Schar School News for September 2023

Mason, Schar School Launch Pioneering Program to Fund Federal Internships for Students

Andrew J Schappert — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 14:38:15 +0000

Mason, Schar School Launch Pioneering Program to Fund Federal Internships for Students Andrew J Schappert Thu, 09/28/2023 - 10:38

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Gregory Washington

Mark J. Rozell

Anne Holton

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��AV President Gregory Washington, right, with Nicola Davis, left, and Danielle Perry. Photos by Nicole Kelleher/Schar School of Policy and Government

Most federal government internships offered to college students are unpaid, leaving many eligible students with no other choice than to pursue opportunities elsewhere. To address this issue, the Schar School of Policy and Government at ��AV launched a groundbreaking program called the Federal Workforce Initiative which will fund some 10 federal internships each semester for students working in various government agencies.

The program is a joint venture among the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, the Schar School, and Mason.

The Federal Workforce Initiative kicked off with an inaugural reception in September at the Virginia home of Schar School alum Colin Hart, MA Global Commerce and Policy ’93, and his wife Marianne. Cohosts on hand included former U.S. Rep. Tom Davis and former president and CEO of the Northern Virginia Technology Council Bobbie Kilberg and her husband Bill Kilberg. Other initiative hosts include former Virginia State Senator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis and former presidential counselor Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty and his wife Donna.

In introducing the Federal Workforce Initiative to the invited audience of community and business leaders, Mason President Gregory Washington and Schar School founding dean Mark J. Rozell described how the program will channel talented students into exclusive federal government internships and provide leadership training, networking opportunities, and other aspects of professional development.

From left, Teresa Freeman, Schar School Dean Mark J. Rozell, and Leslie Durham.

Schar School public policy professor Anne Holton, former interim Mason president, said the program is “a win-win-win situation” for students and the federal agencies they serve, noting that the federal workforce is aging and is desperate to see an influx of “young bright minds” in the near future. She added that the Schar School will increase its regional presence in bringing new workers to federal agencies, and Mason students will be afforded training and experiential learning opportunities, thrusting them ahead of peers from other area universities.

Students chosen for the competitive initiative will receive a stipend of $3,500 each semester. Stuart Loomis, a Master of Political Science student at the Schar School and one of the first recipients, spoke movingly about how receiving the stipend during his internship at the Department of Transportation will impact his education, his career, and his life.

Click here to join the growing number of alumni and community members supporting this vital initiative.

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Schar School Study Shows 4 ‘Hubs’ of Illicit Trade—and the Reasons They Flourish

Andrew J Schappert — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 15:33:03 +0000

Schar School Study Shows 4 ‘Hubs’ of Illicit Trade—and the Reasons They Flourish Andrew J Schappert Wed, 09/27/2023 - 11:33

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Louise I. Shelley

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Louise Shelley: ‘This study underscores the critical need for governments and the private sector to prioritize the fight against illicit activities…’

A major new academic study highlights four geographic hubs of illicit trade for organized crime and specifies how each of the hot spots shares an enabling environment for criminals. In identifying the locations and the lax regulation and governance gaps that create the illicit trade zones, researchers say law enforcement and policymakers can take action to curtail the massive human, economic, societal, and security harms across the world.

The study, Smugglers’ Paradises in the Global Economy: Growing Threats of Hubs of Illicit Trade to Security and Sustainable Development, and its alarming findings were announced at the 2023 International Law Enforcement Intellectual Property Crime Conference organized by Interpol in Oslo in late September. A copy of the report and the accompanying research can be found on the Hubs of Illicit Trade page.

“This study underscores the critical need for governments and the private sector to prioritize the fight against illicit activities and to crackdown on organized crime within their Free Trade Zones and other hot spots,” said Louise Shelley, Hubs of Illicit Trade project director and University Professor at ��AV. Shelley is also director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) at Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government. TraCCC’s Anti-Illicit Trade Institute (AITI), codirected by former U.S. diplomat David M. Luna, also participated in the project.

The study reveals that four global hubs—South America (the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay tri-border area), Central America (Panama, Guatemala, and Belize), the Middle East (Dubai), and Eastern Europe (Ukraine)—share an enabling environment that fuels illicit trade, facilitated by regulatory laxity, and are points of convergence for different types of criminality, such as corruption, money laundering, and other security threats that contribute to the movement of illicit goods and contraband in Europe and the United States, amongst others.

“Our mission is to advance robust international cooperation, not only with European institutions and inter-governmental organizations but also with national law enforcement authorities,” Luna said from Oslo. “An important step in this direction is to strengthen the policing of Free Trade Zones and foster effective cross-border law enforcement and judicial actions, including participation in diplomatic fora.” Those include the upcoming global tobacco control meetings (MOP3) in Panama, the April 2024 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Working Party on Countering Illicit Trade, and the Oslo conference.

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Pulitzer winner, poverty researcher Matthew Desmond to deliver 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture

Colleen Rich — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:59:42 +0000

Pulitzer winner, poverty researcher Matthew Desmond to deliver 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture Colleen Rich Fri, 09/01/2023 - 11:59

Matthew Desmond says the Pulitzer Prize he won in 2017 for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the America City came as a surprise. “I didn’t even know it was happening that day,” he said, still blushing a bit during a Zoom call from his home office in Princeton, New Jersey.

Matthew Desmond. Photo by Barron Bixler

Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, is the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab, which compiles data on the 3.6 million eviction cases a year in the United States; it’s an aspect of his heartfelt studies of poverty and public policy. Desmond is the guest lecturer for this year’s ��AV Roger Wilkins Lecture, taking place Tuesday, Sept. 26, at 4 p.m. in the Harris Theater on the Fairfax Campus. The free event is open to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and all members of the Mason community.

Desmond’s new book, Poverty, By America (Crown), is a deep and compassionate dive into the persistence of poverty in the U.S. and the policies that have been shown to be effective in abolishing it.

“Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to,” he writes in the book. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”

Desmond has seen the effects of poverty—and the policies that change it—firsthand. The son of a preacher growing up in Winslow, Arizona—a desert town offering little else beyond a fabled street corner in a song by the Eagles—Desmond experienced “the humiliations of poverty—we got our gas shut off, for instance,” he said, and losing the family home to foreclosure.

But a public policy changed everything for young Desmond: Arizona students who finish high school in “the top 5 percent of your class, you get free tuition at a state school,” he recalled. “That was the lifesaver that helped me get to Arizona State University. If we’re going to point to one policy along the way that was the secret sauce, it was that tuition assistance policy I got when I was 18.”

He added that there are other policies can help eradicate poverty in addition to tuition assistance. Housing vouchers, for example, allow families to “go to the grocery store to buy more food because they don’t have to pay 50, 60, 70 percent of their income on rent. These things work for the lucky minority that benefit from them.” And lucky is the word: “They literally have won the lottery” when awarded vouchers, he said.

While he’s hopeful his Wilkins lecture will have an impact on those in the audience, “a fear of mine is people read my book or come to my talks and they say, ‘good book, good talk,’ and they go on with their lives,” he said. “I want us all to commit to this project of ‘poverty abolitionism,’ this conviction that we should have a zero-percent poverty rate and [understanding] that profiting from someone else’s pain corrupts all of us.”

The Wilkins Lecture is named for the late Wilkins who was a civil rights activist, the first Black U.S. assistant attorney general, and a Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at Mason for 20 years. The series was established as a tribute to Wilkins by his colleagues and is also sponsored by the undergraduate Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. Previous Wilkins lecturers include Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and civil rights activist James Foreman Jr.

“Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”

~ Matthew Desmond

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Previous Wilkins Lecturers

Wilkins Lecture offers a critical look at how to solve poverty in America
September 27, 2023
Pulitzer winner, poverty researcher Matthew Desmond to deliver 2023 Roger Wilkins Lecture
September 6, 2023
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie examines U.S. political inequality in annual Wilkins Lecture
April 6, 2022
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie is the featured speaker at this year’s Roger Wilkins Lecture
March 30, 2022
Justice Elena Kagan is this year’s featured speaker at Roger Wilkins Lecture
November 11, 2019

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