Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  Sam Rankin, another fellow PC Volunteer, once asked a question that got me thinking. What was it that got each of us on that plane to India in 1967? Though Peace Corps was larger in the 1960s than it is now, only a fraction of the country’s youth applied, fewer were selected; and many of those who started out did not finish their tours. For the India-44 group, we had close to a hundred trainees on day one in 1966. However, only about one-quarter of that total were packing up to return home in 1969 after finishing two-years of service in what was considered one of Peace Corp’s more difficult stations.

  It is not as if we changed the world or altered India’s prospects. The stark fact is that we enjoyed most of the benefits from our volunteer experience with the host country getting comparatively little in return. I must confess, just in case you missed this fact, India was a grain importing country when we arrived in the blistering heat of summer 1967. When we left in that same blistering heat two years later, India was a grain exporting nation. I will let the reader draw whatever inference they wish from this fact. I admonish you not to be confused by those who argue that the extensive drought that ended during our tenure there had anything to do with this reversal of fortunes.

  If I was to become a pretend academic later in my professional career, as you will see in the next chapter, I was surely an imposter as an agricultural expert in rural India. I am now certain that India and Peace Corps were my training ground for faking it later in life, what could explain not being chucked out of the academy in the first six months. As we trotted off to save the world, we were nothing more than a bunch of city boys given a bit of technical training and dropped into the middle of the Rajasthan desert. Not the best of ideas America has ever had but at least India did not sever diplomatic ties with the U.S. due to our incompetence.

  I do recall a basketball game, however, when things might have turned ugly. A group of us volunteers competed against a team from a local Indian military installation, or maybe it was the police. Whatever they were, they were big and tough. We had beaten the boys from the local university a couple of times already, so they brought in these ringers. I still recall driving to the basket several times and repeatedly getting punched in the stomach with no foul ever being called. Now that game almost did turn into a riot though the crowd of locals watching the event appeared to very much enjoy our physical mauling. Despite all, the Indian Embassy had a nice evening for all former volunteers to India during Peace Corp’s fiftieth anniversary in 2011.

  More than one poor farmer asked me if they should try these new varieties of high-yield seed (part of the green revolution that emerged in the1960s). I would grab a handful of dirt from his field, grind it in my hand, examine it, and throw it in the air with a great flourish. Then I would turn to the farmer and with an expression of total confidence while exclaiming, “Yes!” In truth, I had no idea what I was doing, a sense of general bafflement I brought forward with me into my subsequent professional endeavors as a policy wonk. Still, I cannot think of any better preparation for my career. In some fundamental ways, we all wing it through life.

  Most of my early life experiences, all detailed in Confessions of a Clueless Rebel, contributed much to my later policy and even academic ventures. I worked in a hospital on the graveyard shift, worked with disadvantaged kids in a War-On-Poverty community action program, and spent countless hours on the political issues of the 1960s when I probably should have been studying for my classes. But, in hindsight, none of these activities were wasted. They broadened the set of experiences I would bring to the policy table and even sharpened my analytical skills. The top colleges look for experiences outside of the classroom in their prospective candidates. We probably need the same breadth of experiences in those seeking to embrace the policy arts.

  In the 1960s and early 1970s, a simplistic idea took hold. Some very smart people thought that we were entering a new era where data and evidence would replace ideology and values in the making of public policy. We had new mathematical and statistical tools along with larger and more comprehensive data sets. Surely, emerging technologies would permit rational analysis to replace ideology and prejudice in doing the public’s business. This certainly sounded like a reasonably idea. Then again, so did the notion that the earth was flat in medieval times. If you sailed too far out into the ocean you would surely fall off the edge. That conclusion also made great sense at the time, just look about you. Why all the ocean’s water had not already fallen over the edge, though, might have caught me up for a moment.

  Taken to the extreme, it appeared to some that quantitative analysis would dominate future policy work. All we would need is great data sets and whiz-bang estimation techniques and utopia would be ours. Serious people talked about the ‘end of ideology.” Such hubris seems humorous now, along with other 1960-era prognoses that we would exhaust existing supplies of fossil fuels in 35 years and that the biggest social problem for the next generation would be an excess of personal leisure. Beware of surefire prognostications. They have an annoying habit of turning out to be wrong.

  It is a good thing I listened to my heart rather than the predictions of the wise men of my youth. As idealistic kids, we went off to India because, after all, it seemed like the right thing to do. It made sense in terms of our normative positions. The values we had somehow embraced motivated our choices back then, as did Kennedy’s inspiring words about sacrifice. Such fundamental factors as basic values yet play a dominant role in policy making and in how we approach social problems. They fully inform our decisions about what is a just or fair society. Perhaps that is why technical sophistication alone is not enough to address the “wicked” social problems we face. Despite pretenses to the contrary, we are not fully rational beings. Homo-econimicus has its uses but is not infallible.

  You can quantitatively assess traffic flows to devise better stop light patterns during rush hour. Perhaps only a few will be mad at you for the changes subsequently made. You can quantitatively estimate labor supply responses to various income guarantees and benefit reduction rates. I guarantee that some people will be mad at you no matter how reasonable and evidence-based your policy suggestions might be on that issue. But when the policy questions tackle larger questions involving the good society, like what role government should play in equalizing economic outcomes, things really get dicey. In the big questions, reason and data play even a smaller role next to feelings and beliefs and values and prejudices.

  If David Ellwood’s tenure at ASPE was personally disappointing to him, as I suspect it was, that was likely due to his surprise at how little reason and evidence meant in Washington. The halls of power in Washington march to a different tune than the halls of scholarship at Harvard. I still can hear John Antaramian, the Wisconsin Assembly representative who chaired the welfare reform committee with which I worked, as he uttered the following despondent words, “Tom, I thought I was doing some good with the committee and now everyone is mad at me.” Can you imagine how more shocking it is for an academic, used to arguments over evidence, to face irrational attacks based on ideology and partisanship. A word to the wise, don’t become a policy wonk if you want to have a lot of Facebook friends, or enjoy rational dialogue. You want reason and logic, focus on closed-system activities like chess.

  As I pounded away ad nauseum in the prior chapter, policy is dominated by norms and beliefs these days. Oddly enough, as our analytical tools become more sophisticated, our political discourse seemingly becomes more primitive. More than other advanced countries, Americans are much more likely to disbelieve in evolution (40 percent), believe in angels (65 percent), and argue that the world is 6000 years old. Elected politicians argue, publicly, that climate change is not an issue since God will resolve the issue should he decide it is worth His time. These same politicians, a few at least, pray for an apocalyptic conflict between Iran and Israel since that apparently is a necessary step toward the second coming of Christ as prophesized somewhere in the Bible which, they will argue, supersedes the C
onstitution as a guide to the principles of proper governance of this nation. It is very difficult to argue with such logic. It is one thing to find a few deranged elected officials shouting obvious nonsense but more alarming that such beliefs are found here in greater numbers than the remainder of the civilized world.

  This fact raises a question, one I have revisited many times over the years. It might rank up there with the top two or three questions to be faced in life. From where do our fundamental beliefs and feelings arise? How do we get to be who we are? Are basic beliefs and values hardwired? Are they all learned? Is it nature or nurture or some combination of both factors that determine what we believe and how we feel about things? All these are important queries since they determine the cultural milieu and conceptual frameworks that shape how we see both our policy world and ourselves as policy actors.

  When I have had a dispute with one of my favorite Republicans…a Ron Haskins or a Tom McCurdy or a Jennifer Noyes…our differences have nothing to do with their being less intelligent than I or that I have a better command of the evidence or that I am more astute at using facts. These people probably are better informed and quicker of mind than I can ever hope to be. I must admit, though, a lot of conservatives I have run across really do strike me as dumber than dirt but not these nor many others like them.

  The point is that differing perspectives do not always reflect a failure of reason. If that is the case, then we must look elsewhere, perhaps to differing value systems for at least part of the answer. Moreover, we need to think about the etiology of these value systems for just a moment, even if a final answer is likely to elude us. The older I get, the more I sense that our core, individual sentiments are hardwired. We bring them forward into life. Since this is not a text book, I simply will share a few observations based on a lifetime of thinking about such matters. Let me start with a compelling vignette or two.

  A former neighbor of mine had married an Air Force pilot and was living near Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. She had a black maid, as did all white housewives of that era. One day, she heard a commotion and realized that the neighbor kids were throwing stones at this maid as the poor woman hung out the laundry in the backyard. My acquaintance scolded the kids and sent them off home. Her phone rang a few minutes later. The mother of one of the kids started yelling at her about harassing her children. When my friend responded with how rude the children had been to her domestic help, the enraged mother ended with a kind of warning, “Down here, a nigger is just a nigger.” Apparently, throwing rocks at black maids was good sport in the South in the early 1960s. My friend talked back, asserting that there was no excuse for such behavior.

  Later that day, someone from the sheriff’s office knocked on her door. His message was simple. “Up north, where you come from, you may have different ways of looking at things; but when you are living here you have to abide by local ways. Here, a nigger is just a nigger.” She had been warned. And if she still hadn’t gotten the message, just to make sure, someone rode past her house that night and fired a shotgun blast through the front window. As I listened to her story I recall wondering. What if those kids, their mother, the sheriff’s deputy, and the nighttime rider had been raised elsewhere, with a different culture? How would they have turned out?

  Decades later, she remained a liberal and an active Democrat. Her brother, who grew up in the same home environment in Ohio where the family was raised, is quite conservative and a lifelong Republican. The mother of both also had been a lifelong Republican until her eighties. Then she became fed up with the right-wing direction her party had taken and became a Democrat. Still, she initially had trouble accepting Obama as a presidential candidate because of his color. She could not easily shake the stubborn prejudices of her youth and decades of reinforced thinking about race. I did not challenge her beliefs. I merely expressed my own feelings in a quiet way. I recall her listening to me intently as I talked about how much I admired the man, Obama. She did not respond at the time. When I next saw her several months later, when we returned to Florida for the winter just before the election, she had become an avid supporter of Obama. She had held a fund raiser in her home the week before. I look at such families and wonder, why the different life trajectories? In one family we have one liberal, one conservative, and a mother who bucked lifelong habits to switch ideologies and shed long held beliefs.

  I had a friend growing up named Ron. I spent a lot of time with him and his family. We played all the usual sports together, and I spent much time at his house. Yet we argued quite a lot as he tended to reflect the conservative attitudes of his parents on race and other social matters. I loved his parents. They were good and kind people who merely reflected the very same grounded beliefs I found in my own family and most others of my cultural milieu in that generation. I drifted off the reservation by rejecting the consensus world view of my culture very early in life, something that puzzles me to this day. Ron did not.

  We reconnected many years later as adults when his father passed away and later spent time together when I was in Washington working on the Clinton welfare bill. At that same time, he was at the Pentagon for a brief stint as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserves. During several rounds of golf at the War College in D.C. where I dinged several cars belonging to the military brass with my errant golf shots, I got to know him again, now as an adult. His whole belief system had changed 180 degrees. Now, he was quite liberal on virtually all matters including views on race, economics, and on war and peace. This last set of views I thought surprising for someone who had risen so high in the military. By the early 1990s, he was more of a peacenik than I. It was as if his true values had been waiting to emerge until after he got away from the influences of his early home life.

  I know I absorbed much of my local culture as a young kid. Still, early on I could feel a struggle within as I drifted toward a more liberal perspective, long before Ron made a similar journey. As I put my Peace Corps reflections together, and talked to other volunteers, it became evident how early on I deviated from the norms of my community. As mentioned earlier, nothing in my early years suggested anything special. I showed no intellectual promise. At the same time neither did I display any early signs of being a budding serial killer. I was so very average.

  As I became old enough to ponder things, however, I began to evidence streaks of independent thinking. By my early teens, I was arguing that the Supreme Court was correct in desegregating schools even though I doubt anyone in my environment shared my enthusiasm. I still can see my family shaking their heads. “What the hell is wrong with him?” While sitting in a Catholic high school, I kept fighting (within my head at least) with my religion instructors even as I convinced myself to enter a seminary to study for the priesthood. For example, I could never quite accept the church’s birth control arguments or the belief that a merciful God would not embrace alternative paths to spiritual truth. I really rebelled at the concept that nonbelievers in Catholicism were automatically doomed to hell, or maybe it was limbo back then, if they found spiritual comfort in another religious tradition. I mean, really, some child in Mongolia is not going to see God because he wasn’t smart enough to be born in a Catholic family in Worcester. Excuse me!

  I am not sure I was totally aware of this at the time, but I searched continually for ways to make small contributions to the larger good while continuing the struggle to accommodate religious conviction with the application of logical thought. Consistent with that personal struggle, I entered the Maryknoll Seminary after high school, an order that did foreign missionary work. My going in that direction was, in retrospect, an ill-disguised way of trying to help others I saw as less fortunate than myself. Eventually, I figured out that I was far less interested in saving souls than I was in helping what I considered oppressed people find a way forward.

  It helped me that a few Maryknoll members of that era were into the Liberation Theology side of the Catholic spectrum, where Christ’s teachings reflected Socialis
t, even Communist, tendencies. Back then, people still remembered Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. You also had the Berrigan Brothers and Father Groppi who were Catholic priests at the forefront of fights for peace and justice. I simply had trouble with that belief in a personal God thing, otherwise self-sacrifice for a larger purpose made sense to me. Many other young Catholics of my era, however, went in a very different direction…joining the FBI or CIA or Military Intelligence to fight America’s and God’s enemies. They found my beliefs despicable, dangerous to the point of bordering on treason. I found their beliefs totally inconsistent with the sense of Christ’s teachings as I absorbed them in my childhood. One faith but starkly different visions of what was right!

  In college I sought work as an orderly in a hospital on the eleven-to-seven shift before heading off to classes. The night shift in an urban hospital can be taxing. There never was enough staff, sometimes only a senior student nurse, an aide, and myself ran the whole floor. Dealing with the sick and the dying offered many rewards but also many moments of drama and high emotion. You never forget stumbling on a patient’s final moments and taking their pulse as you helplessly watch their life ebb away. I could have found easier work, but this permitted me to help others as I made enough money to keep body and soul together as I made my way through school.

  My other college-period job was working with kids in a community action program that was operating in a distressed neighborhood. My boss in this program was a social worker. Over a couple of beers one day, he told me that I would make a great social worker and should seriously consider it as a career. I instinctively felt that was not right, don’t you have to like people to be one of those. Still, I considered the MSW program at Boston University for a bit. When you don’t have a plan for life, though, the smallest of matters can redirect the angle of your life trajectory. I still recall chatting with a very attractive coed, telling her I was considering going on for an MSW. She gave me this “you are way too smart for that kind of career” look. I believe that specific ambition faded from view immediately after that. Yes, I could easily be swayed by a pretty face.