Sherry Bebitch Jeffe
In addition to publishing opinion pieces in leading newspapers, Jeffe frequently appears on radio and television news programs to discuss the day's most pressing political stories, including the recent presidential election and the California gubernatorial recall campaign.
She also teaches in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, a role that she says is not so different from that of political analyst.
"Political analysis in the media is like teaching in a very large classroom," Jeffe says. "You have to communicate complex policy issues in a way that the media and the public alike can understand. That's what I teach students to do."
Jeffe took a break from her teaching duties this fall to cover the presidential campaign as political analyst for KNBC news, but she returns to the classroom in spring 2005 to teach a class called "Communicating Public Policy."
She has long had a dual career as both political analyst and teacher. After graduating from Goucher College with a degree in political science, she taught sixth grade for a year before setting her sights once again on politics. While working toward a master's degree in political science from Rutgers University, she met and trained under Jesse Unruh, speaker of the California state assembly, who was spending a semester as politician-in-residence at the university's Eagleton Institute of Politics. When Unruh returned to California, he brought with him four students to be part of the newly established California legislative staff. Jeffe was one of them.
"He was brilliant," she says.
Jeffe later earned a Ph.D. in government from Claremont Graduate University, and from the late 1980s to the late 1990s she taught at the university's School of Politics and Economics, having been recruited by then-SPE dean Dan Mazmanian, now SPPD's C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Dean and Professor. She has also taught political science at Loyola Marymount University and Pitzer College.
About four years ago, while teaching at Claremont Graduate University, Jeffe received a phone call from Mazmanian.
"He said, 'Guess what, Sherry? There's a new school of policy, planning, and development, and I'm going to be its dean. We have to talk,'" she recalls. "I said, 'We don't have to talk. I'm there!'"
Jeffe says she sees no contradiction between her work as a political analyst and as a teacher. "The school understands the connection between theory and practice," she says. "There's a respect for those who are out there in the trenches, which is what we prepare our students to do--go out and work in the public policy trenches."