Bill Moyers: Pastor, Politician, Journalist

In a world in which higher education is increasingly thought as preparation for a profession, being multidisciplinary in college and especially in graduate school is decreasingly sought and valued by students at universities in the United States. Unlike in the E.U., where it is more common for the professional schools to be separate from universities given the difference between training and education—skills and knowledge—American universities make it institutionally possible for a person to get a MBA and MPA after a BA in liberal arts or a BS in natural science, or, less commonly, to get a MBA degree and a MDiv degree after having studied in the liberal arts and sciences. The MBA and LLB or JD has been a more popular combination, and I spoke once with a MPA student at Harvard who already had a MBA from Notre Dame and was considering a degree in law. I think the benefits vocationally from being multidisciplinary in one’s formal higher education (i.e., college and graduate school) tend to kick in only after a few decades after one’s final graduation. Perhaps only in retrospect does the traces of such an education reveal themselves in a person’s work-life. I contend that the political aide, pastor, and journalist, Bill Moyers, is an excellent example of how a multidisciplinary education can enrich a person’s career, which is not likely to stay “inside the lines” of one particular industry. This is not a bad thing.

“Billy Don Moyers was born on June 5, 1934, in Hugo, Okla., . . . His father was an unskilled laborer.”[1] The son was anything but. As a young man after graduation from college, Bill Moyers was U.S. “President Johnson’s closest aide,” before serving as that president’s press secretary.[2] Moyers resigned from that administration in 1966 at the age of 32 after a falling out between the two men. Moyers then turned to journalism even though he had studied “journalism, government, history, theology, and ethics in, he said, ‘deliberate preparation for a career in public service.’”[3] That he also “spent two years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, preaching on weekends,”[4] and was ordained at the age of 25 as a Christian minister is not easily discerned from his years in public service and journalism, but I submit that the study of theology and especially ethics undergirded his studies in journalism and government. That he majored in journalism at North Texas State College and studied religious history on a fellowship at the University of Edinburgh before going to the seminary, and then taught Christian ethics at Baylor University made him what the journalist Ann Crittenden aptly wrote in 1981, “one of the most complicated men that politics or the media ever produced.”[5] I submit that his multidisciplinary college education made him so—not his years in the White House or at the American public broadcasting station, PBS.

In its obituary of Moyers, it is no accident that the The New York Times mentions that “Moyers, an ordained Baptist minister, explored issues ranging from poverty, violence, income inequality and racial bigotry to the role of money in politics, threats to the Constitution and climate change.”[6] His interest in theology, as well as the closely related philosophical field of ethics, can be seen in his choices on topics that he would cover in his “Bill Moyers Journal” and “Now” television programs. So too can his “soft,” or normative sensitivity be seen in his decision to work on President Johnson’s Great Society (anti-poverty) program, and before that, to develop President Kennedy’s Peace Corps program, such that at the age of just 28, Moyers was second in command in the Corps. James H. Rowe, Jr, a friend of President Johnson, wrote to the Peace Corps director, R. Sargent Shriver to praise Moyers as “that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator.”[7] Moyers’ studies in theology and ethics, and in journalism and government, reveal this seemingly dichotomous blend in distinctly educational terms.  

As a journalist, his background in theology was perhaps most relevant, though not broadcasted by him, in his famous series of interviews of the hitherto little-known scholar of religion, Joseph Campbell in the 1980s on PBS. Titled “The Power of Myth,” the six-part series focused on world religions rather than exclusively on Christianity, and Moyer’s own vantage-point as a Baptist minister remained nearly invisible against the journalist’s ethic to draw out and understand Campbell’s theories on what the world’s major religions share in common. It should be no surprise that Moyers, as a journalist at CBS and PBS, was seen by many viewers as “the nation’s conscience” who brought “a sense of moral urgency and decency” to television journalism even as the news business in the U.S. was becoming, as he put it, too much like show business at the expense of journalistic standards.[8] For him to have been able to see this trend even as it was underway before the advent of the very ideological Fox News and MSNBC, the multidisciplinary nature of formal education can be credited for it provided him with a broad enough cognitive and perceptual platform to take into account many different kinds of data. In other words, he could look at the compromises being increasingly made in American broadcast journalism not just from the standpoint of ethical theory, but also the deeper theological implications from the ethical compromises. The grounding of his understanding went deeper than what studies in journalism and political science could provide, and it is precisely such depth, or breadth, that enabled him to go beyond being a political aide and then a journalist to be reckoned as something as fundamental as the nation’s conscience.

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1. Janny Scott, “Johnson’s Top Advisor, and PBS’s Trusted Voice,” The New York Times, June 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

Experts on the Supreme Court: Lawyers Who Teach

For all the American lawyers and law “professors” who had been predicting on the basis of their "expertise" that the three days of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court meant that the Affordable Healthcare Act would go down, the Court's decision must have been a rude awakening. Immediately after the ruling, the decision came "as something of a surprise after the generally hostile reception the law received during the six hours of oral arguments."[1] This is an understatement at the very least.

Lest the public be taken in by the predictions of judicial "experts" in the future, we might want to recalibrate just how much insight the so-called experts really have on the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court.

           This public face of the U.S. Supreme Court may be distinct from what goes on 

behind the curtain.      (NYT)

Pete Williams, a journalist, reported on NBC Nightly News after one of the days of oral arguments that “Obamacare” was in trouble. Unless Williams had clerked at the Court, it is unlikely that he knew the Court’s inner workings, not to mention how the justices use oral arguments. For example, a justice might use the arguments to test out legal theories. Because I have not clerked at the Court, have no knowledge of its inner workings, and cannot get into a justice’s head, my projection out from the arguments can only be conjecture. Sadly, the journalists covering the case showed no such hesitancy concerning their own knowledge of the court and, indeed, the oral arguments themselves.

Lest we turn to American law “professors” as experts having even more insight into the Court’s workings than do the lawyers who have argued before the justices, it is important to remember that American law schools hire lawyers rather than scholars to teach law. Whereas legal scholars have the doctorate in law, the J.S.D. (Doctorate in Juridical Science), to practice law one needs only the undergraduate, or first, degree in law (the LLB or JD).  The LLB nomenclature was changed in 1900 at the new law school of the University of Chicago as a marketing ploy to attract students. Students had been complaining about having only a BA and LLB (two bachalors degrees) after seven years of college. Even with the name change, however, having the first degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences and the first degree in Law still constitutes two undergraduate degrees.  One must go on in the same body of knowledge to graduate degrees before one can be considered to have mastered it (i.e., masters degree) and then to be a scholar of it (i.e., doctoral degree).  To treat a lawyer with one degree in law as though he or she were thereby a scholar of law omits two degrees of law (the LLM and JSD).

So when Benjamin Barton, who teaches law at the University of Tennessee, says, “I am a law professor and have been quite interested in this case,” we ought to view him rather as an instructor rather than professor because he is not a scholar of law (i.e., having earned the JSD degree).[2] A clue to his true situs, educationally speaking, is in his next statement: “I had a pretty hard time following those arguments.”[3]  He was referring to the oral arguments. Benjamin Barton is a lawyer who teaches law as an instructor. We should neither blame him nor be particularly surprised that some of the arguments eluded him.

In the E.U., by the way, one must have the equivalent of the LLB/JD, LLM, and JSD degrees to join a faculty of law as a professor. In fact, one must have published one’s dissertation and published another book too, at least before one can become a full professor (it might be a requirement even to become an assistant professor). I know such a law professor, and his legal education goes far beyond a year and a half of survey courses and a year and a half of senior seminars. By “beyond,” I do not simply mean more seminars.

A doctorate is more than just a few additional years of classes. One must sit for long comprehensive exams (over anything in the discipline), and oral exam, as well as write and defend a book-length work of original research (i.e., a dissertation). So adding another year to a physical therapy program does not make the degree a doctorate. Also, a doctorate must be the terminal degree in a body of knowledge, whether or not a particular school offers the degree. Lest a masters be presumed to be a terminal degree (e.g., the MFA), the comprehensive exams and dissertation must also be part of the degree (as well as advanced seminars).

Just as everyone today is a professional, we as a society have a habit of naively assuming that someone is an expert simply because they claim to be one. Whether journalists who presume to know how the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court or lawyers who teach law yet somehow have trouble following the Court’s oral arguments, a good bit of self-restraint is called for in terms of self-entitlement.

1. Mike Sacks, "Supreme Court Health Care Decision: Individual Mandate Survives," The Huffington Post, June 28, 2012.
2. Adam Liptak, “Justices’ Celebral Combativeness on Display,” The New York Times, April 3, 2012. 
3. Ibid.