by Tom Corbett
When I first stepped into the Social Science Building in 1975, I was not cognizant of the significance of IRP or of the long history that the University of Wisconsin played in the development of the country’s social safety net. On the other hand, I surely was aware of the beauty of the place. There was a carillon located outside the sixth-floor entrance (the building is nestled into the side of a hill that slopes down to the lake) from which emanated lovely chimes several times a day. I was also aware of the fierce anti-war demonstrations that had broken out in front of the then Business School located across the street. The spark for the protests was a visit by Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm used in Viet Nam. They were recruiting students about to graduate. On that day, the long-time future mayor of Madison, Paul Soglin (mayor once again and candidate for governor), would be bludgeoned by police and dragged off to jail along with hundreds of other students. That had happened less than a decade earlier than my arrival.
What made U.W. a perfect place for the study of poverty was a history of social experimentation and activism that can be traced back to the turn of the twentieth century. Charles Van Hise, a university president of that era, and fighting Bob LaFollette, a fierce progressive politician and reformer, were classmates and good friends. Their close bonds helped generate a synergistic connection between the university and state government that would grow with time. The ‘Wisconsin Idea,’ most succinctly expressed in the phrase “the boundaries of the university are the boundary of the state,” really took off during the Progressive Era. John R. Commons developed what he called Institutional Economics while working on numerous Wisconsin reforms including Workers Compensation and the Progressive Income Tax. He also supervised many Ph.D. students who furthered the Wisconsin Idea including Edwin Witte who was tapped by President Roosevelt to lead the committee that generated the Social Security Act and other key New Deal ideas. Other acolytes of Commons and Witte flocked to D.C. to help implement and solidify New Deal reforms including Arthur Altmeyer, Robert Groves, and Wilbur Cohen.
Robert Lampman had also studied under Ed Witte. Bob was a classic Midwesterner growing up in a smaller northern Wisconsin town and getting his Economics degree from U.W. He happened to be serving on President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisor’s Committee in the early 1960s when he and Burt Weisbrod authored what turned out to be a seminal chapter in the annual economic report to the president. Bob had been tracking the downward trend in poverty during the post-World War II economic expansion in which all segments of society benefitted. But he cautioned that this rising economic tide would not necessarily lift all boats as Kennedy had once suggested. Some groups, based on physical limitations or racial segregation or geographic isolation, might be left behind. For these remaining boats, further targeted government help would be needed. Many concluded that this chapter served as the intellectual origins of the War-On-Poverty (WOP) that would be declared the following year.
Shortly after, when President Johnson began pushing a poverty agenda far more aggressively than Kennedy probably would have, his generals in the WOP looked around for a place where the heavy intellectual work might be done. Wisconsin seemed a likely candidate with its long history of contributing to progressive policy ideas and given Bob Lampman’s return to the Economics faculty there. The story I heard from those around at the time was that the university did not jump at the idea when it was first presented. Today, if a random federal dime rolled down Bascom Hill, where the campus leaders hide, several U.W. administrators would hurt themselves chasing it.
But those were flush times and there probably were some legitimate concerns about academic freedom or getting too close to government and perhaps risking excessive oversight. Part of university’s initial reluctance involved uncertainty about how to structure such a research entity. Then Chancellor Robert Fleming issued the following directive.
Madison has a great tradition of policy analysis and government service. The Madison campus has an outstanding cadre of researchers dealing with welfare issues, each working in his or her own sphere. Yet, such problems do not fall neatly along disciplinary lines. Policy development and evaluation can only be effective if it is approached in a multidisciplinary way. Let us see if we can bring faculty efforts together in some synergistic way.
In 1966, the Poverty Institute was born. Poverty related research exploded in the next few years. Whereas one would need no more than two or three pages to complete an exhaustive bibliography of poverty in the early 1960s, IRP published some 35 books, 650 discussion papers, and 18 special reports in the first decade or so after its inception. Federal support was generous in those early days, with some $20 million federal dollars alone being allocated over the first several years to support this work (worth over $100 million today).
I walked in the door just as the first decade of IRP’s existence had ended. I was about as low as you could go on the order of merit as they say. In the academy, there is a huge distinction between the regular faculty, where those with and without tenure are ranked accordingly, and the academic staff who barely rise to the rank of noticeable mammals. But even within that lowly species I was without a doctorate at the time. If I were back in India, that would put me among the ranks of the untouchables.
Still, I immediately enjoyed the energy of the place. There was always a buzz of excitement. Papers and reports were being produced at a dizzying pace. I loved going to the brown bags where researchers would talk about their work and where a spirited dialogue would often occur. I loved the team that worked on Irv Piliavin’s welfare decision making project including Stan Masters, a Princeton-trained economist doing a post-doc at IRP, and Tom Macdonald, Irv’s top graduate student. I also got to know many of the other male researchers since I wound up hiring several their spouses on Irv’s project as data collectors. It proved a nice way for them to reenter the work world after helping their husbands through graduate school and raising young children. This got me integrated within the social structure of IRP as I probably would not have done otherwise. It also put me in a touchy situation. I could hardly reprimand most of my staff for poor performance since they were related to the powers that be. It was fortunate that I had no need to do so.
It was a busy place. There were queues to get work done by the large typing pool (in the pre-word-processing era) or to get a document copied, or any of the other staff services such as editing and so forth. I learned early on to appreciate those who can make your life easy or miserable. Walking around as if life owed you everything, which some at the top of the pyramid are tempted to do, is not always a wise policy. Jack Sorenson was the associate director for administration in those days, the man who managed the money. People would often go in and ask for something, often demanding it as the entitled are disposed to do. He would say no almost as a matter of course depending, of course, on the status of the supplicant. I noticed that if you were nice to him, and chatted for a while, a no might turn into “I will see what I can do.”
I was always nice to the administrative staff like Joyce Collins who made the place run on most days. Joyce was as smart as a whip and had an acerbic tongue with quick put-downs. We got along famously. Long retired now, Joyce still, on occasion, looks after my dog when we are out of town. Again, for those readers just starting out in life, be nice to the people who may not look powerful but who are positioned to make your life easier or a living hell. Surviving in a bureaucracy is hard enough. Don’t make it even more difficult by being stupid or arrogant beyond all possibility of remedial help.
In the very early days I recall being reticent to speak up at brown bags or other public events. I always figured I was on borrowed time. Somehow, they let me in this hallowed place and I was getting by with it, at least so far. So, if I were to publicly display my ignorance, as was my wont, I would find a new name on my door and the locks changed. In retrospect, there was probably little real chance of that happening. Irv Piliavin hated the detailed tasks of data collection and that first project of his that bro
ught me to IRP was a data collection nightmare. My reticence did not last long. For all my insecurities, I was seldom shy about engaging even well-known scholars or high public officials. I wonder where that hubris comes from?
We would have these meetings about Irv’s project at 8:30 in the morning, at first to make plans and later to deal with management issues. At these meetings would be the usual suspects…Tom Macdonald, Stan Masters, and few others waiting for Irv to arrive. He inevitably would arrive late. Upon rushing into the room, he would claim once again that his car would not start which eventually became as believable as the dog ate the homework. After a few minutes of him fidgeting in his chair, he would suddenly jump up and say, “I think that is my phone ringing,” before dashing out the door. On cue, Tom Macdonald would shout out to him, “Nice of you to stop by, Irv.” But we managed to keep this complex project on track, and I did come to believe Irv was very thankful to have me around.
In fact, he later put me in day-to-day charge of his next big project, a longitudinal study of the homeless in the Twin Cities. He would be doing this project with Michael Sosin who would eventually leave for the University of Chicago. Now, in some ways the data collection demands were less complex since virtually all of it would be collected through survey instruments that we would design and thus control.
In other ways, the challenges were far more daunting. Think about this, you are trying to do a longitudinal survey of a homeless population. Obviously, I would not testify in court as to the representativeness of the sample. We had to work with those people frequenting selected soup kitchens and homeless shelters who were willing to work with us. Not an easy task since paranoia ran high within this population. We also had to find some way of tracking those who drifted continuously from place to place and tended to fly under the radar. Getting cooperation from a population that is wary of authority was not always easy to say the least. But we did a pretty good job, I must admit.
Between figuring out clever ways to capture needed data and managing project staff, I became increasingly useful to the Institute, at least in my own head. Apparently, though, my most significant contribution to the homeless project was keeping Irv and Mike Sosin from killing one another. Irv was gregarious, outgoing, energetic, and bored by details. Mike was serious, conscientious, disciplined, and paid a lot of attention to details. This was not a match made in heaven. One day, Sheldon Danziger thanked me. “Why?” I asked. “You kept Mike and Irv from killing one another.” I figured preventing a homicide was yet another reason for keeping me around IRP a little while longer. Think of the mess with the blood and all as well as the scandal.
During those early years, there was one person who was unfailingly nice. It was the man most responsible for the institute being at Wisconsin in the first place. Bob Lampman occasionally would catch me in the hall, or stop by my office, and ask if he could pick my brain for a minute. My brain! I can no longer recall what kinds of questions he asked, though I do recollect that he wondered if I might hire a relative of his for some low-level project data position. Most of his questions involved substantive issues though, and I never ceased to be astounded that this icon of poverty research thought I had anything at all to contribute to him.
I recall one day when I was walking along the path that bordered Lake Mendota just outside the Social Science Building. My name was called out and I turned to see Bob moving quickly to catch up with me. He obviously wanted to chat about something. He began commenting on a piece I had written for an obscure IRP series at the time called Notes and Comments where people could articulate emerging ideas that might become actual research projects or papers. I can no longer recall what pearls of wisdom I had committed to paper though I believe the topic had something to do with the relationship between workforce development systems and the welfare system. He went on to praise what I had written and asked a few questions. As we parted, he turned and said to me, “Tom, you keep writing. You have a lot to say.” I was flattered beyond words and surely found some way to dismiss such praise at the time.
Sometime in the 1990s, when it was becoming apparent that Bob’s health was declining, we started chatting in the IRP hallway one day. It turns out that we had both read Nicholas Lehman’s book on the great migration north from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and other northern cities and how this transformed America as we knew it. Somehow, we convinced each other that this book contained a set of issues that deserved broader discussion. In fact, at some later point we invited the author to IRP to discuss this book.
In any case, Bob and I decided to do a brown bag on this work, we somehow concluded that the ideas it contained were provocative. As the day approached, it was clear to me that Bob was declining fast and I was having second thoughts about this joint venture. No one had brown bags like this one, which struck me as little more than a book report. On the day of the event, I probably carried a bit more of the water but thankfully the dialogue was brisk and stimulating, even carrying over to some holiday parties later that same week. I was grateful it did not turn out awkward in any way. I felt honored just to be able to share this moment with him.
That brown bag was, to my knowledge, Bob’s last public appearance. He would die of cancer not long after in 1997. Soon after his passing, I got on the Social Sciences Building elevator and realized I was standing next to two Nobel-Prize laureates in Economics. James Tobin and Robert Solow had come to honor their respected colleague. As I sat listening to several noted IRP affiliates talk about what Bob meant to them, I thought on what he meant to me. Bob was the intellectual godfather of the WOP and spiritual creator of the Institute. Beyond that, he simply was one of the nicest people I have ever come across in my life. He treated me as an equal when I was clearly not. He made me sound wise and profound when I was little more than incoherent. He made me feel important at a time when few knew of my existence or cared. When I think back on his infectious smile, it is hard for me to admit that he really was an economist. I did not think God made them so human or so kind.
IRP now sponsors an annual Lampman lecture where some notable scholar is invited to give a talk. I recall the time that Sheldon Danziger, who most recently headed the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, gave the talk. Sheldon, like many of us, considered Bob a father figure. His voice cracked several times as he tried making a few comments about Bob. I know mine would have as well.
As I think back, there were so many small memories that intrude. One day, Bobbi Wolfe, the director, called me and said to come to the conference room immediately. There were some issues involving IRP that we needed to discuss right away. This must be important to interrupt my nap, I thought as I rushed to the meeting. Perhaps, at last, they realized what an imposter I was. I just knew it could not last forever, but how did they finally figure it out after all these years? When I walked into the crowded room, a hearty happy birthday rang out. My spouse had conspired to surprise me on my fiftieth birthday.
It turns out that her fiftieth would be coming up in a little over two months. Not surprisingly, she was on high alert. “Don’t you dare do this to me,” she said. “I wouldn’t think of it,” I lied. As the day approached, she asked if I had reneged on my promise. I had learned much from spending so much time in Washington. I looked at her without blinking and asserted in my most nuanced Clintonian language, “You have absolutely nothing to worry about.” With her being trained as a lawyer, I thought this ruse had no chance whatsoever. But it worked! After I got my revenge, she accused me of engaging in an untruth. “Perish the thought!” I exclaimed, explaining. “I never said I wasn’t planning a party, I merely said that you had absolutely nothing to worry about.” She gave me that one though there was a moment or two when I feared losing the family jewels.
I loved the rich intellectual life of the place. We had so many conferences and workshops and other events on the eighth floor of the Social Sciences Building and elsewhere on campus. The view from the eighth-floor conference room was particularly breathtaking. You ha
d a panoramic vista of Lake Mendota along with the countryside beyond. You could also see picnic point, a thin peninsula that darted out into this large body of water. As you stroll to the point itself, you can see the State Capitol and city skyline shimmering across the waters.
My cousin’s daughter, Sharon Hennessy, once sent me a magazine article that had a list of the twenty or so most romantic spots in the world. I am not talking about just Madison, or Wisconsin, or even the United States, but the whole world. Picnic point made that list. This seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but I must admit it is a very nice place to walk and does possess romantic possibilities. I also suspect that a few young people probably lost their virginity there including, most likely, the author of that article.
I still smile at the memory of one event there on the eighth floor. The deans of Social Work doctoral programs from around the country were meeting on the Madison campus. An old classmate and officemate of mine from early on, Ann Nichols-Casebolt, then headed the doctoral program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She also was serving as head of this national organization of doctoral program deans. Since the deans were very interested in visiting IRP, Bobbi and I were glad to oblige. We, of course, brought them up to the eighth floor for the spectacular view and I, as associate director and a nominal Social Work type, gave the opening remarks. I have a general stump speech I can rely on in a pinch but do try to tailor my remarks to the audience if I have time. On this fine day, I decided to emphasize a theme in which, amazingly, I believed. I went on about how welfare reform was moving in a direction that would potentially benefit from the contributions of social work and social workers.
