Angie Cooksy: 0:09

All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Bradley Podcast. We are your hosts. I'm Angie Cooksy.

Ben Jedd: 0:15

I'm Ben Jedd.

Angie Cooksy: 0:16

I serve as the Vice President for Enrollment Management, Marketing, and Communications.

Ben Jedd: 0:20

And I am AVP of Marketing and Communications.

Angie Cooksy: 0:23

Basically, I always say that we have the coolest jobs on campus because we get to tell the stories, and that's exactly what the podcast is designed to do is to highlight the amazing people and the work that they're doing in and around the Bradley community. So jumping right in with our episode today, Dr. Ryan Reed is joining us, who is the political science chairperson. Tell us a little bit about your journey to Bradley and what you've done since you've been here to the seat that you're sitting in now as department chair.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 0:50

Well, my journey to Bradley oddly started in Illinois, but took a trip out to California for uh a decade and a half, Wyoming for a year, and a couple years in Missouri. Um, I was uh in school in California and also working my first career, which was in IT. So totally different than what I'm doing now. IT for the film and and uh TV industry. Uh got the bug and decided I needed to go get a PhD in political science. Did that at age 32, which is not when most people go get their PhD in political science or any other uh discipline, and uh, but I realized that was something that I had a passion for. I wanted to teach and research, went to UC Davis, did my uh PhD there, did a visiting year at the University of Wyoming, um, taught for a couple of years at the at Northwest Missouri State University, but then the job at Bradley popped up uh in the listings, and I said, you know, I uh it might be nice to get back to Central Illinois. I grew up in the Champaign County area. Um my parents were getting older, and I knew that uh Bradley was a great place and it was about the right size uh in terms of universities and that I could live in the country and have acres and horses, which was uh part of the part of the plan. And uh threw my hat in the ring and didn't even tell my parents that I had applied because I was like, if I don't get it, I don't want them to be disappointed. Uh I got it. Uh I showed up on their doorstep unexpected with your bags in hand? With uh with a Bradley uh ball cap on. Oh and they're like, What are you doing here and why are you wearing that? And I said, Well, I have news. And that was 10-ish years ago.

Angie Cooksy: 2:29

Okay.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 2:30

Um, and so yeah, here I am at Bradley, now chair of the political science department. And if you're gonna ask me how that happened, I can't explain it. I just woke up one day and they're like, You're chair now.

Angie Cooksy: 2:40

It's you.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 2:41

Yeah.

Angie Cooksy: 2:41

I do actually have some questions. So, first question what was the impetus of the transition from like entertainment technology to political science? I mean, not that they're not super overlapping, but they're not overlapping.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 2:53

And I think maybe that was I I fell into that career. Okay. Technically, that was my second career. I did two years in advertising, which is what I had actually planned to do. I got my um degree from the University of Southern California in communication and uh went into advertising straight away out of there. But after two years, I realized that that was not the dream. Okay. It's a story that I like to tell students because I want them to know that yes, you're studying a thing and you think this is what you're gonna be, but you might be two other things or three other things before your life is over, and that's okay, right? Because life is long and working is long. Some of them seem like they're in a real hurry to get out of here and get to work. And I'm like, you know, you got like 50 years ahead of you of that, right? So um, you know, maybe slow down, but also there might be more than one career in your future. Anyway, um, I was always hanging out with the tech guys at the ad agency. Um, and they were like, you know, we've got an opening in here, and it seems like you have an aptitude for it. And I said, I don't have a degree in this. And they said, it was the 90s. They were like, none of us do. We just we're just good at it. And I said, Okay. So I went to work in the help desk.

Angie Cooksy: 4:08

Oh, cool.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 4:09

And then I went to work for um several other companies after that that eventually worked into moving from advertising actually into the film and TV editing industry. Um, and those require these huge computer systems that require a lot of expertise to troubleshoot. And I went and got certified to do that. And every couple of years, um, I would switch jobs and get another nice raise, but I was like, fell into it.

Angie Cooksy: 4:36

Okay.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 4:36

And at some point I was like, I'm not sure I want to troubleshoot people's computer problems all the time.

Angie Cooksy: 4:43

True story, my grandma, whenever she has a problem with her printer, she calls Comcast. Oh, yeah. She knows Comcast has a helpline. And so when my grandma are very kind to her and they do help her, but like to your point, like you don't know what's gonna be on the other end of that phone call.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 4:58

That's right. And also TV and film never stops, they are a 24-hour day, seven-day a week industry. Other than they stop between Christmas and New Year's, they take one big week off, and then that's it. Otherwise, always. And I was always on call. It could be Sunday, and you might think you're going out to breakfast, but actually somebody's printer broke. Well, right, or there's MTV's latest reality show is having trouble, and they need to get they have to get this cut today. And so you're actually going to drive across town now and work on that for a few hours. And at some point I was like, I don't think this is my passion. It paid well, and I loved living in LA, and I was living in Venice Beach, which was my dream growing up.

Angie Cooksy: 5:39

Oh, for sure.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 5:39

But I was like, okay, but I think there's like 40 more years ahead of me, so I'm not sure about that. And I started thinking, like, maybe there's something else, and then um something happened where an election was coming up, and I realized that all of my friends were asking me how elections worked, because that was just a thing that I uh was interested in. Yeah. And uh, and two of them, uh like unprompted over the course of a week, said, Oh, you know, you're really good at explaining this stuff. You maybe you should do that for a living. And I was like, the set when the second one said it, I said, huh, maybe I should.

Ben Jedd: 6:14

Maybe I should.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 6:15

So I started looking into grad school. A friend of mine um uh had said, you know, I I have a political science professor that I've stayed in touch with out at Claremont College, um, which is just east of Los Angeles, where I was living. And she said, he'd probably love to talk to you if you just want to ask him like what his career's like. John Seary, I'll name check him. He was great. Went out, had a really nice chat with them one afternoon, and I was like, okay, I'm doing this. I applied to, I don't know, 10 schools. Got into two of them, uh, ended up uh UC Davis, which is great. It was a top 20 political science program. Yeah, top 10 by the time I left after those six years. I like to take credit for that. For sure. I'm sure. Obviously, I walked in the door and things just really started rolling after that. Um and it and that's how it all happened, pretty much. Um yeah, and I and I loved it. I loved grad school. I would love to do it again, but not poor. Um because that was I think that was, you know, gradful is grad school is stressful, but then being poor is stressful. If you could just have one stressor instead of two, yeah, that'd be great.

Angie Cooksy: 7:21

In some ways, though, that's sort of like the magic of it, is because you like you hustle a little bit, right? You do like you leverage those connections and right, yeah.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 7:29

But you're like, also I have committed to this thing now.

Angie Cooksy: 7:32

Right.

Ben Jedd: 7:32

Yeah, year three, like you gotta like keep going, right?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 7:36

I left a career behind that paid pretty well, and I'm doing this and being poor. I need to make this work, right? I'm making sixteen thousand dollars a year and I live in California. I gotta make this work because I can't do this forever. Um, and then you know, and yeah. Now you're here. And now I'm here. Now I'm here. Go ahead.

Ben Jedd: 7:54

Okay, sure. Yeah, so you're here. What do you love about being here?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 7:58

Um, I love that uh I can get to know my students because um student, I when I walk into a classroom, it's not a hundred nameless people to me. Most of our classes are small. That's one of the reasons that I came here anyway. I said, Oh wow, like at least in political science, 25 students are less in our classes. I was like, okay, I can get to know them. I can watch students come in the door as you know, like really green, not really knowing what's what. And then I can watch them develop and I like because I see them in more than one class. I see them as freshmen, and then I see them as seniors, and I watch them basically grow up in front of my eyes. Um and so I love that. I mean, I you know, I actually went to my undergrad was not really like that. Um, I was in a lot of auditoriums with 150 other students. Um and I realized that if I taught, that was not the teaching that I wanted to do. And in grad school, I uh got to interact with students a lot because again, professors didn't really interact with them a lot, but grad students did as teaching assistants. And so um I was like, okay, I know what kind of school I want to end up at as a professor. It's gonna be one where I'm in a room that's that I I can name everybody in the room. And that's one of the things that I was able to get from Bradley. Um, and that I think I hope that students really benefit from that, Bradley.

Angie Cooksy: 9:33

You get you're talking about teaching what's your favorite class or what's your favorite part of a class to teach.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 9:39

Ah so I love teaching my introduction to political thought course, and the day that's the most fun is a simulation day where we simulate something called the state of nature, which is a hypothesis of what life would be like without government. And I actually just put students into four teams, and they're fighting over just three extra credit points on the final exam. And these people they turn against each other so fast over three points. They connive, they scheme. Um, it's a really simple game. There are just there's just a grid of squares on the whiteboard, and they have to win the most squares before the timer goes off, and they don't know how much time is on the timer because I tell them that's how life is. You don't know how much time is on the timer. So I said, so you don't get to know how much time, but when the alarm goes off, whichever team has the most squares wins and they get the three points. And they are so ruthless.

Ben Jedd: 10:39

That's awesome.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 10:40

But the idea is to try to demonstrate to them this idea of human nature as being, you know, in in situations of desperation, what the psychology is like. And uh I think it demonstrates it well, and I think they have a good time, and it is so fun to watch every semester.

Angie Cooksy: 10:57

Every one of these that we do now, I just keep saying, like, wait, I want to come back. I want to take that class. I would like to take that class. Um, I love oh my gosh.

Ben Jedd: 11:06

Well, and I'm thinking, like, I'd like to see you change those points. Like, what would they do the same thing for one point? Right. How more, like, what's would there be a physical altercation at seven points? You know, like I don't think we can encourage violence on this show. I'm not encouraging violence on this show per se.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 11:27

You just want to see how desperate they'll get, is what you're saying.

Angie Cooksy: 11:31

I would be curious as we as we talk about sort of that idea of like, you know, you're putting them into groups to sort of see what happens. I imagine in in a lot of capacities, you engage with students that maybe don't really know what political science is. Yep. What do you say to that? And like how do you work them through such a big topic?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 11:52

Right. So, you know, you know, I know it's a cliche to say you have to meet people where they are, but you find out what they care about and then you go from there because it turns out whatever they care about, government has a role in that, or government affects that in some way. So if I have a if I have a business major, for example, who wants to be an entrepreneur and they're gonna start a small business and grow it and all of that. And they're only taking political political science course because it's for the core curriculum and they're they're quote, getting it out of the way, right? Which is which is a phrase I try to get out of my vocabulary. Yeah. But because I don't think we're getting things out of the way. I hope students are getting something from everything that they're doing here at Bradley. But anyway, they're getting it out of the way. But then I say, well, you know, when you when you start your business, there's going to be regulations. They're going to be local, and you're going to need to get permits for things. There are going to be taxes you'll have to pay. That is all determined by government, by local government, by state government, by federal government. And so it might be good to know who you have to go to, how those laws get made, and how they get changed in case, as a business owner, you want to try to get something changed. We can teach you how to do that in these courses, right? And so you can learn that here. If you don't know that stuff, you're gonna have to figure it out on the fly after you start your business. And I think starting a business is stressful enough. Having to figure out government at the same time sounds way worse, right?

Angie Cooksy: 13:20

Yeah.

Ben Jedd: 13:20

Well, and I feel like the science aspect of political science is often lost by your traditional 18-year-old, right?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 13:27

Yeah, that's right. And so a lot of us try to uh I assigned one of my published works for the first time in a class last semester. I think I've just been bashful about it before. But then I thought, actually, I think it's good for students to see what their professors are doing in turn of in terms of the research part of it, right? And all of us are doing research in my department across Bradley. It's if if you are a tenure track here, you are doing research. That's a requirement, uh, not just to get tenure, but to stay here. So um, so to show them that, and then uh make the science part not lost on them or maybe not scary because they can actually just see what you're doing, right? Rather than uh it just being this, I don't know, it's just this term political science.

Ben Jedd: 14:14

Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. That's I think that's I think that's an interesting aspect of the program that often gets overlooked.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 14:24

Yeah, I think that's right. We also allow students um opportunities to research with us, um, and that helps too. And also I like to bring up what my colleagues are doing, so not just what I'm doing. So for example, well, but I'll tell it to students in class. Like if I have a chance to sort of segue into, and by the way, Dr. Esthys, I'll just say Kyle Esthys is going off to the Republic of Georgia this entire semester. He's on a Fulbright, and he'll be researching how ethnic minorities there are able to either access government services or not. Right. And so when I tell students something like that, that it gets real for them because they've had him in a class or they've seen him before. And now they can think about him being in another country and the specific thing that he's researching there. Um, and I think that helps connect political science to like reality for them.

Angie Cooksy: 15:13

Well, I think we would be remiss to not give you space to talk about what kind of research that you're doing.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 15:17

Yeah, so what I'm doing, so uh I currently have a book contract, which just means basically I signed a deal with a publisher that says that by September 1st of this year.

Angie Cooksy: 15:28

Not that you're counting. I will turn in a manuscript, exactly.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 15:30

Not that I'm not that I'm counting, I will turn in a manuscript. And the the topic of the of the book is intergenerational justice, which means um justice between generations. That is, what do generations owe to one another? And most of the time, what we're talking about within that topic is what do what do generations that are either currently in charge or are currently alive owe to the younger and future generations? What kind of world should we leave them? Uh, what kind of government, economy, whatever kind of thing uh that might come to mind in terms of what you can leave behind, what should you leave behind? What is what is fair or just to leave to them? And so um uh I'm co-authoring this book with a colleague of mine from grad school uh who is um who is out at California State Dominguez Hills. And uh we have chapters after we sort of lay out our theory of intergenerational justice, then we apply it to several different topics. So, as you might guess, the topic of climate change and sustainability, but also the topic of public debt, of education funding, um, of artificial intelligence, um, of um uh racial reparations. Um and I'm also I'm about to start writing one on instead of looking just to um what we owe future generations, are there is there some way that we owe things to past generations who did things for us, even if they're gone. Is there something we owe to them? And if we do owe something to them, how do how do we pay it with them being gone? And so that's what the topic I'm a or the chapter I'm about to start writing is about.

Angie Cooksy: 17:05

That's so cool.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 17:06

Well, I hope it's cool. I don't know. We'll see.

Angie Cooksy: 17:08

Well, I think there's like a lot of conversation right now about generations in the workplace, because this is really the first time in maybe in history where we've had five generations in the workplace at the same time. And so to me, especially in a on a team where we have that many generations because we have student employees all the way up to people who are getting ready to retire, thinking about just the intergenerational things that happen every day in our office. And what you're layering on top of that is challenging us as a society to think about more than just our right now. I think is such a cool thing. So I think it's cool.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 17:41

Okay, good. I'm glad that means anything. I've got I've got one of you anyway. Um, yeah, uh it's and what's interesting also is that my co-author and and his wife are expecting right now. So he's like, I just realized who I'm dedicating the book to. It's my daughter. And I said, Well, duh, who else were you? I said, I figured that was a foregone conclusion. But I guess he hadn't even thought about it that way. I had been thinking about this more than he had in terms of like, well, we're writing a book and he has a daughter coming. Um, but yeah, um, but yeah, uh in I don't, and I don't have children, but I still think about um maybe it's because I'm in classrooms with younger generations, you know, daily, yeah. That I'm sort of thinking about what their world will be like. And I'm thinking about I know that they're they'll have kids, and what is it what will their kids' world will be like? And so so something that it you know just kind of has been on my mind for a while, and then we finally hit upon like um a book idea. So yeah.

Ben Jedd: 18:41

Great. Uh so what's something um that people may not know about your role here at Bradley?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 18:52

Great. Well, they may have no idea what a chair does unless they've been chair or they've served under a chair. Yeah. And I discovered that what a chair does is try to act as an umbrella for their faculty because a lot of stuff falls out of the sky. Um, but also, you know, it's everything from figuring out the class schedule that both students are going to need in the coming semester, and also that your faculty can live with as well. Um, it's uh it's figuring out um uh keeping track of who is uh who in your faculty is really busy, and so you shouldn't be asking them to do more stuff, even though they always say yes. Right. And who may not be so busy and who could take on a little task. There's a lot of that juggling. Um and even though they handed me a book when I became chair that was like the chair's handbook or something that someone I would like a book. I'll be honest. I mean, even if even if they wrote the book, it's like I've looked through that book every time I have a problem. My problem's not in this book. Because things are unexpected and unusual all the time, which sounds really interesting, but can be also you have to find like the napkins at the back of the book that have been like written on. I mean, this is someone someone published this book, and I think Bradley bought like a crate of them, and so they get handed out to new chairs. Interesting. And it's nice. And I hope someone got promoted at work for publishing this book, but it hasn't really been that helpful to me.

Angie Cooksy: 20:36

Well, and I think that's so true for all of us, right? Like we're all navigating roles and responsibilities, whether at work or at home, where, you know, kind of every day we're like, okay, let's figure, figure out today, and then we'll see how that how that rolls into tomorrow.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 20:50

It's it's problem solving every day. And that is one of the things that I do then in my classes, it uh is I'll break up students into small groups and I'll take something from the topic that we've been learning about and I'll give them a problem to work on based upon the ideas that we've been working with. And then I have them come up with a solution uh in their group. Um, because I think regardless of whether you're interested in political science or not, learning to problem solve is good in all aspects of life, right? So that's hopefully something I'm passing on even to that business major who's not sure why they're in a political science class, or that biology major that's not sure why they're in a political science class.

Angie Cooksy: 21:31

I feel like your classes have to be so interesting because you have so many different majors in class.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 21:36

Yeah, especially those lower division intro classes, um, because the yeah, they're they're core curriculum courses, so we get we get students from every every major everything from yeah, nursing to computer science. Yeah, we get it all. So cool. Yeah.

Ben Jedd: 21:54

That's awesome. So do you uh have a student story that you think you could share with us that would be a compelling student story?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 22:03

Yeah, you know, I was actually just thinking about one this morning. One thing is I never saw any use for LinkedIn until recently when I realized this was a way that I could keep track of students after they graduate and see what awesome things they're doing. Um so I had this, I don't oh, yeah, no names, but I had a student who was a political science major in pre-law who I would see at the Delhi counter every Sunday at High V because that was she was working her way through Bradley and came from um single parent, you know, disadvantaged background. Um did like crushed it here at Bradley, got into a great law school, uh, is now a practicing lawyer in a firm in Houston, Texas.

Angie Cooksy: 22:56

Oh, that's cool.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 22:57

And I I like just knowing where she came from and where she ended up. I mean, it was she transformed her life. Uh and the fact that I just got to be a teensy part of that felt like a privilege.

Ben Jedd: 23:15

That's awesome.

Angie Cooksy: 23:16

Um somebody just asked me yesterday, like how I can stay so positive in this job and and positive about the work that we get to do. And it's exactly that. Like every day we get the opportunity to change somebody's life. And that's amazing.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 23:31

Yeah, I think that's what kind of turned me on about um about the being a professor at a university. I mean, I loved my experience as a student, um, and it was transformative for me. Um, like everything changed by me going off to college. Like I grew up on a farm, um, and that was great, and and nothing bad about that except for I'll just add, I was a gay kid growing up on a farm in the 70s and 80s. Yeah. And that was scary and hard. And um going off to college opened up a whole world to me and also a world of acceptance for me, and realizing all all the possibilities that all happened there. Um and made everything that's happened since then possible. Um, the fact that I'm that that I have a husband and that we live on a ranch with horses, and then I'm a professor at Bradley, all of that started because I went off to college uh when I was 18 years old.

Angie Cooksy: 24:34

I'm really glad you brought the horses back up because I wanted to know more about the horses. Yeah. Do we have multiple horses?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 24:40

Uh two horses, two horses, yeah. Um, horses, uh soapbox here, horses shouldn't be alone.

Angie Cooksy: 24:47

Okay.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 24:48

They're herd animals. When I drive by like a property and I see one horse by itself, I it makes me so sad.

Angie Cooksy: 24:54

You're like, I will take you home with me.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 24:56

Ryan, I'm like, you need to be.

Ben Jedd: 24:57

We see Ryan getting horses.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 24:59

Ryan just feeling I'm a horse wrestler now, but I'm doing it for them. It's for their horses.

Ben Jedd: 25:04

It's not for me.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 25:05

But they are such they're such herd animals, they need to be, at least with one other horse. Yeah our horses, uh, when they met each other, it was amazing. We were like, well, let's see how this goes. They walked up, sort of sniffed at each other's noses, and then just walked off together in the pasture. That was it. That was it. You're my friend now. That's it. You're my best friend, and they don't really like to be separated either. So so even if I so I um I compete in rodeo on my horse, so I do barrel racing, but we take the other horse too because they need to be companions all the time.

Angie Cooksy: 25:38

So I would also now like to come to a rodeo. Like that. Is it a rodeo local?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 25:44

Uh I have yeah, I don't do anything local. I guess Minnesota is the closest one, but I'll let you know if anything local is. I'm here for it.

Angie Cooksy: 25:51

We we can road trip to Minnesota.

Ben Jedd: 25:53

It's fine.

Angie Cooksy: 25:54

Uh Ben and I spend a lot of time together, so it's fine. Um, okay, so this last question makes everybody anxious. Um, but that's part of why I really like asking it. So I shared that the the point of the show was to share about people that are Matt Bradley. Yeah. And inevitably we bring these awesome people like you on and they tell us all these stories about everybody else and don't talk a lot about themselves because I think that's just the nature of being in the Midwest, and everybody's really, really great and loves to highlight everything else. So, with that, what do you do in your role or in the classroom or in the work that you do that you are unapologetically exceptional at?

Dr. Ryan Reed: 26:40

Oh yeah. So well, maybe you can tell from this. I can turn on talking. Like I and I'll say to students, and I always this is a it's a joke I make every semester, but it's new students in the room, so they don't know. I'm like, I know that some of you may be afraid to be to talk in the classroom. As you can tell, I'm not afflicted with this. However, um, I of course once was, right? Yeah, and now I can just walk in and flip a switch in my head, and now here we're off, we're off to it. And uh very rarely, you know, I I I will put slides up on the screen for students to follow along with, but I'm not looking at them, right? And it's not because I've memorized them. I just I know what we're talking about today. Let's do it. So I I guess that I guess I'm a talker.

Angie Cooksy: 27:33

I love that. I think it probably makes you a really great teacher. Probably makes you a great professor.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 27:36

I also tell them, I also tell them a story about being embarrassed in a classroom and tell them that you can recover from it.

Angie Cooksy: 27:43

Oh, that's so important for them to hear.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 27:45

In my in my uh American literature class in college that had, yeah, like 120 students in an auditorium, I raised my hand to reply to the professor's question. We were reading Hemingway, um, and part of the story was um that the the narrator was drinking a lot of cognac, but a farm kid didn't know that that's how that's pronounced. So guess how I pronounced it in front of 120 people? Cognac. And the professor says, I believe you mean cognac. And when I heard him say it, I was like, Oh, I think I've heard that on TV. That probably is how that's pronounced.

Ben Jedd: 28:28

That's probably what I did mean to say.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 28:31

And yeah, I was super embarrassed, but also it didn't stop me. Yeah, and now I now I talk in front of students all the time and probably occasionally say dumb things. But life goes on and you just keep rolling, right? And I hope that I hope that students um can pick pick that up and take that with them.

Angie Cooksy: 28:51

That's great.

Ben Jedd: 28:52

I love that. So thank you so much. Uh we've we've had a great conversation, Ryan. This has been wonderful.

Dr. Ryan Reed: 28:58

Yeah, it's been fun.

Angie Cooksy: 28:59

Yeah, that wraps up this episode of the Bradley Podcast. As you've heard from our other shows, we are still looking for a name. So if you have a great idea about what Ben and I should call this show, let us know. Um, but we are here to tell the stories of Bradley. So if you want to come on and tell your story, um, until next time, go Bradley.

Ben Jedd: 29:17

Thank you.