Maxwell School News

“The situation certainly makes it much harder for any replacement to defeat Collins, and therefore it makes it one seat harder to retake the Senate,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

“The role of politics in shaping the global currency hierarchy is seen as secondary to…baseline economic fundamentals,” wrote Daniel McDowell, professor of political science, for the Atlantic Council’s Geoeconomics Center. But that’s changing. “In the great global currency debate, market forces have never been more passé and political forces have never been so prominent.”

“I think his strategy now is the same as it's really been from the very beginning, which is to try and figure out how to subjugate Ukraine. And that's the goal he's been after. And he's using really most of the means at his disposal to try and achieve that. If you look at his recent interviews, he does not want to concede at all that Russia is facing any serious problems,” says Brian Taylor, professor of political science.

“This disaster throws a wrench in the White House and State Department plan for securing and stabilizing the circum-Caribbean region that includes Venezuela,” says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

Colleen Heflin, professor of public administration and international affairs, says it is important to note that “since a large portion of these errors are outside the control of the agencies [because they have to work with the information that clients provide], it will be difficult to bring down these errors without needlessly burdening all SNAP recipients.”

“In China, the response is more centralized and top-down,” says Yingyi Ma, professor of sociology. “AI is being built into national education planning and new majors. In the U.S., the response is more decentralized. Individual universities, schools, departments and faculty variability is huge.”

Grant Reeher, professor of political science, argues Pres. Trump's declining approval ratings on the economy are about more than just the recent economic impact of the war with Iran, saying it is "the cumulative effect of a host of policies that have not enjoyed widespread support, combined with rhetoric that has turned a lot of people off." 

“This might be a time of thinking about liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness,” says Carol Faulkner, professor of history. But in some ways this time is different, she says. “It's much more partisan. It's really much more about a divisive president than the 1876 or the 1976 commemorations.”

Leonard Lopoo, professor of public administration and international affairs, says the federal government could help families achieve their family planning goals by expanding pregnancy prevention and infertility treatments at all income levels.

Trump’s age is a “peripheral issue” when it comes to evaluating his presidency, says Grant Reeher, professor of political science. “Concerns about the administration are not about cognitive decline but rather WHAT he IS doing, in terms of policy, funding and rhetoric,” he says.

Separatism is “in the zeitgeist,” says Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science and author of The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work (Oxford University Press, 2025).

In the book, Leonard M. Lopoo, professor, chair and associate dean of public administration and international affairs, traces how America’s first reproductive policies were shaped by eugenicists focused on limiting births among lower-income and minority populations.

Glyn Morgan, associate professor of political science, writes on CapX how the trade deal the U.S. and EU agreed to during meetings in Turnberry, Scotland, in 2025 exemplifies the changing relationship between the two from one built on mutual benefit to one that is fully transactional.

“I think this idea that the Iranians are going to turn uranium over is really posturing. They're not going to turn the uranium over. What they may be willing to do is actually downgrade the uranium to a certain level under UN or international auspices and the United States is going to have to agree to that,” says Osamah Khalil, chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program. 

Dave Larsen, professor and chair of public health, says that with the cuts, $25 million would only be enough to fund wastewater surveillance in a few states, and mean only seasonal epidemic pathogens like influenza, RSV and COVID-19 could be tracked.

“It's going to be very difficult to get all the contacts identified and followed properly, especially since the international aid community is really short on resources,” says Brittany Kmush, associate professor of public health. “You don't want to be short on people and resources to do the contact tracing, short on places to go for people to quarantine and isolate.”

“Even if you don't win this time, now people are at least talking about the possibility of a billionaire tax,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking. “That seems pretty strategic to me.”

“Right now, it feels like for a lot of people, they don’t have much say and control over how AI is being used,” says Baobao Zhang, Maxwell Dean Associate Professor of the Politics of AI. “It is either forced upon them...or they feel like they have to acquiesce to it in order to keep their job.”

“We have a distorted global economic system that rewards fossil fuel extraction, that rewards fossil fuel dependency. And as a result, it is harder for smaller countries that are worried about their own energy security, their own economic security, their own social social development to forgo an oil discovery,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.