Growing up in the Washington, D.C., area just a few years after George Mason University was founded, Sarah Maxwell knew little about what was then a small public university on the rise in Fairfax, Va. But George Mason University’s School of Public Policy—now the Schar School of Policy and Government—had on its faculty a professor she admired: Public Policy Professor Seymour Martin Lipset.
In 1996 Lipset, who died in 2006, is recognized as one of the great social scientists of the 20th century. He gained notoriety for his book American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, in which he popularized the term “exceptionalism,” describing the U.S.’s unique characteristics as a democracy.
“He was famous, and he had such an incredible mind,” Maxwell said of Lipset. “I was drawn to the School because he was there.”
Maxwell began her public policy PhD program with Lipset as one of her professors. Among her classmates were Bruce Lindsey, now a Navy Vice Admiral and the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Fleet Forces Command and keynote speaker at the Schar School’s Degree Celebration on May 16, John Zangardi, now Chief Information Officer of the Department of Homeland Security, and Kevin “Kip” Thomas, now the Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Human Neurobiology at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Lipset was equally impressed by his student. “Marty said she was intelligent, strong, and had an incredible work ethic,” said Sydnee Lipset, Martin Lipset’s wife. “She impressed Marty right away. He expected great things from her, and it’s nice to see that seems to be the case.”
Maxwell has risen through the ranks since earning her degree in 2004. She is now an associate professor of public policy at the University of Texas-Dallas. Earlier this year she was named Assistant Provost for the School.
Mason and the Schar School’s proximity to Washington, D.C., affords opportunities that other schools do not enjoy, she said, such as having a former U.S. Attorney General make an unannounced appearance in the classroom.
“There really is no school like it,” she said. “I mean, you walk into class one day and the Honorable Edwin Meese is at the head of the classroom. I had goosebumps for an hour. You were surrounded by influential and deep thinkers and people who are really engaged in public policy.” (At the time, Meese was a member of Mason’s Board of Visitors and later served as Rector.)
But it wasn’t only the professors and their guests that inspired the doctoral students: “The level of discourse was just so high, and the students who were there were distinguished in their own right, they weren’t students who were there just to check a box, they were coming from high level positions in government. Everything about the program was constantly stimulating and engaging.”
And sometimes intimidating, she added, particularly since she gave birth to two children during the program.
“The level of both the faculty and the students was so high I always wondered if I was good enough to be there,” she said.
“I had an underlying level of consciousness that these people were so distinguished in their careers, even though it was always a positive peer culture. I never wanted to let anybody down. I was studying constantly not because I felt pressure but because I loved it. It was so much fun to be around that kind of intellectual stimulation.”