Professor Adam Sheingate is an associate professor of political science and director of undergraduate studies for the political science department. He is teaching the American Presidency this semester, then switching to Food Politics and American Political Development next semester. Sheingate graduated with a degree in political science and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He went on to get his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, later becoming a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University. He came to Hopkins in 2000, but has also been a visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley and University College Dublin. He has written one book, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan and is working on a second about the history of political consulting. His most recent articles include “Why Can’t Americans See the State?” and “Rethinking Rules: Complexity and Constraint in the House of Representatives.”
Adam Sheingate (AS): So, my first semester teaching at Hopkins was in the fall of 2000, and I was teaching the American Presidency class for the first time. And it was the Bush/Gore election so I had arranged my syllabus kind of around the election and tried to use the election, thinking that people would be more interested. And then obviously the election didn’t end when it was supposed to. And that threw somewhat of a wrench in the plans, and I didn’t know what was going to happen, I didn’t know what Florida election law was or how it was going to affect the outcome. I certainly didn’t know that the Supreme Court was going to step in and say, “It’s over.” I tell this story a lot and what I learned is that I should always teach my American Presidency class in the spring, because that way [there is] a fairly good chance that if [there] is an election the outcome will be known by that point. I guess the broader lesson there is that you kind of have to adapt as you’re going.
The News-Letter (N-L): So what first got you interested in political science?
AS: That’s a hard question, I think I was interested in politics; I never really was involved in politics myself. I was initially interested in philosophy as an undergraduate. I guess it wasn’t until my senior year in college that I took a class on American Politics and found it very interesting and then I decided to go into a political science Ph.D. program. I was interested in politics and government, and I thought maybe I’d go work into D.C. as opposed to becoming an academic. It’s hard to say exactly what got me interested. It wasn’t something I always knew I was going to do; sort of one thing led to another.
N-L: What do you consider your specialty? What do you find most interesting?
AS: Well, I’m studying U.S. politics, but I also look at public policy in the United States and other countries, mostly in Europe. I’ve done work on agriculture policy, on health policy, on food policy. So, U.S. and comparative I guess are my interests.
N-L: What is your favorite part of the job?
AS: I think my favorite part of the job is the opportunity to sort of pick a question that I find interesting and have the flexibility and the autonomy to find out about it and research it. And also the kind of ongoing learning that takes place. So, it’s a long career, but it’s not like being in some sciences where if you don’t come up with a brilliant idea by the time you’re 30 you’re not really given any relevance. So with political science, the more you observe the more you’re actually learning about the political system. I know much more now than [when] I started teaching 10 years ago, and there’s also 10 more years of American politics that’s happened that I can take into account. So that kind of perspective is really interesting. And you know the opportunity to travel and teach other places, that kind of flexibility to be mostly self-directed is great.
N-L: What’s you’re least favorite part of the job?
AS: Well I don’t know, I’m kind of reluctant to say. *laughs* I wouldn’t say it’s my least favorite part, but I would say the most difficult part of being an academic is that nobody actually prepares you for the job.
For example, when you’re a graduate student, you’re just learning about political science, you’re not really learning how to become a professor. You never actually learn how to teach courses, you just have to learn while you’re doing it. Or you never really learn how to do some of your administrative responsibilities. So at every stage of your job you’re kind of peering behind the veil and finding something out that was completely obscure before. And part of the tradition of the academy — I think it’s changing a little bit now — is that it was sort of looked down upon to talk about these things, to talk about the practical aspects of the job, because it was seen as detracting from the pure intellectual aspect of the job. So that’s been the most challenging, because you’re kind of learning on the job a lot.
N-L: What is your favorite class that you’ve ever taught at Hopkins or in general?
AS: I think that this course on food politics right now is my favorite, because it’s an opportunity to take all of these different issues which have gained greater attention recently, whether it’s obesity or food safety or other aspects and see how they fit together. I also really like teaching graduate seminars because that’s an opportunity to engage a small group of people on a topic that everybody is really interested in. It’s very challenging and intellectually it’s very engaging.
I mean, I like teaching large lecture courses too, there’s a kind of performance aspect of it that I like and it’s a real challenge. There are some days when I sort of feel like, “Aw, that lecture didn’t go so well” and some days when I feel like that lecture was good; “I sort of pulled it together there at the end.” So, the challenge of it is something that I also enjoy. And so even though I’ve taught this many times, I can’t just teach the same, it’s not like I’m teaching calculus. Calculus doesn’t change. The presidency changes.
So every year I teach this course, I have to change some aspects of it. That means that even though I’m only teaching two lectures a week, it’s usually the case that every day that I’m teaching, from 8:30 in the morning, until 1:30 when I get in front of the class I’m revising my notes and updating my slides. That’s again something I like about that job, but also something that is very challenging. It would be nice sometimes to just pull it off the shelf and walk into a class, but you just can’t do that. As well as the fact that political science research is changing, and I’m trying to bring information to the class about what political scientists know or think about the issues. Every time we have a new president we have more data that we can use to evaluate what’s going on.
N-L: In that vein, what research have you done that you’ve liked recently?
AS: I’m currently doing some research on the politics of food and trying to think about how political struggles over those issues might be changing or what the possibilities for change might be in the future. Something else that I’ve been interested in and I think I’ve contributed to in a positive way is trying to think about the creative aspects of politics in the sense of how individual actors influence political outcomes. We think about the concept that someone is entrepreneurial in politics; someone who’s a political entrepreneur sort of takes it upon themselves to move things along in some way, to innovate in some way. And that’s some research that I’ve been involved in for the last couple of years, I think I’ve written some really good things that help us understand kind of the creative aspects of politics or the entrepreneurial aspects of politics. So that’s something I’ve been working on. Something else that I’ve been working on, on and off, is the history of the political consulting profession. Trying to understand how is it that political consultants — people like David Axelrod or Karl Rove — how is it that they’ve become so influential in our political system.
So I’m kind of looking at that historically and trying to understand what consequence that has had for American politics and American democracy. The question, I guess, would be, “Does it matter that people who advise political candidates are basically in business to do so”; that they have a consulting profession. How does the profit motive matter for the kind of advice that they give?
N-L: So when you’re doing research or when you’re teaching, I assume you have some political persuasion you adhere to: Is it hard to remain unbiased?
AS: I think there are two answers to that question. I think one is, when a plumber comes to your house, there isn’t like a Republican or Democratic way to fix your sink. I think similarly, there isn’t a Republican or Democratic way to “do” political science, which is to study politics; to try to answer questions like, for example, what is the role of the President in the political system. Of course I have political views, but I don’t think it’s my role to articulate those. I think the greater challenge is that many students, I think incorrectly, assume that a professor has a political viewpoint. So then they might interpret a statement as being a political viewpoint as opposed to being a professional view I have about the political system.
So for example, if I say Obama made a mistake on this, or did well on this, I might be interpreted as making a political statement whether I agree or disagree with the Obama administration. Or if I say that Bush made a mistake in this way, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a critic of Bush. I’m saying from my analysis of his performance, it was a poor performance. So that is I think, the challenge, in that maybe that’s a function of our political system today to the degree that it’s a pretty polarized political environment and the media is kind of a noisy and somewhat poisonous environment, that people assume that if you make a statement about a president or about politics that you’re making a political statement. So the challenge is to communicate to students what the research is showing and that they don’t think that’s my personal view. On the other hand, the realistic view is that we choose our subjects based on our personal interest and those interests are also political.
N-L: Given all of your experience, what advice would you give to students who want to pursue a political science major or take political science classes?
AS: Political science is a very broad field, and there’s a lot of variation among what political scientists do, whether they study American politics or whether they study China or they study political theory, political philosophy, or whether they study international relations. And political science majors I think, should get a breadth of the discipline, and then once they have that breadth, should think about how they want to concentrate their time and focus. And then maybe also add something that distinguishes themselves, whether that’s proficiency in a foreign language or a second major in art history or history of science, something that can maybe help them distinguish themselves from other poli sci majors or other students at Hopkins.
There are just so many opportunities here; if someone has the desire to be a political science major and a cognitive science major, at a place like Hopkins it’s possible to do that because you have so many great departments across the spectrum. And that’s something a potential employer might take note of, or a law school application even. That’s another way to distinguish yourself.
