Laura Katz Olson Celebrates 50 Years of Teaching at Lehigh

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 the political science department to be more diverse.”

Olson thrived at Lehigh. She says she and three other female professors put together a Women’s Studies program. They started a daycare center. They made their voices heard.

“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,” she says. “We were asked to be on every committee because they wanted at least one woman on the committees. The positive was that … we really became very involved in Lehigh and were very much a part of Lehigh.”

Over the years, Olson’s courses have included The American Presidency, Introduction to American Government, U.S. Health Politics and Politics of Women.

Olson says she became interested in health care and elder care because she discovered that although the country spent a lot of money on the elderly, they didn’t seem to be thriving.

“They tended to be poor, especially elderly women,” she says.

During her tenure, Olson took a few side steps to further her knowledge. She worked for a year as a Scholar at the Social Security Administration, for a semester as a gerontological fellow at the Area Agency on Aging in Madison, Wisconsin, and as a Fulbright scholar in Finland.

Olson’s books reveal how politics and corporate influence affect health care and the elderly, usually with negative results. Her most recent book—and she says most impactful—is “Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms U.S. Health Care,” published in 2022. Olson says it’s the first book that tackled how predatory private equity firms are buying everything from opioid treatment centers to hospice agencies. Their goal is solely profit, and, as a result, the quality of services has declined, she says.

The book has received numerous awards, and Olson has received invitations to conferences and speaking engagements.

In 2016, Olson combined her research with her personal experience in “Elder Care Journey: A View From the Front Lines.” She chronicled the difficult challenge of navigating the health care system on behalf of her elderly mother, a woman of limited resources.

“As I say in the book, I studied elder care for years, decades, but the reality was somewhat more stark,” says Olson. “It’s one thing to say how challenging it is to get help, it’s another to actually try to get help. It was really an eye-opener for me.”

At first, Olson managed her mother’s care long distance, but eventually moved her mother from Florida to the Lehigh Valley as her condition deteriorated.

“I decided to write a book about it because I think it was important for people to understand what it was like. The conclusion is we need to make a lot of changes to the system. Because the system is not working for elder care. Especially home care,” she says.