Eric Schulzke (b. 1965) is an American political scientist, journalist, and nonprofit founder whose working life crosses three fields that rarely meet in one biography. He trained as a scholar of American political thought. He earned a doctorate in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, completed in the fall of 2002. He then built a career that joins the study of political ideas, the daily practice of journalism, and the founding of a reentry charity for former prisoners. The combination gives his profile an unusual shape. He belongs to no single guild.
I served on the Placer High School student newspaper with Schulzke (1982-1983) and future political consultant Rob Stutzman (1983-1984). We shared Christianity, conservative politics and a love of journalism.
I remember Eric as brilliant, moral and funny while Rob struck me as a good man with great people skills and an open heart. Both of them mastered the alliance game at an early age, while I couldn’t help going my own way, losing friends in the pursuit of stories and interests.
Our journalism teacher Bob Burge wrote in my 1984 Yearbook that no other student had challenged him as much as I did.
Eric tried several times to pull me back to the reality of alliances. When I insisted on writing a particular story he opposed, Eric asked me, “Do you consider me your friend?” I said yes. He followed up, “Did I defend you when the Beast Bunch (the football team’s offensive line) wanted to kill you?” I said yes. “Then how can you do this?” I accepted his point.
All sorts of things that normal people took for granted weren’t easy for me.
We were all sure we were going places. That the world was our oyster. That we would leave our small town of Auburn far behind and make our mark on the world.
When we were together, we didn’t compete much because there was a clear hierarchy. Eric was the oldest and the smartest, and I was next in line to run the newspaper.
Rob and I never tried to argue Eric out of his Mormon faith while two evangelical girls on the staff tried and failed.
Rob and Eric carried their religion lightly. They didn’t proselytize. And they didn’t compromise their standards.
From day to day, I didn’t know who I was. Running in circles, I was constantly embracing new enthusiasms. I feared I was quite unstable compared to my grounded colleagues.
As I got older, I realized that other people prefer that one be predictable so they don’t have to think hard.
Schulzke’s scholarship grows out of American political development and the theory of executive power. His doctoral research and later articles examine Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) and the idea of crisis leadership. In Wilson’s writing on the presidency, crisis offers a way past institutional gridlock. Schulzke reads this against Wilson’s vision of the organic state, a polity held together by a deep and almost mystical popular unity that emergency brings to the surface. The reading places him among scholars who treat the early twentieth-century progressives as architects of the modern presidency. His other work reaches into federalism and the structure of American government, subjects that ask how power divides across levels and branches and how that division shapes self-rule.
Schulzke carried this scholarship into the classroom. He taught political science at Brigham Young University and worked within BYU Broadcasting in Provo, Utah. Student accounts describe a demanding teacher who prized mastery of concepts over memorization and who welcomed political argument. The setting suited a scholar of American institutions who also held strong views about public life. His later career kept this double character of the analyst who does not stand apart from the questions he studies.
Around 2013 he turned toward journalism. He covered national politics and policy for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City from 2013 to 2017. The beat let him write across a wide field. He covered faith in American public life, the treatment of college students with mental illness, prison education, parenting and shared domestic labor, and the moral questions raised by new technology. His range marks him as a writer drawn to subjects where policy meets conscience. One of his pieces opened with a warning to readers about a court case touching what he called America’s darkest industry, a sign of his willingness to take on hard moral material rather than soften it. After leaving the Deseret News staff he continued to publish, with bylines in Deseret Magazine, at KBYU, and in outlets such as Yahoo, U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Times, and New Atlas. The journalism reflects the same cast of mind as the scholarship. He thinks about institutions and the people inside them.
The third strand of his career, and the most personal, is The Apollo 13 Project. Schulzke founded and directs this nonprofit reentry initiative, based at Utah Valley University and presented online as Youturn.org. The project takes its name from NASA’s 1970 lunar mission, the near-disaster recounted in the 1995 Ron Howard (b. 1954) film Apollo 13. Schulzke draws a lesson from that story. When the odds looked hopeless, a ground crew worked without rest to bring the astronauts home. He wants the same kind of ground support for men and women leaving prison.
The project rests on a clear reading of the reentry problem. The hardest barriers a former prisoner faces are not always legal. Many are cultural and organizational. Employers fear liability, workplace safety risks, and damage to reputation, so qualified people meet a wall long after they finish their sentences. Schulzke answers this less through new legislation than through a change in public attitude. He aims to lower the perceived risk of a second-chance hire, to build relationships between employers and the formerly incarcerated, and to show the gains that follow successful reintegration. He places special weight on the stories of prisoners themselves, told through blogs and short video, on the theory that a human face changes public feeling more than argument does. He grounds the appeal in religious language as well, calling the New Testament a reentry manual at its core. The project drew an advisory board that included the sociologist Miriam Boeri of Kennesaw State University, whose interest in alternatives to incarceration had personal roots. Alongside the project Schulzke has worked on a book about incarceration policy.
A single intellectual signature runs through these three pursuits. Schulzke studies institutions and the moral life that goes on inside them. As a scholar he asks how crisis and structure shape the use of power. As a journalist he asks how faith, family, and policy press on ordinary lives. As a reformer he asks how a community changes its mind about people it has written off. The thread joining them is a conviction that public attitudes, not only laws, decide outcomes, and that careful persuasion can move those attitudes. He treats reform as a problem of culture and belief first and statute second.
The public record on Schulzke remains thin for a man of such varied output. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah, in the corridor between Provo and Salt Lake City that has shaped much of his work. Given his formidable rhetorical skills, he likely could be as famous as he wants, but instead he has chosen a career that has unfolded outside the national prominence that generates detailed biography. This obscurity fits the pattern of his work. He has spent his energy on the study of American government, on reporting that asks moral questions, and on a charity built for people the public prefers not to see. The value of his career lies in that consistency of purpose.
