“The job is a leadership role, where your task is to motivate people from wide-ranging, different disciplines to come together to define the problem as the same and then go about trying to solve it through multiple avenues. Everything I’ve heard about him certainly suggests that he’s got a lot of talent and capability to make him the ideal person,” says University Professor Emeritus Sean O'Keefe.

“If the U.S. stops even doing that—and it would be quite a radical policy change if the U.S. is unwilling even to sell weapons to European countries—then Europe will have to continue on the path it is already on, which is to bolster its own defense production capacity,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

“She [Vice President Delcy Rodriguez] strikes me as somebody who has known how to accommodate to Maduro, which is part of the reason why she’s there, but she doesn’t sort of strike me as somebody who would sort of step into that political vacuum and take control,” says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

“I think the fundamental problem remains, that Vladimir Putin wants to subjugate and control Ukraine and Ukraine wants to stay independent and sovereign and make its own political choices. So it's really hard to see a meaningful deal coming out of this,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Insititute of Global Affairs. 

“The presence of U.S. troops in Mexico will severely and irreparably undermine [President of Mexico] Sheinbaum’s counter-narcotics policies, which are netting results. Crippling the Sheinbaum administration will give rise to an even bigger and stronger enemy south of the border,” writes Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

“There is no way to disentangle red and blue America without tremendous violence. Additionally, a large and increasingly ignored percentage of Americans hold moderate views,” says Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science. “There is no doubt that polarization in America is a problem that is getting worse, but a national divorce is simply not the solution.”

“As a person who has lived on three continents and traveled extensively through three more, and as someone who has thought deeply about the implications of gospel values for both church and world, Leo is well aware that all that he says and does will be examined and parsed for their repercussions,” says Margaret Susan Thompson, professor of history and political science.

“Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is greatly damaging Russia’s future, with the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers at the front and the emigration of some of Russia’s best and brightest young people,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. 

“The truth is that a national divorce would require a dangerous unmixing and re-sorting of Americans. Imagine trying to draw a new map that is coherent yet still satisfies the greatest number of people,” writes Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science.

“This is a transcendent, boundary-breaking work about ‘the need to recognize, decode, and resist demonological messages,’” says Peter B. Kaufman, associate director of development at MIT Open Learning.

The “idea that irreconcilable differences justify secession ignores the violent history of such efforts, including the Civil War, and overlooks the reality that Americans are deeply intermixed—politically, geographically and ideologically,” says Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science. 

Co-authored by Associate Professor of Sociology Selina Gallo-Cruz, the article was published in Local Environment.

Brian Taylor, professor of political science, contributed a chapter to the recently published book Failure. Russia Under Putin (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is one of multiple authors who share their views on Russia’s failures under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. 

“Poland is a NATO member state. The United States is a member of this alliance and Poland is asking for consultations among the alliance. Several other countries sent aircraft to help down some of the drones. So this is at least a potential escalation here in the war beyond the Russia-Ukraine war,” says Brian Taylor, professor of politcal science.

The article, co-authored by Professor of Geography and the Environment Farhana Sultana, was published in Environmental Research Letters.

“That a Muslim woman in a colonized country conceived of green innovation, universal education and social equity as forms of justice more than a century ago is deeply inspiring, ” writes Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment, about Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream (1905).

“It is something that is done in other democracies when it really, really has to be done. It’s never ideal, and it should only be done in the U.S. or in any other democracy when it’s a true emergency, when there’s no other solution, and it should always be temporary,” says Matt Cleary, associate professor of political science.

Azra Hromadžić, professor and undergraduate director for anthropology, has contributed to a recently published book, Bosnian Fluxes: Belonging, Caring, and Reckoning in a Post-Cold War Semiperiphery (Routledge, 2025).

“There have also been arguments that DNI (Director of National Intelligence) has grown beyond its original intent. There is always a process of streamlining and covering the priorities effectively, but this doesn’t seem to be an effective way to do it,” says Kristen Patel, Donald P. and Margaret Curry Gregg Professor of Practice in Korean and East Asian Affairs.

“He [Putin] continues to launch missle and drone attacks, and military attacks continue along the front line. So Putin is really betting on a military solution, not a political one, despite all of the talks that took place over the last week,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.