by Tom Corbett
The big grant went to Northwestern-Chicago. They were our natural competitors though other strong institutions had entered the fray. Their team was led by Rebecca Blank and a host of other heavy weight researchers such as Greg Duncan. They were clearly capable of beating us in a straight-out competition, and probably did. However, we later found out that we were handicapped from the start, perhaps fatally so. Our old friend, Larry Mead, was on the external review committee. Larry had said more than once that his work with Mike, Bernie, and I in Kenosha was one of his favorite projects. Apparently, though, he felt slighted by many of the mainstream economists at the Institute. He later wrote that IRP was too wedded to the anti-poverty agenda of the past. He felt the Institute was overly attached to the Negative Income Tax and other income transfer schemes as a solution to poverty.
Our methods and our predispositions, he argued, did not permit us to fully explore the behavioral and cultural dimensions of poverty nor solutions that went beyond manipulating economic incentives in conventional ways. His strong views swayed others on the review committee, Wendell Primus much later obliquely hinted as much to me. While there may be some truth in what Larry believed, he did go astray in one way. Every other serious competitor would rely heavily on the same type of economists, the same methods, and the same substantive priors as did IRP. That is simply where the world was in the mid-1990s.
I recall a lunch I had with Larry several years after the competition when he was in Madison for something or other. I did not raise the sensitive issue of the competition, but I was fascinated by where he took the conversation. He was deeply unhappy professionally. He felt disrespected by his peers at New York University and believed he had been treated badly by the number crunching economists and political scientists who now dominated life within the academy. He had a point, his name did not come up a lot when organizers of events were pulling together “experts” on various poverty topics, at least not as often as you would imagine given his national reputation. Ron Haskins, a conservative icon, once expressed to me his ire that Larry was so often overlooked in poverty discussions.
Larry expressed himself well both verbally and in writing. In fact, he may well be the most articulate man I know. But he also was somewhat narrow in his approach to issues. He argued that government programs should be used to reward and facilitate appropriate behaviors. It is not a bad point at all. He simply had trouble moving on to other perspectives and issues. My guess is that people did not invite him to things since they knew what he was going to say no matter what the issue of the day was.
Since no second prize had ever been discussed there was much speculation on why IRP got this Miss Congeniality award in the first place. Some felt that no one wanted to go to Donna Shalala and tell her that they were putting IRP out of business. Perhaps there was a realization that the review process had been biased or tainted a bit. On the other hand, perhaps ASPE had grown to like IRP and those of us who spent time there. I recall a couple of ASPE staff mentioning how much they liked Dan Meyer and myself (Dan also spent periods of time at ASPE) and thought that proof that IRP must be populated with nice people. Obviously, they had not met many of the economists (Dan is a Social Work professor).
On the other hand, maybe they did not want to lose the institutional capacities and human capital that had been built up over some three decades. There is at least one small piece of evidence that ASPE did not want to lose what IRP had developed over time. Don Oellerich and Becky Blank (from the winning team) were in Madison for some IRP event soon after the awards were made. Bobbi, Becky, Don, and I sat on the deck of Bobbi’s house which lies on the shore of Lake Mendota. It was a lovely spot for an awkward set of negotiations. Don was hoping we would share mailing lists and perhaps other goodies with our competitors. Feelings were yet a bit raw, but we ended up being quite cooperative. There really isn’t anything personal in all this nor is there much to be gained by stonewalling at this point. I do recall Phil Certain, the Letters and Sciences Dean at the time, asking me to nose around to see what might have happened. I never did since what is done is done. The role Larry played eventually came out in any case. But as I mentioned, Chicago-Northwestern was a powerhouse competitor. Perhaps they would have won without any help.
Day-to-day, you could not see all that much of a difference in the aftermath of the bad news. The university kicked in more support for the key staff members. The belt was tightened even more. And everyone went out to more aggressively seek external funds. For a while, I did run into some embarrassing moments in the outside world which thought that IRP was about to go out of business. I would run into people at conferences who treated me as if my pet dog had just died. There was pity in their voices as they expressed their condolences. “But we are still there,” I would say, and I just knew they thought I was in denial of the inevitable. They would pat me on the head and mutter, “Of course it is.”
One day, I was serving on a panel for the plenary session at APPAM (the national public social policy organization). Judy Gueron, the CEO of MDRC (arguably the leading welfare evaluation firm in the country) was a co-panelist and seated next to me. Before we started she turned and offered me a job. I had spoken at MDRC, had run into Judy who knows how many times in the past, and now she is offering me a job out of the blue? I thanked her for her gesture but really, IRP is alive and well. Eventually people got with the program and the expressions of sympathy died out. It was a consolation to know, however, that if I had been booted out of the UW as a fraud, I might have had opportunities to fool other institutions for a while.
Fast forward a few years and we had another competition. Karl Scholz is now director and I am still associate director. First, another quick digression on Karl as director! Karl is a proficient technical economist who is also interested in policy having served in staff positions for the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and the Department of the Treasury. I knew Karl had served at CEA under Bush the father and assumed early on he was a Republican. During a conversation about whether we had any Republicans at IRP I offered up Karl Scholz as an example of one. This was early in his tenure at UW. My observation brought forth much hilarity from the economists in the room, particularly Art Goldberger, just about the Economics Department’s premier econometrician at that time. As a junior faculty member, Karl also thought his love for policy surely would doom his tenure chances at UW where, as mentioned before, the economics department had swung toward the theoretical side of things. As his tenure decision approached, he started looking for where to land next after the ax fell. I recall him once mentioning the University of Oregon as a place he was considering. Then, to his surprise, he received tenure. Even so, I sensed he had some reservations about staying in Madison.
When Bobbi was about to step down as director, we put together a search committee for her replacement. I recall trying to sell Dan Meyer on the prospect. He felt he wasn’t quite ready to take it on or simply was too smart to take the job, it was never clear which. There were a couple of economists who expressed interest but neither of them generated much excitement on the committee. Karl’s name kept coming up. Unfortunately, he was off in D.C. serving a stint as Deputy Secretary for Tax Analysis at Treasury. Bobbi and I concluded that he was the man we wanted. We just have got to convince him of that fact. The problem was that Karl, as I had long suspected, was not sure he wanted to return to Madison after his D.C. stint was over. He was talking about heading to the Dartmouth Business School. In a very recent conversation with Karl, he now expressed how happy he is to be at Wisconsin.
Undeterred at the time, Bobbi and I set up a dinner with him and his wife, Melissa, while we both were in D.C.on other business. He was in a great mood. The federal budget had just passed after the usual political fights, and he had been named by Vice President Gore as a key player in the Rose Garden celebration. When Melissa left the table for a moment, Bobbi and I pounced, he was the man for the job as our next Director, the savior of IRP. He didn’t quite see it that way though.
His head dropped on the table and he kept repeating…no, no, no, over and over!
I piped up with “Perhaps this was an inopportune time for us to raise the issue. We can come back to it later.” He gave us no hope that later would make any difference as he raced back to Treasury after dinner. There really is no rest for the wicked who take these high-level Washington positions. Bobbi and I were not to be deterred by this tiny setback. She opined that we had to work on Melissa. After all, everyone knows that women make the big decisions, men just think they do. It was inconceivable to us that Melissa would want to leave Madison for Hanover, New Hampshire and Dartmouth College unless you like the wilderness. Okay, Karl’s best friend was there, and it is an Ivy League school. But really, Hanover? You might as well be on the other side of the moon. We worked on Melissa and, lo and behold, Karl returned to Madison and became the next director.
For this next competition there would be a national poverty center (the big prize) and three regional centers. You could apply for either the big or secondary prize or both. Applying for both meant more work but you hedged your bet somewhat. What you did not know is whether simultaneously applying for both would diminish your chances for the big prize. Presumably the review processes were independent but still. Karl wanted to go for broke and only apply for the big prize. I, being more cautious by nature, argued that we should go for both, just in case. We went back and forth, eventually my opinion prevailed.
This time around we were less democratic, or at least Karl was as I recall. We solicited input, but the writing was more closely held at the center. No matter, the outcome was essentially the same. We got one of the regional poverty center designations while the big prize went to the University of Michigan. Can you guess who now headed the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at Michigan…the same Becky Blank! She was ably helped by Sheldon Danziger, a past IRP director. Sheldon and his spouse, Sandy, moved to Ann Arbor several years earlier when it became apparent that Sandy would not land a faculty position at U.W. On the other hand, the School of Social Work at Michigan was happy to have her.
Could I have argued the wrong position? Perhaps our going for both prizes diminished our chances for the big prize somewhat. We will never know, and I will always have that doubt in the back of my mind. I sense that Karl felt quite bad about not getting the big prize. For me, IRP was still alive. I ran into Greg Duncan soon after at some conference. Greg was still at Northwestern, one of the two institutions that had just lost the big prize. He asked me to join him for breakfast and poured out his disappointment at losing the main poverty center brass ring. Everyone is very good at this level. These competitions are fierce and the final decisions always a close-run thing.
The continuing designation of IRP as a federally recognized research center still had benefits, even with a minimum-wage level of funding. It opens so many doors. The university still kicked in and the IRP name yet had much credibility out in the wider world. Though IRP was technically a regional research center, most outsiders never made that distinction. IRP was IRP. My WELPAN work and my other work on service integration in the surrounding states, as well as Dan and Maria’s work on child support in Wisconsin, made it look like we were focusing on the Midwest region while business as usual could prevail for most in the IRP family.
There was yet another competition in 2011. This time there was no big prize. Three institutions would be named as Poverty Centers. Tim Smeeding (the new IRP director), Jennifer Noyes, and Kathryn Magnuson led the IRP for this round. Again, IRP survived while Michigan as well as the other existing regional centers such as the Universities of Washington and Kentucky lost out. The other two centers winning in this round were located at Stanford and the University of California-Davis. In the end, all the other big names such as Northwestern, Chicago, and Michigan faded had from sight. IRP kept chugging along as the little engine that could.
Finally, there was one last competition in 2016 which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of IRP. This time around, Lawrence (Lonnie) Berger, Jennifer Noyes, and Kathryn Magnuson led the charge. Before the competition, I had a lunch with Jennifer who set up a meeting with Lonnie based on our conversation. My point was that there was not enough money to support original research. That research would happen in any case, just be supported by other sources. The institute ought to focus on complementing the work of ASPE to stimulate more useful research both by better connecting the knowledge production and consumption communities and by translating that work more effectively for decisionmakers. Lonnie was interested but cautious. I don’t blame him. No one wants to be the last director of IRP.
When the Request for Proposals (RFP) came out, I had nailed it. It was merely a hunch on my part but sometimes you get lucky. Perhaps this gave IRP an advantage going forward by getting them to think about such themes early on. In any case, the institute won this last competition to become the one and only poverty research center once again. After a half century, we are back to the beginning. The analytic center for poverty research is back in Madison, the only site to have endured in this role continuously since the inception of the War-on-Poverty.
A while back, I glanced over the IRP staff directory. There were over eighty on-campus affiliates listed from a variety of campus schools: Economics, Political Science, Sociology, Social Work, Law, Consumer Sciences, Education, Women’s Studies, Population Health, Public Policy, Education Policy Studies, Commercial Arts, History, Business, Human Development and Family Studies. In 1969, there were some thirty campus affiliates mostly drawn from two departments—Economics and Sociology. In addition, the IRP of today had almost fifty staff members including graduate students who helped with various research projects. Obviously, the small federal investment leverages much more in outside research support.
The reach of IRP beyond the university is broader than ever. The Institute oversees a network of research centers known as the U.S. Collaborative of Research Centers. The participating universities are: Columbia University, Howard university, Stanford University, the Universities of Kentucky, Michigan, U.C.- Irvine, U.C. Davis, and the University of Washington. Many of these formerly were federally sponsored research centers. Moreover, there are over ninety off-campus affiliates associated with IRP. Their home institutions represent a who’s who of top research entities: University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brookings Institution, University of California-Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, New York University, Cornell, UCLA, and so many others. There is even a foreign presence with affiliates from the University of British Columbia, the University of Western Ontario, and Cambridge University.
I mention all this only because I take some small measure of pride in being there when it all could have unraveled. There were dark moments when I could easily see the lights being turned out and the name becoming a mere memory. Did IRP solve poverty? No, of course not! In fact, a small joke I often used in talks and lectures was to show the aggregate poverty rate from 1959 to the present day. Then I would point to the year on the horizontal axis when IRP came into existence. The poverty line had been declining to that point and then flattened out for a time before rising and falling over the succeeding decades. See, I would tell the audience, here is proof that the worst thing you can do is research a problem. I always go for a laugh.
I came to love the place…the people, the work, the vision and principles that motivated all of us. It surely was my special ‘sheltered’ workshop. Really, just think about it a minute, who else would have put up with me so long? Okay, my spouse has!
Well, you now have taken a tour with this wandering academic through his policy candy store and, in this chapter, spent time in the edifice where it is located. Of course, that is not correct since this is a virtual store that lies in the mind. I hope you found the offerings worth a visit, if not enticing. I enjoyed my time in the store very much. Sure, as a kid, I wanted to b
e a writer and, even now, that strikes me as my natural niche. Still, I cannot think of a better fallback vocation to keep me fed and housed than being a policy wonk. Doing public policy never got old…the quests remained complex, intriguing, and even dramatic at times. I can say one thing with conviction, I never got bored.
What a way to fill up a life!
POSTSCRIPT
I hope the joy and satisfaction I experienced throughout my career has come through in the preceding pages. In recent years, I have enjoyed many discussions with peers who grew up in the post-World War II period as I did and came of age in the 1960s. While we faced some angst generated by the Cold War and the Vietnam conflict, we also considered ourselves extraordinarily fortunate for one reason on which we all seemed to agree. We emerged into adulthood at a time when opportunity seemed endless.
In college, I cannot recall ever taking a class because it was essential to my future employment prospects. In truth, I never worried that much about the future other than not being sent off to fight in a conflict I desperately opposed. We had an implicit faith that if we prepared our minds as best we could, and if we honed our cognitive abilities in a way that fostered critical thinking, the rest would fall into place. I took courses that interested me. I spent hours debating the great issues of the day. I devoted great energy and much time doing things I thought might make the world around me just a little better. Despite such self-indulgence, it never occurred to me that I might be sacrificing my future. Such a naïve faith would seem ridiculous today. Somehow, though, it worked for me and I suppose most of my peers back then.
We emerged into adulthood when America was yet a land of opportunity. A totally unremarkable working-class kid like myself could work his way through college all the way to a Doctorate absent any help from my economically struggling family. No question, hard work was involved. I started delivering papers as a boy of ten or eleven and never stopped working after that. Now, I look back and wonder who that young man was that headed off to his morning college classes after working the eleven-to-seven shift at a hospital. It simply was what you did.
