ou with me? That make sense?” Amid a quick summary of the concept of credit crunch, economics professor Jerry Evensky stops. He motions toward the questioner and asks, “Did I answer your question? Are you with me?” Then, toward the whole room, “Is everyone else with me?”

It’s the end of the semester—the last day of regular classes—and Evensky is leading a pre-exam review session for students of ECN 203: Economic Ideas & Issues. It’s one of two sections he teaches of this intro/survey course primarily for freshmen and sophomores (microeconomics up to the midterm, then macro). Today, because there is no new content, attendance is down; only 55 of the 130 or so enrollees are on hand.

The class is held in Room 207, Hall of Languages. It is a service­able but sterile, fairly large classroom, with humming fluorescent lights and 140 seats on a sloping floor that allows Evensky to make eye contact with virtually every student. (“They know I know they’re there,” he says.) He is expert at engaging them, making it very difficult for anyone to check out or nod off. (One student near the back has opened a laptop and is completing a paper on medical ethics and cochlear implants, but he’s the exception.) Each answer is laced with the same audience check-ins: “I answer your question?” “You with me?” “That make sense?”

As the hour wears on, Evensky’s answers become less pat, less succinct. He begins to shape his explanations as scenarios, and successfully provokes students to complete his sentences; he asks them to extract implications from the economic circumstances he has detailed. “Come on,” he pleads, “let’s see some different hands.” By now, almost every pair of eyes is on him.

“If you have a question, stop me,” he says at another point. “This is my last chance to help you understand. You’re all paying me to be here to answer your questions.”

As it turns out, there never is a lull. The questions keep coming, the hour ends, and a half-dozen students shuffle up front after class, in their hoodies and baseball caps and heavily slung backpacks, hoping to ask just one more thing.

 erry Evensky is a senior member of the Maxwell School’s economics faculty (on board since 1985). His research interests run toward the moral, humanist, and philosophical side of economics. His 2005 book about the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith was published by Cambridge University Press.

Except during a sabbatical or two, Evensky has taught an undergraduate intro-to-econ class every semester he’s been at Max­well. Next semester he’ll also teach an upper-division honors course.

It is not at all difficult to find other Jerry Evenskys on the Maxwell School faculty—accomplished, senior professors with strong research and publication portfolios who choose to teach undergraduate classes, including lower-division courses. “If I ever got in a situation where I taught only grad students,” says Kristi Andersen, professor of political science, “I wouldn’t like that.” Andersen regularly teaches in the citizenship-focused MAX Courses, and has taught 200-level courses on political argument and on political parties.

Throughout academe, undergrads populate the same classrooms where senior professors also mentor their Ph.D.-bound counterparts. That is not remarkable. The contrast only seems a bit more stark at Max­well, which is by definition a graduate school of citizenship and public affairs. Officially, there is at present no such thing as a Maxwell undergraduate. When a Syracuse University undergrad enrolls in (or majors in) anthropology, sociology, international relations, history, geography, political science, policy studies, or economics, he or she does so as a student of the College of Arts and Sciences.

But the professor, the curriculum, and often the classroom are provided by the Maxwell School. The social-science education gets done in Maxwell. Last academic year, 1,889 undergraduates majored in the social sciences. (Most popular, by far, is political science, with 719 majors.) In addition to the majors, countless other students take Max­well courses as electives or en route to completing their liberal arts core requirements. Last year, Maxwell provided nearly 51,000 credit hours of undergraduate instruction, which is four times that provided at the graduate level.

In addition, Maxwell maintains a recently renovated study lounge for undergraduates and endeavors to treat undergraduates at least as well as its graduate students are treated. Their diplomas are co-signed by the Maxwell and Arts and Sciences deans (a gesture begun about a decade ago). And graduates of the B.A. programs are invited to Maxwell alumni events, which they often attend, speaking enthusiastically of their Max­well School experiences.

In that light, Maxwell, which stakes so much of its external reputation on the quality of its M.P.A. and other graduate programs, is one of SU’s largest and strongest undergraduate colleges—even if, on paper, it’s not an undergraduate college at all.

here is an assumption in higher education that senior professors live for their research and the opportunity to “teach their research” to graduate students; it follows from this view that teaching undergrads is a dirty job best left to others. The veracity of that cliché is probably arguable, although some Maxwell faculty members have seen it at institutions where they formerly taught.

Andersen taught at a school where, she says, “you taught undergrads in order to pay your bills, basically. You really weren’t supposed to enjoy it. You really weren’t supposed to talk about it.”

For whatever reason, though, Maxwell has always enjoyed a strong teaching culture, attributable perhaps to the original citizenship curriculum. Through this
program, many of the School’s legendary professors were first hired and nurtured.

It is evidenced today by the high percentage of Maxwell faculty members who have been named Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professors for Teaching Excellence, an SU program rewarding and promoting good teaching. Over 12 years, roughly a third of all Meredith Professors named across SU have been at Maxwell (including Evensky and Andersen.)

And the attention to teaching may be encouraged, as well, by the University’s Future Professoriate Program, which focuses Ph.D. students and their faculty mentors on the techniques of pedagogy.

But, mostly, it just seems to happen. It is built into the culture of the Maxwell School.

Christine Himes, chair and professor of sociology, noticed it when she joined the faculty in 1995. “It was in the way people here talked about teaching, and ways to do it better. . . . It was very clear to me the climate was very different here.” Himes regularly teaches SOC 101.

It is telling that faculty members describe not an obligation to teach undergraduates, but an opportunity.

“Teaching undergraduates,” says Himes, “often means teaching them something for the first time. You can see their eyes open. It can be exciting.”
It’s good for the professor, too, says Roger Sharp, a member of the history faculty since 1966 who teaches HST 101. “I really enjoy discussing topics far from my own research,” he says. “I think sometimes we get too close to our research.” Teaching the survey course, he says, “forces me to understand historical issues more broadly.”

s a former high school social studies teacher, Jerry Evensky appreciates the chance not only to teach undergraduates, but to do so in a way that defies disciplinary boundaries. His goal is to connect economics to other human activity—politics certainly, but also sociology, anthropology, and history. During his hour-long review session, he weaves in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”; a newspaper clipping about the 1998 school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas; an account of a World War II soldier who threw himself on a live grenade; and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech anticipating his own funeral. (It’s all part of a larger point about people as something more than cogs in an economic machine.) He considers this the “Maxwell way” of teaching such subject matter. In this way, he says, an undergraduate education taken at Maxwell is different from others. “The best of what Maxwell is,” he concludes, “is a social-sciences integrated view of the human condition.”

Sharp’s perspective on such integration: “Teaching an undergrad class, I feel it’s important for me to show relevance.  . . . I’m helping them to understand where we are as a society today.”

At the graduate level, Max­well’s approach to interdisciplinary cross-fertilization is a hallmark. The School’s research institutes and centers exist for this purpose, and it manifests itself elsewhere in the graduate degree programs and curriculum. According to the faculty, this tradition trickles down to the undergraduate level as well, providing a richness of intellectual exploration that is “graduate-like.”

The interdisciplinary spirit is evident in the policy studies major (see pages 10-16) and international relations major; and in the MAX Courses, which are, by definition, interdisciplinary in their approach to citizenship. And it shows up in any classroom—like Evensky’s—where the professor exercises the opportunity to test traditional boundaries and make new connections.

Evensky sees interdisciplinarity as an outgrowth of the School’s unusual graduate-level mix of theory, policy, and practice. “The Maxwell School is a graduate school,” he says, “but the Maxwell policy orientation permeates the undergraduate education.”

Michael Wasylenko, who, as senior associate dean, oversees academic programming, concurs. He sees the proximity of graduate-level professional programs as a hedge against pointlessly arcane pedagogy. “We’re much more grounded in reality than most undergraduate social science programs,” he says.

Interdisciplinary vigor, transmitted by professors who share Maxwell’s traditional attention to great teaching, makes for a memorable and significant undergraduate experience. Among Syra­cuse’s undergraduate alumni, many report pivotal classroom experiences that took place in the Maxwell School. They cite, as life-changing influences, Michael Sawyer, Robert McClure, Douglas Armstrong, John Western, Ralph Ketcham, David Bennett, or any of dozens of such faculty members. Often, such alumni appreciate only years later how fully broadened their minds were as undergraduates in the social sciences.

It’s a great liberal arts education, to be sure—one delivered via courses in the social sciences. But to Jerry Evensky, it is, as well, a great citizenship education.
“I’m not teaching policy so you can get a job,” he says. “For me, part of the liberal arts is producing thoughtful, active citizens.”

Or, as he tells his undergraduate class on the final day of ECN 203, fall 2007 edition: “The purpose of the class isn’t to answer these questions. It’s to equip you to think in an informed way about them so you can find the answers on your own.”

In a minute, his tone changes, like maybe class is ending, and students start reaching for their bags. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Evensky protests. “Don’t start packing. I’ve got two minutes.”

This article appeared in the Fall 2007 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2007 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.