Vice Admiral Bruce Lindsey: Public Policy PhD Program ‘Helped Me Refine My Thinking’

Vice Admiral and Deputy Commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command Bruce Lindsey, ’05 Public Policy PhD, is the keynote speaker for the Schar School of Policy and Government Degree Celebration on May 16. 

The PhD was Bruce “Birdie” Lindsey’s wife’s idea. It was she who cut out the newspaper advertisement of a PhD prospective student open house at what was then the School of Public Policy at George Mason University—now the Schar School of Policy and Government—and gave it to Lindsey, a Navy officer with a master’s degree in strategic studies from the Navy War College.

He took the hint, attended the open house, and applied for the PhD in Public Policy program. His classmates included fellow Navy officers John Zangardi, now Chief Information Officer of the Department of Homeland Security, and Kevin “Kip” Thomas, now the Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Human Neurobiology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Also in the class was Sarah Maxwell, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Dallas and recently named Assistant Provost.

Not to be outdone, 13 years after earning his degree in 2005, Lindsey is now Vice Admiral and the Deputy Commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. He’s No. 2 in charge of all the surface, subsurface, and Navy aviation assets on the Atlantic side of the country, serving under Admiral Christopher W. Grady and accounting for 125 ships, 1,000 aircraft, and 103,000 active duty service members and government employees. He manages a budget of more than $11.4 billion.

Needless to say, it’s a huge job. Did a PhD make a difference in his career?

“I would say ‘yes,’ and I tell people that,” he said by phone from his office in the command's headquarters building. “I think the academic rigor that George Mason and [now] the Schar School presented helped me refine my thinking processes, especially at the strategic level. The rigor and the multiple disciplinary approach they have there is important.”

Lindsey said he still applies much of what he learned during his studies on a daily basis, particularly as the Navy increases its development of uses for big data.

“I learned statistical methods that I used to this day,” he said. “Basic data mining and going into regression analysis to develop a model and using statistics to see if that model is valid. And then if you want to get into causation, you try to do a path-wise regression with data coefficients. Yes, I actually bring that to my work.”

The application of frameworks is another tool that has remained useful for Lindsey, a lesson acquired by taking a course with Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University who taught at Mason for several years.

“I continue to this day use one of Francis Fukuyama’s ideas, that ideology changes practice. Institutions, structures, culture—they all interact together,” Lindsey said. “I’ve applied that framework to many of the big problems we have in the Navy and it helps me take apart a problem and find a solution and understand how it’s going to work.”

Frameworks, Fukuyama agreed, are important to advanced degrees, and for advancing in careers.

“Doctoral programs are important to people coming out of practical jobs in the policy world by giving them a conceptual framework in which to understand what they are doing, so they can balance theory and practice,” Fukuyama said.

As for the degree itself, said Fukuyama, “I would say that the importance of getting a PhD is often less in the specific knowledge you acquire, but rather in the conceptual frameworks that are useful in organizing the way you perceive the world and think about it.”

In addition to the coursework and the research for Lindsey’s dissertation—“The Effect of Computers on Mathematical Achievement of American Fourth Graders”—the program was punctuated with field trips to Capitol Hill to see Congress at work. “That was very helpful,” he said.

Bottom line: The PhD paid off.

“Who would have thought,” he said, “in 1997 when I started [the PhD program] that the education I received would help me now? But I have to say, it’s played a big role.”