This spring, Dr. Tevi Troy, Senior Scholar and Director of the Impact Office at the Zahava and Moshael J. Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, is offering an innovative undergraduate course on health policy in the political science department. Dr. Troy, a former Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, engages the students with timely policy dilemmas, firsthand case studies, and real-world simulations, preparing students to confront the ethical, political, and administrative dimensions of public health.
Students have explored everything from vaccine distribution and the Affordable Care Act to pharmaceutical pricing and bioterrorism preparedness鈥攁ll while real-life headlines, such as the recent murder of a UnitedHealth executive, make the course deeply relevant.
Dr. Troy assembled an all-star roster of guest lecturers, each bringing decades of experience from government, media, healthcare, and law. Fran Kritz, a health journalist for Forbes and NPR, offered insights into the COVID-19 pandemic鈥檚 legacy and how to balance faith with professional demands in the policy world. Lloyd Green, a political commentator for The Guardian, took students back to the early days of the pandemic in New Rochelle and reflected on the human and narrative dimensions of public health crises. Blue Cross executive Justine Handelman provided a sobering assessment of America鈥檚 health insurance ecosystem, touching on regulatory structures and the tensions between cost and access.
Students also learned directly from those who had shaped policy at the highest levels. Jay Lefkowitz, former White House domestic policy advisor and envoy to North Korea, and Dan Troy, former chief counsel to the FDA, offered candid reflections on mentorship, public service, and the ethical tensions within executive leadership.
The policy lessons included a mock FDA approval simulation led by Dr. Bob Goldberg, founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. Students debated a fictional stem cell treatment, embodying regulators, industry leaders, and ethicists. In a culminating vote, the therapy was approved鈥攂ut only after spirited cross-examination and ethical deliberation.
In a world grappling with intense controversy over health policy and ongoing debate about the role of government in medicine, this seminar combined rigorous policy analysis with moral inquiry, advancing the Straus Center鈥檚 mission of training 色花堂 students to become intellectual leaders proficient in both Jewish thought and the contemporary world.
