APPLETON, WIS. — Robert Suettinger, a former U.S. intelligence officer and a scholar on East Asia, will spend seven weeks of Spring Term as Lawrence University’s Stephen Edward Scarff Memorial Visiting Professor. He will be in residence in the government department from March 22 to April 19 and again from May 8-29.
A 1968 graduate of Lawrence, Suettinger will reunite with his former mentor, Professor Emeritus of Government Chong-do Hah, to team-teach the seminar “The United States and Rising Asian Powers.”
Suettinger, currently an analytic director with Centra Technology, Inc., an Arlington, Va., consulting firm that provides national security research and analysis, among other services, brings an extensive background in East Asian affairs and policy making to Lawrence.
He spent three years as director for Asian affairs for the National Security Council in the mid-1990s, where he dealt regularly with NSC advisers Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger and occasionally briefed President Clinton. He also twice served on the National Intelligence Council for East Asia, first as a deputy national intelligence officer (1987-94) and later as a national intelligence officer for East Asia (1997-98).
Suettinger began his career with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, spending 12 years with the agency as a researcher, senior analyst and branch chief in the China division of the Office of East Asian Analysis. He joined the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1987, where he spent two years as the director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific.
He has written extensively on U.S. and China foreign policy issues, including the 2003 book “Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.-China Relations, 1989-2000,” in which he argues that the Tiananmen Square “massacre” in June, 1989 produced an overnight shift of Chinese-American relations from “amity and strategic cooperation to hostility, distrust and misunderstanding.” He contends the bloody confrontation in Beijing continues to undermine cordial relations between the two countries yet today.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Suettinger earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in political science from Lawrence in 1968, undertook Chinese language study at Princeton University and Middlebury College and earned a master’s degree in comparative politics at Columbia University.
He joins a long list of distinguished scholars and notable public servants who have previously held the Scarff professorship, among them McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Karl Scheld, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., former chaplain at Yale University, noted civil rights advocate and peace activist, Takakazu Kuriyama, former Japanese ambassador to the U.S. and George Meyer, long-time secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The Scarff Memorial Visiting Professorship was established in 1989 by Edward and Nancy Scarff in memory of their son, Stephen, a member of the Lawrence class of 1975, who died in an automobile accident in 1984. It was designed to bring civic leaders and scholars to Lawrence to provide broad perspectives on the central issues of the day.
