The Citizen

Richard Parker

Senior Fellow Richard Parker, Lecturer in Public Policy, is a one-man institution at the Shorenstein Center. He first arrived as a fellow in 1993, and was asked to stay on. Parker, like many KSG faculty, did not follow the well-trodden path from graduate school to academia. “I was waylaid on the way to an academic life,” he says.

After graduating with a DPhil in Economics from Oxford, his first stop was a Santa Barbara, California think tank called the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions.  There he found a passion for journalism, which later inspired him to co-found Mother Jones magazine in the 1970s. Nearly two decades later, Parker worked in Washington, DC for Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), spending weeks, sometimes months, in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe.

“This was in the first Bush presidency, before the fall of the Soviet Union, and Democrats in the Senate felt that they really couldn’t rely on the State Department or the White House to tell them what was going on,” Parker says. “This was clearly very important, so I became their eyes and ears.  I took my economics training, my journalistic training, and literally
flew to Poland, or flew to Russia, with an introductory letter from
Kennedy and one or two other Senators.  And then just followed my nose, interviewing everyone I could lay hands on, from senior ministers back to janitors.”

Parker was in Washington after Clinton’s first presidential win in
1992.  He and his wife were close to Clinton¹s inner circle ­ she was the director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and he went to Oxford at the same time as Clinton.

“We were living in Washington and on the verge of getting sucked into the Clinton Administration, but we had just had our first child, a boy named Sam, two months before Clinton was elected,” Parker recounts.

“[My wife and I] looked at each other and looked at the baby and said, well we could do this and never see each other or the child, or we could get out of here.”

This semester Parker teaches PAL 122 Religion, Politics and Public Policy, KSG’s only class focused on religion.  The class, he says, was created in response to student demand for a class on religious influence in American public life.

“By the late 1990s there was a significant number of students who were shaken that the school offered no course on religion, politics and public life,” Parker says.

“The Academic Dean at the time, Fred Schauer, called me in and said, 'I want you to teach this course.' I said, Fred, I’m an economist, not a theologian.  And he said, ‘That’s exactly right - we want somebody who’s trained in social science to teach this as a social science not as a branch of religion.’  So I spent the next 3 to 4 months designing the course.”

While he may not be a theologian, religion has played an important role in Parker¹s life. “I was the son of an Episcopal Minister, so I had grown in a particular branch of mainline Protestantism. It was a very ecumenical branch of
mainline Protestantism so I got exposed to a lot of these different faiths,” he says.  “It had always been a source of interest to me but, I think like most preachers’ kids, I fled the church the minute I got to college and stayed away from it for 15 to 20 years.”

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