“If you want to stick your nose under the tent, don’t be surprised
if somebody grabs both of your ears and drags you in.”

For the third piece in this series, Ernest Calderón (AZ ’77), a prominent Arizona lawyer and current president of the Arizona Board of Regents, was interviewed by Christopher Sopher (VA ’10), undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Calderón has worked as a lawyer for more than 25 years in both private and public practice. He served as President of the State Bar of Arizona and in 2002 was named “National Latino Lawyer of the Year” by the National Hispanic Bar Association. He has been appointed to public service roles by seven Arizona governors from both political parties and worked on issues from juvenile justice to early childhood education. He was appointed by former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (NM ’77) to the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public university system. Since July 2009 he has served as the board’s president, leading its work on college access and affordability. Calderón graduated from Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona law school.

Sopher is an undergraduate and Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies public policy. He helped start the national college mentoring organization Strive for College, and founded and ran its chapter at UNC. He spent the 2008 year working for the Obama for America campaign. He blogs about youth issues at www.youngerthinking.com.

How do you navigate political party? You’re a Democrat, so if a Republican asks you to serve in a public role, how do you decide whether you want to do that?

For me, the thought process is: the greater good is neither Republican nor Democrat. The greater good is whatever the right thing to do is. If I have a Republican governor that comes to me and says that they have a particular task force they want me to lead, or a particular job they’d like me to help them with, I ask myself: “Who’s this going to benefit?” If it’s going to benefit the public, then I’m willing to do it, even over the objection of people in my own party. I really believe my duty as a citizen and certainly as a Truman Scholar is to try to make life better for the citizenry, so if I can contribute to a solution, then it’s my duty.

Applying that idea to your current role as president of the Arizona Board of Regents, what were your starting goals?

We focused on accessibility and affordability issues. And we’ve made a pretty good cut at it.

So access and cost are the key issues right now?

Greater access was my theme. Cost is a component of that. Geographic location is another; cyberspace accessibility was another. We strove every possible way to ensure that, for example, people in the military who had taken courses in the military would now receive credit in our university systems for those courses. We put together “3 + 1” programs where we jointly admit students their freshman year along with a community college.  They complete the first two years at the community college. The third year they complete at the community college but we control the curriculum. The fourth year they go to the four-year university at the full rate but they are guaranteed matriculation at the end of that year. So essentially they spend three years of community college tuition and one year of university tuition and they get a bachelor’s degree. That reduces the cost of higher education by about 60 percent.

That’s been successful?

So far, yes. We started on my watch this year and so far it’s been very successful.

We were also talking about more online outreach. Our universities now are probably at the forefront of the country, probably in the top 25 universities in online courses. So if you live on the reservation someplace and you can’t afford to travel to Flagstaff or Tucson or Phoenix, many courses are online now. All you need is Internet access. We’ve even helped with that, trying to provide more Internet access to those places on the reservations that don’t have Internet access.

And we’re doing a comprehensive effort to ensure that we have more branch campuses located geographically around the state. As it is now, we have Arizona State University, which has 68,000 students in Tempe. We have the University of Arizona, which has about 35,000 students in Tucson, and we have Northern Arizona University which has about 22,000 students in Flagstaff. But there’s a whole lot of Arizona in between those places. So we’re going to try to ensure that we set up branch campuses, either in conjunction with an existing community college or just freestanding. In the case of NAU, we went ahead and created a campus in a city library in Prescott Valley, Arizona. We got the community college to join as well, so if you live in that rural area, all you have to do is go to the city library and you can take community college courses, a university course. You can even apply for some limited Bachelor’s degree programs and complete your entire education there, which would make it very affordable.

On affordability, I feel safe saying a sizable number of Truman Scholars are concerned about this issue in one way or another: as current or former students, as parents, as people with loans, as parents of kids who will be taking loans. In your experience, what are the obstacles and some of the possible solutions to bringing down the cost of higher education?

The things I just mentioned are tremendously important. The geographic location changes allow you to go to school without moving away and having to pay room and board and that sort of thing. Online courses do the same thing. And the “3 + 1” program knocks about 60 percent off [a student’s] education costs. So those are significant by themselves.

And they were not easy to do. There’s a variety of people who like to hang on to past traditions. And anything other than “desk time” in one of our established physical locations is seen by them as being “less,” when in this new world it really means “more.” We’ve got to see more state and federal aid to higher education. Arizona is 48th in the country for state student financial aid. State student financial aid is very, very important. If you look at Georgia and you look at Arkansas, they both have stellar programs of student financial aid. Those are the sort of models we need to move toward.

Another thing we need to do to make school more affordable is to eliminate the remedial work that our universities are doing. We have a lot of students that come to the universities unprepared for university studies. They might have sailed through high school, but somebody did them a disservice by not adequately preparing them for college. So one thing we can do is bolster our K-12 system so that students are taught more rigorously, they have higher standards.

So what would you ask people reading this interview—the average or the interested person—to do to address some of these needs?

The average person should get involved politically Whether they run for office, help a neighbor run for office, or just get involved in candidate debates, they need to support legislative candidates that are willing to place education, particularly higher education, on the front burner. I think we’ve seen a trend in the country where you’ve seen a greater amount of support over the last two decades go to corrections than to higher education. It was probably needed in the corrections area, but now I think it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way and invest in education.

The only way legislators will invest in education is if they find you and your neighbor calling and saying, “Hey, I’d like you to support our universities and our education. Why are you cutting taxes when my seventh grader’s middle school doesn’t have adequate supplies?”

Let’s shift gears. You’ve had a very long career in law in many capacities: private, public, government. What advice would you offer other Truman Scholars interested in law, about where the leverage points are in the legal profession, about how they can make the greatest public service contribution?

If the person is already a law student, the advice I’d give them is something I wish had been given to me. That is: when you come out of law school, get a job, even if it’s for a brief period—one year—where you actually have to try a case. Where you actually have to present a set of facts to a jury, you have to persuade a jury, you have to get a judge to rule on things. The reason I say that is you learn a lot about human nature when you try a case. You learn about what motivates people, you learn a lot about what turns people off. You learn to distill down a complex set of facts into something that the jury can absorb and determine what to do. Along with that, once you’ve tried a case, if you become an advocate of any sort, you have no fear anymore of something going to trial.

You’d be amazed at the liberation you have when somebody says to you, “Well, we’re going to try to block your homeless shelter and take you to court over it.” When they told me that when I was working on trying to get a homeless shelter built in Phoenix, I said, “That’s great. Let’s go to a jury.” And they said, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, if you want to file a lawsuit to try and stop us, go ahead. But my first words to a jury are going to be, ‘What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me.’ And we’re trying to take care of the least of our brethren.” As soon as they heard that, they relented. Now I wouldn’t have been able to do that had I not faced a jury before.

So spend a year in the public defender’s office or the county attorney’s office. Or find a law firm that’ll teach you how to try a case, and do that. Then after that you’ve got the fundamentals down. You have seen Armageddon.

Now let’s say you’re not a law student. I would ask myself, what is my passion? Some people go to law school because they want a job that pays well. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can be very miserable in life and be well-paid. Try to find something in law that really gets you passionate about life. If you find that, the law will be very interesting for you, very vibrant, and less tedious.

And what was that thing for you?

I grew up in segregated housing. I’m Hispanic—they called us the “Mexicans”—and where I grew up we had to live in a certain place. The company owned all the housing—it was a copper mining company—and so the Mexicans had to live in a certain place, and the two black families had to live next door to each other, and the Native Americans—Apaches, Navajo— had to live in a certain place. And I grew up thinking, “this isn’t fair. We’re being judged by the color of our skin.”

So I gravitated to those parts of the law where I can help, particularly in education. I see myself as an equal opportunity person to—either through the law or civic activities—inject myself when I see somebody’s not being treated fairly.

So I’ll ask the obligatory Arizona question about fairness: SB 1070 [the Arizona immigration enforcement law of recent attention]. What is going on, where do you think that is headed?

SB 1070 is incredibly popular here in Arizona. I think that shows there’s a great deal of frustration with the Obama administration for not doing something about it. The Obama administration promised that in year one, they would pursue immigration reform. It never happened. It still hasn’t happened. So what you’ve seen is an overreaction in Arizona to the fact that we have an immigration problem. We have immigrants who are here, hardworking, good people, but they are putting a strain on our infrastructure—health care, city services, whatever. There’s also a very small percentage of immigrants who are here in the criminal element. They victimize everybody, particularly fellow Hispanics. And then you have a segment of our community in Arizona—a small, vocal community—who just don’t like these people because they look different. And when you add all those things together, you have the perfect storm.

That’s what prompted Senate Bill 1070. Twenty-five percent of Hispanics in Arizona support SB 1070. Twenty-five percent. So that tells you that even the Hispanic community thinks that the system is broken. The federal government’s going to try to enjoin the application of the statute, and we’ll see if they’re successful. But ultimately the President of the United States and the Congress have to come up with some immigration reform. We’ve got to allow those hardworking immigrations who are here to become legal. They’re paying taxes already, so let’s get them to pay more taxes, just like everyone else. And then we need to have real stern punishment for the criminal element that comes over. None of that is happening. That’s why 1070 was passed.

You’ve spent your entire career in Arizona. I know many younger Truman Scholars feel conflicted about that. They want to stay in their home states and do public service work, but they also feel this draw to Washington or other major cities. What advice would you give Scholars making those decisions?

Go with your heart. As you get older, it’s more difficult to get to Washington. You’ll have a mortgage, you’ll have family commitments. So if there is somebody that really loves Washington, then consider trying to get a job there early in your career. You have to remember that Washington draws the best and the brightest, and you might be the head of a government agency or a county attorney in Iowa, but when you get to Washington you’re probably three or four steps below that, because there are other people who got there before you. So if you’re willing to work your way up slowly, Washington is a great incubator. Sooner or later, though, you don’t become effective in Washington unless you have left Washington at some point, and gone to your home community and served.

What advice would you give Truman Scholars who are interested in education: policy, administration, higher education?

Now’s the time. If you’re interested in education policy, our country is at a crossroads. We have declining financial resources for it. I would have people get involved, if they like K-12 education, by attending school board meetings. Find the parent groups who are organizing about school sites and management and that sort of thing. If there is a local department of education, contact them and find out what task forces are going on. Attend the meetings. If you know a politician who can appoint you, get appointed to a task force or committee to attack a problem.

If you’re interested in higher education, contact the Board of Trustees or Board of Regents and say you’d like to be involved. I’ve received many people and plugged them in wherever I could. It’s an open door. Higher education policy is an open door for two reasons. Right now we’re at a crossroads, and things are ripe for change. Second, education is a very open system in this country. If you want to stick your nose under the tent, don’t be surprised if somebody grabs both of your ears and drags you in.

If you would like to conduct an interview or write a feature for the Truman Scholars Blog, please contact news@trumanscholars.org. 

For the second piece in this series, Jeffrey Toobin (NY ’80), noted legal analyst and bestselling author, was interviewed by Anthony Vitarelli (NJ ’04), law clerk to Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

Toobin serves as senior legal analysis for CNN and as a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he has covered legal affairs since 1993. A prolific writer, Toobin has authored numerous acclaimed essays and books. His latest, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, earned the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for Nonfiction from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Toobin graduated from HarvardCollege and Harvard Law School. 

Vitarelli recently graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal. He will join the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in the fall of 2010. 

Interview with
Jeffrey Toobin (NY ’80), Noted Legal Analyst and Best-selling Author
By Anthony Vitarelli (NJ ’04), Law Clerk
April 12, 2010 

Anthony Vitarelli: Do you view the judicial confirmation process as a one-way ratchet of partisanship, or do you think there is a way that a President—either this President or one in the future—and members of the Senate could make the judicial confirmation process more civil? 

Jeffrey Toobin: I don’t think partisanship is necessarily a bad thing. These are important issues and important disputes. There is aWashington phenomenon that people think disagreement is inherently bad. I don’t buy that at all. 

Sure, if Barack Obama nominated a Republican to be on the Supreme Court, that would eliminate the fight and the partisanship. But one reason we have elections is so the President can put people who are ideologically simpatico on the Supreme Court. Barack Obama, like every other President, plans on doing that. Now, it may be more or less difficult to get this person confirmed, but I certainly don’t think he should back away because there may be some unpleasantness. 

Vitarelli: Let me probe that a little more. It seems that in the last few years—you could trace it back either to Justice Thomas’s confirmation hearings or some would point to the filibuster of Miguel Estrada—that there are some nominations that seem like they would not have been so discordant a few decades ago. Now, for instance, many circuit court nominees are getting a lot more attention than they would have in the past. It seems the rhetoric has continued to ratchet up, especially in light of anonymous holds that can be placed on nominees. 

Toobin: I think it’s true that circuit court nominations have been more closely scrutinized in recent decades. But there have been a lot of Supreme Court nomination fights since the beginning of the Republic, [such as] in 1920. There were Haynsworth and Carswell under Nixon, Robert Bork under Reagan, and then Thomas. 

In fact, the last several nominations have been fairly civil. Yes, I think we have passed the day when—like Justice Stevens—nominees get confirmed 98 to nothing. But, was there ever any real chance that Sonia Sotomayor was not going to be confirmed? I don’t think so. 

Vitarelli: Since you mentioned Justice Stevens, I’m curious what your thoughts are on what has made Justice Stevens effective at garnering majorities in cases like Hamdan and Boumediene? If this President were seeking to replicate that aspect of Justice Stevens's temperament, what would he look for in a nominee's career to date? 

Toobin: One of the myths of Supreme Court confirmations, or Supreme Court appointments, is that there are very good predictive tests of how people will turn out as justices. I mean, look at Justice Stevens. Justice Stevens started out on the bench as kind of a lone eccentric and turned into a tremendous consensus builder. Through the course of all his decades, there were a couple of different kinds of justices that he was. 

Obviously, it would be best not to nominate a reclusive scholar, but it is hard to predict what kind of personality would move the very small electorate that is the Supreme Court, especially when you’re largely talking about only one persuadable target. That’s really guesswork. Any nominee that is nominated in 2010 is likely to serve with many justices whose identities we don’t even know yet. All this talk about the kind of personality you want is really guesswork at best. 

Vitarelli: In terms of the current careers that potential nominees have, the last nine have been sitting judges on circuit courts. How has that fact helped or hurt the Court as an institution? What advice would you give to the President on this point? 

Toobin: I think Obama is right that it is time to end the circuit judge monopoly on the Supreme Court. Historically, the justices have not all come from the appellate court bench. Personally, I don’t think the Supreme Court should be the top step on the civil service ladder for judges – it’s a different job than other kinds of judges. And it’s no coincidence that the court that decided Brown vs. Board of Educationdidn’t have one person on it that had ever been a judge on any court before that. I think judges with legislative, executive, and business experience would be very good. 

Vitarelli: Do you think that the fact that 2010 is an election year will affect which person the President nominates for the Court? 

Toobin: I don’t think so. We operate in a 24-hour, 365-day political and news cycle. So I don’t think 2010 is much more politically incendiary than 2009 was. Democrats and Republicans fight all the time, that’s just the world we live in. And I don’t think it matters much. 

Vitarelli: What do you think the biggest issue facing the federal judiciary as an institution is now? Certainly, the issue of a stalled judicial pay raise has created some concerns, particularly in light of judges like Michael Luttig, David Levi, and Michael McConnell leaving the bench. Do you perceive any other challenges facing the judiciary as an institution right now? 

Toobin: I think it’s terrible that they’re paid so little, but I wouldn’t call it the biggest challenge of all. Most American political issues wind up in court. The issues that divide us politically will be the biggest ones that divide us legally, as well. 

Vitarelli: Shifting gears, I’m curious about your experience working for Lawrence Walsh on the Iran-Contra investigation, the topic of your book Opening Arguments. Did that deter you from being a career lawyer, or did that enhance your interest in becoming a journalist? 

Toobin: My decision to be a journalist was an affirmative decision to embrace journalism, not a negative decision to reject law practice. I loved working for Walsh. I was very privileged to do that, and I learned a lot. 

Vitarelli: How did your experience as an Assistant U.S. Attorney [in the Eastern District of New York] influence the way you cover trials, and criminal prosecutions in particular? 

Toobin: I think it’s a big influence. Trying a case is a very particular skill. You operate within a specific legal and cultural framework, and you have specifically defined goals. Journalists have a different framework and different goals. I think journalists are often frustrated when trials don’t seek to explore the facts of a situation. That’s not what they’re about. Criminal trials are about proving someone’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or failing to do that. In addition to helping me understand the specific rules of evidence and all the other kinds of rules that trials operate by, just understanding the mindset of trial lawyers is very important. 

Vitarelli: What advice would you give to young attorneys just graduating from law school now? Do you perceive the legal world as a different world from when you graduated law school? 

Toobin: Of course it is a different place. But, I think law school breeds in people a very narrow sense of what’s possible and what’s successful. You hang around with law students and you think the job with the biggest law firm at the highest starting salary is necessarily the best. Grown-up life doesn’t work that way. People get other sorts of rewards from their work—non-financial rewards. There are ways to make money, if that’s what you’re interested in, that are different and perhaps better than being a lawyer. Being open to a variety of possibilities, including not going to law school at all, is the best thing you can do. 

If you would like to conduct an interview or write a feature for the Truman Scholars Blog, please contact TSA@trumanscholars.org.

Each month, a Truman Scholar who has established himself or herself in public service will be profiled in a feature article or Q&A piece written by a more recent Truman Scholar. For the first piece in this series, Margot Rogers (VA ’86), Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was interviewed by Bryce McKibben (WA ’08), Staff, U.S. House Education and Labor Committee.

Prior to joining the administration, Rogers worked for more than 15 years for foundations and non-profit organizations on issues of education policy and practice. Most recently, she served as the special assistant to the director of education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where she managed and co-led the development of the foundation's five-year education strategy. Rogers is a member of the District of Columbia Bar, holds a J.D. from the University Of Virginia School Of Law, a master's degree in American history from the University of Virginia, and a bachelor's degree in history from Emory University. Rogers lives in Arlington, Va., with her husband and two sons.

Bryce McKibben met Rogers at the beginning of the 2009 Truman Summer Institute. At the time, she was just getting settled into her new position working for Secretary Duncan. During the opening week of Summer Institute, she welcomed all of the scholars to the Department's headquarters for a forum on education and public service. Ms. Rogers was also crucial in placing McKibben in his summer internship, and it was while working for the Under Secretary at the Department of Education that he was exposed to the administration's aggressive agenda for reshaping American higher education. He since joined the staff of the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee.

Interview with

Margot Rogers (VA ‘86), Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

By Bryce McKibben (WA ’08), Staff Assistant, U.S. House Education and Labor Committee

McKibben: Ms. Rogers, when you submitted your application for the Scholarship as a Emory University sophomore in 1986, what did you expect your career to look like?

Rogers: I knew a few core things:  First, I wanted to go to law school because I was strongly interested in civil rights.  Second, I wanted to end up in the field of education in some capacity.  Third, I wanted a career primarily in the public sector.  Beyond that I had absolutely no idea what my "career" would look like, and I still don't!  I have been very lucky to have been in the right place at the right time in order to have some truly remarkable experiences.

McKibben: Your have led a distinguished career in public service, as an attorney for the Center for Law and Education, senior staff at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and now, Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of Education. How have the Truman Scholarship and the Truman Scholar community supported you in your career as a public servant?

Rogers: I was a Truman Scholar in the 1980's, when there was no TSLW [Truman Scholars Leadership Week] and no Summer Institute.  Early on, while I was very grateful for the financial support - which I needed - I wasn't particularly connected to the Foundation.  But I was very lucky that I got to re-engage in the 1990's with the Truman community by serving on selection panels, as a senior scholar at TSLW, and in a variety of other small ways.  As a result, I have a group of Truman Scholar friends who are very dear to me and who are great advisers on everything from career to child-rearing.  I have also felt tremendous support from the Foundation staff over the years; recently, I particularly appreciated advice from [Truman Scholarship Foundation Executive Director] Fred Slabach (MS '77) about being a Chief of Staff in a federal agency!

McKibben: What advice do you have for recent recipients of the Truman Scholarship who are pursuing careers in public service?

Rogers: First, become a content specialist in something.  It's great to have solid generalizable skills, but over time, content knowledge matters and is marketable. Second, pick your boss as carefully as you pick your job. You want to have someone who will at best invest in you and your growth, and at least ensure that you get great work. Third, find something you love to do. Fourth, live within your means - and if you make more money than you need, save it; there's little worse than staying in a job you hate because of the proverbial golden handcuffs.

McKibben: How has the opportunity to serve in a new administration impacted you and what inspires you to public service?

Rogers: The opportunity to serve in this administration has had a profound impact on me, particularly because it isn't something I had ever even contemplated doing.  First, I have learned more than I thought possible about how government works; there are few better vantage points for seeing government in action than a Chief of Staff‘s job. Second, I have been pushed in more new ways faster than in any other job I have had.  There is an incredible amount to learn and do -- and I have loved it!  We are at a unique moment in time, when a bi-partisan approach to real reform in our nation's schools seems possible, and being a part of making that happen is a tremendous opportunity.  Finally, I work with smart, thoughtful, engaging, committed people; being reminded every day of the strength of people serving in government is a joy.

As for what inspires me to public service:  First, I come from a family in which service is highly valued.  Second,  I grew up in a small town in Southern Virginia where the public schools closed for 5 years instead of integrating.  Many students simply didn't get to attend school for 5 years, because the adults in the community were not brave. And the schools remained relatively segregated for decades.  My family made the decision to attend the public schools and not the segregated private school.  In short, my parents were not afraid to do the right thing.   As a result of these formative experiences,  I decided early on in my life that I was going to try to be brave, and I was going to work on issues related to access to a quality education.  That naturally led me to a variety of incredibly satisfying and challenging jobs, in which I hope I have had some impact.

McKibben: Do you have a favorite quote from or story about President Truman?

Rogers: My favorite thing about President Truman is not a story, but a couple of attributes.  He was incredibly brave - can you imagine the courage it took to integrate the military, as just one example?  And he did it simply because it was the right thing to do.  And yet, in the midst of very difficult decisions, he was a man of extraordinary kindness: ordering President Eisenhower's son back from the Korean war so he could witness his father's inauguration, writing love notes to his wife, keeping up with his friends.  Above all, he remained true to his values and to the greater good of the citizens he was serving.

McKibben: Thank you, Ms. Rogers.

If you would like to conduct an interview or write a feature for the Truman Scholars Blog, please contact blog@trumanscholars.org.