Spotlight

“Completely ignored was the basic economics of trade deficits and surpluses, which says that trade balances are governed not really by trade policies but by macroeconomic conditions and policies,” says Devashish Mitra, professor of economics.

“We're still not very close to phase two coming into place. Hamas is unlikely to disarm willingly and Israel is not going to be able to disarm them,” says Osamah Khalil, chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program.

“The images that these cameras capture have a lot of information. Even when you anonymize them by throwing away metadata, you can figure out where the image was taken,” says Johannes Himmelreich, associate professor of public administration and international affairs. “After all, you still see the street and everything around the car. So, I doubt that the anonymization is robust.” 

Mark Brockway, assistant teaching professor of political science, notes that the plaques may seem ridiculous and are certainly a ham-fisted approach to pushing a message. “But they really are a way to reaffirm the narrative that everything that’s wrong in the world is because of somebody else,” he says.

“Contrary to a lot of modern assumptions, it [the Maginot Line] was never expected to defeat a German attack by itself. The point of the Maginot Line was not to stop the boche in their tracks, but to channel any future westward offensive away from the French industrial heartland and toward the Low Countries, particularly Belgium,” writes Alan Allport, professor of history.

The maps are a tool to communicate more realistic flood risks to vulnerable groups, says Sarah Pralle, associate professor of political science. You can plug your address into a FEMA webpage and it will tell you your property’s flood risk. “But,” Pralle says, “if you don’t know where the risky areas are, none of that works.”

While the strikes on alleged drug boats have raised questions about the use of military force, Trump’s seizure of the tanker and other actions against sanctioned entities are consistent with past American policy, says Vice Adm. Robert Murrett (Ret.), professor of practice of public administration and international affairs.

If parents had more guaranteed welfare state program available to them, “it would be easier for them to juggle jobs and children and they might not need to rely on grandparents quite as extensively,” says University Professor Madonna Harrington Meyer.

For Trump, it doesn't matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, says Mark Brockway, assistant teaching professor of political science. “They are caught in the middle of Trump's fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway says.

“So many small farmers across Vermont and New York and elsewhere, are competing in a really unequal, unfair system. You have this structure where the vast majority of the food dollar—the money we pay for the food—is not going to the farm, the farm level, at all. So small-scale farmers are really struggling today, not just the workers but the farmers and the farm owners,” says Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, associate professor of geography and the environment.

“The job is a leadership role, where your task is to motivate people from wide-ranging, different disciplines to come together to define the problem as the same and then go about trying to solve it through multiple avenues. Everything I’ve heard about him certainly suggests that he’s got a lot of talent and capability to make him the ideal person,” says University Professor Emeritus Sean O'Keefe.