Deborah Winslow Nutter, Senior Associate Dean and Director of the Global Master of Arts Program
Senior executive programs at universities are no longer just the domain of the business schools. There is a growing provision from other graduate schools too; and while these may still account for a very small part of executive development providers some have been engaged in the sector for some time. Here we take a look at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of International Affairs that offers an international affairs program with a business theme, a variation from the more usual business programs with international themes.
As the Global Master of Arts Program (GMAP) — an executive masters degree program for international professionals — celebrates ten years of impact and influence this year, The Fletcher School looks back with great pride and satisfaction at how the program came to be, the journey it has been on with its students and its plans for the future. The goal has been to bring together developing leaders to hone their leadership skills with a 360-degree perspective of the world while continuing to work in it.
When the program launched in 2000, it was under the mandate of then Fletcher School Dean Jack Galvin, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, who believed that there were professionals living and working around the world, already quite successful in their own right, who could benefit from the international affairs curriculum that Fletcher had to offer but who could not interrupt their careers to move to campus for the one-year Master of Arts degree. He believed that there was a great opportunity to combine the technology of the 21st century with the traditional Fletcher mission to offer in a new format a broad program of professional education in international relations to a select group of graduate students committed to the stability, prosperity and fairness of our increasingly complex, and challenging global society...