Walk through the corridors of Encina Hall and you may hear gentle music drifting from an open office door. Inside sits Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar, known to most as Tom, flanked by shelves of red-spined books on China, photographs with world leaders, and stacks of journals accumulated over decades of scholarship. Coffee in hand, he is as likely to discuss Chinese politics and intelligence analysis as he is to mentor students and visiting scholars.

As he prepares to retire from Stanford at the end of August 2026 after a long career spanning academia, the State Department, and U.S. intelligence,  Fingar reflects on the relationship between scholarship and public service and shares a handful of lessons that have shaped his thinking and understanding of international affairs and U.S.-Asia relations.

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Right Place at the Right Time

“I feel like the character Forrest Gump,” he says with a smile. “I have been in the front row seat for an incredible number of developments in U.S.-Asia policy, being in the right place at the right time.”

The remark captures his characteristic modesty, but it also marks an important theme in his career. While circumstance created opportunities, Fingar built his career by recognizing them and by approaching each new challenge with intellectual curiosity.

He formed that mindset at Stanford, where he received his master’s degree in political science in 1969 and his doctorate in 1977, a period when the university made a deliberate investment in becoming a global leader in Asian studies. The field itself was being rebuilt after the disruptions of the McCarthy era and the “Red Scare,” during which many China specialists had found themselves under political suspicion. Stanford assembled a cohort of young scholars across history, political science, economics, anthropology, and language studies, creating what Fingar remembers as an unusually collaborative intellectual community for the time.

The Vietnam War gave his generation a powerful sense of purpose. For many students studying Asia, the war illustrated the dire consequences of misunderstanding the region. Scholarship, they believed, should help prevent similar mistakes.

“We began to articulate an answer to the question, ‘Why am I studying Asia? Why China?’” Fingar recalls. “Not to become the world's foremost expert. To use the understanding of China to inform the American public, to inform policymaking, and to overcome the kind of ignorance and attitudes that had led us to Vietnam.”

His conviction extended beyond the classroom. Fingar helped found Concerned Students Against the Vietnam War and became involved in efforts that later evolved into the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), introducing Asia into K-12 curricula and teacher education. Many of his classmates pursued such careers, moving between universities, foundations, government agencies, and public education organizations."You have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk," he says.

His own career reflected that philosophy. Following military service in Europe as a German-language intelligence translator, Fingar returned to Stanford just as the United States and China began reopening contact through “ping-pong diplomacy.” Due to its proximity to Asia, Stanford quickly became a hub for U.S.-China scientific and academic exchanges well before the two countries established full diplomatic relations.

Opening to China

As director of Stanford's then U.S.-China Relations Program, Fingar helped organize numerous exchanges among scholars, engineers, physicians, and scientists. Many of the Chinese scholars and officials he first encountered through academic exchanges eventually rose to senior leadership positions. 

Looking back, he believes those relationships and their insights into the ways U.S. and Chinese institutions function often mattered more than the formal agreements that accompanied them.

“[China] doesn't have to stay a black box,” Fingar says. “If both sides are trying to accomplish something important, and you develop personal relationships, you begin to understand how the system works.”

The effort to build U.S.-China relationships would define much of his career. 

An Extended Detour in Washington, D.C.

In 1986, Stanford loaned Fingar to the State Department to head its China office. He expected to stay two years but remained for twenty-three. As he made the adjustment from university to government service, he found that, while academic careers reward individual specialization and careful, often solitary work, government work, especially foreign policy, moves much faster. Decisions cannot wait for perfect information, and success depends on drawing together analytical expertise from across multiple disciplines.

Compiling briefings for senior officials on crises ranging from the Philippines to Cambodia, North Korea, the Balkans, Darfur, and Iraq, he gradually realized that leadership required something different from mastery of every issue. “Our job [as public servants] is not to demonstrate how smart we are,” he says. “Our job is to make other people smarter, so they have better information with which to make decisions.”

That insight became a guiding principle of his later career in D.C. As responsibilities expanded beyond China to encompass every region and issue confronting the U.S. government, he relied on specialists who knew Haiti, Somalia, Russia, or Southeast Asia far better than he did. His role was to identify trustworthy expertise, synthesize competing perspectives, and help policymakers understand their choices.

“My value was using my disciplinary training to ask the right questions. They knew more than I did, but, if you know what questions to ask, you can get a lot of insights.”

Fingar ultimately rose to one of the highest analytical positions in the U.S. government as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, overseeing thousands of analysts across sixteen intelligence agencies. Even then, he resisted the image of the all-knowing expert. Good analysis, he argues, is fundamentally collaborative.

Cultivating Intellectual Community

The rotation between academia and government also reinforced his appreciation for what each institution contributes. “The university provides an arena for discovery,” he explains. “Most of the time it's focused on the training mission. Government isn't training people – you're burning up intellectual capital.” Neither can succeed without the other.

Fingar returned to Stanford in 2009 to share the lessons he learned from his years of government service and to resume his role as a scholar and teacher of Asian studies and U.S.-China relations. Although strategic competition between the world’s two great powers has intensified sharply during this period, he remains cautiously optimistic. “I'm concerned," he says, "but not worried.”

He believes the architects of normalization of the U.S.-China relationship correctly invested in dense networks of academic, scientific, commercial, and personal ties. These, in their turn, created constituencies in both China and the United States with a prevailing interest in preserving engagement even during repeated periods of political tension.

Yet he warns against complacency. Many of the pioneers who built those relationships in the 1970s and 1980s are retiring. Academic and cultural exchange programs have dwindled, and mutual familiarity can no longer be taken for granted.

“Personal and institutional ties must be rebuilt every day,” he notes, borrowing a favorite observation from the late Secretary of State George Shultz. “Diplomacy is like gardening. You pull weeds, you trim rosebushes, and you've got to do it every day.” As Fingar puts it, relationships are “a wasting asset” unless continually renewed.

Looking back across more than five decades, Fingar measures success by whether knowledge has proven useful. The most important contributions, he suggests, are often made quietly – through mentoring students, informing public debate, strengthening institutions, and helping others make wiser decisions.