1/10/2007 - Guest recalls a special year in Kent: Nigel Roberts was AFS student in 1962

Had it not been for a foreign exchange student program in the 1960s, a world-renowned political scientist may never have gotten a chance to study abroad or come to Kent—the place that he says set him free.

“It was liberation,” Nigel Roberts said of his trip with the American Field Service as an exchange student to Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent. “It opened my eyes to a world. It was just wonderful.”

Today, Roberts is a professor at the University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he specializes in comparative politics. He also works as a consultant for one of the country’s largest television stations.

Roberts took a sabbatical this past semester to study at the University of Minnesota. He visited with Kent Rotary and other friends from his AFS days last week.

Born in Britain, Roberts lived the first 18 years of his life in South Africa, where apartheid rule gripped the country. He attended Roosevelt during the 1962-63 school year, which he described as a year of turmoil. The Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding on the front page of every newspaper in the country and Americans lived with the fear of Communism. It was also the first time Roberts had watched television.

“It’s gotten much less innocent,” Roberts said this week of the country where he was exposed to a world beyond the confines of a brutal regime in South Africa. “I always point out to people, the time I was here – the film ‘American Graffiti’ – that was my year. Fairchild (Avenue) used to be a sleepy road that led nowhere. That part of town was a backwater.”

Roberts spent part of his stay in Kent with Ralph and Louise Liske, who lived on Fairchild Avenue, and later lived with Carl and Janice Meeker. He said his impressions of the United States have changed drastically since he last lived in Kent.

“When I was here perceptions were almost unusually favorable because it was the Kennedy era, and the young, youthful president had made a world-wide impact,” he said. “(Today) I think that a lot of people … confuse opposition to a country’s policies. You shouldn’t confuse it with what the people think.”

At the University of Minnesota Roberts compared voting systems and electoral processes in the U.S. and elsewhere. He studied how different voting systems force parties and candidates to campaign in different ways. “If you’ve got a proportional system the whole emphasis is on the party because basically you vote for a whole party and not the person, whereas in the United States it’s the polar opposite,” Roberts said. Some of the countries he compared included European nations, Canada and New Zealand. In Canada, the whole emphasis was on the liberal or conservative party, he said.

“The way they advertised, the way they promoted the candidates there was identical across the country,” Roberts said. “It’s very tightly party-centered rather than candidate-focused.”

Campaigning in other countries is not as ceaseless as it is in the United States. Laws on campaign expenditures in other countriesare much tighter. A candidate for the house of representatives in New Zealand, for example, may only spend the equivalent of $14,000 on a campaign in the three months leading up to an election.

Roberts said a lot of other countries limit campaigning and expenditures by limiting TV ads. Additionally, there is largely no private advertising for candidates, but ads for political parties.

Roberts has studied political science since 1964 as an undergraduate at the University of Tasmania in Australia. He became a professor in 1970 and has since studied mostly Western politics.

“I’m much more interested in studying developed democracies where one has a body of data,” Roberts said. He also has been to Fiji, Mongolia, South Africa and other less-developed countries giving advice to pressure groups, parliamentary committees and non-governmental organizations. “My main interest is in studying countries with a long history of elections,” he said.

Roberts’ sabbatical leave ends Feb. 1 on the day he gets back to Wellington. There he will teach courses on New Zealand politics, parliamentary voting and U.S. politics.

Aside from his political accomplishments, Roberts is also an accomplished mountaineer, cyclist, runner and kayaker. He has climbed mountains in Wyoming and Montana and competed in a coast-to-coast race in New Zealand. In June he plans to tackle Oregon’s Mount Hood, where three hikers died in December.

And all this Roberts said he could not have experienced if not for his time in Kent.

“Of a dozen school teachers who really made a difference in my life Kent Roosevelt had half a dozen of them,” he said.

Article and the photo are reprinted with permission from Record-Courier, Kent, Ohio, USA; Written by Matthew Fredmonsky; January 7, 2007.