Maxwell School of Syracuse University: Maxwell Perspective

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By Renée Gearhart Levy

hen public administration Professor Larry Schroeder returned to the Maxwell School in 1999—after five years teaching at Indiana University—the longtime Maxwell faculty member chose an office in what he thought was the logical spot: the Public Administration Department. A year later, he moved to the third floor to be housed within the Global Affairs Institute (GAI).

“There were things going on up here I was interested in: speakers, seminars, more students interested in international issues,” says Schroeder, whose research since the early 1980s has focused on international public finance in evolving countries.

A decade ago, Schroeder had served on the advisory committee headed by Robert Jensen, analyzing international activities at Maxwell. Its central recommendation was the creation of an institute to gather and support international research. GAI was launched the year before Schroeder went to Indiana. He believes the changes at Maxwell during his absence were profound and that GAI has much to do with it.

There may have been as much international research a decade ago by individual faculty members, but you probably wouldn’t have known about it. There was no attempt to bring it all together,” he says. GAI has energized the atmosphere, he adds, inspiring its associates to seek external funding, attend seminars, and create new courses.

A big part of that energy has to do with the way in which GAI was organized. When the advisory committee recommended creating such an institute, they also recommended that research be organized not just regionally, but thematically. That makes GAI unusual.

“Most international studies centers are set up by area of the world and they’re quite divided,” says political scientist Mitchell Orenstein. “We’ve gone past that model. People don’t end up in their own area-studies ghettos. We know what people are working on.”

GAI provides the institutional base for six problem-focused working groups and three regionally-focused research institutes. It also houses the editorial team for the journal International Studies Review and sponsors conferences, seminars, workshops, and lectures (an average of 15 a month).

It’s a busy place, to say the least. “There are approximately 75 faculty members and probably 300 graduate students in the Maxwell School whose research is comparative, international, or global,” says political scientist Margaret “Peg” Hermann, the Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs and director of GAI. “That’s our constituency.”

As much as any component of Maxwell, GAI manifests the School’s multidisciplinary nature. If you walk through the institute’s third-floor office suite, you’ll rarely see two faculty members from the same department housed side-by-side. Schroeder, for example, has an office next to an anthropologist and a political scientist. Economist David Richardson’s office is between those of an international relations professor (also a former American ambassador) and a political scientist.

“Having the GAI here has made my work much more targeted to multidisciplinary audiences,” says Richardson, who splits his time between Maxwell and the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. “Some of my recent papers have appealed consciously to historians in one case, legal scholars in another, and public administrators in another. Seven or eight years ago, I wouldn’t have been doing that.”

Richardson was recruited to Maxwell to help build an international economics faculty at the school. For the last five years, he has run the GAI’s political economy group, which examines early-stage research in a cross-disciplinary spirit. The group’s members include faculty from political science, geography, economics, history, and anthropology.

“As the world becomes more globalized, people recognize that globalization raises serious policy questions, but also raises theoretical social science questions,” he says. “These are not questions that only economists or political scientists or sociologists can answer,” he says. “It takes multiple perspectives.”

Hermann says GAI strives to create information applicable to the world outside. The Transboundary Crisis Management Project (which she co-directs) is an example. The project examines how problems of governance are exacerbated when crises cross borders. Working with the National Center for Crisis Management Research and Training in Sweden, the group has developed a framework for the study of how transboundary crises—problems ranging from Mad Cow disease to September 11—are managed. They’re working toward the creation of training materials of use in various policy settings.

This project, like others at GAI, is “getting students to think about these real-world problems and to address them using the theories and frameworks that have been developed within our disciplines,” says Hermann.

Although it is still a work in progress, Hermann says the vitality of GAI’s activities resonates throughout the Maxwell School and the University at large. “Syracuse is not a big enough university to afford 10 European scholars in political science,” she says. “But we can have 15 of the best European scholars if we pool resources from across the University the way our European Union Center does. That’s what we’re trying to do: bring people interested in studying international issues together, combine our resources, and offer students some very exciting opportunities that are less feasible within single disciplines.”

The robustness of GAI, she says, owes a lot to the financial support of SU trustees Samuel Goekjian ’52 and Gerald Cramer, who emerged as “international boosters” early in the Campaign for Maxwell. Their gifts continue to support GAI initiatives, lectures, and student research awards.

“We could not do what we’re doing without it,” says Hermann.
She believes there’s no more important initiative at the School. “We’re training the young people who are going to shape our world in the future,” she says. “We’re training them to govern. More and more, that means practicing governance with a mind to other countries around us.”

Renee Gearhart Levy is a free-lance writer, based in Fayetteville, N.Y., who specialized in higher education.