Max Anderson on the best teacher he ever had…and the gift of rigorous feedback paired with the chance to do it again.

The Weekend Reader - 10/31/22 postscript

Another transition this week is at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which lost its leader, Ashton Carter, to a sudden heart attack. Carter (pictured above) served in Defense Department for multiple administrations, and for two years served as Secretary of Defense under President Obama. A Rhodes Scholar and a PhD physicist, Carter was widely respected on both sides of the aisle and was often recognized as the smartest guy in any room he entered. He was also a kind man who cared about mentoring young people.

Ash Carter was one of my favorite professors as a graduate student at the Kennedy School. He taught American National Security Policy, where a group of 20 or so of us got to meet with him twice a week to think deeply about America’s interests in the world.It was difficult to get a seat in his class, but those who did got to hear first-hand about our professor’s nuclear negotiations with the North Koreans and the strategic imperative of shifting the U.S.’s foreign policy focus to the East. I got an A+ in the class and I know that’s a horribly braggy thing to write but I’m happy to say about it because a) it was known as one of the harder classes at the school and b) I think it was the only such grade I ever got as a grad student. For me that course was less about my natural mastery of it and more about how a teacher inspired me to give my greatest effort in pursuit of learning.

Ash was a great teacher, not just because he had so much experience to share, but because he gave us the opportunity to practice with intense feedback. Every couple weeks Professor Carter would have us write a two-page policy memo, the kind that might find it’s way to a president’s desk. It couldn’t be longer than two pages, because time is of the essence. Yet if the memo failed to go deep in that limited space, it was a failure. And I mean failure. His standards were high. He said they were White House standards. I had never had so much red ink splashed on my work as a student, either in grad school or in college. He found every weakness in my arguments. He noticed what I didn’t say. He even ruthlessly slashed through grammatical errors. At the end of the day, he demanded better than what I was delivering. But then he gave me the chance to show I could be better. Central to Ash’s teaching approach was to do two grades for each memo. He had of us re-write our memos for re-grading, with the benefit of his feedback, to see if we would “get” the advice he was giving. And for me that made all the difference. His approach was fair and it was motivating. He had made me rise to the occasion like no other professor ever did.

I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from some incredible people and some of the “names of our age.” Carter is not a name that I would expect many readers to have remembered. But he is one who in my book deserves recognition, more than some others with more widely-known profiles. I will remember him for the leadership he displayed in serving our country, and for the teaching he did in our classroom. I know if he were reading this he’d have red pen edits all over the place. And for some reason, that brings me some comfort.