About the Director
Eitan Hersh is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the inaugural Director of the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education (CEVIHE) at Tufts University. Hersh’s research focuses on U.S. elections and civic participation. Hersh is the author of Politics is for Power (Scribner, 2020), Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge University Press, 2015), as well as scholarly articles. Hersh earned his PhD from Harvard University in 2011 and served as Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University from 2011 to 2017. His public writings have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, POLITICO, and the Boston Globe. Hersh regularly testifies in voting rights court cases and has appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the role of data analytics in political campaigns. He teaches courses on elections, American conservatism, and technology and politics.
In addition to working on elections and civic engagement, Hersh has written on topics ranging from antisemitism and the political consequences of terrorist attacks to politicization in health care delivery and the opioid crisis. For his teaching, research, and campus leadership, Hersh has received national recognition for prioritizing viewpoint diversity in higher education.
In 2022, Hersh was awarded an Emerson Collective Fellowship and went on leave to conduct research on the civic role of business leaders. While on leave, he decided it was time to prepare a new course for Tufts undergraduates. Many students, he felt, were in ideological bubbles with little exposure – even in the classroom – to conservative ideas. Hence, he created a course focused on contemporary public policy designed to help students learn more about the ethical, legal, and empirical debates in American society. The course, profiled in Boston Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, has helped broaden Tufts undergraduates’ perspectives on contentious public affairs issues.
The course on American conservatism alerted Hersh to a strong appetite among Tufts students to engage with all sides of political and social issues, even the most sensitive ones. Whether in a classroom, a research lab, a workplace, or in the public square as a citizen in a democracy, our best and brightest students want to grow into mature citizens who understand the world and can engage with people with all sorts of worldviews. CEVIHE is built for them and for the society they will inherit and lead.