Dr. Charles F. Hermann is a Senior Professor and the Brent Scowcroft Chair Emeritus. He came to Texas A&M University in 1995 to organize the Bush School of Government and Public Service and serve as its founding director. The School opened in the fall of 1997. After the Bush School became an independent unit with its own dean (initially Robert Gates), Dr. Hermann served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs and then as the designer and first director of the Bush School’s master’s program in International Affairs . He continued that assignment until summer 2013, when he spent a year on professional development leave at the Ohio State University. With Sally Dee Wade, he has recently coauthored a book on the first twenty years of the Bush School, Called to Serve: The Bush School of Government and Public Service (Texas A&M University Press, 2017). In the Bush School, Dr. Hermann teaches courses on American foreign policy, international politics, and foreign policy analysis.
In addition to his administrative and teaching responsibilities, Dr. Hermann has been an active scholar in the fields of foreign policy, national security, and group decision making and simulation. He has published widely on each of these topics, including nine books and over seventy journal articles and book chapters. In pursuit of his research, Dr. Hermann has received a number of grants and contracts from both private and public sources, including the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Currently, his research examines the likelihood and nature of change in foreign policy when a president finds an existing policy is not performing as expected. This work continues inquiry initiated in his book When Things Go Wrong: Foreign Policy Decision Making under Adverse Feedback (Routledge, 2012).
After receiving his PhD from Northwestern University, Dr. Hermann taught at Princeton University until accepting a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship in 1969 to serve on the National Security Council under Dr. Henry Kissinger. From there, he went to the Ohio State University, where he was director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a professor in the Department of Political Science. (He temporarily left that post from 1988 to 1990 to serve as the Acting Vice Provost for International Affairs at Ohio State.)
Dr. Hermann is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, American Political Science Association, International Studies Association, International Society for Political Psychology, and the Arms Control Association. He has been active in his profession and served as president of the International Studies Association, 1988-89, which awarded him the Distinguished Senior Scholar Award in 2001.
He has also volunteered in the local community, having been president of the Bryan Rotary, the Texas A&M Opera and Performing Arts Society (OPAS), and the Brazos Valley Symphony Society (BVSS). He currently serves on the board of Project Unity, a nonprofit organization assisting families and children.