For over three decades at the College of William and Mary, Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government and Public Policy Chris Howard has studied U.S. social policy. He has taught courses on topics ranging from poverty and the American welfare state to research methods.
Having grown up in Charlottesville, Va., with a father who worked as an English professor at the University of Virginia, Howard was initially unsure about pursuing a career in academia.
“I was not convinced that I wanted an academic route, partly because my dad, who had been an English professor at UVA, was often an unhappy English professor,” he said. “I had heard plenty of stories about the downsides of academic life, so it was not at all a foregone conclusion that I would become an academic.”
Howard pursued his undergraduate education at Duke University, where he majored in history. After graduating, Howard worked in various public sector jobs across Washington, D.C. and Boston.
“That experience was really important in sort of shifting me away from history to politics,” he said. “That’s sort of where the social policy comes in.”
After a couple of years in the workforce, Howard decided to continue his education. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he gained a Master of Science and Ph.D. in political science.
Howard emphasized the effort he put into his first few years at MIT.
“I literally was working 100-hour weeks the first two years of grad school,” he said. “And my wife was going back at the same time to get her MBA degree from MIT. All we did for two years was basically just study, eat and sleep.”
Once Howard finished at MIT, he eventually decided on academia and began looking for teaching jobs. The market was not strong at the time, so he was left searching for roughly two years.
“The first year, I got one offer and turned it down at Syracuse because it was just too bloody cold, and neither me nor my wife had any friends or family in the Syracuse area,” Howard said. “And then the second year on the market, I got a lot more interviews.”
He dealt with a lot of rejections from other schools until he heard back from the College.
“Literally at the end of the hiring season, William and Mary gave me an offer,” Howard said. “And since it’s a really good school in the right part of the country, for me and my wife, it was a very easy yes.”
At the College, Howard began teaching a range of classes focused on his social and public policy research interests. He has also taught a research methods course to government and public policy students. Howard described his goal in teaching the course as giving students some of the academic training he feels he didn’t receive.
“To be honest, in grad school, my methods training was not great, and I always felt like that was something that was a mistake on MIT’s part,” Howard said. “And so I was trying in part to sort of help students get better training than I had.”
In his academic work, Howard prefers working on longer-term book projects over shorter papers.
“I enjoy the sort of long-run challenge of the book,” he said. “And to me, one of the benefits/responsibilities of having tenure is tackling long projects that might pay off.”
Howard has written and published five books, per his profile on the College’s website. He considers himself a generalist in U.S. social policy by trying to understand a range of American programs instead of only focusing on a few.
“I think of myself as a generalist, and I have written about a wide range of social programs over a long span of time,” Howard said. “I like being sort of known as a good generalist, the way some doctors are general practitioners and not specialists.”
For his next major academic work, Howard plans to write a book comparing the history of fighting poverty for children, the unemployed and the elderly. Howard plans to research the extent to which inclusive versus targeted U.S. social programs have helped reduce poverty across these groups.
“My answer, I suspect, will be sort of [that] it depends on what era you’re looking at,” he said.
Howard said he plans to begin working on the book once the current spring semester finishes. He added that he will take the next fall and spring semesters off from teaching to work on writing, with the manuscript due to his publisher in April 2027.
Howard described his public engagement work, writing opinion pieces for news organizations like CNN, The Washington Post and The Hill.
“That’s also one of the things that I’ve sort of done more since getting tenure,” he said. “[I’ve] tried to do more sort of public writing and not just academic writing.”
Howard also serves on the James City County Social Services Advisory Board. Members of the body are appointed by the James City County Board of Supervisors for four-year terms, where they serve in an advisory capacity on social welfare issues for county residents.
“That sort of grew out of the pandemic, where I wanted something that I could try to do and not just be stuck at home,” he said.
Howard’s most recent work on the advisory board involved reviewing grant proposals for local social services and scoring them.
He explained how he is also involved in giving back to the community through his church.
“I do delivery of hot meals to people living in local motels a few times a year, and I help supply some of the summer meals for kids’ programs,” he said.
When asked what he has enjoyed most about his time at the College, Howard mentioned the positive relationships he has built with students.
“So clearly, I really like the fact that I get to teach bright students,” he said. “On a day-to-day basis, it’s being in the classroom and talking and working with students.”
