This winter, Jeffrey Straussman, professor and chair of public administration, visited India to teach at the Indian Institute of Management. His students were midcareer Indian civil servants who had spent seven weeks at Maxwell last fall. Almost universally they cited as the highlight of their Maxwell experience the Symposium on Development and Social Transformation. “Repeatedly, they told me how valuable the opportunity to debate issues with people from all over the world was to them,” says Straussman.

Soon to start its sixth year, the symposium mixes the Indian midcareer visitors with other Maxwell students for four solid days of paper presentations and discussion of topics in international development. The symposium is the brainchild of Jeremy Shiffman, associate professor of public administration and an expert on public policy and administration in the developing world. The idea came to him prior to his first semester at Maxwell, while riding the LifeCycle at his gym. “The students would be writing papers for the class,” he says. “I thought it might be interesting to have them present the papers to each other in a simulated symposium.”

That first semester, Shiffman created a small “conference” for students in his classes. It worked so well, he expanded participation and turned it into a public event. The Symposium on Development and Social Transformation has been held each academic semester since. Last fall, 95 students presented papers in 25 panels, on topics including AIDS policy, corruption in bureaucracy, and the reconstruction of war-torn countries. Participants included students of Shiffman and of Professor Larry Schroeder, who also teaches development policy.

Many of Shiffman’s and Schroeder’s students are international and, with the midcareer Indian students, they make an interesting mix. Symposium participants have hailed from more than 50 countries and had work experiences that include the Peace Corps, United Nations, World Bank, and various government agencies.

Each one-hour panel includes short presentations and then about 30 minutes of discussion and debate, often including members of the Maxwell and greater Syracuse communities. “We have people with fresh ideas and people with long experience doing this kind of work, engaging and arguing with each other,” Shiffman says. “From that flow new ways of thinking about these subjects.”

Public presentation of these projects sometimes leads to unforeseen connections. Three years ago, for example, Shiffman was struck by common themes in student presentations on tuberculosis and malaria—themes shared by his own study of polio and global disease priorities. Shiffman and those students, Tanya Beer and Yonghong Wu, later co-wrote “The Emergence of Global Disease Control Priorities,” published in 2002 as the lead article in Health Policy and Planning (Oxford University Press).

Now the symposium has its own periodical. Last fall, the best papers from the previous year’s sessions were assembled in the first-ever issue of the Journal of Development and Social Transformation. Funded by the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, the journal, says Shiffman, is a natural extension of the symposium—another way to extend the reach of the research and ideas.

What the symposium has done, according to Straussman, is create a community of graduate students interested in international development issues. “There are literally hundreds of students who come through Maxwell each year who have an interest in developing countries,” he says. “We really could become one of the best schools in the country to study development policy issues.”

—Renée Gearhart Levy

This article appeared in the Spring 2005 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2005 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.