Waiting for your thoughts, Standing Eagle...
 

I start my, admittedly sketchy, indictment of the IOP's shallowness and lack of moral compass on the front page of its website. What could be more typical of the IOP than the first headline under IOP news: "Harvard Crimson: Speechwriter Shares Her Tricks of the Trade"? We don't need to know who the speechwriter is; we need only remark how much more this makes the IOP sound like an apprenticeship (to the guild of political tricksters) than like a place of dialogue and substantive learning. I think it's a VERY typical headline.

The other big element on the IOP website is hard to analyze briefly, but let me state my opinion about it. It's a policy paper on Immigration Reform. Its recommendations are probably fine; I don't know; but what interests me is the choice of subject matter. What exactly is the reason that immigration reform is at the top of the agenda of an Institute of Politics? There are a couple of possible answers, neither of which is really it. Is it a need for better treatment for guest workers or the children of illegals? Or is it a need to protect American resources from foreigners? The answer, of course, as is always the case at the nonpartisan IOP, is Both. Both opposite problems are crucially important, and need to be solved URGENTLY, even though their solutions are mutually contradictory.
http://www.iop.harvard.edu/pdfs/immigration_report.pdf

The real reason immigration reform is so important at the IOP at this moment, of course, is that it's the issue that a party flogged to death in the last election. Since then of course they've showed no interest in actually solving any aspect of it....

Here's a quotation I find particularly typical of the IOP, under the heading of National Security (on the premise that National Security is one of several unrelated topics, others being Education, Guest Workers, and so on, that make Immigration Reform both Singularly Urgent and Wonkishly Multifarious and Nonpartisan): "The 9/11 attacks drastically changed the approach legislators take towards immigration [sic -- no footnote]; they inextricably [sic] linked immigration to terrorism and national security. Though the link between the undocumented and terrorism is tenuous [score one for the wonks! and indeed all the 9/11 hijackers were basically legal], *there is the acknowledgment that any policy proposal should focus heavily on national security."

What interests me is that passive voice: "there is the acknowledgment." Who acknowledges it, and why? The true answer, of course, is that it has to be acknowledged because the insane Republicans are the ones who brought Immigration Reform to the table, as a populist issue they could run on. The reasons they did so -- xenophobia-baiting and fear-mongering -- have no place at a university. But the thing they've brought to the fore is nonetheless considered an important part of the nation's agenda.

Now I don't want to pick on this report too heavily, because it's clear that lemonade is being made from the lemons of cynical electoral politics. But the real question the IOP should be asking is, "How do voters respond to an issue that appears from clear blue sky and is suddenly the most pressing foreign policy issue around? How do parties get away with raising things that were not on the radar at all before and hammering them into being the prime issue of the national discussion?" Instead, the IOP becomes PART OF that parroting of party talking points, and simply has to concede (in what I would call a shameful passage of this admirably wonkish report on immigration reform), on NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER, that "The US has lost control of its Southwest border. Existing immigration policy is inefficient [?] and the reform strategies thus proposed [sic] by Capitol Hill fail to provide a realistic solution to the illegal immigration crisis."

Notice that word: crisis. What makes it a crisis? The fact that one political party calls it one. No footnotes here to really claim that this is a PRESSING problem; sure, it's a problem, and the wonks should work on it (so I don't want to be too hard on this report). But should elections be decided on it? No way. The students who are curious about policy at the IOP however develop this extraordinary Stockholm Syndrome which causes them to accept certain frames from the cynical politicians and then (if they're good students) to work diligently and effectively on a relatively inane agenda. The result could be incoherent -- like this report, which tries to solve opposite 'problems' simultaneously, and lacks a clear goal -- or it could be a total distraction from the real governing matters of the national conversation.

The development of my opinion that the IOP is not a responsible force for improving government in the United States -- at all -- began in earnest in 2004. At the moment in a nutshell my claim is that "politics" is far too divorced from policy; and the ways that those two things go together do not seem to matter. There are, to be sure, the wonky policy groups -- the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw people, if you like; nonentities, basically, in the life of the club -- and then there are the politicos, Slytherin and Gryffindor. These two groups are filled by the Sorting Hat (in this case, whatever party you thought you agreed with in high school), which says that you're either gonna root for the red team or the blue team, and your job is to figure out how the game is played, not to think about how it should be played or what outcomes should result.

Here's how I started to be perplexed and dismayed by the IOPS. At the tippy-top of the agenda in November 2004 in terms of student involvement at the IOP was -- okay, let me find it.

Here it is. One of the founding entities resulting from a program called the Student Policy Group Program, in 2004, focused with laserlike intensity on the issue of -- well, I'll let the founder explain it, from his Crimson op-ed of February 2005:

"A scourge that has spread to all corners of the country, sex trafficking is an issue that must be dealt with immediately [!]. I am starting a policy group at the Institute of Politics, which will feature a three-prong approach: raising awareness on campus and nationwide, conducting research to investigate the full extent of the problem with the help of guest speakers whom we will invite to speak to the group, and publishing a policy proposal with specific recommendations for state and national lawmakers."
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505910

The initial meetings leading to the creation of this group were by far the most visible things the IOP did during the months of October and November, 2004. Indeed, a search of the Crimson during those months reveals only 15 mentions of the IOP. The buildup to the sex-trafficking stuff was plastered all over campus; as for the rest, it boiled down to fifteen mentions in the entire two-month period, October-November, 2004; I'm not sure how to prove to you that this is a woeful performance at the most politically intense and important moment the country has faced for many decades. But I thought the invisibility of the IOP was very puzzling (yes, yes, I know, all the politicos were off working for campaigns and polishing their resumes; but doesn't that beg the question of why their analytical work at the IOP isn't meaningful in itself at election time?). And I thought the incredibly anodyne nature of the sex-trafficking project -- anodyne in the sense of, Who the hell could be in favor of sex-trafficking? -- was absolutely shocking. The country was at its most bitterly partisan moment I hope ever, and the IOP seemed to have gone purposely looking for something with no partisan dimension whatsoever.

Two of the Crimson mentions in October/November 2004 are for polls the IOP did on campus (the ultimate value-neutral exercise --or is it? see below); one of them is about Shimon Peres's visit; one is about a talk by "high-powered husband-and-wife duo: Kathleen Matthews, anchor of ABC-7 in Washington, and her husband Chris, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball” "; one is about a panel on student-athlete voting called "Jock the Vote" (so don't try to pretend the Crimson ignored a lot of smaller events, cuz this one was small); a couple had nothing to do with the IOP really; one was about Nader; one was about the emerging conventional wisdom that "moral values" were the difference in the campaign -- a meme COMPLETELY debunked by the slightest analysis in the weeks that followed, but one flogged mercilessly by the participants, so that the lede was "According to an Institute of Politics (IOP) panel last night, the key disparity in the election was the way Democrats and Republicans employed moral values in their campaigns" (the errors of fact within the quotes in this article are legion, and I recommend it to you; http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=504276); and then there are two pieces on the IOP's trumpeting of the Youth Vote. Here I focus a bit more again before turning to my most important example.

The Youth Vote is a favorite topic at the IOP. The size of the Youth Vote, the rate at which it's growing, the way Youth are a constituency that demands attention, etc., etc., are topics CONSTANTLY returned to. On the front page right below the piece of the speechwriter's Tricks of the Trade is a piece by an IOP Fellow in the National Journal called "Generation 'We.'" The premise is that young people ARE, truly, politically engaged, really, much more than ever before. But this is not really about a new generation -- in 1996, the IOP did a big push about the Youth Vote as well --
"In New Hampshire., we'll be turning out young students and young voters to vote and making sure that the candidates hear about the issues that young people care about in the last few days of the New Hampshire campaign," Frishberg said."
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=123039
The campaign was called, quite appropriately, HYPE -- Harvard Youth for Political Empowerment.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=124900
And it's always morning again for youth voters in American, according to the IOP: in 1996 -- "This year is especially important to increase voter turnout among the young, Frishberg said, because it is the 25th anniversary of the 26th amendment giving all people above the age of 18 the right to vote."

As late as 1989, the IOP seems to have been much less college-centered in its events: a reporter casually defines the place in 1989 as "the graduate school's bridge to the real world of politics." So I guess it's only in the mid-90s that this focus on college-aged people's importance to politics (rather than the OTHER WAY AROUND) began to develop. But it's truly a sickness -- consider for example the emphasis placed on youth engagement in this poll press release, March 2004
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=358354

and this third paragraph from the 2007 version of the same poll --

"In the seven years we have been conducting this national poll, we have seen a marked difference in political engagement and attitudes of young people," said IOP Polling Director John Della Volpe. "From the thirty-one percent increase in youth voter turnout from 2000 to 2004 to the 2006 upset victories of Senators Tester and Webb, younger voters are making a difference."
http://www.iop.harvard.edu/newsroom_release_survey_s2007.html

and the lead in 2002, before there were any numbers to support these claims about increasing youth involvement: second key finding: "While unlikely to be involved in politics [!], students are following politics and consider it important."

The point of all this is of course -- politicians, pay attention to young people! Which is to say (is there any doubt?), Politicians, pay attention to THE IOP ITSELF. Fundamentally this is a constituency aggrandizing its importance in almost every poll it puts forward.

But it was the substance of the 2005 poll that really turned me against the IOP. And I'm just going to lay this out and then call it a day, cause this is taking many minutes.

In spring 2005 the issue was how much of Bush's vaunted "mandate" (see the panel discussion at which that word was tossed cheerfully about, based on the incredibly intense voter-suppression efforts in Ohio, in November 04) would become law. And the leading edge of that insane agenda was Social Security "reform." Now almost no one except the old people knew that Social Security was the only part of the government that WASN'T completely broke (you can look it up); and ultimately the old people were the reason Congress balked and Bush began to look not invincible. But in March 05 that was yet to come. And here is what the IOP produced:

Okay, wow, the press release is missing from the website ('file not found'). And item 1 from the executive summary isn't Social Security, it's Youth Vote (presumably because politicians will read the Executive Summary, and want to know that they should be targeting all those active youth voters through institutions like, say, the IOP). But item 2 is what I'm after. It was the lead in the press release, you'll have to take my word for it. Here's how the Crimson covered it.

"The survey found that a full 70 percent of college students do not believe that Social Security will be able to provide benefits for them when they retire, and 63 percent doubt that Social Security will be able to provide for their parents. They also favor private accounts more than the general public, according to a press release from the IOP.

“Students are actually very nervous about Social Security,” said Krister B. Anderson ’07, who helped design the survey.

(And oh wow, at the bottom here is the blatant statement of the thing I notice about the IOP's shameless self-promotion in its 'substantive' Youth Vote empirical studies: "“We’re the only group doing this kind of polling and working with undergraduates to come up with questions,” he said. “That is the most important thing we can do—show politicians that this is an important constituency that understands the issues and is going to vote.”)

Let's look closely at that. 63 percent of college students believe THEIR PARENTS (i.e., in 2020 or whatever) will not get their promised SS benefits. As anyone who knows anything about the issue knows, this state of affairs is impossible; the surplus is there precisely to cover that generation and is ample. The first possible shortfall (an incredibly minor one, by the way) is in the 2040s.

What does this mean? It means that in its poll of college students the IOP specifically asked (and you can confirm this by drilling down quickly into the data; it's featured very prominently in the IOP's public versions of the poll) "How concerned are you that your parents will not be able to get their promised SS benefits?" And THAT, my friends, is a push-poll question. Plain and simple.

"How would you feel if you knew that John Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts?" "Would you feel better or worse about Hillary Clinton's health-care plan if you knew that it would prevent you from keeping your current doctor?"

Etc., etc. This is a COUNTERFACTUAL question, asking people to develop -- and then HEAVILY publicizing -- an opinion that bears no relation to the reality.

And that was very simply and clearly the end of my regard for even the wonkiest aspects of the IOP. When the agenda is set by the professional politicians, and politics is incredibly sick and twisted and cynical (and yes, a professional pollster helped write the poll in 2005), students cannot do good work. The well of their political engagement is poisoned by the politics itself, and there is no gatekeeper to keep the lies and distortions away from the research.

Need that gatekeeper be an adult? No. But it needs to be someone who is not afraid to appear 'partisan' in insisting on facts. The IOP is so focused on not being partisan that it is reduced all to often to simply saying, lamely, and truthfully, "Well, there is the acknowledgment that we have always been at war with Oceania," or whatever. "There is the acknowledgment that politicians stretch the truth." One acknowledges, one accepts, one fails to stand for Veritas. And all too often that is what the IOP represents in the intellectual life of its members.

Okay, that was a lot of typing. Don't react by pointing out that it was a lot of typing, or by saying that I should get my own blog, or with the Aha! moment of recognizing who Standing Eagle is because s/he is always having this conversation with people. (People who know me SHOULD have recognized me before this, I continue to maintain.)

Just tell me how you'd defend the IOP against the charge that it does much too little to protect itself from the taint of a dishonest political world.

Standing Eagle
 

Oops, here's the key link. Scroll to page four.

http://www.iop.harvard.edu/pdfs/survey/spring_poll_2005_execsumm.pdf

There are many errors of haste in my post above; sorry about that.
 

A detail I forgot:

"The poll found that a full 70 percent of college students do not believe that Social Security will be able to provide benefits for them when they retire."

This was doubly shocking to read, in the same formulation, in the press release (Allison Frost was a good reporter and I remember the press release; she transcribed it right). It's shocking enough that opinions are being sought about a factual matter that extremely few college students have any economic basis to guess about intelligently, and that the very asking of this question fits perfectly into an extremely mendaciously presented agenda of the President's.

But this sentence also misrepresents what the poll actually DID find. The question they actually asked (and you can easily drill down and find it) was not "How concerned are you that SS will not provide benefits to you?" It was "How concerned are you that it will not provide all the benefits you're entitled to?" (or something to that effect). In other words, in its quest for newsworthiness, the IOP poll misstated the opinion of all 70 percent of US college students, to claim that they feared getting NO benefits, not getting fewer than they'd been promised.

The sentence read better in the press release. But was actually a FALSE representation of what the survey had found.

SE
 

A propos of your 9:15 post, Standing Eagle, are you still quite sure that you don't enjoy mysteries, at least on some level?
 

Well, Prof. R., on SOME level, who doesn't?
 

Indeed. But if you're a member of academe, it might be well to heed the reminder of the person who posted on today's entry about the K School asking about your "day job." The summer's disappearing rapidly. I myself am getting a little concerned about all the research and writing I still have to do before it's over. So no more Nancy Drew acts for me right now.
 

P.S. Sorry if the above post seemed to be instructing you to have a clean, ironed handkerchief in your pocket at all times...
 

That's a daunting condemnation, SE. I look forward to reading through it, and at RB's response. I will say this -- few organizations are as influential among the most influential undergrads as the IOP.

And to Professor Ryan, from a former student who took and enjoyed one of your classes, the image of you as Nancy Drew is amusing and sort of fitting. I can picture you unearthing secret passages and hidden bodies in the Barker Center's Klein wing.
 

Dear Crimson05er,
Thanks for the kind remarks. Yes, secret passageways are just up my alley (pun intended).
 

You know, it's funny, as a student I've never paid much attention to the IOP since I always assumed that they were all in it for the resume-building and networking and didn't really care about the quality of the research they were doing, but it's reassuring to know that careful analysis yields the same conclusion. And I'm not politically uninvolved either. Well, that's Harvard.
 

"they were all in it for the resume-building and networking and didn't really care about the quality of the research they were doing"

Actually, in a sort of subtle way, this is not at all what I was trying to argue. The point was not that individuals at the IOP are, or even tend to be, uninterested in the truth as opposed to careerism. I chose examples instead that indicted no individual in particular, but speak to the general culture of the place when it sets the agenda for its student participants. (And of course, yes, much of that agenda is set by individuals, and many of those individuals are students themselves. So there's truth to the anonymous comment -- but it wasn't what I was arguing. There's a large and challenging philosophical discussion to be had about who is responsible for the general drift of a culture; something worth considering in general when it comes to the College's student-satisfaction numbers and what they suggest about how the place has changed....)

In other words, I think the I.O.P. AS AN INSTITUTION is not doing the things it should do to promote truth-seeking within its walls, and defend those walls from cynicism and distortion. This has an effect on the students who participate, but that does not mean those students are universally either motivated by or driven to postures of cynicism and relativism.

All those Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, in other words, do good work; and some of the Slytherins make great truth potions and some Gryffindors are brave in defense of the truth. But they're not doing so because of the institution's culture; indeed, often they can only do so in spite of that culture.

SE
 

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspxref=519331