Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy graduate Dr. Stephen Flynn (F '90, '91) became the sixth president of the Center for National Policy (CNP) in January.
CNP is a small, independent think tank based in Washington D.C. that has been a mainstay in public policy for nearly 30 years. Previous presidents of CNP include former congressman Tim Roemer and Madeline Albright, the former United Nations ambassador and former Secretary of State under the Clinton administration.
In a recent press release, Albright called Flynn "a gifted leader, who will expertly carry out the organization's mission."
Nathaniel Eberle, director of public relations at The Fletcher School, noted Flynn's extensive experience in the field of national security.
"Dr. Flynn has a celebrated career of helping make this country a safer place, and that is quite admirable," he said.
Flynn graduated from The Fletcher School, where he received a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 1990 and a Ph.D in 1991. His experience at Fletcher, Flynn said, has informed everything he has done since.
"All the most important public policy problems that we face today are inherently multidisciplinary problems … the way Fletcher works is to not only talk the talk of multidisciplinary but also to walk the walk," he told the Daily. "That is the education I got from The Fletcher school. I had to make my brain work across these boundaries … If you couldn't navigate across those disciplines, you didn't do so well."
Eberle echoed Flynn's belief in the multi-faceted education that The Fletcher school provides.
"Fletcher is a pretty unique learning environment," he said. "The concepts that are dissected by CNP are the same concepts that are examined in our classroom discussions everyday."
Flynn said that his work at CNP will focus on two issues that he has long been an advocate for: community resiliency and infrastructure resiliency.
Community resiliency, he explained, is the ability of a city, a town or a community to deal with the disruptions that come its way and to quickly recover. Such disruptions can include manmade threats like terrorism, but can also be natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.
Being able to bounce back from such events is crucial to success, according to Flynn.
"The key winners and losers in the world are going to be divided into those that can cope well with disruption and those that cannot," he said. "The places that people will want to live in and invest in are the ones that can adapt to these occasional bumps that come their way."
Flynn's said that finding out what makes certain communities able to rebound quickly — such as Galveston, Texas after Hurricane Ike — is central to ensuring that people "don't pay the price for being unprepared," a price that, according to Flynn, the city of New Orleans is still paying.
The other issue that Flynn is concerned with is infrastructure resiliency, an issue that, he believes, goes hand-in-hand with homeland security and our economy.
"Our economy is different today, our environment is different and we're also facing a different security world," he said. "The question is: How do we adapt our infrastructure in a way that makes it more sustainable in light of environmental concerns, better able to deter the kind of security threats faced today and … work better in our economy?"
According to Flynn, hybridizing our infrastructure — updating and maintaining the foundations already in place — is the key to jumpstarting our economy and ensuring that we do not fall behind other industrialized nations such as China and countries in Europe.
Flynn plans to achieve these goals by extending beyond Washington, D.C., outside of which he feels the most "relevant pockets of expertise" lie.
"I'm convinced that most of the expertise that Washington needs to make decisions resides outside the D.C area," he said. "The challenge is that the expertise has a difficult time finding its way into the halls of power."
Flynn said that he also plans to reach out to his alma mater in hopes of tapping into "a concentration of intellect in Medford."
He noted that he would like to expand CNP's internship program so that more Fletcher students could potentially get more hands-on experience. Flynn also expressed a desire to host a portion of The Fletcher School's annual trip to Washington.
"There is this network of people at Tufts and Fletcher that find the problems I'm working on to be extremely interesting," he said. "I would definitely want to figure out how I can harness that interest."
Prior to joining CNP, Flynn had been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he held the Ira A. Lipman Chair for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies.
He also recently served as President Obama's lead policy advisor for homeland security on the presidential transition team and as a member of the National Security Preparedness Group.
