The Political Fray

July 9, 2014

From Maxwell Perspective...

The Political Fray

Demonstrations in 1963 to protest construction of I-81, in which Maxwell faculty members and students participated. (Courtesy Onondaga Historical Association.)

Considering that the Maxwell School was designed from the start to engage with civic issues and public policy, it’s no surprise that the School has been politically active throughout its history — and scrutinized and criticized for its perceived political leanings.

In the ’30s and ’40s, when Maxwell graduates were helping to lead a progressive movement in social-studies education and were also employed in large numbers by the burgeoning bureaucracy of the New Deal, the School was often under attack by conservatives — and tagged as “the little red schoolhouse” and “Maxwell.” Feeding into Maxwell’s liberal reputation, too, was the involvement of many faculty and students in the peace movement after World War I.

In the McCarthy era, right-wing attacks on the School intensified — despite the fact that some Maxwell professors at the time were producing fervently anticommunist works, such as The Communist Problem in America, edited by political science professor Edward E. Palmer. Even Maxwell Dean Paul Appleby was pulled into the fray, forced on several occasions to defend himself against charges of being a communist sympathizer.

During the political tumult of the 1960s, Maxwell students and faculty members were often at the center of antiwar and civil rights demonstrations on campus. One local issue that sparked impassioned protests was the state’s plan to raze Syracuse’s largely African-American 15th Ward to make a path for Interstate 81. In 1963, more than 150 SU students and faculty were arrested for chaining themselves to demolition equipment — including sociologist Byron Fox and political scientist Dale Tussing (still at Maxwell as an emeritus professor).

In the present era, though, Maxwell is as likely to be criticized for its conservatism as for its liberalism. In the 2000s, for example, faculty member Arthur Brooks was well-known for a series of Wall Street Journal op-eds debunking common liberal values, making pragmatic, data-based arguments for conservative policies and priorities. (Brooks is now president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.) It is likely that, today, both the American political landscape and the Maxwell School are too large and complex to ever occupy any one political pigeonhole.

— Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers