For Professor Joseph Lowndes, the new director of the Public Policy Program at Hunter’s Roosevelt House, his education in politics began at the schoolhouse door.
Born in 1966, Lowndes, 59, grew up in central Florida where, he recollected, the ways of the Old South persisted. Integration arrived late: His classroom was the first in the county to desegregate, around 1972.
The experience formed him. Lowndes went to college at progressive Antioch in Yellow Springs, OH — a former stop on the Underground Railroad that was founded by abolitionists and escaped enslaved folk — and dove into political activism as a youth organizer for groups such as the Green Party. He got his degree in 1990.
“Our attempt was to try to focus ecological concerns on corporations and capitalism, as opposed to just individual consumer choices,” he said.
In the 1990s, he managed a food coop and worked for anti-racist causes and reproductive rights in Minneapolis, where he familiarized himself with the white-supremacist skinheads, Christian nationalists, and paramilitary groups who were making the Midwest a hub for radical-right agitation.
More than just fight the far right, Lowndes sought to understand its growing role in American political culture. Wanting to think deeply about politics and ideology, Lowndes moved to New York in the 1990s to earn a PhD at The New School, which he got in 2002.
In New York, Lowndes met his wife, Priscilla Yamin, now the chair of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter. He also got to know a young Hunter politics professor, Andrew Polsky, who assigned him a post as a teaching assistant.
Things went well for Lowndes. Yale University Press published his dissertation as a book, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism. University of Minnesota Press put out his latest book, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, written with Daniel Martinez Hosang.
Beyond the academy, Lowndes has published in venues such as the Washington Post and The New Republic and been interviewed on National Public Radio and by the New York Times. He remains connected to nonprofit and advocacy organizations.
Now, after 21 years teaching at the University of Oregon, Lowndes has taken over the Roosevelt House Public Policy Program.
It’s a crucial job. Public policy is one of two flagship programs (the other is human rights) at Roosevelt House, the former home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, which Hunter reopened as a public-policy institute in 2010. Hunter students in any major may take public policy as a minor; the program also grants certificates to those who complete a capstone project. In recent years, about 80 to 100 students annually have taken the minor; a couple of dozen have earned certificates.
It’s a gateway for careers: Students interact with experts and practitioners, learning how to create policy and promote political change. They intern for elected officials and at nonprofits. The program, serving one of the most diverse colleges in the nation, has had interim directors for more than a year.
Roosevelt House’s Jonathan F. Fanton director, Harold Holzer, welcomed Lowndes and said that he had arrived at the right time, so to speak.
“We know he will be a magnet for both student and public engagement, and that under his guidance the public-policy program will continue to grow and flourish,” Holzer said. “No doubt because of our fraught times, students seem more interested than ever in public policy, and at Roosevelt House we look forward to recruiting them, deploying the best professors to educate them, and equipping them for future public service.”
Holzer praised the interim leadership of the program of Professor Joseph Viteritti, who helped create the original public-policy curriculum and stepped into the role last year.
Viteritti said that he looks forward to working with Lowndes.
“Given Joe Lowndes’s extraordinary scholarship on the tensions that divide American democracy, he is an ideal person to take our public-policy program to the next stage as our nation stands at such a precarious crossroad,” Viteritti said.
Lowndes agreed that it is an interesting moment for public policy. Washington’s new direction has raised the salience of states and municipalities as venues for policy change, with advocacy and political-activist organizations likely to play a bigger role.
“We will be encouraging students to pursue connections with activist and advocacy organizations in the city, the nonprofit groups that are carrying out a lot of the work now that can’t get done otherwise,” he said.
Lowndes can’t wait to dive into it with Hunter’s students.
“Hunter students are special in every regard. I find them to be really engaged and interesting. Like many New Yorkers, they have very strong opinions,” Lowndes said. “Such an incredibly rich linguistic, ethnic, borough, and neighborhood mix creates a very dynamic atmosphere in the classroom. It’s exciting!”
