Schedule of Events

This essay will explore the topic of affirmative action through socioeconomic policies and their relation to the equal opportunity theories of Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. While race-based affirmative action is still needed to bridge the gap between overrepresented and underrepresented students in college admissions, socioeconomic-based affirmative action is the key to reaching diversity and the level of pluralism we seek in our schools and job force. Class-based policies not only help racial and ethnic minorities, but they also provide a platform for all students from weak socioeconomic backgrounds to succeed in higher education admissions. Concurrently, by exploring affirmative action policies through the lenses of deontological jurisprudential theories, we are able to align the morality behind equal opportunity clauses, affirmative action cases, and rectificatory injustice with socioeconomic patterns. By considering the categorical imperatives of Kant, the Difference Principle of Rawls, and the general principle of Dworkin, I posit that our morality is closely tied to how judges, lawyers, and policies makers adjudicate and determine the scope of affirmative action cases. Specific methods used will include: 1) Critical Analysis of jurisprudential theories in relation to the legality of moral law and affirmative action cases; 2) Case Study of the different affirmative action cases based on race and socioeconomic background brought before the U.S. judiciary system, specifically the U.S. Supreme Court; 3) Data Analysis on the effectiveness of affirmative action policies in higher admissions programs; 4) Interviews with jurisprudential academic scholars; 5) Interviews with scholars who advocate for socioeconomic-based affirmative action.  

The construction of civic space and public buildings are engineering and architectural pursuits, however the form, design and artistic style these projects take are often the result of politics.  This work looks at the ideal form of civic space as being an extension of the community and shows how this community can be manipulated and constructed by the locus of governmental power to create false national identities for political gain.  Using Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany as case studies, I carve out a role for architecture in creating these institutions of exclusion and totalitarianism.  Public architecture and the segregation of space was a powerful tool of these regimes in embodying and legitimizing such institutions into the national conscious, but it also had the reverse effect as these institutions fell.  This work seeks to define “unity” architecture by analyzing architectural projects and civic attempts to construct a new society in both post-World War II Germany and post-apartheid South Africa where memory of past wrongs and optimism for future solidarity coexist and flourish.

Income inequality continues to be a problem, especially for the middle class who often earn too much for any subsidization. Borrowing money at higher interest rates is more difficult for less wealthy individuals impacting their ability to purchase large items like homes and cars, however the income of the wealthy is more closely tied to financial assets which are pushed higher in low interest rate environments. This paper will explore the interplay between the fed funds rate and income inequality in the US by reviewing data from 1977 through 2015. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether changes in the Fed Funds Rate resulted in changes in income inequality in order to make policy recommendations. Three Hypotheses were developed 1) a higher fed funds rate leads to greater income inequality, 2) a lower fed funds rate leads to greater income inequality, 3) there is no correlation between the fed funds rate and income inequality. To evaluate these hypotheses, the following data were compared: the average Fed Funds Rate, the average annual price of S&P 500 as well as the delta between the median income of top 1% earners and the median income of the bottom 99% earners. The results research indicates that there is a semi-strong indirect linear relationship between income inequality and the fed funds rate, which supports Hypothesis 2: a lower fed funds rate leads to greater income inequality.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the European Union creates foreign policy and incorporates the individual positions of member states by using the EU’s energy policy as a case study. Energy is an area of policy that is both foreign and domestic, which means more considerations have to be made between individual countries and the EU. Furthermore, Europe has a long history of sustainable energy policies which can be analyzed. Research was carried out through mixed method analyses of: (1) in-depth interviews, (2) EU governing bodies/structures, and (3) past and current energy policies.