hortly after Daniel Patrick Moynihan died in March 2003, his widow, Liz, and the Moynihan family decided that, to honor the Senator, an institute should bear his name. It should address the increasingly pressing questions of international relations and globalization. And, ideally, it should reside in Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, where Moynihan had served as a faculty member, both before and after his celebrated Senate career.

This idea made great sense to an awful lot of people, among them Charles Schumer, U.S. senator from New York and, as such, Moynihan’s Senate colleague until the latter re­tired in 2001. “When I was told about this, I was excited right away,” Schumer says. “Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a mentor to me.”

Working with Senator John Warner (R-Va.) and, in the House, James Walsh (a Republican serving the district that includes Syracuse), Schumer spearheaded a congressional initiative to create the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

This spring, Schumer visited Maxwell to report on their success: The bill creating the institute had passed, and Congress had allotted $5 million in endowment funding. That’s half the amount Schumer’s bill calls for; while on campus, Schumer vowed to get the second $5-million appropriation, describing it as a “top priority” for the upcoming fiscal year.

The Moynihan Institute subsumes and builds upon the success of Maxwell’s 11-year-old Global Affairs Institute (GAI). Renamed in the Senator’s honor and operating with the eventual $10-million endowment, the new institute is positioned to gain national and international renown, multiply its project load, and further bolster the multidisciplinary, theory-into-practice traditions of the School’s collection of institutes and centers.

According to Margaret “Peg” Hermann, director of the former GAI (now director of the Moynihan Institute), the federal grant—the money per se—provides stability. As an endowment, the $10 million cannot be spent, and its dividends are modest. (University-based en­dowments are managed conservatively, yielding roughly 4.3 percent.) But, though modest, the payout is pivotal because it is permanent. It assures that the institute operates with confidence and long-range purpose.

The Moynihan Institute, like most such bodies, is only as strong as the externally funded projects it hosts. Other than those, GAI has depended on generous funding from alumni Gerald Cramer, Samuel Goekjian, and Joan de Sardon-Glass. However, even those gifts are directed to particular forms of student support, events, and faculty positions; only Cramer’s support comes close to the sort of general, operational assistance the Moynihan fund gives. This new endowment will provide the milieu and mechanisms from which major initiatives arise. The infrastructure of a successful research institute—assistantships, fellowships, travel grants, event support, and the like—are now assured. On that strong base new faculty-driven projects can develop.

What will those projects be? Hermann likes to imagine the Moynihan Institute possessing a creed, of sorts, based on the Senator’s own intellectual legacy. She lists three Moynihanian traits that are directly applicable to the institute’s mission.

“Senator Moynihan always recognized issues before others, anticipating topics that would soon occupy the public agenda,” she says. “Second, he always followed the data, basing his insights on empirical revelations. And, third, he always found a new ‘twist’—a new way to look at a question.”

That knack for innovative, transcendent analysis is what made Daniel Patrick Moynihan a prophet. A former ambassador to India and the United Nations, he championed a broad understanding of the roles of nationalism and international law in world affairs (in books such as On the Law of Nations and Pandemonium. Even in matters that seem domestic, he in­sisted on a broader context. As in his famous Beyond the Melting Pot study, he held ethnicity as a crucial ingredient in the American diaspora.

On the threshold of its expanded mission, GAI comprises four regional-study centers and seven thematic working groups. Roughly 80 faculty members do work fully or partially under its umbrella, as do nearly 300 graduate students. Meanwhile, Deborah Freund, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs of the University, has asked Hermann to help bolster an emerging SU priority: transnational citizenship (the no­tion that human affairs and al­legiances of­ten cleave to institutions that operate world­wide, ignoring national borders).

From all this, Hermann and a recently charged planning group must synthesize a vision for the Moynihan Institute, building on current GAI strengths while capitalizing on the legacy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who, Hermann says, “epitomized what we want to be in so many ways.”

—Dana Cooke

This article appeared in the Spring 2004 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2004 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.