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After breaking his ankle while playing football his freshman year of high school, Professor Grant Reeher was put in a full-leg cast, leaving him with ample time to discover that he could be an even better student than he already was.

“That kind of put me on a path to be pretty academic,” Reeher said.

This path led Reeher to Dartmouth University for his undergraduate degree, and then to Yale University for his doctorate. Now, Reeher is the director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, housed in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Reeher also created the Campbell Conversations, a broadcast program on WRVO Public Media, the largest NPR-affiliate radio station in Central New York.

On the Campbell Conversations, Reeher welcomes a different writer, politician, activist, public official or business professional to talk about their work each week. Many guests are from the central New York community, while others are from all around the nation. Past guests range from members of Congress like John Katko to notable novelists like Dana Spiotta. Each episode is a half hour, allowing guests to delve into their work and background.

Reeher has been teaching at SU for over three decades. In 2009, he was asked to direct the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, which targets both citizenship and leadership and is one of the many interdisciplinary centers within the Maxwell School at SU. When Reeher was hired, the dean’s office was aiming to create a program that engages the public in some way, he said.

Now, the program has been running for almost 13 years on WRVO. Prior to joining forces with the station, Reeher said that he had done some commentating for them in the past, so they were familiar with him.

“I just called WRVO, and to my surprise, they accepted it pretty quickly and decided they were going to go forward,” Reeher said.

Kristi Andersen, a former professor in the Political Science Department at SU, worked alongside Reeher at the Maxwell School, and has been a loyal listener of the Campbell Conversations since its inception.

“I continue to listen fairly regularly because of Grant’s interviewing skills and the broad range of interesting people he talks with: politicians, experts in a whole variety of fields from medicine to business to poetry,” said Andersen.

WRVO broadcasts to central and northern New York, as well as Southern Ontario, allowing locals to hear what Reeher calls “relevant public affairs conversations.”

Reeher stresses that the discussions on the Campbell Conversations are simply just conversations, and that he never wants the program to “get nasty.” Reeher wants to establish respect and for listeners to see how that is possible, even when talking about politics and social issues.

“I hope that there is a model of civil discourse that (listeners) can hear and appreciate because we’re not yelling at each other, and I try to steer the guests from doing the same,” Reeher said.

Larry Cohen, a listener of the Campbell Conversations, has done his own political commentary on YouTube. Cohen also mentioned that he had done non-political commentary for WRVO and WAMC from the late 1990’s until 2004. Cohen applauds the Campbell Conversations for its civil nature.

“The show is exactly that, a conversation, not that of a prosecutor asking a defendant about a crime,” Cohen said. “If one were to ask me if Campbell Conversations is a liberal or conservative slanted program, I would have to answer neither.”

With each week featuring new guests of varying backgrounds and expertises, Reeher said he hopes that when listeners tune in, they hear about something they may not have been expecting to learn about that day. The wide variety of guests that Reeher has on the program is one part about the Campbell Conversations that make it interesting to him, saying he never quite knows what exactly he’s going to get the following week.

Much of Reeher’s own research in political science relies heavily on observations of interviewing in the field, like for his 2006 book, “First Person Political.” With this background and his experience with interviewing, the idea of turning these conversations into a broadcast program was somewhat of an abstract idea to Reeher – not something he thought would actually happen.

“The fact that it’s real and in year twelve is not what I would have expected,” Reeher said.

Reeher hopes to possibly expand the Campbell Conversations in the future in some way, but is not willing to do so if that means he has to sacrifice the Syracuse focus. For now, Reeher is content with focusing on keeping the quality of the program consistent and the conversations meaningful.

“Right now in the world we’re living in, it can be pretty soul crushing, so having a half hour once a week to have a respectful conversation, it’s like political psychotherapy,” Reeher said.

Published on December 5, 2022 at 11:18 pm