Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  Now, I had traveled throughout most of the country in my avocation as a wandering policy wonk. Yet, I had never gotten into the real Dixie. Arriving the evening before the first meeting, I wandered around the State Capitol building of Mississippi in Jackson. When I saw people working on the Capitol lawn, my initial thought was that they had put their maintenance crews in very striking uniforms. Then it hit me that they were wearing the classic horizontal pin stripe prison garb of a chain gang. Why waste taxpayer’s money when you have forced labor available.

  We did get a nice tour of the governor’s mansion. Southerners can be gracious, that is for sure. The meetings were held in the State Capitol building itself at the good graces of a former governor, William Winters, who was a friend of Dick’s. I casually chatted with the former chief executive for a while. He shared with me his near-death experiences as governor such as the time he tried to excise the stars and bars of the confederacy from the state flag. I was going to tell him mine at the hands of angry social workers but refrained, not wanting to one-up him. I wondered which group might be more rabid…racist rednecks being asked to hide their heritage, or social workers being asked to do paperwork. My money is on the social workers.

  At one point he pointed out a marble statue and asked if I knew who it represented. I had noticed it earlier and said something about this man being one of the more rabid racists ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, Senator Theodore G. Bilbo. His racist rhetoric became more extreme over time, reaching such a pitch in the 1946 election that a Senate investigation was initiated to examine his conduct. He then told me a story:

  When I was governor it bothered me that we honored this man by having his replica situated right in the middle of the State Capitol, directly under the rotunda. So, one Friday afternoon, I instructed the maintenance people to move him to a less conspicuous location. I came in Monday morning and, by God, he was back under the rotunda again. I tried again, and the same thing happened. People give things up very hard down here.

  When Tom Gais sent me a draft of the agenda for the first meeting, I knew they had missed the essence of the WELPAN experience. Dick and he had scheduled too many agenda items into the sessions. This would almost guarantee that the experts (Dick, Gais, other SUNY staff, even yours truly) would talk to the state members. There would not be enough time for them to dialogue among themselves or interact meaningful with the resource people present. Thus, they would fail to develop a sense of ownership over the process or the bonds essential to a real network.

  When I talked with Tom at length he understood my concerns, but the agenda was out already. We fortunately were able to basically ignore it as the meeting unfolded and, guess what? These deep-south states also hungered for more. Absent a formal name at the start, we very informally referred to this group as BUBBAPAN.

  Now we had three sample points which all showed a similar result. State officials loved this format. It proved so popular that the head of APHSA asked for a meeting during one of my frequent trips to D.C. By way of a preface, when Theo and I were first doing WELPAN, a top staff member from APHSA wanted to chat with us. We had a telephone conference. It was clear that the organization, or at least this official, was very upset about what we were planning to do. Theo tried to be accommodating and argue that we were not invading their turf, that we respected what they did. I was bemused. How would this little network of seven states (at the time) threaten this large and well-established trade organization? Perhaps I underestimated Washington’s capacity for self-interest and paranoia? In the end, Theo and I did not diminish the APHSA representative’s hostility one whit, and we simply agreed to disagree.

  When I now met with the head man, he was very amiable. “We struggle a bit getting states to our meetings, economic times are tough and travel budgets are being cut back. They seem to love WELPAN. What is the secret?” Of course, one secret is that we paid for the members’ travel expenses, which helped immensely. They did love the meetings, though, that was undeniable.

  There were other reasons for the network’s popularity as well. By this time, I had heard WELPAN members informally discussing which national meetings they would attend or not. Often, they decided to skip certain meetings or only reluctantly attend because they thought it more a requirement than a learning opportunity. This was particularly true of federal meetings where nonattendance might be a form of mutiny. Occasionally, I would ask about their reluctance. Responses varied, of course, but ran along somewhat similar lines. They sometimes felt as if they were being treated as half-literate children who were being scolded or being told to eat their spinach because it was good for them. They felt that those lecturing them often had little appreciation of the complexities they faced daily.

  I explained to the APHSA head what I thought were WELPAN’s core elements. The network belonged to the members. We might suggest topics and outside resources, but they had the ultimate say on everything. And the members did exercise control, even to the point of barring federal officials stationed in Chicago from attending at least parts of their meetings. In a sense, they were considered the experts, not the academics, or the think-tank types, or the high public officials we brought in. We gave them plenty of time to dialogue among themselves, to bond, and to really vet either the research put on their plate or the issues they were confronting as welfare reform rolled out. It was a cook’s tour and the APHSE head listened respectfully. Whether he acted on it, I have no idea.

  At one point, Barry Van Lare, Tom Gais (on behalf of Dick Nathan), and I tried to jointly approach foundations for more support to spread the WELPAN concept across the country. After all, the dramatic character of welfare reform would take years to work itself out. In the meantime, the states were experimenting with all kinds of new ideas and concepts. Welfare was being transformed from a limited form of income support into what might be considered an exciting opportunity to create a more comprehensive system of social assistance. States would need to help one another if the potential was to come to pass. At one point I spoke to an affinity group of foundations who banded together around their common interest in helping poor families. It all seemed so obvious to us, but perhaps not so obvious to them.

  The philanthropic community responded to our combined entreaties with depressing indifference and misunderstanding. There was a lot of “now tell us again how your meetings differ from other meetings.” The most common response was “we would love to give you money for a meeting on topic X. That falls into our priorities, but what if your members are not interested in topic X?” Or we got the “I am sure the network is bang-on, but we don’t support infrastructure, only substance…this is not exactly bricks and mortar, but it sounds like infrastructure to us.” And there was always the variant of “We need to see results. We are a results-oriented foundation. Can you promise that new laws attributable to our investment will be forthcoming?”

  To be honest, I could not. What members told us time and again is that they left sessions energized and full of ideas. They would communicate these back home, sometimes following up with phone calls to their fellow members or contact through a LISTSERVE we set up. What came out of the other end of this broiling process might be results not easily traced directly back to the meetings, but change did happen; and the network did play some part in many of these changes. The neat kind of causality we were being asked to provide was not a measurable certainty. You were influencing the decision-making process and that had to remain the expected reward.

  I remember being at some meeting (they tend to collapse into one continuous session in my memory) where Helen Neuborne was present. Helen was from the Ford Foundation. Like most foundation-types, I found her knowledgeable and accomplished. At one point in this gathering, I slipped out of my witty, nice guy persona (really, I could be like that), and went on a bit of a rant about the myopia and narrowness of philanthropic world. I am not sure what got me started, but I did rather forget that Helen was there. I can yet recall the sheepish grin on her face when I noti
ced her presence. I started to stammer a quick apology, but she quickly cut me off. “You are absolutely right, Tom, but that is the way it is I am afraid.”

  No one ever came forward to fund BUBBAPAN and it dissolved after several meetings. WESTPAN went on for two or three years and was taking off just as WELPAN had. What I found remarkable in our Western franchise is that a tiny, very conservative state like Idaho still had things in common with a huge, more liberal state like California. I had wondered about that at the start. The west coast network also gave me a few memories, a chance to visit Las Vegas (which I doubt I would have visited if not for work), and a memorable half trip to Seattle.

  A WESTPAN meeting was scheduled to start in Seattle on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. I decided to fly out that morning since the time zone changes would give me ample opportunity to get there on time. One of my favorite former students, Rachel (Weber) Frisk, who by then worked at the GAO, was to attend as well. She was working on a big welfare study at the time and was scheduled to share some of her findings. Barry Van Lare would also be flying out from Washington.

  I had been through about five awful trips in a row (with delayed and cancelled flights), so was pleased that I made it to Minneapolis. It looked like clear sailing from there. Then I noticed a pool of people watching a TV monitor with great interest. It quickly went downhill from there. The full extent of the 9/11 disaster all unfolded in slow motion. For a while I still thought I could get to Seattle, though late for sure. When the enormity of the disaster became clear, I made a dash for the rental car place. Fortunately, I had used it before and knew where it was located since hordes of others would soon follow me. Barry Van Lare had flown out the night before and was stuck in Seattle for a week. Like me, Rachel was scheduled to fly out the morning of the eleventh. Later, she told me about being swept out of National Airport into streets of panicky people as smoke drifted over from the nearby Pentagon, which had just been hit. She said it was all too surreal. It was!

  WELPAN did last for well over a decade. Theo had moved on to other concerns after a couple of years. Eventually, Jennifer Noyes joined me as co-coordinator of the network. That certainly gave it ideological balance, though both of us were very careful not to let our biases intrude too much. The Network eventually ended sometime after Unmi moved on to become head of another Chicago Foundation that focused on the arts or some such thing. Jennifer Phillips, who had moved to Joyce from the Mott Foundation, picked it up for a while until she too left for other pursuits.

  During its life course, WELPAN was, as I often say, a front row seat to the reality and possibility of welfare reform. The group first met, as I mentioned, literally days after the enactment of TANF. As of the first session, we barely had enough money for one more. People came, but with the caveat that they were unusually busy. National welfare reform was upon them. Maybe they could spare a single day to see what this was all about. Ann Sessoms did not like Wisconsin, perhaps a sentiment shared by others. J. Jean Rogers, who was the only state attendee I knew when the meeting started, did not like me, to put it mildly. I thought our prospects less than bright as we kicked off our first meeting.

  At the end of the day, the topic of a next meeting came up, which would be the last unless Unmi coughed-up more dough. Everyone whipped out their calendars. They struggled to find a common date that would work…they were busy folk after all. I still recall the representative from Indiana saying, “This has been so great. I would be willing to come back on a Saturday if that works for the others.” I leaned back in my chair and mused, What the frack just happened here?

  Ann, who didn’t want to come in the first place stayed a member to the end. Some several years after its demise, she noted that she still found some WELPAN products useful to her job (she is now retired). J. Jean Rogers left her position as head of W-2 early in the WELPAN timeline (to be replaced by Jennifer Noyes as the Wisconsin representative). J. Jean took a position with Vocational Rehabilitation in the north part of Wisconsin. She surprised me by asking if she could still attend the WELPAN sessions, even though her new job took away the rationale for doing so. I can attest to the fact that her loyalty to the network had little to do with any growing affection for me, though her negative animus had abated. Really, who could stay mad at such a charming Irishman?

  Unmi graciously gave us the resources to support a robust WELPAN concept. Now, we could expand the membership. States could send two, even three people, to the sessions. We could now bring resource people to meetings to share their knowledge and help to stimulate thoughtful dialogues. We strived to keep it small enough so that everyone could sit around the same table. We developed the concept through trial and error. In the beginning, though, we toyed with going in a different direction.

  I thought it might be a good idea to more formally wed WELPAN to academia, to seek a marriage of sorts between knowledge producers and consumers. It turns out that there was a Big Ten consortium that facilitated (I was told) communications across researchers at the member universities. I spoke to the University of Wisconsin people involved in this and they appeared interested. When I broached the idea to the WELPAN members, I hit a brick wall. One member put it this way: “Too many academics sit on the outside criticizing us for what we are, or are not, doing. They do so without trying to know the realities we face.” They did not need that kind of second-guessing from a group they saw as generally naïve and at the same time arrogant. They were interested in what some academics had to say, but they would do the choosing of which ones they wanted to hear.

  That kind of negative perception toward academics cropped up from time to time. Once we did survey where they would prefer to get their information and had a subsequent discussion on the results. Academic research was way down the list. It was viewed as inaccessible, irrelevant, and dated. Again, people in the academy were looked upon as removed from reality. They tended not to keep abreast of rapidly changing conditions and realities. They did not fully appreciate the complexity of the world in which public officials operated.

  Statistical significance is fine, and most WELPAN members got it, but there was such a thing as substantive significance as well. If you have a big enough sample size, you can find associations among a lot of things. The magnitude of the difference may not be great enough, however, to offset all the other potential costs associated with change. Such a calculation needs a critical and experienced eye to competently assess. Most academics do not have the experience to make those judgments. That, however, does not inhibit them from criticizing public officials for ignoring the evidence. Of course, good evidence is ignored all the time…no one is completely in the right here.

  The mechanics of WELPAN were simple enough. Each meeting typically started with what we called the state round-up. Each state would bring the others up to date on what was happening, what issues had cropped up, new wrinkles they were confronting, pretty much anything that struck their fancy. That session was always off limits to outsiders other than the IRP facilitators and any Joyce folk that wanted to stop in. Anyone around the table was able to chime in with comments or questions. If we needed to stay on a specific topic longer than expected, we would do so within reason since the agenda was viewed as malleable. At times, these sessions turned into quasi-therapy sessions as the stresses of those days got to people who cared very much about what they were doing. After a time, members knew they were among friends who were going through the same things, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, conservative or liberal. Over time, a bond formed among the members with new additions to the group quickly being integrated into the network’s culture. On more than one occasion, tears flowed in the room, often after another of my attempts to be witty.

  In the afternoon, we usually brought in resource people. These could be academics, folks from think-tanks or evaluation firms, top federal officials, or program people who were running interesting innovations. Sometimes we mixed and matched, sometimes we looked at several innovations in a single meeting. N
o matter what, the choice of topics and resource people were up to the members. We might make suggestions, but they had the final word. The morning of the second day often was spent vetting the issues raised on the first day. This gave everyone plenty of time to absorb what they had learned and to think through how it might be of use for them. As the meeting came to an end, we discussed potential topics for future meetings.

  We had special meetings. Some were held in various state capitals, where that state would demonstrate ideas and concepts they were trying out. These show-and-tell sessions often involved field trips to actual pilot and program sites. We had Washington meetings. We had meetings that tied into larger conferences. We had meetings where we brought in officials from other systems like child support and workforce development. There was a rhythm to what we did but it was not cast in stone. If there was an opportunity to learn by doing something different, or the possibility of having an impact by reaching out in creative ways, we did it. Sometimes we stretched things a bit far, and Unmi would fire me again; but I was getting used to that. In the end, the woman was very forgiving.

  By far it was the substance that I found to be most interesting. And after all, it was all about me. The first thematic issue the group focused on was the identification of what contemporary welfare reform was all about. Here was a chance to think through the purposes or ends of what they were trying to achieve. After all, you cannot know what you want to do unless you can describe where you want to be. The subsequent dialogue was long and serious.

  The members came from different places both politically and ideologically. One moment was especially memorable. “No one has mentioned poverty.” I pointed out, “After all, I am from the Institute for Research on Poverty. You guys are killing me here.” After Unmi chimed in that my demise “sounded like a good plan to her,” Joel Rabb from Ohio spoke up. Joel, like Ann, remained with the group for the duration. We became good friends over time. He could be loquacious but spoke in gentle terms. He obviously cared about his work and the people he served. It wasn’t until after his retirement that I realized the depth of his goodness. He is involved in humanitarian projects that take him to Texas and Southeast Asia, two under developed areas that needed a lot of help. Apparently, this was a family trait; his brother, a minister, was killed in Haiti while helping the suffering of that country after a horrific natural disaster. Joel’s primary flaws were remaining a diehard Buckeye fan and having a disposition for taking potshots at Wisconsin athletic teams.