Maxwell Perspective: For Further Consideration
July 11, 2012
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For Further Consideration
Year in and year out, students decide to supplement classroom instruction by organizing full-fledged scholarly conferences on a topic of special interest. It’s hard work. (And this spring there were three.)
MPA candidate Burnell Holland III (center) stands amid a team of students who organized a conference on inclusive governance.
For Matt Isles, a current MPA student, it all began with a lecture last summer by Leonard Burman, Moynihan Chair of Public Affairs and former director of the Tax Policy Institute. Burman described the possibly catastrophic fate toward which current U.S. federal budget policies were leading all Americans. The conversation was lively and, for some of the students, provocative. There were more questions to be asked and answered. “A bunch of us kept talking about it afterward,” Isles remembers. “One thing kind of led to another.”
Growing out of Burman’s class, a new student group, Policy Students for Fiscal Sustainability (PSFS), was formed, building upon the work done by a similar group the previous academic year. Its shared, though loosely articulated, goal was to keep the federal budget dilemma in the forefront of student discussion, both in and out of class. Before they knew it, the members of PSFS found themselves embarking on what might be considered the ultimate in student self-education: a multi-day, panel-and-workshop-based conference.
Of course, springtime at Maxwell always means conferences, most organized by staff and faculty members. But others are fully conceived and organized by students themselves, motivated chiefly by the very serious issues their conferences address. This spring there was a bumper crop of those, including three whose ambitions were extraordinary, though their topics could scarcely be more different.
Debt, Deficit and the Economy was the title of the conference organized by a nine-person, non-hierarchical leadership team within PSFS. Another conference, coordinated by the Coalition of Multicultural Public Affairs Students (COMPAS), looked at inclusive governance in a changing demographic. The third, on post-disaster recovery, was organized by a collection of students informally affiliated with Maxwell’s Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.
Despite their different topics, these conferences were alike in a few respects, not least of which was the work necessary to pull them off. All required long-term planning, the work of committed teams, the financial support of Maxwell programs and institutes, and the guidance of the faculty.
Knowing that no one person could shoulder all the work that launching a conference would entail, the groups spread out responsibilities. Some students took on the task of seeking funds; others met to think about who, in a perfect world, would be the key experts to speak to the issues raised; and others drew on their experiences prior to Maxwell. Sabith Kahn, for example, a joint MPA/MA (IR) student, relied on his work in the area of special events planning and public relations in India to shape the conference on post-disaster recovery.
“The opportunity to work alongside an amazing group of students on a policy area so substantial was a motivating factor.”
-Conference organizer
Burnell Holland III
One of the most fundamental decisions each conference’s organizers faced was the type of speakers to select. The post-disaster conference featured student panelists from such institutions as Tufts University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Iowa. One goal was to create an inter-university network of students committed to this topic. A participant from Tufts said she hopes to host the second annual conference on post-disaster recovery next year.
The students organizing the debt-and-deficit conference, meanwhile, decided to reach for nationally recognized experts. (One student remarked that choosing panelists was a “go big or go home” effort.) Lacking contacts themselves, the team approached Maxwell professors to ask them to plumb their Rolodexes. It worked. The conference featured nationally recognized speakers such as Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Bruce Bartlett, columnist for the Fiscal Times; Susan Tanaka, vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation; and William Spriggs, assistant secretary for policy in the U.S. Department of Labor.
Asked why they willingly took on these conferences — when the life of a Maxwell student is intense enough — students answered variously that they wanted to leave a legacy behind or wanted to leave the Maxwell School better than they had found it. Not one student would agree, when pressed, that the effort was a resumé builder. Self-interest appears low on their priority lists.
Mostly, they were driven by the topics. “I look at the budgeting process as a moral issue,” says MPA student Jack Mayernik, who worked on the debt-and-deficit conference. “It’s a very complex issue, involving the values of a diverse constituency.”
Burnell Holland III, a member of COMPAS and co-organizer of the inclusive governance conference, says his topic (whether governmental processes adequately represent the diversity of the nation’s citizenry) is simply too complex to address otherwise.
“We wanted to fill a void, something we believe is missing from the routine academic discourse at public affairs institutions,” Holland says. He also describes a conference as an exercise in student community building. “The opportunity to work alongside an amazing group of students on a policy area so substantial was a motivating factor as well.” Holland credits 13 student colleagues, all willing to put in long hours, with the success of the COMPAS conference.
For organizers of the post-disaster conference, about the policy and management needs of recovery after natural or manmade disasters, the inspiration was current events. When they started planning, Pakistani flooding was in the news. Later, it was the earthquake in Japan. “We envisioned crafting a post-disaster tool kit that could be made available globally,” says Emera Bridger Wilson, a PhD candidate in anthropology. “We didn’t actually reach that point. But the work has begun. It’s something we hope the next class will work toward.”
For Leonard Burman, whose federal-deficit lecture inadvertently sparked one of these events, student conferences are a symptom of students’ highest instincts. “I really like working with our policy students,” he says. “I hope to give them some tools and spur them on to change the world.” Are they really as driven and idealistic as some of their conferences would suggest? “Yes,” he said, “and I hope they stay that way.”