Notes from Maxwell in D.C.

T he whiteboard in Mark Jacobson’s home office in Washington, D.C., lists all the students taking a semester in the Maxwell School’s programs in the capital. He has written down their housing assignments, internship sites and contact information.

Updating the whiteboard and digital contact lists is a standard practice that has taken on a new urgency since the false claims of election fraud after the 2020 election culminated in an attack on the Capitol.

“Jan. 6 made the issue of domestic instability something that I have to watch,” says Jacobson, who started his job as assistant dean for Washington Programs in June of last year. “What I did double down on is the ability to reach out to students all at once.”

No students were in D.C. for classes and internships that day, but security remained tight in the weeks after the riot. The height- ened alert was not a new experience for Jacobson, who spent 27 years in the Army and Navy reserves, including tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He was working at the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This time, however, the threat came from within.

A child of the Reagan years, Jacobson says he was “old enough to be scared” by The Day After, a movie about a nuclear war with the far-off Soviet Union. When he began his career in foreign policy and national security, he responded to conditions across the globe.

“It was no longer a world of a big, ferocious Russian bear, but an assortment of venomous snakes that could do our nation harm,” he says, referring to conflicts in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then Jacobson, whose research interests include the history of propaganda, watched as President Donald Trump and his supporters spread disinformation and stoked division, tactics he had seen in overseas insurgencies.

“A violent, extremist insurgency movement driven by fear and a cultist-like ideology. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen what it did in Afghanistan. I saw what it did in the Balkans,” he says. “The last four years of watching what it did to our democracy was traumatic.”

Jacobson has been proud of the Maxwell students’ maturity in handling both the pandemic and the unsettled atmosphere in the capital. They are mindful of the questions that Jan. 6 has raised about the state of American democracy and “in that sense, they are having good, solid policy discussions,” he says, adding, “No matter what their political persuasion, whether it’s Republican, or Democrat, conservative, liberal or libertarians, they all want to do good things for their country and that binds them together.”