Maxwell School News and Commentary

“Fighting to Survive: Collective Action, Trusted Messengers, and UNITE HERE's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” co-authored by Associate Professor of Sociology Gretchen Purser, was published in Labor Studies.

“What Mr. Trump is doing with tariffs is a result of a lost consensus about how the United States should interact with other countries in the global economy. He is stepping into that vacuum, filling it with the unrestrained and autocratic use of import taxes, moves that appear to be based on personal whim rather than on U.S. trade law,” says Mary Lovely, professor emerita of economics.

“Lots of the fights that they have picked—especially Musk’s out-of-control, rampant destruction of federal agencies from within—a lot of those fights they are not going to win in court,” says Thomas Keck, Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics.

Valerie earned a bachelor’s degree in policy studies in the spring of 2024 after just three years and with a 4.0 GPA, and was in her first year with the organization Teach for America. She passed away on Dec. 23, 2024.

“Military and surveillance tech aren’t bad or unethical as such. Instead, supporting national security and doing so in the right way is incredibly important. And supporting national security is, in fact, arguably the ethical thing to do," says Johannes Himmelreich, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs. 

It has been almost two decades since the start of the Great Recession, but that historic economic crisis is still having an impact on older adults. In this Q&A, Miriam Mutambudzi, assistant professor of public health, explains her most recent study on the effect of the Great Recession on older adults

Townsend joined the faculty in 1973, and through the decades served as a professor, mentor, writer and researcher in the Anthropology Department. He faced long-term health conditions but, so devoted to his craft and his students, he continued to teach through the spring of 2024. He passed away on Jan. 22, 2025, at the age of 83. 

“ I thought that [Pete] Hegseth, the defense secretary, was the most problematic overall, of all the ones that stayed in the process. I think given that Hegseth has made it through, that tells me that the other ones are likely to make it as well,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

Before 1934, Congress—not presidents—had power over tariff rates and negotiations, says Andrew Wender Cohen, professor of history. But Democrats had an enormous majority around the New Deal era and passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, granting the president the right to negotiate tariffs in certain cases, Cohen says.