When Daniel Patrick Moynihan first ran for Senate in 1976, his opponent, James Buckley, dismissively referred to the former Harvard sociologist as “Professor Moynihan.”
The backhanded insult did not work well enough. Moynihan won that race and three more that put him in Washington for the next 24 years.
Moynihan may have been the most famous New Yorker to transition from the lecture hall to the legislative chamber, but today there are several politicians that live in both worlds.
Council Member David Yassky admits to being something of a professorial type—and for good reason. The comptroller candidate had been teaching law at Brooklyn Law School when he abandoned his tenure-track position to join the City Council in 2001.
Yassky has found that constituents and colleagues can be as hard to get through to as his students were.
As a law professor, he said, he learned the rule that “anything you want students to learn, you have to say three times and I took that to heart.”
“It’s true that as an elected official, if you’re speaking to a group or talking about an issue, you oftentimes have to repeat yourself to make yourself heard,” Yassky said.
There are differences between the two jobs, of course. Politics, he said, allows for less time for serious deliberation.
“As a law professor, you spend five months writing an article—so it allows you to step back and think more deeply about the underlying policy issues,” he said.
Yassky taught a class at NYU in 2007, but other than that, the demands of the Council and running for citywide office has kept him from the classroom.
Others have found a way to balance the two roles.
Council Member Gale Brewer has juggled stints in government and academia for 30 years. She has taught at CUNY and Barnard while serving as a government staffer and representing the Upper West Side.
She now teaches a spring semester course at Hunter College with one of her old bosses, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger. The class is about the relationship between policy and politics, she said, adding that attempts to bridge the divide between academia and the real world were rare on campus.
“When I was at the CUNY Graduate Center for two years,” she recalled, “here we have all these great professors working on housing issues, but what they were doing didn’t have anything to do with what government was doing.”
Brewer said responsibility for the disconnect goes both ways. While electeds need to listen more, academics also need to get off campus more and bend the ears of lawmakers.
“It takes a lot of time to get your ideas into the right hands,” she said of her fellow professors. “It’s very time consuming.”
Since 2007, Assembly Member Carl Heastie has put his MBA to use in teaching finance and business ethics at Monroe College in the Bronx.
Heastie finds that his business students “are very much attuned to politics.”
With all the government intervention in the finance sector in recent years, Heastie offers a window into the mind frames of legislators.
“A lot of the times, politics comes up and they like having an elected politician teaching,” he said.
Heastie added that at least one lesson from business school translated into the political realm: He talks to his students about what kind of managers they will be.
“In graduate school, they teach that there’s three types of leaders: authoritarian, laissez-faire and democratic.”
Asked where he was on the spectrum, the Bronx Democratic Party boss had an obvious answer: “Democratic.”
The backhanded insult did not work well enough. Moynihan won that race and three more that put him in Washington for the next 24 years.
Moynihan may have been the most famous New Yorker to transition from the lecture hall to the legislative chamber, but today there are several politicians that live in both worlds.
Council Member David Yassky admits to being something of a professorial type—and for good reason. The comptroller candidate had been teaching law at Brooklyn Law School when he abandoned his tenure-track position to join the City Council in 2001.
Yassky has found that constituents and colleagues can be as hard to get through to as his students were.
As a law professor, he said, he learned the rule that “anything you want students to learn, you have to say three times and I took that to heart.”
“It’s true that as an elected official, if you’re speaking to a group or talking about an issue, you oftentimes have to repeat yourself to make yourself heard,” Yassky said.
There are differences between the two jobs, of course. Politics, he said, allows for less time for serious deliberation.
“As a law professor, you spend five months writing an article—so it allows you to step back and think more deeply about the underlying policy issues,” he said.
Yassky taught a class at NYU in 2007, but other than that, the demands of the Council and running for citywide office has kept him from the classroom.
Others have found a way to balance the two roles.
Council Member Gale Brewer has juggled stints in government and academia for 30 years. She has taught at CUNY and Barnard while serving as a government staffer and representing the Upper West Side.
She now teaches a spring semester course at Hunter College with one of her old bosses, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger. The class is about the relationship between policy and politics, she said, adding that attempts to bridge the divide between academia and the real world were rare on campus.
“When I was at the CUNY Graduate Center for two years,” she recalled, “here we have all these great professors working on housing issues, but what they were doing didn’t have anything to do with what government was doing.”
Brewer said responsibility for the disconnect goes both ways. While electeds need to listen more, academics also need to get off campus more and bend the ears of lawmakers.
“It takes a lot of time to get your ideas into the right hands,” she said of her fellow professors. “It’s very time consuming.”
Since 2007, Assembly Member Carl Heastie has put his MBA to use in teaching finance and business ethics at Monroe College in the Bronx.
Heastie finds that his business students “are very much attuned to politics.”
With all the government intervention in the finance sector in recent years, Heastie offers a window into the mind frames of legislators.
“A lot of the times, politics comes up and they like having an elected politician teaching,” he said.
Heastie added that at least one lesson from business school translated into the political realm: He talks to his students about what kind of managers they will be.
“In graduate school, they teach that there’s three types of leaders: authoritarian, laissez-faire and democratic.”
Asked where he was on the spectrum, the Bronx Democratic Party boss had an obvious answer: “Democratic.”
