Maxwell School News and Commentary

“In general, I'd like to hear answers or comments, not so much about Ukraine, but about Russia, because it's not Ukraine, but Russia, that poses the biggest challenge today,” says Tetiana Hranchak, visiting assistant teaching professor in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system. Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes,” says Gary Engelhardt, professor of economics, in response to Trump's statement that Biden will destroy Social Security and Medicare by putting migrants entering the U.S. on the benefits.

“There is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming,” says Jacob Bendix, professor emeritus of geography and the environment. 

Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment, says the Saudi monarch-in-waiting “is more concerned about selling these projects to his people than he is in selling them to the West. So, all of these big sports investments have to be carefully positioned as somehow contributing to Saudi national interests.”

“Trump seemed to bring almost every issue back to immigration and the harms he asserted were coming from that—that was obviously one of his main strategies. President Biden seemed to address different policy questions more in their own terms. He talked fast and in a staccato, hoarse whisper,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

In our most recent GenForward poll, “what they actually said [was most important to them] was income inequality and economic growth. It seems that what we saw four years ago has really shifted for young voters and they're more concerned now with how they're going to have economic longevity,” says Jenn Jackson, assistant professor of political science.

Professor of History Albrecht Diem's book chapter on the evidence of queer life in the Monastery of Reichenau during the early medieval period, based on a ninth-century visionary text and early medieval commentary to the monastic rule of Benedict of Nursia, was extensively discussed in an article published in Der Spiegel.

“We think the current civil service system is badly in need of reform. But the blueprints offered by both left and right are problematic. One side is firmly rooted in a status quo that (inadvertently or otherwise) impedes accountability, and the other could end up politicizing the very civil servants who should be politically neutral,” writes University Professor Sean O'Keefe and his co-authors.

“The U.S. and Canada will do anything possible to avoid a draft,” says Michael Williams, associate professor of public administration and international affairs. If war breaks out, a coalition force of North American professional military personnel would likely do the fighting, alongside existing European troops, he says.