Professor Garners World Experience

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Professor Garners World Experience

By Allee Evensen in The Utah Statesman, Wednesday, April 18, 2012

After hearing Jeannie Johnson teach, her students probably never guess she was born tongue tied. The political science professor describes herself as talkative — an adjective many of her upper-division students use as well.

“She knows what she’s talking about, and she has a lot of energy,” said Doug Perl, an international relations major and one of Johnson’s students. “She’s really into the subject material. She’s fun but always very professional.”

Johnson said her at-birth impairment never actually stopped her from striking up a conversation.

“It didn’t inhibit my talking one bit,” she said.

Though she’s been traveled around the world, Johnson said her passion for political science began and remains at USU. She said she knew what she wanted to do after a single day as a freshman.

“I fell in love the first day, in Mike Lyons’ class. I was sunk — hook, line and sinker,” she said. “And I really didn’t look to the right or the left after that. That was what I wanted to do.”

Johnson earned her undergraduate degree in political science and international relations and her master’s degree in political economy from USU. She is currently in the process of finishing her doctorate in strategic studies.

Though she’s worked in multiple governmental areas, including positions in the CIA and State Department, she continues to teach because she loves sharing her experiences with students, she said.

“Teaching is just an intrinsically enjoyable activity. It is so much fun,” she said. “I love the students, and I think I admire them increasingly year by year. They demonstrate so much initiative in what they are doing — adventurous, fantastic things that at their age I never would have dared do.”

Through her teaching position, she also tries to make sure USU students are noticed, she said, and she often secures guest speakers from various government agencies to give her classes a small piece of the real world in the classroom.

“I make sure they have a constant reminder that Utah State is on the map and that we have fantastic students to send their way,” Johnson said.

Even though she teaches, Johnson said she still works with the government in foreign policy making and travels Washington, D.C., multiple times a year, sometimes as much as every other month.

Junior Megan Hurst, one of Johnson’s students, said her professor’s real-world experience is an aspect she looks forward to in her classes.

“She has a lot of connections and brings in a lot of guest speakers into the classroom,” Hurst said. “It is very challenging, but they were worth it at the end of the semester.”

At the end of her undergraduate experience, Johnson said she took an internship on Capitol Hill and realized the local aspect of politics was wasn’t for her.

While working on her master’s degree, she took another internship with the State Department at the American Embassy in Paris. It was here that she said she found a passion for foreign policy.

As she was writing her master’s thesis, she said she was recruited by a CIA member to work under the director of intelligence — a wing of the CIA that conducts analysis. She worked on the Balkan Task Force, whose primary foreign concern at the time was Serbia.

Currently Johnson is working on her dissertation, which focuses on the way organizational cultures, like the CIA or Marines, impact the implementation of security policy.

“I cultivate a type of expertise in my scholarly research that is also useful in very practical ways to the intelligence community,” she said. “I go back and forth to D.C. to work with the intelligence community and the department of defense to cultivate better ways of gleaning and then employing cultural data into actionable intelligence.”

The inspiration for her research came from time she spent with the State Department in the Zagreb Embassy in Croatia. At the time, she said, the U.S. was bombing Serbia in what was expected to be a three-day war.

The Serbian government refused to respond, something the CIA could not figure out, she said.

“We were into day 30 and then day 40 and then day 50, and they were not capitulating,” she said.

The department began to make mistakes, such as accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy by using an outdated map.

“We were making decisions on the fly about which target sets to bomb, and we were using an old map, one that was produced in 1998, instead of the current map of 1999,” she said. “(The target) was labeled the federal directorate of supply procurement for Serbia. We didn’t update our map to find out the Chinese had purchased that building and were using it for their embassy, and so we accidentally bombed it.”

In a morning meeting, she said the ambassador came in frustrated and slammed a newspaper down with pictures of Serbians that had put actual targets on their heads. The government couldn’t figure out why citizens reacted to the bombings the way they did.

“We knew everything about leadership figures,” she said. “The head of the Serbs was Milosevic. We knew everything about him down to his prescription medication. That’s not a hyperbole. We knew everything about him. But we didn’t know who (the) Serbs were.”

The idea dawned on her that the government didn’t understand the culture of the people, she said. Since then, her research has taken a turn toward what she calls “cultural typography.”

“When I returned to academia, it is the thing I devoted myself to entirely — filling in that gap,” she said.

Johnson said she wouldn’t change anything about her position in life.

“I love this life,” she said. “I love having an opportunity to live in paradise in Logan, Utah, which is as good as life gets, but still keeping my hand in the policy-making machine of Washington, D.C.”

– allee.evensen@aggiemail.usu.edu