Les AuCoin - Life After Political Office

Life After Political Office

AuCoin went into higher education five years after leaving the Congress, joining the faculty at Southern Oregon University in Ashland as a visiting professor of political science and business ethics. He was named Outstanding Professor of the Year by the SOU chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation's largest scholarly society. AuCoin was also voted by SOU students as one of the university’s four “most popular professors.” While at SOU, he won an Oregon Associated Press award for political commentary at Jefferson Public Radio. AuCoin writes on national issues for the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Blue Oregon blogs, for Writers On The Range, an editorial service for newspapers across the West, freelances magazine articles and publishes book reviews for regional newspapers. He is co-author of The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. In the 1960s, while working at Pacific University, he won several national awards for excellence in editing the school’s official magazine.

AuCoin and his wife Sue campaigned in Wisconsin in 2004 for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for the last month of his presidential race. In 2008, they drove to Ohio to spend the last five weeks of the election cycle campaigning for Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

The former congressman lectures at and serves on the advisory board to the Maxwell School’s National Security Studies program at Syracuse University in New York. In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates appointed him to the Transformation Advisory Group of the Pentagon’s U.S. Joint Forces Command. AuCoin is a corporate director at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle and Teton Heritage Builders, Inc., a high-end residential housing contractor located in Jackson, Wyoming, and Bozeman, Montana. He has been an expert witness in federal district court on issues regarding fiduciary duties of corporate board directors, and he served as vice chair of the board of trustees of Pacific University.