Professors in Politics

By Hans P. Johnson

In launching his campaign, Miles follows a well-trod path of academics who have found their experience in teaching and campus governance to be sound preparation for campaigning for and holding elected office. The ranks of academics who have preceded Miles in seeking a transition from a professor’s chair to elective office include some legendary names. President Woodrow Wilson was a professor of government at Princeton University. Former Illinois senator Paul Douglas, later eulogized as "the people’s senator," was an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Closer to home, Miles can claim more exemplars. Hubert Humphrey, the former Minneapolis mayor, senator, and vice president, began his career as a political science professor at Miles’s campus. Should Miles win the Democratic primary and November’s general election, he and the state’s other senator would become colleagues twice over. Paul Wellstone, the former Carleton College professor of political science, rode a grassroots campaign to an upset victory in 1990 and is now Minnesota’s senior senator. In seeking to replicate that triumph, Miles has borrowed a tactic from Wellstone, who traveled around the state in a rickety campaign bus, by rolling out an old ambulance to highlight his calls for accessible, affordable health care.

For Congressman Vernon Ehlers, a Michigan Republican and former professor of physics at Calvin College, experience as a faculty member does not dictate his positions on topics, but it does affect how he arrives at them. "I approach the issues as an academic," he says. "I try to gather information, analyze it carefully, weigh the evidence, and then use the appropriate avenues to move forward with the best option."

Still, Ehlers’s penchant for navigating the halls of Capitol Hill has benefited from an additional facet of his campus background. While at Calvin in the 1970s, he spearheaded an effort to expand professors’ stake in college governance under an administration that several colleagues perceived as unduly top-down. Ehlers deployed the art of compromise during the drive, according to colleagues at the institution, some of whom still admire his work. He hopes that the more democratic structure he helped implement at the college remains just as functional today. "Faculty can retain their authority only through constant exercise of vigilance," he contends.

Despite his conservative leanings, Ehlers takes credit for confronting some would-be "ultraconservative" obstructionists in Congress and generating support for bills dear to many professors. Ehlers, now in his third term, once sponsored an amendment to redistribute funding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). But in the wake of that proposal’s defeat, he has helped to forge consensus on the importance of both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities. "I may have been instrumental in recasting them to make them more acceptable to some members," he says. "We seem to have fewer major battles about killing them."

Ehlers’s brand of pragmatism may be a hallmark of academic politicians, many of whom cut their political teeth in campus governance and learned to persevere through both prolonged decision making and the stops and starts of the academic calendar. Another model of the professor in politics, however, is marked by greater militancy, drawing on a tradition of organizing in the faculty workforce that emphasizes outreach and agitation.

"I teach social work, and in this job I’ve almost necessarily learned how to organize and use the media and to speak publicly," says Don Cooney, a professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Cooney, who was elected to the city commission in 1997, after two previous unsuccessful bids, says that while in office he has worked with a broad coalition of labor groups, neighborhood activists, religious leaders, and advocates for the poor on behalf of a living-wage ordinance. He has also led efforts in the city to establish a center for service learning that would involve students and faculty from four nearby campuses. If the drive for the center succeeds, one of the projects Cooney envisions for it is a campaign for awareness of lead-paint poisoning and the need for toxicity screening in the county’s low-income households.

For Cooney, an important consideration in effective community relations and service in office is not overcoming the image of the detached academic, but rather time constraints. "I do my job here. And, yes, there’s this other job on the side. But there is no question that my participation in the city improves my teaching." Any student involvement in his campaigns or initiatives, Cooney emphasizes, is entirely voluntary.

The AAUP long ago recognized the tensions that surface when faculty members become involved in campaigns and assume elected office. In 1969 the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities adopted its Statement on Professors and Political Activity. "College and university faculty members are citizens," the statement asserts, "and, like other citizens, should be free to engage in political activities so far as they are able to do so consistently with their obligations as teachers and scholars." The statement goes on to call for "institutional arrangements that permit [political involvement], similar to those applicable to other public or private extramural service."

Even in the presence of such accommodations, some faculty members may feel enormous pressure against taking a more vocal or active role in democracy. Some states have laws requiring professors employed at public colleges or universities to take a leave of absence to hold office. And many nontenured professors have expressed a sense that their appointments are precarious and that they face termination if they incur an administrator’s displeasure.

At the same time, though, they may be summoned by friends to participate and feel a weighty obligation to contribute to a cause or campaign to which they are intimately bound. "I was very shy about it, but I let them call me ‘Doctor This’ and ‘Doctor That,’ because they believed it lent credibility to their case," says Sally Miller Gearhart, who in the 1970s became active in gay-rights politics while serving as a professor of speech-communications studies at San Francisco State University. Gearhart, later to become an associate dean, was a candidate for tenure when she vaulted to prominence as an opponent of the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 California ballot measure to ban gay and lesbian teachers from the public schools. Gearhart’s political engagement never included a bid for elected office, but for a while it made her a highly visible and valuable spokesperson for a movement.

In one memorable display of Gearhart’s skills and academic status, pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk in 1978 sought her out to join him in rebutting the sponsor of the initiative, state senator John Briggs, in a televised debate. Gearhart came clad in formal garb and maintained a warm, discursive tone throughout the proceedings. Brandishing her academic pedigree and her expertise as a communicator, she presented a stark contrast to the visibly flustered Senator Briggs as well as to the image of the rabble-rousing hippies who then dominated prevalent notions of the gay community.

Reflecting on the ultimately successful drive to defeat the measure, Gearhart notes the boost in credibility her academic credentials may have given the campaign: "The movement itself prospered by using whatever prestige we could get." The era’s spirit of unbridled activism may have waned, she says, but its lessons for what faculty can accomplish if they take an active role in politics endure to this day. "At that time and in that place, the image of the professor was not one of being staid and isolated and detached," she says. "We supported each other, and we were doers."

 Printer-Friendly Page