January 14, 2009
SPA News

The university has risen consistently in the past three years, ranking seventh in 2008, eighth in 2007, and twelfth in 2006. Fifty-one AU students volunteered in the Peace Corps in 2008, bringing the schools overall total of volunteers to 769, reinforcing the university's commitment to "putting ideas into action, action into service."
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December 19, 2008
SPA News

The events of Mumbai focused the world on the looming threat of terrorism—again. The menace of these attacks touches on a basic emotion: fear. But until now, terrorism has largely been scrutinized under the lens of politics. Other dimensions—globalization, technology, liberty, and privacy,y as well as theories of aggression and criminology—have been sidelined and left unexplored in the classroom.
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December 9, 2008
American Today

The 1992 American University graduate takes the reins of the nation’s most influential political talk show this Sunday, becoming only the 10th permanent moderator in the 61-year history of the program. He succeeds the legendary and beloved Tim Russert, who died of a heart attack earlier this year.
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November 26, 2008
SPA News

More than a dozen AU alumni either successfully defended their seat or ran for office in their district or region earlier this November. Betsy Markey, SPA/MPA ’83 led an impressive contingent of SPA graduates running successful campaigns in November as she won a hotly contested election for the U.S. House of Representatives in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District.
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November 20, 2008
American Today

Given by the School of Public Affairs, the award honors two federal career executives for commitment to excellence, leadership, and professional development. This year’s recipients were Thomas Betro, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and Theresa Whelan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs in the Department of Defense.
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January 24, 2008
American Today

It’s an exciting time to be a young woman interested in a career in politics. A woman is running for president. A record number of women are now serving in Congress, with 74 in the House and 16 in the Senate. It’s more than ever before, but it’s still not quite 17 percent. AU’s Women and Politics Institute recently launched a program to help women prepare for a career in politics by gaining experience with today’s women leaders.The Congressional Fellows Program is an internship program for selected students enrolled in the Women, Policy and Political Leadership (WPPL) Certificate Program at the School of Public Affairs.
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January 23, 2008
American Today

Statistics show that roughly half the South Carolinians who will flock to the polls on Saturday, Jan. 26, to vote in the state’s critical Democratic presidential primary likely will be African Americans. No one knows for sure how they or anyone else will vote (see: New Hampshire), but few are better positioned to understand the unique dynamics of this historic race than SPA professor David Lublin.
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October 9, 2007
School of Public Affairs

School of Public Affairs alumni Annie Mayol and Sarah Simmons were selected as 2007 Rising Stars by Campaigns & Elections magazine. The award goes to people 35 or under who have already made a significant mark in political consulting or advocacy. Campaigns & Elections chose 10 Democrats, 10 Republicans, and five nonpartisan leaders this year out of a pool of several hundred nominees.
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October 9, 2007
School of Public Affairs

More and more, government appears to be running on contracts—even for crucial services and efforts. In stories on social services, health care, and the war in Iraq the name of an outside company is never too far from the lead. DPAP Associate Professor Joceyln Johnston sees the complexities of the new public manager now in charge of huge contracts
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October 4, 2007
American Today

Mark W. Everson, president and CEO of the American Red Cross delivered the keynote speech at the 30th Annual Roger W. Jones Award Oct. 4 in the Katzen Arts Center. The 2007 awardees were: John Potter, postmaster general and CEO of the U.S. Postal Service, and MaryAnn Musumeci, director of the Bronx/James J. Peters Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
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May 11, 2007
School of Public Affairs

Roger Depue (SPA/MA ’76, SPA/PhD ’86) has a knack for finding himself at the center of history as it unfolds. Over his 40-year career, the former marine has been on the trail of gangsters, assassins, even Watergate’s Deep Throat. Depue’s lasting contribution, however, has been his pioneering work in the field of criminal profiling and analysis.
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February 6, 2007
American Weekly

By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. Cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Professor Robert Durant explores efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns and build an environmentally sensitive culture within the post-Cold War military.
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November 21, 2006
SPA News

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Nov. 21, 2006) – American University’s Robert Durant, professor of public administration and policy in the School of Public Affairs, was recently inducted as a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). With Durant’s appointment, ten AU School of Public Affairs professors have been inducted into NAPA, as have more the 24 AU alums.
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November 9, 2006
Curtis Gans, Director, Center for the Study of the American Electorate

Contact: Curtis Gans, director, 202-434-8729 (temp. office), 202-885-6295 (reg. office); (703)
304-1283 (c)
Maralee Csellar, AU Media Relations 202-885-5952

Fueled by citizen anger at the performance of Congress, a growing disbelief in the wisdom of the war in Iraq, a mistrust of President George W. Bush’s leadership and a rejection of the Republican nostrums of the past 12 years, a modestly increased percentage of Americans turned out to give the Democrats a net increase of an estimated 300 state legislative seats, control of nine legislative chambers they did not have prior to the election, a net gain of six governorships and, likely, control of both Houses of Congress, overturning 12 years of Republican legislative rule.
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November 2, 2006
Curtis Gans, Director, Center for the Study of the American Electorate

Based on final and official registration reports from 34 states, an estimated 68 percent of eligible citizens or 138,810,000 will be registered for the Nov. 7 election, according to a report on registration and final statewide primary turnout released today by American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate.
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September 14, 2006
Faculty Q & A

A colleague from Oxford calls Robert J. Marshak a “grandmaster of OD.” Marshak (SPA/MPA ’73, SPA/PhD ’77) demurs but admits he occupies a unique niche in the growing field of organizational development. The scholar-in-residence at SPA’s AU/NTL program is both an accomplished practitioner as well as a renowned academic.  His first book, Covert Processes at Work: Managing the Five Hidden Dimensions of Organizational Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2006), addresses the concealed forces at play in offices around the world.
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September 8, 2006
Assistant Professor of Government Todd A. Eisenstadt in "Scholar"

Someone on 2006 Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s team forgot to update his post-election playbook. López Obrador, the losing candidate, protested all summer to condemn the referees of the election he lost by a razor-thin margin on July 2. His fiery rhetoric was decidedly twentieth century. The candidate seemed nostalgic for Mexico’s pre-democratic days when street demonstrations and “sit-downs” forced concessions from authoritarian rulers. To my view, López Obrador failed to recognize his nation’s dramatic move toward democracy since the turn of the new century.
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August 14, 2006
AU Media

American University and Universidad Autónoma de Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s largest public universities, have been awarded a three year, $300,000 grant by USAID’s U.S.–Mexico Training, Internships, Exchanges, and Scholarships (TIES) university partnership initiative to train indigenous lawyers in the tenets of a the newly proposed criminal procedure code of Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s most retrograde states in terms of its lack of democratic and accountable governance
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August 10, 2006
AU Media

The Bryce Harlow Foundation selected three graduate students from American University's School of Public Affairs for the prestigious Bryce Harlow Scholarship Award. The scholarship is awarded to exceptional graduate students with career goals in public affairs, government relations or lobbying who demonstrate high academic achievement and leadership skills.
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July 27, 2006
AU Media

American University School of Public Affairs Scholar Beryl A. Radin scrutinizes the assumptions of the performance movement in her new book, Challenging the Performance Movement: Accountability, Complexity, and Democratic Values (Georgetown University Press, June 2006). She argues that evaluation relies too often on simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions that are not always effective for dynamic organizations.
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July 18, 2006
AU Media

The prevailing notion that the best government is achieved through principles of management and business practices is hardly new. This early twentieth-century ‘gospel of efficiency’ was challenged by Dwight Waldo in his 1948 book, The Administrative State. Nearly 60 years later, American University School of Public Affairs Professors Howard McCurdy and David H. Rosenbloom examine the legacy of the scholar’s work and look ahead to administrative solutions in the newly released, Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State: Constancy and Change in Public Administration (Georgetown University Press, June 2006).
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May 31, 2006
American

Shortly after Abramoff’s January 3 guilty plea, Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Rules, picked up the phone and called Professor James Thurber, Washington’s preeminent academic on lobbying. Dreier had just been tapped by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to spearhead the Republicans’ lobbying reform effort.
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May 31, 2006
American

"Most of the women in this country have lived through an era in which they've been able to take their rights pretty much for granted," says Karen O'Connor, who launched AU's Women and Politics Institute (WPI) five years ago to study, teach, protect, and promote those rights. "I'm soon to be 54, and that's about as young as you can be and still recollect an era when there wasn't a Title IX, when abortions weren't legal, [and] when want ads said, 'help wanted male' and 'help wanted female.'"
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May 2, 2006
American Weekly

The debate over stem cell research has become one of the most polarizing and contentious ones in American society. Thursday evening, a distinguished panel of experts from the worlds of politics, science, research, and ethics convened in the Ward Circle Building to examine the issue from a number of different perspectives as part of the second-annual SHAPE: Carmen Group’s Policy Forum.
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May 2, 2006
American Weekly

School of Public Affairs professor Alison Jacknowitz set out to answer that question, and when her study, which she completed with two colleagues from the University of Southern California, was published earlier this year its findings sent ripples through the education policy community.
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April 18, 2006
American Weekly

Two Pulitzer Prize winners—Washington Post columnist David Broder and Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Taylor Branch—highlighted last Monday’s first biennial Conference on the State of American Democracy. The event aimed to explore “issues essential to the health of democracy,” including redistricting, voting law, and campaign finance reform, said Curtis Gans, director of the sponsoring Center for the Study of the American Electorate.
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April 11, 2006
American Weekly

With Israel and Palestine at an apparent crossroads in their decades-old struggle for peace, David Makovsky, a foremost expert on the region, was a natural choice to deliver the School of Public Affairs’ inaugural Amos Perlmutter Memorial Lecture. Perlmutter, an AU professor from 1972 until his death in 2001, was a dynamic scholar and expert in comparative politics and foreign affairs.
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April 4, 2006
American Weekly

For the second year in a row, AU boasts more Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) than any other school in the country. Thirty-four graduate and law students were selected for the federal government’s prestigious two-year program, which puts fellows on the fast track to high-level management positions.
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March 28, 2006
American Weekly

The spirit of suffragette and WCL alumna Alice Paul lives on in four AU women, honored last Tuesday by the Women and Politics Institute.
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March 21, 2006
American Weekly

Corruption takes place “under the table,” as the phrase goes, where it’s hidden from view and seems impervious not just to the eyes of the law, but to the measurements of scholars. So how is it possible to gain a reliable sense of just how pervasive corruption is in a society, and whether or not anticorruption measures are working?
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March 7, 2006
American Weekly

There’s a common image of a terrorist in the popular media and in the minds of millions, and it goes like this. He is a young Muslim man, perhaps steered onto his bloody path by a militant recruiter. His madrassa education gave him knowledge of almost nothing but the Koran, and he’s so sexually frustrated that he’s willing to blow himself up to get to a martyr’s heaven and enjoy his reward of 72 virgins.
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February 28, 2006
American Weekly

Touting patriarchal marriage as the “seedbed of virtue” that undergirds democracy, the Christian Right advocates traditional gender roles for husbands and wives.
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February 14, 2006
American Weekly

The Washington, D.C., 2006 mayoral campaign got into full swing on campus last Wednesday, as the National Pan-Hellenic Council hosted the contest’s first televised debate in the Kay Spiritual Life Center. Students, faculty, and city residents crammed the building and overflowed onto the front steps as five candidates defined their stances on crime, education, urban development, D.C. statehood, and—of course—baseball.
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February 7, 2006
American Weekly

The gravest threat to the country, the one that could “do this country in,” is secrecy in government, famed investigative journalist Bob Woodward told a standing-room-only crowd last week at the Kay Spiritual Life Center.
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January 31, 2006
American Weekly

A panel of experts headlined by Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats' point man on the issue, gathered at the National Press Club downtown for a summit sponsored by CCPS and the Committee for Economic Development.
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May 10, 2005
Government Executive

Homeland Security leaders should take very seriously the actions last week by House appropriators to slash funding for key programs...a panel sponsored by IBM and the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University.
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May 10, 2005
Government Executive

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday that his leadership team was opposed "more often than not" to raising the level of the color-coded threat advisory system because of the impact it had across the country...the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University.
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May 10, 2005
NPR

Eight former Homeland Security Department officials reflected on the department's first two years at a forum in Washington Tuesday.
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May 10, 2005
USA Today

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.
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