'Political junkie'

Professor Margaret Thompson brings passion to history courses

By: Hope Morley

Posted: 9/22/08

Professor Margaret Thompson's office speaks for itself.

Bumper stickers proclaiming "Well-behaved Women Don't Make History" and "Peace Takes Courage" adorn her office door. Hanging on one of her walls, a collection of political buttons tell visitors to "Question Authority" and "Clean up Politics, Elect a Woman."

Around Syracuse University, Thompson is known as the history department's resident political fanatic.

"She's a political junkie per se," said history professor Scott Strickland, who has known Thompson since 1984.

Thompson came to SU in 1981 as an assistant professor in history after working at Knox College in Illinois. During her years as a graduate student and before, Thompson worked on a number of political campaigns, including several presidential ones. Though she is still active in politics, she decided that teaching was a better career choice for her.

"In government work, even when you are working for somebody you really admire, you're ultimately working for them. You do what they need done," Thompson said. "I decided that what academia offered me that those jobs didn't was control of my own mind."

Thompson is teaching two courses this semester: HST 341: "The Modern Presidency," and a new honors course, HST 300: "The Election and the New Media." The latter is composed of fifteen honors students and about ten senior citizens from Oasis, a local senior enrichment program.

"To hear from people who have been involved in politics and have been voting for a long time, but who may not be as familiar with the technology as young people are," Thompson said. "I think there's going to be some good intergenerational communication there."

While talking to her classes or anyone in her office, Thompson demands attention. She will not enter into a conversation lightly, but when someone poses a few good questions on a topic that she is passionate about, the stories begin to flow. In every conversation, she offers experiences, examples and historical information.

In her Modern Presidency course, a full lecture class with 100 students enrolled, Thompson works to engage her students. She holds no lecture notes, even when that day is based purely on theory. As students volunteer their opinions on articles read for homework, she pulls in those who did not raise their hand with comments like, "You're nodding, talk to me."

Students often comment on her uncompromising manner.

"She runs the class pretty strictly, but she's not cruel, she just demands undivided attention," said Brain Amaral, a junior broadcast journalism major in Thompson's class. "Leaving the class in the middle of a lecture is a big no-no, and she's not afraid to call out students who leave. But I think she manages to not have students hate her for it, because the class is lively and interesting."

Some students aren't always thrilled with Thompson's political enthusiasm. In her Modern Presidency course, Thompson has been upfront about her support for Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy. She received several e-mails from students who argued her liberal political leanings created a political bias in the class.

"I want to make it very clear to you that when I express something that is obviously an opinion that I don't expect or anticipate that you will share that opinion," Thompson said to her class this fall. "I have taught many students over the years who are ardent Republicans, ardent conservatives and guess what? They left my class as ardent Republicans and ardent conservatives."

Joleen Zanuzoski, a political science and history major who graduated in 2006, took Thompson's Modern Presidency course and later asked her to be her honors thesis advisor. That thesis is now being expanded into a full book on sex trafficking in Southeast Asia.

"She's really inspiring," Zanuzoski said. "She's by far one of my favorite professors I had at SU because she's so excited by what you're doing, and she really takes an active interest in it."

Before teaching at SU, Thompson's first passion was politics. She became involved as a child growing up in Gainesville, Fla. She remembers going campaigning with her father, who actively worked for the civil rights movement and even once had a cross burned on his lawn before Thompson was born.

"I came from a family that was very committed," Thompson said. "We did get obscene phone calls and garbage thrown on our lawn and things like that."

In 1964, when Thompson was 15 years old, she became co-chair of her county's Citizens for Lyndon Johnson. Her fellow co-chair was a black boy from the separate black high school. When the local paper ran a picture of the two of them together, it was considered very incendiary.

"Supporting Lyndon Johnson in the segregated South was a very racial thing to do," Thompson recalls. "It was really all about civil rights, at least in my part of the world."

By the presidential election of 1968, it was all about Vietnam.

Thompson switched her allegiance from Johnson to a Democratic challenger named Eugene McCarthy in opposition to the Vietnam War.

"I'm not saying I was involved in every election, but I've been involved since I was a high school kid, basically," Thompson said.

While attending Smith College for a degree in American studies, Thompson interned in Washington, D.C., for Congressman Claude Pepper. In 1975, when Thompson was working toward her graduate degree in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she became an American Political Science Association congressional fellow.

As a congressional fellow, she worked in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. One notable alumnus from that program is Dick Cheney.

During her time as a congressional fellow, Thompson worked on the presidential campaign of democratic Sen. Frank Church from Idaho. Church had come onto the national scene while doing an investigation into the intelligence community and decided to run for president. He won three primaries.

"To give you an idea of how ineffectual this campaign was, I ended up being the fourth most experienced person on his campaign staff," Thompson said. "I was a grad student who had never run a campaign in my life."

Though Church was not successful in his bid for the White House, Thompson does claim her time with him as a valuable learning experience.

"I learned what I did and didn't want to do, and I learned some things about what works and what doesn't in political campaigns," Thompson said.

Based on her experience in campaigns, Thompson is opinionated about politics and not afraid to be outspoken about it, and her colleagues in the history department can attest to that. Both Thompson and her fellow professors enjoy discussing politics within the department.

"She is a source of insights that you can't find easily anywhere else, even in this age of blogs," said professor Norman Kutcher. "As a presidential historian, she has a good sense of how today's politics relate to politics and events past."

History professor Strickland said that they share similar political leanings, though Strickland said they tend to disagree over religious matters.

Thompson is a Catholic and is devout enough to be an associate with the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Essentially, she is a nun but she is able to maintain her own lifestyle while maintaining a close relationship with the church.

Catholic nuns became a research interest for Thompson while teaching a women's studies course. She is currently working on a book about nuns in the United States.

"I did give a paper once at the American Political Science Association on lobbying nuns," Thompson jokes. "I'm very interested, generally speaking, although it's not the primary focus of my work on nuns, on the intersection between religion and politics."

In the end, Thompson said that what brings her back to politics year after year is not personable candidates or campaign slogans. She said she is inspired by Obama and others in the past, but when it comes down to it, she cares about the issues.

"The cause is going to still be there, whether or not the candidate is," Thompson said. "I think that's what keeps me going."

hemorley@syr.edu