[The following conversation began as an email exchange on May 20, 2009, after Craig Hayden wrote Public Diplomacy and the Phantom Menace of Theory, a response to Pat Kushlis’s Detroit on the Potomac. The first email of the exchange, by John Brown below, like the comments that follow, do not have accurate time stamps due as the comment were copied from the email-based discussion.  All comments do appear in correct order and are posted here with the permission of the respective authors.  This is posted here to continue the discourse.  Add your voice. –MCA]

Craig Hayden,
Thanks for your recent excellent piece on the academic study of PD. It think it contributes much to the debate of theory vs. practice in PD. I hope it will be widely read. Have you considered submitting it to “American Diplomacy,” which is published by ex-FSOs? My main quarrel with much of the “scholarship” re PD, which Pat Kushlis critiques so well, is that it often misses a key element in PD — what PD officers (or whatever you want to call them) concretely do “in the field” and the day-to-day issues that they face. That is why, in the case of PD, I find memoirs, history and media reporting often more enlightening that abstract treatises. We are not, after all, dealing with rocket science here, but with a down-to-earth, all-too-human activity. As you point out, there’s no PD “theory.” Also, I am concerned that people who want to “do PD” as a career might think that “a degree in PD” is sufficient to be an effective PD practitioner (I realize that is not what academic courses on PD “promise”). Of course, nothing wrong with being a PD “scholar,” but based on my FSO experience what is most helpful in preparing to be an effective “public diplomat,” at least for the US government, is learning foreign languages in depth, familiarity with cultures overseas, and people-to-people skills that are not necessarily acquired in the classroom or by research in libraries/on the Internet.