Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  A tiny fraction at the top of the distribution, 0.1 percent control 23.5 percent of all the wealth in the U.S., while the top 1 percent commands at least 35 percent. On the other hand, half of all Americans have negative net assets. Yet, too many of those at the top of the income distribution see fit to spend their fortunes turning the policy levers further in their favor. I sit back and stare with wonder. Is there no end to such avarice and greed?

  When I look to the future I see many problems ahead. Then again, we have always seen problems ahead. Still, let me end this chapter with some thoughts I shared in 2013 with an audience of college level faculty who teach courses on poverty and public policy across the country (the complete talk can be found in the 2013-14 Winter edition of Focus):

  When I look to the future what I find troubling is that our easy strategies for dealing with declining economic opportunities (stagnating incomes for most families along with growing inequality) appear exhausted. We have already delayed marriage, had fewer children, thrown our spouses and partners into the labor market, saved less and borrowed more (using household equity as personal ATMs), and added more advanced credentials after our names. And our children often delay establishing their own households (good luck in kicking them out of the nest). And still, economic outcomes grow more equal.

  And yet, so little outrage. When new policies are posed, not enough ask, “What does it do for the poor or those falling further behind in an increasingly bitter Darwinian struggle for success?” So, let us ask again, have we lost the War on Poverty? On a superficial level, yes! But let us think of the question in a different way. Think of the trends over the past several decades that would be expected to exacerbate poverty and increase the economic struggles for so many.

  Demographic changes—particularly the rise on single-parent households raising children.

  Globalization—where firms seek to lower labor costs by outsourcing higher-paying jobs overseas.

  Technology-driven changes, automation, and computerization—where tasks formerly done by humans are now done by digital technology and robotics (can robot-driven trucks be far off?).

  Immigration—rising in the mid-1960s, we saw the proportion of foreign born jump from 5 percent to 23 percent, many (though surely not all) of whom are low-skilled individuals.

  Deunionization—unionized workers in the private sector fell from about one-third of the workforce in the 1950s to about 7 percent in recent years.

  A fractal economy—even within specific sectors of the economy, compensation has grown wildly unequal even in the face of modest differences in talent and contribution. A typical CEO’s remuneration went from 27 times the average worker’s pay in 1973 to 262 times the average in 2008.

  Macro-policy changes—aggregate federal taxes and benefits reduced inequality by 23 percent in 1979 but by only 17 percent in 2007.

  When you consider these trends and others that might be cited, maybe we did better than many of us had thought in at least moderating the adverse effects of an increasingly hostile world for the less-well off. Still, so much remains to be done.

  I remember asking a colleague many years ago why he thought the United States had such an impoverished safety net for the disadvantaged. He gave only a one-word answer: heterogeneity. Over the years I came to appreciate his terse response. We are too tribal and have no common identity. It is too easy to say, and to believe, that the less successful are “them” and not “us.” They did it to themselves. We are not all in this together. It is instructive to note that Americans are much more likely (by some 30 percentage points) than out European counterparts to respond positively to questions that assign success to personal factors as opposed to luck or social environments or family fortunes.

  Let me finish by returning one more time to the Wisconsin Idea. Key to the idea is that one generation helps the next…passes on the torch so to speak. Each of us has a responsibility to pass on to the next generation an understanding of and a passion for an issue, poverty, and a population, the poor, that too often go unnoticed these days. If we do not, who will?

  In sum, the poverty warriors of my generation probably did do a better job than we ever imagined. At the same time, the problems before us loom larger than ever. As resources concentrate at the top, the remainder of society could well descend into some version of a Dickensian horror, a Darwinian struggle of epic proportions. Democracy itself may be in danger as a wealthy oligarchy struggles to maintain privilege and power. I hope I am wrong and am comforted by the belief that most doomsday prophecies seldom come to pass. But you never know, you just never know.

  What I do know, or at least strongly suspect, is that poverty research in the future must extend beyond the narrow confines of technical questions. The usual methods and conventional investigatory strategies will not plumb the deeper psychological and sociological terrains where belief systems are formed and sustained. Think about the following for a moment. The country becomes absorbed in the death of one child and the capture of the responsible miscreant. We were glued to our televisions during the Boston Marathon bombing where three people lost their lives. The whole city was locked down until the perpetrators were apprehended. There was widespread outrage.

  We have tens of thousands of amenable deaths each year due to an expensive, inefficient health care system, totally bizarre gun laws, and unacceptable levels of inequality and child poverty. Yes, some protest, particularly the mass shootings in our schools, but little gets done. The future of poverty research needs a broader net, more imagination, and a healthy dose of old fashion moral passion. We need a new generation of policy wonks that care and carry within themselves a fire born of anger. There is, however, some good news. The good news for future policy wonks is that my generation left so much work for you to do. Simply consider the vast numbers of working class folk out who have seen their incomes stagnate for so long while watching their opportunities evaporate in the face of automation, globalization, and the loss of supports such as deteriorating educational opportunities and declining union strength. They face a future of opioid addiction and the allure of snake oil salesmen like Donald Trump.

  You can thank me later.

  CHAPTER 11

  A WAYWARD ACADEMIC OR THE CULTURAL DISCONNECT

  Too much sanity may be madness—and the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

  —Miguel de Cervantes

  This chapter overviews the sorry story of my misfortune as a wayward academic. Not everything in my career was wine and roses. In exploring this tragedy, I tap into some dark and myopic corners of the academy’s culture as well as my own many personal failings. I start this story by pointing out that one topic defined my final years as a policy wonk and wayward academic. It was the concept of professional and institutional culture writ broadly. I focused on institutional culture as an explanation for why separate programs are difficult to integrate into seamless service systems in several other works, chief among them The Boat Captain’s Conundrum. I also focused on the concept of professional culture and the disconnect between the academy and the policy world in Evidence-Based Policymaking, authored by Karen Bogenschneider and myself. Most of all, I do what I do best in this chapter. I whine a lot. I have two undeniable talents, napping and whining. I am waiting for them to be made official Olympic sports.

  Culture, in brief, is the soup of norms, patterns, expectations, language, and incentive systems surrounding and embracing us in ways that fundamentally shape our behaviors and beliefs. In my personal memoir, Confession of a Clueless Rebel, I muse how I broke away from my youthful, limiting culture…Catholic, working class, tribal, and insular to become a radically different adult. The notion of culture has so fascinated me in recent years that it became a central theme in my first two fictional works, Tenuous Tendrils and Palpable Passions, both published in 2017. In each novel, I explore how one’s cultural environment shapes choices, possibilities, and attitudes.

  I start with one of my favorite vi
gnettes involving my good spouse. In earlier times, she labored in a high administrative position with the Wisconsin court system. Many years ago, the Wisconsin legislature, in its wisdom, decided to kick the state Supreme Court out of the Capitol building. They wanted the space. The justices said, “No way, unless you build us a palais de justice overlooking one of Madison’s lakes.” My wife would have had to manage such an undertaking and came home all upset. How can we build a Palace of Justice with seven corner offices, each of equal size and shape, and all on the same floor overlooking the lake? She knew that no sitting justice would accept even the slightest hint that one of their colleagues had been treated preferentially. I had a good laugh, in which she did not join. Academics (at top research universities) and justices share a common cultural attribute…their egos are continually stroked and thus risk inflation. This gives them a sense of entitlement which makes walking through doorways without bruising the sides of their heads an iffy proposition. Culture is a powerful force. By the way, in the end the justices stayed put, at least while she held that position.

  This notion of culture represents an omnipresent reality in our lives. It shapes our understandings of our wider world, our perceptions and normative beliefs, our communication preferences, our ambitions and purposes, and just about everything else that counts. Many things go into shaping our dominant personal perspectives and world views. What is important to realize is that we often fail to fully apprehend the world in which we are immersed. Below, I do some complaining which admittedly is obsequious but not irrelevant. I look at how one small part of the academic community and I interacted with dismal results. In retrospect, I find that sad story very illuminating, as I do with all the counters in my candy store. My own experiences reinforced some broader implications for cross-cultural understanding and communication in general. I remain grateful for all the epiphanies and insights that came my way.

  In all the important ways, my entire professional life has involved negotiating a demanding tightrope between the academic and the policy worlds. I nominally had a position in one while predominantly working in the other. Is that even legal? It certainly is not wise. Anyways, this is like living in a bicultural world which, I have discovered, is excellent for those preferring to accentuate their bipolar, even schizophrenic, dispositions. In layman’s terms, living in these two worlds can drive you nuts. Those wishing to lead sensible and sane lives are well advised to choose a single dominant culture in which to spend most of their waking hours.

  Unfortunately, I have never been a wise person, a fact not in dispute among my acquaintances. While foolish, this high-wire act between the academy and policy worlds offered me one clear advantage. My bicultural immersion helped me understand each culture much better than if I had chosen to live within one and study the other. I often felt like the proverbial anthropologist living among primitive cultures. Total immersion helps the observer to better understand a foreign world. However, I could never quite decide which was my native tribe and which the primitive one. In any case, this has given me insights into what it takes to communicate across these two very different cultures where any interaction can be awkward at best. Unfortunately, I see the chasm between those in the academy and those in the real world widening, not closing. This is a sad trend in my opinion, if true.

  First, a moment on terminology. I call one tribe the academy since their members largely identify with the function of knowledge-production or the creation of new theories and insights for the betterment of mankind, or the advancement of their careers, whichever comes first in their own minds. The other tribe I refer to as members of the policy-world (sometimes referred to as the real world) since they tend to be knowledge-utilization junkies as they seek ways to improve society and people, if that is even possible. They are the policymakers and implementers and managers that we tend to associate with public bodies like legislatures and executive agencies as well as many think-tanks and trade or interest groups that dot our national and state capitals. In fact, both tribes produce and consume knowledge and each side evidences considerable heterogeneity within their ranks. That is, not all knowledge producers and consumers are identical. Still, this is how Karen Bogenschneider and I have created a boundary between communities in our writings on this topic.

  Second, an important caveat or two. Below, I descend eventually into the depths of that most mysterious of all rituals within the academy…the tenure process. I do so by exploring my own experiences with this ancient rite of passage. In truth, my aborted effort at securing an academic position, not my idea to begin with, needs to be seen in context. My perceptions of the academy are historical in character. However, I discuss the issues in a way that implies contemporary validity about how things are done in the academy. As such, I risk mischaracterizing some since, while my example may be historically accurate, it is about two decades old after all.

  In fact, I have been informed that changes have been made to improve the processes I touch upon more below. I have no idea whether the situation is materially different now, but some believe that to be the case. My story is also written about a single departmental process, which might be misleading to a casual reader. What I write about below, to the best of my knowledge and based on discussions with colleagues across the disciplinary spectrum, taps what historically has been some of the more universal aspects of the academy’s dominant culture. My rhetorical victim, the University of Wisconsin Department of Social Work in this case, is only a convenient illustration of what is, or had been, things common among research universities. I have been informed that the School recently has taken steps to better integrate research with teaching and application within the tenure seeking ordeal. Again, more later.

  Despite my whining below, I loved living mostly among members of the academic tribe. Despite their idiosyncrasies, I enjoyed romping in a university playground among the intellectual elite. Most of them commanded mental quickness, substantive knowledge, and analytical depth. I found that my own cognitive and analytical competencies improved merely by proximity, if not intimate association. Then again, they hardly could get worse. Importantly, the academy provided an opportunity to pass on what little knowledge and insight I possessed to the next generation of young students. The real problem was this: I was not, by disposition or preference, a scholar. Thus, a certain amount of cleverness was required to make this tightrope-walk work. I almost pulled it off but, alas, not quite.

  You probably have heard it said that three factors are important to academic tenure and promotion decisions—research, teaching, and public service. That is not quite right. During my day, the three that really counted were research, research, and research…at least at those institutions where teaching is viewed at best as an unavoidable nuisance. Of course, not all research counted equally. Research, in this context, only means articles published in peer-reviewed journals.

  In my long experience in the academy, good teaching would not hurt your cause unless you worked at it too hard. It would not be wise to be seen with students too often, certainly not undergraduates, nor should you express much enthusiasm for the classes you are stuck teaching. Atrocious student reviews will never be a mark against you if your production as a researcher is exemplary. If your research production is exceptional, no one will even notice rampant student drug use or waves of suicides following their attendance at your lectures. If your research is not that great, however, you best do well in the classroom though that is unlikely to save your fanny.

  I recall an assistant professor in Social Work once telling me that she had been cautioned about spending too much time with students. Now that I think on it, she did not get tenure. I made the mistake one day of casually mentioning this vignette to a powerful state legislator with whom I was working at the time. I thought he was going to jump out of his pants. Here was proof that the university did not care about teaching undergraduates, not exactly the best kept secret in the world but hard to prove. I had to beg him to back off by mentioning how much tr
ouble I would get in with the UW administration before he would back down. Thank god he liked me.

  In research universities like Wisconsin, teaching is at best tolerated. At least that was my experience associating with IRP affiliates for over four decades, most of whom had faculty positions in mainstream departments. I cannot recall any discussions about teaching, or at least so few that they made no impression on me. in all that time. If it did come up, the discussion mostly ran along the lines of the misfortune of getting stuck in the classroom. Very recently, I was having lunch with two long-time IRP colleagues. One had recently retired and accepted Emeritus status. I expressed surprise, believing she would remain a faculty member somewhat longer. “Well, they expected me to teach a service course the next semester (usually a larger, lecture course for undergraduates). That prospect pushed me out the door.” This was on the extreme side but I heard such sentiments for decades.

  Public service, on the other hand, is always a loser. Teaching is something woven within the rationale of a university but public service strikes many in the academy as a frivolous add-on. You cannot be a serious researcher if you care about the real world, the so-called Wisconsin idea notwithstanding. While the sentiment most associated with the Wisconsin ideal is “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state,” this catchy phrase has little currency in the academy of today. Back in the days when the Wisconsin Idea emerged, scholars from the University of Wisconsin easily moved up and down State Street betwixt the academy and government. Respected members of the academy such as John Commons, Charles McCarthy, and Richard Ely worked with Wisconsin legislators on several ideas that eventually became national initiatives including a worker’s compensation program, a progressive income tax, and various labor market improvements. Perhaps more importantly, they helped elevate the professionalism of the state legislature by developing an independent staff capability, on occasion taking staff positions themselves. They wrested control of the bill writing process from the powerful corporate special interests who previously drafted legislation for friendly politicians that favored their own narrow business interests. The academy and the state were true partners. Given that the corporate interests once again have seized control of the legislative-writing process in Wisconsin and other states, we need that state-university partnership to make a comeback.