Episode 114 - John Mark Hansen: "Bringing shadowed things to light."

 Professor John Mark Hansen is one of the nations leading scholars of American politics. His research focuses on interest groups, citizen activism, and public opinion, and he has written two books: Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, which he wrote with Steven Rosenstone, and Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby. He is also the Interim Chair for the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Listen to his career story of becoming a UChicago Professor in this episode.

Transcript

Julie 00:01
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Julie, and I'm speaking with Professor John Mark Hansen from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Hansen is one of the nation's leading scholars of American politics.

His research focuses on interest groups, citizen activism, and public opinion. He has written two books, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, which he co wrote with Stephen Rosenstone, and Gaining Access, Congress and the Farm Lobby. He is also the Interim Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

He is here today to talk to us about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor. 

Welcome to The Course, Professor Hansen.

John Mark Hansen 00:54
Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Julie 00:56
Can you start us off with a general overview of your career path from your college years to becoming a professor at the University of Chicago? I will dig into more specifics in a moment, but can you kind of tell us the steps you took from college to where you are now?

John Mark Hansen 01:15
I went to high school in a very small town in northwestern Kansas and went to the University of Kansas for my college career. I got some encouragement there to think about graduate school. So in my senior year, I applied, got in a lot of places and ended up going to Yale University for my Ph.D. I had a dissertation fellowship at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where I was there for about 15 months. And then I joined the University of Chicago faculty in the fall of 1986, as an assistant professor.

Julie 01:47
And can you give me an overview of what it is you study and focus on now? How would you describe your specialty to someone who's less familiar with your field?

John Mark Hansen 01:59
Well, I would, I suppose, I think I would focus on the courses that I'm teaching now. Most of my research now is actually on Chicago history, but the teaching that I do, I teach a course on the Politics United States Congress. I teach a course on the politics of the United States elections at the presidential level.

I teach a course on Chicago politics and then I teach undergraduate courses as well in the general education program, so called Common Core here. So my field, I would say, is American institutions, pretty broadly construed, but there's also a great degree of interplay between institutions and what political scientists in my field would call political behavior.

So that's more, what voters and ordinary citizens do, that's also been a lot of my research in the past. But what I'm particularly interested in is the way in which citizens interact with their government.

Julie 02:55
Great. And again, we'll dig into some of that in a moment. But I want to go back in time now, to when you were young, even kind of, I'm thinking like those middle school years, even early high school. What did you want to be when you were a kid? What did you think your career path would look like?

John Mark Hansen 03:14
I wanted to be a professional basketball player, but I got disabused of that notion pretty quickly. So that was, that was kind of the initial idea, I suppose. It was really when I got into high school that I began to be interested in, I guess, doing something that would be a little bit more engaging of the mind, and got some encouragement, particularly from a high school English teacher to really start to delve into more serious kinds of thinking, more serious kinds of literature, more serious kinds of history, and so when I came out of high school, my thought was that I would eventually become a lawyer.

Julie 03:5
When you look back on those years, do you now, in retrospect, see some of the things that you were interested in coming out in your work now? Are there any sort of echoes from your childhood that have cropped up in your interest?

John Mark Hansen 04:10
Well, I would say it's a little odd that I became an academic, although my mother was a teacher. She was a high school physical education teacher who became a community college physical education teacher. And so there was always heavy dose, I suppose, of teaching in the air. And I grew up in a house where we had lots of books, where we subscribe to newspapers, where we subscribe to magazines.

And so through those, public affairs was always a kind of active engagement.  My folks and I also were never really politically engaged ourselves, they were dependable voters. And I've been a dependable voter, but they weren't active in in politics at all. They weren't active in party affairs.

They really weren't engaged that much with government. I don't remember a single time that any of them went to a county commission meeting or to, we grew up on the farm, I grew up on a farm, so I don't remember any time that we had a county commission meeting, or anything like that. But there was, it was a fairly intellectual, environment, particularly for someone who grew up on a farm in that era.

Both my parents had college degrees and they were interested in a bunch of different things that went beyond what they did every day for work.

Julie 05:34
So tell me a little bit about what started to change for you when you were in college, where were there specific classes or specific events or professors that started to shape your career path?  what were some of the early steps to your interest in political science and your interest in research?

John Mark Hansen 05:54
When I went to college at KU, they asked us for a, to declare a major right at the beginning, and I declared history. And then I never took a single history course when I was at KU. In the spring of my first year of college, I took a comparative politics course. They had an honors program at KU, and I was in the honors program.

And so I got to take the honors Introduction to Comparative Politics, which was taught by a woman who actually got her PhD here at the University of Chicago. She worked on charismatic leadership, particularly looking at the Dictator Sukarno in Indonesia. And I did well in that class, and I did well enough that I attracted her attention to someone who might, she might want to encourage.

And so she encouraged me very much to think about, she actually encouraged me to transfer to a different college, but beyond that, she started to encourage me really to sort of think about putting my abilities to work, in a more academic direction on. And then in the fall of my second year, I took the honors Introduction to American Politics with a man named Alan Sigler, who really, I would say, was one of the great mentors of my life.

I did well in that class too, and he was the first one to suggest to me that, well, maybe you ought to think about going to graduate school, and so the next course that I took at his suggestion, was the graduate undergraduate course in statistical methods, which was taught by a guy named Russell Getter, and it was, it was really, Al Sigler, who started me down the path of thinking about making scholarship and teaching a career.

Julie 07:46
Yeah, my next question was going to be about mentors or people who influenced you, so I'm curious if there are other mentors you've had in graduate school or even in your early career who really influenced you and if you can speak a little bit to the role of having a mentor or someone who can take you under their wing or point you in a specific direction and how that can shape someone's career.

John Mark Hansen 08:13
Oh, no question about it. A number of years ago, professor Sigler was nominated by the College for a prize, a named professorship, prize teaching, professorship. And so I was able to sort of write up my regard and my gratitude for him in that letter. And one of the things I said is that, you know, there are many people who will talk about how great a teacher he was, but there will be few people who can say that he was really the person who launched them onto the career that they're doing today, what they're doing today.

And that was the way he was. He was a working class kid from Pittsburgh. We kind of had that in common. As I say, I grew up on a farm. And so this kind of, you know, background, his parents had not gone to college, but my parents both had finished college. But he was really the one who opened my eyes to what the possibilities were in academia and at a time when they weren't encouraging many people to go into academia. This was in the late 1970s when college faculties were pretty much tenured up from all the people who'd gone to graduate school to avoid the draft in Vietnam and there didn't seem to be many options.

It turned out to be a great time to go to graduate school and to come out into the profession, but really didn't know that at the time. So he's sort of helped me to set my course. When I got to graduate school, I was, I would say, extremely fortunate to have a number of people who took an active interest in me and my career.

I would especially cite I guess, three people who were influential. One, Steve Rosenstone, which, as you know, from the introduction, we later have become professional colleagues and did a book together. And we've stayed in touch through all these years. Steve Rosenstone, taught courses on elections and on political behavior. So that was that, sort of part of my interests that he helped to, to nurture.  

And then my thesis advisor, David Mayhew. One of the really supremely influential figures in American political science in the last part of the 20th century and the first decade or two of the 21st century. David was my dissertation chair. And David in a lot of ways was kind of my, I dunno, my sparring buddy, I suppose. He knew more than I could ever imagine knowing about the United States Congress. So much so that I would have graduate students here who would kind of marvel at all the trivia I knew about Congress. And I would tell them, I would tell them I'm a piker compared to Mayhew. The man knows everything and just a tremendously warm and supportive person. 

And then the third person, Edward Tufte, was a political economy guy who then turned to writing books on statistical graphics. And so, I had the pleasure of working with Tufte as a research assistant on a couple of those books. Probably the most creative person I've ever met, just an enormously fertile mind. And as I say, just, enormously helpful. 

And then beyond that, once I got started there, I had colleagues here, David Greenstone, Chris Aiken, who were,  I would say just enormously supportive and helpful colleagues as I was making my way in my first years here at the University of Chicago, and I had professional colleagues.

One I'll cite in particular is, I was on a panel, early on in my time on the faculty, and I was a discussant on a panel that included a professor at Irvine, who had been a graduate student here at the University of Chicago. And after I had made my remark, a man came up to me and said to me that he really thought my remarks were very helpful and really spot on.

And he'd like to introduce himself and his name was Sidney Verba. And Sidney Verbe, a major figure in the field, later became a great friend of mine. But I was really fortunate that there were people who didn't even really have a stake in me or my career. They hadn't taught me, but they took an interest in me because they liked the kind of work I was doing and they wanted to encourage me.

Julie 13:13
So, a lot of very influential people in your career. Can you talk about the decision to pursue academia specifically?

I don't know if that was always, once you decided you were going to go to graduate school, if that was always the path you had in mind or if you were more interested in doing something else, but can you tell, talk a little bit about the decision to pursue academia.

John Mark Hansen 13:41
Well, when I went to graduate school, it was certainly with the notion that I would probably go into an academic job. But as I said, it was a very uncertain time. I graduated from college in 1981. We were in the middle of the recession. And as I said, very few people were going to graduate school.

My entering class was really, really small. The admission rate was very high, which was probably a factor in my actually getting into Yale and being able to pursue my PhD there. Fortunately, by the time I started to get into my dissertation, the situation in the academic job market had changed enormously.

And so, when I finally came to the point where I was thinking about what to do next, well, an academic job was a very real possibility and a very exciting possibility. I would say however, that a lot of the people I went to graduate school with did not go into academia. Many of them actually went into political consulting.

One of them these days is a very, very important democratic pollster. A guy named Mark Melman. Another guy, Roy Bearer, went into media work campaign media work, and has practice out in California. And there are a number of others as well. So, you know, there was a real, there was a real kind of market, I guess I would say, for people who wanted to go in a different direction, and a real set of skills that people acquired in PhD programs that allowed them to go into something that put those skills to work and valued those skills and rewarded those skills.

I made the other, I made the kind of obvious choice, I suppose, the conservative choice. But, you know, I think that's one thing to know about graduate school is that it isn't only preparing you for a job in higher education or in teaching or in research. But those skills can take you a long way in a bunch of other endeavors and very important and exciting careers.

Julie 15:55
What would you say inspires your work these days? Is it something in the research that you're doing? Is it something in the, the classroom or at the university? What, or maybe there's, there's several things that are inspiring you, but what would you say are some of the things that inspire or drive your work?

John Mark Hansen 16:15
Well, I would say it's always been fun in research, just the discovery aspect, sort of bringing things to light that perhaps had been in the shadows before, either through a new argument or an idea. About what's actually going on in some phenomenon of interest in politics or in history or something.

But also sort of bringing new information to bear on things that we thought we knew already. And so it's, there's always been this sort of wonderful sense of discovery, to give you an idea of this. I did a paper with some colleagues a number of years ago now on primaries at the state level.

So for United States Senate ,statewide officers, United States Senate, governor, attorney general, and offices like that. And one of the things we were interested in was in party primaries was the degree to which they were structured by something that wasn't a political party. And so one of the places we looked at was North Dakota, which in the 1910s and 1920s and into the 1950s, actually had a pretty robust factional organized politics. That was a lot like having a two party system, but it was all playing out in the Republican party. And just being able to go back to bring all that out, to reconstruct that, to identify the names, to identify who was associated with faction and why, qas, just really, really a lot of fun. It was something that said something about the nature of elections, and the nature of parties in the United States. But it was something too, that really helped to bring out an aspect of our political history that nobody really looked into before. Nobody really knew.

Julie 18:21
Yeah. I want to move into talking a bit more about the day-to-day specifics of your job as a professor at the University of Chicago. And I know you are also the Interim Chair for the Department of Political Science. So can you talk a little bit about some of the things that you really enjoy about your specific job that you have now, either as a professor, either, or as the chair, but specifically at the university, what are some of the things that you really enjoy about your role?

John Mark Hansen 18:55
Well, certainly one of the things that's enjoyable is teaching. I'm not teaching this fall. It turned out that the enrollment in my section wasn't sufficient. And so my course actually got canceled for the fall. But in a normal year, in a normal quarter, I'm teaching a course. And, it's a lot of fun to, I have students in classes in the general education program.

It's fun because it's students who are brand new to college and are being treated as intellectual adults in the way that we do around here. We give people original text with, you know, great thinkers thinking great thoughts. And, we tell people that, yeah, you're 18 or 19 years old, but you can actually engage these thoughts, and you can make your own contributions and you can draw your own conclusions about these great thoughts.

And it's really, really great to see students get engaged in that and to gain confidence, in their ability to think clearly and to gain confidence in their ability to present their thoughts clearly. So that's just really inspiring, I would say in the general education programs. 

And in the major, in the political science major, in the other programs I've been involved in, it's students who are interested, they're taking the class because they're already interested in the subject matter. But I think especially in the classes that I teach the Congress course and the Elections course, one of the things that I really am excited about is in modeling for students, how you can approach politics analytically.

And approach politics from the standpoint of trying to understand what is happening and what's going to happen, not from the standpoint of what you want to happen, because almost everybody who's in political science has favorites there, you know, they would like to see the Democrats win or they'd like to see the Republicans win or what have you. But just learning the discipline of setting aside your own interests. Kind of partisan interest in your own political hopes, as it were, to take a more analytic, a more detached look, so that you can begin to really understand what's going on in the politics and in that way, you know, perhaps being able to interact with politics in a more informed, in a more publicized way. More thoughtful, way than coming into the class. 

And finally, I just finished five years of directing the master's program in the social sciences division, which was a special kind of experience as well. We have very large master's programs here. It's a divisional master's program, so it's not a master's in any particular subject, but rather in the social sciences.

It's a program that students can tailor to their own interest, and whether those interests are, I want to create a record so I can get into a great PhD program, or whether it's I would like to be a journalist, and so I'm going to take a variety of things that relate to the kinds of things I would like to report on, you know, that's all something that people can do.

But what was really inspiring about that, and I think what's inspiring about higher education in general. It's just the opportunities that it gives people, it gives people the opportunity to enter in one place in their lives with one set of possibilities in front of them and to exit with whole new set of possibilities that weren't there before. And so, you know, when I was Dean, which has been a while ago now, but it was what I loved was talking to alumni.

And what I loved was hearing their stories about how the University of Chicago changed their lives. How it set them on the path that was different from what they had available to them before they were here. I really wished I could bottle up all those conversations and play them back to my colleagues so that they would know how much influence they actually have on students, um, and the kind of impact that they have on students lives.

And that's really, really special. It's one of the special things about teaching at the university level and one of the special things of teaching, especially at the University of Chicago, which I think does an unusually good job at this.

Julie 23:41
I'm curious, on the flip side, what are the things about your job that are less fun or less enjoyable?

John Mark Hansen 23:50
I would say, first off, the increasingly, onerous and, in my view, wasteful regulatory regime that we're in, the kind of micromanagement, that is now expected of everything from the way we teach our courses, to the training that we're required to go through, one instance for just one example is that every year I have to take a fire safety course.

A good part of which is learning things like, you know, what kind of fire extinguisher fights which kind of fire, which isn't a big concern over here in the social sciences. It might be in a chemistry lab, but it's that those kinds of compliant sorts of things that just really drive me crazy and that, you know, make me think here, here we have a lot of really, really specialized talent, people who can really do amazing research and write amazing articles, and teach amazing courses. And we basically have them ticking boxes. Instead of doing, instead of doing that work. So that's one frustration.

The other frustration I would say is the political climate for higher education, which is over the last 20 years, I would say has gotten steadily worse. You know, this has always been a profession that is, you know, while University of Chicago faculty members get paid quite well, I would say, it's still the case that many of the people we went to college with, you know, make a lot more money than we do.

They have a lot more sort of freedom to do things that they would like to do outside of their employment. As a result of that, what's always been rewarding, though, is the is the kind of respect and gratitude that people who teach, receive both from students and from their parents and from society at large on that has really eroded over time.

It just feels like we're in a profession that is less respected than it used to be. And that's really frustrating, frustrating both from a kind of personal,  standpoint, but also frustrating from the sense that, we have so much to offer,   in terms of our expertise, so much to offer that can make our society better, and to have that sort of rejected out of hand is really, really discouraging to see it says, it does not speak well of our political culture.

Julie 26:53
I'm wondering what advice you might have for someone, a young person, who is interested in pursuing a career in political science or specifically going to grad school for political science and maybe even becoming in an academic or becoming a professor. What advice might you have for someone?

John Mark Hansen 27:12
Well, I would give a pretty broad response, which is that if you're going to go to graduate school with the idea of having an academic career you have to look within yourself and make sure you're the kind of person who is interdirected. 

One of the things that happens when you step into graduate school in the humanities and social sciences is that the due dates just don't exist as much anymore.

You're stepping away from doing courses, you do four courses for a couple of years, and then you move on to doing a dissertation. And once those courses end, there are basically aren't any hard and fast due dates on. If you're going to get your work done both as a graduate student to get your PhD. But even more when you're an assistant professor trying to compile a record that will earn you tenure. And even when you're in your later years of your career as I am, the only way that anything is ever going to get done is if you're really excited and committed to getting it done.

It's a wonderful career. It gives you a lot of autonomy. You get to decide in many, in many respects, you get to decide what you're going to teach.

You get to decide what you're going to work on. You get to decide what kind of conversations you're going to have. You get to decide what kind of papers you're going to read. You just have enormous autonomy, and enormous freedom. But with that freedom comes a flip side, which is that there's no one there to tell you what to do.

And there's no one there to make sure that you do it. So my first advice would be make sure you're a self-starter, make sure that you're really, so deeply interested in this, that you'll want to get up every day and do it, even though no one is making you do it.

Julie 29:07
Yeah, I think that's great advice. What is the most gratifying thing about your career? I know we've talked about the things that are a little more fun or more inspirational, but what would you say is the thing that is most fulfilling or gratifying?

John Mark Hansen 29:20
What has been most gratifying about my career?  I would say the ability to help people. The opportunity to help people, help them both as a teacher, as I said, I spent a lot of my career, more than half of my career. I've actually spent in academic leadership and administrative kinds of positions.

And, you know, the opportunity to help my colleagues do their research  and to get their research out into the world, the ability to help students to have the kinds of opportunities that, we're able to give them. Being able to contribute to an institution that's going to be around for a long, long time and is going to be  doing a lot of things that are beyond anything that I could do by myself.

It's really been, you know, part of that enterprise of helping people that, you know, highest job satisfactions and sociologists look into this and the professions that have the highest rates of job satisfaction are the so called helping professions, it's teachers, it's nurses, it's doctors, it's people who are able to do things for other people and that's been, I would say, a big part of what has been gratifying of being in this career.

Julie 30:51
Thanks again, Professor Hanson, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed listening to today's episode, please check out the other ones.

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