Campaign aims at scientists and engineers

For physicist and US Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), the decision in 1998 to leave his job as assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and run for Congress wasn’t too surprising. His father, Rush Dew Holt, was known as “the boy senator” who, at age 29, became the youngest person ever elected to the US Senate. And his mother was the first woman to serve as secretary of state of West Virginia.

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in politics,” Holt said. “I’ve been interested in how the country works for as long as I’ve been interested in science.”

For physicist and Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), it was garbage that drew him to politics. In 1968, eight years after earning his PhD in nuclear physics from the University of California, Berkeley, Ehlers was teaching at Calvin College in Michigan when he became concerned about the “terrible number of open dumps and leachate flowing into the creeks and rivers in the county.” His friends encouraged him to clean up the garbage by running for county commissioner, which began a political trek that led him to Congress 25 years later.

Both men, despite their party differences, have constantly urged other scientists and engineers to run for political office, without a lot of success. Now Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA), an organization that formed with a partisan, pro-Democrat agenda just before the 2006 presidential election (see Physics Today, November 2006, page 32 ), is reshaping itself into a nonpartisan group dedicated to encouraging and supporting scientists who are interested in running for political office.

“Our activities going forward will not be partisan,” said SEA executive director Michael Brown. SEA has legally changed from a political advocacy group (known as a 527) to a nonprofit, educational organization, a 501(c)(3). The original advocacy organization will still exist, he said, but will be separate and mostly dormant until the next election. The change was prompted, he added, because in the wake of the presidential election, SEA, despite having a board of directors that included eight Nobel laureates and two former presidential science advisers, had a difficult time working with other science organizations—most of which are nonpartisan.

“We realized we didn’t want to politicize science,” Brown said, “so we thought about what programs we could develop, and we came up with the campaign project. In the beginning it will be aimed at helping scientists and engineers run for school boards. What we are going to do is spend a lot of time encouraging them to become politically active and run for office themselves.”

Challenges to evolution in recent years by intelligent design advocates on school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and other states made school boards the obvious focus for the campaign project, Brown said, but the issues go beyond the teaching of evolution. “This is really about the importance of a vigorous science curriculum and good textbooks,” he said.

“This is about finding scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who want to step up by becoming involved in the political process, and specifically by running for office,” said Daniel Goroff, vice president of academic affairs and dean of faculty at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Goroff, one of the founders of SEA, said the organization will develop field manuals and “how to” kits specifically geared to scientists and engineers who want to run for political office. “We want to bring experience, expertise, and enthusiasm to people who are interested in running.”

As SEA members developed the campaign project, Brown said, they realized that nobody really knew if there was significant interest among scientists and engineers in running for their local school boards. Brown turned to the American Physical Society’s associate executive officer Alan Chodos, editor of APS News, for answers. Chodos, in turn, ran a quick, unscientific e-mail poll among 1500 APS members.

“We realized when we began talking to people at SEA that we were almost completely in the dark about this,” Chodos said. “We had a few anecdotes, but we wanted to supplement that with a poll to find out how much interest there was.” Of the 396 APS members who responded, 26% said they had attended a school board meeting, 3.2% said they had actually run for or served on a school board, and almost 25%, or 98 of the respondents, said they would consider running if they could count on support.

“Those numbers are encouraging to me,” Chodos said.

Brown noted that SEA doesn’t want to limit the organization’s support to just scientists and engineers, but the qualifications are still being worked out. “A science teacher would be perfect,” he said, “but the board will have to decide what the qualifications are after the program grows.”

Ehlers said he didn’t like SEA’s politicizing of science prior to the last election, but if the organization is truly going to work in a nonpartisan way to encourage more scientists and engineers to run for office, “then this group might want to meet with me and I could help them write a primer for elections.”

Holt, who has been supported by many SEA members, said he, too, would like to work with the campaign project. “I certainly would like to see them be successful with this. And I would tell people who run for the school board or some other local offices that they can keep up their professional career at the same time.”

But Ehlers had a piece of realpolitik advice for those in the science community considering a run for office: “They have to recognize that the world is not sitting there breathlessly waiting for scientists to get into office and straighten everything out.”