Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  During those chaotic sixties and seventies, there was always a struggle between emotion and reason. At Clark University, my undergraduate institution, I can recall learning about how the U.S. had conspired in the overthrow of governments of which it did not approve while supporting governments that were barbaric and oppressive. We did so simply because these barbaric regimes endorsed our national interests. It was irrelevant that they tortured and murdered their own people. I remember burning with shame and outrage as I became aware of my country’s recent history while in college. In the previous decade, we casually conspired to overthrow elected regimes in Guatemala and Iran when they threatened the interests of fortune 500 companies. If we are no different than the other side, where in heaven’s name is our moral authenticity?

  After a near-death experience in my first anti-war march, I drifted further into leftist politics. I helped form something called the Student Action Committee (SAC) the acronym being a play on the title for the Strategic Air Command (also SAC) which flew bombers 24/7 so we could always retaliate when the Russkies attacked as they surely would. We were just so clever in those days. I even joined the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) though this was before the organization went into a death spiral of nihilistic self-absorption and violence. At the point I joined, there were a lot of very smart folk involved. Many struck me as blazing quick in their analysis of events and issues. I loved the intellectual sparring that went on. But there were signs of problems just ahead where endless debates over who was truly a leftist and which ideological position was the purest replaced reasoned argument about right and wrong. I am reminded of the Alt-Right extremists of today. It was only a matter of time before some could only prove their credentials, or their ideological purity, by turning to violence. I would remain an acolyte of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. That was whom I was.

  One humorous vignette as a would-be leftist occurred during my selective service medical exam. It is a revealing story. Okay, probably not, but it is a fun story. After Peace Corps I was in Milwaukee. I received a notice to report for my draft physical which I dutifully obeyed. At some point we all took a paper and pencil exam. There was an academic section which I breezed through followed by a kind of mechanical arts section where you did things like figure out which of the tools on the right was most like the tool pictured on the left. I had no idea what was going on in this part of the exercise and just made wild guesses. Perhaps intelligence is context specific after all.

  The real fun was at the end of this mechanical arts exercise clearly designed to humiliate me and deflate any remaining sense of intellectual superiority. First, they asked if you had ever belonged to any of the organizations they listed on page Q. Most of the listed organizations looked like they had become extinct sometime during the Spanish Civil War period of the 1930s. I recall the Abraham Lincoln Brigade being listed. This group referred to those Americans among the 30,000 international volunteers who signed up to fight for the Spanish Republic against Franco and the Fascists. They were defending the elected government while Hitler was backing the military-led right-wing insurgents. I knew everyone in the room that day was too young for most of these groups (who developed such a silly list?).

  The kicker was the open-ended question at the end. It asked if you belonged to any organization that advocated terrible things against the United States. Now I saw that other guys were causing trouble during the whole procedure while I politely went through my paces. Here, though, I did raise my hand. “Does S.D.S. qualify under question Q?” I asked, feigning innocence. “You bet your ass it does, buddy,” a large, rather grumpy-looking sergeant replied. So, I answered yes and put down S.D.S. in the space provided. At the end of the process, when all before me were handing in their paperwork and exiting out the door, the final official between me and freedom looked at my name and then at me with what I interpreted as utter contempt. “You report to the third floor!” he barked. Uh-uh, this did not sound good but obediently I did so.

  I sat quietly until three men arrived and ushered me into a room. I think they said they were from one or more intelligence agencies, interesting that we need so many of them. They started grilling me on all kind of things even including sexual partners. What was with that? Perhaps they were looking for Soviet female agents who seduce innocent young men like myself, then trading sexual favors for state secrets as if I would have any of those. I recall thinking that I would have to check into that at the time, perhaps I could make up some state secrets to trade. I answered some of their silly questions for a while, rather a long while in fact. During all this fun, I kept wondering why I did not see any of the real troublemakers from earlier in the day. This was obviously the equivalent of the principal’s office to which the hardcore delinquents had been banished for suitable punishment.

  At some point, I must have gotten bored. When they asked, “Well, you Commie Pinko, will you fight any, and all, enemies of the United States?” I leaned back and considered the question for a moment before responding along the following lines, “Now, would you first define enemy for me.” The interrogator’s eyes narrowed. I could tell he had concluded I was a Commie rat who needed to be squished like an annoying bug. It went on like this for quite a while, they would ask something, and I would have fun by running them in circles. Soon they were making veiled threats about dropping guys like me behind enemy lines in Vietnam. It was hard to take them seriously no matter how hostile they tried to look. As it turned out, I did turn twenty-six before my turn to be drafted came up though it was a close-run thing. If I had not made it, I would have been faced with a real moral dilemma. Would I have gone to Canada, to jail, or what? That would have been a real test as to whether I had any moral spine at all.

  My wife once mentioned hearing at a conference that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line but rather a horseshoe. Both ends are closer to one another than to the middle. Each end may have very different substantive beliefs but those situated at the extremes look at the world in similar ways. There is a right and wrong, a black and white answer to all questions. Moreover, there are all kinds of things to be feared out there in the world, evil is everywhere and omnipresent. They typically see a small tribe of people who really have the right answers, who see the true way. Since life is this dangerous place with plots and enemies everywhere, one must always be vigilant and prepared to defend truth and justice, at least as they see it.

  From my early anger at what I thought was a rather indefensible war in Vietnam and glacial progress toward social justice at home, I gradually moved to a different place. I became more intrigued by the intricacies of policy questions rather than the easy, often emotional, answers that were typically offered up. My rational side began to dominate my passionate side. The more I immersed myself in social problems such as welfare and poverty and family integrity the more I realized that good intentions and the bright clarity offered by one’s values were not sufficient to finding satisfying solutions. It surely was not the case that values ceased to be important. I saw they were important indeed. It was merely the case that defining what is right or wrong is not always as simple as advertised. In fact, evidence cannot easily resolve normative ambiguity.

  Welfare, defined broadly, was a case in point. Who held a better claim to being more compassionate? Would it be those who would extend income assistance to the poor without any substantive behavioral expectation in return or would it be those who would demand something back in return for the provision of help? Many of the severest critics of welfare were those closest to the poor themselves. They saw the two sides of the issue, what might happen in the absence of help and what might happen when help was given in the wrong way. The separation of cash from social services in the late 1960s was a rational decision at the time on both normative and efficiency grounds. I certainly bought into it. Yet, as with any policy decision that is easy to make in the moment, the true consequences are manifest only with the passage of time and in so many unexpected ways. Later,
I concluded I had been hasty in my decision.

  I recall the surprise Wendell Primus experienced when, during the planning for Clinton’s welfare reform proposal, he tried to exempt those recipients with a physical disability from facing a work expectation as a condition for receiving cash assistance. It was the classic liberal thing to do. But the advocates for the disability community were generally outraged and yelled at him. They wanted to be treated like all others. They wanted to be viewed as responsible adults and as full partners in society. True, they may need some assistance, but they did not want that help in the form of a simple hand out. They did not want to be treated as lesser citizens.

  I have never forgotten a long-ago article I read written by a New York Supreme Court Justice. He recalled growing up in the 1930s. It was the depression era, and he and his young college friends flirted with Socialism, even Communism. He argued that this was not a bad thing at all. It was the times that forced them to question all the assumptions with which they had been raised as children. They used this very challenging period to rethink everything they thought they knew and believed. In doing so, however, they were required to develop a foundational philosophy and world view that was theirs, not something handed to them. They did not put principles for living on like a suit off the rack. Rather, they were woven piece by piece in the cauldron of both large events and intense debate. He felt strongly that having gone through such a process made him and his childhood friends become more independent thinkers. In any case, they all went on to productive lives as adults.

  My early years had been a kind of roiling, volatile, provocative, stimulating course in what life was all about. All that turmoil in the early years proved great preparation for a policy career. I developed an instinctive feel that getting to the truth would never be easy. Doing policy was fun because the best issues are very wicked. In truth, technical problems can be extremely complex, but most are solvable. I suspect there is an answer to that age-old question of how long it takes for the boat captain to eat his lunch when the river is going downstream at Y miles an hour and the boat was chugging upstream at Z miles an hour. I will never figure it out though. For those who command its mysteries, mathematics can answer so many questions that I find mind-bending…the speed and trajectory of a craft necessary to hit a moving celestial object located some three-billion miles away (as the New Horizons project did in a fly-by mission to take close-up pictures of the planet Pluto) or estimate the temperature of some distant sun in a faraway galaxy.

  It is when we bring the human element into the picture that things get dicey. Some policy questions are beyond science. For example, questions about abortion likely will remain beyond the ability of science to resolve. It is fundamentally a question of values and belief. Others can nominally be answered by science but are not easily resolved! While 97 percent of scientists can agree that humans are contributing to global warming, that will not dissuade a substantial number of Americans from deciding that all these scientists are full of crap. Others will resist paying for necessary solutions to a planet that is heating up since the earth will burn to a crisp only after they are gone. Why bother, then? Within this volatile mixture of values and evidence and self-interest, our capacity to solve societal problems is taxed to the limit.

  Science does a great job of providing input into our policy debates but a lousy job of providing final and irrevocable answers to or wicked social problems. Science can estimate the effects on labor supply or marriage probability or even fertility decisions associated with various income-guarantees and benefit-reduction rates (the rate at which benefits are lowered for each dollar earned). It can give us good data on welfare-induced migration or whether wage bill subsidies work. Such estimates, however, are seldom definitive. It cannot, however, resolve fundamental political or ideological disputes about which way to go when foundational norms are involved. One person’s “that is not so bad” is another person’s “that is unacceptable.” It is such disputes that make some social policy questions so contentious and ultimately irritating!

  While normative disputes disrupt political agreements even when social science provides reasonably clear results, this is far from the case in many situations. In fact, science can often add to our confusion. I recall attending a research presentation one day at IRP. The topic had something to do with crowd-out effects of the provision of a publicly provided health care option. Basically, what proportion of employer-provided health coverage plans would disappear if a public option were introduced, an unintended consequence that many would find unappealing? The presenter ran through a bunch of econometric studies that employed alternative assumptions and specified the equations in different ways. The results ranged from a crowd out effect of zero (no loss of private plans) to something like 75 percent where a large majority of private plans would disappear. I remember thinking how the average policy maker would respond. Thanks for nothing! The typical politician probably would grab the result that comported with his or her priors and run with it. The uncertainties attached to some social science results can further abet normative contention.

  I used to be a little annoyed when I first started attending seminars and brown bags at IRP. Someone would ask a nontechnical question and be shot down with a quick “that is a normative concern of no consequence to us.” The discussion would return to some technical question to the relief of most in the room. Over time I realized why this happened. The normative questions were not resolvable or at least not easily so. I suspect that is why so many in the academy are loath to enter the policy fray. It takes a peculiar type of masochist to expose themselves to the slings and arrows of the real world where clean answers are difficult to find, and many times rejected. I guess I was just born to be that kind of masochist. Still, I was always sensitive enough to caution my students that the real world is highly over rated and to be avoided at all costs if alternatives are available.

  While values are inseparable from policy, neither can we do policy absent other personal attributes like curiosity and risk-taking. I recall a young woman my wife hired many years ago. My wife and she stayed in touch for decades. On the surface, this woman had everything going for her. She earned a Ph.D. a law degree and was sufficiently sophisticated as a computer systems person to work for the Chicago Board of Trade doing systems work. She was attractive, quick witted, very personable, and easy to be around. Moreover, she could communicate well orally and with the written word. If you took all the separate parts of her, she had more to contribute to any endeavor, including the doing of public policy, than I could ever hope to do. And yet, she remained in rather low-level positions through her professional life, always staying in jobs where others would tell her what to do. Both my spouse and I were baffled by this.

  Something was missing in her, a vital spark. Yes, you need at least a few of the technical skills to be a policy wonk (though I obviate the necessity of that requirement to a large degree). You also need the soft skills I discuss in chapter one. And it might be a good thing to have a decent set of norms and values as discussed above. Beyond those things, however, you need that indefinable spark. You need to want to tilt at those hopeless windmills. You need to want to make a difference. You need to be able to take chances and suffer defeat, many defeats. You need to have an abiding curiosity about how the world works. We are talking more than science here.

  When we do find students with the “right stuff,” we need to do much more to prepare them for the trench warfare of doing policy. Was it Bismarck who said that watching policy being made was akin to the making of sausage…not a pretty sight? When preparing for my Peace Corps service in India, we received as much training in the culture we were to experience as we did in the substantive area in which we were supposed to contribute. Perhaps that is something to think about as we educate the next generation of knowledge producers. They need to be prepared just as diligently for the softer skills they will need and the professional cultural challenges they will face as they do for the technical sk
ills to be mastered.

  The academy provides virtually no preparation for teaching at the university level for those pursuing doctorates, except for those who support themselves with teaching assistantships, which really is on-the-job training. Amazingly, the academy provides even less training in what it means to contribute to the policy making process or how to do it, even for those doing relevant research. By that I mean the academy does precious little to acquaint students with the institutional cultures in which policymakers function and the vernacular ordinarily employed by them. Producing highly technical work that satisfies the academy will not suffice if one ever wants to cross the divide into the real world. Wishing does not make it so…you must work at it.

  In the end, I loved the “wicked” social problems that others found so vexing. I loved working with other passionate and smart people as they struggled to find some way forward amidst the fog of policy wars. That the issues were so hard, and the slogging forward so impossible at times, made it even more worthwhile. It might have been futile but it sure was fun. It really is the hard that makes it great.

  Technically, I have entered my eighth decade. That is, I am fast approaching my dotage. In my head, this fact once again permits me to vent to my values and emotions, much as I did as an irresponsible college student. I read the New York Times and I find myself once again roiling with emotions not felt since the1960s. I am deeply troubled that we have concentrations of income and wealth not seen since just before the great crash of the 1920s. The Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality used by economists, now shows income and wealth disparities in America close to those found in Banana Republics that we used to laugh at not long ago.