Organizing and Integrating Consulting with Teaching

Consulting with political candidates is not the exclusive province of academics who teach within the areas of political parties and campaigns or other related subfields. As suggested earlier, a variety of skills developed over the course of an academic career are politically relevant and can be put to use in campaigns, although faculty who teach campaign-related courses may have more opportunities for integrating their campaign activities into their teaching than faculty who teach other, less-relevant courses. Nevertheless, both groups face similar issues. The first challenge pertains to course scheduling and the creation of time for campaign work, and the second involves issues of course content and the integration of campaign activities with classroom activities.

The ability to schedule teaching in ways that reinforce rather than compete with campaign work will vary according to individual faculty circumstances, but accommodations can be made to merge these activities in at least two ways. First, campaign activities may be focused on the summer months, when the academic workload is typically lighter, tension is lower, and faculty are less constrained by university-related responsibilities. In these cases, instructors have an obligation to ensure that the campaign is not left short-staffed when the fall semester begins and the campaign revs up for the November election. Second, departmental teaching assignments may be arranged to allow less demanding courses to be scheduled during campaign season or courses to be grouped into particular semesters in exchange for more freedom in other semesters coinciding with campaigns. Obviously, campaign season is not the time to prepare new courses.

One of the primary benefits of active involvement in political campaigns is the opportunity that such involvement provides for integrating practical experience into academic courses. By integrating work on campaigns into courses, faculty can offer students opportunities to volunteer their own time and talents to the campaign in exchange for some amount of course credit. Because many campaigns are small and enjoy little professional assistance, students can play major roles in them and develop substantial résumés in the process.

The activities that can be integrated into such courses do not need to be restricted to those that are related to partisan campaigns. Participation in nonpartisan efforts related to citizen initiatives, general voter mobilization, and the like can also be incorporated into courses.

Another prime benefit that arises from the integration of campaign work and academic coursework is the opportunity provided to students for involvement in the creation of products that they might eventually be called upon to provide as professional political consultants. For example, courses on campaign management typically cover topics such as targeting and message development. Involvement in specific campaigns offers students opportunities to engage in the process of producing targeting plans and message boxes in real-world environments under realistic time constraints. Other kinds of campaign activities can be integrated into a variety of courses on other topics, such as “earned media” plans in political communications courses or voter contact plans in geographical information systems courses.

The important point here is that the courses that best allow integration of campaign experiences are directly related to consulting and are not competitive. Faculty are not required to forgo coursework for campaign work. Instead, such courses offer an opportunity to bring consulting work into the classroom. Furthermore, as the most recent academic and professional literature is reviewed for incorporation into a syllabus, the new knowledge arising from political science research can be introduced into campaigns.

The participant-observer status involved in campaign consulting provides an opportunity to expand, clarify, and flesh out the knowledge communicated through traditional academic textbooks and research papers. Such experiences provide colorful and useful examples to illustrate arguments made in course-related reading and, I find, generate interest and excitement on the part of students.

One last point: consulting for political campaigns can be viewed in the same light as other professional development activities that are routinely considered part of the merit retention process.

Organizing and Integrating Consulting with Academic Research

While there is no imperative to integrate research with consulting, there are two primary benefits to such integration. First, campaign consulting may raise new and interesting research questions to be pursued; second, managing a campaign and being actively involved with campaign professionals and political party activists may offer opportunities for testing important hypotheses.

Gillespie and Michelson, writing in this symposium, offer examples of political scientists who have worked with campaigns to execute voter mobilization experiments and describe how their interactions with practical politics have opened doors to new research questions for themselves and others. I have had similar experiences. In the course of my involvement in Florida party politics, I was asked to help identify state legislative races in need of support from the state party. This task required re-thinking the usual measures of party competition at the state legislative level. The traditional measures employed in such analyses have been the relative numbers of party registrants in the district or the percentage of the vote that a party has enjoyed in previous legislative elections. In Florida, however, registration figures are often unreliable indicators of support for a particular party, especially among Democrats, and previous competition for a legislative seat is heavily influenced by candidate rather than district characteristics. Working with a student who was deeply involved in Florida electoral politics, we developed a new conceptualization of party competition that more accurately reflects the underlying partisan dynamics of a district (Crew and Bayliss Reference Crew and Baylissforthcoming). We hope to test this measure in the near future.

Theoretically, holding a position as campaign manager enables opportunities for testing hypotheses related to campaigns and elections. While Gillespie and Michelson must negotiate their opportunities to work with campaigns as scholars, a campaign manager can sometimes make the choices necessary to carry out the test and thereby ease the research process. I stress sometimes, however, because there are limits even to a campaign manager's authority. For example, my most cherished research project, which I had hoped to test in the fall of 2010, fell victim to candidate insecurity. The project related to the effect of lawn signs on voter choice and required the selective placement of lawn signs in some areas of the district. Unfortunately, the candidate who had initially agreed to the experiment reneged at the last minute after considering the chance of losing votes in the control areas. This decision served as a reminder to me that campaign managers' authority is never absolute.Footnote ¹

Active involvement in politics may lead an academic to change the focus of his or her research. My own involvement in Florida led me, perhaps inevitably, to pay closer attention to broad academic questions related both to Florida politics and to campaigns and elections in general, and to focus on these areas in my academic work. As a result, I have recently published a book-length analysis of the gubernatorial administration of Jeb Bush and have completed a manuscript on the 2008 Florida elections that will be published shortly. In future years, I expect to spend more time conducting research on these topics. Thus, involvement in campaigns can reorient and reinvigorate research.

Intensified Demands from Campaign Management

Moving from the role of political campaign advisor to campaign manager is a huge step, both practically and psychologically. First, a serious campaign, even for a relatively small office, is time-intensive and requires work to be conducted outside an academic office for considerable periods of time. In the kinds of small campaigns in which I have been involved, time must be devoted to maintaining the candidate's schedule; knocking on doors; telephoning; locating positions for, putting up, and maintaining lawn signs; planning for and holding fundraisers; creating and staging events worthy of “earned media”; negotiating with vendors of all kinds; recruiting and managing volunteers; and accompanying the candidate on all sorts of excursions. Unless an academic schedule allows for ongoing engagement in these types of endeavors—many of which can consume multiple hours of time—campaign management is impossible. It may be necessary to take a leave of absence to fulfill these duties.

I have yet to take leave to direct a campaign, but campaign management is obviously disruptive to an academic schedule and has required me to significantly reduce my academic workload during election periods. I forgo any research activity and simply focus on teaching my classes. Fortunately, campaigns are episodic and those on which I have worked are relatively short-lived, spanning six to nine months. Given my rank as professor and the university's expectation that I be involved in some external activities related to its applied American politics program, I have been able to forego research attention over these time periods for a number of years. This schedule, however, may be more problematic for others at different ranks and in different circumstances.

It is important to recognize that participation in a political campaign at the level of campaign manager usually involves a psychological commitment to a candidate or cause that will inevitably challenge the theoretical detachment that scholars claim for themselves. While professional detachment is a necessity in any consulting activity, I have found it very difficult to devote the amount of time and energy necessary to effective campaign management without a personal and psychological attachment to the candidate involved. Sitting through a six-hour meeting of the Builders Association of Columbia County, Florida, listening to candidates for positions such as clerk of the county court provide poorly thought-out reasons why the group should support them, and watching the size of the group dwindle to six people before your candidate has an opportunity to speak at midnight, and then driving back home at 3:00 AM takes personal commitment. A conscious effort must be made to prevent the kind of commitment that is necessary to campaign management from coloring one's academic perspective—an issue that I discuss in greater depth later in this article.

Office Space and Equipment

While the campaign activities described previously are the tasks to which I have felt I could contribute, I also settled on them because they do not require an investment in specialized equipment, personnel, or facilities other than a workspace and a computer. Using university equipment and facilities is problematic when you are employed by a campaign, and to be safe, you may want to seek legal advice about the topic. My operating assumption is that any use of a university computer in a campaign is automatically questionable. Although faculty may have some flexibility in this respect, out of an abundance of caution, I typically use only personal computers and personal telephones for all aspects of my work when managing a campaign.

When managing a campaign, I have also found it necessary to establish an office away from the university to have space for staff meetings, the storage of materials, and other activities related to the campaign. For some campaigns, such as those for the local school board, my home serves as the campaign headquarters. For a state legislative race, the chosen site was a donated office in a local law firm. Finding an appropriate space for this purpose is one of the duties of the campaign manager.

Financial Issues Associated with Campaign Consultation

When addressing the financial aspects of campaign work, two distinct questions are involved, one relating to billing for the time you spend as a consultant, and the other involving the management of campaign funds. Specifically, these questions are: Do you acknowledge and report to your university the income that you receive for your services? How do you manage the collection, reporting, and expenditure of campaign funds?

I am not knowledgeable about the full range of options on either of these matters, but I do know that some universities—Florida State among them—allow their faculty to earn “outside” income while fulfilling their academic duties. In these cases, the university requires individuals to report the activity in question. The institution may or may not place limits on the faculty member's engagement in this activity, requiring only that it not interfere with normal productivity. In my case, I report the source and amount of funds that I receive from consulting services not only to comply with university regulations, but also to legitimate the activity and create a record that can be used in annual performance reviews. It probably makes sense to consult your colleagues and university administration before accepting a paid campaign position. Some universities—particularly public institutions dependent on state funding—may frown on faculty engagement in state-level politics.

Political campaigns cost money, and the generation, accounting, and spending of funds consumes a huge amount of campaign managers' time and raises several logistical and ethical issues. For an individual whose primary association is with a state-supported university, the intersection of money and politics is particularly fraught with anxiety. For many people, this combination raises suspicions that something unseemly, biased, or unethical may be afoot.

Three rules guide my actions regarding campaign finance. First, I engage one individual to be responsible for accepting, accounting for, and disbursing campaign money. That person and the candidate are the only persons authorized to receive and expend the campaign's financial resources. In short, the first rule is: do not handle the money. Second, keep fundraising activities separate from university space and equipment. Third, do not ask junior colleagues or especially students to contribute to the campaign.

Managing Issues Relating to Political Partisanship

Consulting with political parties and managing partisan political campaigns is inherently problematic for an academic who has pledged to maintain objectivity, especially in the classroom, and this activity sets on edge the teeth of those who see academia and political activity as separate worlds. Campaign consulting may also raise the hackles of members of the opposite party and challenge the public's view of the university's objectivity. Academic political involvement is obviously a sensitive issue for which the parameters and intensity likely vary across specific locales. Given such wide variation, I offer only the most general comment here: be alert to the possibility of backlash and attempt to inoculate yourself from it. Determining how to address backlash can only be done in the context of individual circumstances.

I follow these rules in all my campaign activities. First, I am open about my partisan attachments—I work exclusively for Democrats and nonpartisan candidates. Second, I seek out and maintain friendly personal relationships with members of the opposite party, some of whom are candidates for degrees in my department and others with whom I have crossed political swords in past campaigns. Third, I employ individuals from both political parties who have the requisite skills for adjunct teaching and visiting practitioner roles in our graduate program in applied politics. Fourth, I assist students regardless of their political background to find internships and paid employment in the political arena. Fifth, I am scrupulously professional in the classroom. My experience is that the political community is relatively small and interconnected, and this reality serves as a check on “inappropriate” behavior. Word about such behavior would travel fast and be detrimental to both my academic and professional goals.