Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  I still recall one evening during those frantic days when I was balancing teaching, administration, research, public speaking, and several other roles. I got a call from my tenure mentor, or whatever they called these individuals burdened with such an onerous task. It probably was the third or fourth in the round-robin parade of losers in the annual straw-drawing contest to determine who got stuck with me. This woman went on about how to improve the organization of my tenure package that would go to senior faculty for the annual review. I am sure she was correct and doing her best to be helpful. I simply dug up as many of my annual products that I could find in the moment and stuffed them into a folder. As she droned on, I felt myself reaching a breaking point. I came within a whisker of saying, “Hey, let’s end this now. I just don’t have the time. Damn it, I am doing way too many things that are important. This is just crap. Let’s just agree it was a bad idea. No harm, no foul.” But I did not. I regretted that lost moment ever since.

  I had one more lost moment to end this charade. Irv Piliavin caught me one day. He said, “Tom, go over and talk to Mel Morgenbesser (school director at the time) about your tenure situation. They should be past ready to give it to you by now.” I was dubious but thought he must know since he was senior faculty who had been around forever. It turns out he did not know a thing. Poor Mel squirmed in exquisite anguish as he went on about how much I was liked in the department but…. Somehow, I diverted Mel from having to complete the sentence. I knew the substance of all the buts from the get-go. I felt so bad for him and secretly cursed Irv. I knew I was an issue, why didn’t Irv know that from the inside. For the second time I came within a whisker of just ending it as I watched Mel’s agony that day. In truth, I know why I never pulled the plug. I liked teaching and there might be a tiny chance that walking away could impact those opportunities to work with students. Not at all likely since finding willing faculty to teach all the courses was a constant struggle, but the prospects of being shut out of the classroom remained above a zero probability in my head. Then again, I was never good at math.

  Perhaps I can attach one moment of regret to my failure as an academic. Bob Haveman and Bobbi Wolfe once sat me down for a serious talk. I suspect it was toward the end of Bobbi’s tenure as director and before we began to full-court press Karl Scholz into taking the position. They asked me if I would consider becoming the next IRP director, essentially moving up from being associate director. After all, I had already run the place for a year while Bobbi had been on a sabbatical and had been a very hands-on Associate Director. It seemed like a great idea to me, a natural position given my skills at schmoozing all kinds of folk and cross-walking institutional cultures…the academy, government, evaluation firms, think tanks, interest and trade groups, the media, and others. Besides, I was good at thinking strategically and seeing the big picture.

  The catch, they said, was that I would have to be tenured. I smiled but said nothing in the moment as I recall. Tenure would never happen. I knew that from that early faculty meeting where the agonizing paralysis of faculty governance hit me upside the head like a two-by-four. I suspect that the discussion of the directorship was genuine on their part though it did occur to me that this might yet be another ploy to motivate me toward tenure. Others always seemed far more interested in my status than I ever was. If the motivational theory were correct, it was doomed from the start since that ball was not really in my court. Still, this lost opportunity to lead IRP did constitute a small regret for me.

  Even after I formally retired from teaching and IRP management, this tenure farce would pop up at unexpected times. I was sharing a taxi with Maria Cancian in New York. It was 2004 and we were on our way to a conference at Columbia University. Suddenly, she mentioned the fact that Dan Meyer, who started out as an RA on the child support project Irv Garfinkle and I had put together years earlier, was now department director. Getting tenure could happen now, she argued, though did not elaborate on how things had changed so dramatically. I tried not to laugh as I thanked her and declined her offer. Many years later, the current director raised the possibility very casually as we were having lunch at Blackhawk Country Club, which has the best view in town from the terrace. She is a very nice person, a great director, but I had no idea what she was thinking on this one occasion.

  It might surprise some that I accepted a monetary sacrifice to become a pretend academic. To repeat, I was paid quite a bit less for my role as a traditional academic. My colleagues in economics would disown me for this. The thing is, money never motivated me. The reason is quite simple. My mother obsessed about not having enough money and she became a rather bitter, unhappy woman. I promised myself early on that the pursuit of wealth would never dominate my life. Besides, my spouse made considerably more than I, so we always were quite comfortable financially, thanks to her. I recall concluding once that, even though I was acting director of IRP one year, I was very likely the lowest paid affiliate associated with the institute. I suspect I won that award, so to speak, with considerable ease. Fortunately, our needs were never great in any case. I only wanted enough to cover the basics and, beyond that, to enable me to call someone to fix anything that broke in the house. Now, that was very import ant to me, given how inept I was at life’s everyday tasks.

  For me, the academy remained the best platform from which I could erect my policy candy store. I was surrounded by whip smart people, I had almost total freedom to pick and choose what policy delights to put into my various store counters, and I enjoyed passing on my policy knowledge to students, some of whom might even follow in my footsteps. Specifically, IRP enabled me to connect with the best and the brightest in my areas of interest from across the nation and even beyond our borders. It also brought so many unsolicited opportunities my way. Most of us policy wonks want to be players…to get a chance to participate in the next great adventure. Being at a place like IRP, I never had to worry about being shut out of the fun, policy adventures kept falling into my lap. Make no mistake, I do love the academy, even the not so good parts. Still, while I was in the academy I was never fully of the academy.

  Irv Piliavin once told me that I had problems with authority. If I had just played the game, all would have been okay. I never thought of myself as being that rebellious. Well, maybe just a little. Oh hell, I titled the recent republication of my personal memoir Confessions of a Clueless Rebel. So, perhaps I am one of those. In any case, I am clearly too selfish and perhaps a bit too stubborn to follow all the rules. I simply enjoyed playing in my candy store way too much. After all, I am still just a kid at heart who has never really grown up! And what kid doesn’t love to be surrounded by a lot of candy!

  There is, however, a larger story associated with this bout of narcissistic whining. As most acquainted with me know, moaning and groaning is a peculiar strength of mine. A former neighbor, a social worker herself who worked with teen delinquents rehabbing houses for the needy as a treatment modality, once bought me a shirt that said, “No Whining.” Apparently, I would go on and on about my dislike of yard work. I was a big fan of artificial flora and Astro Turf, but I could not get the neighborhood to agree. They preferred the real stuff. Go figure!

  Perhaps the biggest critic of my “poor Tom” theme is the current director of the Wisconsin School of Social Work, Stephanie Robert. She is, hands down, one of my favorite social work types and a great head person for the school. Better still, she reads my books. My best guess is that she did something truly despicable in her prior life and this is her karmic penalty, reading my books that is. She praised my first fictional work, saying that my rendering of female characters was so authentic despite my being a clueless male. My point is that I must possess a strong feminine side…a claim that, when made by me, results in most women present losing their lunch. On the other hand, she believes that the story of woe regarding my experiences in the social work school is way too chipperish. On that point, I suspect she is bang-on. Like I said, I am a whiner.

  Nevertheless, h
ere is how I look at it. Bottom line, I fully agree that I am not suited for a conventional faculty role. As I keep saying, I am not a traditional scholar, far from it. A clinical position, though, is much different. Such a position reflects the rhetoric that could be found (and ignored) in many university mission statements of my era. Among other things, these often call for faculty to synthesize and translate research for the public good. That is what I did all the time. I pushed to realize that part of the university mission that gets overlooked given that traditional faculty do not get rewarded for doing it. If you don’t reward something, it won’t get done.

  I can state, even without too much blushing, that I contributed much to the academy. I excelled as a teacher, helped manage the premier poverty research entity in the country, brought in millions of dollars either directly or indirectly, worked my fanny off flying around the country giving talks, consulted on a variety policy and programmatic matters at all levels of government, maintained an exemplary reputation in the policy and philanthropic worlds, wrote reams of papers and reports on policy and program evaluation matters that were very well received, maintained a place on the speed dials of media types from around the country, and developed networks for bringing research and researchers to policymakers. That is just a partial list. For a scholar, however, only narrow, technical peer-reviewed papers count and those bored me to tears. They always struck me as being as being narrow, ritualistic, and excessively selfish.

  In the end, this is a story about more than me. It is about the notion of culture and fully appreciating the professional environment in which we function. So, let me now broaden out my personal whining in a way that embraces more important, or at least more universal, issues. I start this more significant, if somewhat pedantic, story by noting some wider implications of professional culture on the policy world. There are two primary inputs to the creation of our personal world view…professional training and institutional position. Training is never only technical. You learn both substance and preferred styles for dealing with the world. That is why Law students spend at least one-year learning how attorneys think and write while social workers spend their first year being indoctrinated into the ethos of that profession. Positional influences, your institutional home, recognize that you typically are surrounded by similar types of people in your work setting. Your organizational peers are likely to be very much like you in important ways and thus reinforce the dispositions you bring into a setting through training and background.

  Older theoretical positions tended to see the world rather simply, within a more dichotomous framework. There were academics and policymakers…knowledge producers and knowledge consumers in our lexicon. Karen, who spent a great deal of time working with legislatures, and I quickly recognized that the real world is far more complicated. Initially, we developed several major categories that could easily be positioned along a theoretical continuum: basic researchers, applied researchers, intermediaries, policy doers, policymakers. It doesn’t take rocket science to postulate that those positioned at the extreme end of the continuum would be most unlike one another and have the greatest difficulty communicating or even understanding one another. Those residing in the middle are operating in institutions that incorporate features of both worlds. For example, knowledge brokers like trade organizations and issue-oriented agencies (e.g., child poverty) want to use evidence and analysis that passes the methodological sniff test but are acutely aware of the complexities that make the doing of policy far from a purely academic exercise.

  Let us take two actors, one from each end of the continuum. At one end would be your typical academic toiling in a major research university. At the other might be a legislator or a politically-appointed executive agency head. The possibilities of misunderstanding and miscommunication between these two worlds are endless including breakdowns in information needs, work cultures, and communication preferences, among other areas. But an important question remains…what do these hurdles look like? Experience in this regard is a great teacher, and I saw a lot walking back and forth between these two alien worlds.

  Let’s look at a graphic employed in a paper we just finished that focused on how state legislators viewed research and researchers, using responses from state politicians from Indiana and Wisconsin. The graphic lays out the critical dimensions of culture:

  Domains and Themes of Professional Culture

  Domains Themes

  Work Context (A) Decision-Making Process—How does the decision-making process work? What factors and processes influence how decisions are made and the ways the work product gets done? (B) Work Environment—What kinds of pressures do inhabitants face in this professional world? What is the dominant pace of activity and to what kinds of time pressure are they exposed?

  Interaction Preferences (A) Preferred Communication Style—What communication channels are preferred? How important are interpersonal relationships and how do relationships compare to other influences on getting the job done? (B) Preferred Interpersonal Qualities—What qualities or style contribute to productive interactions? What qualities of style can interfere with effective communication?

  Epistemological Frameworks: (A) Credibility of Knowledge—What processes and methods do individuals use to know what to believe. (B) Decision-Making Criterion—How does this individual make decisions about what types of evidence to acquire to factor into decisions? How do inhabitants screen and sort out conflicting information?

  Influence Loops (A) Effectiveness Strategies—How do inhabitants shape the attitudes and beliefs of others and how are their attitudes and beliefs shaped by others? What ways of presenting information are being most effective? (B) Organizational Signals and Rewards—What defines effectiveness in their professional world? How does an individual define success? What institutional cues do they respond to and which indicators signify success?

  Focal Interests (A) Salient Topics—What substantive topics or challenging problems attract interest and attention? (B) Salient Goals—What is the nature and purpose of policy goals? From whom do ideas come?

  Salient Stakeholders (A) Salient Targets—What constituencies are of prime interest? At whom is the work product aimed? (B) Salient Actors—To whom do inhabitants pay attention?

  Like all tables, this one is as boring as hell, but it is critical to my narrative. It provides clues as where to look when trying to understand miscommunication and misunderstand across actors in different systems. It is along these dimensions that friction points exist between dwellers in separate cultures, or islands as my colleague Karen Bogenschneider puts it. When you run into the natives from a different island, look out for problems. In addition, it might help us see where members within the academy might misunderstand one another if they come from different cultural traditions even if they nominally are from the same general tribe. How effortlessly can scholars from the hard sciences get along with social scientists or university scholars with evaluation-firm researchers?

  How do we make the above table come to life? Easy, we draw upon a wealth of real life experiences for stylized examples. Take your typical academic, sitting in their ivory tower laboring away toward the discovery of ultimate truth. Naturally, they see this quest as timeless, nor do they want to arrive at any ultimate answer. Were that to be the case, they could not end their most recent paper with the standard caveat that more research is needed, accompanied of course by a request for further funding. Normally, our truth warrior would only care what his anonymous peers would conclude as they reviewed the paper for inclusion in a top journal. Beyond the limited group of similarly-situated academic elitists, why would any real academic care? It would do them no good. It could do them harm.

  For the sake of argument, let us assume this paragon of the ivory tower is moved to take his insight to the real world. Perhaps they lost a bet, and this was the penalty imposed on the loser. He or she would approach any meeting in the real world using the same techniques that had always worked in the past. Hell, it always wor
ked before. They would focus on the methodological rigor employed and the lengths they went to ensure that the resulting statistically significant results possess internal and external validity. Just before their audience of policymakers lapsed into a full coma, they would use their assumed hubris to convey the fact that anyone who did not agree that their results deserved immediate policy consideration clearly had to be a cretin and a Philistine deserving immediate approbation.

  The legislator, if that is whom they are addressing, is sitting there looking across the table with increasing incredulity. He or she has concluded that the first order of business after this meeting is to fire the idiot aide that scheduled this clown in the first instance. If the legislator were savvy enough, they might point out that statistical significance is not the same a substantive significance. The former could represent rather small differences when larger sample sizes are employed. Why wasn’t this clown informing them about relevant findings in a clear manner that might have applicability to the issues on their plate.

  Policymakers focus on the issues relevant to their world and in ways that stress applicability and not abstract additions to our theoretical understanding of things. The two worlds talk past one another. Okay, this egghead might have a point but why am I listening to him or her. The underlying issue is not of concern to his constituency back home, no one has brought a compelling story that might elicit action on his or her part. Besides, no one is pushing this in the legislature no matter the merits. Finding co-sponsors would be a pain and might demand that he give up chits he needs for his priority items. There are only so many favors you can call in. What time is my next appointment?

  Furthermore, the egghead has not considered the immediate fiscal implications. Sure, there might be savings down the road, but the political world is dominated by the next election. The policymaker could already envision oppositional ads from his next opponent decrying the expansion of unnecessary government during these difficult economic times. It makes no difference whether there is significant money involved, the big-spender label is almost impossible to shake once established and remains no matter the worth of any costly proposal. The policymaker cannot envision this egghead engaging the typical voter with his complicated charts and graphs in a convincing way. By this time, communication surely has ceased.