Professors Running for Office Make Final Push in First-Time Campaigns

Paul Walker

Paul Walker wrote an obscure article for the journal Rhetoric Review in 2012. One urban planner’s “sensitivity to multiple factors of urban use,” he wrote, “illustrates his valuation of collective discourse for perceived social problems and provides a reminder of the importance of approaching complex issues with an orthos logos perspective.”

Six years later, deep in a midterm campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, Walker found himself greeting a raucous crowd at the Fancy Farm Picnic, in western Kentucky. “Thank you, teachers!” he said. “I am a teacher. And I love teachers, and I support everything you do.”

That, he’s learned, is the difference between writing about rhetoric and using it.

The change didn’t come naturally. Walker, an associate professor of English at Murray State University, is one of a handful of first-time candidates emerging from the professoriate to run in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

These political newcomers join a broader, and much examined, class of laypeople drawn into electoral politics this cycle. Academe, they say, has much to bring to civic life, and vice versa.

Nationwide, at least 156 current and former college administrators and faculty and staff members are on the ballot, according to a Chronicle analysis of data supplied by Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan election database. At least 47 more ran for office this year and lost or dropped out. The true numbers are probably higher, a Ballotpedia representative noted, since many candidate profiles lack biographical information, and the database doesn’t track every local race.

Many of the candidates are incumbents who are affiliated with colleges — the longtime state senator, say, who teaches law, or the experienced politico brought into a political-science department to share war stories.

Others are adjuncts, juggling side hustles in politics and teaching. Lesley Lopez, communications director of Run for Something, a progressive recruiting group, teaches a course at George Washington University and is running as a Democrat for a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.

And Mary Geren, a former lecturer at Tri-County Technical College, chose to leave her five-class workload teaching English to run an uphill race for the U.S. House in South Carolina’s 3rd District. A Democrat, she is spurred in part by her campaign experience and the appointment of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

But a few academics have taken the unusual step of tenured scholar to first-time candidate. Those who spoke with The Chronicle — most of them Democrats in Republican-leaning areas — said that they have important reasons to run, and that skills gained on the campaign trail translate back to the classroom.

“Your experiences in academia, I think, prepare you pretty well,” said Jonathan H. Ebel, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He ran for a U.S. House seat in Illinois this year, motivated by the 2016 presidential election to meet “a specific need at a specific moment,” before losing in the primary.

“It’s funny — the academic conferences and panel discussions that I’ve been a part of were really great preparation for debates and public town halls,” he said.

Walker said he, too, had never thought about running for office until 2016.

At first he didn’t expect to win, and his hopes aren’t much higher now. President Trump carried the 1st District by a margin of 48.5 points in 2016, and Walker, a Democrat, is virtually certain to lose, according to polls. But on a slim budget, he collected a respectable 51,000 votes in the primary, and still plans to visit all 30-plus counties in his district by Election Day, for the second time this campaign.

Campaigning has reshaped how he teaches and researches, Walker said. He understands his students better, “because I’ve been to so many of the places where they come from.” Politics hasn’t flattened his humanities perspective — if anything, he said, it’s enlivened it.

Ebel agreed. At first, his humanities background made him want to talk about grand moral issues on the campaign trail.

From a “30,000-foot, public-intellectual perspective,” anything else might seem to miss the point, he said. But meeting scores of people quickly taught him that the so-called kitchen-table issues — roads, education, elder care — “are precisely the frickin’ point.”

Running to Win

Not all professors felt so unprepared. Carolyn Long, an associate professor of political science at Washington State University at Vancouver, has raised more than $3.25 million in the tightened race for Washington’s 3rd District seat in Congress.

In the 1990s, Long, as part of her research, followed former Representative Brian Baird, initially a little-known psychology professor, as he campaigned around the district. And as she pondered her own choice to run last year, she pored over past elections there. “I had an idea of what I was getting into based upon that academic experience,” she said.

“I don’t want to go back to academia. I want to continue running,” Long said. “I will sort of always be thinking about how this could translate into a paper that I could write, or a book chapter, because that’s what academics do.” But her future is in politics, she said.

The choice doesn’t have to be stark, said Shaughnessy Naughton, founder of 314 Action, an organization that recruits scientists to run for office. Beyond Congress, “we have 500,000 elected positions in this country, and many do not require taking a leave of absence or a break from your career.” The presence of academics in state and local races elevates the level of public debate, and campaigning at that level doesn’t take the fund-raising networks needed for federal races.

“It’s the case I try to make to university administrators as well,” Naughton said. “You might not have to fight as hard for funding for research or education if you had people from academia in elected office.”

If law firms let lawyers cycle in and out of public office, she asked, why not colleges?

Academics are not unknown in politics, and they’ve upset expectations before. In 2014, David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his Virginia primary. (Brat, a Republican, is now defending the seat against a former intelligence officer and higher-education consultant.)

Virginia A. Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the House education committee, has long used her background in community colleges to sway higher-education policy.

A North Carolina counterpart across the aisle, Alma S. Adams, a former art historian at Bennett College, has been a vocal advocate for historically black colleges and universities.

Less than a fifth of the 535 members of the House and Senate have worked in education of some kind, according to the Congressional Research Service. Just 23 have doctorates.

Paul Walker recently submitted his application for a full professorship at Murray State. But will he or any of the other newcomers feel the itch to run again, or will they stick with academe?

“Hard to say,” Ebel said on Tuesday. “Maybe we can talk in a week.”

Other Races

Here is a list of other current and recent academics running in races as non-incumbents, based on data from Ballotpedia, local news reports, and political organizations. It is a nonexhaustive sample and may be updated.

Updated at 11/8/2018, 1:25 p.m.

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.