Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  As I made my transition to the academy with Irv Piliavin’s welfare error project, I could see that Irv was having trouble selling his proposal to the state folk that counted. He could talk research but not policy. The state officials, on the other hand, didn’t believe an egghead could contribute anything of value to their work and only saw his project as a potential pain in the rear. I was clueless about research at the time, probably still am. I could, however, effortlessly translate between Irv and the division brass. At the meeting to give the final okay to state support of the project, there remained significant opposition. At one point, I thought the tone was going negative and that my stay at the university would be about four weeks and not, as it turned out, four decades. I might be wrong, but there probably was more than a 50 percent chance that they would have turned Irv down had I not been at the table.

  There are so many vignettes over the years that drove home this disconnect between knowledge producers and consumers. I recall one national conference that had been put together early in the welfare reform period by the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA), which had been APWA or the American Public Welfare Association. Apparently, welfare had become such a discredited concept that they no longer wanted to tarnish their brand by including that tainted word in their title.

  They had convened what they called the welfare CEOs (heads of welfare agencies) from numerous states to meet and dialogue with representatives from the top evaluation firms and think tanks (these included MDRC, ABT, Mathematica Inc., Urban Institute, IRP). For the first couple of days the evaluation firms chatted about their ongoing projects and hinted strongly about the superb services they might provide to the attending states. The final session was to focus on the research questions of interest to the CEOs at the gathering. I was stunned when I realized that only three researchers remained for this last session…Alan Werner, a gentleman from Mathematica whose name I forget, and yours truly and I barely count as a researcher. Didn’t the others think the real world had anything remotely interesting to say? Could not they see that this was a fantastic opportunity to see future research possibilities? What is going on here?

  Later, I recall one of Howard Rolston’s first national evaluation conferences. Yes, this is the same conference series where I gave the plenary address instead of Wade Horn, but that would occur down the road a bit. This was a maiden voyage for the concept. Howard therefore put together an advisory committee that included Barbara Blum and myself, among others. He wanted independent feedback on how it went and how it might be improved. The maiden voyage was structured as a typical conference format where the “experts” from the big evaluation firms along with a few academics presented their wisdom to the assembled masses. It was lecture style followed with a few minutes for Q&A at the end of each session.

  It went like this. The first session ended in deafening silence…no questions. I suspected that no state person wanted to risk asking a stupid technical question in front of all their peers. On the other hand, I had a long career of asking stupid questions and had no self-respect left, so I started the ball rolling. The same happened in the next two sessions. Then, after the fourth panel, the whole audience turned to me when it was time for Q&A. They were probably drooling with anticipation at my next asinine query.

  The substance was great, but the format needed work. Barbara and I later explained to Howard that he needed to find a way to generate more of a two-way communication dynamic at the conference. The passive, lecture-type format, we thought, diminished real learning and prevented state participants from seeing how the new knowledge might translate to their situation. It would not be easy, but it was worth a try. Howard did modify the format in future years. And I put that experience in my cognitive filing place.

  I doubt that Unmi Song and I talked about such matters in that first call. In fact, I have no recollection of the substance of the conversation or how she came across my name. My guess, someone who did not like her suggested she call me. In any case, we must have made promises that we would stay in touch when I got back to Madison. We did, in fact, continue to chat. We also made plans to overlap on a trip to the Twin Cities after I was settled back in Madison. I was there on some child support evaluation project in which IRP was involved, one of my numerous projects the details of which are now all but lost to my memory. It may not seem like it, but you are only getting the highlights on this tour.

  She was travelling there to seek out new project possibilities for the Joyce Foundation. I was always taken with her proactive style. She did not wait for ideas to be brought to her. She sought them out by actively engaging the real world. It was apparent to me, though, that she had not enjoyed a great deal of prior experience with bureaucrats or what they did, so I was able to smooth the conversations at some points. As I have often said, I am very nice to people who give out money. In any case, this serendipitous common trip gave us an opportunity to share ideas in a relaxed manner over dinner and as we walked around looking at the Christmas lights in downtown St. Paul.

  I have often kicked myself for never asking her how she came across my name in the first place. I doubt she came across it in USA Today. Someone probably said, “Hey, get in touch with Corbett if you want to help the downtrodden. The way his career is going, he is about a year away from Food Stamps himself.” Still, as with so many cold calls I have received, it had an outsized impact on future events. Opportunities and projects just kept falling out of the sky into my lap. I am a fortunate man, indeed.

  Either at the end of 1995 or early in 1996, I made a formal proposal to the Joyce Foundation for a regional learning network. This was not the first of my silly ideas they supported but certainly the most significant. The network came to be known as WELPAN or the Welfare Peer Assistance Network. The primary notion behind the concept was that the states were now the experts. They were running ahead of the national government in innovation and experimentation. What we needed now was a way to stimulate their exciting work and provide a venue though which they could help one another.

  Yes, research and expertise were necessary, but the actual transfer of knowledge had to be more of a give-and-take, more intimate and two-way as opposed to unidirectional. The audience needed to participate in the exchange to fully vet what the information might mean to them and not remain passive absorbers of divine truth. Not surprisingly, the seven states that would comprise the network coincided with the states on which the foundation focused—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

  As best I can recall, the inspiration for WELPAN did not come out of any talk I had given. It emerged from a workshop I convened during my ASPE days. I was struck by how little the people in Washington were aware of the exciting things going on in the states. Perhaps if an innovation was being evaluated by MDRC or one of the other big firms, they would see a report but that was too far removed from seeing a new idea up close and personal.

  So, I came up with the notion of “Bringing the Real World to Washington.” I dug up some unused money in the ASPE budget and invited three or four exemplar (lighthouse) sites to talk about what they were doing and why it was exciting. For the first session I brought in the gang from Kenosha, officials from Riverside California (a site that was making national waves at the time), and representatives from a Pennsylvania-based teen-pregnancy focused program that Becca Maynard favored. There probably was a fourth site but that one escapes my failing memory.

  The serendipity, or foresight, associated with the event occurred just before it was to take place. I looked at the room. There was a table up front with chairs set out in typical audience style. I suddenly grabbed a passerby to help me rearrange everything. We strung two or three tables together in the middle and placed all the “audience” chairs around the periphery.

  With this physical format the participants would talk among themselves and not to the audience. All these years later, I am not sure why I thought this important at that moment.

  As soon as
the session started, however, I recognized a different tone to the event. The participants slipped into a dialogue, not speeches. They bounced off one another as they saw common challenges and exchanged solutions. It was as if the feds were not in the room. They truly began to teach one another and learn from one another. Toward the end, of course, there was a Q&A so that the flow could go from the central table to the periphery; but a different and exciting dynamic had been established. There was less defensiveness and more honesty since they quickly understood that they all were in the same boat and faced similar mountains to climb. There was less competition to look better than the other program. When it was over they were hugging one another and exchanging contact information. I surely stuck that experience in my cognitive file for future use.

  Later, after returning to Madison, I had occasion to organize an event in D.C. The topic was the development and use of social indicators. Briefly, social indicators are measures that tap the well-being of a community, whether neighborhood or county or state or nation. The tricky part involves interpreting what the measures mean and thinking through how to use the information for policy or management purposes. I was heavily involved in the topic at the time, as discussed in the next chapter, and thus the rationale for this event. Again, the participants were largely drawn from localities and states that were doing (using) social indicators as inputs to the policy process. The larger audience encompassed federal officials, think-tank representatives, and academic types interested in either the development of social indicators or their use.

  Through the good graces of Deborah Phillips, we held the session at the institutional home of the National Academy of Sciences. Deborah was doing some work there at the time. As it turns out, she is everything I am not—smart, attractive, and nice. In any case, I was glad she was willing to help. I must have thought that this august venue would somehow lend an air of importance to the event. Or perhaps I hoped that some of the wisdom that had accumulated in this venerable site over the years would rub off on me somehow. That surely did not happen, but I did luck out again. As with the ASPE event, I tried setting it up so that the locals would chat mostly among themselves while the others primarily listened, at least at first.

  I saw some of the same dynamics I noticed at the ASPE event. Lightning had struck twice, my suspicion that the approach led to a more dynamic dialogue was reinforced. More importantly, Unmi Song was there. She had grown up in the D.C. area but did her academic work at the University of Chicago where she focused on business and economics. After a stint doing mergers and acquisitions in the private sector, she drifted toward the philanthropic community. Unmi was of Korean descent. She was quite attractive with luxurious black hair (I focus on hair because I have so little left) and an incisive mind. Like with Deborah, we were opposites. Unmi was focused, goal oriented, and disciplined…I, not so much.

  She ran the foundation’s employment section and found a way to support some of my hare-brained welfare ideas under that umbrella. I really enjoyed her a lot, but I am totally sure I drove her beyond the point of distraction with my careless ways and incessant jokes…there was no off switch. She did not suffer fools lightly, so why she put up with me for so long is beyond explanation. In her defense, she did fire me on numerous occasions. I can still see her in my mind now saying, “Corbett, you’re fired,” just like Donald Trump used to do on TV before he rose to a position from which we all would like to see him fired. Then I would respond with a “thank god” and “oh, by the way, I will call you about the next meeting in a week or so.” At that, she would roll her eyes.

  The first grant she had sent my way supported Mike Wiseman and I as we wrote a few papers to try to bring some reason and balance to the welfare debates which were descending further into vitriolic name calling, if that were even possible. The proposal was well written if I say so myself. It must have been since Unmi called to say that it was such a pleasure to read a well-reasoned and written proposal, so unlike much of which she had to endure. The underlying concept, however, sucked. Another report or paper by some academics was like dumping a thimble of water into the Atlantic. It doesn’t make much of a wave. Dissatisfied with that project, I dragged out those vague concepts that had been floating around my head since the ASPE and NAS sessions I described above. This regional network idea was born.

  I conned Theodora Ooms into joining me in this venture. Theo was a matriarch on the Washington scene. She had spent much of her professional life trying to bring rigorous research and rationality to the Washington policy process as it affected families, children, and marriage. She will always be remembered as the godmother of the Family Impact Seminars which I discuss further below. In addition, she helped Bobbi Wolfe and I organize some IRP events for Congressional staffers in D.C. on issues we thought critical to debates about the social safety net in the 1990s. One of these was on the Block Grant approach to funding programs, a strategy regaining considerable traction at that time.

  Unmi was so moved by this WELPAN concept she gave us enough money to finance maybe two meetings if we kept them small, if we hitchhiked to the Chicago offices of the Joyce Foundation (who gave us free meeting space), and if we brought our own bag lunches. Clearly, this was a trial run. What I recall best about the start-up was trying to convince Wisconsin and Minnesota to participate. I sucked up what little courage I possess and had a face-to-face with J. Jean Rogers, who still seemed to dislike me rather intensely. Dislike a sweet, harmless guy like me, go figure! In truth, it was not so much a dislike as a visible rage.

  Her tone was so frosty I began wishing I had bought one of those bulletproof vests our soldiers use in the Middle East. However, I turned on my best Irish charm which, it sadly turns out, is surprisingly useless. When it became clear that I was not leaving until she agreed to join us, Jean reluctantly relented. Good thing for her since I was just on the verge of using my secret weapon—telling her my life story.

  Then I called Minnesota. I got to someone named Ann Sessoms who was destined to become one of my favorite members, and who stayed with the network until its demise. In fact, I still hear from her on occasion, though usually just so she can remind me what a sad sack I am. On that first call, she appeared as reluctant as J. Jean. Finally, after a few protests about how busy she was, she came out with her real reservation. “Listen, I am not going to another meeting and listen to the Wisconsin people tell us how great they are. And I certainly don’t want W-2 crammed down my throat.” I assured her that would not happen, but I had absolutely no idea how to prevent it. Many of the Wisconsin people did think they rather walked on water. That, of course, is silly since I walk on water all the time and have never run across one of them out there.

  It turned out that Ann was quite nice, funny and extremely knowledgeable about the programs and policies. She also could be no nonsense and direct and quickly became an ally of Unmi in the hopeless task of keeping me in my place, or at least in giving it a try. Ann would give me the “look” when I got out of line with my so-called wit. Unmi would follow up by whacking me upside the head or, when I was having a very good day, by firing me.

  In August of 1996, one person from each participating state except for Ohio (which sent two) gathered in the Joyce Foundation conference room. Given my prescience, admittedly a wondrous gift, national welfare reform had just passed. AFDC would be replaced by TANF, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. In short, a new era of social assistance was breaking forth. The question on that day of the first meeting was whether WELPAN would be around for only the conception of the new era or would it be around for the entire birthing process?

  Eventually two other offshoots of WELPAN would take root. There was a west coast version called WESTPAN. With my assistance, it was launched by Barry Van Lare, a long-time Washington fixture who served as a kind of ubiquitous consultant and guru to states on welfare and related human services programs. I remember Barry and I were on the phone with a representative from the Packard Foundation who was cons
idering supporting the west coast venture. Despite my assurances that state officials really, really prized these meetings, she could not quite see how they differed from any other workshops and conferences that states attended. She would almost be convinced and then back away. After several ebbs and flows, the sick feeling of being in a faculty meeting (or maybe one of the old Washington groundhog-day meetings) overwhelmed me and I sort of snapped. “Oh, screw it,” those were my exact words I believe, “…I can scrounge up money for the first meeting. Let’s just do one and see if it makes sense to proceed further.” Representatives from Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington attended. They loved it as much as the Midwest states and Packard kicked in, at least for several years.

  Somewhat later, I was contacted by Dick Nathan who headed the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Albany. Dick had taught at Princeton for years and had earlier served in the Nixon administration. He seemed an intellectual by breeding but a man who also wanted to leave a distinct imprint on public policy. He was assisted by Tom Gais, a quiet and thoughtful man. Tom and I only shared a first name, our temperaments were quite distinct. For one thing, Gais always thought before he spoke. I, on the other hand, typically spoke first and thought afterward, if at all.

  They wanted to set in motion a series of WELPAN-type meetings among four southern states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and perhaps Missouri). Dick had some contacts down there and saw a dire need to help them out. Governments in the deep-south, he opined, were not as well developed as in other sections of the country. They needed all the help they could get. I could not agree more and signed on to help.