Esther D. Brimmer: A Running Start

NAFSA welcomed Esther D. Brimmer, DPhil, as its new CEO and executive director in January 2017. Prior to joining NAFSA, Brimmer held three appointments at the U.S. Department of State, serving most recently as the assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs. She has also drawn on her foreign policy expertise as a faculty member at institutions such as George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and the College of Europe in Belgium.

You’ve been personally and professionally invested in international relations, foreign policy, and academia long before taking over as NAFSA executive director. Could you recount one or two highlights from your career in international relations and education and talk about how this will inform your leadership at NAFSA?

One highlight for me was a program called Teaching Respect for All, which was eventually adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). I was looking for a way to work with countries to build on the power of education to help large multiethnic societies. We ended up working on a major initiative in Brazil, which led to a UNESCO worldwide survey of best practices on teaching respect at the secondary-school level. That developed into a curriculum that schools could use. One of the lessons I learned was that projects may have uses you didn’t initially think of.

Another career highlight for me was a speech I gave in 2009. The United States was elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council for the first time under the Obama administration and