Rebecca Hughes

When her work as executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer for the University System of Georgia doesn’t have her driving across the state visiting the public colleges and universities for which she oversees academic programs, Susan Herbst, also a tenured professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, works in an office at the Board of Regents’ headquarters in downtown Atlanta.

The space is filled with African artifacts, politically themed artwork and mementos from her 20-plus-year career in higher education. Before moving to Atlanta in 2007, Herbst served in faculty and administrative positions at Northwestern University, Temple University and the University at Albany-SUNY.

A political scientist whose early research focused on the history of public opinion in America, she has served as editor of a book series on politics published by the University of Chicago Press for more than decade. She now is writing a book titled Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics, which is scheduled for publication later this year by Temple University Press.

Inspiration: Great, original ideas inspire me. One of my favorite activities, besides working with students and political science colleagues around the nation, is working with the chancellor and regents on the vital issues in higher education. We try to support presidents and provosts in building even better universities.

On a drawing of Jacques Necker: He was the finance minister for Louis XVI, so was critical in the court and the economic planning of the period. He’s often thought to have coined the phrase public opinion, and he was also a very insightful reader of public opinion. As a public opinion scholar, he’s very big for us.

On the road: I do travel around the state a lot to our different institutions. It helps me to understand the campuses better when I drive there and I get in the local community and I stop for food or gas — or get lost, which is common. Many times, the president’s secretary is out on the street trying to wave me in.

Old-time politics: That’s a portrait by George Caleb Bingham, a great painter of daily political life in the American 19th century. It shows how voting was a very public practice. There’s no going behind a curtain in this. You could see not only that people were voting, but you could see how they voted too.

Civility in politics: On both sides, left and right, there’s much more advocacy journalism now of an ideological sort. Many people have argued that this has led to more incivility and less collaboration among people of different political parties and backgrounds. In my new book the argument is that Americans need to have a thicker skin about political debate. While we don’t want people to be rude to each other or destructive, and certainly I come down firmly against hate speech of any sort, we are also very thin skinned about political debate.

Up for debate: The last chapter of the book tries to lay out some ways that Americans can learn to be better debaters, from the time they enter middle and high school to the time they’re adults and they really do have to engage in substantive debate, whether that’s in PTA, at a town council meeting or a zoning board meeting or around the workplace. I think Americans are really bad at it. I think we were never good at it.

Debunking myths about the good old days: I’m always against the Golden Age arguments, which are typically false, that we used to be more civil, we used to be better debaters, politics used to be more substantive. None of that’s true. Historians know very well that there’s always been incivility, there’s always been mudslinging, the parties have long acted poorly to each other. I do think incivility is manifest in different ways now because we have the Internet, Facebook and Twitter and all these technologies that make incivility and civility look very different.

Inspiring gift: It appears to be a strong factory worker woman of the early 20th century, in the artistic style of “social realism.” It was a gift from one of my closest friends at Northwestern, a professor of art history. It was meant to inspire me to stay in leadership, as I had been a leader at Northwestern in many roles, including chair of the department of political science.

On her Duke-themed Barbie: I was an undergraduate at Duke. My husband, a Carolina grad, gave her to me because he thinks I’m not quite like a cheerleader. But he and I know, from our many campuses, that cheerleaders are often among our very best students. One can be a scholar at the same time, so perhaps there’s hope for me yet!

Where she gets her news: I definitely read The New York Times every morning and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Then I start going on the Internet and look at WallStreetJournal.com and whatever else comes up. I think that a lot of people probably aren’t reading the two papers in the morning, they’re going right to the Internet. And certainly young people are.

Where students get their news: I wonder about my students. They seem to keep up really well, but they often have an incomplete picture of the news, and it’s hard for them to do the gatekeeping. So many people call themselves journalists now, and it’s difficult to tell from the Internet who’s really doing work and who has expertise and who doesn’t. The Tech students have said that one big source of news for them is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And on that I will withhold opinion.

Hometown: I was born in New York City, and then my parents moved a little farther north on the Hudson River. I grew up there.

She originally wanted to grow up to be: I kind of wanted to be whatever my older brother was going to be. Maybe that’s why he became an academic and I did too. I guess I knew I’d do something bookish.

Out of Africa: That same brother is also a political scientist. He’s an Africanist. He just became president of Colgate, a university in upstate New York. … He goes to Africa like I go to Target. He’s there all the time, and he’s always bringing back interesting things, masks, carvings, tapestries. His house is just like a museum, so occasionally he brings me something too.

Her children: They are 14 and 15, Daniel and Rebecca. They love Atlanta. One of the reasons we moved here is my husband’s father lives in Dahlonega, and so does his brother. So we’ve been coming down here for 25 years.

Morning routine: We are up early, and I always drive the kids to school, unless I have a meeting. I’m in the office between 7:30 and 8, after Starbucks. Sometimes I drive straight to a campus. I’ve really put a lot of mileage on the car.

On her founding fathers action figures
Lewis and Clark are in there too. I got those at Temple when I was in Philadelphia. Being an academic leader in Philadelphia, you get deeply involved in places like the Constitution Center. Most people with any historical sensibility who spend time in Philadelphia get all wrapped up in that.

Current hobby: I started out as a philosophy major in college, and, I think because I had a bad professor of logic, I went scurrying to political science. … Right now I’m reading a book on Immanuel Kant, who is absolutely one of the premier philosophers of all time and also one of the most difficult. So I think trying to slog through Kant is a hobby.

One tough cookie: I have actually written a scholarly paper about Norman Rockwell, and it’s about how much he had to say about public opinion in early- to mid-20th century America. That was a gift from my husband, The Shiner. It’s often referred to just as “the girl with the black eye.” He thought it was a good representation of women in leadership because it looks like she beat up a boy.