Campbell Institute News

University Professor Emeritus Sean O'Keefe says the nations that land on the Moon will have the advantage of exploring and developing the resources that are there. “After all these years of thinking it was nothing more than a dust bowl, we have come to realise it has a significant amount of helium 3,” he says.

“...What kind of worries me is this idea of the collapse of the context of communication when it comes from official government channels. What happens if the government is actually trying to send out a very serious message, alerting the public to maybe a natural disaster or some other serious threat?” says Baobao Zhang, Maxwell Dean Associate Professor of the Politics of AI.

“I do think it’s a particular moment of danger [for Trump]. Up to now, there has been this drip-drip-drip erosion in the president’s support. This one, to me, has more of a potential to open up a floodgate,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

The Maxwell professor will receive the honor at the Society for Applied Anthropology’s annual meeting in March 2026.

The U.S. is placing tariffs on other countries for making successful products—not because they’re acting unfairly toward the U.S., says Andrew Wender Cohen, professor of history. “Imagine there's a country that's producing something very inexpensively that people make a lot of use out of. You're basically saying, ‘Well, we want to punish you for that.’”

“If a person is on a short-video platform solely for entertainment, then their standard for whether something is worthwhile is simply ‘is it entertaining?’,’ says Emily Thorson, associate professor of political science. “But if someone is on the platform to learn about a topic or to connect with community members, then they might perceive AI-generated content as more problematic.”

Published in Social Work in Public Health, the article was co-authored by Robert Rubinstein, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Sanda Lane, professor emerita of public health; and Brittany Kmush, associate professor of public health.

“There is some sense that if they go low and you don't go high, then you end up being reduced to the level of the person you're disagreeing with. I would suggest something different, which is to focus on the real stakes,” says Keith Bybee, professor of political science.

“It is a very fine line, but it's a special obligation that public servants carry, particularly those in uniform, to follow through in this manner and to do so in a way that they understand precisely why what they're being asked to do is lawful in prosecuting the national interest of the United States,” says University Professor Emeritus Sean O'Keefe.

Robert Rubinstein, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and professor of international relations, has co-authored the textbook Cultural Awareness for Peace Operations Personnel to accompany a course of the same name offered by the Peace Operations Training Institute in Richmond, Virginia. 

“The images that these cameras capture have a lot of information. Even when you anonymize them by throwing away metadata, you can figure out where the image was taken,” says Johannes Himmelreich, associate professor of public administration and international affairs. “After all, you still see the street and everything around the car. So, I doubt that the anonymization is robust.” 

The maps are a tool to communicate more realistic flood risks to vulnerable groups, says Sarah Pralle, associate professor of political science. You can plug your address into a FEMA webpage and it will tell you your property’s flood risk. “But,” Pralle says, “if you don’t know where the risky areas are, none of that works.”

The school’s highest award was presented to the former dean, University Professor and senior statesman who “embodies Maxwell’s mission.” 

The article, co-written by Maxwell professors Peng Gao, David Larsen, Robert Rubinstein and Sandra Lane, was published in the International Journal of Health Geographics.

“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.

“It is time to wake up, break the gridlock, and take steps to address a range of large and growing challenges that threaten our collective future—including the need to make the Social Security system both solvent and sustainable,” says University Professor and Dean Emeritus John Palmer and his co-authors.

“As government—especially federal—support recedes, competition for philanthropic dollars and other revenue sources is likely to intensify significantly,” says Jiahuan Lu, associate professor of public administration and international affairs.

Ahead of the meeting between incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump, Grant Reeher, professor of political science, tells Agence France Presse: “Look for the outcome of that meeting to be something to the effect of, ‘I think I can work with (him)—but we will see how it goes and I’m hopeful—we both want the city to succeed’.”