Although Bill Thomas has been a congressman for 26 years, he has not forgotten his days as a professor at Bakersfield College.

Thomas, R-Bakersfield, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over all of the tax code, was a political science professor at BC from 1965 to 1974. In 1974 he was elected to the California Assembly and was there two terms.

“After the incumbent congressman died they had a convention and after the primary in August, I was named to the ballot as happens under California law with a vacancy after the primary. I was on the ballot in November of ’78 and I went to Washington in ’79,” said Thomas in an interview with The Rip.

“One of the things that obviously impressed me was that the city of Bakersfield at that time was somewhere between 65 and 70,000, but we had a football stadium that seated 21,000 and it was filled every game,” he said.

When Thomas taught at BC there was no four-year school in the area.

“I really enjoyed it because there was no Cal State, there was no four-year school. For anybody who wanted to stay home and go to school there was a much more broad-based community role that BC played then,” said Thomas.

“It still has a very important role to play, and I am pleased that the President (Bush) has mentioned now in a number of speeches, the role that community colleges have to play, and I encourage him to do more of that.”

Thomas attended Santa Ana College. He said Bush continues to focus on community colleges as an option. When asked how, Thomas responded, “He mentions the role that community colleges can play in people furthering their education in providing education close to home at a relatively low cost.”

Thomas graduated with his B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University.

When asked if he has always been a Republican, he said, “Uh-huh. Well, I mean, you can’t register till you get older. I always thought that the approach to politics and the role of the individual visa-vie the government was more along the way I thought it should be along Republican than Democrat. So I was kind of an anomaly.”

He said no students taking his courses at BC could tell he was a Republican.

“I don’t believe you should teach that way. I know there are a number of teachers who wear their political affiliation on their sleeve. I don’t believe you should,” he said.

When asked what his teaching philosophy was, Thomas said, “Basically I didn’t use any of the usual structural approaches to teaching. What I taught was that the belief system that you hold has been created and that it can be adjusted based upon your reaction to reality. It’s called a conceptual framework,” he said.

“The real difference in terms of people is that you obviously know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know, but you can be put into situations where you know you don’t know and how you deal with those situations in terms of what you know you don’t know, really does determine whether or not you are educated.”

He said when he was teaching a class he would give different viewpoints on facts and make sure his students understood both sides of an issue.

Thomas said ever since he came to Bakersfield, he has been involved in politics.

“When I came here in 1965, I immediately began involving myself in the community with both the two major parties … I set up classes where students could get a one unit for lab participation in the campaigns, then they would have to write a paper. So I was involved with the parties as soon as I got here,” said Thomas.

He was part of a Republican search committee to find incumbent candidates to run against in 1974 and he could not find anyone who wanted to run for the local assembly seat against then incumbent Ray Gonzales.

“I believe incumbents ought to have opponents so people can make choices between candidates. That’s what elections are supposed to be about.”

He ran against Gonzales in 1974, which was the year of the Nixon Watergate scandal.

“I was the only non-incumbent Republican to win anything in California that year,” he said.

He got reelected in 1976 and was on the ballot to go back to Sacramento in 1978, when the Bakersfield area congressman at that time died and Thomas wound up running for Congress. He’s been reelected ever since.

Philosophy professor Jack Hernandez, who has been at BC since 1961, said Thomas was, “a really good collegue. He was active with students and student government and active with other campus activies.”

Professor Emeritus Greg Goodwin, who shared an office with Thomas in 1964, was unable to do an interview because he was on vacation but said through an email correspondence, “Bill was an active leader at BC, largely running the faculty bargaining committee.”

“Quite a few of us remember the good agreements he got in negotiations. Like now, his strong suit was attention to detail and really knowing the facts. If the administration challenged his information they were nearly always proved wrong.”

He said in the e-mail, faculty, including himself, turned to Thomas to help negotiate deals in buying things such as real estate and automobiles. “He never charged anything and was a much better bargainer than I was.”