SIPA Celebrates Its 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award Winners: Stephen Biddle and Robert Walsh

Each year, Columbia SIPA students vote to honor faculty members whose teaching has left a lasting impact on their academic and professional journeys. This year, the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Awards – which will be presented on SIPA Class Day – were awarded to Professor Stephen Biddle for his lecture course Foundations of International Security Policy, and Adjunct Professor Robert Walsh for his seminar Transforming the Urban Economy. Both professors were selected by popular vote from SIPA’s graduating class, underscoring their influence in and beyond the classroom.

Reframing Security Policy Through Ethics and Analysis

Biddle, a leading scholar in military strategy and international security and author of the seminal book Military Power, brings decades of policy-relevant experience to his teaching. He has worked as a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and also served as the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

At SIPA, he is known for translating complex ideas into frameworks that help students grapple with real-world challenges. 

“It’s deeply gratifying,” Biddle said of the student-voted award. “Our students are preparing to do important work to make the world a better, safer, more secure place. To know that they think we've prepared them well for this important work is a great feeling.”

Applying theory to real-world conflicts is also central to the course's design. “At a school like SIPA, it's important that our teaching be applicable to the real world,” he added. “So every semester we try to apply the ideas from the course to a variety of ongoing crises and conflicts. On topics that often generate more heat than light, the class conducted serious, respectful conversations.Some of the most important course concepts involve the morality of killing in the name of the state; our unit on ethics in security policy is my favorite part of the course, and I was especially pleased that the class could think systematically about this, and analyze difficult ethical dilemmas from a reasoned perspective.”

Students praised Biddle’s ability to connect theory with practice, and for creating space to think beyond conventional doctrines. “Professor Biddle really stands out for how engaging his lectures are the whole way through,” said Nishta Sharma MPA ’25. “More importantly though, it’s his lectures on the ethics of war and peace and challenge to orthodox security studies. We looked at feminist critiques and focused on avenues to prevent conflict which made the course feel relevant, inclusive, and intellectually refreshing.” Sharma also appreciated the course’s rigor: “The assessments really pushed me to think critically about how we learn from strategic failures—not just to critique them, but to extract insights that can inform better policy decisions.”

Samuel Dumesh MIA ’26 said the course helped reframe how students understand global conflict: “Biddle enabled us to see security policy not just through the lens of military strategy, but through frameworks of peacemaking and negotiation,” he noted, adding that this made the course relevant to “almost every field a policy student might pursue,” while still grounded in the rigor of strategic analysis.

Turning the City into a Classroom

Adjunct Professor Robert Walsh was honored for his seminar, Transforming the Urban Economy, which draws on his long career in public service and economic development. His experience, from running the Union Square Partnership to serving as Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Small Business Services, shapes a course that blends policy, practice, and place-based learning.

“Professor Walsh’s course is special because his career has been deeply rooted in New York City government,” said Rose Murphy MPA ’25, a teaching assistant for the course. “His course brings in working professionals in numerous areas to bring the content alive.” Murphy recalled one memorable session: “We traveled to Union Square, where Professor Walsh had once run the Business Improvement District (BID). Having Professor Walsh walk us around the area and point out businesses, buildings, and changes he implemented was incredibly interesting.” 

Matthew Flower MPA ’26 echoed this sense of momentum and relevance: “I loved all the field trips in Professor Walsh’s class, and his camaraderie with all of the guest speakers he introduced us to.” Whether discussing skills training programs, the Cornell Tech campus, or efforts to preserve Grand Central Station, the class offered a behind-the-scenes look at how real projects shape New York’s neighborhoods.

Walsh emphasized the value of hands-on exposure and leadership under pressure: “In this course, we spent a great deal of time discussing successful public-private partnerships. I stressed that I have often seen a hesitation on leaders moving forward with big, bold plans because no matter what in a large city environment you tend to have some on the other side of a plan.” He said the kind of bold, effective leadership needed for urban transformation is rarely easy—but entirely necessary: “New York’s comeback after 9//11 demonstrated this, and it required fearless leadership, a solid plan, and a dedicated team working together.”

That energy and perspective left a lasting impression on many students, who found themselves rethinking the complexities of urban life through a new lens. For Anjaly Ariyanayagam MPA-DP ’25, the course transformed how she viewed development work at the city level: “Taking his class made me think about what’s right under our nose and in our backyard at Columbia. Why do we choose to live in Manhattan and not the Bronx? Why don’t we get off the boat at Staten Island? What does it take to manage a city of great extremes?” She noted that, despite the class ending late in the evening, students consistently left feeling more energized than when they arrived.

“I am very honored and thankful—knowing the class benefited from my teaching and our team taking a look at various transformative developments in New York City,” Walsh said. “Teaching in the classroom about game-changing economic development initiatives has its limits so in this course we got where the ‘rubber meets the road’. That made a difference!”