The Carnegie Corporation of New York has awarded $1 million to Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs to develop a program to narrow the gap between policymaking and academics.

The grant will help create the Carnegie International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network which will bring together policy makers and academics into a network of scholars, said Francis Gavin, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the leaders of the consortium. Gavin credited Maxwell Dean James Steinberg with the idea.

“Dean Steinberg’s essential insight is that this situation is not optimal for the students, the nation or policymaking. Creating a situation where students can do both (academia and policy) will be better for the Maxwell School and all universities,” he said.

The scholars in the consortium will work with and mentor a class of fellows. While this will require some meetings and conferences on location, the consortium leaders plan to leverage online technology to make and maintain the network, Gavin said.

To this end, Maxwell will create a laboratory, like a virtual boardroom, which will enable real-time communication and collaboration between institutions. This collaborative laboratory, or collaboratory, will allow students to efficiently seek expertise and guidance, Gavin said.

Maxwell’s grant proposal grew out of another Carnegie grant to explore program ideas that could help bring academics and policymakers closer together. The grant then competed against grants from other schools in the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs.

An outside panel of experts and the entire Carnegie International Peace and Security program staff reviewed the proposals. Selected finalists then offered full proposals to the reviewers who then made recommendations to senior management and the Board of Trustees, said Stephen Del Rosso, the Carnegie Corporation program director for international peace and security, in an email.

The grant will cover the cost for the first two years of the consortium. After that point, the university will have to decide whether or not to continue the program. The grant is still in the planning stage, which means many things still need to be determined. But according to the initial budget schedule, the collaboratory should be built by the spring of 2016 and students should be attending classes by the fall of 2016.

Professor Margaret Hermann, director of Maxwell’s Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and co-leader of the consortium, said one of the reasons she came to Maxwell was to support the connection between policy and academic theory.

“This is something I believe in and have worked across my career to try to do,” she said. “I truly believe we have the capability here to be interdisciplinary and to move between these two domains.”

If the program proves to be successful, it could potentially grow beyond the initial grant and consortium to include more institutions and scholars. Duke University, University of Virginia, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a few others have agreed to participate in and collectively govern the consortium since it will consist of students from each institution.

Professor Hermann said she is optimistic about the future of the project and applauds the Carnegie Corporation for its insights.

“I think it’s exciting and I think it’s critically important for the future of both the academy and the policymaking community,” she said. “I think Carnegie really is to be congratulated for seeing this as a problem and trying to do something about it.”

Published on September 29, 2014 at 12:01 am

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