by Tom Corbett
Then the steps got larger. Soon after J. Jean Rogers, who long had disliked IRP, resigned as head of W-2 to take another state position, I got a call from the secretary of the Department of Workforce Development, where W-2 was now housed. Linda Stewart wanted to meet with me. I was intrigued, to say the least. When the appointed time came, I told Bobbi Wolfe that I was headed up for this meeting and would let her know what was up upon my return. However, when I arrived and informed the secretary’s receptionist what I was there for, she gave me a blank stare. No such meeting was scheduled. The secretary wasn’t even in Madison that day.
What was going on? Did someone play a malevolent joke? Did I dream that such a meeting had been planned? Had I finally lost what was left of my mind, which was never particularly robust to start with? The heavy betting was on the last option. I had to drag my fanny back to IRP and explain there was no such summit meeting. I got another one of those “he is finally losing it” looks from Bobbi. A couple of weeks later, the mystery was resolved. The secretary had not gone through the regular channels to put the meeting on the calendar, and then was called out of town suddenly. Perhaps she wanted to keep it somewhat secret. In any case, it was rescheduled.
Fearing another dream or hallucination, I kept the second appointment secret. But they knew what I was talking about when I arrived, and I was ushered into a small meeting room. Soon, in walked a tall, attractive blond. I knew this was not the secretary who was a short, black woman. This mystery woman turned out to be Jennifer Noyes who had just replaced J. Jean Rogers as head of W-2. In fact, it was her first day in the new position. We introduced ourselves to one another and waited, neither of us knew what was going on. Then Linda walked in and the meeting began. Yes, the secretary wanted a new relationship between her department and IRP. Were we interested? I assured her we were and would be most willing to work with her. We agreed to keep in touch. Not much happened for a while. I believe the secretary began to hit a rough patch politically and became distracted. However, I did run into Jennifer once or twice and we did have that disastrous trip to D.C. where we exchanged life stories during the long delays. Perhaps it is more accurate to say I told her mine as she proceeded to slash her wrists in despair.
Around this time, the state put out bids soliciting proposals to write White Papers on some of the challenges facing W-2. They offered modest amounts of money and, given that I was over funded in any case, the work was not that attractive to me. But I really wanted to know if I was still blacklisted. So, I bid on one of them. When I got it, and eventually a second one, I had real tangible evidence that the world might be changing. Evidence of a real thaw came about when I invited Jennifer to a meeting at IRP. By this time, I was sufficiently encouraged to seek a new understanding. She agreed and Karl Scholz (then IRP director) and I went up to pick her up and bring her to our place.
A brief note about Karl before continuing. Karl was raised in one of those Midwest farming states that all look alike to me, rural and flat and boring. I do believe his parents were academics though he does possess that look of a fresh-faced farm boy who had spent the morning slopping the hogs. He typically had a wide grin and a friendly demeanor. Growing up, Karl was more interested in basketball than academics. He chose a small school in Minnesota, Carlton College, because that would give him the best opportunity to play college ball. Apparently, he was good, or so he claims, but realized his future lie in scholarship and not professional sports.
He switched his focus to hone his incisive mind and excellent scholarly skills as an economist. He also had sharpened his policy skills with two tours in D.C. For some reason, Karl and I have been trading insults in a good-natured way since the day he arrived on campus. I recall the day when he must have thought I had gotten the upper hand in our ongoing banter. So, he reached back for the best invective in his arsenal. “You…you…social worker…you,” he sputtered from the other side of Observatory Drive. I hung my head in shame with that one, hoping that passing students and faculty had not heard what he had just called me.
On another occasion, I was teeing off on the tenth hole at Blackhawk Country Club. Karl was the guest of another member that day, Mike Knetter, who was dean of the Business School at the time. He has since become a member. In any case, they passed behind me as I addressed my drive, Karl tried to throw me off by yelling out as I swung. No need for that, really, I suck at golf on my own without any distractions. He told me later that Mike chastised him, saying that was quite improper behavior at a Country Club!
Someday, however, I will find this picture I have of Karl, the current dean of Letters and Sciences, and Gary Sandefur, his predecessor in that office. Both are wearing silly costumes and mugging for the camera when they were much, much younger and even more foolish than they are now. The event was some mystery game where you were supposed to play a part in costume while identifying the guilty party. My wife and I had sponsored this fun-filled evening at our house. When I find it, I am sure the National Enquirer will pay me big bucks.
But back to Jennifer and the State-IRP cold war! To this day she says it was an act of courage coming to the institute on her own. Her staff apparently cautioned her against doing it. Either they thought it would get her into political difficulty with the governor, or they believed the rumors that we had instruments of torture somewhere in the basement of Social Sciences explicitly set aside for Republicans and other such enemies of truth and justice. It is true that we have a room called the mole hole where copies of old IRP publications are stored. However, never did I see a single rack or other form of torture there. Admittedly, being forced to read some of those old documents just might constitute torture under the articles of the Geneva Convention.
We chatted loosely for a while. She had not been around when the IRP-State relationship darkened into political hell. But she admitted that her staff had filled her in on the rocky relationship of the past dozen years or so. She was curious as to how we saw things. I was more involved in all this than Karl had been, so I spoke for several minutes about the sad situation. I tried to stress that the animosity was largely one-sided, that most affiliates here had no political agendas though, of course, had opinions. These were scholars first and foremost. They would be guided by evidence more than anything else. The bottom line, as I saw it, is that IRP would welcome any thawing in this cold war and a return to normalcy.
She listened politely. When I finished, she got up and closed the door. “Okay,” she started, “I am willing to take a chance on you guys. But if you ever screw me over I will find out about it and you will be sorry.” Wow, she looked so young and attractive, but she came across like a Mafia hit man. I loved the honesty. This is a woman I could work with, that was for sure. And work together we did. Besides putting the IRP-State relationship back together again, we became good colleagues and friends. As life has a way of working out, Jennifer is now an associate dean working directly for Karl who, as noted, is now dean of Letters and Sciences.
IRP is perhaps the only university-based research entity that had direct access to state automated case files of selected public benefits programs. I helped bring in a talented state worker named Ingrid Rothe who was critical in setting up mechanisms for permitting IRP programming staff to access automated state data files. Some of these technical staff had split appointments between the state of Wisconsin and the university which enabled us to address certain privacy issues. This synergistic arrangement is a stellar illustration of the Wisconsin Idea in practice…the state and the academy working in concert to address public concerns.
Cooperative research and policy analysis now goes on in several program areas including child welfare and child support. I went out to the University of Washington in 2011. At the time, they also had a poverty research center supported by ASPE, much like IRP. The conference was on how to facilitate evidence-based policy making and improve relations particularly with state policymakers. The issue of Wisconsin’s now close relationship with state government was raised sev
eral times. I told them that one critical factor is that, for the past two decades, there has been an IRP associate director who had been recruited from state government. I was the first, Tom Kaplan was the second, and Jennifer Noyes held that position until very recently.
My other contribution to the institute was in the keeping alive the relationship between IRP and ASPE. I recall a question I asked Irv Garfinkel when I first met him on that plane ride sometime in 1974 or 1975. I wondered if federal funding had been jeopardized at all when the Republicans had taken the presidency and began dismantling some parts of the WOP. He replied that they had not experienced any budget problems during the Nixon years. Of course, Nixon turned out to be a rather big spender on social programs even when his rhetoric was tough. Fast forward to the Reagan presidency, now the rhetoric about minimal government and budget austerity had more bite. First, the new administration argued that funding for a federally supported poverty research center ought to be awarded through a competitive process rather than a targeted earmark.
Fair enough, earmarks were not good government. Competition is necessary to keep you on your toes. When IRP subsequently won the competition, the Reagan administration decided to sequester the money or simply defund any poverty research center. This was the first crisis. I recall having to drop something off at Gene Smolensky’s house during this period, perhaps 1982. He invited me in and looked rather down, not surprising since he was IRP director at the time. In fact, either just before or after my visit, he cut a bit of his finger off while mowing the lawn. He was simply too preoccupied by the impending collapse of IRP to focus on what he was doing.
Geno, as he was known, obviously wanted to talk. My memory is that we sat in his darkened house for some time. He had none of his normal mirth and humor. At one point I asked what he thought would happen. He thought the party was over. The institute would have its name and perhaps the university could pick up a few support staff but, without federal funding, they might not even want to do that. He ended his monologue with a little shrug. He certainly looked like a defeated man to me.
Rumors of IRP’s demise were a bit overstated, however. It turns out that Bob Haveman had served a stint as senior staff on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress just before coming to Wisconsin. While there, he got to know Senator Proxmire’s staff very well. With this access, he asked if an earmark was possible to save the institute since the senator now was a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee. No was the response! The fiscal hawk would hold to his position against earmarks. He did, though, agree to put strong language in the committee report about the value of the Institute and that continued support for its work was both essential and warranted. For the administration to ignore this language would be to pick a fight and there were other fights to be fought. For over a decade, a line was inserted in ASPE’s budget that specified a certain dollar figure that would go to the IRP.
IRP would live for another day though the Republican administrations remained suspicious of the place. It was getting easier to be tarnished politically and conservatives saw the institute as a supporter of big government and discredited ideas like the Negative Income Tax even though many conservative intellectuals such as Milton Friedman endorsed that very concept. ASPE now required a say in the composition of the National Advisory Committee that would comment and even approve, to some extent, the research projects supported by the institute with federal dollars. This was less alarming in practice than it might sound in principle. These were academic appointees. Though some were conservative, my memory is that none were total ideologues. I was not in management during this period but never sensed great tension between the ASPE overseers and IRP leadership. I did hear one assistant secretary half-jokingly say on his first visit to IRP that it was nice to finally see the place to which he was forced to send such a large chunk of his budget.
The bigger problem was that IRP’s budget was shrinking over time in both nominal and real terms. If you looked closely, you could see the changes. There were fewer and then no post-docs. The personal secretary to the director, the typing pool, the gal who did the photo copying all went away. Most significantly, there were fewer and fewer IRP grants to support research and research assistants. IRP did continue to make small grant awards, many to external scholars, but they were very small indeed. One might also think that the overall level of activity would be in decline. This was undoubtedly true but probably not as much as would be imagined. Outside grants began to replace federal dollars. The university picked the costs associated with some of the support staff. The place remained exciting and viable. In fact, some administrative positions lost during the lean years are back in some form or another and other lost support staff are no longer needed.
The Clinton years brought another more serious challenge. I will say one thing for the Democrats, at least the appointees I worked with in the executive agencies, they did believe in good government and in playing by the rules. They looked at earmarks and said this is not the way things should be done. We should have an open competition for university-based poverty centers. I am speculating here, of course, since any such deliberations took place after I had returned to Madison. But given that Donna Shalala, the former chancellor of the Madison campus, was secretary of the department at the time, it is not likely they wanted to simply move the function to another institution as was likely the motivation in the Reagan administration. This was a good government move.
Thus, we geared up for a major competition for both federal blessing, as well as their money, as the poverty research center. At ASPE, the details of managing the national competition were assigned to Don Oellerich and Matt Stagner. I suspect that the appearance of balance played a role here. Both men were very smart and capable. Don, whom I described earlier, had received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. No one wanted to put him in the position where favoritism might be playing a role. Matt, on the other hand, earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago which, in fact, would be one of our main competitors. Matt had distinctive red hair and round face that easily broke into a pleasant smile. He had a quick wit so made a good partner for the playful banter I always enjoyed. We grew into good friends over the years.
In the run up to and during the competition, we all had to walk on eggshells. No one could talk about anything that could be interpreted as advantaging one competitor over the other. Since it was natural to run into Matt or Don this made conversation strained indeed. “How is the weather there in Washington?” “Hot and humid, you moron, what do you think?” As the competition approached, I increased my presence out there in the so-called real world. I wanted to make the Institute as visible as I could. I was painfully aware that things had changed drastically since the place was established in 1966. Back then, there were a paucity of think tanks and evaluation firms to which the federal government could turn for rigorous analytical work on social issues. By the 1990s, the Washington landscape was dotted with such organizations, most of which were more responsive than any university could be and peopled by staff who were accustomed to interacting with policymakers. On a day-to-day basis, the ASPE staff did not think of IRP or any university for that matter as a go-to place.
Putting together the proposal was a painful process. In retrospect, I imagine it is easier to write a proposal from scratch, with a clean slate so to speak. You do not have to incorporate a lot of the baggage accumulated over the years or make what you have been doing for so long seem fresh and exciting. How do you balance the tried and true with the innovative and provocative? In the end these are subjective decisions. It is a good thing that Bobbi Wolfe and I worked so well together. Had we not, this would have been a total nightmare.
We did employ a rather democratic approach to writing the damn thing. Bob Haveman wrote the long introduction that summarized what we knew and didn’t know about poverty. We then brought in affiliates to do first drafts of sections where their individual ideas and strengths might be highlighted. Bobbi Wolfe was sch
eduled to participate in an international conference in Portugal in the middle of all this. We faxed a draft copy to her which came out the other end in one long script with increasingly larger print size for some reason. She spent all her free time editing this long, continuous scroll that wound throughout her hotel room. After all this, we tried mightily to weave the whole buffet into an appetizing entree that we hoped made some sense.
The process was a tense, grueling ordeal. With so many cooks stirring the pot, there were numerous disagreements about approach and tone. Egos were bent as various affiliates felt their ideas were not prominently displayed or their contributions to IRP sufficiently appreciated. It was like walking on eggshells to keep everyone happy. I was very glad when Dan Meyer, an IRP affiliate with business in D.C. at the time, hand delivered the proposal to ASPE officials. After the first blush of relief, however, I found the waiting much worse than developing the damn thing in the first place. I would be in D.C. for some event and run into some of the ASPE folk. Since we could not discuss the competition, I would try to tease something out of their expressions and body language. Did Don or Matt or Ann or Wendell or Canta look me in the eye or not. Was that an expression of sympathy I just saw? Am I a total paranoid nutcase or what? My concerns, however, were not frivolous. Some thirty years of history were at stake as were the jobs of numerous staff.
The end came in an unexpected way. My phone rang one day. It was Don Oellerich from ASPE. What could we do with half-a-million per year over several years? What could we do? Not much, I thought! Now what should I do? We obviously did not get the big prize but what was this, the consolation prize? This was surprising, no consolation prize ever was mentioned. Should I start by negotiating for more, sound outraged, sound grateful? I must have signaled someone to get Bobbi because I recall she appeared in my doorway. I mouthed the offer and she looked as stunned as I was. Then I just went ahead and carefully told Don we would do the best we could, watching Bobbi as I said the words to see if she disagreed. She didn’t correct me or, if she did, forgave me quickly.
