A Life of Service and Scholarship

I first met Jes Salacuse when I interviewed for a job at Fletcher in 1989. Unfortunately for me, he was the person with whom I negotiated my initial salary. He was the first dean I worked with at Fletcher, and throughout my career, he was the person to whom I turned for guidance. He was unique among Fletcher deans since the founding in that he was a leading scholar as well as an effective leader and fundraiser. His scholarly perspective and his approach to leadership made him a very effective dean, transforming the school into a leading academic institution in international relations with analytical breadth and depth.

Like Fletcher students and many faculty, he had several careers. His early career included nine years in Africa and the Middle East with the Ford Foundation, finishing as Ford’s representative in Sudan. He then began as an adjunct at Southern Methodist University Law School in 1978 and almost immediately was moved to a tenure-track appointment. A year later, he became dean at SMU. He came to Fletcher as Dean in 1986 and served until 1994. After stepping down as dean, he held the Henry J. Braker Chair in Commercial Law and was appointed Distinguished Professor. (I am proud to now occupy the Braker Chair that he held, although my feet don’t quite reach the floor.) He served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Comparative Law at Bocconi in Milan, Chair of the Board of APSIA, Chair of the India Fund, President of several investment arbitration tribunals, and President of the Tufts Faculty Senate. Jes was a dominant scholar of international investment law, negotiation, and leadership. He seemed to do all this effortlessly, but as Roger Federer recently explained, “effortless is a myth”—Jes worked hard and thought hard about everything.

He led through mutual respect, kindness, and process. For Jes, leadership was a process of working through shared goals, divergent goals, and different capacities to contribute. He defined leadership as “the ability through communication to cause individuals to act willingly in a desired way to advance the interests of a group or organization.” He was a servant-leader, never engaging in coercion or bluster. He worked with impeccable integrity and established, then faithfully followed, good processes for decision-making.

I had lunch with Jes on May 21. He was physically fragile but mentally agile. He told me that he was reviewing treatment options for his brain cancer, but I did not anticipate how short a time he had left, how short a time we had left. We will all miss him greatly.