Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  While I like to make fun of academics, Gary is an exception. By that I mean he is truly a wonderful human being. He is quiet, humble, unassuming, likes students, and loves to teach. Perhaps his background explains his uniqueness. He is a Native American who was born and raised in a tiny Oklahoma town. He struggled early in life, dropping out of school to work at real, manual labor type jobs. Then he got back on track, earned a doctorate at Stanford, and became an academic star. After a stellar career at Wisconsin, he returned to his home state, accepting the position of provost at Oklahoma State University.

  I would have been on the Learnfare program research team. I think my role would involve running for coffee and bringing in the donuts for morning meetings. In any case, one day I got a call from a friend who worked for the state. “Tom,” he said, “I just wanted to let you know you won’t be getting the Learnfare evaluation contract.” I mumbled something about winning some and losing some, but then it hit me…the proposal review meeting was not even scheduled for another week. “That is true,” he replied, “but they put someone on the review panel with specific instructions to not let you guys win.” We had been blackballed by the governor. Had the famous Wisconsin Idea sunk so low?

  Now, why would that be? I had never met the man. I suspect that he felt that all academics, particularly the social scientists, were guilty of being Marxists until proven otherwise. Yet, perhaps there was another reason, one based on what looked like evidence. As welfare reform heated up, so did the media calls. While it would become a crescendo in the coming years, already there were numerous calls. While I always tried to be evenhanded, I could not control how I was used by the media. I recall one call from a New York Times reporter that was emblematic of so many of these interactions. I could tell from his questions that he was antagonistic toward the reform in question. In reaction, I started off with several positive points about what the governor was trying to do. At the end, though, I had to throw in my concerns as well. Those concerns, of course, were all he used. He had merely waited me out until I said what he wanted to hear.

  Another call is a perfect caricature of some of the more outlandish media connections. “Hi Professor Corbett, I am calling about Thompson’s latest welfare reform. I can’t think of the name at this moment, but are you for it or against it?” I responded that I didn’t answer questions like that, but it was not hard to figure out the initiative they were calling about and went on with my usual measured and balanced response. Measured responses tended to piss off most, but certainly not all media types.

  Another caller asked about Bridefare, an initiative which I discuss more below. When I finished my (hopefully) balanced response, there was silence on the phone. “Hello,” I asked, “are you still there?” Finally, the reporter replied, “Sorry, I was taken aback. You are the first person I have interviewed that did not go ballistic on this topic.”

  I will admit, the press generally seemed suspicious of Thompson’s reforms. Thus, they tended to grab on to my caveats and concerns (many of which were quite real) and not any positive statements I might make. Since any doubt or cautious statements would put you on any politician’s enemy list, that is exactly where I landed in the governor’s mind, as did the institute. Of course, most affiliates at the institute probably had no idea what Learnfare was (or care), but that subtlety would be lost on the other end of State Street.

  One final media vignette before returning to the Learnfare evaluation. The brother of a colleague who was on the faculty of the Public Policy School worked as a reporter for a Milwaukee newspaper. He called from time to time to sound me out. This call was about a recent book purportedly authored by the governor on his reforms. When I mentioned I had not read this literary masterpiece yet, he sent me a copy, which I dutifully perused. “Well,” I said, “I give the governor great credit for negotiating the thicket of welfare reform politics. But, in truth, the reform ideas are not new. They are old ideas, many of which were tried in the past, that are simply being resurrected once again.” He ignored my compliments on the governor’s political skills and focused on my comments about the recycling of old wine in new bottles. In truth, there really wasn’t much, if anything, new in the welfare reform debates. Upon seeing the article, I am confident the governor threw a few more darts at my picture that hung on his office wall.

  Back to the Learnfare evaluation. As it turned out, we came in second in the review panel’s scoring of the Learnfare proposals. When we asked for the scores, it appeared that my informant was spot on. Four of the five reviewers gave us the highest score among the proposals while one gave us something like 35 points out of 100, dropping us into second place. I sincerely believe this was a mistake on the part of the governor. This IRP team would have done a high-quality evaluation that would have been recognized as such nationally. These were true academics. They had no prior agenda or axe to grind though everyone has opinions or priors, as the economists say. They would have gone wherever the evidence took them which, of course, is exactly what most politicians fear. There was some grumbling about challenging the process, but I thought that a very bad idea, probably futile and surely counterproductive though, in retrospect, how much worse could our relationship with the state get?

  As it happened, I had an opportunity to chat with one of the two leaders of the UW-M evaluation team one day. I sensed they were qualified to do a good job and had a lot of experience manipulating large education data sets. But I remember thinking after just a few minutes, “Uh-uh, these guys are real liberals. I don’t think the governor thought through what he might get when he torpedoed our research proposal.” Subsequent events seemed to bear out my initial suspicions. The state and UW-M team eventually got into a very public fight over the course of the evaluation with the feds being brought in to referee. The researchers wound up writing articles asserting political obstruction of their work and threats to their independence.

  Eventually, the contract was terminated amidst mutual recriminations. I am not sure we ever learned if the program had impacts though the early data suggested that the sanctions, by themselves, had little effect on school attendance. Again, my argument all along was that you needed stronger support services to go along with the sanctions if any benefits were to be anticipated, so perhaps this is what an unbiased observer might have expected. In fairness to the UW-M team, however, if the data had led the IRP researchers along a similar analytical and interpretive path, the result may have been the same. We would have been vilified by the administration and fired. However, we will never know.

  As anticipated, Learnfare was the first breech in the entitlement fortress. Other attacks were to follow one upon the other, too many to document without numbing the average reader into a comatose state. I will briefly mention two, however. First is Bridefare, notice how this also builds on the old workfare label from years back.

  Bridefare was the brainchild of Eloise Anderson. Eloise was unusual in some respects. She was a Black conservative and Republican who was very concerned about Black men not stepping up to take their proper role as fathers and husbands. For that concern, she should be commended. Her Bridefare proposal was not that radical when you looked at it closely. It rested on modest financial incentives to motivate young welfare mothers to marry the fathers of their children and vice versa. On the surface, that did not sound outrageous to me. As far as I can recall, there were no shotguns involved. Again, however, the liberal community went ballistic. You would be forcing mothers to marry these worthless fathers. There would be an increase in domestic violence and child abuse. The government has no right to interfere in the private decisions of people, and aren’t we forgetting that welfare is an entitlement. You can fill in the rest.

  When compared with the moderate character of the changes being proposed, I thought the apocalyptic scenarios being thrown out were a bit hyperbolic. But reason had long been abandoned in the welfare wars. Eloise eventually left to run welfare in California and a stint in a west coast think tank but did return to
Wisconsin and now serves as a department secretary in the Scott Walker administration. She was bruised by the reaction to her proposal and, over the years, thanked me several times for my early support.

  I do recall one final smile from the Bridefare kerfuffle. One day, I was contacted by the secretary of the Wisconsin welfare department, Gerald Whitburn. He managed to locate me in my social work office, a remarkable feat, since I never spent time there. That prompted my paranoia to kick in as I feared they were tracking me with GPS or something to keep on top of my comings and goings. You can never be too cautious. Of course, there was the day I walked in what everyone called One-West Wilson, a depression-era cement fortress where the top state welfare officials were located. As soon as I entered, all kinds of bells and whistles sounded. I was sure that the next thing I would hear over the loudspeaker system would be the warning “liberal alert; liberal alert; take cover, liberal alert.” Then, armed guards would sweep down upon me. But it was just a monthly fire drill, not that I am paranoid or anything.

  In any case, he had called to thank me for my kind comments to the press about Bridefare. I assured him that I call them as I see them. Now, he was a rather humorless man, so I tried a little levity to see if I could lighten him up. Using what you should now recognize as one of my tried and true lines once again, I said, “I worry about compliments in this welfare business. I feel I am getting closer to the truth when nobody, absolutely nobody, agrees with what I am saying.” I thought I heard a tiny chuckle on the other end of the line as our connection clicked off, but it may have been a groan.

  A second initiative worth noting was the “Work, Not Welfare” (WNW) pilot program. This was getting closer to the concept of Welfare Works or W-2 that would be the centerpiece of the Wisconsin reforms. W-2 would not just reform welfare, it would replace welfare with a work program, or so the advance billing claimed. WNW took the goal of bringing the work message up front in the customer’s experience and put it on steroids. Now the approach would be work first and then maybe a little welfare if all else fails. Two modest size counties were selected to dry run what would be the precursor to the real thing that was still in the planning stage, one of which was Fond du Lac County.

  Fond du Lac was about an hour northeast of Madison. The county director, Ed Schilling, was an MSW from the University of Wisconsin. He said that he had done his policy internship with me (the same practicum experience I was then running in the School of Social Work) many years earlier when I was employed with the state. I had no memory of that but now found him an engaging, thoughtful guy. At the time, I happened to have a wonderful second year MSW and joint Public Policy student (Mary Healy) who wanted to spend some time interning in Fond du Lac. Great! Being a curious sort, I would get to eavesdrop on this new wrinkle in welfare.

  As I mentioned, Ed was an interesting guy. Unlike many social workers, he believed that the welfare entitlement hurt, not helped, most recipients. The metaphor that Jason Turner, one of the key architects of W-2, always used was that of a hospital patient. He argued that we treated welfare clients as if they were sick and needed treatment. Most did not, he felt. They were stronger and more capable than liberals thought. What they needed was a strong dose of adult responsibility. If you approached a person as if they were weak and disabled, that is how they would see themselves. If you assumed they were competent and capable, they were more likely to respond that way.

  I learned several things from the Fond du Lac director. One day, he told me that doing reform was like rowing upstream. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He leaned back in his chair and then went on:

  It is like this, Tom. I have staff that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. You cannot walk in and say the world is now different and expect them to get it right away. Let me give you an example. We come up with a policy question for which there is no answer in the manual. This is not surprising since we are doing brand new things here. But my staff runs in and says, we must call Madison, we don’t know what to do in this instance. I scream, no, we don’t have to call Madison. We can now use our own judgment and professional expertise to resolve these issues. Oh, they say, I see. Then another issue comes up and they come running in, we must call Madison…at which point I start pulling out my hair.

  On another occasion he started talking about left and right brain workers. This intrigued me, and I asked him to go on:

  I had workers who were great at doing the books. They would put on their eye shades and keep focused on the numbers, making sure that everything added up and that no one was cheating. Now they must look at the clients, ask questions, figure out their problems and their strengths. Their main task now is helping them toward independence. This takes different skills, putting facts together to get a feel for what a person can do, see where family dynamics may be a problem, and use their imagination to fit a customer with a potential employment opportunity. Most of all, they now must work as teams and not as individuals. Where I had mostly left-brain people, those good at doing the books, now I need right-brain folks. These folks are better at seeing the big picture as well as working with others. And you know what, Tom? You can’t change a person from one to the other very easily, if at all.

  I had these kinds of conversations all the time when I visited agencies and programs over the years. Sure, a lot of them were repetitive or not very interesting. Then again, many of the academic presentations I have endured over the decades put me into a deep comatose state. On the other hand, in the real world I often would come across nuggets of provocative perspicacity that would get me thinking about things. Bottom line, the real world has always been a source of learning for me. I treasure some of the truly remarkable people I met out there, good people just trying to do the best damn job they possibly could. My education would have been woefully incomplete without them.

  On another occasion, Ed casually mentioned what was happening as applicants for assistance were being exposed to the Work, Not Welfare rules for the first time. He said it was amazing how many looked at the eligibility worker and said things like, “Hell, if I have to go through all this I might as well keep my day job.” Then they would get up and head back out the door. It was a portent of things to come, the old world of welfare as about to crack wide open. That story, though, can wait for the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 5

  WELFARE WARS: ENDING WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT

  The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  While Tommy Thompson was moving in the direction of “ending welfare as we know it,” another well-known politician had the same idea. When William Jefferson Clinton ran for president in 1992, one of his most popular campaign lines promised to “end welfare as we know it.” From the left and the right came similar rhetoric. One question was on the lips of many among both his friends and his detractors…what did this mean? An inconvenient question kept popping up…tell me once again exactly how you will do this! To wish something is one thing, to do it is another. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

  Sometime in late 1992, a memo from the new IRP director, Robert Hauser, came across my desk. It went on about IRP’s long-standing relationship with ASPE, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Development (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Federal support for IRP was funneled through ASPE and there was a lot of contact between the two entities. Hauser was asking if any IRP affiliate might want to spend time at ASPE as a way of reinforcing our connection with HHS. My immediate reaction was “go to Washington,” no way! I vividly recall crumpling up the memo (I guess we still used paper back then) and throwing it in the wastebasket.

  Something happened over the course of the day, however. My mind kept drifting back to Bob’s memo. Bill Clinton would be the new president. Welfare reform, along with healthcare reform, would be the big domestic policy
issues. Hey, I was getting good at mucking up things in Wisconsin. Why not mess things up on a grander scale? That might be even greater fun. At the end of the day, I recall rooting through the wastebasket to find the memo. I straightened it as best I could and brought it home to discuss with my spouse.

  “You want to go to D.C. for a year? Are you serious?” At first, she looked incredulous but when she saw I was being serious for once, a broad smile broke out. “Great, can I help you pack?” Don’t you just hate it when your spouse is so eager to get rid of you? In truth, it was not that easy a decision. My wife, Mary Rider, was the deputy director of the Wisconsin court system and could not easily pick up and follow. So, we would face a long commute challenge. Still, I wandered into Bob’s office later that week to ask if anyone else had responded to his memo. Nope, the opportunity was wide open. Oh, goody, I thought, guess I am the only moron willing to volunteer for the lion’s den.

  Several months later, that damn office phone rang again. It was Ann Segal, a high-level career civil servant from ASPE. Ann is a lovely person, on the short side but with the kind of directed, disciplined personality that inspires confidence. She had a lively mind and very good management skills. She was not a welfare person, coming from a child protection and child care background, but her innate good sense was treasured by all. You would do well to listen when she spoke. She would play an important role in the coming months. “Tom, it is all set up. How soon can you get here?”

  The timing, however, wasn’t great from my perspective. I had teaching commitments to finish up and my mother was very ill and would soon pass away. I probably could get there in May, early June at the latest, I told her. “Hurry,” she urged me, “we are moving ahead on welfare reform and want to get a bill out by late summer.” Damn, I thought, I might miss the boat. A couple of months or so later I recall walking into ASPE hoping that the boat had not already left the harbor. By noon I knew that not only had I not missed the boat, the boat was merely a shell in dry dock. This vessel would not sail for quite a while, if at all. I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I thought, I wonder what I have gotten myself into?