Few people on Dartmouth's campus have as much knowledge and enthusiasm for international politics as History Professor Marty Sherwin.
As director of Dartmouth's John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and a prize-winning historian, Sherwin shapes Dartmouth's opinions of the outside world everyday.
Sherwin, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1959, said it was a privilege for him to come back to College to teach. Sherwin said he uses his diverse range of talents in his capacity as an educator.
"Teaching is a very serious commitment," Sherwin said in a recent interview. "One shouldn't teach unless you get real satisfaction."
Rebecca Liddicoat '95, Sherwin's research assistant, said, "Marty epitomizes the ideal Dartmouth professor as an individual who is able to blend superior scholarship with a commitment to great teaching."
"He gets you as excited about the material as he is and he makes you feel as if you have something important to contribute in discussions," Liddicoat continued. "There are very few professors who excel at both the lecture and the discussion format and Marty is one of them."
Sherwin's academic and professional career has been extremely varied.
He said creating an international relations program at the College has been his greatest achievement and his greatest challenge.
Since his appointment to the Dickey Center in July 1993, Sherwin has sponsored forums on the future of democracy in China, Haiti and Russia, as well as the current forum on Cuba. The Dickey Center also sponsored forums on Women Writers Across Cultures.
Although setting up "the programs gets a broad range of faculty involved ... the biggest challenge is getting all of the programs together," Sherwin said.
Sherwin has also been an adviser for a number of acclaimed documentary films on the nuclear age, including the "Day After Trilogy," and a 13 part PBS series, "War and Peace in the Nuclear Age."
Sherwin said he once considered the threat of nuclear war "the most important issue in the world."
"I was looking for a dissertation topic and someone who I had respect for said 'Why don't you write about a subject you consider the most important subject in the world?'" Sherwin said. "Being a historian, I went back to the origins, and since I was working in the late 1960s, I went back 20 years to 1945."
In 1976, Sherwin's book, "A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance," was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. The book won the Stewart Bernarth Prize by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the American History Book Prize awarded by the National Historical Society.
Sherwin said he uses his historical background to be innovative. He is the founding director and executive producer of the Global Classroom Project, a "spacebridge" program, which uses TV satellites to link university students in Moscow and the United States for interactive discussions.
"Between February 1988 and April 1992, there were 11 or 12 interactive sessions, two hours in length, between Russian and American students," Sherwin said. The topics ranged from nuclear arms to democracy and a free press, he said.
Nuclear weapons are still a significant issue in the post-Cold War world, Sherwin said. While the nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia is "no longer a dramatic issue," the world is "now facing the possibility of nuclear proliferation in other countries," he said.
Sherwin's career has also brought him in contact with prominent political figures. Sherwin said he found Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be the most fascinating figure he has met.
"I talked to Aristide for half an hour, and found him intelligent, sensitive and different from how he was perceived in the newspaper," Sherwin said. "His visit to Dartmouth began an important process of making the Clinton administration turn around."
Sherwin said Aristide needed to get more popular support in the United States in order to change the mind of the Clinton administration with regard to Haiti.
Sherwin has taught at Dartmouth every summer since 1976 in Dartmouth's Master of Art in Liberal Studies Program.
Sherwin stressed the importance of documentary films in teaching. He said students and the population at large learn more history through documentary films than through reading.
"Historians should stop complaining how superficial documentary films are, and get involved in teaching people how to watch films critically," Sherwin said.
Sherwin's work makes him no stranger to the controversy and debate surrounding nuclear weapons. Currently, he is at the center of the debate about the placement of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
"The way they came out with the exhibit was ironic because the values that support democracy and that Americans fought and died for in World War II are undermined by stifling open debate about this important topic," Sherwin said.
