Our Principles

Three students smiling at social networking event

The School of Defense and Strategic Studies (DSS) is a unique and venerable institution that has been educating national security professionals for more than half a century.

Founded by Professor William R. Van Cleave at the University of Southern California, he relocated DSS in 1987 to the Springfield, Missouri, campus of Missouri State University. In 2005, Missouri State relocated DSS to the Washington, DC, area. DSS has remained true to the spirit and goal of its founder, which is to develop the type of scholarly and realistic national security practitioners for which DSS is well known throughout the U.S. policy community.

DSS has acquired a strong reputation in national security policy circles for the rigorous and security-forward “flavor” of its instruction and the caliber of its graduates. As the School continues to grow, to increase its academic offerings, and to expand its engagement with the policy and strategy world and the broader higher education community, it is important to set forth a clear vision of the principles that lie behind our success to date and will guide us in the years ahead. We thus attempt to articulate here what might be called the “Five Principles of DSS.

The DSS Philosophy

Consistent with Missouri State University’s commitment to being a community of citizen scholars committed to public affairs, as well as the University’s vision of itself as the nation’s leading public affairs university, the School of Defense and Strategic Studies (DSS) is an academic institution dedicated to training outstanding national security professionals and to producing and catalyzing the development of national security wisdom and policy insight.

To this end, DSS reveres five principles:

  1. Clarity and Rigor in our thinking, our instruction and our scholarship;

  2. A focus upon public policy issues from a practitioner’s perspective, dedicated to realistic and usable insights, not only to theoretical or aspirational ones;

  3. A spirit of professionalism and dedication to the education and development of national security experts;

  4. A commitment to nonpartisan instruction and scholarship;

  5. A commitment to academic freedom, open inquiry and the search for truth and practically useful insights.