I was born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa on October 1, 1952, in the midst of a presidential election campaign involving Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.
My "home town," where I lived from ages four to nineteen, is Fort Madison, Iowa, an old river town on the Mississippi River in the southeastern corner of the state. It is the home of Sheaffer Pens, the Iowa Maximum Security Prison (hence the nickname "pen city"), Catfish Bend riverboat gambling, the world's second longest swing-span bridge, major Santa Fe railroad junction and the Fort Madison High School Bloodhounds (the only such nickname on earth).
Why the Bloodhounds? Because they track down the convicts, or so my uncle's high school class thought when they chose the name in the early 1930s. That uncle, Donald S. Schier, taught French literature at Carleton College from 1948-1984, retiring as the Mellon Professor of the Humanities. He is the author of two books and several scholarly articles, and lives in retirement in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I first visited Carleton on my first solo train trip, from "the Fort" to Northfield at age twelve in 1964.
My other uncle, Richard F. Schier, taught American politics for thirty-five years at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. My father and I visited him in Washington when he served as legislative assistant to Senator Joseph Clark (D-PA). It was 1965, at the height of the "great society" legislative program. I remember my uncle, who died in 1997, escorting us into a closed Senate committee meeting so that we could watch Bobby and Teddy Kennedy in action.
My parents, Marjorie and James Schier, grew up during the depression and both served in the Army during World War II. My father became a captain and commanded Saipan Island in the South Pacific once it was liberated from the Japanese. My mother served as a staff sergeant in the WACs in Port Moresby, New Guinea. You can check out her service record at the Women's Military Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington.
While an undergraduate at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, I attended American University's Washington Semester Program in the fall of 1973. While there, President Nixon precipitated the "Saturday Night Massacre" when he sacked Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. A few weeks later, I was on Capitol Hill when Vice President Agnew resigned. My internship with the Coalition for a Democratic Majority took me all over town. I eventually graduated from Simpson in 1974 with a double major in political science and history.
I immediately enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There I studied American politics with Leon Epstein, a renowned expert on political parties, and, during my time at Wisconsin, president of the American Political Science Association. I studied Congress with the late Barbara Hinckley, and public policy and political theory with Charles Anderson.
I received my M.A. in the summer of 1975 and my Ph.D. in October 1978. By then I was teaching at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. After three years, there, Carleton hired me as an assistant professor. I was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor in 1987 and to full professor in 1993. The Congdon chair was awarded to me in 1997. I received a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturing Award that takes me to York University in Toronto to teach in the fall term of 2002.
During my time at Carleton, I have taught widely in American politics--courses on Congress, the presidency, parties and interest groups, political rhetoric, America's future, and public policy. The department's required methodology course was mine from 1981 to 2004. Syllabi for my classes reside at our department's web page.
In 2005, my comps advisee Rebecca Stark won a national award for that year's best undergraduate paper on the presidency, presented by The Presidency Research Group of The American Political Science Association.
I founded and have conducted the Carleton in Washington program nine times, most recently in the spring of 2004. On this program, students intern three days a week, and meet with some sixty prominent Washingtonians during the remaining two days. Past speakers have included Supreme Court Justices Harry Blackmun, Byron White and Antonin Scalia; journalists Bob Woodward, Elanor Clift, Margaret Carlson and Juan Williams; and Senators Russ Feingold(D-Wisconsin), Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana).
My curriculum vita reveals that I have published nine books and have authored many scholarly articles and monographs. One recent book, By Invitation Only: The Rise of Exclusive Politics in the United States, now in its second printing, examines the reality behind America's current infatuation with participatory democracy. I argue that in fact participatory democracy empowers those elites best able to activate small fragments of the public and call it majority rule (book description at Amazon.com). The first chapter, available for your inspection, presents the argument of the book.
My edited book entitled A Postmodern Presidency: Bill Clinton's Legacy in American Politics was published by Pittsburgh Press. Choice magazine named that book an "Outstanding Academic Book" of 2001. My most recent book, an edited volume entitled High Risk and Big Ambition: The Presidency of George W. Bush was listed as an "academic press best seller" in 2004. Another recent book is You Call This An Election? America's Peculiar Democracy, published by Georgetown University Press.
I am also active as a media commentator. My columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Washington Monthly, Brookings Review and other publications. My observations on state and national politics are quoted frequently in newspapers and magazines. I also work as a political commentator for local television stations, Minnesota Public Radio, and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Outside of work, I listen to classical music and collect autographs and manuscripts (that are stored safely in a local bank). A few I have collected include George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, Emiliano Zapata, Mary Shelley, Simon Bolivar, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Johnson, James Madison, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jimmy Cagney, the great filmmaker Preston Sturges, William Shakespeare and George Washington Carver (a fellow Simpson alumnus). My personal heroes from that group particularly include Orwell, Swift, Johnson, Madison, Zapata and Bolivar. I also love baseball (win Twins) and Sherlock Holmes, and am a member of the Norwegian Explorers, a Twin Cities Sherlockian society. My favorite Holmesian quote: "You see, but you do not observe."
I spend as much time as possible with my wife Mary Lahr Schier, our two daughters, Anna (age 19) and Teresa (age 15) and Lily, the wonder dog. Anna served as a US House intern in 2005.
