Back in the Duck of Minerva‘s heyday, Jon Western was one of its anchors. Indeed, it wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about his returning. Jon said that he’d gained important perspective on the state of higher education from his time as dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke. He wanted to share that with a broader audience.
That won’t happen. Jon died on Saturday. I don’t have the details. Just a forwarded email from Mount Holyoke. It reads:
Dear members of the Mount Holyoke community,
It is with the utmost sorrow that I write to say that, yesterday, Mount Holyoke lost an exceptional scholar, teacher and administrator. Our colleague, professor and friend, Jon Western, Carol Hoffmann Collins ’63 Professor of International Relations and Five College Professor of International Relations, died suddenly, leaving behind his wife Jenny and their two sons, Charley and Alex, to whom he was utterly devoted.
There are simply no words to describe how profoundly many of us will feel this loss. Jon’s talents, commitments and warmth had a profound impact on many of us, and on generations of colleagues, students and alums.
Jon joined Mount Holyoke in 2000, and served with distinction as dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs from 2016 to 2020. He was the author of “Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and co-editor of both “The International Community and State-building: Getting Its Act Together?” (Routledge, 2012) and “Global Giant: Is China Changing the Rules of the Game” (Palgrave, 2009). Jon was passionately at work on a biography of Dorothy Fosdick, titled “The Woman in the Room: Dorothy Fosdick and the Rise of American Power in the 20th Century.”
Jon earned his BA from Macalester College, and went on to earn an MPP from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Before joining Mount Holyoke, Jon was a Peace Scholar-in-residence and the coordinator of the Dayton Upgrade Project at the United States Institute of Peace. He also served as a Balkans analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. Department of State. He previously taught at Columbia University and George Washington University.
Recently, in a tribute to his commitments, scholarship and integrity, and with the help of six Mount Holyoke students, he uncovered that the prominent Christian conservative lawyer Michael P. Farris had played a key role in the lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General and others looking to overturn the 2020 election. The revelations made the national news.
Jon leaves a lasting legacy at Mount Holyoke and will be deeply missed as a cherished member of our community. More details regarding plans to honor Jon’s memory and accomplishments will be shared as soon as they are available. Counseling resources are available for any students and employees needing support at this time.
On behalf of the entire Mount Holyoke community, I extend our heartfelt condolences to Jenny, Charley and Alex, and to their wider family and many friends.
In shared grief and sorrow,
Sonya [Stephens, President of Mount Holyoke]
This does a surprisingly good job of describing Jon’s achievements and outlook.
Jack Snyder was on the email chain. I’m sharing, with his permission, his comments:
This is a terrible shock. Just a couple of weeks ago I had an email from Jon bearing condolences on Bob Jervis’s passing, and everything that Jon said about Bob’s virtues can and will be said about Jon as well. I can imagine how much Jon will be missed in the Five Colleges community. I recall what a wonderful sense I got about their IR community when I visited there a while back, and the role that Jon played as the glue for it.
Just two days ago I told one of my students that he absolutely had to read Jon’s book and marvelous IS article on the Somalia intervention. It always seemed fitting to me that Jon had written such an insightful book on political media spin on military interventions, since he was a master of that art himself. I remember just before Jon showed up at Columbia for the first day of his PhD program a firestorm of publicity broke out in all the major newspapers announcing that Jon, the desk officer for Bosnia, had resigned in protest against the immorally weak US policy there. He was good at analyzing brilliant tacticians because he was one himself.
A terrific guy in every way.
There’s not a lot to add, so I thought I’d share two anecdotes that have really stuck with me.
In 2011, the ISA annual convention was held in Montreal. Instead of traveling there directly, I flew to Burlington with my daughter so that she could visit her maternal grandparents (they live pretty close to the border on the New York side of Lake Champlain). I went the rest of the way by bus.
At the end of the conference, Jon offered to give me a ride back. I’m pretty sure it was out of his way, but he said he could use the company. He spent a good portion of the trip talking about his kids.
Maybe a year or two later, we invited Jon to our house for dinner. I can’t remember exactly when or why he was in DC. At almost exactly the time that I was supposed to drive Jon back to his hotel, my daughter – who would’ve been eight or nine years old – returned from gymnastics practice. She went to take a shower. We left.
We were barely down the street when my wife called me. My daughter was utterly distraught. She’d heard from us that Jon knew a lot about military interventions and civil wars. She wanted to ask him about Syria.
At Jon’s behest, we turned around and drove back to the house.
He did, indeed, answer – to the best of his ability – all of her questions. And didn’t get back to his hotel until much later than he planned.
That’s the kind of guy he was.
***
I’ll be creating an in memoriam page. If you have any memories, anecdotes, or thoughts that you want to share, you can post them below or send them to me. I’ll post them here and add them to the page.
I’ll be honest, this is just devastating. Jon wasn’t a very close friend of mine, but we had many memorable conversations and discussions over the years dating back to our time in the Columbia Ph.D. program. One of my enduring memories is an ISA conference after Jon was leading the team that had taken over a lot of the day-to-day operation of Duck, and he pointed out that I still owned one of the redirect domains for the site…and so I was owed a drink, and he proceeded to get me a glass of very nice whisky. A class act, Jon Western.
One particular conversation stands out in my mind, though, and I want to mention it here because it is not something we talk enough about in the profession, in my view. Back in 2016, when Jon applied of the position of Provost and Dean of Faculty at Mount Holyoke, he reached out to me to talk through the various issues that a leap into full-time admin work would raise. At that point I’d been Associate Dean for four years, and Director of General Education for six years before that, so had already joined the dark side and was busily baking cookies for new recruits. Looking back at the e-mail thread I see that it took us a couple of weeks to actually schedule a call, jammed in between travel and family commitments and work with students. but then we had a delightful, far-ranging conversation about the promises and perils of academic administration, including the increasing “professionalization” of Dean-level jobs and the creation of an accompanying admin career track.
What I came away from that conversation with was a firm belief that Jon’s approach to admin was the same as mine: this was less a career shift than an opportunity to do more of what we both dearly loved, which was teaching students and making more and better teaching of students possible. What excited Jon most about the admin gig he’d applied for was that it was a real opportunity to help the college and its faculty work through the challenges involved in maintaining a liberal arts education in an environment increasingly dominated by narrowly careerist notions of what college was for. So we talked about what was possible and what was practical, what good one might realistically do as an administrator, and how important it was not to lose touch with teaching and with students while doing admin — precisely the aspect of the academic vocation that the professionalization of Dean-level positions made the most difficult to sustain. So Jon wisely planned to keep up a very reduced teaching load, maybe a course a year, during his stint as Provost. The research, we agreed, could slumber and wake up again more easily than the teaching could.
Jon was a traveling-companion through the sometimes weird world of academia, and I will miss our engagements.
We have lost a great colleague and wonderful person. I was at State in 1993-94, working mostly on the Middle East but with enough involvement in the Bosnia issue to have a sense for how courageous and deeply moral Jon’s resignation was : https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/10/world/3d-us-aide-quits-over-bosnia.html We got to know each other pretty well in 1999 when we had neighboring offices at the US Institute of Peace, me as a faculty fellow and Jon as a pre-doc. I also was working then on preventive diplomacy/humanitarian intervention, and learned a great deal from our conversations and his work. In the years since it was great to see his career develop as it did, all aspects of it: his own scholarship, his leadership among conflict prevention scholars, his commitment to connecting academic and policy worlds, his dedication to teaching and his students, his university leadership. We didn’t see each other all that often, but when we did the conversations were rich and meaningful, some about key career decisions he was considering and all speaking to how core values lay drove so much of what he did. My heart goes out to his family. Please know how much we all will also miss him, and the great respect and affection in which he is held.
I had the pleasure of working with Jon ever since he came to The Valley. He led the 5 college IR program with a deft hand. We also jointly administered a Mellon funded research project which led to a jointly authored article. He was a delight to work with, and we always enjoyed gossiping and hashing out the editorial details at The Dirty Truth in Northampton.
Jon and I became friends back in graduate school in the 1990s and I am grateful that we sustained the connection over the years. The Jon I knew was an insightful analyst and scholar with deep convictions and also a very kind, down-to-earth guy. He had such a genuineness about him. In the flow of conversation, he could shift from intense discussions of abstract political questions, or events of the day, to delicate exchanges about personal matters without any drop-off in sincerity or attentiveness toward his counterpart.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when, in the early years, our acquaintance became something more substantial. But I do remember, vividly, that when I went to DC for an internship in the summer of 1996, Jon and Jenny welcomed me to town with a cookout at their place in Virginia, and sometime around then he also introduced me the joys of Red, Hot, and Blue BBQ, and the secret of his middle initial, which always makes me smile. Several years later, when I moved back to DC, Jon invited me to join him on one of those capitol hill softball teams (from Jenny’s congressional office I believe) that make summers in DC fun despite the brutal humidity. Although we rarely won games it didn’t matter much to me because our post-game rap sessions were always winners. Jon liked to talk and tell stories and—unlike many who do—he was good at it. Over the years, I’ve always looked forward to catching up with him at conferences and the like. He’d greet me from across the room with his raised eyebrow and half smile, and then we’d converge to resume the natural cadences of those post-game conversations.
Jon’s 2002 article, “Sources of Humanitarian Intervention,” in International Security is, in my view, the most penetrating and convincing account of the American decision to step into the Somalia conflict in 1992. Aside from the specifics of the case it grapples with, I’ve always been struck by how powerfully it illustrates a larger theoretical point—that foreign and security decisions can be taken primarily to serve indirect rather than direct goals. Jon was also an astute and eloquent critic. While we shared a common interest in humanitarian intervention, we disagreed about its virtues and that disagreement, in a funny way, deepened our connection. When Alan Kuperman and I were putting together a special issue of Ethnopolitics (and later edited volume) on moral hazard and intervention in civil war, we asked Jon for feedback. Boy, did we get it. It was clear that he thought the approach was badly flawed, in theory and about the facts. Fortunately, he agreed to contribute to the volume with a full-blown critique (aptly entitled “Illusions of Moral Hazard”), which I would encourage anyone interested in the topic to read closely. It is a model of civil, direct, intellectually rigorous, and empirically grounded criticism.
In our last correspondence in December, we figured out that with our overlapping conference schedules we would see each other at least twice in 2022 (and maybe more because, as he put it in his final words to me, “You know, we only live 90 minutes from each other.”) Alas, the early January conference we were expecting to meet at fell through, and then time for our conversations ran out. I’ll miss my friend Jon Wayne Western terribly. My heart goes out to Jenny, Charlie and Alex.