February 2007 Stories

Politics Prof Picked as Oregon’s Outstanding Researcher

Professor Richard Ellis was named Oregon’s Outstanding Researcher of the Year. The Oregon Academy of Science generally looks to the hard sciences to honor researchers, but Ellis’ prolific record of research and publication is difficult to ignore. The Willamette professor has written or edited a dozen books on the American presidency and political culture.

Most academic work is read only by other academics, but Ellis strives to write for a broader audience as well. His most recent book, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, now in its fourth printing, has reached well beyond the Ivory Tower. In 2005, the year of its publication, the book outsold every politics and law book on the Library Journal’s list.

Ellis’ account of how the Pledge developed in response to anxieties about immigration and “alien” ideas like Communism has been featured on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe. Locally, the Portland City Club initiated a conversation about the book by selecting it as the Citizens Read book of the month. The book has also met with critical acclaim from scholars, garnering the Langum Prize for the best book published in legal history.

While the plaudits roll in, the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics is quietly finishing up his next project — a history of presidential travel from George Washington to George W.

The things we take for granted Ellis takes as subjects: presidents shaking hands with crowds, travels abroad, presidential protection by the Secret Service, taxpayer funding for presidential trips. None of these phenomena would have been familiar to Washington or James Monroe, yet today’s presidency is unimaginable without them. Readers can discover when and how these changes occurred, as well as what they mean, when Ellis’ book is published in 2008.

The ‘How To’ of Historical Research
Ellis’ research looks more like history than what many think of as science; he contacts historical societies, studies presidential papers and scours hundreds of old newspapers. “The digitizing of historical newspapers and other resources has transformed the way historians and political scientists conduct research,” Ellis says. “A 10-year project can become a two-year project.”

Changes in information technologies may have made research easier, but writing, Ellis says, remains as slow and laborious as ever. “Good writing is always hard work. Nothing is more painful than throwing out what one has spent weeks writing, but nothing is more essential to good writing than the ability to ruthlessly prune.” He recently hit the delete key on 25 pages.

Ellis has observed that many good researchers never think of themselves as writers, and as a result never focus on the “how to” of compelling writing. Some academics even distrust good writing, he says, feeling that compelling prose may disguise weak argument or shoddy evidence. “I always thought of myself as a teacher-scholar, but only in the last decade have I begun to shed my graduate school biases and think of my vocation as not only researcher but writer.”

The writing process, for Ellis, is a necessary part of the research process. “While I enjoy research, I’m always eager to get started writing. It’s a back and forth process. I use the writing to find out what I don’t know and where I need to do more research.”

The Envelope Please
Scientists from around the state will be on hand to congratulate Ellis as he receives the Outstanding Researcher award. “I’m delighted that the nomination has gone to someone in the social sciences,” says Jeff Myers, president of the Oregon Academy of Science and geology professor at Western Oregon University. “In the past, the awards have gone to people in the hard sciences. It’s nice to see the academy expanding.”

“Ellis’ students are clearly lucky to share his insight and experience, and Willamette University is equally fortunate to have Ellis as a colleague,” Myers says, adding that Ellis was “enthusiastically chosen.”

The Oregon Academy of Science promotes science education and scientific research in the state, encouraging communication among Oregon scientists and mentoring new generations of scientists in Oregon high schools.

A Running Tradition

While she’s only a junior this year, Sarah Zerzan’s connection to Willamette University starts back in the late 1940s, when her grandfather Charles Zerzan ’48 came to campus on the GI Bill after fighting with the Army in World War II. Her grandmother, then Joan Kathan ’48, was here on a music scholarship. The two met, fell in love and married in their senior year.

Several decades later, Charles and Joan’s children were deciding where to attend college. Five of the 12 siblings followed in their parents’ footsteps and chose Willamette, including Terry Zerzan ’78, Sarah’s father. Terry was a star runner at Willamette, and he still holds the school record for the marathon.

So when it was Sarah’s turn to choose, she already knew quite a bit about the small liberal arts university in the heart of the Willamette Valley. A runner herself, Sarah picked up the habit as a young girl in San Carlos, Calif., when her father asked her to run with him. The Willamette ties in her family are strong, but Sarah insists it was the University’s academic caliber and strong running reputation that brought her here.

And while she continues the family tradition, she doesn’t stand in the family shadow. Zerzan jokingly calls herself the “dumb jock” of the family — her father is an aerospace engineer, her late mother spoke seven languages, Charles Zerzan was a doctor who cared for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her other grandfather pioneered prestressed concrete in America. It’s a lot to live up to, but Zerzan hasn’t hesitated to distinguish herself in multiple ways — academically, athletically and through her involvement in socially conscious activities.

What garnered her the most attention last fall was her string of wins with the cross country team. Zerzan plowed through a muddy 6-kilometer course in November to become the NCAA Division III women’s cross country national champion. This added to Zerzan’s previous honors as an All-American in cross country and winner of multiple regional races, including the Northwest Conference Championships and the West Regional Championship. Like her father, she is setting school records, in the 5K and the 6K. Her recent honors include a nomination for NCAA Division III Collegiate Woman Athlete of the Year and being chosen the 2006 Ad Rutschman Small College Female Athlete of the Year at the Oregon Sports Awards.

Zerzan considers winning nationals the highlight of her athletic accomplishments so far, mainly because of what she went through to get there. Last spring during track season, Zerzan was traversing a crosswalk when a turning car struck her, throwing her 15 feet into the bike lane. Luckily, no bones were broken, although she suffered deep tissue damage in her thigh. “I’d been running better than I ever had in my life. It was frustrating to be doing so well and then lose it all,” she says. “That’s what made this season so great for me, to come back from something like that. Being able to still run every day is special to me.”

Although running is a major passion in Zerzan’s life, it’s not the only one. “I come here to study, and I run because I love it,” she says. “So I’m a student first.” Zerzan is majoring in biochemistry with a minor in Spanish, has a 3.9 GPA and plans to go to medical school to become a pediatrician. “I’ve always been really fascinated by how the world works, and that’s science,” she says. “When I was younger, I had an amazing pediatrician who would explain things to me because I was really curious. I know it sounds cliché to say you want to help people, but I can’t think of a greater way to do that than to make them feel better.”

Zerzan came face-to-face with health concerns in a developing country last summer when she traveled to Costa Rica through the Organization of Tropical Studies, headquartered at Duke University. The organization includes 63 universities and research institutions from the U.S., Latin America and Australia. Its goal is to provide leadership in education, research and the responsible use of natural resources in the tropics. Through the program, Zerzan studied the epidemiological effects of dietary change in Costa Rica’s indigenous populations.

As the indigenous people have become Westernized, they have also started eating more processed foods, in turn causing them to exhibit more Western health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart attacks. Zerzan went door-to-door interviewing villagers about the effects of this phenomenon. “The thing that shocked us most was the lack of awareness of these issues,” she says. “In America, we know if you eat potato chips every day at every meal, you’re not going to be healthy. There, they don’t know that. I also was astounded at these people’s lack of health care. In general, Costa Rica has good health care, but the populations I was working with were especially marginalized. Some people had to walk miles and miles to find adequate care.”

On the positive side, Zerzan was also struck by the kindness and generosity of the Costa Ricans she met. If she had gone door-to-door in the U.S. and asked people for an interview, she expects many would have refused. In Costa Rica, “they were very open to it. They would invite you in and offer you juice.”

Zerzan addresses global health issues while at home through one of her other campus projects — the Student Global AIDS Campaign. She is one of of the four students who founded a chapter at Willamette. SGAC is a national grassroots movement, the largest student network committed to ending the HIV and AIDS crisis worldwide. Zerzan and the other founders discovered Willamette had the only university chapter in the region, so they organized and hosted a Pacific Northwest Summit on World AIDS Day to build the movement’s momentum elsewhere.

Creating and hosting a major regional conference is a tough job, one Zerzan squeezed in while training and running at the national championships. “We’re one of the only groups in the West, and that’s a problem,” she says. “We want to make Willamette a leader on this issue.”

Zerzan’s interests and achievements seem endless, and she is looking forward to this spring’s track season, as well as her final cross country season in the fall. She knows that whatever choices she makes after graduation, running still will be a major part of her life. “I definitely plan to be running for the rest of my life, as long as I can. My dad still runs, but he calls it hobbling,” she says, a grin spreading across her face. “He’s a fast hobbler.”

Protest on the Edge

Sociology Professor Kelley Strawn spent his summer as he always does, looking for the Holy Grail in a sweltering city in Mexico. After the sun rises, the temperature climbs past 100 and the air is thick as a sauna. Strawn spends his days indoors, in an air conditioned library, navigating online databases and typing words in a search engine: “sit in,” “protest,” “blockade,” “rally,” “march.”

He has more than 65,000 news articles on his hard drive, but he’s collecting more, and during a handful of trips to Mexico City he succeeded in acquiring official state and police records of protest events. “That’s the Holy Grail of research — getting state officials to turn over data they don’t want you to know they have,” he says.

Strawn is tracking news events to better understand what the media is, and is not, telling the public when protests occur. He wants to understand how protest becomes radicalized and how social movements turn to social unrest or even violence, and Mexico is his laboratory.

“We can’t take the stability of our neighbors for granted,” he says, “especially Mexico. Not everyone there has bought into the system because for everyone who has power, many more do not. There’s a delicate balance.

“The country is undergoing major social, political and economic changes — in a deliberate manner. We assume that because Mexico has a relatively long history of stability, things will remain stable. In 2000, though, one-party rule was broken and the political structure shifted right, toward a more conservative government.”

Events in 2006 offer both hope of continued stability, through the highly contested but peaceful transition of federal power to a new congress and president, and reason to be concerned: The schism between the affluent and poor is becoming ever more unstable.

Changing Track
Strawn didn’t mean to end up in Mexico. Two years into a sociology PhD program, he threw caution — and his professional track — to the wind, took a two-year leave of absence, and headed for Mexico, where he taught at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), a system of private schools with 30 campuses in Mexico. “It’s essentially high school prep and a privatized university system, one of the only Mexican schools accredited by North America,” he says.

The campus where Strawn taught is based in Culiacán, a city of 750,000 people and counting. Immigrants from around the world find their way to the valley where two rivers meet, creating a vibrant ethnic melting pot, but the population is still largely Mestizo (a blend of Caucasian and Amerindian) and Catholicism still dominates. In spite of Culiacán’s size, the campus is known as one of the smaller, more provincial branches.

Strawn returned to the States after two years and brought two things back with him: a wife, a Culiacán native and fellow teacher, and a deepened conviction about social justice. He immersed himself in his sociology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with new energy and a stronger sense of purpose. “My whole state of mind was elevated,” he says.

“I have seen so many inequalities in Central America and Mexico,” Strawn continues, remembering the impoverished barrios from his travels. “Wealth is so unequally distributed in these countries, and this puts tremendous pressure on social and political institutions. That I have family there makes it all the more real to me. In many ways, this guides my research as a sociologist and fuels my determination to engage students in discussions about causes and solutions.”

Thinking Past the Labels
Now Strawn returns to Mexico each summer, to the ITESM library with its Spanish-language databases. He collects and categorizes and works to shed light on why people block streets, why they march, why they organize.

He hopes to instill passion and a sense of social justice in his students. “I want them to be critical thinkers who won’t just accept presented information. At the same time, I don’t want them to be cynical or pessimistic because the problems are so difficult to solve.”

Strawn wants his students to ask questions and seek solutions without the baggage of labels — Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, right-wing, left-wing — getting in the way.

“I don’t like how the world puts us into those categories, or how our public discourse invokes these labels in ways that grossly over-simplify complex issues. A fundamental tenet in sociology is that social explanations are seldom as obvious as we think they are. Thus, it’s important to value all positions regardless of which place you’re coming from, whether you’re talking about inequalities in wealth, health care, the death penalty or what the legal definition of marriage is going to be. It shouldn’t come down to whether we’re liberals or conservatives. What should matter is what we’re doing right and what we need to do better.

“Most important,” Strawn says, “is to be hopeful about what any one individual can accomplish.”

Talking Across the Divide

Having the state Capitol across the street often creates meaningful opportunities for engagement. In early January the Senate President’s Office and the Willamette Public Policy Research Center collaborated on a forum for senators to refresh communication and negotiation skills and bone up on the policies of governance.

The 2007 Senate Leadership Institute, a two-day workshop for old and new hands on the Senate deck, was formal in name only. Senators from around the state attended in slacks or jeans, dress shirts or sweaters, and got to know each other in a non-partisan setting. Friendly rivalry was interspersed with collaboration and team building exercises as 30 senators learned about government ethics, negotiation skills and budgets, and worked through fictitious political scenarios (“Senator Jones and Senator Green need to get X bill passed. How will they negotiate a compromise?”).

“You and I do not have the luxury of not getting along,” said Senate President Peter Courtney in closing this year’s institute. “If we do not figure out a way to get along — and we’re not always going to agree — then we fail in our mission.” He said communicating and negotiating are as important as the mastery of issues.

“The intent is to build skills toward a collaborative rather than a competitive approach,” says Laura Leete, Public Policy Research Center director. Leete headed up the organization of Willamette’s second annual institute.

Susan Glaser, who co-presented a communications course, said people are tired of gridlock. “Citizens want to believe in government again. They want to hope. It’s important to talk across the divide, to find consensus in spite of divergent viewpoints.”

The Public Policy Research Center concentrates on community-based research and outreach, with a recent focus on poverty and hunger in Oregon, state forest management, environmental justice and “green” investment markets.