Meet Jeff Tulis ’68: Political Scientist, Lifelong Academic, and Renowned Author

Jeffrey K. Tulis ‘68 is a distinguished academic, author, and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has profoundly influenced the study of American political development and constitutional theory. For his exceptional contributions to political scholarship and education, he was celebrated at the 2024 Reunion with one of the inaugural New Hampton School Alumni Association Awards.

Jeff Tulis is on our list of “alumni we’d really like to have a long dinner with,” but we settled for a Q & A instead (and will hope to see him at Reunion 2025).

The following interview was conducted in October 2024. All views expressed are those of the interviewee.

When did you first become interested in American politics and political theory?

Perfect first question! I first developed this interest in Peter Sterling’s extraordinary AP US History class at New Hampton. Sterling ignored the template typically used for this course around the nation and previously at NHS. For us, he designed a completely original course that combined political theory, sociology, and American history. The reading included: The Federalist, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Max Lerner’s America as a Civilization, and books by C.Wright Mills, Henry Steele Commager, William H. Whyte, David Reisman and others. I lived in Russell House, which was located on the hill overlooking the campus near where the hockey rank now stands. Every day I could not wait to get back to my room to my rocking chair to immerse myself in the reading Sterling assigned. Years later, when I was on the visiting faculty at Harvard, I went to the USS Constitution in Boston where Sterling was director of the museum. We were both delighted to catch up in his office — where right behind him on the most visible shelf of his bookcase were the books for the AP class at New Hampton.

Can you remember the point in your life at which you decided to pursue a life in academia?

I spent my junior year abroad in college at Oxford. Up until then, I had thought I might become a lawyer but in England I decided that academia was where I wanted to be.

As a professor with a long tenure, most recently at UT Austin, how do you believe the role of higher education has evolved over the past few decades, particularly in fostering critical thinking and civic engagement among students?

With respect to “critical thinking,” my discipline of political science, and the liberal arts more generally, have been marked by that commitment the whole time I have worked.

Civic education was a different story and remains a real problem. It did not really exist when I began teaching at the university level.  We are experiencing the unfortunate results of that lack in our political culture today. Since the 1990s, I have been deeply involved in civic education projects including: new programs at colleges and universities, summer programs for high school teachers, and consulting for the US state department in developing civic education abroad.

Most memorably, I spent two weeks in 2003 during the second intifada in Israel, doing civic education workshops for Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, the leadership of a Druz community, Bedouins, recent Russian Jewish immigrants and journalists, and consulting for an MA program in civic education at Hebrew University.

What do you think is the most important lesson a student should learn, especially in the fields of political science and constitutional law, before they enter society as a thoughtful, engaged citizen?

The most important lesson – which takes at least a semester to absorb — is how to think like a constitution-maker – that is, how to think like one responsible for sustaining, improving or changing the fundamental aspects of political life in America — as opposed to a constitutional-user, one who only learns how to navigate or benefit from politics. Thinking like a constitution-maker requires one to learn how to identify the fundamental attributes of a constitutional order and to distinguish them from the peripheral, to understand the philosophic presuppositions of those attributes and to discern the political and cultural implications of them over time.

In your view, how should the humanities be positioned within a contemporary educational system that increasingly emphasizes STEM? What is the particular advantage to a young person studying the humanities?

Most college students begin their studies in the late teenage years, when the biggest and hardest questions regarding what living and dying mean arise naturally.  The multiple and competing answers to these questions are difficult. They are not accessible to most who do not have an education that equips them to read very demanding texts in the humanities. And after one begins a career and gets absorbed in personal life as well, one no longer has the leisure and space to learn that the college years provide — though after a good liberal arts education mature adults can continue to learn on their own or in the company of friends.

How do you think schools and/or universities can contribute more effectively to the civic life of their surrounding communities?

The best way to contribute is to open the entire curriculum to the local community with courses on the very subjects taught to regular students. This can be done easily now with free online classes. But in-person learning is the best way to teach and to learn. Colleges should provide some of that to their local communities to the extent that it can be afforded by the schools and the citizens.

What role do you think academics and scholars should play in shaping public discourse and public policy?

I think Op Eds and other public facing writing is very important and I have done a lot of it myself since 2015. At the same time, I think academics should take care not to trade on their expertise, academic rank, or institutional affiliation to amplify political opinions over those of their fellow citizens when the issue is outside of one’s actual area of study.

Given the increasing use of social media and online platforms for community building, how do you view the impact of digital technologies on both local and national community engagement?

This is a complicated question. I can’t do it justice in a short answer. But I can say that like most technologies — social media can be used for good or bad purposes. For example, young people have become more engaged and even more informed by social media than they were previously. On the other hand, the forms of these media often have the tendency to transform argument into assertion and to accelerate the degradation of democratic discourse.

You are especially known for your study of the American presidency. How would you assess the current state of the U.S. executive branch in relation to the principles of checks and balances laid out by the Founders? Do you feel the presidency gained too much power?

I think that presidents now do have too much power and that has been the case even before Trump. However, prior to Trump,  the so-called “imperial presidency” was not mainly due to presidential self-aggrandizement but more to a long process of congressional abdication, which has also continued through the Trump era. In my view, the core pathology of American institutional politics is the failure of Congress to meet its core constitutional responsibilities.

In your book The Rhetorical Presidency, you argue that presidential rhetoric has changed over time. How has modern presidential communication, particularly through social media, altered the nature of leadership and democracy in the U.S.?

The practice of appealing over the heads of Congress to the people at large has made the presidency more demagogic over time.  The newer forms of communication have allowed a demagogue like Trump to add Orwellian innovations to techniques of popular leadership that presidents have deployed since Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson began the modern rhetorical presidency.   In addition to playing on passion, as previous presidents have done, Trump has been able to upend the polity’s shared understanding of fact and reality.  He does this by repeating lies or outrageous claims incessantly, by proliferating his outrageous statements—flooding the zone as it were with nonsense and worse, and by projecting his vices onto his foes—falsely, and sometimes preemptively, claiming that they are what he is.  The overall effect is the normalization of crazy.

Will you share some advice for a young person interested in pursuing the life of an academic scholar?

Anyone interested in pursuing a PhD should decide in advance if they think five to eight years doing so would have been worth it even if, after all that work, they do not get a job in academia.  If the answer is no, then don’t do it.   Scholarship needs to be its own reward.  Ironically, students who come with this mindset are more likely to do well and to get an academic job in the fields in which I work.

Which political theorist – living or deceased – would you most like to share a meal with…?

When I was in my senior year of college, I asked myself a version of this question – if I could just sit quietly in the back of the classroom, even if not accepted to a program as a graduate student, what political theorist would I like to see and hear?  My answer was any one of three:  Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago; Harvey Mansfield at Harvard;  or Sheldon Wolin at Princeton.   About fifteen years later, I had become friends with all three and shared many meals with them.   I remember thinking when I was a young tenure track academic that if I did not make an impact publishing or if I did not get promoted to tenure my academic life would have been fully complete because of those friendships.  I was so honored to know them and for them to know me.   They were among the world’s greatest minds.   Mansfield, now 92, is the only one of the three still alive.

When I got to Chicago to study for my PhD, I worked with Cropsey initially. My original plan was to study and write about Aristotle.  But within the first year I realized that it would be more likely I might have something original to say if I could combine political theory with the study of American politics. A remarkable man teaching there did this unusually well.  His name was Herbert J. Storing.  Storing was a legendary scholar/teacher of the American founding, of black American political thought, of The Federalist, of Tocqueville, of the presidency and public administration, and public law.  I studied all those subjects and more with him and with the strong community of students he attracted.  Herbert Storing died unexpectedly from a heart attack when he was 49 and I was just beginning my dissertation.  More than anything I wish I could share a meal with him.

More About Jeff Tulis ’68

Jeffrey K. Tulis is Professor Emeritus. He joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 as a senior member of the Government Department. In recent years, he served as Professor of Government in the College of Liberal Arts, his primary appointment, and also as Professor of Law in the School of Law, and Professor of Communication Studies in the Moody College of Communication.

Professor Tulis’s interests bridge the fields of political theory, American politics and public law, including more specifically, American political development, constitutional theory, political philosophy and the American presidency. His publications include The Presidency in the Constitutional Order (LSU, 1981; Transaction/Routledge, 2010), The Constitutional Presidency (Johns Hopkins, 2009), The Limits of Constitutional Democracy (Princeton, 2010), and The Rhetorical Presidency, (Princeton, 1987, new edition, 2017).

Four collections of essays on The Rhetorical Presidency with responses by Tulis have been published, including a special double issue of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society, (2007), where his book is described as “one of the two or three most important and perceptive works written by a political scientist in the twentieth century.” In 2017 it was chosen for the Princeton Classics collection of affordable new editions of “some of the most important and influential books ever published by Princeton University Press—works by leading scholars and writers that have made a lasting impact on intellectual life around the world.” It received the American Political Science Association’s Legacy Award in 2018.

In 2022 Bates College awarded him its Sesquicentennial Prize, given to an alumna/us for a significant academic, artistic or scientific achievement.  In 2024, his high school alma mater New Hampton School awarded him its inaugural John Kelley Simpson Award for Outstanding Achievement and Impact.

His most recent book (co-authored with Nicole Mellow) is Legacies of Losing in American Politics (Chicago, 2018). Two symposiums on this book have been published — in the LSE USAPP American Politics and Policy Blog in 2019, and in the journal Political Theory in 2020.

Since 2016, Tulis has been regularly writing for the public sphere, including essays and articles in: The Atlantic, Washington Post, The Bulwark, Public Seminar, The Constitutionalist, American Purpose, The Unpopulist, Democracy Seminar, and the LSE American Politics and Policy Blog.

He was the first President of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association.

He received the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas, and the Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching, chosen by students in the Government Department.

He has held research fellowships from NEH, ACLS, Olin Foundation, Harvard Law School, and the Mellon Preceptorship at Princeton University, where he taught before moving to Texas. He has held visiting positions at Notre Dame and Harvard.  During the academic year 2008-09, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. During Spring 2016, he was a Dahrendorf Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Jeffrey Tulis served as President of the University of Texas at Austin chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Texas, 2017-2022.

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The Alumni Association Awards were created to recognize and honor those alumni who have been a credit to the education provided to them by New Hampton School and are living a life representative of its mission. Awards will be given for outstanding community service; exemplary academic, intellectual, or creative achievement; and/or distinction in an alumnus/a’s professional or vocational field. For more information, or to nominate someone, please visit the School’s online alumni platform, Husky Hub.