"If you want some notion of the problem, just try uttering the words “public administration” before a roomful of students and watch them look at their phones or start to fall asleep. Nonetheless, the classic field of public administration is one of the most important today, and its decline (at least in the United States) is one of the reasons why we get poor service from government," writes CDDRL Director Francis Fukuyama. Read the article here.

"The idea that the big internet platforms are not media companies has never really been tenable, and the contradictions in their public protestations of neutrality have become ever more apparent over time," writes Francis Fukuyama in The American Interest. Read the article here. 

"What is different today is the speed and extraterritorial reach of disinformation. Over-restriction on content undermines our democratic values, but understanding the mechanisms of manipulation opens up the solutions." Our Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director of CDDRL's Global Digital Policy Incubator, said in the podcast "Digital Media: Combatting Threats in the Era of Fake News." Listen here.

With so much circulating about the Helsinki summit on social media and in the press, we asked one of our resident Russian experts and historians at CISAC, Prof DAVID HOLLOWAY, for his 60 second quick take-aways on the Trump-Putin meeting of July 16th.

Quick-Take: Helsinki 2018 with David Holloway 

Q:What specific results/agreements have come out of the meeting?

A: That’s not clear.  We have only the press conference to go on.  Putin mentioned a number of areas in which working groups might be reestablished.  Trump mentioned that the NSC would follow up with the Russians on issues addressed in the meeting.  Those included arms control, the humanitarian in Syria, and counterterrorism.  Cooperation in those areas could be beneficial. 

Q: Trump mentioned that the meeting marked a “fundamental change” in US-Russian relations.  Is that true?

A: First, we don’t know what specific agreements – if any – have been concluded.  A broader dialogue between the two governments appears to be likely, and there are some areas in which agreement could be reached quickly – extension of New START, for example.  But reconstituting working groups is no guarantee that agreements can be reached.

Second, the tone of the press conference was extraordinary.  Trump’s earlier tweet that the US was to blame for the worsening of US-Russian relations set the tone.  Putin showed much greater command of the issues than Trump, which was to be expected.  Trump seemed obsessed by US domestic politics and his own political position, which was not a surprise.  Trump’s unwillingness to back his own intelligence agencies on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 election was perhaps predictable, but nonetheless remarkable in the context of a meeting with Putin.

Third, taken together with the NATO summit last week, the meeting with Putin may come to look like a turning-point in US foreign policy, overturning – or at least greatly weakening – a long-standing alliance and creating dangerous uncertainty in European security relations.

About David Holloway:

DAVID HOLLOWAY is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. 

His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory.

Want to hear more from our experts?

FSI Director, MICHAEL MCFAUL, has been reporting live on the Trump-Putin summit from Helsinki. For access to his interviews with NBC News and MSNBC in the lead up to and the aftermath of the July 16th meeting, click here. To hear his post-Summit interview with NPR News, click here. 

In her latest article for The Atlantic , 'The Self-Inflicted Demise of American Power', CISAC co-Director AMY ZEGART argues that Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine can be summed up as “Make America Weak Again.” For the full article click here.

FSI's Deputy Director, KATHRYN STONER weighs in on the Helsinki summit and how disheartening it is to our own president reject the findings of our own Justice Department and Intelligence Agencies to defend Putin and blame everything on Hillary Clinton and her email servers. Listen to the episode of Background Briefing with Ian Masters click here. 

Discover More:

Check out the Russia Research page on our website for all articles and interviews about US-Russian relations with FSI faculty and visiting scholars.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to congratulate the 2018 class of honors students for completing their research under the CDDRL Fisher Family Honors Program. The ceremony for the honors students took place on June 15, 2018.

Each year the Center offers an interdisciplinary honors program, through which students write a thesis related to the topics of democracy, development and the rule of law. This year’s cohort wrote on a vast range of topics, including electoral reform in Chile, the rise of the far-right in Greece, and public health in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Each year the CDDRL gives one student an Outstanding Thesis Award. This year’s recipient is Marin Callaway for her work, “Whose California? Power, Property Rights, and the Legacy of the 1851 California Land Act”. Callaway researched Mexican land grant ownership in California throughout the nineteenth century, and how the 1851 California Land Act interacted with social, economic and political phenomena, which led to a loss in this ownership.  
 

One of the CDDRL honors students, Qitong Thomas Cao will receive the Stanford University Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. This award is given to the top ten percent of all theses in social sciences, natural sciences and engineering and applied sciences. Cao’s thesis, titled “The China Wide Web: The Information Dilemma and the Domestication of Cyberspace”, addresses many of the contemporary technology and information issues within authoritarian regimes.

Furthermore, several of this year’s honors students have been the recipients of university-wide and national awards.

Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award

The Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel award is given for university-wide recognition of distinctive and exceptional contributions to undergraduate education or the quality of student life at Stanford. Each, year, two graduating seniors receive the award for their service to the university. 
 

Alexis Kallen

Fulbright Scholarship

Fulbright scholarships provide graduates the opportunity to pursue research all over the world to foster intercultural relations and understanding with other countries.  
 

Jason Jiajie Li—Fulbright research scholarship to Shaanxi China to implement and independently evaluate an integrated early child development intervention with community health workers to combat the effects of childhood malnutrition and a lack of quality health care.

Rhodes Scholarship

Rhodes scholarships are awarded to promising future leaders to support their academic studies at the University of Oxford.  
 

Qitong Thomas Cao

Alexis Kallen

Schwarzman Scholars

Schwarzman Scholars continue post-graduate studies and focus on China's relations with the world at the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Lucienne Oyer

Truman Scholarship

The Truman Scholarship is a prestigious graduate fellowship in the United States for those pursuing promising careers in public service.   
 

Alexis Kallen

Finally, a special shout out to two of our alumni. Anna Blue (2016) received a research Fulbright to Estonia, and Jelani Munroe (2016) received a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford.

"In what may be looked back upon as the most important election in the United States in 2018, the voters of Maine rejected political cynicism on Tuesday and preserved ranked-choice voting (RCV) for its future elections. To appreciate the historic significance of this vote for greater democratic choice, it’s important to understand what Mainers were up against—a two-party duopoly in which “all the levers of power” (in the words of one grassroots activist) were overtly or covertly working to block political reform," writes Larry Diamond in American Interest. Read here. 

CDDRL Deputy Director Stephen J. Stedman received the 2018 Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award For Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education. Stedman is a Freeman Spogli Senior Fellow, an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He has directed the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program for the past three years during which time several students have won prestigious university awards for their outstanding research.  

According to the Stanford News Service, Stedman was honored for his work in shaping the intellectual development of students with thoughtful and forward-thinking ideas, as well as for his profound and lasting contributions to the quality and richness of the undergraduate experience.

CDDRL sat down to learn more about why undergraduate teaching is so meaningful to Stedman and how his own experience as an undergraduate at Stanford has informed his teaching style.

What does this award mean to you?

It’s nice recognition from the university about something that has been a big part of what I’ve done at Stanford over the last twenty years, but more importantly it’s incredible to hear from so many students about how I’ve touched their lives and helped them reach their potential. 

It’s also a validation of Corinne - my wife - and my decision to live our lives among undergraduates as Resident Fellows, a role that we’ve had 15 of the 21 years we’ve been at Stanford. We are huge believers in the mission of residential education at Stanford, and since many of the students who supported my nomination either staffed for us or lived in our dorms, I want to say that Corinne deserves a lot of this award and that our kids deserve a shout-out for being willing to live with college students in a dorm most of their lives. It’s not a normal upbringing!

Your work as director of the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program is a big part of this recognition. Can you tell us more about your commitment to the students and to this program?

The Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is a special program. We are getting terrific students who are smart, hard-working and really interesting. It takes a special kind of undergraduate who can see the value in studying with a cohort of diverse majors from engineering to earth sciences, English and History to political science and international relations. We stress to our students, and they take it to heart, that to do good interdisciplinary work you have to be strong in a discipline. Interdisciplinary work that is founded on weak disciplinary skills and knowledge will be weak interdisciplinary work. 

Didi Kuo, who is a superb teaching fellow for the program, and I spend more than a year with every cohort. It’s an enormous amount of fun to see how the students develop and what they produce. And their work has been spectacular as evidenced by the fact that in the last six years the program has produced three Kennedy Award winners which recognizes the single best thesis in each of the four areas of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering at Stanford.

Being a mentor - how important and rewarding is this for you? 

It’s a huge part of who I am and by far the most rewarding part of my job. I was fortunate to have an incredible mentor, John Lewis, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford. John passed away last fall and I spoke at his memorial service in January about the impact that he had on me and my career. He taught me how to write, how to create a clear, coherent argument, and how to think about how knowledge can and should contribute to solving problems. He also had a profound ethical core. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that my big light bulb moment when I was an undergraduate was to realize that I wanted to do what he did.

A lot of Stanford faculty are incredible undergraduate teachers, but I also think if you are a faculty member who was an undergraduate here, you especially care about undergraduate education at Stanford. It’s no accident that faculty like Larry Diamond, Mike McFaul and Norman Naimark, among others, are superb undergraduate teachers and care deeply about the lifelong development of our students.

One last note on the Stanford undergraduate experience and why this award is special. My freshman RA over 40 years ago, Al Tomaszczuk, won the Dinkelspiel Award as a graduating senior; his RA when he was a freshman was Larry Diamond, who won the Dinkelspiel Award 11 years ago.