FEATURE STORY — November/December 2009

 

Street Cred, Book Smart

Dick Simpson brings both to his UIC  classrooms—he’s authored 16 books on politics and was one of the few to successfully challenge the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley

By Kevin McKeough
Illustration By Shannon Brady

As a Chicago City Council alderman, DickSimpson earned a reputation for being a reformer and a thorn-in-the-side to the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who once had him forcibly seated during a City Council hearing. In his current role as head of UIC’s Department of Political Science, Simpson, who is frequently interviewed by the media, has recruited a pair of Ivy League Ph.D.s to the faculty and organized two conferences of national and international scholars.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is on the phone.

“Hi, Lisa. How are you?” asks Dick Simpson, head of the UIC Department of Political Science, as he sits in his book-lined office in the Behavioral Sciences Building.

It’s a soot-gray Monday afternoon, a day after the Chicago Sun-Times published Simpson’s latest opinion column for the newspaper. In it, he called for a number of political reforms, including passage of legislation Madigan has proposed that would strengthen the state’s Freedom of Information Act, making it easier for people to access government records. Now she’s just called to thank Simpson for his support.

“I hope it will put you over the top,” he says, and goes on to advise her that the key to the legislation’s passage is getting it out of committee and onto the floor of the Illinois House of Representatives, which would make it difficult for reluctant legislators to oppose it. “If you can get it to the floor, you win,” he declares. “I hope it all comes together. Anything I can do, you let me know.”

A former elected official himself—he served two terms as an alderman on the Chicago City Council in the 1970s—Simpson has blended the teaching and research roles of an academic with a hands-on involvement in Chicago’s forever colorful political machinations. He has published voluminously, taught 25,000 students by his estimation, and worked on numerous political campaigns and post-election transition teams (including Madigan’s transition).

“The interplay back and forth is very useful,” explains Simpson. “It gives me a unique perspective that I can translate either as practical advice or as an academic analysis of what’s going on in the world. By understanding first how things work, I’m able to study them more accurately.”

This dual engagement has earned Simp­son, age 69, admirers in both realms. “Dick has long been a great public servant and has continued his dedication to public service by sharing his experience and wisdom with the next generation,” Madigan states via e-mail.

“In many ways, Simpson exemplifies the mission of UIC and the spirit of the engaged university,” Dwight A. McBride, dean of UIC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, responds in an e-mail. “He refuses to be limited by the boundaries between the city and the University, just as he does not allow disciplinary boundaries on campus to limit his imagination when it comes to the future of political science. I greatly admire his many contributions.”

FIGHTING MAYOR DALEY IN CITY HALL
Even as a young man, Simpson was combining political study and action, and displaying an idealistic streak that found him standing up for his beliefs in the face of rancorous opposition.

Born in Houston, the son of a homemaker and an oil-exploration-equipment executive, Simpson became involved in the civil rights movement while earning his BA in political science from the University of Texas in the early 1960s.

As an undergraduate, he participated in protests during which integrated groups of students would try to be seated together in segregated restaurants and movie theaters. “There was a lot of shouting and bottle throwing, but we won. We integrated the restaurants,” Simpson recalls. “By the time I got to Chicago and the City Council, it wasn’t unusual for me to be in situations where I was in the minority.”

First, though, his interest in African studies—an outgrowth of his involvement in the civil rights movement—led him to Sierra Leone, an independent republic in West Africa. Then a doctoral student at Indiana University, Simpson conducted research on the political progression of two of that nation’s rural towns. While living in Africa, Simpson became alarmed by the race riots that were sweeping through the United States during 1966-67, and asked his Ph.D. advisor to help him obtain a university position in one of the affected cities, where he hoped he could do something about the problem. In 1967, he joined the UIC faculty as an instructor (Simpson became a full professor in 1996), with a teaching load that included a course on African politics.

I built a better volunteer organization than the machine,” recalls Simpson. “We had more workers. I was able to beat the machine at its own game.

Simpson soon took an active role in the political process. In 1968, he became the Illinois campaign manager for U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, the role that first found Simpson squaring off against the powerful political organization of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who strongly supported the eventual Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

In the wake of McCarthy’s defeat, Simpson helped create the Independent Precinct Organization (which has since merged with the Independent Voters of Illinois) to oppose the Daley political machine. When the previous alderman in Chicago’s 44th Ward was gerrymandered into another district, Simpson ran for the open seat in 1971 with the backing of the ward’s independent voters. He won an upset victory.

“I built a better volunteer organization than the machine,” recalls Simpson. “We had more workers. I was able to beat the machine at its own game.”

On the Chicago City Council, Simpson became part of a small bloc of reform-minded aldermen opposing the nearly all-powerful control of city government by Mayor Daley and the machine. Upon his re-election in 1975, Simpson became head of the opposition bloc. “The machine was such a totalitarian operation, it was essential to have some people speak up,” says Simpson’s City Council ally Marty Oberman, 43rd Ward alderman (1975-87), now an attorney in private practice. “If we [hadn’t] raised issues,” there wouldn’t have been any “scrutiny at all to what was going on in city government.”

Although Simpson and his colleagues were defeated regularly by Daley loyalists—often by vote margins of 47-3—he succeeded in passing legislation that eliminated bank redlining, improved the city’s housing programs, and increased funding for day care and public transportation services for senior citizens. Reflecting his commitment to making government truly democratic, Simpson also created a number of citizen groups in his ward to guide him, including a ward assembly and community zoning board.

His aldermanic tenure included a storied incident in which Simpson confronted Daley about his appointment of a political ally to the city’s zoning board; the infuriated Daley turned off Simpson’s microphone. A photo of an apoplectic Simpson being led away by the City Council’s sergeant-at-arms illustrates a page of his book, Rogues, Rebels, and Rubber Stamps: The Politics of the Chicago City Council 1843 to the Present.

Looking back, the most remarkable thing about the eruption may not be Daley’s action—the mayor routinely turned off opposition aldermen’s microphones—but its effect on Simpson, who is a soft-spoken, subdued presence whether teaching a class or hosting a dignitary visiting the UIC campus.

“His demeanor and delivery are very dry,” observes Oberman. “The substance is very significant, but he always delivers it in a dry fashion. His calmness is a great attribute. It took a certain amount of fortitude to stand up there while the machine guys were booing.”

TRAINING STUDENTS TO BE DEMOCRATIC LEADERS
Simpson didn’t seek election for a third term on the City Council, a decision he attributes to the heavy time demands of his aldermanic work. Aside from unsuccessfully running in the 1992 and 1994 Democratic primary campaigns against U.S. Representative Dan Rostenkowski, then the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Simpson has channeled his commitment for political reform into his work as a scholar and teacher.

“I’m interested in democracy and the things that prevent democracy from succeeding,” Simpson says. That concern is the focus of his writing, which encompasses 16 books, nearly 100 book chapters, journal articles and reviews, the monthly column he wrote for three years for the Chicago Sun-Times, and the eight videos and film documentaries on politics that he’s produced.

This focus also informs Simpson’s teaching. “I don’t think of myself as teaching civics. I’m not interested in getting my students to read the paper and vote,” he notes. “My concern is to make them political leaders, even if they never run for public of­fice and all they do is work for their block club. I try to train not only citizens but democratic leaders.”

“He continues to raise critical issues regarding the status of local and state governments and whether or not people’s concerns are being met properly,” says one of those students, former U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun LAS ’69, who credits Simpson’s book, Winning Elections, with helping her achieve her upset 1992 election victory. “He creates a dialogue that helps make government better and our community better.”

Simpson’s commitment to the public good also has a religious aspect. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and has spent 20 years working with ecumenical groups involved with social justice issues. “It was an important stage in my life when I became interested in questions of spirituality,” Simpson explains. “Religion provides the values from which you do your politics.”

My concern is to make them political leaders, even if they never run for public office and all they do is work for their block club.                
—Dick Simpson

Now Simpson is putting his stamp on UIC’s Department of Political Science, which encompasses 15 tenure-track faculty members and teaches 1,400 students each semester, including 350 political science majors and 50 graduate students. As department head, he has recruited a pair of Ivy League Ph.D.s to the faculty and organized two conferences of national and international scholars. (One in 2007 focused on global cities; the other this past April, in collaboration with the UIC Department of African Amer­ican Studies, covered development and democracy in post-war African nations.) A third conference that will examine governing cities in developing nations is in the works for 2010.

Simpson also has added a UIC student debate team and model United Nations, as well as a second team to the mock trial program. “We’re expanding the opportunities for students to become leaders, and trying to help them be more successful, [achieve higher] scores and get into law school,” Simpson explains.

The dizzying breadth of Simpson’s interrelated administrative, academic and civic endeavors is evident in his schedule during the week prior to Madigan’s call. In addition to the typical round of administrative meetings, he held his weekly class with students in the department’s internship program, advising them on how to maximize their work for community organizations and elected officials; took part in a panel discussion with prominent members of the local media; gave an interview to a Ger­man television reporter (Simpson often is called on by everyone from local television stations to the New York Times, to comment on Chicago and Illinois politics); met with staff members of the Office of the City Clerk of Chicago to advise them on upgrades to their website; spent two days at overlapping conferences in Chicago; and met with his co-authors on a forthcoming textbook.

In fact, Simpson has three books under contract, and plans for at least two more. He also will continue as department head for at least another year, possibly three, after which he expects to return to serving as a professor.

“I like to think I’m making a contribution, and this is how I can do it best,” Simpson says. “Most people see what I do as compartments—minister, city councilman, teacher, department head. I see them as different aspects of the same vision and purpose.”