Professors in politics

WHEN STEVE MILES DECIDED TO IWN for the United States Senate from Minnesota this year, he did so to make a difference on health care and education. "Others can present these items as issues," says the bioethics professor and teaching physician at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. "I can present them as my life's work."

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 all amendment to redistribute finding 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 stay 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 ofa 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 leadpaint 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.