Maxwell School News and Commentary

Ryan Gross, an incoming M.P.A. candidate and one of 61 Tillman Scholars across the nation, plans to use his degree to build upon the leadership and decision-making skills he gained through his career and to hone his policy development expertise. His goal is to create flexible, effective policy that will meet military commanders’ and soldiers’ operational needs on the ground.

"To allow a municipality to be stripped bare...would be to counter every other effort by which the law attempts to keep the municipal debtor intact," writes James Tatum III '17 M.P.A. 

"The role of the alt-right in the 2016 campaign, alongside the broader movement of fringe motifs into the mainstream, suggests a political future that once seemed inconceivable: the potential public re-emergence of a white supremacist organization, something not seen in America since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s," says Michael Barkun, professor emeritus of political science.

"These [Confederate] symbols were not widely used after the Civil War, but were reintroduced in the middle of the 20th century by white Southerners to fight against civil rights for African Americans," writes Logan Strother '13 M.A. (PSc), a Ph.D. candidate in political science.

Grant Reeher, professor of political science and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, says without key people pushing the administration’s agenda, "the government is going to have a tendency to kind of trundle along in the same direction it was beforehand."

"We're at a point now where I would think that the pressure to not be seen as toeing the party line for the White House would probably be more powerful than the pressure to protect the president in some way," says Grant Reeher, professor of political science and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.

"Trump’s proposal — at least what we know of it so far — reveals a plan that rests not on privatization but on public-private partnerships," writes David M. Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School.

Eric van der Vort '13 M.A. (PSc), Ph.D. candidate in political science, explains the lessons that LGBT movement history can teach social movements. He says the four key lessons are to acknowledge difference, pursue and provide education, build informal policy networks, and turn networks into durable coalitions.