What would it be? A career with the CIA or academia?
Patrick L. Schoettmer, PhD, associate teaching professor in political science—with a second gig as a news commenter and expert source for journalists—came to a fork in the road.
After completing his undergraduate degree, he had just earned his first master’s degree in near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University where he studied Arabic, Turkish and German and had started applying to political science programs as well as jobs.
That’s when he had to make up his mind.
In one hand he had offers from academia. The other? Straight to the CIA’s Open Source Center, likely working to gather publicly available data on Muslim minority groups in Europe.
“I decided my talents and temperament were much better suited to teaching rather than clandestine services,” says Schoettmer, who came to Seattle University in 2016 by way of Southeastern Oklahoma State University after earning his PhD from Notre Dame.
“You have to fade into the background when you work for the agency and I like to talk, hence why I tend to do a lot of media interviews,” he says. “Plus, I think by nature, I’m a teacher at heart and I like sharing what I know with others.”
One of the highest profile SU faculty members, as measured by the sheer number of times he appears in local, national, even international media—from KING 5-TV to the New York Times to Sky News Australia—Schoettmer is regularly called on as a faculty expert to weigh in on the day’s events or a range of topics.
“What I try to do in my role is make sure that the value I’m bringing is a commitment to truth and a degree of integrity, a willingness to say what you know and acknowledge what you don’t know,” he says.
“The scary thing and the beautiful thing about the social sciences is that what you’re studying, the experiment you’re looking at, is always happening in real time right in front of you. And it’s impacting several hundred million people all at the same time and we’re just trying to figure out what that data is telling us.”
—Patrick L. Schoettmer, PhD
From the Seattle mayor’s election to the impact of the federal government shutdowns to plumbing the subtleties of a joint press conference with President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, journalists seek out Schoettmer an average of five to 10 times a month (mostly by broadcast media, for which he has some regular spots). In 2025, reporters interviewed him 70 times.
For Schoettmer, he sees his role as an expert source for the news media as an extension of his work in his SU classroom.
“For the most part, when people are coming to ask questions about some event that’s going on, what they’re really asking me to do is explain something that I’m explaining in Political Science 2000,” he says. “What they’re doing is really no different than what the students are doing in the class.”
Schoettmer’s U.S. politics counterpart in the Political Science Department, Associate Professor Sarah D. Cate, PhD, sees his appeal for news consumers as a mix of his personality, such as his confidence and sense of humor, and his expertise.
“He is a great spokesperson for political science and our department because he has a wealth of experience working on campaigns and closely follows local politics,” she says. “He is deeply engaged beyond the classroom with the political world, which makes him well suited to comment and help explain to a broader audience key tenets of our discipline in an applied and relevant way.”
Hailing from a politically aware family in Columbus, Indiana, his mother and father have both been involved in labor activism. He knew growing up that he wanted to have a career in politics but saw himself as falling into the niche of lobbyist, deadpanning: “I didn’t think I was wealthy or likable enough to be a politician.”
He describes his personal politics first and foremost as being a pragmatist.
“I would definitely say my views align with a progressive Catholic worldview fairly generally,” he says. “But when I’m doing interviews, I’ve mostly seen my job as calling balls and strikes.”
There is a learning curve to mastering the art of being an expert source, he says, one defined by precision and efficiency, beyond the level that is expected in the classroom.
“Students want more depth and want more meandering,” he says. “The journalists, they want to be able to fit it into a 15-second window, which is all the time they’re going to have sometimes.”
When he’s not in the classroom or fielding calls from reporters, he enjoys gaming—he’s getting back into Fallout, a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game—and spending time with his family.
Schoettmer and his wife, Katrina, have three children, Amelia, Hannah and Max, who is a freshman at SU.
Though his expertise is in political science, Schoettmer has a front row seat to how the news media shapes government and elections and vice versa. And from his perch he sees the confluence of worrisome media trends such as insulated bubbles, distrust of institutions, AI-generated misinformation and the authoritarian creep into social media and legacy media ownership. In his view, the solution is Americans deciding they want to change course, short of some catastrophe, and come to terms with the discomfort of having their world views challenged.
Is it inevitable that Americans will make that shift?
“We don’t know, we haven’t had this before,” he says. “The scary thing and the beautiful thing about the social sciences is that what you’re studying, the experiment you’re looking at, is always happening in real time right in front of you. And it’s impacting several hundred million people all at the same time and we’re just trying to figure out what that data is telling us.”