Experts in the News

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Richmond Times-Dispatch

Richard Schragger column: Pandemics and our faulty federalism

The U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been at best fragmented and incomplete. At worst, it is incompetent and disastrous. Critics say the fault lies largely in the lack of a unified competent national response to the crisis, though some are thankful that states and cities have some independent authority, for at least it means that governors and mayors can act when the federal government fails to do so.
Richard C. Schragger
The Hill

White House goes through dizzying change in staff

“It takes a while to understand how the mechanics of government run,” said Chris Lu, who served as White House cabinet secretary under Obama during his first term. “You need to have that kind of institutional memory when you’re dealing with crises.”
Chris Lu
JFK35 Podcast

Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK

When President Kennedy became his party’s nominee in 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt would eventually endorse him from her role as the leading member of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. However, he wasn’t her first or even second choice. We talk with historian Barbara Perry, who’s working on a book about the political pair, and how Kennedy was able to get the New Dealer’s seal of approval.
Barbara Perry
Washington Post

With ‘kung flu,’ Trump sparks backlash over racist language — and a rallying cry for supporters

“The fact that he got the crowd so riled up was just chilling,” said Chris Lu, a Chinese American who served as cabinet secretary in the Obama White House. “In that really primal desire to get a rise out of the crowd and get that affirmation he wants, he went to this place that has such bad consequences for Asian Americans broadly and for Asian American kids in particular. It’s a joke to him but not to us.”
Chris Lu
Quartz

Academics fear using Zoom to study China—even in the US

Aynne Kokas, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, warned that Zoom is “allowing for local censorship to take precedence over academic freedom.” Now she’s considering that some of her online classes could put Chinese students in a “risky situation,” by assigning or discussing a reading “that might deal, for example, with a period of Chinese history that is perfectly fine to talk about in a US classroom, but might be a very profoundly difficult thing for a Chinese student in China.”
Aynne Kokas