NEW YORK, May 7 (Xinhua) -- Harvard University's distinguished service professor, emeritus and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government (HKS) Joseph S. Nye Sr. died at 88 on Tuesday.
HKS Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein announced Nye's death in an email to faculty, staff and students Wednesday afternoon.
"It is impossible to capture Joe's intellectual contributions in a paragraph or a page," Weinstein wrote in his email to HKS affiliates. "In a century of unprecedented change in global politics, he was among the foremost thinkers to shape our understanding of contemporary international relations."
Nye, who served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under former President Bill Clinton, is also known for coining the term "soft power" in the 1980s to describe a country's non-military sway on the world stage.
Nye first joined the Harvard faculty in 1964 after receiving his Ph.D. in Government. Nye served as HKS dean from 1995 to 2004. ■