In 1964, the same year Nye received his doctorate, he joined the Harvard faculty. He was Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at
John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1985 to 1990 and was Associate Dean for International Affairs at Harvard from 1989 to 1992. In 1968, he became the Carnegie Endowment International Peace Scholar and taught at the
Geneva Graduate Institute. Nye also was Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard from 1989 to 1993 and Dean of John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004. Nye was a University Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus. Nye and his colleague Keohane have been characterized as key figures in the development of a discipline of international political economy, largely as a result of their authorship of
Power and Interdependence. Nye's influences include
Karl Deutsch and
Ernst Hass. From 1977 to 1979, Nye was Deputy to the
Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology and co-wrote a series of reports on the Japan-US alliance with his friend
Richard Armitage. In 1999, during a visit to Singapore, Nye suggested to
Lee Kuan Yew that Singapore should set up a version of London's
Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park to allow public speaking, which Singapore then created its own
Speaker's Corner at
Hong Lim Park in 2000. Nye was considered by many to be the preferred choice for
National Security Advisor in the
2004 presidential campaign of
John Kerry. He was the chairman of the North American branch of the
Trilateral Commission and the co-chair of the
Aspen Strategy Group. He was also a member of the
Atlantic Council's Board of Directors. Nye also served as a trustee of
Radcliffe College and
Wells College. He was on the board of directors of the
Council on Foreign Relations, the Guiding Coalition of the
Project on National Security Reform, the advisory board of
Carolina for Kibera, and the Board of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies. He was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Prize by
Princeton University and the Charles E. Merriman Prize by the
American Political Science Association. In 2005, he was awarded the Honorary Patronage of the
University Philosophical Society of
Trinity College Dublin and was awarded honorary degrees by ten colleges and universities. In 2010, Nye won the Foreign Policy Distinguished Scholar Award from the
International Studies Association. In 2009, he was made a Theodore Roosevelt Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In October 2014, US Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the
Foreign Affairs Policy Board, a group that meets periodically to discuss strategic questions and to provide the Secretary and other senior department officials with independent informed perspectives and ideas. Nye served as a Commissioner for the
Global Commission on Internet Governance, and served on the
Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace from 2017 until its conclusion in 2019. He served on the global Advisory Council for
CFK Africa, a leading NGO working in Kenyan informal settlements. Nye coined the term
soft power in the late 1980s, and it first came into widespread usage following a piece he wrote in
Foreign Policy in 1990. Nye consistently wrote for
Project Syndicate since 2002. ==Significant views==