18 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN | FROM THE NEST FACULTY Celebrating 50 Years of Teaching Laura Katz Olson continues ‘full steam ahead’ in her dream job at Lehigh. A new fiction book, ‘Wrinkled Rebels,’ is set for release this summer. Fifty years ago, when Laura Katz Olson arrived at Lehigh with a Ph.D. in political science and a passion for teaching, she felt like a “curiosity” on campus. It was 1974 and women were an uncommon sight. Lehigh had just become co-ed, and the first small class of female undergrads had yet to graduate. Women professors were few. To Olson, Lehigh was seemingly a sea of men wearing sport coats in pursuit of engineering degrees. To say today’s Lehigh is a different place is an understatement. The political science department is now composed predominantly of women. Nearly 50 percent of Lehigh students are women. And Lehigh is engaged in providing an interdisciplinary, well-rounded education to students of all genders. Olson has been in the middle of the change, and some might consider her a trailblazer. She just sees herself as someone who has been lucky enough to so far spend 50 years in her dream job. “I love teaching. I love writing. I love researching. Lehigh essentially pays me to do what I love,” says Olson. “Professionally, I feel very satisfied.” Olson, at 78, continues full steam ahead from her home base—a tiny office on the third floor of Maginnes Hall packed full of books, accolades and awards, memorabilia and photos. It’s from there that she plans her classes, meets with students and operates a veritable publishing business. Olson has written nine nonfiction books on her research specialties of politics, health care, women and the elderly, as well as two fiction books. Currently, she is working on a book about private equity’s influence on the nursing home industry. She also is deep into another passion—writing fiction. “Wrinkled Rebels,” a story of six college friends who were active in the Civil Rights Movement and reunite for a weekend as 80-year-olds, is scheduled for release this summer. She had been researching and writing it for three years. “It was fun,” she says. “I loved writing it and missed it when I was finished.” A Path to Lehigh Olson grew up in the Bronx, in the working-class neighborhood of Pelham Parkway. She attended the High School of Music & Art and went on to the City College of New York, aspiring to be a geneticist—“they do such important things”—but soon discovered it wasn’t for her. What better suited this activist child of the 1960s was political science, and she went on to get her master’s and doctorate from the University of Colorado. In Boulder she got to know Charles McCoy, then chair of Lehigh’s Department of Government, who recruited her to teach political science at Lehigh. McCoy was a founder of the New Political Science group, a caucus of the American Political Science Association, and Olson was a member. “He was very determined to have a female in the department,” says Olson, who received the Charles A. McCoy Lifetime Achievement Award from New Political Science in 2009. “He wanted “BECAUSE THERE WERE SO FEW WOMEN FACULTY, WE ALL KNEW EACH OTHER. WE SUPPORTED EACH OTHER. WE LEANED ON EACH OTHER TO A GREAT EXTENT.” —Laura Katz Olson CHRISTA NEU
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