• forever orange

    Now more than ever

    These are important times for the United States, for democracy, and for the world. And they are important times for the Maxwell School, which exists to sort out the biggest issues of society, while preparing leaders and citizens for their roles in public life.

    Maxwell is taking extraordinary steps to meet the challenges of the era. We are creating new research initiatives—and enhancing many of those that exist, so as to better inform public policy and gain a deeper understanding of society. We are creating named faculty positions and filling them with scholars who not only conduct such research, but also prepare future researchers to do the same. And, in particular, we are optimizing Maxwell’s advantages for undergraduates—many of them future public leaders, all of them future engaged citizens.

    In all this work, Maxwell remains doggedly interdisciplinary, because complex public challenges require broad approaches. Maxwell is still the only major school of public affairs mixing the social sciences, policy research, and professional degrees.

    Amid these efforts, in late 2019, Syracuse University announced the Forever Orange campaign. Within it lies $125 million in funding priorities for Maxwell. The campaign also incentivizes Maxwell to attract 125,000 unique donors, to symbolize the breadth of School support.

    All who have ever supported Maxwell, or even considered supporting Maxwell, are encouraged to make a new investment in the School. For Maxwell, and for the world, it matters now more than ever.

  • Campaign priorities

    Over the life of the Forever Orange campaign, Maxwell will raise $125 million to fund priorities contained in the School’s long-range strategic plan. As of early 2020, our donors have already moved us to meet almost half of our goal!

    With this incredible support, our start is strong. To meet our campaign goals, we will raise the remaining $65 million to support the following priorities from the School’s long-range strategic plan.

    Student Access and Experience

    This is Maxwell’s top campaign priority, which will provide support for financial aid for both graduate and undergraduate students and undergraduate research.

    Faculty Support

    Maxwell hopes to create, through major naming gifts:

    • seven endowed professorships (each requiring $2 million of support);
    • thirty faculty fellowships (at $100,000 each); and
    • with $5 million each, three specialized faculty posts: a Visiting Ambassador in Residence, Visiting Executive in Residence, and the Maxwell Deanship.


    Gifts will also augment the existing Astrid Merget Fund (which supports professors based in D.C.) and the Tenth Decade Fund (which provides seed funding for entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary faculty research projects.

    Discretionary Support

    This campaign priority allows the School to support immediate priorities and needs. Half will go to the Dean’s Fund, through which School leadership seizes upon emerging opportunities and meets unforeseen challenges. In recent years, the Dean’s Fund has supported individual faculty research projects, provided start-up funding for Maxwell’s now-thriving X Lab, and allowed a handful of promising students to address unforeseen financial challenges.

    Aside from the Dean’s Fund, discretionary gifts have supported programming for politically active veterans, Community Geography projects focused on refugee populations in Syracuse, and a new academic program at the nexus of geography and economics.

    Research Center Support

    Rounding out the campaign goals, Maxwell aims to underwrite research activities in the School’s interdisciplinary research centers and institutes.

    Facility Upgrades

    As well, we wish to fund facility upgrades, including new and improved spaces serving the School’s undergraduate population.

  • Commitment to Inclusion

    The Maxwell School stands in support of all students demanding change in the face of racism and hate speech on our campus. We are committed to making our school and our university a more inclusive and just community for all.

    There is absolutely no place here for behavior or language that degrades any individual or group’s race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability or religious beliefs.

  • Support Maxwell

  • Make your gift using our online form.

  • Honor Roll of Donors

  • Our 2018-19 Donor Report lists Maxwell alumni and friends, as well as corporations and foundations, that supported the School between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.

    In addition, we recognize lifetime and consecutive annual giving in our Dean's Circle and Sustainers groups.

    > View Maxwell's Honor Roll of Donors for fiscal year 2019.

  • Giving Stories

    Scruggs Scholarship will benefit current undergrads

    A new scholarship fund, honoring former history professor Otey Scruggs and his widow, Barbara, will reward current undergraduates for their accomplishments and promise at Syracuse University and the Maxwell School. The Otey and Barbara Scruggs Maxwell School Scholarship is being created with a $280,000 gift commitment from Otey and Barbara Scruggs’s son, Jeffrey M. Scruggs, and his wife, Robbin E. Mitchell.

     

    Scholarship fund honors policy studies professor Bill Coplin

    A campaign intended to raise as much as $1 million in new scholarship funds was launched earlier this semester in the name of legendary policy studies professor Bill Coplin. Creation of the Bill Coplin Policy Studies Scholarship was prompted by alumna Elysa B. Wolfe, a 1993 Maxwell graduate who herself majored in policy studies (as well as political science).

     

    Maxwell's first-ever Huxley scholar has found her intellectual home

    From the moment Brielle Valenza stepped foot in the Maxwell Auditorium as a first-year student, she knew she had come to the right place. "The sense of history in that room is palpable."