NINA HANNA
Staff Writer
Pepperdine University professor Gary Galles is no ordinary teacher. Having taught at Seaver College for the past 25 years, he has established himself as a longtime and distinguished professor of economics. But a better title might be Writer of Everything.
Galles’ collections include hundreds of articles and opinion pieces. His writings have appeared in, but are not limited to, the Orange Country Register, Los Angeles Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer and Washington Times. In addition, he has written for professional journals and contributed book chapters.
Galles, the chairman of the Social Science Division, may be the most prolific Pepperdine professor in recent memory.
Stepping into his office, students find an array of bookshelves filled to the brim and file cabinets jam-packed with his publications. At the rate he’s going, space for anything incoming is going to become an issue very soon.
Some of his articles address matters of religion and social sciences, but the bulk of his papers discuss economic and legislative issues, which intertwine most of the time. “Economics is such an imperialistic discipline,” said Galles. “It doesn’t mean you just write about economics, you write about everything because economics is connected to everything.”
His extensive background in economics has in large part equipped him with the tools to recognize logical errors and data inconsistencies and thus write credible opinion pieces. Galles received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Washington.
For him, there is no going out searching for subjects to cover. Years of experience have helped sharpen his eyes when it comes to deciding what to write about and what position to take.
“The longer you watch politics, the longer it’s been where you’ve seen the same arguments or similar arguments and in part you learn,” said professor Galles. “The same basic issues from 1986 don’t just disappear. They come back in different forms.”
Galles added: “The underlying argument stays the same, but the details have changed.”
Galles says he has never written a piece he hasn’t wholeheartedly believed in. But knowing what to argue is the easy part. Writing opinion pieces is a tough undertaking and demands hard work. The challenge lies in its space restriction. Opinionated writers are limited to a certain amount of space, therefore concision is a crucial, not to mention difficult, skill to master.
“It’s trying to squeeze out the essential incentive argument of a story and explaining it in as succinct a way as possible, which is very hard and painful,” said Galles. “Like I used to tell my daughter, ‘writing is editing, and editing is nothing but pain.’”
Nevertheless, Galles believes that going through the agony of cutting your piece down until it is brief enough will make you a better writer in the end. With opinion pieces so clear and straightforward, you inevitably will succeed at stirring things up.
For Galles, opinion writing and teaching seem to go hand in hand. For students in his public finance class, the workload will include 75 of Galles’s articles. “The pieces are literally all applications of what we learn in class,” Galles explained. I’m trying to show my students that what I say is actually useful.”
One example entitled “There is a Better Way to Grade in University,” argues that the “90 percent A; 80 percent B; 70 percent C grading system used by colleges may actually reduce higher education’s effectiveness.”
The idea behind the piece is that if a university truly seeks to promote high-level thinking and application and to cultivate the ability of students to deal with more complex issues, the 90-80-70 scale is largely inappropriate because it produces a curve. As a result, students complain about their teachers, who in turn return to rote memorization questions, which neglect fundamental principles and their real-world applications and reduce what students learn and retain.
Writing an opinion paper is no easy feat but Professor Galles has the craft down. Ever since he published his first article in 1986, Galles has been writing dozens of pieces each year. He brings to the classroom the same passion and enthusiasm.
He expresses that the art of economics has much to do with theory and logic. Thus if it were up to him, he would create a university where the freshman seminar was logic. “That is the most valuable thing you can take at a university because we all think very sloppily and to be very rigorous in how you think allows you to detect your own sloppiness and others,” said Galles.
And, in turn, you might be able to keep up with the Writer of Everything.
03-21-2007