Maxwell School News and Commentary

Professor Bill Pooler "was a popular instructor whose courses were always oversubscribed. His teaching approach was to get students interested and involved in the subject, not just to memorize facts,” says Christine Himes, former chair of the Sociology Department in the Maxwell School.

"I think it's a very disturbing trend for the President to turn the relationship between the presidency and the justice department into an adversarial relationship based on political points of view. The justice department is charged with enforcing the law, it's that simple, and they shouldn't be influenced to do so in a certain way by the president or anyone else," says William C. Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism.

In his book, "A Culture of Conspiracy," Professor Emeritus of Political Science Michael Barkun writes "such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another," but rather "they are interconnected."

Jenny Sacks '08 B.A. (Soc), current president of the Syracuse University Alumni Club of Philadelphia, is this year’s recipient of the Generation Orange Award. The award recognizes alumni who have made an impact on campus and in their communities through volunteer work and philanthropy on behalf of Syracuse University.

According to Leonard Burman, professor of public administration and international affairs, "enlightened policy should aim to make work pay and help workers adapt. Better education and training will help. But a permanent solution would create a mechanism to automatically translate economic growth into higher wages."

"No matter how strong or dominant a personality the president has, he is going to have trouble taking on an American political institution as powerful as the U.S. Senate," says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.