Maxwell’s reputation as a research institution is as impressive as its record of producing leaders in its classrooms. Governments, corporations, and foundations at home and abroad regularly seek counsel from its professors and multidisciplinary resources, which include the Alan K. Campbell Institute of Public Affairs, the Global Affairs Institute, and the Center for Policy Research. Yet even while bearing considerable national and international responsibilities, the faculty continues to function as a vital campus resource, offering the University community the kind of reliable information and informed opinion that keep the conversations of a vital democracy buzzing on the Hill.

An
Unstable
World
      Senior Associate Dean Robert D. McClure is as much a voice in those discussions as any figure on campus. A political scientist with an unabashed enthusiasm for the ideals of American democracy, he seems to take the terrorist assault on American soil as a personal attack. When asked in what ways he thought the world had changed in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he offers a broad context for understanding the events. “Without question the world has changed,” he says. “This transformation began a decade ago, but was made horrifyingly and graphically clear on September 11th.”
      McClure believes the collapse of Soviet communism and the emergence of new technologies that have fostered globalization are the driving forces that moved us to a new era in world history. “Many saw the momentum of those developments moving us toward a more democratic and stable world,” he says. “But the change that looked so good to some was seen differently by others. Gradually, it became clear that America, as the one great power after the end of the Cold War, would be held responsible for all things in the world, both good and bad. September 11th warned us that we may be living in a world that is less stable than the one we knew back in the days of ‘mutually assured destruction.’ It warned us that we are perhaps more vulnerable now, and that globalization through trade and technology does not assure us a peaceful life of individual liberty in a global community.”

Demonstrators chant slogans and hold portraits of Osama bin Laden during a rally in Karachi, Pakistan, to protest U.S. military action in Afghanistan.