Confessions of a Wayward Academic Read online

  Selected Praise for the Author’s Nonfiction Works:

  “Tom Corbett’s The Boat Captain’s Conundrum is a winning performance.”

  —Forward Clarion Book Review

  “Corbett takes a topic often shrouded in numbers and dense writing and turns it into an intellectual, yet conversational memoir.”

  —U.S. Review of Books

  “A long-time policy wonk delivers an engrossing look at his work fighting poverty in government and academic settings.”

  —Kirkus Review

  “I enjoy his writing style, it was comfortable yet candid, like listening to a respected relative recount their own life with unabashed honesty.”

  —Pacific Book Review

  “Corbett imparts an enormous amount of wisdom and humanity.”

  —Clarion Review

  Reviews of the author’s fictional works:

  “Palpable Passions delivers a compelling story arc infused with historical fact that should appeal to readers…”

  —Blue Ink Reviews

  “The book feels like a screenplay; its dialogue is abundant and punchy, its landscapes well defined, and its characters have significant bonds. Palpable Passions uses bright, earnest characters to show that a microcosm can be as complicated as the big picture.”

  —Foreword Book Review

  “Tenuous Tendrils by Tom Corbett is a compelling journey from exile to redemption. Like its characters, the book is quite clever and features an abundance of humor. Many heavy scenes are punctuated by conversations about the futility of war and the humanitarian failings of government also feature omniscient narrative wit that keeps the text from being bogged down by sentiment and allows the character’s personalities to shine.”

  —Clarion Review

  “Corbett has created a captivating novel. The book title perfectly describes the fragile thread that spirals around each individual…to create an enthralling story that anyone will love to read.”

  —U.S. Review of Books

  “Corbett obviously loves to tell stories. Tenuous Tendrils by Tom Corbett is a captivating read with engaging vignettes which paint a picture of a retired professor, his life, and the connections which bind everything together.”

  —Pacific Review of Books

  “This is…a fully rendered tale. Those interested in the complexity of relationships will find some rewards here.”

  —Blue Ink Reviews

  Amazon Reader Reviews for Tenuous Tendrils and Palpable Passions.

  “A penetrating look into the human soul and the fragility of relationships.”

  “Tenuous Tendrils is a conversational and meditative look back on a man’s life. I really like the depth of detail that the author brought to these characters.”

  “This book was incredibly personal on so many levels. Overall, I found this to be an extremely touching and educational read.”

  “I personally loved this book. It was refreshing and thoughtful.”

  “The overall story is incredibly genuine, realistic to the time limits it covers and thoughtful. Each time I put down the book I found it moderately difficult since I wanted to know what would happen next.”

  “Excellent characterization and historical facts make this a compelling story as hope overcomes despair.”

  “Tom Corbett’s “Palpable Passions” is the perfect combination of fact and fiction as it educates its readers about current events in our world today.”

  Other Books by the Author

  Confessions of a Clueless Rebel (Hancock Press, 2018)

  Palpable Passions (Papertown Press, 2017)

  Tenuous Tendrils (Xlibris Press, 2017)

  The Boat Captain’s Conundrum (Xlibris Press, 2016)

  Ouch, Now I Remember (Xlibris Press, 2015)

  Browsing through My Candy Store (Xlibris Press, 2014)

  Return to the Other Side of the World with Mary Jo Clark, Michael Simmonds, Katherine Sohn, and Hayward Turrentine (Strategic Press, 2013)

  The Other Side of the World with Mary Jo Cark, Michael Simonds, and Hayward Turrentine (Strategic Press, 2011)

  Evidence-Based Policymaking with Karen Bogenschneider (Taylor and Francis Publishing, 2010)

  Policy into Action with Mary Clare Lennon (Urban Institute Press, 2003)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are many people that contributed to the production of this book in big and small ways. I received input on an earlier version of his book from several colleagues including Karen Bogenschneider, Sheldon Danziger, Dennis Dresang, Mary Fairchild, Irv Garfinkel, Bob Haveman, Robert Moffitt, Joel Rabb, Ann Sessoms, Unmi Song, Matt Stagner, and Barbara Wolfe. Most were helpful in reading portions and making sure my faulty memory was not playing tricks on me, some provided encouragement. Robin Snell and Dana Connelly helped with various logistics. In addition, I want to thank Carol Lobes very much for reading through the whole draft and making numerous editorial suggestions, she is a trooper.

  Finally, I would like to thank Mike Middleton and Eileen Snyder of Hancock Press for their encouragement and assistance in making this project come to life.

  CONFESSIONS OF A WAYWARD ACADEMIC

  Copyright © 2018 by Tom Corbett. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law. Every effort has been made to ensure that credits accurately comply with information supplied. We apologize for any inaccuracies that may have occurred and will resolve inaccurate or missing information in a subsequent reprinting of the book.

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN hardcover: 9781948000239

  ISBN softcover: 9781948000222

  eISBN: 9781948000253

  This work is dedicated to many people but mostly to my devoted spouse, Mary Rider, who put up with many absences over the years as I ran around the country tilting at just one more policy windmill. She and our adorable Cavalier King Charles, Ernie, who unfortunately is no longer with us, would greet each of my returns home with enthusiasm. I must admit though, Ernie greeted me with a good deal more enthusiasm than did my spouse. I suppose he knew no better. Now we have a cute black Shih Tzu appropriately named Rascal. He is wise enough to ignore me totally.

  Sheldon Danziger, Irv Garfinkle, and Robert Haveman were early Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) Directors who helped me a great deal as my career evolved. Frustrated, Sheldon finally kicking me out of the doctoral program with what I feel was an unearned terminal degree (a Ph.D.). Bob taught me much about thinking like a policy wonk, as we worked together on Wisconsin welfare reform issues in the late 1970s. Irv demonstrated for me a seminal truth that an academic could both be a scholar and be passionate about change in the real world. Another colleague, Karen Bogenshneider, has been extremely supportive of me as a purveyor of the written word, almost embarrassingly so.

  In addition, there are three individuals important to my development who are no longer with us. Irv Piliavin provided me with an opportunity to transition from state government to the university. Robert Lampman was an iconic figure in poverty research, often thought of as a godfather of the War-on-Poverty and the man most responsible for the Institute for Research on Poverty being located at the University of Wisconsin. Despite his fame and stature, he was a wonderful and kind man who always treated me with far more respect than I deserved back when I had no academic standing whatsoever. Finally, Bill Prosser was a longtime official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He was a good friend of the Poverty Institute and to me personally.

>   While most of my academic colleagues were trained as economists, there are a couple of social work types I want to mention. Stephanie Robert, now director of the Wisconsin Social Work Program, has been supportive of my writing compulsion from the beginning. In addition, Jennifer L. Noyes, more a management guru than a social worker, proved a wonderful colleague toward the end of my career, and a good friend. Jennifer, along with Stephanie, insult me with sufficient regularity to prevent any sign of an ego from developing.

  Ms. Unmi Song, as a project officer at the Joyce Foundation, consistently supported my rather crazy notions through several grants despite our tendency to bicker with one another, a fact that obscured much mutual affection. Finally, there were many public officials at all levels of government who taught me so much about doing public policy. I cannot thank them all, but I am indebted to each of them.

  “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

  —Confucius

  “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

  —Nelson Mandela

  “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”

  —Albert Einstein

  “The ultimate authority must always rest with the individuals own reason and critical analysis.”

  —Dalai Lama

  “Your life has purpose. Your story is important. Your dreams count. Your voice matters. You were born to make an impact.”

  —Someone who does not know me

  CONTENTS

  How To Read This Book

  Preface

  Chapter 1; A Candy Store

  Chapter 2; The House Training Of A Policy Wonk

  Chapter 3; Welfare Wars: Storm Clouds Rising

  Chapter 4; The Welfare Wars: Cracks In The Safety Net

  Chapter 5; Welfare Wars: Ending Welfare As We Know It

  Chapter 6; Searching For The Holy Grail

  Chapter 7; A Failure To Communicate

  Chapter 8; To See Things, You Have To Go Out And Look

  Chapter 9; Darkness And Light?

  Chapter 10; Values And Other Inconveniences

  Chapter 11; A Wayward Academic Or The Cultural Disconnect

  Chapter 12; The “Sheltered” Workshop

  Postscript

  Key Sources and Other Resources

  About the Author

  HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

  I thought it wise to provide the reader with a few caveats before they plunge into the text itself. Be advised, this is not a text about the social safety net. It is not a manual for doing social policy, nor is it a history book. You will, however, learn quite a bit about the safety net, about doing policy, and about the history of the transformation of the welfare state and antipoverty policies over the past half century.

  This is a personal memoir of my professional life based largely on what I can still remember. You will see a lot of quotes, some of which I draw from written material and many from memory. They cannot be taken verbatim, though I have not intentionally altered or fabricated anything. I report conversations and events as I recall them. I do provide a list of books cited in the text at the end, as well as a list of many papers, articles, and reports I have written on the topics covered in the text. These are organized by theme, though many products could be placed in more than one category. The book itself is structured in terms of the big themes covered by my professional life. Thus, on occasion, it will look as if I am backtracking at the start of a new chapter. I am merely picking up the thread of the new theme at the point I began (or believe I began) to focus on this specific set of issues. Unlike many academics that prefer to specialize, I was more of the dilettante who moved from topic to topic with the themes often overlapping with one another. Even though the text feels like a novel, at least I hope it does, there are serious lessons for current and would-be policy wonks. The overall tone is light, but the underlying issues and insights can be quite serious.

  Finally, you will notice several articles of mine in the text that were published in Focus, a publication of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. You will also find reports distributed through the WELPAN (Welfare Peer Assistance Network). You can find these papers and so much more on poverty, inequality, and the social safety net at the Institute for Research on Poverty’s web site located at http://www.irp.wisc.edu. Have fun, which is precisely what I had in mind as I created this journey down memory lane.

  PREFACE

  Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

  —Confucius

  In 2014, I wrote Browsing through My Candy Store, a memoir of my career practicing the public policy arts. That book, though enjoying modest sales at best, was well received by members of the academy, by those members of the public who stumbled upon this gem, and by so-called book scouts who ferret out literary finds. That pleased me greatly. My intent was to develop a crossover work that might bridge both the real and the academic worlds. I tried to avoid being so technical that the average reader risked being driven into a deep coma. That is an unfortunate condition I too often witnessed among my university students, especially the undergraduates I taught in early-morning required courses.

  More than once, I called in paramedics to check for signs of life among the apparently lifeless forms sitting in front of me. Chastened by such near-death experiences, among my hostage-like students at least, it became my firm conviction that works of substance do not have to be dreary tomes. In fact, one of my more enduring life goals has been to bring some wit and savoir faire to a policy world normally infused with way too much angst and anger. I think I may just have accomplished that in these pages though, in the final analysis, only the reader can judge my success or failure in that regard.

  Still, why republish an updated version of Browsing? Three reasons: First, the initial effort was not well-marketed, something we hope to remedy this time around. Second, during the summer of 2017, I began receiving numerous phone calls from assorted marketing and publishing firms saying that book scouts loved the work while offering to help push Browsing in the marketplace. One caller breathlessly informed me that Browsing had scored a 90 percent mark in originality—whatever that means. Third, much has changed in the policy world over the past four years, especially at the national political and policy levels. I welcome the opportunity to comment on the dire public policy environment we now confront.

  The original work did not materialize out of thin air. Rather, the birth of my professional memoir was the result of a rather fascinating gestation period. Over the Memorial Day weekend in May of 2009, Peace Corps (PC) volunteers from what was known as the India-44 group gathered in Oakland, California. It was the fortieth anniversary of our return home from service in either Rajasthan or Maharashtra, two provinces located in the western part of India. Whatever our expectations might have been, the reality of the get together proved remarkably personal and rewarding.

  This sharing of experiences and feelings evoked memories and emotions long muted by time and the demands of our frantic lives. Those of us who wished would put thoughts and reflections to paper—what brought us to Peace Corps; what we experienced during training and service; how those experiences shaped our subsequent life; and what those subsequent lives looked like. These reflections served as a kind of palimpsest that uncovered a deeper set of memories for me and the others. Each specific recollection serving as a source for images and feelings long buried under the detritus of a life long-lived, if not well-lived.

  Then it hit me. With a modest, or not so modest, expansion of effort and a slight alteration of focus, my India reflections could serve as inspiration for Tom’s scintillating story as a policy guru or, as I prefer to say, a policy wonk. Such a narrative would surely compete on any futility scale with my fanciful efforts to single-handedly turn India into a developed country way back in the 1960s. With the right marketing, I might be able to hawk this rendition of my professional experiences to
the Pentagon, perhaps as an insidious instrument of torture. Employed with sufficient care, my years in the trenches might replace the infamous waterboarding technique that fell into such disrepute after Vice President Cheney left office.

  I often have ideas, however, which excite me in the moment, yet never see the light of day. Perhaps this vision would be another of those. I was blessed, though, when a couple of people inadvertently pushed me along. One was Michael Simonds, one of my Peace Corps colleagues who helped in developing the two volumes capturing our experiences in India. Michael also wrote a set of personal reflections, one based on his triumphs and tragedies (mostly the latter, in his view) with the women he met through online dating services after his divorce. He asked me to read an early draft, which I found moving, sometimes sad, occasionally humorous, but always entertaining. This is good stuff, I thought.

  Besides, I am eternally grateful for the way Michael pictured me in a chapter of his draft that went all the way back to our final Peace Corps days. He apparently despaired of lucking out with some of the PC gals at a final “going home” party in New Delhi. Unbelievably, he feared competition from me for the affections of the young ladies. He went on to describe me as “tall and dark, with the rugged good looks of someone who could adorn the cover of a romance novel.” Of course, this was just hours before it was discovered that he had a detached retina and was whisked off to a U.S. military base in Germany for emergency eye surgery.

  But the specific origins for this tale of woe may well go back further, to the early days of this century. I was headed to Washington, D.C. for a National Governors Association meeting. At the airport, I ran into the woman who headed the highly touted welfare reform program in Wisconsin known as W-2 or “Wisconsin Works.” Jennifer Noyes had formerly been a policy advisor to Governor Tommy Thompson who, at the time of this trip, was serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. I was then the Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. Now, Secretary Thompson, the former Governor of Wisconsin, did not like the Institute. He did not like me. By extension, Jennifer was required to dislike me as well. But, since we were headed to the same destination, we struck up a conversation.