CSUSB Professor Invited to Join NATO Academic Advisory Board

Mark T. Clark, a political science professor at Cal State San Bernardino and director of its National Security Studies Program, has been chosen to serve on an advisory board to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Defense College. Clark, who is an expert on national and international security issues and serves as the director of the California State University Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, will serve on the Academic Advisory Board, which focuses on security issues that affect both the Middle East and NATO at the strategic political-military level. Clark will serve a two-year term in one of only two positions from outside NATO and its partner institutions. The 10-member board is chaired by the commandant of the NATO Defense Council, Lt. Gen. Arne Bård Dalhaug of the Royal Norwegian Army. The board, which meets annually every autumn in Rome, is responsible for education, research and outreach for members of NATO and its partners in the region. Its main academic course is the NATO Regional Cooperation Course, a 10-week strategic level course that links issues of importance to the region with the wider international community. The course is designed for senior military and political officials in NATO and partner institutions. “It’s truly an honor to be invited to join this prestigious board that advises NATO and its allies on issues affecting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization states and states of the Middle East,” Clark said. The advisory board was established to provide the NATO Defense College with independent external advice on NATO Regional Cooperation Course activities and provide close links with sister institutions in the Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative countries, which both seek to contribute to regional security and stability and achieve better mutual understanding. Clark, who joined Cal State San Bernardino in 1990, also serves as the CSUSB National Security Studies graduate coordinator. Clark holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Cal Poly Pomona and a master’s degree and doctorate in international relations from the University of Southern California with a concentration on defense and strategic studies, Soviet foreign policy and international politics and diplomacy. The California State University is an Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, for which Clark serves as director, is a consortium of seven CSU campuses with Cal State San Bernardino as the lead institution. It was created by a $3.75 million grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2006 to prepare students for careers in intelligence through a full academic program and field experiences. In the fall of 2011, Clark received additional funding of $1.75 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency to continue the work of the consortium. The other CSU campuses are Bakersfield, Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, Northridge and Cal Poly Pomona. The National Security Studies program at Cal State San Bernardino is just one of several such graduate programs in the United States, along with those at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Fairfax, Va., satellite campus of Missouri State University. The intelligence community has frequently recruited at CSUSB, and the university’s NSS students also have gone on to work for legislators, the Governmental Accountability Office and the military.