Director of Alumni Relations Jess Murray's fall 2024 letter to alumni and friends. 

Dean David M. Van Slyke writes to alumni about citizenship, declining democracy and the naturalization ceremony held at the Maxwell School in November.

“Landlords would still be able to evict tenants who are behind on their rent or who have violated the terms of their lease, but this law would give tenants the presumptive right to stay in the property otherwise. It would be a mechanism for both contributing to housing stability and prohibiting landlord retaliation against tenants who play by the rules,” says Gretchen Purser, associate professor of sociology.

“The idea that you’d use political coercion to bind countries, or bind market actors within countries, to use the currency is not how the dollar ascended to this place in the first place,” says Daniel McDowell, professor of political science. “If that’s what’s needed to maintain dollar dominance, that shows there’s a real fundamental problem with the economic appeal.”

Amid reports of democracy’s global decline, Maxwell faculty and students are gathering new insights into perception, polarization and other pressing concerns.

“There’s no way for Elon Musk to be unbiased,” says University Professor Hamid Ekbia. “He will use his new-fangled role to insert xAI into a dominant position at the expense of competitors who have a history of divergent agendas and philosophies.” 

Lara Hicks is an impact associate for Protect Democracy.

The translation, “Someone’s Rule for Virgins,” in Professor Albrecht Diem's “The Pursuit of Salvation: Community, Space, and Discipline in Early Medieval Monasticism” (Brepols, 2021), is currently featured as the Translation of the Month on Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index.

Jennifer Kuk and Renata Miskell were among those recognized for their innovative approaches to government operations. 

“The Roosevelt administration had attempted to reign in the Japanese, particularly by the use of economic boycotts. In mid-1941, especially, the Roosevelt administration had boycotted all sales of gasoline and aviation fuel to the Japanese. Now the idea was that this would be a detterent to the Japanese. It would persuade them to withdraw from China. But ironically, it ended up having the opposite effect,” says Alan Allport, professor of history.

She served as Peru’s minister of defense during a delicate time in the country’s history.

“If they had strictly stuck to doing technocratic policy and formulated this as a matter of bureaucratic procedure, avoiding terms to which the Republican administration is allergic, maybe that executive order could have stood a chance,” suggests Johannes Himmelreich, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs.

Michah Rothbart, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, and co-authors examine the ways in which county fiscal constraints may be associated with responses to the opioid epidemic. Published in Social Science & Medicine.

Members of the MPA Class of 2010 came together to support the Maxwell School with a fundraising campaign.

Professor of Geography and the Environment Natalie Koch examines how sustainability spectacle ultimately obscures Gulf state leaders’ refusal to shift their economies and political systems away from fossil fuels, while simultaneously justifying yet more unsustainable development—just with a new green label. Published in Current History.

“If all of a sudden HHS is now in the business of passing more regulations on the food industry, on agriculture, we might see that a Republican Senate majority and a Republican House is less interested in allocating a budget to HHS that then would be under a different leadership,“ says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science.

In this study, Associate Professor of Economics Monica Deza and her co-author find evidence that a prevalent and transitory exogenous health-shock, namely pollen allergies, increases traffic fatalities. Published in the Journal of Health Economics.