Teaching Politics Without Prejudice

For Harold Stanley, the 2008 presidential campaigns are serving as a laboratory for a class he teaches every four years. He uses the primaries, media coverage, campaign finance reports and voter patterns to teach

Harold Stanley, Political Science Department

Dedman College’s popular political science course on “Presidential Elections.”

“The challenge is trying to figure out what is happening while it is happening,” says Stanley, the Geurin-Pettus Distinguished Chair in American Politics and Political Economy. “Most election analyses are written well after the fact.”

Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were on the ballot in 1996, the first time Stanley taught “Presidential Elections” at the University of Rochester in New York. Since then he has seen voters and students grow more polarized.

“Typically, young people are not strong partisans,” Stanley says. “But what is happening in society is reflected in students. The specialized news outlets that developed over the past few years have reinforced polarization by enabling voters to select what they want to hear.”

Stanley avoids strident polarization in class discussions, instead encouraging thoughtful consideration of each candidate’s stand on issues. “For students to form their own positions, they need to broaden their horizons to understand other political positions,” he says.

Stanley joined SMU’s Political Science Department in 2003 as the first professor to hold the Geurin-Pettus endowed faculty chair. The position was created to attract a scholar whose research and teaching interests related to domestic policy and government and fiscal issues, says Cal Jillson, Dedman College associate dean and former chair of political science.

“Harold taught in one of the nation’s leading political science departments for 20 years,” Jillson says. “We knew that he could help lead an effort to continue the growth and development of our department. And he has done just that.”

Stanley has developed new political science courses that draw upon his research interests, including Southern politics and Latino politics, which he teaches at the Dallas campus and at SMU-in-Taos. Active in the SMU community, he was appointed by President R. Gerald Turner to chair the University’s Task Force on Honors Programming and serves on the Board of Directors for Friends of the SMU Libraries.

“Typically, young people are not strong partisans. But what is happening in society
is reflected in students. The specialized news outlets that developed over the past few years have reinforced polarization by enabling voters to select what they want to hear.”
– Harold Stanley

Students in his courses benefit from small class size &ndash political science class sizes are limited to 30 &ndash and spirited discussion. He schedules 15-minute meetings with each student at the beginning of the semester because “it puts them at ease to come in later to talk about their research papers, and it leads to better discussion in class,” he says.

An expert in American national politics and electoral change in the South, he has served as president of the Southern Political Science Association. His publications include Vital Statistics on American Politics, now in its 11th edition, which he co-authors with Richard G. Niemi, professor of political science at the University of Rochester. Vital Statistics, the standard resource for political science researchers and students, includes updated data, facts and figures on key areas such as elections, political parties, public opinion and voting patterns.

Stanley earned B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Yale University and a Master of Philosophy in politics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 1979 he joined the University of Rochester Department of Political Science.

Stanley’s interest in political science and an academic career dates to his days as a student at Yale. “By the end of my freshman year I realized that professors had the enviable job of pursuing what they were really interested in,” he says.

While at Yale from 1968 to 1972, Stanley reported on years of student political unrest as news director of the campus radio station. Classes were suspended when, on the heels of Vietnam War protests, 15,000 demonstrators converged on New Haven to protest the murder trial of Bobby G. Seale, national chairman of the Black Panther Party.

“It was a very contentious and difficult time,” Stanley recalls. “Everything was political.”

A native of Enterprise, Alabama, Stanley says he knew “a lot was at stake for the United States. Growing up in Enterprise, I had a real sense that the world is out there and going on somewhere else. My sense was, ‘Let’s go see.’ ”

He encourages the same attitude in his students today.

– Nancy Lowell George (’79)