Professor leaves legacy
San Bernardino Sun 5/14/07
Since establishing the Model United Nations program at Cal State San Bernardino in the early 1990s, Salmi has consistently led teams of students into competition against students from the world's most prestigious institutions - and they have won top honors 10 times in the renowned program, which requires students to lobby on behalf of a nation in faux United Nations assemblies.
The awards are nice, Salmi said, but the list of accomplishments by students who have passed through his program is the sweetest victory.
"The program has never been so much about the U.N., from my perspective, as it has been about students' development," Salmi said. "They are developing skills they'll use throughout their lives."
For Salmi, a political science professor and one of the nation's foremost experts on Middle East politics, last month's competition in New York City was a swan song of sorts. He will enter the Faculty Early Retirement Program in September to serve as president of an institute on Middle Eastern and Islamic affairs.
A legacy of education
Salmi's legacy is set as the professor who launched the university's Model United Nations and Model Arab League programs, where his students have netted more than two dozen top honors.
Many of his students have gone on to practice law, politics and other disciplines, Salmi said.
Today, Tobin Brinker is the newest San Bernardino City Councilman. As a politician, he is viewed as an eloquent compromiser who strives to broker policy consensus between rival factions on the seven-member council. Brinker, 38, points to his two years in Salmi's Model U.N. program in the early 1990s as a formative time in his collegiate career. Brinker said Salmi combined a real interest in students with his foreign policy bona fides to bring out the best in students.
"He really drove you," Brinker recalled. "He was that kind of professor you didn't want to disappoint."
Beyond the policy minutiae, the rhetorical honing and the knowledge of parliamentary procedure students learned under Salmi, a more intangible benefit came from those trips to New York, Brinker said. It gave local kids at a state college a chance to test their wits and their mettle against the nation's top pedigree.
"It really boosted our confidence," Brinker said. "I came away thinking, `Wow, if I put in the work and give it my best shot I can compete with anybody.' "
A troubled world
Having worked at the U.S. Embassy in Iran during the tumultuous 1970s - the Shah's rule was overthrown in 1979 - Salmi has a perspective on the Middle East informed by both study and real-world experience.
In transitioning from serving as full-time professor to overseeing an institute that will produce scholarly journals on the Middle East, Salmi will be in the thick of what should be among the 21st century's most consequential issues: How the United States deals with a region rich in oil and riven with ethnic, religious and class divisions.
Salmi calls the current war in Iraq "a quagmire," pointedly echoing the language often used to describe the costly U.S. entanglement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
The invasion, numerous missteps and protracted involvement of U.S. military in Iraq are symptomatic of cultural and historical ignorance on the part of national leaders, Salmi said, and demonstrate the importance of studying the region both at universities and in institutes such as the one he will head.
"The quagmire in which we find ourselves in Iraq today is a clear expression of the Bush administration getting it all wrong," Salmi said. "Ignorance is at the core."
As Salmi surveys international relations in the world in the post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 era, he is wary about the future. Foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, may have planted the seeds for a generation of anti-U.S. sentiment.
"Based on my experience, (the U.S.) is viewed with increasing hostility," Salmi said. "I'm concerned most about the way we are viewed by the next generation of leaders now in universities around the world."