Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  Best of all, they get to see the university in a new light. Here is something the eggheads are doing that, incredible as it sounds, might be useful. Typically, they see the university as a remote and alien world filled with elitist, entitled academics. They hold such views only because the typical university is an isolated island largely inhabited by elitist and entitled prima donnas. Sitting in these FIS sessions, I am sure that many a legislator has glanced toward the heavens fully expecting the sky to be full of flying pigs. Really, the university is doing something useful! How could that have happened. On the other hand, many of my egghead colleagues view legislators as barely qualifying as homo sapiens since, in their eyes, politicians fall short on the sapiens (or wisdom) dimension.

  I am yet friends with Terry Wilkom, whom I introduced earlier when talking about the 1970s era Wisconsin welfare study group. He was a powerful Democratic politician in the early 1970s. For a while in retirement we had Florida winter homes not far from one another. Terry was an eclectic and thoughtful man who spent time in both government and the private sector, at one point working closely with computer genius Seymore Cray. Periodically, we would chat about the old days including how things have changed in the legislature. Yes, there was partisanship back then. In public, on the legislative floor, the two parties would attack one another. But then they would dine and drink together in the evening where they often worked out deals to keep government moving. That is no longer the case. Real communication across the partisan and ideological divide is rare indeed in the current climate. The FIS is a treasured exception.

  I did drift away from any day-to-day involvement in the seminars. However, I remained close to the concept, and how Karen helped develop it over the years. I served on her various advisory committees and Boards, as I had for Theodora earlier. In addition, Karen would email and call me often, sometimes a lot. Once she focused on an issue, she was a tenacious bulldog.

  Working with Karen could be taxing. The worst issues involved deciding what something should be called, deciding on a title. Sounds simple but not when Karen is involved. Every detail is given extraordinary thought and helping her label something is a kiss of death request from my perspective. First, she sends me a list with several possibilities. I would select one and give her my reasons for my choice. So far so good! Then I would get a longer list back. In some cases, my first pick is gone! Hmmm, what happened to my initial choice? I would think. I might make another selection or even tweak one of those now on the list. Then another list would appear. This one is even longer and with none of my prior selections to be seen.

  At this point desperation sets in. Now I start sending messages that Tom Corbett is seriously ill, perhaps even about to expire. But now another even longer list of options appears. “No, really,” I would reply, “Tom Corbett expired last night, really sad but true.” Perhaps I have used this ploy once too often, since she never believes me anymore for some reason. So, yet another list inevitably arrives in my email box. At this point, I hang myself, or at least try. The damn rope inevitably breaks…I really need to go on a diet.

  My favorite Karen story, however, involves the time she introduced me as I was about to give a talk. I no longer recall the topic, but it was a Wisconsin audience of mostly family extension agents whom I believe had some connection with the university. In any case, the overwhelming majority were women. It started off all right. She had gone through my CV and counted all the talks I had given. She was impressed. I was stunned. The number was impressive by anyone’s standards. Suddenly I felt tired. It was a partial list after all since who could recall them all? I stopped listing them after that. Anyways, Karen loved the onion piece that I bragged about earlier at some length. For this introduction, and loving props that illustrated her point, she had brought along some fake onions that she wanted to use. That was okay. Then she tried to say something about how I carried them around all the time in my pants pocket. Uh-uh!

  It was at that point that things went downhill. She began to describe a bulge in my pocket that somehow came out as if I was, indeed, quite a very well-endowed male. If you knew Karen, you would know she was clueless. She is very innocent and sweet. By now, though, the audience was howling though I could tell she had no clue as to why. Nothing I was to say would top that introduction, but I was pleased when several women later pressed their telephone numbers into my hand. Karen finally got it later in the day when a male colleague of hers gently explained how he would have been fired on the spot if he had made the same remarks. Since then I have asked Karen to write “for a great time, call Tom at…” in various women’s rest rooms but she flatly refuses.

  I saw FIS as a natural complement to the Peer Assistance Network concept. FIS had a different target audience, state legislators. WELPAN focused on state executive agency folk. Of course, there were differences in structure and protocols. Yet, there were many similarities as well.

  Both efforts turned “ownership” over to their target audience. Karen is guided by a legislative advisory committee…the agenda of the WELPAN group was determined by the members. Both provided members with a safe venue. Karen has done her best to keep the press away. In WELPAN, we had a strict policy of what was said in the room stayed in the room, unless everyone agreed to make something public. Parts of meetings were off-limits to outsiders when sensitive topics were being discussed. Both stress an objective approach to the deliberations, striving for education, not advocacy. If either target audience even smelled an agenda, these experiments in communication would have ended quickly. Both worked to bring rigorous, objective analytic work to the target audiences. I suspect the WELPAN audience was a bit more knowledgeable about available research and could often select their resource people while Karen expended more energy in searching for and then screening potential FIS presenters. In the end, both of us suggested resource folks we trusted and who were considered good communicators.

  My feeling was that both the WELPAN and FIS audiences prized the “honest broker.” Both are bombarded with information all the time. Much of that input is biased in one way or another. Decisionmakers do not have time to sort through the blistering maze of material, nor sort out which document or report is worth reading and which is not. FIS does the sorting and recomposing of the messages in a way accessible to the intended audience. The legislators and their staff are exposed to the policy nuggets without having to wade through reams of methodological detritus. Most importantly, they got the material in several formats, so they could both digest it and vet it with their peers. For example, research summaries and policy recommendations are made available in audio formats so that legislators can listen as they ride to and from the state capitol and their home districts.

  WELPAN did the same thing. It gave members an opportunity to be exposed to information in a safe environment. Typically, they were not hustled with obvious agendas and, if they were, there was ample opportunity to sort things out. They had the luxury to absorb and vet any input with their peers and with the so-called experts themselves. There was plenty of time for give and take. The policy relevance of a new idea could be examined in detail with consideration of local variations in context and settings being discussed. Perceived problems that might inhibit serious consideration could be addressed adequately.

  Both FIS and WELPAN-type initiatives performed one remarkable service. Both made rigorous information accessible to policy audiences. This was not always academic work, but it generally was work that would pass scientific muster. The question remains, why do we even need special strategies for accomplishing this end? Why don’t members of the academy do a better job of bringing their work and insights to those who might use their knowledge in practical ways?

  Karen and I write about this failure in our book, Evidence Based Policymaking: Lessons from policy-minded researchers and research-minded policymakers. You are more than welcome to peruse this 300-plus page work for the full story on how the academy has failed the policy world (see resources at end for more deta
il). We need the royalties. We have also written several articles that build on our underlying theory.

  The bottom line is that there is a fundamental disconnect across the cultures of these two worlds. Each person absorbs core assumptions about one’s professional role, preconceptions about how the world works, signals for how to behave, and guidelines for how to treat others. I see the differences in many places. I would look at journal articles written for policy-minded outlets. Over time, they increasingly became more sophisticated in terms of technique and methods which is fine. However, many of these would end with a section on policy implications that borders on the laughable. You can just imagine the author or authors struggling mightily to get the methods and analysis straight and then dashing off something about the meaning of their results for the real world in a few minutes before hitting the send button to the journal editors.

  I personally would love going back and forth between conferences in the real world and conferences in the academy, simply to experience the contrast in styles. In the real world, presenters would use a power point with clear, concise statements that summarizes the findings succinctly and carefully draws out the application of those findings. There would be a discussion about methods but only enough to convince the listener that the numbers were not generated from a crystal ball or on the back of an envelope. Most importantly, speakers would talk with sufficient clarity to be understood, almost as if communication were an important element of their presentation. How delightful.

  Perhaps it has changed now but, in the past, this would be my experience when attending the IRP Summer Workshops for the high-tech researchers. Not all that long ago, the speakers would still be throwing up transparencies with columns of coefficients representing various data runs while talking at breakneck speed as if one breath would allow a critic in the audience to pounce on some real or imagined error. They seldom got to the application part of their talk as fights would break out over how one or more equations had been specified. Demonstrating their technical bonafides seemed far more important than what the research results were or how they might be applied. I could never escape the sense that the search for truth played a secondary role to engaging in technical one-upmanship.

  I am engaging in hyperbole with the above example, and not all academic conferences were remotely like this, but there is some truth here. If you are in the policy world, which can be distinguished from the political world, you prize certain things. You want input that is clear, concise, and available before the end of time. The input should be based or rigorous methods, but these methods are only a means to an end, not the end itself. You want declarative sentences that communicate something clearly. You want to know how the information might be used. And you want honesty where necessary caveats are acknowledged without reservation.

  If, on the other hand, you are in the knowledge-producing world, methods are what count, the message is secondary. Interactions are often based on a one-upmanship designed to demonstrate who the sharpest pencil in the pencil box or the brightest bulb on the marquee might be. Obfuscation, or leaving the audience puzzled, is too often seen as a virtue and not a vice. Time, of course, is not much of a concern since the pursuit of truth is timeless.

  If you followed a young man or woman who stayed in the academy all through their professional training and landed in a research university at the end of the road, what would you find? Most likely you would find someone who had few clues about how to talk with a policy person. Moreover, they would see few reasons why they should bother. You would have a person who would, if given a choice between curing cancer and publishing a peer-reviewed article in some obscure journal, would chose the latter in a heartbeat. You would get a person who, if given the choice between spending an afternoon talking with officials about the applicability of their findings or spending that afternoon running just a few more estimates that will not substantively change the outcomes of their research, will chose the second option without a moment’s hesitation. You will find someone who is further and further self-contained within their own small, theoretical world and see absolutely no problem with their isolation or with the character of the larger institutional norms that shape their world view.

  I watched what happened at IRP over the decades. When I first got there, faculty from the economics department played a big role in the institution. Now, I cannot think of one full-time economics faculty member who plays an instrumental role in the workings of the institute. The engaged affiliates located on the campus are associated with Social Work, the Public Policy School, and other more applied disciplines. When Karen looked around for a faculty successor as head of PINFIS, particularly as she headed toward retirement, she came up empty. One likely successor seemed to be on board until that potential successor asked one day if talking a lot with legislators was a requirement for the position. It is, of course, and she immediately lost interest.

  When I was at ASPE, the people looking for evidence would seldom turn to the academy. This was still true even though the reform effort was run by Harvard-based academics. Instead, they would turn to the evaluation firms and think-tanks that now dot the D.C. landscape. What if they did call an academic? Here is what they would have heard: “Well, that is a good question. I just might have a graduate student who could look at it next semester. Or if I get some support, we can have a response to you in three years.” “Three years,” my ASPE colleague would think, “but I was hoping for some feedback by EOBD (end of business day) tomorrow afternoon.” Again, hyperbole to make a point!

  The policy world moves in real time, the academic world operates in a timeless world where the pursuit of truth obeys no clock. My ASPE colleagues probably wanted a best, well considered guess but that is not what you are trained to do in the academy. Science does not operate that way. It is not that one world is right and the other is wrong, they are simply different.

  I could labor on about certain blind spots on the policy side of the ledger. They also have cultural blinders that make them poor communicators to academics whom they often avoid based on assumptions that are not always accurate. But perhaps I should bring this chapter to a close. Besides, it is more fun to pick on my peers in the academy. They really offer themselves as easy targets for a bit of good natured ridicule.

  PINFIS (now called the Family Impact Institute) has been transferred to Purdue University along with the foundation resources that sustain it. Karen never found a faculty member to take over her role nor did she ever get real support from the administration at UW until they were lobbied hard by some powerful people on Karen’s national board. The university finally is stepping up to support the Wisconsin seminars. It took a while, and some head-bashing, but they did get (I think) that this helps improve the campus’s image on the other end of State Street. As noted, Karen has a national advisory board that includes current and former top power players in Wisconsin (and elsewhere). They were literally shocked at the university’s initial indifference to the fate of the Wisconsin seminars as was I. I thought the university missed a huge opportunity to support a worthwhile program that could help its tattered image in the legislature.

  Karen and I started our book on evidence-based policy making with one of my favorite vignettes. It was the lunch break at some conference, again, which one has long faded from memory. Larry Aber, an excellent researcher into early childhood issues who was then at Columbia, asked my second favorite Republican Ron Haskins what role research played in policy making in Washington at least. “Five percent,” Ron replied, “maybe 10 percent at the most. I will tell you what counts in Washington. It is values and power.” The researchers at the table were a bit crestfallen. Several years later, Haskins wrote that the role research played in policy decisions at the federal level had fallen to 1 percent. Apparently, things are getting worse. The researchers that were at the lunch table would now be suicidal given his reassessment of the value of their contributions to the public good.

  From my perspective, Ron is right. As a
member of the academy, you cannot assume you can walk in and bowl over policymakers with your intellect and your evidence. You need to walk in their shoes for a while, see how they view the world. You must feel, just a bit, the pressures and influences and rewards that shape their environment. Learn to speak their language, if you will. You can reach policymakers. It is not a hopeless endeavor. Hell, I did it and I don’t have many friends, other than the ones I rent from ‘Friends-R-US.’ It just takes a bit of effort and, of course, you must care about their world and what they do.

  I spent a lot of time in the real world. Did I get bruised from time to time? You bet, but I also learned a lot. The real world remains one of the treasured corners of my candy store and a source of so much of what I have learned. Some of the candy found in each counter in my store came directly from dipping my toes into the shark-infested waters of the real-world. Of course, I always kept my eyes out for those sharks. They will jump up and bit you in the behind.

  CHAPTER 8

  TO SEE THINGS, YOU HAVE TO GO OUT AND LOOK

  The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

  —Bertrand Russell

  The title of this chapter is quite recognizable as one of Yogi Berra’s famous malapropisms. Of course, I might have said something just as stupid myself. He was born so much earlier than I, however. It is most likely, therefore, that he said it first.

  In a loose way, this is a chapter about epistemology or about how we know things. That is a rather odd subject for someone who still cannot figure out the duration of the boat captain’s lunch break, a classic high school algebra torture. You must remember those classic exercises employed to destroy teen minds. They went something like this: the river is flowing one way at a given rate while his craft is moving the opposite way at another known speed while a buffeting wind is diagonally impeding the craft at x mph. Given all this, how long does the captain take to finish his lunch? That is how all these puzzles looked to me. I was so clueless in the face of this high school plot to destroy my sanity that I titled a recent book of mine The Boat Captain’s Conundrum. By now, you should be sick of hearing about my abject failure at basic high school algebra. Clearly, I am a bit obsessed by this deficit in my talent repertoire though, oddly enough, this affliction has never kept me from discoursing on weighty issues.