Rush Holt

Congressman Rush Holt (holt.house.gov)

If there were a contest for most intellectual member of Congress, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) would be a prime contender. Armed with a Ph.D. in physics from New York University, Holt taught at Swarthmore College for eight years, was the Assistant Director of Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory for nine years, and was a five-time winner on Jeopardy! before he was first elected to Congress in 1998. In the House, he is known for having championed legislation to regulate the use of electronic voting machines, bringing desperately needed updates to the Help America Vote Act of 2002. As a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Holt has most recently called for an in-depth investigation of CIA practices like domestic surveillance and so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. Campus Progress managed to catch Holt for a few minutes between House votes to talk about his career, some of the issues he’s currently working on, and his thoughts on today’s youth.

I don’t think of Congress as a very academic place, but you were an academic scientist with your career at Swarthmore and the [Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory]. How do your academic and your political careers intersect?

One can have an academic career and be an activist as well; Paul Wellstone and others are certainly good examples. In fact, when I was an undergraduate at Carleton College in Minnesota, there was a physics professor who was something of a role model to me, who was an activist back then against the anti-ballistic missile system (and by the way, the fight against missile defense continues to this day). I was inspired by people like Henry Kendall from MIT—the founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists—and a number of other people, who used their technical or scientific background to illuminate policy issues as activists. I think the most important lesson I learned from them is that you don’t have to compromise your intellectual integrity or your science to advocate. Scientists by temperament seem to avoid political activism. But they don’t have to, nor should they.

I’m not saying everybody should be an activist any more than everybody should be a scientist. But we could benefit from more scientist-activists or activist-scientists, and I think we would benefit more from having more scientists in politics and in the House of Representatives. I’ve spoken often of the "two cultures" as defined by C.P. Snow way back in the 1950s: There are humanists and there are scientists, and in this country we have carried that division to the extreme. There really is a chasm. And so most of my colleagues in Congress will say, "Well, I can’t understand science; I’m not a scientist; you have to be really smart to be a scientist." Let me assure you, there are many members of Congress who are smarter than I am who are perfectly capable of understanding the scientific components of the policy issues before Congress. But because of this psychological chasm, they choose not to. They believe that science is for scientists. And that’s actually dangerous.

Is it ever hard to work with members who will take a position, like denying global warming, that’s contrary to the ideas of the scientific community?

There are some wonderful people in Congress … most members of Congress have some very attractive features once you get to know them—things they have done to help people, often altruistic motivations. But I must admit, it is really frustrating when you run into know-nothings, and there certainly are some. I’ve got an amendment up this week in the Defense Appropriations Bill to cut tens of millions of dollars from an unworkable missile defense system. Missile defense has been carried forward as an article of faith, not an article of empirical examination. Missile defense hasn’t worked, is unlikely to work, and actually wouldn’t be desirable. And yet as an article of faith, it keeps reappearing. It got its biggest boost in the days after the 9/11 attacks, which is bizarre, because missile defense would have been irrelevant to what happened that day. And yet members of Congress took the floor after 9/11 to say, "You see, we should have a missile defense." Well, that kind of irrational thinking can be aggravating.

I read about your calling for a new committee to investigate intelligence practices (modeled after the post-Watergate committee headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID). What impact would that have?

Intelligence is really important. It’s really important for our national security. If done right, it can prevent wars, save lives, inform our military if there is war, and preserve the American way of life, I guess you’d say. But intelligence is dangerous; it’s a powerful thing, particularly when it is not just … collecting and analyzing information, but actually seizing information and, through covert actions, affecting world events. The way we practice intelligence raises serious questions about what America is. The intelligence community has been able to operate in an unexamined way too much of the time—and as a result we get weaker intelligence, not to mention the risk of compromising American values.

You have quite a few colleges and universities in your district: Princeton University, Rutgers University, four other New Jersey State campuses, and four community colleges. How does that impact how you view your constituency?

I came of age in the 1960s, and so I have long believed in the power of students. I watched students bring down a president and begin to change a war. Ultimately, it didn’t quite happen—bringing Vietnam to a sane and a rapid end—but nevertheless I have seen the power of students. I have always believed in it. Sometimes, I have longed for it to come back, and in spurts it has. I think Campus Progress is very promising; it’s knowledge-based activism. It’s not just activism for activism’s sake, flailing out about everything, but it’s combining good policy analysis with activism. So I hope that it achieves its potential, and I am encouraged by promising signs in recent years of student activism. At colleges and universities, I think, students should be sharpening their values, because much of the rest of life is designed to wear away at those values, to round the corners, to blur the sharp distinctions, to really weaken one’s principles. And so you want to be as sharp as possible when you’re in an environment where you’re able to do that. Traditionally, going back over the centuries, that’s what a university was supposed to be. It was not a trade school—it was an environment for a moral education, a policy education, as well as a so-called "classical" education. Too often, I think, the non-trade-school part of the university education is lost, and so I hope Campus Progress helps fill that dimension.

Emily Rutherford is an editorial intern and staff writer at Campus Progress. She is a sophomore at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter.

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