NORMAN — He is, arguably, one of Oklahoma’s best known political scientists.
A faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, he has taught and written about American democracy, Southern politics, voting rights, political
polling, journalism, architecture and heck, even sports.
He’s authored or co-authored more than 20 books, countless articles and even a few amicus briefs. He’s testified in court as an expert on gerrymandering, taught thousands of students and served as a counselor for more than one university president.
He’s the political scientist the media calls, the prof who can explain national, state and local politics to the average Joe. The one who does the radio talk shows or the election night analysis on television. The Kentucky expatriate with the Georgia bulldog, the Sooner flag and the Florida State pedigree.
For more than 25 years, Keith Gaddie has been a fixture at OU. He’s been busy, too. In that time, Gaddie has taught 30 different courses in three different colleges on two separate campuses.
Not anymore.
As of July 31, Professor Gaddie is calling it quits – as in retiring – from the University of Oklahoma.
But he’s not leaving academia; he’s just changing addresses.
Born in Kentucky, Gaddie graduated from Eastern High School in Middletown in 1984. He received an associate and a bachelor’s degree from Florida State. Grad school – a master’s and a Ph.D. – took place at the University of Georgia.
Call him a true Southerner. Instead of becoming an engineer – his original plan – Gaddie wrapped his love of history around a deep understanding of Southern politics. It was a career he hadn’t expected but one that he did embrace.
After his doctorate, he stayed in the Deep South, spending three years at Tulane.
“It’s not that my parents were not political,” Gaddie said. “My dad was a union plumber who ended up as an executive. And my mother was an executive secretary.”
That interest in history and politics was sparked by his grandparents.
“My grandfather was in politics, but he was not a politician,” Gaddie said. “He was in politics, local politics turning voters, but he was also a mechanic. He was a fixer. He could fix problems for people.”
Gaddie’s grandmother delivered the mail – with a good helping of political conversation on the side. “My grandmother was how I got interested in politics,” he said. “She and my grandfather -- this was before World War II -- had the contract for rural mail delivery. And my grandfather went off to war and she held on to the contract.”
Years later, during the summer of 1973, Gaddie stayed with his grandparents. His grandfather, who had lost a leg, would prop his ashtray on top of his artificial leg as he watched the Watergate Hearings.
“He’d be sitting there smoking cigarettes, flicking the ashes into his ashtray which was on top of his artificial leg,” he said. “And, you know, I processed that and paid attention to that. I got to high school, I had always loved history and politics, they are fascinating. Not because I necessarily have any real political values other than intense belief in the Bill of Rights.”
Because of those interests he said, he and his grandmother – who he describes as a yellow-dog Democrat – would spend hours talking.
“My grandmother loved the fact that I could talk politics. She was getting older and retired by then,” he said. “So, I was in high school, I’d just pop up there, if I wasn’t working, spend time there. We just sit and talk politics and sports stuff. She hated Ronald Reagan almost as much as she hated Richard Nixon.”
After a bachelor’s degree at Florida State, Gaddie traveled to Georgia, where he met Chuck Bullock, a professor who became his mentor.
“I did a master’s degree and decided this research stuff was interesting,” he said. “Then I decided to do a doctorate. Chuck thought I was interesting, so we started writing together. We’ve written six or seven books together. We still write together. He is one of my best friends and he is 81 years old.”
His doctorate complete, Gaddie needed a job. So, naturally, he turned to the school that refused to accept him as a grad student – Tulane. At the same time, he would meet and marry his wife, Kim.
“I ended up at Tulane because of an academic recession and well as an actual recession. It’s 1992 and I’m looking for a job and there wasn’t anything out there for me, really. I had ambitions and, the truth is, I wanted to be at a big university in a small state with good athletics.” Solid athletic credentials, he said, would mean the university was stable.
“You can never get past the value of athletics,” he said.
That road led him to Tulane and a postdoctoral fellowship. But three years later, Gaddie was ready to move on.
By 1995 Keith Gaddie’s job search had become serious. After an interview at the University of Texas, he got a call Gary Copeland from the University of Oklahoma.
“By then, Kim and I had our first son Colin,” he said. “And so, I came up here to interview in November of ‘95. I got off the plane and Ron Peters met me at the airport.”
The interview, Gaddie said, went well. But it wasn’t just a solid interview and genial hosts that sold Gaddie on Oklahoma – in 1995, former U.S. Sen. David Boren had become university president and, Gaddie said, there was a belief that big changes were on the way.
“There was an ice storm here while I was interviewing. Of course, everything had turned brown. And it’s six months after the bombing, right? And there’s still that malaise and over everything. Everything looked like it -- it just stopped,” he said.
Sick with the flu and a 102 temperature, Gaddie called his wife from a payphone. “I called Kim, and she says, ‘Well, what did you think?’ And I said, ‘Well, honey, I said, I said, the campus has kind of worn, but it’s got a quality to it.’ I said, ‘A third of the faculty are totally checked out. A third of them are new. A third of them are really solid.’ I said, ‘Here’s the thing: David Boren just became president of this place. I think something great is gonna happen here. And we might go be part of it.’”
He was right.
Hired as an assistant professor, within four years, Gaddie had made OU his own. He’d leveraged his Kentucky/Florida/Georgia background and his understanding of Southern politics settled into the life of a political science professor at OU.
Over the next few years, OU would grow and change, too. National Merit Scholars flocked to the school and a new building for the journalism school – funded by newspaper magnet Edward L. Gaylord – was built.
Seven years later, he was promoted to full professor. In 2014, he was named chair of the political science department. Gaddie stepped down as chair of the political science department in 2017 and, at the same time was named an Executive Faculty Fellow.
“I hadn’t planned on resigning as chair when I walked into that (department) meeting,” he said. “And I hadn’t planned on changing colleges when I walked into that meeting.”
By the time the meeting was over, Gaddie would change course – this time to OU’s Gaylord College of Mass Communication.
His career continued to rise.
“Coming to Gaylord, I liked (OU Profs.) John Schmeltzer and Mike Boettcher a lot,” he said. “And I loved Ed Kelly. I think he was a great dean and I wanted to be involved here.”
In addition to his teaching duties, Gaddie authored several books: Regulating Wetlands Protection: Environmental Federalism and the States, Politics in America and The U.S. Supreme Court’s Democratic Spaces with Jocelyn J. Evans. Along with way he earned several awards, including the V. O. Key Jr. Award for an outstanding book on Southern Politics on two occasions in 2018 and 2011, the Julian J. Rothbaum Award for the outstanding book published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2009 and the Jewell Prestage Award, for the Best Paper on Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Political Behavior, in 2003, and again in 2018.
After a stint at Gaylord – which included mentoring students covering the Iowa Caucuses – Gaddie transitioned to the school of architecture.
“Keith Gåddie’s career at OU has been nothing short of remarkable,” David M. Wrobel, Dean of the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, said in a media statement about Gaddie’s retirement. “He arrived in Norman in 1996 as an assistant professor; seven years later he had been promoted to full professor. His scholarly output over the last quarter century has been voluminous and highly influential for political scientists, historians, journalists and scholars of the built environment and should be read by everyone who cares about the protection, expansion and celebration of democracy. Professor Gaddie’s career at OU, and in academia more broadly, exemplifies the positive impact that a dedicated research scholar, teacher, mentor and creative thinker can have on public policy and on the life of a university.”
Along with teaching and writing, Gaddie has also remained a fixture in Oklahoma media, serving as a pollster and pundit for dozens of journalists. He has analyzed and provided context for thousands of political stories.
Things changed a few years later.
By 2018 Gaddie saw Oklahoma politics at its ugliest – the politics on the OU campus. Boren, OU’s longtime president was forced to retire in June and was succeeded by businessman Jim Gallogly.
A short time later, the OU Regents announced that Boren was under investigation for sexual harassment. At the same time, Gallogly moved quickly to undo his predecessor’s legacy, firing six high-level administrators on his first day in office.
It was at that point Keith Gaddie saw the large target on his back.
One of Gallogly’s first moves was to question the need for OU’s two new residential colleges. The brainchild of Boren, the residential colleges – modeled after the British-style residential college at Yale and Oxford University – drew Gallegly’s ire.
Gaddie had been tasked by Boren to help bring the colleges online, particularly Headington College, where Gaddie was asked to serve as the college’s first master. Gaddie told the OU Daily in 2015 that his goal was to put together a team of faculty to live in the college and interact with the student body more than ever before. Gaddie said he wanted to plant the seeds and watch them grow into positive traditions for the university.
After Boren’s departure, the residential colleges began to lose their shine and it wasn’t long before they became Gallogly’s symbol of OU’s budget problems.
“Every day I’m watching the president of the university evoke these residential colleges as the things that bankrupted the entire university – and that’s just not true,” he said. “Or watch the dogged pursuit of David Boren or the gross mishandling of things like racial events on campus.”
Between Boren’s departure and Gallogly’s hiring, the University of Oklahoma had been in a perpetual disruption since about 2015, he said. “It was definitely in disruption by 2017, because by September of 2017, David Boren is going to be ousted and we have a disrupter president coming in and we have all that transition and what happens?”
The university’s longtime leaders began leaving.
“By 2018 and 2019, President Gallogly comes in and I have this weird, strange job that no one is sure what it is, including me,” he said. “Which was basically a portfolio to go to work on whatever people want.”
After Gallogly assumed the presidency, Gaddie said he was ‘riding the pine’ because Gallogly wasn’t sure what to make of him. Then the firings started. Gaddie said he watched as several of his friends lost their jobs.
Gaddie said he was trying to work on projects for Gallogly while, at the same time, Gallogly was attacking the same projects Gaddie had worked on for Boren.
“It just wore me out,” he said. “He personally attacked my organization in my dining hall when he was supposed to give a talk about diversity. He hijacked a meeting in public to go on and on about the costs of these buildings.”
Gaddie’s answer to Gallogly’s complaints mirrored the answers he gave the state’s press corps – straightforward and direct.
“I remember the first time he did that with me I looked at him and said, ‘Jim if you want me to take this building apart and take all the pieces back to Lowe’s, I’ll be glad to try and go get our money, but I don’t think they will give it to us. We built this Bentley, and we have to drive it. So, you may as well let me drive it. Something has to happen, so let me do something that will make money.”
Gaddie never got the commitment he needed. “He (Gallogly) couldn’t see past the costs,” he said.
Nine months after he became president, Gallogly would exit OU, replaced by the university’s Law School Dean, Joe Harroz Jr. Yet even with the new leadership, Gaddie said he found himself again on the sidelines.
“I’m feeling value in that place, but I also watching as how leadership is being constituted in the university and nobody is being advanced or promoted,” he said. “So that’s why I migrated over to the Architecture College.”
There, Gaddie returned to teaching, albeit with administrative duties. Yet even with the disruptions, Hans Butzer, the Dean of OU’s Gibbs College of Architecture, praised Gaddie’s work.
“Dr. Gåddie understands that the planning, design and construction of resilient and equitable cities, towns and landscapes across the globe is based on values and ideals,” Butzer said in a prepared statement. “He contextualizes the expertise developed through our professionally accredited curricula for our students. It is through his perspectives on democratic space and its form that our graduates better understand how their work may foster stronger social relationships and mutual understanding in the communities they serve.”
For Keith Gaddie, the two-plus decades he’d spent at OU were meaningful and transformative – but OU wasn’t the same anymore.
Like Gaddie, the university had changed.
And it was at that point, Gaddie decided that it was time to leave the University of Oklahoma. His departure, retirement in name only, means that he won’t be a presence on the OU campus.
But he remains part of the university.
“What happened is every day, at the beginning of every September, I walked in and found amazing people in a classroom,” he said. “They were all 20 years old with nothing but possibilities in front of them. And a lot of them are still my friends. I got to know some of the best people to come through this place and they think I matter to them. That’s the most humbling thing that can happen in life, is you matter to somebody.”
This fall Prof. Gaddie’s name won’t be on a class roster at OU. Instead, you’ll find him at Texas Christian University as the first Al and Dawn Hoffman Chair of the American Ideal, a new endowed position at TCU.
Still, Gaddie said he was keeping his house in Norman, his Georgia Bulldog and his love of Kentucky bourbon.
But he has changed colors: the crimson and cream is gone. Come September, Keith Gaddie will step into a TCU classroom sporting purple and white. He’ll still be the well-known political scientist – only this time he’ll be in Texas.