Lovett College alum wins seat as Harris County Judge

By Sarah Rutledge     11/6/08 6:00pm

Republican Ed Emmett (Lovett '71) won Harris County judge on Tuesday, defeating Democratic candidate David Mincberg. Emmett was appointed to Harris County judge in March 2007 by the Harris County Commissioner's court. In 1978, Emmett ran for the legislature and served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

This year, Emmett spent more than $3 million on his campaign, but Emmett's dedication to politics wasn't always so apparent.

At Rice, Emmett originally intended to be a physics major, but he soon found out this was not his forte.

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"Probably making a 12 on the final convinced me this was not my career path," Emmett said. "I wasn't cut out to be a physics major."

Emmett also started out at Will Rice College but, at the end of his freshman year, was randomly selected to be part of the then-new Lovett College. There, he was appointed president as a junior.

He describes his college years as full of turmoil.

"We had the Vietnam War going on and protests around the country. On campus, I guess I was considered a conservative. Off campus, my parents considered me this wild-eyed liberal, and that made me fairly moderate," he said.

Though he describes Rice as being a few years behind the times in terms of protests, he mentioned the Dean of Students' office being burned by upset students during a student takeover of the Allen Center for Business Activities. During his time in college, he said angry members of the Ku Klux Klan stormed the campus.

"It was quite a time," Emmett said. "At least two years in a row, students held discussions about whether Rice should cancel final exams or protests."

He said he decided to go into politics after realizing many of the politicians as well as the protesters did not represent his interests.

"I thought there's got to be a middle path here, and I got interested in politics at that time," Emmett said.

He went to the Lyndon B. Johnson School for Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and ran a state Republican campaign in Harris County in a largely Democratic district. He was elected and served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

In 1989, he served under former President George H. W. Bush as interstate commerce commissioner.

Today, Emmett's office is located close to Rice's campus.

"I only half-jokingly tell people I wanted to be close to Rice to be close to baseball," he said.

Emmett credits his successful campaign this year to split-ticket voting. He estimates 100,000 people split their tickets and voted for him.

"This goes back to something I learned at Rice: that middle ground is what people are looking for, so I was fairly pleased," Emmett said.

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