January 31, 2007
Academe Is Talking Over... Sort Of
Academia is beginning to look like a beachhead for aspiring Democratic politicians.
The 2008 presidential field features Barack Obama, who spent more than a decade as a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school. Hillary Clinton spent a handful of her Arkansas years as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas law school. The University of North Carolina provided John Edwards with a nice 2008 launching pad by creating the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity for him after his failed 2004 vice-presidential bid. On Monday, the Drake University law school announced Tom Vilsack would teach a course on “legal issues related to rural development and renewable energy.”
This comes on the heels of the 2006 congressional elections, which saw a wave of Democratic academics running for office, including American University professor Allan Lichtman in Maryland’s open Senate race; Judy Feder, dean of Georgetown University's Institute of Public Policy, in Virginia’s 10th District; Brown University professor Jennifer Lawless in Rhode Island’s 2nd District; Case Western Reserve University law professor Lewis Katz in Ohio’s 14th District; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Bryan Kennedy in Wisconsin’s 5th District. There were perhaps a dozen more; if you count adjunct professors, the universe of Democratic candidates expands considerably. [CHARLES MAHTESIAN]
All of the above failed in their bids last year, but a few others managed to join North Carolina Rep. David Price, a Duke University poli sci prof and author of The Congressional Experience, in the House. One of them is Dave Loebsack, a Cornell College professor, who now represents Iowa’s 2nd District; another is Chris Carney, an associate professor at Penn State-Scranton, who knocked off Don Sherwood to win Pennsylania’s 10th District.
It’s hard to know whether 2006 represented a sharp increase in the number of academics running for Congress since no one keeps reliable stats on the question. But Lichtman said in a September interview that the example of the late Paul Wellstone, a liberal college professor who made the leap from the classroom to the Senate, is providing an inspiration to many academics; in Lichtman’s case, his disillusionment with the 2004 Kerry campaign and his distaste for the Bush administration prompted him to run. “I felt morally compelled to act,” he said.
College campuses aren’t just launching Democratic candidacies these days – they are providing soft landings, too. In addition to finding a place for John Edwards, in 2005 UNC hired Erskine Bowles as the 16-campus system's next president after the second of his unsuccessful Senate bids. In Nevada (where UNLV poli sci prof/state Senator Dina Titus lost her 2006 gubernatorial bid), unsuccessful 2006 House candidate Tessa Hafen, a former Harry Reid aide, was recently hired as a lobbyist for the University of Nevada Health Sciences System.
Today’s news? The Boston Globe reports that Congressman Marty Meehan is on the short list to become chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.
Posted at 03:06 PM
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