Professors as Politicians

by Jonathan Zimmerman

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. His next book is “Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education,” which will be published next spring by Princeton University Press.

Next fall, two professors at the same college will compete for a congressional seat in Virginia. I speak of course of David Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College, who shocked the country last Tuesday by defeating House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a GOP primary election. Brat will face off against Democratic nominee Jack Trammell, his colleague in the sociology department.

That’s good news for my own tribe, the much-maligned academic profession. And it’s good for the country, too.

First of all, the election will remind Americans that professors come in all ideological shapes and sizes. As a host of surveys have demonstrated, academicians are mostly liberal. But in business schools and economics departments, especially, there’s a healthy representation of conservatives as well.

And Mr. Brat certainly isn’t the first one to enter politics. Two of the leading Republican legislators of the 1990s, Phil Gramm and Dick Armey, both held Ph.D’s in economics. Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich was — like me — a professor of history.

Second, the Virginia election will help demonstrate that our work actually matters in the so-called real world. The doddering, checked-out professor has long been a staple of American literature and entertainment. “The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing,” quipped H. L. Mencken, nearly a century ago. “He has a special unmatchable talent for dullness.” ...

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