Dr. Nelly Stromquist
The University of Maryland
Professor, International Education Policy

ANALYSIS - March 19, 2013

Drastic transformations in the higher education landscape are underway throughout the world. In today’s promised “knowledge society,” higher education is an essential path to professional and managerial positions, which—for the most part—pay higher salaries than other jobs in the marketplace. All over the world, participation in higher education has been increasing...

Dr. Lloyd J. Dumas
The University of Texas at Dallas
Professor of Political Economy, Economics, and Public Policy

ANALYSIS - October 25, 2012

Political security is primarily a matter of relationships, not military power. This is easy enough to demonstrate: during the Cold War, the American military spent a great deal of effort and trillions of dollars building weapons and structuring forces to deter the Soviet Union from attacking the U.S. or its major allies with nuclear weapons. For much of that time, both France and Britain had enough ...

Geraldine Heng
The University of Texas at Austin
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

ANALYSIS - May 3, 2012

In a departure from the Gulen Institute’s usual presentation of analyses and summaries of academic research, I have chosen the format of a first-person narrative to frame and contextualize research and learning projects that are aimed at transforming the study of the past. My less-traditional methodology focuses and grounds the discussion of how we study the past in the sense of urgency that drives ...

Peter A. Swenson
Yale University

ANALYSIS - March 2, 2012

American politics today is in thrall to crude ideology to an almost unprecedented extent. Ideology blocks compromise, an essential source of progress in a community divided along many lines. To ideologues, even the word "compromise" is distasteful. When they hijack politics, the political process freezes up. Partisan gridlock generates indiscriminate disgust with politicians and unhealthy denigration ...

Adrian Pabst
University of Kent
United Kingdom

ANALYSIS - January 31, 2012

The year 2011 witnessed a new wave of protest movements and unprecedented popular outrage across the globe.  From the protests in North Africa and the Middle East to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States to the camps outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and Moscow, demonstrators have expressed a deep-seated anger at global finance that is shared by many[1].  Worldwide, there ...

Michael O. Emerson
Allyn & Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology
Co-Director, Kinder Institute for Urban Research
Rice University

ANALYSIS - November 25, 2011

It’s a riddle, really.  The United States is by many accounts post-racial.  We reassure ourselves that racial groups are no longer kept separate and unequal by our laws, customs, and personal prejudices.  And ever since the last official vestiges of racial discrimination were eschewed from our laws in the 1960s, we have indeed seen amazing changes.  By almost any attitudinal survey measure, prejudice ...