State & Hill fall 2022

Democracy in the United States and across the globe has been in decline for years, as documented with rigorous tracking methodologies. Freedom House has tracked declines in civil liberties and political rights in the U.S., for example. And the...

Governing for revolution In her 2021 book, new Ford School professor Megan Stewart describes how, during the Chinese Civil war in the 1940s, Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established a new model for governing as they took up...

Passing the baton A June gathering with faculty and staff celebrating Michael Barr’s first term as dean—and this photo with then-associate dean Celeste Watkins-Hayes—took on new meaning a couple of weeks later when the U.S. Senate confirmed Barr...

Greetings from Ann Arbor! It’s been my great honor–and a lot of fun–to serve as interim dean of the Ford School, an outstanding community dedicated to the public good. This edition of State & Hill focuses on education policy—the research,...

Interdisciplinary, rigorous, and committed to real world impact and to mentoring: the Ford School has one of the strongest education policy programs in the country.  How did we get there? S&H asked the scholar at the front of the class, economist...

The Education Policy Initiative connects researchers and policymakers—helping make good use of their one-of-a-kind secure data clearinghouse By Daniel Rivkin A recent research project examined the ties between school funding and crime in...

Ford School education researchers look for answers By Shaun Manning From early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered public education in the United States. Many schools introduced remote learning for at least part of the 2020-2021...

By Daniel Rivkin When the state of Michigan issued its COVID-19 stay at home order in March 2020, Youth Policy Lab (YPL) Data and Policy Fellow Ava Attari found herself in the middle of an ambitious state program. The thousands of workers who had...

As the first chief economist in the U.S. Department of Education, Ford School alumnus Jordan Matsudaira (PhD ’05), seeks to identify and implement policies that best promote student success—academically and financially—in higher education. Ford...

By Miriam Wasserman At a time when the U.S. economy is facing the highest inflation in 40 years, two former Ford School deans have a vote on the 12-person committee in charge of steering U.S. monetary policy. Michael Barr will have a vote on the...

“The line of students registering to vote on Election Day stretched across the University of Michigan campus, with students waiting for over four hours. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the election on campus. For many...

The University of Michigan is currently in an interim period between its strategic plans for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), with the next plan set to launch in early fall 2023. The Ford School community did not pause, however, and is hard...

Many internships returned to in-person or hybrid modalities this summer, taking Fordies back around the world to work with nonprofits and NGOs, governments and agencies, and consulting firms and businesses—applying the skills and knowledge they’ve...

A new graduate fellowship has been endowed in honor of former dean Michael S. Barr, thanks to a generous lead gift from Jim Hudak (MPP ’71), chair of the Ford School Committee. The Ford-Rackham Master's Awards (RMA) are one of the Ford School’s and...

In 2021, after an initial pilot test, the Ford School became the first policy school to offer all Master of Public Policy students the opportunity to work with a certified executive leadership coach during their required summer internship. In...

Distinguished sociologist Celeste Watkins-Hayes works at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and institutions, with a special focus on urban poverty and race, class, and gender studies. She’s particularly interested in the lived...

Jenna Bednar published “The Fractured Superpower: Federalism is Remaking U.S. Democracy and Foreign Policy,” in Foreign Affairs. The Coalition for Networked Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE awarded Paul Courant the...

Ron Geason (MPP ’72) began his career as budget director at Carnegie Mellon with JP Crecine, the first director of IPPS. He received a PhD in 1988 in public administration and finance from The Ohio State University. From 2015–2017 he served with...

The results of the Russian aggression—starving people, murdering people—from that perspective, we have to help (people) so that they survive. But the cause, the causes are really more important. The cause is the bad political system in Russia....

This fall, after a national search, the Ford School selected Peter Vasher as the school’s director of career services. Vasher has been with the school since 2017 and served as associate director of graduate career services for three years. During...