SMU names Seyom Brown to John G. Tower Distinguished Chair

by John P. Meyer

Not sure exactly what the chair itself looks like, but the fellow who will soon be sitting in it sure carries around a lot of titles.

Not only will Seyom Brown (kind of piling on to call him Dr. Brown, when you consider the immense stockpile of current and former titles he brings with him to Dallas) assume the position of John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security at the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences when he joins the SMU faculty this August; he will also be serving as a political science professor and as Director of Studies in the John G. Tower Center for Political Studies. (Sounds like a studious sort of outfit, for sure.)

Now, it occurs to me that one of the reasons Dr. Brown looks so whacked out in this photo is because he's got all these dang titles attached to his name. And when you add in his current experience, it gets even worse: he's presently employed as the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University, while at the same time serving as senior fellow in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; and to top it all off he's a senior adviser in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

HOLY MULTIPLE RESPONSIBILITIES, Batman! Hopefully Dr. Brown is secretly twins, and his brother surreptitiously shows up at Harvard or Brandeis while he's at one of the numerous other places - or maybe at the (medical) doctor's office refilling his high-power ginkgo biloba prescription, which he needs just in order to tell people on the street what he does for a living.

But wait - there's more: in the past, Brown has served in policy analysis roles at the RAND Corp. and the Brookings Institution; he was a special assistant in the Office of International Security Affairs of the U.S. Department of Defense; he was director of the U.S.-Soviet Relations Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and he's been acting director of the University Consortium for Research on North America in Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.

As Dennis Ippolito (who only has one title to worry about: chair of political science at Dedman College) relates - "Dr. Brown is a preeminent scholar in national security policy and one of a handful of individuals over the past four or five decades who has become enormously influential in this area.” Not only that, "he has moved easily between the worlds of academia and government and has occupied very senior positions in each." Often simultaneously, it appears.

I'm just hoping the Tower Chair Brown will soon be occupying is one comfortable mo-fo - this guy needs all the relaxation he can get.