Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  Anyway, my neighbor returned from his New York soiree to insist that Bill, indeed, did remember me from those days. I scoffed, concluding that the former President is just a smooth politician who tells people whatever they might want to hear. But you never know, a fair amount of my work, and even my actual language, made it into the final version of the President’s welfare proposal as submitted to Congress in 1994. Moreover, his memory is the stuff of legend. I think I will go with the totally unlikely story that he did recall me.

  Later in the town hall meeting, many of the attending academics, researchers, policy wonks, and public officials whom I knew from various prior projects wandered up to ask, “How did you get up on the stage?” I could hear the unstated query, “When did you get so important?” Good questions, I thought. As a kid, there was no promise of anything other than a most ordinary life for me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood; spending my early years hanging around street corners with dissolute buddies clearly headed, I thought at the time, for the same kind of nondescript life as I. Now that I think on it, it is where most of them ended up.

  Perhaps part of the motivation for putting all this down on paper is to figure out how I managed to get on that stage. Just how did I become one of those policy wonks? Surely, my only accomplishments from that most ordinary of childhoods was to stay out of juvenile hall. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest a professional tenure among the better social policy minds of my generation. Surely, it was never part of any plan. I grew up simply hoping to find some way to support myself that did not involve heavy lifting or an extended prison term.

  Yet, there is another, more compelling, motivation for this rehashing of my professional life. It goes back to the many years I spent teaching policy courses to eager (and not so eager) students at the University of Wisconsin. Some of those students kept raising questions that have stayed with me to this day. Perhaps it is time that I answer them…better late than never.

  The 600-level Social Work course that I taught for many years was what we called a practicum experience for advanced graduate students interested in doing policy work from a social work perspective. Permit me to make a brief distinction between the acts of doing policy and studying policy. You typically attack the latter challenge through a rigorous curriculum of course work and readings and mathematical exercises. You are expected to absorb a large amount of information on programs and policies designed to help people, and to develop a command of technical skills designed to carry out rigorous analyses of issues and policy options. You study policy to become a better technician.

  Doing policy is somewhat different. I am reminded of a sociology professor way back in college who kept insisting that all of us students should be “doing” sociology. I thought that a stretch, but doing policy makes more sense. Here, you want to help nurture or learn a set of skills and attitudes that make you an effective player in the larger policy arena. These skills and dispositions are less precise than the microeconomics and benefit-cost analysis skills that technical policy folk master. But they are so very important for engaging what we call “wicked” policy issues where disputes over ends, theories, design, and evidence are severe and clouded by competing values and ideologies.

  The “doing” policy skills include things like listening well, interpreting what is going on around you, integrating diverse and seemingly unrelated facts into meaningful wholes, and communicating well with others. You must see issues and interactions in a larger frame of reference, not just how something affects a single family, but how aggregates of families are affected by society’s rules and protocols. You must be able to absorb arguments that challenge your belief system with a modicum of grace, and to debate points in ways that suggest respect for the positions of others. In short, you must be a special kind of person, whose core attributes I will describe more fully later.

  Each second year Social Work masters student interested in doing policy was placed in what was called a practice internship with real policymakers. In such a setting, they hopefully would experience policy work at the ground level. Their real-world practice experience was supported by weekly group meetings where I would astound them with my brilliant insights on a range of related topics. Well, that is my story, at least, and I am sticking with it. It was a small group (eight to fourteen students), and I would have them for a full academic year…great fun, for me at least.

  So, each September, a small band of intrepid second year masters students would troop into my office with various degrees of conviction. They faced a big decision—their choice of a second year “concentration.” In effect, they were facing that terrible decision each of us has faced at some point in our life—what do we want to do, and be, when we grow up? I myself plan on tackling that question next month, if I am not too pooped by then.

  In many ways, this choice was much like a medical student deciding on whether to be a brain surgeon or a urologist—the decision to focus on the body’s central processing unit, or its internal plumbing. This decision, whether made by a future doctor or social worker, could well decide their future as a professional. Social workers selecting a policy practicum over more conventional choices such as personal counseling or child welfare, signaled their disciplinary interest in a way that would likely narrow future career prospects. Policy was a choice for the intrepid few.

  For virtually all aspiring social workers, counseling various angst-ridden middle-class clients or perhaps aspiring juvenile delinquents, proved more appealing than tackling seemingly intractable and abstract issues such as poverty, social dysfunction, and political paralysis. Besides, any expression of interest in policy would be met with incredulity by several members of the social work faculty of that era. Students told me that some responded to their interest in policy by asking, “Tell me again why you don’t want to be a real social worker?” Fortunately, most remained undaunted by such expressions of ill-disguised contempt.

  Some of these policy wannabes were the “I want to change the world” types. Those already committed to righting wrongs, to tilting their unbounded reservoirs of optimism at various societal windmills. But most were far less certain or committed. What is social policy? What would I do? Can I learn to do this stuff? Could I get a job, really? I want to make a difference, but isn’t it all hopeless anyway? Isn’t doing this stuff very mysterious and complicated? But policy is all about boring numbers and such, wouldn’t I be happier working with real people? And then they would circle back to the most pressing concern of all, what kind of job could I possibly get? Such questions and concerns would go on in one form or another, but you get the drift.

  Whatever I told them must have been somewhat convincing since virtually all eventually signed on. I can yet recall some of my spiel. I would talk about the need for smart, tough people willing to take on the critical macro issues of the day. I would remind them of the historic role that social work once played in rectifying social wrongs. Surely, they remember Jane Adams. And did they ever hear of Harry Hopkins, the social worker who lived in the White House while helping President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pull the country out of the Great Depression?

  I might even touch upon an embarrassment or two for the discipline. There was the time President John Kennedy called on social work and social workers to tackle what was perceived as an emerging welfare crisis in the early 1960s. It was an assignment that, within a fairly short time, the profession would abandon to the dismal science of economics and to those dry, humorless economists, a disciplinary retreat to be regretted for sure. At some point, I would resort to the ever-handy metaphor about whether it was better to pluck endangered individuals from the raging river one by one and/or head upstream to curb the river’s tempest in the first instance.

  I would typically end with a challenge, “If not you, then who? Surely not those heartless economists!” Now, I feel comfortably denigrating acolytes of this dismal science, since many of my professional colleagues were trained as economists. In the academy, they
typically were my closest colleagues even though my doctorate was in Social Welfare, the advanced degree in Social Work, and I was attached to the School of Social Work in my awkward and futile attempt to play at being an academic. In fact, I worked so closely with economists that I picked up quite a bit of their world view and their everyday vernacular. Many from outside the university assumed I was a devotee of the dismal science, until I set them straight.

  Despite my playful comments about them, most economists I worked with ranged from damn smart to outright brilliant. But as a group, they did have one or two rather annoying traits—they took themselves way too seriously and tended to look at things from an overly narrow perspective. All that mattered was costs and benefits and incentives all expressed through the metric of money. All our understanding of issues was to be pursued through sophisticated, quantitative techniques. Thomas Picketty, the acclaimed economist put it this way in his highly regarded book on inequality:

  To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity (sic) without having to answer the more complex questions posed by the world we live in.

  But I digress! There were times, after these young students left my office full of newly found conviction and purpose, that I would sink into a shallow pool of guilt and remorse—a dark pool well-known to those of Irish persuasion. I am reminded of an aphorism attributed to Dave Powers, a member of the Irish Mafia that counseled President Kennedy. It went something like this, “We Irish know we must pay for any good we experience, we just don’t know when the price is to be paid.”

  Was I a snake oil salesman? Would these students one day return to sue me for ruining their lives? After all, I knew just how demanding and difficult the challenge of achieving policy goals can be. I was fully aware of how intractable most social problems remained. So why did I continue urging them on? Then I would calm myself. My culpability likely was limited. To win a lawsuit, they would probably have to establish malicious intent on my part. In truth, I was not exactly evil, just a little misguided.

  In a weak, pre-emptive strike against the inevitable guilt that would follow, I would touch upon the difficulties they would face. Doing policy was often a marathon, not a sprint. Success was often hard to identify, never mind achieve. I would warn that right and wrong often blurred in indefinable ways, that tradeoffs were everywhere, and that it was almost a certainty that new policies and programs would involve losers as well as winners. Victory was seldom clean and neat, if it could be achieved at all. Purveyors of the policy arts must be prepared for a life of partial successes at best.

  I would even suggest that their emotional experience of the coming year would be curvilinear. They would start out with enthusiasm and commitment. That upbeat period would slowly erode as they confronted the glacial speed at which policy often occurs, the paralysis imposed by political or ideological confrontations, and the sheer difficulty of deciding what is right and wrong in many situations. Even when you have the problem correctly identified, it is not always obvious what to do about it. Still, these caveats often struck me as insufficient.

  I would sometimes sit in my office and ponder the following: knowing what I knew by that time in my career, would I do it over again? If I were facing the choice that these students were, would I now say, “Thanks, but no thanks…I think I will see what they are offering down the hall.” After all, doing policy was not only challenging, it was exhausting. Victories typically were uncertain, opaque, and ephemeral. The policy wars seemed interminable and intractable. Bottom line, doing policy was hard and frustrating work. For the most wicked of problems, there never seemed to be an ultimate solution.

  And when you add the fact that I was trying to be both an academic and a policy wonk at the same time, the challenge of being a policy wonk struck me as exhausting and overwhelming. I can recall, one year, when I was the associate director of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), a major research unit at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I also was carrying what was considered a full-time teaching load, was the principle investigator on several projects, and had a full schedule of talks and presentations to make across the country. Some of the additional burdens during that period could be attributed to the fact that IRP was in danger of losing its federal support. In response, I accepted more opportunities to give talks than I typically might to keep the institute visible nationally, particularly in Washington.

  In addition, I was playing at being an assistant professor of social work, which meant accommodating the demands of an academic department, including those interminable faculty meetings and committee responsibilities. In retrospect, it probably was the equivalent of at least two full-time positions or more—an impossible schedule even for one with ambition and clear professional goals, which certainly was not me. While that year was a bit of an outlier, it was close to the norm in the latter part of my career. Most years were zany and taxing in one way or another.

  It got so bad that I had no time to prepare for talks or class lectures. Hell, I hardly had time to take care of my bodily functions. Since this was back in the days when transparencies were still used, I gradually collected a large file of these useful aids covering a variety of social policy topics. I would start preparing for most off-site presentations when I boarded the plane to wherever the event was located. First, I would recheck what kind of talk I was supposed to give. Next, I would sort through my pile of transparencies, select a subset, and begin organizing that subset into a sequence that might conceivably serve as a coherent narrative. Then, I would cross my fingers, hoping the talk would be reasonably on target and good enough to fool the audience that my story line was relevant.

  For years, I had a recurring nightmare that I would be introduced by a conference moderator as an expert on toxic waste disposal or some other equally exotic topic I knew nothing about. But who knows, perhaps being thought of as a so-called expert gives you an inherent comparative advantage. You know, the audience would think, “Gee, this sounds like total bull-hockey, but the guy must know what he is talking about since he is an expert.” In any case, I would stand before those assembled, say a brief prayer to a deity I assumed had long since given up on me, and then wing it. It must have worked since invitations kept on coming.

  Often, on the return flight, I would turn to an upcoming class lecture, one of which (a Program Evaluation course for Public Policy masters students) was a new course for me. Thus, I could not just slide through on the previous year’s notes. Way too often, there was simply no time to get ready for the upcoming lecture. I would kid myself that, if needed, there would always be a spare hour or two to prepare right before the appointed hour. That anticipated opportunity inevitably would slip away as unavoidable phone calls, administrative crisis, and unexpected project-related demands intruded. At the last minute, I would panic and jot down a few basic thoughts before bracing myself for a room full of expectant students. Disaster stared me in the face.

  What a fraud, I thought to myself, surely, they will sue to get their money back or mercifully stone me with their textbooks to escape this misery. Ironically, however, I often sensed I did better on those days when I was least prepared. The lecture seemed to flow effortlessly. I could always call on my limitless supply of personal and professional vignettes to fill in the silences, many of these stories you will have an opportunity to suffer through in subsequent chapters.

  Such a frantic life is not enjoyed without some cost, however. One fine day during this period, I noticed several of those yellow slips used back then in my mailbox. They contained increasingly frantic notes to contact my doctor whom I had seen the day before for a routine exam. Wow, this l
ooks serious, I thought, perhaps I have a half hour to live. When I called his office, he was home for lunch, but had left a message for me to call him there. Oh shit, I thought, perhaps I only had a few minutes left. Turns out there were anomalies in my EKG and he wanted me checked out by a cardiac specialist at the university hospital right away, even before getting on a plane for my next D.C. trip that was coming up, a fact that somehow had come up as we chatted.

  After getting the Cadillac of cardiac exams by the top heart man at University Hospital, he sat me down to ask about my work and my lifestyle. Then, he gave me the lecture. Ever get the lecture? It is about getting priorities straight and scaling back. Time to think about my health and not what I falsely thought was important. No one is as important, nor as essential, as they believe they are. He told me he had reached the same conclusion about his own career. He had started to find a heathier balance in his life.

  Though I assume he was right, I pretty much ignored him. If you have not already, you will soon conclude that I am not too bright. I would still get on planes to fly around the country to knock my head repeatedly against a figurative wall composed of impossible policy questions. Fortunately, I escaped all subsequent medical catastrophes. In addition, I am happy to report that no student ever sued me for dereliction as an instructor. More amazingly, I can’t even recall any (well, not many at least) complaints. A declining memory can be a blessing. In fact, the opposite occurred. I recall one public policy student from the LaFollette School who later held a congressional staff position in Washington D.C. She told Health and Human Services (HHS) officials, with whom I worked closely with, that I was the best professor she had at Wisconsin. My friends in HHS were incredulous. So was I.