by David W. Cash, Dean
John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies

Dig beneath the headlines that track the presidential campaigns and you find policy proposals, each of which has real and lasting impact on people–their jobs, communities, livelihoods, and security.

 

Sound bites and 30-second ads mask the complexity of design and implementation impacts of policies on immigration, taxes, welfare, healthcare, climate change, economic development, gun control, and homeland security. Each of the policies that address these issues can be characterized in terms of feasibility, effectiveness, justice, equity, legality, costs, and benefits.

For a brief window, presidential elections bring sharper focus on policy issues, but at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies our core mission is to always dig deep, not only into national issues of policy and governance, but into policies that span the local to the global.

We explore the design of local property taxes, and we investigate how the United Nations system works. We examine issues of peace and justice in Middlesex County, in cities in Nigeria and in the Middle East. We try to understand policies that impact access to pre-school and child care and programs that affect access to healthcare for an aging population. We try to understand how climate change and social equity intersect in Boston, and intersect globally.  And we try to understand how current policy is shaped and influenced by policy history.

Our school is named after John W. McCormack, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1962 to 1971 and a major driver for a half-century of progressive policies on medicare, civil rights, social security, education, immigration, and voting rights. When he spoke, he spoke on behalf of social equity and an activist role of government in improving people’s lives while empowering them.

This new blog, McCormack Speaks, provides a forum for members of the McCormack Graduate School community to informally discuss policy ideas and research, to present findings, to challenge dogma, to comment on current events, and to dig beneath headlines.

David W. Cash (PhD, Harvard University) has spent his career trying to understand and better harness knowledge to solve pressing policy challenges. He has worked locally to develop and implement nation-leading science-based environmental, climate, clean energy, water and waste management regulatory programs; innovative renewable energy and grid modernization efforts; and greenhouse gas initiatives as well as globally on clean energy and climate change projects.