough to get in,” Lujan said. “That was my big shot – my winning, cosmic lottery ticket. I was offered the opportunity to go do something different, to go be in the Army in the special forces. All the people I ever knew were in San Antonio.”
Green Berets are an elite group within the United States Army Special Forces that receive specialized training and perform a wide range of missions in hostile settings around the world, including counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. As part of his training, Lujan learned Dari, a major language spoken in Afghanistan.
Lujan’s next military chapter came in Afghanistan during the Obama administration when U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice visited his base in Afghanistan. Rice, he said, was curious about how things were going. Lujan was the acting commander and gave her the briefings. While he couldn’t sense it during the visit, Rice was impressed. He was soon asked to come work in the Obama administration.
From 2014 to 2017, Lujan was director of Afghanistan, then senior director of South Asia on the National Security Council at the White House, where he led interagency setting U.S. policy and counterterrorism efforts. Lujan also spent three years in the U.S. State Department, as a member of the U.S. negotiating team seeking a political settlement in Afghanistan.
“I have had a very blessed career, running around doing operational stuff with the special forces,” Lujan said. “Then I was able to get a front-row seat to how policy gets made in the White House. I was able to distill a lot of lessons: the use of military forces, foreign policy, politics.”
In recent days, Lujan said been putting the final touches on the syllabus for his upcoming Howard course, which will be offered in the Department of Political Science. But he said what he’s most looking forward to is learning from Howard students.
“I want to understand how Howard students see the world, their hopes and fears, and new ways to imagine things,” Lujan said.
Bob Cassidy: From Colonel to College Professor
By Erin Husey, Assistant Features Editor, The Wesleyan Argus
Before finding himself at Wesleyan, Col. Robert Cassidy spent over 30 years in the military, serving in combat and contingencies in Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He held various positions including special assistant to senior commanders in Afghanistan, director of assessments for a special operations task force, battalion commander in Kuwait, and squadron executive officer in the 4th Infantry Division. In 2016, Cassidy became the first Retired Military Officer Teaching Fellow at Wesleyan. The Argus sat down with Cassidy to talk about his role on campus and his journey from the Middle East to Middletown.
The Argus: What is your role as a teaching fellow?
Bob Cassidy: My purpose is to bridge any real or perceived gaps in knowledge between the students and faculty here…. There hasn’t been a faculty member like me before…a retired military officer who had some academic credentials. [I’m part of] the Chamberlain Project, which is named after Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College…. He was a blend of academic at Bowdoin, which is a college not unlike Wesleyan, and a guy who served in the Civil War.
A: What are your academic interests? Are there any books that you think everyone should read?
BC: My interests are history, national security, international relations. My knowledge is the focus on strategy and policy in military history, and how countries managed to do policy and strategy in war. Unfortunately, war is not going away…. If you study the history of this country, the national security studies part of it and the strategy part of it, we haven’t acquitted ourselves. There are a lot of books in my course that I think people would benefit from reading. I designed the course to fulfill the purpose of the fellowship.
When I was writing my letter of interest, I said I thought it would interesting to expose students to relations between senior civilian leaders and senior military leaders, and how they interact…. [In my class], we start with the military relations piece of it, and the book I’d recommend is kind of dense. It’s Huntington’s “The Soldier and the State,” a seminal work of 1957 on how senior civilian leaders relate to senior military leaders…. There are a number of works on the Vietnam War that we use, like “Lessons in Disaster.” That’s readable; it’s 230 pages and really focuses on McGeorge Buddy, the national security advisor during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Then there’s a book called “War and Politics” by Bernard Brody, who was a seminal scholar in the area during the seventies, but his work is still relevant. We study how the outcome of the Vietnam War influenced civilian practitioners and military officers perceive why we failed in Vietnam.… That led to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which in a simplified form, states, “follow this set of principles if you go to war, and you’ll never do Vietnam again, you’ll never do Somalia, you’ll never do anything but a conventional war like the Persian Gulf War or like World War II.”
A: How does commanding troops compare to teaching students?
BC: Wow, that’s a good question. I think it’s similar, because it’s about leading, and it’s all about influence, and being positive, and animated, and being interested in how the students are doing. It’s the same thing with leading troops. You’re leading not by dictating, not by prescribing, but by influencing…. My last command I was in charge of a battalion that oversaw all the support and training the people in the central command: around 1100 people, seven generals, 43 colonels. So it wasn’t about confrontation, it was about influence and being positive. I think the classroom is like that. If you’re teaching in a way that gets the students excited, then you’re leading.
A: How do you think you contribute to the community as far as bringing a new and different perspective?
BC: First of all, I’m a little bit different than a host of my colleagues. I bring an insight from someone who served for a long time in the military but also studied. I’m candid, and I’ve already had some positive experiences speaking to the general student population. In the Olin Reading Room, we had about 70 students for a talk. I did this because you can only have so many people in one seminar per semester…so I make myself available to step into other people’s classrooms. I provide insights that are candid, and I’m confident that those discussions will bring new insights to all of us.
A: How have students reacted to your ideas? Do you think you’ve changed any minds, or have you found yourself met with opposition?
BC: I’ve had some good, hard questions in some of the forums, but they were factual, and I love a good counter-argument. I’m kind of a counter-argument to someone who may have a perspective that diverges from my perspective, and that’s good. We’re all talking together, and when I make an argument, it’s factual, but there may be some compelling counter-arguments. If there’s not a counter-argument, we have a problem. If we’re all thinking the same thing, then no one’s learning. That’s why I think the more diversity and heterogeneity you can bring to any set of faculty or population creates a more rewarding experience for everybody.