Political animator

SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:

Sept. 22, 1971 in Spokane, Wash.

Occupation:

Professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and director of the Arkansas Poll

Family:

Husband Bill Schreckhise, daughter Kate Schreckhise, son Paul Schreckhise

The interviews I am most nervous about are

anything live. It doesn’t matter if it’s local TV or election night coverage on NPR; I always feel like I’ve swallowed a litter of kittens.

The honor that meant the most to me

was any shout-out for teaching. Even a short e-mail from a student makes me smile.

Five years from now,

I hope my children still think I’m fun.

In high school, people thought I

was much too serious, and they were right, of course.

When I’m running, I like to listen to

anything with a fast and furious beat.

The hardest course I ever took was

calculus.

If I had an extra hour each day, I would

read more fiction.

My advice for parents of twins is

accept help.

The book I really want to read is

Bill Schreckhise’s in-progress book on evaluating American democracy.

A word to sum me up:

energeticFAYETTEVILLE - The most important thing Janine Parry does as a political science professor involves few political science majors.

Professionally, Parry says, nothing she does matters as much as the American National Government course she teaches at the University of Arkansas. This is saying something; Parry’s a professor at the UA and the director of the Arkansas Poll, a broad, statewide survey of political opinions that she founded with colleagues in 1999.

On its surface, American National Government seems like one of those courses that nobody - neither students nor instructors - gets terribly excited about. It’s primarily for freshmen, with upwards of 300 crammed into a room.

Parry loves it ... and simultaneously confesses that this makes her “weird in that regard.”

“She’s just so energetic from day one,” says Victoria Jones of Little Rock, who earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from the UA in 2009. “She gets people excited about learning, which is a huge thing for a professor to do.She never gets up there and bores you. Her classes are very interactive.”

Part of the appeal of American National Government comes from the fact that the class is so large. Parry admits she’s “something of a show horse,” and she gets a kick out of seeing so many faces out there, watching dozens of hands shoot up at once or hearing the sound of a few hundred people laughing. (It’s partly the same reason she is eager to accept interview requests from local, statewide and national media outlets.)

Enormous introductory courses at state universities don’t have the world’s greatest reputation, Parry says, but it’s precisely because students often come in with low expectations that she feels her enthusiastic personality can fostera real connection.

“If you show them any generosity of spirit, they will respond in kind,” she says. “I care what happens to them, I want them tobe there and they react to that very positively.”

Numbers aside, the major reason why teaching American National Government matters so much to Parry is that for many of the students, it’s their last opportunity to study and debate what citizenship means. The majorityof students in the class are going into fields entirely unrelated to political science, and indeed, won’t be taking another course in the subject in their lifetime.

Parry, 41, knows the class represents a final chance for many young adults to learn how to think critically about government and political institutions. So it’s extremely important that Parry makes the course meaningful, for the students and for herself. More than anything else, she wants the students coming away from the class knowing two things:

1) “The bar for political information is very low in American life.” That means it’s easy for students to possess more knowledge than most of their peers. If they just read a single newspaper article a day, she stresses, they’ll usually be the mostinformed person in the room at parties until they are 30.

2) “It’s not all about the presidential election.” Many other things are going on in the political system that are worth paying attention to - local issues that affect students more than the occupant of the White House.

If the students leave the American National Government class knowing these two things, even if they never take another political science course, Parry is certain she’s made them more well-rounded citizens. She also knows she’s done her job well, just as she does when she is able to use the Arkansas Poll to explain political opinion to a wide audience through the news media.

“I remember the very first day of the first seminar we had in graduate school,” says her husband, Bill Schreckhise, an associate professor of political science at the UA. “The professor was asking why they were getting a graduate degree in political science. Janine’s response was the most unique of everybody. She saw it as someone who had an advanced degree could educate not just the students, but alsothe public.”

‘GO-GO-GO GIRL’

Parry is in search of the perfect pie.

She’s a great baker, someone who makes crust from scratch, setting it just so in her grandmother’s Corning-Ware pan before it goes in the oven. Baking a pie isn’t something Parry does casually; she devotes her whole attention to it.

“She’s really tenacious,” says close friend Laura Kellams of Fayetteville. “When she decides she wants to do something, she goes all out.”

Kellams raves about Parry’s pie-making ability. So does Parry’s husband.

At the same time, Schreckhise says Parry is “never entirely satisfied” with how her pies turn out. No sooner have he and the couple’s 6-year-old twins, Paul and Kate, finished their slices than Parry wants to gauge their opinion.

“Our kitchen table becomes a focus group,” he says. “She’ll ask us, ‘What could I do better with the crust?’”

This unending quest for the perfect pie speaks to Parry’s competitiveness. She’s ferociously competitive, and always has been.

In high school, the 5-foot-11-inch Parry played basketball, volleyball and tennis. Today, she’s a serious runner, winning her division at the Cow Paddy Run this past spring in Fayetteville.

She hopes to finish among the top 10 women overall at this year’s Fayetteville Half Marathon. She also just began rock climbing and playing city recreation league volleyball.

“She was always a go-gogo girl, and I think that’s even more heightened today,” says younger sister Jonica Crumley of Spokane, Wash. “It doesn’t unnerve her to have multiple things [going on at once]. She keeps all the balls up in the air.”

The middle of three sisters, Parry grew up in a competitive home. All the girls played sports, and pennypoker games were popular at night.

Similarly, the girls were all driven in school, finishing near the top of their high school graduating classes. Even in such a brainy family, though, Janine’s love of the printed word stood out.

Their grandmother owned a wide range of literary classics, and Crumley says she’s sure Parry devoured them all.

“She was such a reader, and she was curious,” Crumley says. “She’s was just always so curious about the other person [in a conversation], about what they were about.”

Parry retains that intense curiosity when it comes to other people. Sitting in the living room of her historic Fayetteville home, drinking lattes that she made with the touch of a seasoned barista, she often seemed less an interview subject and more like a long-lost friend - someonefascinated with all the details of a person’s life.

This makes her an ideal candidate to head the Arkansas Poll. It began in 1999, a year after she arrived, and to date has surveyed the opinions of nearly 12,000 Arkansans. In addition to polling the public on timely matters, the poll has common questions that are repeated annually; Parry finds it fascinating to see how public opinion in the state shifts over time.

The 14th annual edition of the poll was released Wednesday.

“She’s wound up like a top; I’m not sure she needs to drink coffee,” Kellams says. “She’s just constantly very enthusiastic about the matter at hand. Sometimes I’ll be in a 30-minute conversation with her about what’s going on, and I’ll drive away and realize I didn’t ask her anythingabout what she’s doing.”

A DIFFERENT PATH

It wasn’t until late in college that Parry considered going into political science.

She loved journalism, and wanted to “be a syndicated columnist like Ellen Goodman.” She was, and remains, a big newspaper reader, and always keeps up on the issues of the day.

“I don’t think I was any kind of savant,” she says. “My parents would describe me ascoming home from summer jobs with [National Public Radio’s] All Things Considered blaring on the radio instead of music, which they thought was a little odd.”

When Parry was growing up in Spokane, political discussions were common in her household. They were less of the “Why you must support this candidate” variety, and more of the “What do you think about this issue?” kind. As a third-grader, Parry marched in a picket line with her dad during a teachers’ strike.

“Even with as busy as our lives were, our mom was in the community, fighting for things she felt strongly about - like she wanted to make sure there was a sledding hill when they rebuilt the park,” Crumley says.

As a senior at Western Washington University, Parry took American National Government. Much like the students who take the same class from her today, she was not a political science major; she was majoring in journalism.

After she wrote a proposal paper about the 1990 5-cent increase in the federal gasoline tax, her professor, Don Alper, asked her to come see him. Ever “the Lisa Simpson student,” Parry was worried that she had done something wrong, but Alper was elated.

He introduced her to Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (today CQ Weekly), “which I thought was the neatest thing I’d ever seen,” and asked what her major was. When she said it was journalism, he strongly suggested political science instead.

A year later, she was at Washington State University, working on her master’s and doctorate degrees in political science. It was there that Parry met Schreckhise, a fellow graduate student. They married in 1996, and had their twins a decade later.

“I would have loved to have become a sociologist or reference librarian,” she says. “Who doesn’t want to know a little bit about everything?

“But it was the right switch. I was always interested in politics and policy; he just gave me a new way to think about how to be involved in it, how to write about it.”

EAGER TO TALK

Paul and Kate Schreckhise are first-graders, a long way from attending Fayetteville High School.

Although Parry still has not gotten used to Arkansas summers, she hopes that her family is still in Fayetteville when they get to that age. If the twins wind up at the high school, they’ll be right where their mother wants them.

A few years back, Parry helped organize theBuildSmart campaign, which opposed a potential move of Fayetteville High School west of Interstate 540. She believed, after examining the research, that such a move would have negative long-term consequences for the city.

Ultimately, a proposed millage to build the new high school failed. A second millage later passed, and the high school was extensively renovated at its current location, right next to the UA.

It wasn’t the original millage increase proposal that Parry was opposed to - her father was a teacher, and she’s inclined to vote for education funding in just about every instance - but rather the distance of the proposed new high school from the city’s center. Parry dislikes driving, preferring to walk to campus from her home in Fayetteville’s historic district.

“In Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character was described as ‘wicked smart.’ Well, that describes Janine: ‘wicked smart,’” says Fayetteville School Board Vice President Jim Halsell, who got to know Parry well when she and Schreckhise volunteered on his winning 2008 school board campaign. “She’s very energetic, gregarious, and is a real asset to the University of Arkansas and Fayetteville.”

The BuildSmart campaign was a learning experience forParry, one she says continues to affect her scholarship. As she tells the hundreds of students in her American National Government course, it’s often the local races that have the greatest impact on a person’s life.

But Parry is a scholar when it comes to the politics of Arkansas, and so her thoughts are often in demand. Among other outlets, she’s been interviewed by the CBS Evening News, FOX News’ The O’Reilly Factor, and The Washington Post.

The show horse in her gets a thrill out of this. She’d love to write things that more people read, and enjoys knowing that she is often afforded the opportunity to educate people who are not political science majors, or even students at the UA.

“She’s really easy to talk to, because she’s so engaging,” says Kellams, who frequently interviewed Parry for news stories when Kellams was a reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “She’s a really good political analyst. She has a keen sense of how to explain politics to people, and to look at Arkansas and how it fits into the rest of the country politically.”