The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies (CACPS) has recently posted on its website “Notes Toward an Agenda for Research on Orchestras,” which encapsulates the findings from a day-long workshop held last April in Princeton.  The Center convened more than 25 scholars, orchestra managers, grant makers, policy makers, musicians, and music critics to design an agenda for social-science research on orchestras.  Also available on the website is the blog discussion that followed the workshop and resulted in the final agenda.  To view the discussion and the Agenda, please visit the Center’s website. 

The Center for Health and Wellbeing (CHW) is supporting five research awards for undergraduates through the Grand Challenges Health Initiative. Each of the students is investigating aspects of infectious disease for their senior theses. CHW has also received a generous gift to support its expansion efforts. David Tanner ’80 has established a fund to support innovative research projects that engage faculty and students, and address critical health and health policy issues in the United States. He has also established a fund to support domestic research-focused internships or independent research projects conducted by students in the summer between their junior and senior years.

The Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP) co-sponsored, with the Department of Politics and the Department of Psychology, the Princeton Graduate Student Conference on Psychology and Policymaking on October 24-25. This interdisciplinary conference featured eight workshop-style panels of innovative graduate research examining the connections between psychological theory, political behavior, and elite decision making, with a keynote address by Richard Herrmann on “The Role Nationalism and Ideology Play in Shaping Images and Choices in Foreign Policy.”  It was organized by Nick Carnes, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and a member of Princeton’s Joint Degree Program in Politics and Social Policy; Dan Myers, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics; and Ann Marie Russell, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology and a member of the Joint Degree Program in Politics and Social Policy. Graduate students who attended expressed appreciation for the “coming together of these disciplines,” and highlighted the “bright people,” “diversity of the panels,” and “the collegial environment” that this innovative conference offered. The detailed program and links to the papers can be found at the conference website. CSDP also created the Election 2008 Blog which catalyzed faculty and students to offer their insights and analysis on the 2008 presidential race. The blog was created because CSDP faculty and fellows thought it would be “helpful and fun to collect the election-related research, analyses, and offbeat insights of our extended scholarly community, both for our own edification and as a resource for others interested in how political scientists are thinking about the election,” noted Larry Bartels, Director of CSDP and a Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School. A post-election debriefing, as well as all blog archives, remain available online.

The Future of Children policy journal has been awarded a grant of nearly $900,000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which will support the production, dissemination and outreach activities of four journal issues dealing with disadvantaged youth. The Future of Children volumes will contribute to the knowledge base of the Post Secondary Education Plus Initiative recently launched by the Gates Foundation.  Each volume will examine an issue that affects youth ages 16-26 as they try to improve their life circumstances, as well as those of their children. The topics proposed are Children in Fragile Families; Children and Youth in Immigrant Families; Work and Family Balance; and Post Secondary Education. The governing principle of all the volumes will be to identify research and policies that show promise in helping disadvantaged youth break the cycle of poverty and climb the income, employment and education ladders. 

The Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) welcomed its eighth class of Fellows this fall.  The distinguished group was the most geographically diverse since LAPA’s inception. The 2008-2009 Fellows include Christopher Beauchamp, named the Microsoft/LAPA Fellow, a historian of law, business and technology. He is working on a book about patent law and litigation during the “second industrial revolution” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Mark Brandon, a Professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University, where he is also Director of the Law School’s Program in Constitutional Law and Theory. He is presently studying the ways in which family might participate in creating, maintaining and changing a constitutional order; Malcolm M. Feeley, named the Martin and Kathleen Crane Fellow in recognition of his distinguished teaching career and contribution to the Princeton undergraduate curriculum, holds the Clare Sanders Clements Dean’s Chair in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley School of Law. He is currently exploring the importance of privatization in the development of prisons and the origins and antecedents of plea bargaining; Christina Murray is Professor of Human Rights and Constitutional Law at the University of Cape Town, where she is currently Head of the Department of Public Law and Deputy Dean of the Law Faculty. At Princeton she will be writing a book on the constitution-making processes from a comparative constitutional law perspective; Ingolf Pernice is a Professor and holds the Chair for Public Law, International and European Law at the Humboldt-Universitat of Berlin. He is examining multilevel constitutionalism as a theoretical pattern for a global law system; Noah Zatz, a law professor at UCLA Law School, joined LAPA after a year as a visitor at University of Chicago Law School. He will be investigating how contemporary anti-poverty policy has rendered child-care invisible as a component of household need and as a form of valuable work and seeking to develop new approaches to means-testing and work requirements of welfare policy.
    LAPA’s year began with the fourth annual LAPA Faculty Retreat, where faculty and graduate students joined with the new fellows for a full day’s discussion of new work by LAPA-associated faculty.  LAPA also sponsored a full slate of activities in the initial months of the fall semester for fellows, faculty, students, and the larger Princeton community. The line-up included two events featuring authors of new books relating to law and national security, a multi-discipline array of scholarly LAPA Seminars, dinners for this year’s LAPA Undergraduate Associates and the Law-Engaged Graduate Students, known as the LEGS Group, to meet the LAPA fellows, and culminated at mid-semester with a visit by Associate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Justice first discussed “The Lighter Side of the Supreme Court” and then engaged in a conversation with Provost Christopher Eisgruber as LAPA’s John Marshal Harlan ’20 Lecturer in Constitutional Adjudication, an event co-sponsored with the Walter Edge Lecture of the University Public Lecture Series.  She also had tea with the LAPA undergraduates and brunch the next day with LAPA Fellows and members of the LAPA Executive Committee. LAPA also held its inaugural dinner for M.P.A./M.P.P. candidates in the second year of the series “Law in the Public Service: Not Just for Lawyers.” Professor Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School and a former LAPA Fellow engaged students in an examination of the challenges of achieving effective campaign finance reform in a session entitled “Dollars and Democracy.” 

The Policy Research Institute for the Region (PRIOR) and the Department of Molecular Biology presented the second and third forums in a three-part series that focused on the health enterprise in New Jersey. On September 12, Princeton University’s Uwe Reinhardt, New Jersey State Senator Joe Vitale, Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services Heather Howard, and seven other policy experts participated in the forum titled “Access to Universal Health Care: New Jersey, The Nation, and The Globe.” The forum explored universal health care, weighed proposals for New Jersey, and examined models from within the region and throughout the globe. The final forum in the series, ”Summit For Children’s Health Care in New Jersey,” was held on October 17, and brought together scholars, practitioners and leaders in the medical and public policy field to examine the topics of prenatal care and infant mortality; the pediatric workforce; infrastructure; the medical home; and the S-CHIP program.
    PRIOR released the publication “A View from the Top: A Conversation with Former Governors about Abbott v. Burke”, an edited volume from the conference of the same name, at which Brendon Byrne, Jim Florio, and Donald DiFrancesco offered their unique perspectives on the landmark education decision and the challenges its implementation presents for New Jersey. The governors concurred that New Jersey has reached a juncture at which the terms established in Abbott v. Burke require renegotiation, and discussed Governor Corzine’s recently introduced School Funding Reform Act, which was signed into law in January, 2008. PRIOR also published “Land and Power: The Impact of Eminent Domain in Urban Communities,” the outcome of a conference co-sponsored by PRIOR and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, in which scholars, students, advocates, and experts in land use law, planning and development convened to analyze a broad span of issues surrounding eminent domain in the wake of the 2005 Kelo v. City of New London U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Copies of the publications may be obtained by contacting Georgette Harrison at gharriso@princeton.edu.
    On November 7th, PRIOR hosted a forum titled “Regional & National Financial Crises: Roots, Results & Responses.” The first morning session focused on the anatomy of the mortgage crisis and the macro and micro level motivations and decisions that triggered the present phenomena. The second session discussed the threats in the public finance arena as a result of sophisticated agreements, such as auctions, derivatives, interest rate swaps entered into by state and local governments.  Former Congressman and Chairman of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee, James Leach, opened the Forum, discussing financial regulations and the responsibility of the U.S. Congress. Alan Blinder, PhD, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University and former Vice-Chairman, Federal Reserve Board, delivered the luncheon address; and Susan M. Wachter, PhD, Professor of Real Estate and Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and former Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), presented the final address, putting the day’s forum into context.