In November 2010, Truman Scholars witnessed an historic first for our community when Chris Coons (DE ‘83) won election to the US Senate. A collaborative and intergenerational effort, the campaign embodied many of the values for which the Truman family is known: loyalty, camaraderie, and a commitment to public service.

For this article, Bill Rivers (DE ‘09) had a conversation with a few of the many Scholars who supported the Coons campaign: Terry Babcock-Lumish (PA ‘96), Eric Tucker (IA ‘01), and Russ Dallen (MI ‘83).  

Though regarded for his longstanding commitment to public service – as Delaware’s New Castle County Executive and for his work with the “I Have a Dream” Foundation – Chris Coons was not a household name across the country in early 2010. 

But for members of the Truman community, his recent Senate bid was not the first time they’d heard the name “Chris Coons.” Trumans are long familiar with this 2001 Staats Award recipient, a regular in the annual Truman Scholars Leadership Week in Missouri, a highly involved member of the Truman Scholars Association, and an active supporter of the Foundation’s efforts. Consequently, for many of us, the decision to get involved in Chris’s US Senate race was an easy one, a natural result of shared commitments and Truman friendships.

Last autumn, Eric Tucker traveled from Brooklyn to join Brendan Kelly (MN '97) and Terry Babcock-Lumish to help the Coons Campaign in the state’s southern, historically conservative Sussex County.

“I was interested in the campaign because I believe in Chris Coons and in his vision for our nation and the state,” Tucker said. “The decision for me was all about Chris. Thoughtful and reflective, he has both a global vision for justice and a commitment to Delaware and his neighbors. That made the decision for me.” 

Together, Tucker, Kelly, and Babcock-Lumish collaborated with local Democrats and the DC-based Human Rights Campaign to coordinate the down-state get-out-the-vote efforts.

Russ Dallen, a classmate of Senator Coons’ from the Truman Scholars Class of ’83, is further proof of Trumans answering the call. In 2000, he helped raise money in New York City for Coons’ very first campaign. At that time, Coons was running for Delaware’s New Castle County Council, the same body in which Joe Biden served before his first campaign to represent the First State in the US Senate in 1972.

“When Chris called me in early 2010 telling me that he would be running for Joe Biden's Senate seat, I knew the drill,” Dallen explained. Except this time, Dallen would help Coons fundraise in major cities across the country, not just New York. Bringing the Coons Campaign of 2010 full circle with the Biden Campaign of almost 40 years ago, he even helped organize a fundraiser in Miami with Delaware’s former US Senator, now Vice President Joe Biden.

“The Tea Party publicity was raising large sums of money for competing candidate Christine O'Donnell,” Dallen explained. “And the Coons campaign needed all the funds it could get its hands on. I am pleased that I was able to help.”

It worked. The Coons Campaign raised over $3.8 million dollars, with roughly 70% coming from individual contributions. But beyond money, the Miami event and others like it across the country highlight one of the Truman community’s most instantly recognizable features and an enduring constant of the Coons Campaign: fidelity to other Trumans.

“We have this ready-made network of help from politically-minded, driven leaders—some with time, some with expertise, some with connections, and others with money,” Dallen went on to say. “Other Trumans have also successfully tapped into [this] over the years to help in their campaigns.  I think that it may end up being the most powerful benefits of the scholarship.”

“Truman Scholars of all decades, from all over the country, came together for this,” Eric Tucker said. “They served as a national brain trust, raising money, introducing Chris to friends and potential supporters all over the country, and just being supportive. The Truman Scholarship community was a galvanizing force in bringing all these different supporters together.”

Traveling from England to support Chris’ Senate bid, Babcock-Lumish affirms that the bond of fellowship between Scholars runs deep. “Truman Scholars care greatly about each others’ professional efforts, of course, but it’s also personal.  To spend any time with Chris, his commitment to serving his community and our society is made abundantly clear – but one also learns just how much he loves his family, one learns what drives his ideas and efforts.  He is a role model,” she said. “What struck me was fielding calls and emails from Truman Scholars who had never met Chris and who were excited to learn how they might support the campaign. Chris was my Senior Scholar back in ’96, and I was hearing from Scholars across the country for whom I served as their Senior Scholar at TSLW.  This transcended generations of Truman Scholars, and I trust it will continue to do so.”

One of the most compelling reasons for such loyalty was the candidate himself.

Recalling the first time he met Chris Coons at TSLW, Tucker relates, “When he spoke about his professional experiences, how he balanced his deep commitment to his family with his desire to have an impact in the world, it was one of the most meaningful experiences of the week for me. Chris embodied integrity and compassion. To me, Chris Coons represents the best of what it means to be a Truman Scholar.”

Even among Republican circles in Delaware, the Amherst and Yale-educated Chris Coons is known for his integrity.

Bill Rivers managed several local and state representative campaigns in Delaware for the Republicans this cycle. Though not directly involved with the battle for US Senate, he was a keen observer: “Even if they disagreed with him—sometimes vigorously so—Republicans in the down-ticket races understood Chris Coons to be as honest as the day is long.”

Most of all, the campaign’s underlying theme was a serious commitment to Delaware, a fealty to home that is yet another hallmark of Truman Scholars. Senator Coons was raised in Northern Delaware, and throughout the campaign, “consistently spoke to issues for Delawareans,” Babcock-Lumish explains.

The commitment to home combined with the significance of the campaign for the Truman community led to some emotional moments, the most memorable of which was a rally held in the City of Wilmington, at which Vice President Joe Biden once again made an appearance, and delivered the opening remarks.

For Eric Tucker, the event was a historic moment. “It was fantastic for us as members of the Truman community to see Chris on that stage, standing up for Delaware. The continuity was impressive too, because Joe Biden made such a contribution during the time that he served in the seat. Chris at once embodied continuity of leadership, and was beginning the next chapter.”

“It was a special moment, simultaneously a homecoming and a send-off, as Delaware’s voters decided to put their trust in him as their newest US Senator,” Babcock-Lumish adds, reflecting on the rally.

*          *          *

Whether campaigning full-time like Tucker, Kelly, and Babcock-Lumish, leading Election Day voter protection efforts like Bryan Townsend (DE '03), or simply donning a “Chris Coons for US Senate” T-shirt and working the crowds at Sussex County’s world-famous Apple-Scrapple Festival like Abbas Ravjani (TX '03) and David Zipper (NC '99), Delaware witnessed an extraordinary effort from the Truman Community to elect one of their own.

No one is better-suited to speak to that effort then Senator Coons himself:

“I was deeply moved by all the encouragement and support I received in my 2010 campaign from Truman scholars young and old, from those I met many years ago, to those I have just met for the first time. Trumans contributed to the campaign, both financially and with volunteer time, from across the East Coast and across the world.  I got Facebook messages, emails and blog postings, online contributions and volunteer phone bankers, folks who came out for a weekend and folks who were with me every step along the way.  It was a great community effort, and I am eternally grateful!”

“The Truman community is like no other community I know,” Terry Babcock-Lumish confides. “I count Truman Scholars as trustworthy colleagues and as my closest friends.”

“Truman Scholars are family,” Eric Tucker concludes. “We keep each other honest. Senior scholars like Chris remind me of what’s possible from a life in public service, and the newer generation of scholars reminds me of my passion for making a difference.”

Now, thanks in no small part to so many Truman Scholars, Chris Coons can continue to play this role, now in the US Senate.

Bill Rivers (DE ‘09) is currently Executive Director of the A Rose & A Prayer Education Group (www.aroseandaprayer.org), a nonpartisan, interfaith, multiracial social action nonprofit working to lower the abortion rate in the First State. 

Growing up in rural Illinois, Maryland Delegate Heather Mizeur (IL ’94) never thought that her first Washington, DC, job would lead to a life there, let alone a successful political career in one of DC’s suburbs. Although believing she would return to the Midwest, this self-described “old soul” knew from an early age that she was gay, that she held strong Catholic spirituality, and that she saw her life in elected public service.

“I always thought I was heading back to Illinois” Mizeur said. “I moved to DC in 1994 and didn’t rule out moving back to Illinois until 2001―when I set roots and bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland.”

Those roots quickly flourished. She ran and won a seat on the Takoma Park City Council in 2003. After serving for two years, she later ran for the Maryland House of Delegates, winning a seat in its 20th district in 2006. In the Maryland House, she has led on health care and LGBT equality, working specifically on a bill that increases low-income children’s access to health care. She successfully won reelection for her second term in 2010, and The Advocate magazine recently named her as one of the "Forty Under 40" emerging LGBT leaders.

Interview with

Heather Mizeur (IL ’94), Maryland Delegate for the 20th District

By Adam Amir (FL ’09), Policy Analyst, NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg

April 26, 2011

AMIR: What was your public service passion as an undergraduate and how has it changed, if it all?

MIZEUR: Health care has always been the issue I’ve been most passionate about. I got my start in politics as a child of the labor movement. My father was a member of the United Auto Workers. My Catholic background also tied me closely to social justice. I volunteered in missions in the Yucatan region of Mexico as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In terms of a policy issue in this country, I have always been tied to health policy: Medicare, Medicaid, and state child health insurance programs, and trying to expand access to these services. It’s what I focused on the federal, state level, and in my private practice.

AMIR: What do you think about the budget cuts proposed by the House Republicans? Is the gutting of Medicare or Medicaid merely political posturing?

MIZEUR: I think it poses a real threat. We need to mobilize seniors and low income folks to stand up for health care programs in the same way that the other side mobilized people to voice their opposition to health reform at town hall meetings last summer. We’ve got to take these cuts very seriously, agitate, and defeat these proposals. I had to work really hard this session to avoid a $20 million Medicaid cut in Maryland. In tough budget times, we need to be smart. We should still pay for it (Medicaid coverage) because people will still be sick no matter what. We can pay for their care in an emergency room where it is expensive or we can give them health insurance. You might as well give people access to primary care, which is more affordable. I don’t see it as a budget saving mechanism to be whacking away at the Medicaid program. 

AMIR: Insurance and Medicare are such complicated issues. How do you simplify the messages?

MIZEUR: I think about how I would explain it to my parents and my grandparents back in Illinois. I try to use human stories and explain what it means for individuals in a tangible way, rather than just talking about esoteric policy. But it’s an interesting blend, because in my district, I represent people who work in government and like to talk about policy specifics. I get to have it both ways.

Sometimes you have to use the media to get the message out, to larger constituencies. That’s where the message does have to be a little more simplistic.

AMIR: I saw that you had worked for John Kerry. Many in the Truman Scholar community work or have worked for an elected official. How do you transition from staffing an elected an official to becoming one?

I was with Senator John Kerry for almost four years. I think the biggest difference is that as a staffer you have one-fifth of the issues a legislator must understand. As a staffer, you’re really an expert on a certain small cadre of issues. You watch your principal hoping that they say the right thing. As a staffer, you compete with other staffers to push the issue you care about most and hope the Member agrees.

Now as the elected official, I can work on issues I cared about while working in other levels of government. Many of the good ideas I had staffing for a Member of the House of Representatives in the minority party, I later retooled to be part of my campaign platform— initiatives like expanding insurance coverage for young adults, allowing them to remain on their family’s plan until they are 25 years old. I worked with Senator Kerry to make this an element of his 2004 Presidential health reform plan and then turned it into a state initiative, and I actually got it done three years before it became a part of national health reform. It sounds cliché, but states really are the laboratories of democracy.

AMIR: Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to know how the disparity in partner benefits for same-sex couples affects you on both a personal and policy level.

MIZEUR: Well there are different tiers of discrimination. Even if we fixed everything at the state level, until the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is repealed there will still be unfair treatment of tax on the federal level. I’ve experienced this in Maryland. At one point, the Governor decided to bring domestic partners onto state employee insurance plans. My wife would be eligible to be on my state insurance policy, except that she would have to pay taxes on that benefit at the federal level. Something no straight married couple must pay. There are about 425 state benefits that come with a marriage certificate and nearly a thousand more at the federal level.

We have had a parallel approach in the General Assembly in Maryland. While working ultimately for marriage equality, my colleagues and I have attempted to address a range of individual issues like inheritance rights, visitation rights, and burial decisions for same sex partners at the state level.  We’ll chip away at those 425 rights, one-by-one, until we get full marriage equality.

AMIR: In a passionate and emotional floor speech about a marriage equality bill in the Maryland House, you described yourself as an “old soul.” What did you mean by that?

MIZEUR: The technical term might be more “self-actualized at a young age.” I knew at age seven a lot of things about myself that it takes others a lifetime to find out. I knew I was gay. I knew that I wanted a career in elected public service. I was also very tied to my Catholicism, and knew that it informed my identity, drive, and relationship with God. Sometimes it required extra work to reconcile these seemingly conflicting identities, but they motivated me at an early age.

AMIR: My last question is very controversial. Where is the best place to get blue crabs in Maryland while you’re in session?

MIZEUR: It’s not crab season during session in Annapolis. Though you can get crab cakes in the winter, you should  ask if they are pasteurized because they are not as good without fresh crabmeat. During the summer, my favorite place to pick get crabs is in Rock Hall, Maryland at a restaurant called Watermans.

By Amber Herman (TN’ 06)

For this interview, Lisette Nieves (NY ’90), who at the time of the interview served as Founding Executive Director for Year Up NY, was interviewed by Amber Herman (TN ’06), Federal Partner Relations Management for Year Up National Capital Region.

Lisette Nieves (NY ’90) has been appointed the Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor in Public Policy at the City University of New York and is Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Blue Ridge Foundation, a leading nonprofit incubator.  Most recently, Ms. Nieves served as the founding Executive Director for Year Up NY, a leading workforce and education program for disconnected young adults, where she took the site from a $250,000 seed grant to a $7 million operation in five years. Prior to that position, Ms. Nieves served as Chief of Staff at the Department of Youth and Community Development for the City of New York, Director of Grants Management and Compliance at the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, and Senior Program Officer for the Corporation for National Service. Throughout her career, Ms. Nieves has also served as a consultant to nonprofit organizations in strategic planning, program development and management.  She is the Vice-Chair of New York City’s Panel for Education Policy, a trustee of the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System, a member of the Year Up National Board, a board member for the Fund of the City of New York, and a member of the Woodrow Wilson School Advisory Council.  She was the winner of a 2008 Robin Hood Hero Award and a 2011 El Diario Mujeres Destacada Award.  Ms. Nieves received her MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, her BA in political science and philosophy from Brooklyn College, and was a Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar.

Amber Herman (TN’ 06) serves as the Federal Partner Relations Manager for Year Up National Capital Region. Formally, Amber served the US Department of Agriculture as the Acting Deputy Director for the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and as a program analyst for the Office of Strategic Initiatives, Partnerships and Outreach at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Upon graduation, Amber served as a National Hunger Fellow with the Congressional Hunger Center. Amber is a 2006 scholar and graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in public service and administration in agriculture.

Have you always felt called to public service?

I grew up in a family that did not think twice about helping someone in need.  We often had someone staying with us that was going through a rough time.  Also, I went to a public high school that was about learning by doing and that included a strong community service component.  For example, in my senior year, I did service one day a week and attended class the other four days. This early exposure to service contributed to my desire to delay college for one year and serve with the City Volunteer Corp, which was one of the few urban corps in the country at that time and became the model for City Year.

What issue did you write your Truman Scholar application essays on?

I believe I wrote about homelessness and HIV/AIDS.  At that time I was very engaged in raising awareness about AIDS and HIV and also including more physical manifestations in the definition so that we women could be represented and access needed resources.  At the time, there was so much misinformation being published by The New York Times and people were dying and leaving behind families. I was acutely aware of how policies were creating social, moral, political and economic impact.  

You are a Rhodes Scholar. Tell me about your experience?

My experience at Oxford was in stark contrast to my time at Brooklyn College. I came from a poor, working class background and was accustomed to first generation collegiate peers who attended the local city or state university and worked many jobs while attending classes. The Oxford cohort represented a very different class, whose parents had college degrees and an understood the nuances of accessing the best of the education system. For me, the experience was a lesson in class segregation but also one of what issues can truly bring diverse classes and races together.

After earning your degree at Oxford, why did you choose to work in public service?

When I graduated from Oxford, I weighed a few offers. Although I have nothing against the private sector and recognize its value in the economy, I wanted to be part of a movement. I had an opportunity to serve on the start-up team for AmeriCorps. Of course, it meant I got paid the least of my Rhodes Scholar peers. However, I was able to live and work in DC and be part of a social movement to engage citizens in helping transform their communities.  It was an exciting time to be part of a team working on real solutions.

Looking back on your career, do you see any trends?

Every job I had was either a start-up or a turnaround. When I look at a job description, I look for the opportunity not yet written on the page. I take joy in building something new that didn’t exist before. I like being part of a vision and making it come to life. I have been blessed with jobs that have impact. I strongly believe that public service jobs are as competitive as the private sector. However, in public service people are willing to make trade-offs since there is such a great social return in working in a mission-driven organization.

What career advice do you have for other Truman Scholars?

You create the opportunities that you want to see happen. Your reputation and everyone you come across can become a critical person in your future. Do not let life just happen to you – instead lead it. We are not passive recipients in our lives – we are the ones that help drive the direction and provide opportunity for others.

As an Executive Director, what advice do you have to other Trumans managers?

It is not always about the content of your work but how you get things done. Relationships matter. You have to be committed to encouraging talent to thrive. The change you want to make is not about you but a team of people you have working along side of you. If you have a gift to inspire and build, then seeking out other talented people and spending time cultivating relationships and talent is the best gift you can give to yourself and your mission.   

What inspires you to take on a new challenge?

I love what I do and am blessed with a role that has impact on people’s lives. I never want to be the founder that is so tied to the organization that no one else can see themselves in that role. Emotionally it is hard to leave behind something that you created and built but there are other opportunities to take advantage of. There is also value in stopping to reflect, write and coach others.

How do you make value choices that impact your career?

I ask “what are your values and how do you want to represent them? Do you want to represent them through family, volunteer work, professional life or all three?” For me, what gives me happiness and fulfillment in being engaged in the transformation of lives and being part of a movement for equity. I will not compromise my values, but I have made trade-off’s in other areas.

What is the next chapter for Lisette?

I am my best when I am fully 100% engaged and my work compliments my life. I am my best when I have people around me that are dedicated to changing lives. For now that means I will spend more time with family as well as more time working on equity issues from the influence/policy perspective. I have accepted a two-year full-time appointment to be the Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor in Public Policy at the City University of New York (CUNY).  Under this position, I will be teaching as well as providing two city-wide lectures a year.  Also, I have accepted a federal appointment on an education commission looking at the academic issues for Latinos.  Lastly, starting next month, I will continue to support leadership in the nonprofit sector as a “Social Entrepreneur in Residence” at the Blue Ridge Foundation working with our great colleagues in the field.

By Adam Harbison (AL ’07)

William W. Mercer (MT ’84) served in the US Department of Justice for twenty years in Montana and Washington, D.C. In Montana, he served as United States Attorney from 2001 through 2009 and as Assistant US Attorney from 1994 to 2001. He was responsible for natural resources litigation, prosecution of criminal cases, and appellate practice on behalf of the United States. From June 2005 through July 2007, Bill served Acting Associate Attorney General and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. As Acting Associate Attorney General, he served as the third-ranking official in the US Department of Justice under President George W. Bush and had oversight responsibilities for five litigating divisions (Antitrust, Civil, Civil Rights, Environment and Natural Resources and Tax) with criminal and civil cases. A native Montanan, Bill was a 1984 Truman from the University of Montana. He received his MPA from the Kennedy School at Harvard University in 1988 and his JD from George Mason University in 1993. Today, Bill is an attorney practicing energy, environment, and natural resources law at Holland & Hart in Billings, Montana. He is a recipient of the Truman Foundation's two prestigious alumni awards, the Elmer B. Staats Award and the Judge Joseph E. Stevens, Jr. Award.

Growing up in rural Montana, Bill Mercer became interested in public service at a young age. As a child, his father was elected and served in the Montana state legislature, which is what first piqued his interest in politics and public policy issues. Throughout high school and college, he pursued student leadership positions, including Boys Nation and student government. Even though he attended the University of Montana, he was privileged to get early experience in Washington, DC through his activities, and this is what really led him to start following national politics. Bill believes that winning the Truman Scholarship was a huge development in his life. He had always intended to go to law school in Montana, but the financial advantages that the Truman presented allowed him to consider other opportunities. He eventually decided to pursue a MPA from the Kennedy School at Harvard University. While at Harvard, his academic advisor was Dick Thornburgh, who served as Governor of Pennsylvania from 1979 to 1987.

Upon finishing his studies at Harvard, Bill was selected as a Presidential Management Intern (now known as the Presidential Management Fellowship) to served two years working at the US Department of Treasury. Meanwhile, his former advisor was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to serve as Attorney General. Bill was then able to move over to the Department of Justice, where he stayed through the transition period to the Clinton Administration. When his father became ill in 1994, Bill was anxious to get back home to Montana as soon as possible. Meanwhile, his experience at the Justice Department helped him secure a position for the US Attorney’s Office in the state. After serving for several years, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as the US Attorney for Montana and later as the Acting Associate Attorney General, the 3^rd highest ranking position at DOJ.

Reflecting on his more than twenty years of service with the Justice Department, Bill is convinced that the ability to evaluate a program’s impact is an essential skill for anyone entering public service, especially in government. He thinks that the quantitative skill sets that are developed in graduate programs are essential for analyzing the effectiveness and efficiency of programs that have been allocated public funding in order to determine if a program is accomplishing its goals, is having unintended consequences, or is failing. Bill said he was initially surprised to find that this kind of impact evaluation was not utilized to the degree that he would have expected at the federal level within agencies. Over time, he realized that there is not a strong audience for such an independent evaluation as you have federal agencies, elected officials, and organizations that receive federal funding that would not be in favor of seeing headlines in a local newspaper proclaiming that a federal grant or earmark has had no effects on a key issue or problem.

Looking at the general political ideologies, he made a personal observation of why this issue does not gain prominence with either Republicans or Democrats. Bill said, “Conservatives often believe that much of federal spending is illegitimate in the first place, and an impact analysis would be a risk if it showed a program was really successful in reaching goals and building collaborative efforts.” On other hand, he said, “There are lots of people who identify as liberals who believe that all government spending is good and that there is not a need to quantify benefits comparing narrow or extensive spending on programs.” Under his political observation, conservatives would run the risk of being attacked for not supporting the funding of programs that really make a difference and liberals run the risk of being challenged for supporting frivolous spending when it comes to ineffective programs. Moreover, Bill believes that there is no champion of this practice within agencies. He feels that program evaluation should be essential to government, but the culture of resisting change at federal agencies makes this a huge problem that needs attention.

As Montana is a very rural state, Bill Mercer believed that his work as the US Attorney could be used to improve the quality of life for rural Montanans. He cited the methamphetamine problem as an issue of major importance. During his time in DC, he noticed the lack of a concentration of people from rural states when he would attend DOJ or interagency meetings. In the 1990s, Congressional and DOJ drug policy efforts were mainly targeting crack cocaine enforcement and prosecutions. However, meth use was becoming a huge problem in the rural West and South but got almost no attention from Washington, DC. Meanwhile, meth was tearing apart the fabric of rural communities with increased crime, drug overdoses, and related problems, including drug endangered children and the environmental hazards associated with meth labs. Bill stated, “There was just no resonance for meth as an issue in DC.” Instead, rural states had to take the lead on driving the promotion of the problem and developing solutions. In Montana, he worked both on prosecuting offenders and providing public awareness on the dangers of the highly addictive drug. Bill believes that this is still a major problem for rural areas and that people should be cautious of saying that we have beat meth. According to his experience, the best way to continue dealing with methamphetamine abuse is to keep the focus on prevention and education with young people.

Montana has a huge Native American population with seven reservations. Bill put together extensive public outreach efforts with the Native American community around the issues of public safely. He said, “While I don’t always agree with the current administration, I am glad to see they are still focused on public safety in Indian Country.” He also expressed a belief that the quality of the environment is the most important reason why people live in rural areas. They may make less money but have a higher quality of life and really love nature and being outdoors. For the sake of rural citizens, the protection of the environment must be a priority. Bill was very involved in the prosecution of environmental crimes in Montana, and during his tenure, his office handled considerably more cases in this area than most other states did. He feels strongly that people must know that if they destroy wetlands or violate Clean Air act there are consequences to be paid. “Our national treasures are based in rural areas, so it is important to protect the environment there,” he said.

When asked about how things have changed since he was first selected as a Truman, Bill immediately pointed to the financial value of the scholarship. With the Truman Scholarship and other limited funding sources, Bill managed to complete his undergraduate, graduate and law degrees with only $5,000 of debt. Twenty years later, he (and all Truman Scholars) has seen the cost of higher education skyrocket and now sees the challenges that younger Truman Scholars face as they weigh the consequences of taking on lots of student debt and how it can make public service a difficult financial decision. However, Bill said, “For those who have been privileged enough to win the Truman, the real benefit is the alumni network of people that can be drawn upon from around the country.”

Bill has been involved with the Truman Foundation for a long time as a Senior Scholar at TSLW from 1992-1996, as a founding member of TSA, and as a winner of both of the Foundation’s alumni awards. He stresses that the Truman community provides a vital service as scholars can talk to people about what they are currently doing or would like to be doing in the future. “The Truman network is a community of common and diverse interests with a strong knowledge base that can be a tremendous resource for everyone,” he said. Like many Trumans, Bill is excited by the prospect of the community’s first US Senator Chris Coons, especially given his integration within the Truman community. As Trumans, Bill believes it is important that we all take advantage of our opportunities to be better by engaging with each other to shed light on important issues.

As a piece of final advice for Scholars, Bill recalled times in the life of the Truman Foundation where scholars were told in regards to Presidential appointments that there are not that many and you cannot build your career around that. He certainly did not imagine himself being recommended by his Senator to President George W. Bush to serve as US Attorney, and he said the odds for a rural US Attorney to be appointed to a senior DOJ position would have not been likely at all. He stressed, “There are definitely opportunities for federal appointments in DC and in the states, just as there are great nonprofit leadership opportunities.” Scholars should have an idea of their career goals and never lose sight of what they want to achieve. Even for young scholars, he definitely does not think it is wise to say there are things that are off limits. For Bill, there are just too many examples of people having a strategic vision, and even if it does not exactly turn out the way they envisioned, there are always exciting opportunities to pursue.

Phillip Adam Harbison (AL ’07) is a graduate of The University of Alabama. He also is a 2010 George Mitchell Scholar and just recently completed a MSc in Rural Development from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Formerly employed at the Appalachian Regional Commission, Adam recently joined the office of Representative David McKinley (R-WV) as legislative assistant/projects coordinator.

John Kroger (CA' 87) is the Attorney General of Oregon. He has devoted his entire life to public service as a United States Marine, federal prosecutor, public policy expert, and professor. As a federal criminal prosecutor, John won major cases against mafia killers, drug kingpins and corrupt government officials. He helped prosecute crooked Enron executives and served on the emergency response team to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. John wrote about his experiences as a prosecutor in his book Convictions, which won the Oregon Book Award in 2009. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy from Yale University and his law degree with honors from Harvard Law School.

Caitlin Schoenfelder (OR ’08) is currently a Princeton in Latin America fellow working for Convivencia Educativa, A.C., an NGO that specializes in teacher on-site coaching to restructure classrooms and transform instructional practice in marginalized public schools in Mexico. Last year she worked for DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee as an advocate for families with children in special education. Caitlin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Whitman College in 2009 with a major in Politics and a minor in Latin American Studies.

CS: Why did you originally commit yourself to public service? Have your reasons for committing to public service changed throughout the course of your career?

JK: My commitment to public service has never changed. As you can tell from my career path, I’m constantly assessing how I can do the most good. My ideas about what kind of public service would be most productive for me to do has changed over time. The reason I do public service has a lot to do with my time in the Marine Corps. I must have been vaguely patriotic and committed to public service when I enlisted – but I don’t really remember. What I do remember, though, is coming out of three years in the Marines with an extremely deep commitment to public service. The Marine Corps tells you ever single day that your country is more important than yourself. I mean, right now everyday in Afghanistan and Iraq Marines are giving up their lives to protect our country. That is something the Marine Corps tells you everyday: that your country is more important than your own selfish interests, and that you should be willing to give up everything to serve your country – including the ultimate sacrifice. So I left the Marine Corps with the belief that we’re each given one life and that we need to make the most of it. I thought that the way I could do the most good with the life I have is by committing to public service.

CS: Did your time in the Marines also influence your decision to focus on criminal law and become a federal prosecutor?

JK: No, not really. When I got out of college I was considering becoming a high school teacher or going into politics because they were the two things that I thought would be really useful. [I decided to go into politics because] I really believe that you make positive social change through politics. After college I actually decided to go work on Capitol Hill for Senator Chuck Schumer who was a congressman then, and then for Speaker of the House Thomas Foley, and then for Bill Clinton on his ’92 campaign. It was interesting. I enjoyed all those jobs and I learned a lot. When I left politics I wanted a very concrete job with very real, measurable results where I knew I was doing something good for the public interest every single day. And that is why I became a prosecutor. Being a prosecutor is a great job. When you convict a murderer you go home at the end of the day knowing you took someone really dangerous off the streets and you don’t have any doubts about whether you are doing something really valuable. You know you are. What pushed me to being a prosecutor is that I’m really not a fan of violence. I spent a lot of my time as a prosecutor fighting violent crimes. For me that is an important statement, that in our society violence is not how we resolve our disputes.

CS: Why did you eventually decide to teach? Did being a career lawyer deter you?

JK: It was a combination of things. One is that I really believe in teaching. I never have any doubts that when I’m spending my time teaching I’m making a positive impact on our community. Part of it was that I was really burned out with being a prosecutor. I was working 70 to 80 hours a week year after year in very intense cases — I was a mafia prosecutor in New York. When you’re in a job like that you just don’t have any time to think. You don’t have time to think about the big picture. You don’t have time to really assess your career to think about whether you’re doing what you think is important. Going into teaching – in addition to being important in its own right – was personally a time to sort of recharge my batteries, and to get a little more critical self-reflection on my own career and whether I was living up to my own values or not. I can already see that being Attorney General is a very intense job and that after doing this for a certain number of years it will be great to go back to teaching again to sort of think about the big picture…. For me teaching is extraordinarily rewarding. If I can produce more thoughtful ethical lawyers who are really deeply committed to fighting for justice that is just priceless and tangible as a contribution to our society.

CS: Changing the subject a bit, I’m interested in hearing more about your time as a federal prosecutor. Did you ever have to deal with moral ambiguities? And if so, what did you do professionally as well as personally to resolve these ambiguities?

JK: It is funny you ask that – and maybe this motivated the question – but I have written an entire book about the moral ambiguities of my life as a federal prosecutor. My book, Convictions, which was published in 2008 and won the Oregon book award in 2009, is all about the moral quandaries and difficult positions that one finds oneself in as a federal prosecutor. I took the job thinking that it would be really ethically straightforward. You know, there are the “bad guys” and you put them in prison. It turned out that the job was actually an ethical minefield. Sometimes it’s very difficult to find out what actually happened. Sometimes you think you know what happened in a case and it turns out the witness was lying to you. You are given immense power and to use that responsibly and ethically is a great challenge. Another part of the reason I took the years to teach was to think about and write about those questions.

CS: I did read a review of your book and the title struck me: Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. What were some of the main differences in prosecuting corporate executives and street criminals?

JK: The simple thing to say is that it’s easier to prosecute the mafia than a company like Enron because the mafia members know they’re criminals. The mafia is pretty rational when they’re investigated and charged with a crime. They are pretty rational about making a decision to plead guilty or not. They sort of look at all the evidence and they have no problem going into court and admitting to being a crook – in fact they like to think of themselves as criminals. Most white-collar defendants don’t view themselves as criminals in any way. They’re shocked at being treated like criminals. Whether it makes sense or not, they fight very aggressively. They often have millions of dollars to pay for very high-end legal defense. And it’s difficult to convince them to plead guilty because they have a very hard time admitting publicly that they did anything wrong. With Enron we started the case with roughly 10-12 million documents to look at and originally we had a team of five prosecutors. Five prosecutors trying to look at, examine, and assess 10-12 million documents is an immense challenge. White-collar cases are very hard. Quite honestly, I prefer violence cases to white-collar cases as a prosecutor.

CS: I’m currently living in Mexico and the drug war is the biggest policy issue affecting every level of government here. Based on your experience prosecuting major drug cartel leaders, I’d love to hear what sort of policy advice you might have regarding the current “war on drugs”?

JK: The Mexican government really needs to get its arms around corruption within its own government to be able to protect its judges and to make sure its prosecutors and police are not corrupt. The United States has put Mexico in a very difficult position. We are the drug market that fuels their drug wars. That is just a fact. We have not done a good job in the United States decreasing our demand for illegal drugs. My experience is that you can prosecute drug cartels, you can disrupt drug cartels, but as long as the market is still there someone will always pop up to meet that market demand. Narcotics are a commodity just like sugar, tobacco, or anything else. If there is a demand, someone will meet it with a supply. In the long term, Mexico will have a very hard time weeding out the drug trade unless the United States has a better national strategy for decreasing its demand for drugs. I think the Mexican government is correctly and reasonably frustrated that it is our guns and our demand that fuels the trouble that it has to deal with.

CS: What inspired you to sit down and begin writing about your experiences as a prosecutor?

JK: Initially it was that I just had fascinating stories to tell. I was a mafia prosecutor in New York and I had these crazy stories of what it was like to prosecute the mob… As I kept writing it became a way for me to put my own career under an ethical microscope and really relive what I had spent six years doing and try and learn from it. The book is filled with the lessons I learned as a prosecutor, but most of those lessons weren’t immediately clear to me. They were lessons learned by reflecting and writing about that experience. So I’m a huge fan of having enough time in your life to have time to reflect in a self-critical way. The book was a really important vehicle to do that.

CS: From the law school classrooms of Lewis and Clark, why did you decide that running for Attorney General in 2008 was your next career step?

JK: Hardy Myers, who was my predecessor, had served 12 years so I knew that he was going to step down. I’m very familiar with what AGs do and I knew it was both a position that I was very well prepared for and also a position where I could do an incredible amount of good if I ran and won. I had very specific goals when I ran for the office. They are the same issues I’ve worked on my entire career, which are: fighting crime, protecting the environment, and helping consumers. So it was the perfect opportunity to accomplish a lot of the things that I hold very dear. And, frankly, as a law professor I am constantly telling students to go into public service so it was a “put your money where your mouth is” kind of moment. My students said, well why don’t you run for that! And so there was also a sense of practicing what you preach.

CS: What do you consider your biggest accomplishments so far as Attorney General?

JK: First of all, when I got into office we had no attorneys investigating mortgage fraud and we’re obviously in the biggest mortgage crisis in our country’s history. So, we created a new mortgage fraud task force, which is in part putting some people behind bars, but also investigating and closing down, or banning from doing business in Oregon, some unethical foreclosure relief companies. I’m happy with that as an achievement. We created Oregon’s first environmental crimes enforcement unit. So we’re taking on polluters and charging them with crimes. For me, if you’re not properly enforcing environmental laws you’re not going to be able to properly protect the environment. We’ve also been very aggressive about consumer protection. We’ve taken legal action against a very large number of America’s biggest companies – big Wall Street firms, big pharmaceutical companies. We’re trying to hold them accountable for breaking the law. I think we’ve done a great job in that area.

CS: Have there been unexpected challenges you’ve encountered in this position?

JK: There has really only been one surprise. I’ve increased investigation and prosecution of official misconduct by government officials by somewhere between 400 and 500 percent over my predecessor. We’ve removed a judge from office. We’ve removed prosecuted a couple of sheriffs. We’ve charged a sitting elected district attorney with crimes. The biggest surprise for me is that we spend a considerable amount of time investigating people within government who aren’t living up to expectations.

CS: There are a lot of Trumans who go to law school – and even more who consider it. What advice would you give to Trumans considering law school?

JK: I think law school is a great preparation for a career in public service … I think there are two things really powerful about it. One is that it gives you a very specific set of skills that you can use in the public interest and that is valuable – whether you are a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a judge or a legislator. Second, it gives you a lot of flexibility. If you value public service and you’re an education expert, at a certain point you’re only going to be able to get jobs as an education expert. Careers are so long now that you really can have a 40 to 45 or 50-year career. Having the flexibility to move around and do different things in public service is great. I really liked being a prosecutor. But I also like the flexibility of having other options of public service that aren’t just that

CS: Has your concept of justice, or relationship towards justice, shifted over the course of your career – from the time you were studying philosophy at Yale to now serving as Oregon’s Attorney General?

JK: I don’t think it has changed, I think it has deepened. I started studying justice as a philosophical concern back in college before I knew I was going to be a lawyer. And a lot of my work in philosophy as a college student has really influenced my career. My ideas about justice first started taking hold reading Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls in college. I teach all those texts now. I’m still an adjunct law professor and teach one night a week and I focus on theories of justice. So I don’t think there has been a radical shift, but I think I see justice as being both more important and harder to achieve the longer I work at it.

Truman Scholars Charting a New Course in Education

Part 2: The Transition: John King Reflects on Journey from Charter to Public Schools

This piece is the second in a series. See also “Part 1: The Founders: Building Schools with No Excuses.”

By Christopher Sopher (VA ‘10)

Dr. John King has moved from successful charter school founder to national charter network director to Senior Deputy Commissioner of New York’s State Department of Education. We interviewed him about his experiences, lessons learned, and advice for Trumans interested in education.

John King (NJ '95) is the Senior Deputy Commissioner for P-12 education at the New York State Department of Education. Prior to joining the state in September, 2009, he was Managing Director at Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter school network. In 1999, he co-founded Roxbury Prep, a middle school charter serving low-income students in urban Boston. Roxbury has been frequently recognized as one of the top-performing urban middle schools in Massachusetts.

What's your story from the Truman to where you are now?

I taught in New York City schools at Teacher's College, and then taught in Puerto Rico and at a private school, and then went back to Boston to teach at City on a Hill Charter School, which was one of the first generation of charters in the country. I taught high school history. One of the things that struck me was how many of our students were coming to us in 9th grade with 6th grade math and reading skills. One of our challenges was that we tried to get students prepared for college by 12th grade, but they were coming from so far behind, they were spending a ton of time and energy on remediation.

I met Evan Rudall, who cofounded Roxbury Prep with me, through college friends … Those conversations evolved into the decision to start the school together. One of the things that drew me to it was the opportunity to start younger, get students in middle school so we could get them the skills they needed to be on track, so that by the time the students at Roxbury Prep would get to 9th grade, they would be ready to do college prep work. 

What interested you in teaching in the first place?

I think it was a combination of factors. Both my parents were teachers. They both passed away when I was a kid, and for me teachers made all the difference in my own experience. My mom passed when I was eight, and my father was quite ill and passed away when I was 12.

During that period, I had extraordinary teachers. I had a teacher named Mr. Osterweil, who was my fourth, fifth and sixth grade teacher. He was a phenomenal teacher, and really became a father figure to me. His class was rigorous, engaging, incredibly supportive environment. He created an environment that was both challenging and supportive.

I went to Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island, and had an amazing seventh grade social studies teacher, who was so talented at creating a classroom environment that was both academically challenging and also an incredibly safe and supportive learning environment. Between them, I really saw the difference teachers could make, because they made the difference for me during what was really a difficult period of my life.

So when I was in college and got involved in different public service activities, and involved working with young people, I fell in love with the work, because I could see how being a teacher could help me try to create for other kids what they created for me.

Was that kind of classroom environment a part of the plan at Roxbury Prep? 

Exactly. That's what I tried to build as a teacher myself, and it's what we tried to build into the culture of Roxbury Prep. An academically rigorous school that would prepare students for college, challenge them to do a lot of writing and a lot of thinking, but also in environments that were joyful and engaging, and allow students to be creative and really to see the joy in learning.

What were the steps you had to take to create that environment?

I think rigor is an important starting place. First, making sure teachers have a very clear understanding of what students know and are able to do, and are constantly pushing students to do more and to tackle more challenging work.

Second, having teachers plan with students at the center and trying to figure out: what will the students write; what will I ask them to read; how am I going to ensure when we're discussing that every student is thinking? It's small things, like, when you ask a question to the class, asking everyone to write down their answer before calling on a student, so you make sure every student in the room has taken time to think about the answer. Small things to big things like figuring out, at the end of every unit, how do you know that students have really mastered the content?

When you were starting Roxbury in 1999, it was still quite early in the charter movement nationally. What was it like to be on the front of that movement as it was beginning to take shape?

We had a couple really strong models. Evan Rudall, who cofounded Roxbury Prep with me, and is now the CEO of Uncommon Schools, had done a principal internship at the Timilty School, which was at the time the strongest of the Boston middle schools. So a number of practices—around teacher planning and collaboration, school culture, integrating a structured learning environment—were lessons that we took from them.

We also worked with Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, which is a high-performing school that sends students on to college at a very high rate, with students who are mostly low-income students of color. She was a mentor to us as we were doing the planning for Roxbury Prep. We were also fortunate to recruit a really great list of founding teachers, some of whom are still at Roxbury Prep. They helped us figure out how to shape a rigorous and engaging school culture. 

What was the community's —parents’, teachers’, others’—reaction to the school?

Early on there was some apprehension about our ability to build a college prep school that was open to all students. There were certainly schools in Boston that achieved at high levels, but they were often schools that had screening of students and that you had to test into. So there was skepticism in some corners that you could build a school that could be academically rigorous to prepare students for college, but that took any student who applied. 

That first set of parents was really taking a big risk. I remember doing some of the meetings with parents in a local library, because we didn't have a building yet, or teachers yet, and we were just laying out a vision of what we hoped the school would look like. I think they saw the opportunities that could be possible for their children if they got a college prep middle school education that put them on the right trajectory. 

Where do you see the charter movement going now?

I think there are three categories of charter schools now. There's a set of very high performing schools, many of which are serving very high-need student populations, that are proving pretty decisively that the achievement gap can be closed, and that low-income students can achieve at very high levels in strong environments. You've got Uncommon Schools and KIPP and Achievement First producing consistently outstanding student outcomes.

On the other side of the spectrum, you've got charters across the country that are struggling. They have serious governance issues and have serious educational weaknesses. State charter authorizers need to do a better job closing those schools. 

Charters ought to be consistently high-performing. To get there, authorizers need to close the low performers, and the schools in the middle have to see that states and charter authorizers are serious about performance. It's a crossroads moment for the charter sector. 

Some scholars have suggested that one of the dangers in charters growing so quickly is that they become a large bureaucracy that's functionally similar to the existing public school system. Do you share that concern?

Well, you have charter management organizations like KIPP and Achievement First and Uncommon and Aspire, thinking about how best to create a network of high-performing schools. In many ways, they could be a model for how you build high-performing urban districts

On the other hand, I think charters have not done as good a job as they could have across the country meeting unmet needs. For example, we have a huge population of English Language Learners, in New York and around the country, and there have not been as many charters started for ELLs as one would hope. There haven't been many charters for over-age, under-credit students as one would hope. There's opportunity in the coming years for the sector to try and tackle some of the biggest challenges that our urban school systems face.

Tell me a little bit about the work you're doing now for the New York State Department of Education.

One of the biggest projects we've had over the last 14 months is Race to the Top applications. We were unsuccessful in Round 1, but we were the second highest scoring state in Round 2 and are very excited to win. So now we get to the work of implementation of things we committed to in Race to the Top. That includes adopting the Common Core Standards, working to build a new assessment system, dramatically improving our state data system … trying to get teacher evaluations that are much more differentiated.

We've got a full plate of different initiatives.

Several Trumans involved in charter schools have said they've found that the changes they believe in are only fully possible at the charter level. As you've transitioned into public education from running charters, how do you think about the challenge of creating change in the public system?

In many ways, Race to the Top illustrates that it is possible to achieve broad-scale change in a large system.

I do think it's possible to have change in the public system, but it's slower. I'm happy to have had the experience of being involved at the school and network level in the charter sector, where I could move quickly on the changes I wanted to see. Today I move more moderately, but I do think the scale of impact is pretty extraordinary. We're got roughly 3.1 million school kids in New York State. If we can change how teachers and principals think about their work, and how they're evaluated and supported, and impact more than 3 million kids, that's a huge contribution.

So there's a tradeoff to the speed and scale. But that's changing … there's a tremendous sense of urgency in the sector that's making it possible to achieve change more quickly.

What do you see as the "inflection points" where Trumans can enter who want to contribute to and learn about improving education?

It's a great moment to be a person interested in education. There are interesting things going on at every level. It's the kind of time where I'm talking to people early in their career, and I tell them that it's really a question of what you'll be happy doing.  Would you be happy in the classroom? Would you be happy at the Department of Ed? Would you be happy building a longitudinal data system for New York? It's about the intersection of where you can be most useful and what you enjoy the most.

Chris Sopher (VA ’10) is a senior in his last semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies public policy.

For this interview, Bob Holste (PA ’83), Deputy Director of Government Relations for the Pew Charitable Trusts was interviewed by Bill Rivers (DE ’09).

Bob Holste is Deputy Director of Government Relations at The Pew Charitable Trusts, where he ensures Pew’s program initiatives are understood by state, federal and international policy makers.

Mr. Holste was a partner in a political consulting and advertising firm from 2008 until joining Pew in 2009.  Previously, he was the national coalitions director of the Rudy Giuliani for President Committee and served for over 12 years as the Chief of Staff for U.S. Rep. Phil English (R-PA), a member of the House Ways & Means Committee.  During this time, Mr. Holste served for three years as president of the bipartisan House Chiefs of Staff Association.  He is a veteran of numerous political campaigns across the U.S. and in his home state of Pennsylvania and headed Incumbent Retention at the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2002 and 2004.

Before coming to Washington, D.C., he served as the director of the Office of Policy and Planning in the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General and as a manager in the Pennsylvania Treasury Department.

Mr. Holste serves on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania State Society and the Capitol Hill Club. He is graduate of the Pennsylvania State University with a degree in public service.

Bill Rivers is a recent graduate from the University of Delaware where he studied International Relations and History. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a 2010 Simon Fellow, he currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

Is there a specific moment or an event in your life when you first realized you wanted a career in politics?

There wasn’t a light switch moment. My junior and senior years in high school I was a cloakroom page in Congress. It was exciting to work on the House floor. I loved it. I’ve really been doing this since I was 16.

In 2002 and 2004 you ran the GOP’s Incumbent Retention efforts in the House of Representatives, coordinating dozens of congressional candidates, with near-perfect records both times. Given that sitting Congressmen must have some strong opinions about how to best get themselves re-elected, how do you herd cats so successfully?

By keeping in mind that the effort is about the members and getting them reelected, not about you. I used to tell members the only thing I get judged on is whether or not they get reelected. I wasn’t looking for a job with any of them. I was always going to leave when the campaign ended and go back to my Hill job, which was a lot less stressful anyway. I told them frequently, “I’m just here to get you reelected.”

If you realize that races are similar but districts are different, and take the time to learn about each district, then you can be helpful. And if you’re helpful, they’re willing to listen.

In the first cycle, I also had “soft money.” That was back before McCain-Feingold. Then, we spent lots of money and everybody could find out where it came from. I’ll leave it to others to determine if it was a better system.

Is all politics local?

It depends on the cycle. You ignore local preferences at your peril. We do live in one country. As the last election made pretty clear, it is possible to be in a cycle where the election is nationalized and voters move together because they have similar concerns across districts. There is a reason every McDonald’s looks the same, and every TJ Maxx looks the same. There is value in consistency. If you’ve got double-digit unemployment in 60 out of 100 districts, don’t be surprised that every campaign will be talking about jobs and the economy.

When you know a candidate is going to lose, and your limited resources would be better spent elsewhere, how do you say ‘No’?

From the national party perspective, in a number of cases you can’t say yes or no. Candidates will get a pretty good clue when you tell them they’re not getting their coordinated funding that the parties are allowed to spend. You can’t tell them independent expenditures, but all that information is publicly available. A smart campaign tracks that. And you’ll see that as soon as a party withdraws their independent expenditures, it makes national news.

You just say, “We have deep concerns given the state of polling and what you’ve done.” You need some version of a very polite, “We told you so.” But there are consequences to bad decisions. Politics is a very Darwinian process and money is not unlimited. Candor works. Just tell the truth.

One time I had a member come in to my office and ask me about where his coordinated money went. When I told him, he responded by saying ‘I think I’ll start cleaning out my desk.’

Relating to our discussion of electoral politics, California is getting attention for its non-partisan commission to oversee redistricting efforts. One of the guidelines will be that all districts will be condensed, regardless of whether they encompass homogenous parts of a region. Does such a thing as a ‘non-partisan re-districting commission’ really exist? How should re-apportionment be handled?

I’m skeptical of nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Theoretically, I suppose its possible. It depends on how you define “fairness.” Does it mean a district will be politically competitive? This is not going to be possible in every case. Does it mean there is a reasonable chance that a district will send minority representation to Congress? We know there’s a reasonable chance they won’t if compactness is the standard. Re-districting is not a panacea if what you want is more challenging, competitive races.

I think we can look to states like Iowa for a reasonable, successful nonpartisan redistricting effort. They’ve managed to get a lot of the partisanship out of their process.  In 2000, Iowa’s 5 congressional seats were all re-districted. They rotated them like a clock. All the members ended up with 45-60% of their district being new constituents. Functionally, it turned every one of them into freshmen congressmen and Iowa into a national target. What followed was a hard fought battle, with a lot of national media attention. And do you know what happened? Every incumbent was reelected.

What would be a more sustainable approach—though this is asking a lot—would be to generate elected officials who were more sympathetic to alternative political points of view. You want officials worried about what their general electorate thinks, not just their primary electorate. On balance, that would be useful for the country. But recognize there’s no one-stop solution. We have an increasingly contentious electorate.

Why is that? Is it because of Gerrymandering? Or is there really some schism in the American soul?

Gerrymandering definitely makes it worse. That’s all about packing and cracking. If districts are all packed, then anybody just has to win the primary. Generally speaking, Gerrymandering is a bad thing. But when 45 percent of the country comes down on one side of an issue, and 45 percent on the other, that means there’s great division.  You shouldn’t be surprised that your Congress is reasonably representative of that.

What we’re seeing now, I think, is the end of forty-year majorities. The electorate is comprised of divided, free actors. We’re a three party nation with a two party system.

Your work with the GOP didn’t end in 2004. In 2007 the Giuliani Presidential Campaign named you their National Coalitions Director. What’s the first thing you did when you took the job?

After finding a place to live in Jersey City? The campaign had no existing coalition structure at all. The first thing to do was to get some staff in Iowa and New Hampshire, and later in Florida. Then it was bringing volunteers into a coordinated structure. The campaign ended up with over forty different coalition groups of which Women for Rudy and Students for Rudy were the biggest. Once you get organized, you have to task your volunteers. That means millions of phone calls.

Would you have done anything differently?

Sure. How much time do you have?  If we had to do it over again, I think we would have skipped Iowa. Giuliani was a centrist candidate and caucus states just aren’t good for that. Iowa is a fundraiser, not a poll. You’re lucky if you get two percent of the electorate to show up at the polls. And most of the people who win the caucus go on to lose, both the nomination and the White House. New Hampshire is much more predictive because it’s an actual primary. You get higher levels of voter participation and a more representative electorate. A caucus is easily highjack-able by special interests.

What do you think is the driving force behind the two major political parties in the United States today?

The Republican Party is more homogenous than the Democrats in terms of membership. Its policy base is a small businessman in Ohio. The Democratic Party is a coalition. Its policy base is a union shop steward in Indiana who works for a public sector labor union. You see these positions playing out in the positions of each party.

Take taxes for example. Republicans worry about capital gains, estate taxes, and tax breaks for the rich because most small business people are sub-chapter S, which means they pay taxes at the personal rate not the corporate rate.

I was approached once by a small business owner who made $350,000 a year, out of which he paid 9 employees. But because he made $350,000, he was considered ‘rich’ and he personally was taxed for it. He told me, “If they raise my tax rates, I’m firing people.”

You currently serve as Deputy Director of Government Relations for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Now that you’re outside the partisan political realm, what do you see as your greatest challenge?

The challenge for any downtown group, but especially for Pew, is to get on the agenda for Congress and then move your issues through. If you look at some of Pew’s major issues—food safety, antibiotic protection and research, financial market reforms to protect consumers—everyone’s for that. But there’s a big difference between everyone being for it and actually getting on the floor of the House and build a bill that people can get around. Especially if you don’t have a PAC and aren’t likely to have one.

Pew has to form coalitions and work with like-minded individuals across party lines to help convene people who together are loud enough to command the attention of political leaders in Congress and the Administration to put issues front and center and get them moved.

I couldn’t find anybody who was for salmonella in their eggs. That doesn’t mean there weren’t people opposed to the food safety bill. It’s not that their objectives are illegitimate. It’s just that in our view, they were too focused on their concerns and not enough on the public’s concerns.

So you’re still in politics?

Everything’s political in that sense. There are legitimate policy differences that have to be overcome. And in a process that’s designed to be difficult to pass laws (the Founding Fathers really nailed that), that’s the principal challenge: punching through and being persuasive enough.

One of the Trust’s founders, Joseph N. Pew, famously remarked that if elected President of the United States, he would “Tell the truth and trust the people.” Given the recent Wikileaks headlines, how do you determine when telling the truth and trusting the people is harmful?

There is a place for secrecy in statecraft and there is a place for public discourse and the free flow of information in a democracy. We’ve managed to find a balance for 200 years. I’m sure we’ll be able to do it now.

I’d obviously draw a pretty bright line between Wikileaks and Pew. Pew’s advocacy is founded on a solid principle of action: When the facts are clear and the case is compelling and we think that Pew’s intervention would make a difference, then we will engage in advocacy supported by our nonpartisan research. I think most people would agree that knowledge is good, but it needs to come in context. I’m all for making the government tell me what they’re doing, but not if servicemen and women are going to get killed in Kandahar.

The Pew Research Center studies, among a host of issues, American civic literacy. How would you rate the average American in this regard?

If we’re talking about electoral politics, people can be stupid but voters are smart.  I am not in the voters are stupid category. When you get large numbers of them, in the aggregate, they tend to get it right. You get on thin ice when you assert that it’s dumb voters making dumb decisions that are to blame. The “voters are stupid speech” starts with what the question “What other explanation could there be for their failure to see my point of view?”

There’s a reason stuff happens. I’ve seen people lose that I thought should have won. Sometimes you get caught in a wave and it’s not fair. But if voters are going to change the direction of the country, they’re going to fire a whole bunch of people. Sometimes voters want to change and the decision is above your pay grade. And they have lots of opportunities to change their mind. We have elections every two years.

There’s an old adage that says “You are what you read.” As someone who’s been highly successful in electoral politics and in the non-profit world, what are you reading right now? What are your favorite books?

I just finished Last Call, a political history of the rise and fall of prohibition in the United States. It’s an absolutely terrific book. I really recommend it to students in the process. It’s history at its finest. It gets back to the previous question of civic literacy: How could such a colossally dumb idea actually get called into being in a democratic country? It describes the rise of single-issue politics in the States and what I think was the most powerful political organization in the United States, the Anti-Saloon League. The NRA on its best day couldn’t hope to achieve that kind of influence.

Last question: One of your Truman classmates, Chris Coons, was just elected to the US Senate from my home state of Delaware. Can you say you knew him when?

Well, we didn’t have Truman Leadership Week when Chris and I were selected.  We didn’t get that class consciousness that recent Trumans are able to have. When we were selected, Scholars flew out to Missouri for two days. We spent the first at the Presidential Library, and had our ceremony the following day. The Leadership week is really a great experience that we didn’t get to have.

Bill Rivers (DE ’09) currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

For this interview, Todd Gaziano (WV ‘83), Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation and Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, was interviewed by Bill Rivers (DE ‘09).

Gaziano has worked in all three branches of the federal government. He served first as judicial law clerk to the Honorable Edith H. Jones, United States Judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Gaziano later worked in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, where he helped provide legal advice to the President, Attorney General, and other Cabinet secretaries.  As Chief Counsel to the House Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs, he worked closely with Chairman David McIntosh on government-wide regulatory reform legislation and regulatory agency oversight. A John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, he received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

As Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, Gaziano focuses on issues relating to the separation of powers, the role of the courts, civil rights, and Supreme Court jurisprudence, working closely with the Edwin Meese, the 75^th Attorney General of the United States. In addition to these duties, in early 2008 Gaziano was appointed by the House of Representatives to serve for six years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Bill Rivers is a recent graduate from the University of Delaware, where he studied International Relations and History. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a 2010 Simon Fellow, he currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

Your family has a unique history with the Truman Foundation, doesn’t it?

I was only the second Truman Scholar from West Virginia University. Several more were selected from WVU in the next five years, including two of my relatives—my first cousin, Anthony Majestro, and my younger brother, Thomas Gaziano. My brother Tom also went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship and now teaches at Harvard Medical School. The Truman Foundation will always have a very special place in our family.

One of the core principles of the Truman Foundation is a commitment to public service. You’ve worked in all three branches of the federal government. What have you learned from that experience?

It’s been incredibly interesting and helpful to have worked in all three branches, especially for someone who studies the separation of powers. Except for three years I spent at a law firm in Houston, my entire career has been either in direct government service or at a think tank focusing on law and public policy.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is the principal defender of the President’s prerogatives vis-à-vis the other branches. It also settles many internal, executive-branch legal disputes, including any legal issues the President wants resolved. It’s a great job because it includes both providing legal advice (including to the President) and serving as an executive-branch court of last resort. Later, when I was a House counsel, that experience was incredibly helpful in conducting executive-branch oversight. In short, defining and defending executive power helps show where its limits lie.

Moreover, both of those jobs have been quite valuable in the work I’m now doing on the Commission on Civil Rights. The Commission is directed to investigate and report on civil rights enforcement policy to Congress and the President. Congress and the President also each appoint half the commissioners, so it’s important to understand the perspectives, prerogatives, and priorities of each branch.

Civil Rights seem to be a long-standing focus of your career. You also grew up in West Virginia. What influence, if any, did your home state have in shaping that focus?

My father was in the first generation born in America of impoverished, Sicilian immigrants. Discrimination against Italian Catholics from 1935-65 in southern West Virginia coalfields was strong. It wasn’t as bad as that against African Americans, but the bias he faced was not subtle. Nevertheless, my grandparents taught my father and his siblings that, no matter what level of societal discrimination or their lack of wealth, they could succeed in America and that it was their destiny to do so.

The civil rights struggles were quite different in that era than today, but I think more people should try to teach a similar lesson to their kids despite the current societal struggles. My father went from the young son of parents who spoke Italian at home to one of the most respected physicians in West Virginia. It’s important for us to teach our children that they are still largely responsible for their own success—regardless of the type of discrimination that still exists.

Where is America on the question of Civil Rights today?

Landmark Civil Rights legislation was enacted in the 1960s which helps guarantee equality of opportunity. Since then, the argument intensified about whether society needed to be more concerned with equality of opportunity or equality of results. Although some think we can pursue both without conflict, a conflict soon emerges with government’s efforts to do both. If the government steps in to try to ensure equality of results among different racial, ethnic, or other groups, it necessarily interferes with the equality of opportunity for all of them. And sometimes public policies that try to address a disparate impact in a particular way not only interfere with the equality of opportunity, but they make the underlying problem worse. The law of unintended consequences is an unforgiving force.

It’s wonderful, however, that it no longer takes courage to condemn open, blatant racism. This wasn’t always the case. Racist statements are immediately condemned these days. Comedians and politicians lose their careers over them. And they should. The public change in attitudes and the rapid increase in interracial dating and marriage shows how much progress we have made.

We’re still trying to live up to the promise of the 14^th Amendment, and we still have a way to go. But there are other threats today to our individual liberty; some of them come from a government that not only interferes with them directly (like screening at airports) but may interfere with our economic opportunities indirectly.

Let’s talk about the courts. In the beginning of the Republic, most of the federal government’s power seemed to be held by the legislative branch. In the 20^th century, that seemed to shift to the executive. Is there now a shift of power underway in the federal government toward the judicial branch?

All three branches of the national government have grown in power and influence over the lives of Americans. The federal courts’ power has grown in proportion to the rest of government, and some of that has been necessary and for the good. The historic desegregation decisions of the 1950s and 1960s are an example. The courts’ persistent enforcement of the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection was necessary during the ugly period of massive resistance.

But once they began to exercise extraordinary remedies, including some controversial integration decrees, it became attractive for activist groups to urge the use of those same powers for more questionable ends. At about that same time, some legal doctrines that tended to encourage judicial activism, unmoored from the text and original public meaning of the Constitution, were gaining currency. This and the growth of the federal government generally led the courts to assume even more power.

While there’s hardly an issue the federal courts won’t decide now, at least there is a healthy trend back to a more careful interpretation of the Constitution that relies more on the text and its original public meaning.

You’re saying there’s been a trend toward Originialism?

I think so. The issue got an incredible public boost twenty-five years ago with a series of speeches on originalism that then Attorney General Ed Meese gave. Those talks helped launch a debate that re-invigorated that school of thought. The Heritage Foundation just celebrated the anniversary of those talks with a symposium of scholars at the Supreme Court with General Meese and Justice Alito. Today, regardless of legal scholars’ personal positions on textualism or originalism, its hard to deny that they are serious, mainstream approaches to constitutional interpretation.

Just look at the Supreme Court’s use of originalism in the landmark Second Amendment cases of the last five years. In DC vs. Heller, the question was whether the Second Amendment protected only the rights of state militia to keep and bear arms or the right of all Americans, regardless of service in a militia. Both sides engaged in a serious parsing of the text and a discussion of its original public meaning. Regardless of what the justices thought the right historical answer was, none of them were willing to say that the text or its original public meaning was irrelevant.

I’d like to switch gears for a minute and talk about the legal profession, especially as it relates to starry-eyed, newly minted Truman Scholars. There is a popular understanding now that recent college graduates, if unable to find a job, can always apply to law school. The thinking goes that a JD is a great thing to have, even if you never use it.  Is this true?

I don’t recommend law school to everyone regardless of interest, but I do recommend it to a lot of people. Assuming you have sufficient interest in the type of subjects studied in law school, it’s a great interdisciplinary degree. I thought it was a fascinating course of study that combines some of the wisdom of the ages from history, sociology, economics, political science, linguistics, and rhetoric.

Law school is also really good training for the mind. Lawyers are taught to spot issues in a particular way before they try to come up with the right answer. It teaches you to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant facts in prior cases. What differences are immaterial? Why? In hard cases, there is no easy answer. Law school focuses on the hard cases, and that really trains the mind in a manner that is useful in many fields.

It’s also a very versatile degree for other reasons. Besides a lot of specialties in legal practice, it can be helpful in business, government, public policy, the nonprofit world, teaching and more. It allows you to change your career plans.

Lastly, it’s about the easiest doctorate degree to obtain. My four brothers are MDs. They had to work harder and study longer than most of my lawyer friends.

An overwhelming majority of members of Congress, both past and present, have been lawyers. And it makes sense for legislators and members of the judiciary. But a large number of America’s Presidents have been lawyers as well. Does legal training impart executive capability?

It’s certainly not necessary for the Presidency. Ronald Reagan is among the highest-rated presidents in the 20^th Century, and he wasn’t a lawyer. What he did have though was a strong understanding of and appreciation for the Constitution. I think that’s vital for anyone in government. Kennedy is another popular, non-lawyer President from the last 50 years. Carter and Johnson were non-lawyers with questionably legacies. And Nixon and Clinton were lawyers who were both impeached. In my lifetime, there is no obvious correlation between legal training and presidential performance.

Is our American political system, courtesy of our Constitution, exportable?

Certainly there are important lessons and virtues that are exportable. Few countries have the same free speech protection we do. Not even England has as strong protections for speech. I think more countries ought to follow our lead. And that would have a significant impact on the government itself. If citizens are free to harshly criticize their government, they not only enjoy that freedom but it will tend to lead to better and more democratic government.

As a quick aside, it will be interesting to see if the Peoples Republic of China can continue to suppress political freedoms as it allows more economic freedom. People with economic freedom and the information necessary for global market power will want more political freedoms, but soldiers with tanks and guns exercise their own persuasive power.

Speaking of criticizing government: Is the President’s healthcare plan constitutional?

The individual mandate is clearly unconstitutional if we are concerned with the original meaning of Congress’s commerce power. Yet, Congress and the Supreme Court have read the commerce power much more broadly than the framing generation understood it to be. Under current judicial precedents, it’s a much closer call, but I still think the Supreme Court will strike the individual mandate down. There are several reasons, but I’ll mention two simple ones.

The first is that the mandate truly is unprecedented, which means there is no controlling judicial precedent for it—regardless of some claims to the contrary. Congress has never before attempted to require Americans to buy a particular product or service, even when the nation’s existence was at stake. For example, Americans were never required to buy war bonds in World War I or II.

Second, the Supreme Court has always been clear, even when it has approved a very broad exercise of commerce power, that there are some limits.  If Congress can regulate people for not purchasing something because staying out of the market would affect the market (even if that is so), then it can do anything. If the Court were to adopt that theory, it would be adopting a chaos theory of the commerce clause, one without any limits. I don’t think the Court will do that.

It’s the equivalent of requiring Americans to buy a new GM car every year. You wouldn’t even have to drive them. You could keep them all in front of your house. But every year, a family of four would have to buy a new car of a particular brand with particular equipment in order to stimulate the car market and to avoid certain transportation “externalities.”

I explained the constitutional arguments in a lot more detail in a paper I co-authored last December (see http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2009/pdf/lm_0049.pdf) which I am happy to learn was entered in the Congressional Record during the healthcare debate. (Every think tanker hopes that will happen with their scholarship occasionally.)

Now, if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate, there is a question whether the rest of the legislation fails. The court would have to engage in a severability analysis. That’s an even tougher issue, but I think the sponsors of the Obamacare bill, including Senator Bauchus, made it clear the act couldn’t survive without the individual mandate.

The healthcare debate really seems to have been an issue that helped make the Tea Party a household name. What do you think of the Tea Party?

One encouraging aspect of the rise of the Tea Party is the participants’ hunger for knowledge about the Constitution. Some have wacky ideas about it. Some have rather impressive ideas and knowledge. It’s an important opportunity for all of us to help inform and educate Americans on the Constitution.

I also think the Tea Party movement is going to be part of a long-term trend, especially as concern over the scope and financing of government continues. Whether you believe in large government or think that government’s size should be reduced, the problems in Greece and Ireland suggest that paying for government entitlements anywhere near those that exist now is a very serious problem. And that often raises constitutional issues.

This age may be analogous to the Progressive Era, only with the opposite effect. Many early progressives in the academy thought constitutional doctrines limited the scope of national government to solve problems they thought were pressing. I think the opposite instinct is emerging today. The constitutional doctrines of today may be enabling a leviathan to trample the protections for liberty the framers enshrined in the Constitution.

What do you enjoy most about your job as Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies?

I especially enjoy organizing practice argument sessions for many of the advocates who are going to argue cases before the Supreme Court. In a given Supreme Court term, we might organize a practice “moot court” for about a dozen of the seventy or so cases the Court will decide. These are often some of the most important cases. We try to bring together the best Supreme Court advocates to help those who have never argued before the High Court. It’s always an interesting challenge. And there have been times when our guest advocates have told us they believe our preparation session made the difference in their winning the case.

Bill Rivers (DE ’09) currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

By Jennifer Lambert (SC '00)

As a recent PhD graduate interested in work involving development, security and the Middle East, Jennifer Lambert (SC ’00) called upon the Truman community to find someone with relevant experience.  She quickly connected with Matthew Mingus (CO ’86), who recently returned from working on governance and development issues in Iraq.

Matthew was a double major in speech communications and public affairs at the University of Denver when he won the Truman Scholarship in 1986.  His desire to work with community development organizations drove his interest in public service.  And after his undergraduate degree, he did work for community-based non-profits in Colorado and Michigan.  Yet his love for learning, influenced by the work of some influential teachers, drove Matthew back to school, where he earned an MPA and PhD in Public Administration.  He is now a professor of governance at Western Michigan University.

Most of Matthew’s research focused on comparative public administration—comparing two or more countries like Canada and the United States.  While he found his research compelling, he continued searching for international consulting opportunities to broaden his knowledge and expertise.  It is this desire that led a rather comfortable and tenured professor in Michigan to apply for the opportunity to serve as a senior governance specialist with an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Iraq.

By the time the State Department called to interview Matthew, he had talked with several people who had been to Iraq before and served in similar capacities.  So when he was presented with the opportunity, Matthew felt he had a good idea of what he was signing up to do.  Of course, no person’s path to Iraq comes without obstacles, and Matthew’s biggest obstacle was making this work with wife of 19 years and a 15 year old daughter.  While his wife was against the idea at the start, she was much more supportive by his first R&R because she could see how excited he was by the work he was doing in Iraq.  But perhaps Matthew was aided by the speed of events after taking the opportunity.  Within weeks of being hired, Matthew was training for his Iraq adventure just outside DC.  And after just three weeks of training, he was landing at the military side of Baghdad International Airport.

Of course, going to Iraq comes with risks, so his family’s hesitancy is certainly understandable.  While he had some concerns and worries about his own safety, Matthew said he basically let the US military personnel worry about security and focused his attention on learning about a foreign culture and doing his job.  He remarked, rather casually, “You know we have the best trained security personnel in the world in the US armed services.  I wasn’t preoccupied with concern about my safety; I let the people whose job it was to protect my team worry about that.” 

Matthew’s job consisted of working with local governments to teach local officials, in his words, “that democracy means more than just elections.”  Life under a dictator in Iraq meant that nearly all decisions were made by a highly centralized regime in Baghdad, so most members of town councils and provincial governments had little experience in actually making decisions and implementing them.  One of the biggest lessons that Matthew and his colleagues taught Iraqis was how to communicate more democratically to reach a consensus. 

Perhaps his biggest accomplishment was helping the more rural provincial governments, called qadas, surrounding Baghdad work together and advocate for their collective interests.  Matthew says that this is a classic urban politics problem.  When locales live near a large urban center, most of the attention and resources get devoted to that urban center and leave many of the suburban and rural surrounding districts with less clout.  These more rural districts now hold a semiannual conference and have learned to work more closely to get their districts’ concerns and issues addressed.

Overall, Matthew said it was a great experience, it will contribute positively to his research and course content, and it gave him the opportunity to learn about a completely foreign culture.  He had never been in an Arab state before and didn’t have an educational background in anything related to the Middle East.  Matthew characterizes the Iraqi people as “a friendly, open, and extremely hospitable people who have a very hands-on and engaged culture, particularly when in groups, but individuals can be very reserved.”  During meetings, when a new person entered the room, everything often stopped as people greeted and welcomed the new member.  “It made for some long meetings,” Matthew recalled, “but it shows just how warm and hospitable the Iraqi people really are.”

If other Truman Scholars are interested in similar work, Matthew said most of the current opportunities to serve on PRTs are now in Afghanistan.  The key is to talk to people who have done it before, so you can figure out if the opportunity is right for you and how to get connected to the opportunities available.  Most opportunities are available at usajobs.gov (U.S. government) and devnetjobs.org (private contractors and NGOs).

Jennifer Lambert (SC ’00) recently completed her PhD in Political Science (International Relations/Middle East) and is currently teaching at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Truman Scholars Charting a New Course in Education

Part I: The Founders: Building Schools with No Excuses

This piece is the first in a series. See also "Part 2: The Transition: John King’s Journey from Charter to Public Schools"

By Christopher Sopher (VA '10)

Featuring:
Dacia Toll (MD ’93), Co-CEO and President, Achievement First
Seth Andrew (RI ’99), Founder and Superintendent, Democracy Prep Schools
Ravi Gupta (NY, ’04), Fellow, Building Excellent Schools

Over the last few years, charter schools have generated an exceptional amount of interest and activity across the country, spurred by the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative and by encouraging results from the most successful charters. Nationwide there are some 1.5 million students attending more than 4,000 charter schools. It is a moment of great potential for leading education reformers who have spent years and sometimes decades developing, opening and running charter schools in some of the country’s lowest-income, lowest-performing districts.

A remarkable number of these leaders are Truman Scholars. I interviewed three Truman Scholars (among many, many more) who are involved in founding and running charter schools. This is their surprisingly connected story.

“A heck of an opportunity”

Dacia Toll had just returned from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and was starting law school at Yale, when the state of Connecticut passed its first charter school legislation in 1996. “It basically says to community leaders and entrepreneurs and others who are concerned about kids, ‘If you think there's a better way to do it and put together a robust plan and team, we'll actually let you run a public school,’” says Toll (MD ’93). “And that's a heck of an opportunity.”

Toll and a group of her fellow Yale Law School students took the offer, and over the intervening 13 years she and her colleagues have transformed that opportunity—first into a charter middle school in New Haven, and then into one of the most respected charter school networks in America.

Toll had not planned a career in education. In college she was involved in journalism and poverty issues, and later spent several summers working for former President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta Project, an antipoverty program.

“We worked with 18- to 30-year-olds, and we were preparing them for jobs that we would not want for our own kids. Without adequate educational background, it was not possible to access economic opportunity beyond a certain level. I had that experience over and over again ... It seemed like all the issues we were focused on in terms of job opportunities and issues of social equality and civil rights were really just downstream of unequal investments we were making in kids.”

That inequality found names and faces when Toll started a teacher prep program in New Haven Public Schools, while still in law school. “Something that was theoretical, something that I understood on a policy level became very real in my classroom of eight graders at Fair Haven Middle School.”

These experiences led Toll and her peers to found Amistad Academy, a charter middle school that opened in 1999 in one of New Haven’s toughest neighborhoods.

“There were officially I think 32 founders of Amistad. It ranged from the CEO of the local bank to a juvenile court judge to a child psychologist to a teacher, a parent. It was a wonderful mix. In New Haven there's always sensitivity to Yale projects. As a result we worked especially hard to broaden the founding team,” says Toll. “And it worked out really well.”

The founding team visited high-performing schools around the country, including some of the very first charter schools. They designed a “no-excuses” model, relentlessly focused on student achievement and quality teaching. Toll quickly found herself running Amistad.

“To make a long story short, the principal didn't work out, and by November of the first year, I was already starting to function as a principal, and I officially became the principal in the second year of the school. The story is, I loved the job. So I ended up doing that for six years.”

After only a few years in operation, Amistad began showing impressive results: performance gains with some of the most difficult students in the city, higher state test scores, high teacher satisfaction. The school was profiled in a PBS documentary and won a state award in 2006 for having the best middle school performance gains in Connecticut.

In Amistad’s fifth year, Toll’s partner and co-director (and fellow UNC alumnus) Doug McCurry left to found a second school in New Haven and start Achievement First, a charter network that now operates 17 schools serving predominantly low-income students in Connecticut and New York. Toll is co-CEO and president. Amistad’s early success has continued for Achievement First’s other schools.

“When Connecticut went to evaluate the performance gains [for schools across the state] without us in there, they said, we need to include the Achievement First schools. They needed to change the scales on the graph because the scores we so different between our kids and the rest.”

Success follows success...

In 2004, the same year Amistad was featured in a PBS documentary, Seth Andrew (RI ’99) arrived there for a one-year residency as a fellow with Building Excellent Schools, an organization that trains charter school founders and leaders.

After graduating from Brown University in 2000, Andrew followed his future wife to Korea, where he taught in a public school, an experience he says still informs his charter schools’ approach. Upon his return he taught and became an administrator in traditional public schools.

“I got very excited about teaching and about my practice, but really did not like the environment of the traditional school, which seemed stifling and bureaucratic, and my colleagues didn't have the same mission as I did,” says Andrew.

He left and became a fellow at Building Excellent Schools, which in 2005 helped him launch Democracy Prep charter school in central Harlem, one of New York City’s most historically troubled neighborhoods.

“I first tried to start Democracy Prep in Rhode Island almost ten years ago. The educational and political environments weren't supportive of bold reforms at that time,” says Andrew. “When we couldn't do it in Rhode Island we moved to New York, and had a very supportive chancellor and mayor and political environment, which meant that we were able to get Democracy Prep off the ground and open in 2006 in public school space.”

By 2009, Democracy Prep was the top performing school in Harlem. In September of 2010, New York City named it both the top middle school and top charter school in the entire city.

“I ran the school day-to-day as head of school for the first two years, and now we're running five schools in New York and Rhode Island, and that half of it is exciting, hard, challenging, brutal work,” says Andrew. “But it is incredibly rewarding because you get to see your results with kids every single day.”

Democracy Prep schools, like Dacia Toll’s Achievement First schools, follow a “no excuses” model. Andrew says the model has five elements: 1) more school time; 2) the use of data to measure outcomes and needs; 3) rigorous curriculum and high expectations; 4) a culture of respect and enthusiasm (what Andrew calls “the joy factor”); and 5) high-performing teachers. “The single most important thing of successful schools is really great teachers in every classroom,” he says.

Andrew’s experiences and early success have given him confidence in the model and the best practices it suggests for public education. “It's 100 percent clear. It's not something magic. It's a lot of work, but if you look at the highest performing schools around the country ... they all do exactly the same core principles.”

Despite opposition in some circles to these principles and to the charter school movement, Andrew says parents and students in New York have responded positively—so positively that student demand currently far exceeds the supply of charter school spots.

“We had 1,500 families apply last year for about 100 spots. Literally almost every kid who is eligible in District 5 for our program is putting in an application to our school. For New York, there are 40,000 families on the waiting list trying to get into charter schools.”

“I want to do what he’s doing”

In the summer of 2009, while Democracy Prep was busy becoming central Harlem’s best public school, Ravi Gupta (NY ’04) wandered into a panel session at the Truman Scholars Association’s first National Conference in Washington, DC.

“In the meeting there were Trumans who had started charter schools and were involved in education. I saw an incredible guy named Seth Andrew ... and I was blown away by his presentation. I was so floored by his take on charter schools, and by his passion for the cause ... that I said to myself, I want to do what he's doing. I slipped him a note and told him I would be e-mailing him. I sent him an e-mail the next day telling him I wanted to do what he was doing, and he told me to apply for Building Excellent Schools.”

Gupta had just graduated from Yale Law School and was working as an assistant to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice (DC ‘84), a job he had maintained while in law school, after taking a year off to work for the Obama for America presidential campaign.

“I almost immediately applied and was accepted, but had to defer for a year because I had an obligation to work for Susan Rice. But I knew what I wanted to do. Seth is a warrior. There are few people I've met in life who are as passionate and dedicated and effective as he is. He was a big part of it.”

Gupta is now a fellow with Building Excellent Schools, where he is studying school leadership and preparing to launch a charter school in Nashville, Tennessee.

“My dream in life is to start a school where I grew up in Staten Island, but an opportunity presented itself to build a school in Tennessee because they won Race to the Top ... and I jumped at the chance. I love the people in Tennessee, and I'm loving Nashville.

“We're getting used to the grind of running a school. But for me, that's not too much of an adjustment. I went from campaign world, working seven days a week until 1 a.m., to the UN, where every day there's another crisis to respond to.”

“I hear a lot of people tell me that it's not possible in medium-sized cities, or not possible in that region. But if you look around this country, there are a handful of schools out there defying the odds, and they're doing it all over the place,” says Gupta.

What’s next

Toll, Andrew and Gupta all say they expect the movement to grow in the years ahead.

“There really is a quiet revolution taking place,” says Toll. “Through Race to the Top and other things, we have seen more progress in the last 18 months than we've seen in the previous decade.”

Andrew, for his part, is ready to open more schools.

“We need more high-performing charter schools ... I told the chancellor [of New York City schools Joel Klein] in no uncertain terms, that we will build as many Democracy Pep schools in Harlem as they will provide us buildings,” he said. “We want to serve our community so that there is no lottery and no waiting list. We want to get to the point where supply meets demand, and we have enough spots for everybody who wants one.”

All three founders credit the Truman community with support, ideas and inspiration, and say they hope the connections continue to the next generation of school founders and leaders.

“The Truman community is like wind in your sails, having a whole group who shares your values and commitment,” says Toll.

“There is no better advice than from those who have done it; to sit down individually and talk with the great resources the Truman community has,” says Gupta. “Seth helped me, and I'm ready to [help other] folks who want to get involved.”

Chris Sopher (VA ’10) is a senior in his last semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies public policy.

by Jennifer Kimball (MO '08)

When I talk with people about my work at the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, they frequently ask if it’s depressing to hear about terrible abuses people inflect on other human beings. For me, the reality is quite different. While I do see some of the darkest aspects of human nature, I also get to see the some of the brightest and most inspiring aspects.

I met Wendi Adelson (FL ’00) at TSLW in 2008, soon after my selection as a 2008 scholar from Missouri. The following summer, I met Martina Vandenberg (CA ’88) during Summer Institute at the Truman Scholars Association Conference, and I recently had the chance to connect with Kristina Filopovich (OR ’96). Adelson,  Vandenberg, and Filopovich’s work focuses on the severe human rights abuse of human trafficking. We are only beginning to understand this global problem and its scope and extent in the U.S. As a relatively new scholar, I have been fortunate to learn from other scholars who have been pioneers, and whose anti-trafficking work has touched many victims and helped shape the field.

After finishing her graduate work at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, Vandenberg moved to Moscow, Russia, where she co-founded one of the country’s first rape crisis centers. Through this work, Vandenberg met an American attorney and filmmaker, Gillian Caldwell, who was developing a film about the trafficking of women from the former Soviet Union. “At that time, people were aware of trafficking in Southeast Asia, but it was a new issue in Russia,” Vandenberg says. Vandenberg helped Caldwell connect with the feminist activists in Russia working to combat violence against women, and started learning about human trafficking.  After operating a grant fund for women’s rights NGOs in Russia and Ukraine for nearly two years, Vandenberg returned to the United States and attended law school.

While in law school, Vandenberg received a human rights internship grant to conduct research for the Israel Women’s Network, an NGO based in Jerusalem.   Vandenberg spent seven months in Israel, documenting the trafficking of women to that country for forced prostitution.  She eventually published a report on the issue, including documentation of the trafficking victims’ detention in an Israeli women’s prison. After returning to the United States, Vandenberg accepted a position in the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, continuing to work at HRW while completing her law degree.   Both during and after law school, Vandenberg documented violence against women in the former Soviet Union, as well as rape as a war crime and trafficking in the Balkans.    She enjoyed working while attending law school.  “While lots of folks went to Florida for Spring Break,” Vandenberg remembered, “I went to Bosnia to interview trafficking victims.  It provided some much-needed perspective.”

After five years at Human Rights Watch, Vandenberg was eager to use her law degree and to learn to litigate.  She approached former Truman Foundation Executive Secretary Louis Blair for advice. Vandenberg eventually landed at Jenner and Block LLP, a law firm known for its extensive pro bono work.  She seems to do “all pro bono, all the time,” pursuing civil remedies for trafficking victims in the U.S. federal courts, and helping women trafficked for forced labor apply for immigration remedies.  She and her colleagues at Jenner advocate for victims, helping them navigate the criminal prosecution process as witnesses. Many of the cases Vandenberg has worked on over the past few years involve exploitation by employers who enjoy diplomatic immunity or work for the World Bank.  Vandenberg calls the forced labor cases that she focuses on the “forgotten side of human trafficking.”

Like Vandenberg, Filipovich came to anti-trafficking work through previous work on violence against women. While an undergraduate, she founded a non-profit working on women’s issues, before pursuing a Watson Fellowship.  She encountered sex trafficking in Vietnam and Thailand while researching women’s issues internationally. Filipovich’s career path has taken her from working for President Clinton’s National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women reviewing results of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to researching gender issues, including trafficking, overseas through a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to working on micro-credit issues at Women for Women International, before coming to Jenner & Block two-and-a-half years ago.

At Jenner and Block, Filipovich works with Vandenberg, pursuing civil remedies for trafficking victims in the United States, and is working on her fourth trafficking case. “We’re able to do cutting edge litigation work on these topics,” says Filipovich, noting that many times the government does not formally prosecute the cases, so the civil law suit may be the only repercussion the trafficker faces.

Adelson first became aware of human trafficking through her interest in international relations and humanitarian immigration work. After finishing her undergraduate work, Adelson worked for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. She then received a Gates Fellowship to study comparative immigration policy at Cambridge University. Following training in law, Adelson started working for the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights (CAHR) in 2007 after spending a year as a clinical fellow with the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. On her first day there, Adelson worked on a case for a teenage victim of trafficking. “I see human trafficking as part of a continuum of human exploitation,” says Adelson. “Training in law gave me a discrete set of tools to help people,” she said, adding that she gets to work with and know her clients personally and professionally, and is able to see the direct impact of her work.

Adelson’s anti-trafficking work centers on immigration remedies for foreign national victims of trafficking in the United States. Adelson helps trafficking victims apply for and navigate the T and U visa process, special visas for victims of trafficking and victims of crime. Adelson also advocates for the people with whom she works, and helps them navigate the service process. Like Vandenberg and Filipovich, Adelson’s work doesn’t end with the case work. The CAHR was asked by the Governor of Florida to help create the state’s strategic plan to combat human trafficking and serve victims in Florida, and through her work on this project, Adelson has conducted hundreds of interviews of service providers. Adelson will be teaching a course on human trafficking this fall and Filipovich currently works as an adjunct law professor at American University where her gender and law course includes a focus on human trafficking.

When asked what keeps her motivated, Vandenberg answers without hesitation, “My clients. They are totally inspiring, after all that they have survived.”

Adelson concurs, citing the relationships she builds with individual clients as sustaining. “I feel like I’m part of the solution,” says Adelson. “I work with people at a turning point, and I can help them reclaim their lives.”

“I’m lucky,” says Filipovich. “I’ve always thought I was really lucky to find my passion [for gender issues/women's rights] early and know that I can make a difference.”

I also count myself as extremely lucky. Human trafficking is a terrible crime against people, and hearing their stories and seeing the abuse they suffered can be almost immobilizing at times. However, I draw strength from seeing the resiliency of survivors and from the inspiration of others working in the field to continue to do what I love: working to end this human rights abuse.

Jennifer Kimball (MO ‘08) is the regional specialist for the Northeast for the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.

by Jonathan Jones (NE '04)

In Clare Sierawski’s (PA ’04) Truman application policy proposal, she proposed a bilateral agreement between the United States and China on climate change.  As the Special Assistant to the Special Envoy for Climate Change, Sierawski pursued this vision and helped to develop the first official bilateral agreement between the United States and China on climate change. “It was amazing to implement my policy proposal and be a part of something so historic,” Sierawski said.

In between her first and second year in the MPA program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Sierawski was offered a job at the State Department to work on the international climate change team.  Her work on the team soon led to her role as the Special Assistant to the Special Envoy for Climate Change – a position established by the Obama administration.   For Sierawski, this was a major step in achieving her career goals.  “Since my days as an undergraduate climate activist, it was one of my dreams to work for the government on our international climate change policy,” Sierawski explained. 

The Truman Scholar experience has been important in shaping Sierawski’s vision and path on the issue of climate change.  As a recent graduate, Sierwaski worked as a Truman Fellow at the Department of Transportation on its climate change portfolio.  “As a Truman Fellow at DOT, I was able to deepen my understanding of climate change policy, as well as meet the people working on climate change at the State Department, which is in part how I was later offered my job at State," she said.

Sierawski believes that the Truman community has a powerful role to play in helping its members meet their career goals and aspirations for positive change.  “Most of us have a real and burning passion for a particular social issue or change that we want to see in our world,” she said. “At some point, however, the reality hits that it can be extremely difficult to affect even the most incremental change. This is where the Truman community comes in - we can inspire, guide and support each other to realize our goals.”  She added, “The values of the Truman Scholarship and knowing amazing Trumans inspires me to keep going and continually reminds me of the importance of public service.” 

As Sierawski returns to the Woodrow Wilson School this fall to finish her MPA degree, fellow Truman Scholar, Kelley Greenman (FL ’08), will be taking her place as Special Assistant to the Special Envoy on Climate Change.  At a regular meeting that the Truman Foundation hosts for recently graduated Scholars, Sierawski spoke about working on climate change at the State Department.  Greenman was in attendance.  “Kelley was interested in working more directly on climate change and wanted to explore the international side of the issue. When I was looking for a replacement, I knew that she would be perfect for the job,” Sierawski said. 

While at graduate school, Sierawski will continue to study climate change issues and consider how to push forward energy efficient policies and climate change legislation.  She is also interested in developing an informal Truman community around the issue.  Please contact her if you are interested and/or already work on the issue of climate change policy – claresophia@gmail.com.

Jonathan Jones (NE ’04) is pursuing his MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.

In this month’s Scholar profile Max Finberg (NY '90), Director of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Center for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, was interviewed by Jeni Lamb (CO '09), a current participant in the Truman Summer Institute and intern for the American Seed Trade Association.

Max Finberg has spent his career working on domestic and international hunger issues. Prior to his appointment at USDA, Max served as the Director for the Alliance to End Hunger, a collaboration of nonprofit organizations, religious bodies, universities, corporations, and individuals dedicated to eradicating hunger at home and abroad. He also spent 12 years in the service of former Congressman and Ambassador Tony Hall (D-OH) as the founding Director of the Bill Emerson and Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program at the Congressional Hunger Center, a senior legislative assistant working on domestic hunger issues, and as an advisor and special assistant to the UN mission in Rome.  Max holds a Master’s in Social Ethics from Howard University’s School of Divinity.  A 1990 Harry S. Truman Scholar from New York, Max attended Tufts University to study International Relations, German, and Political Science as an undergraduate.  Today, Max lives in Washington D.C with his wife and two young children.

Jeni Lamb graduated with degrees in Agricultural Economics and Political Science in May 2010 and is currently finishing a Master’s in Agricultural Economics at Virginia Tech. She is a 2009 Truman Scholar from Longmont, Colorado.

Edited Question and Answers with Max Finberg (NY ‘90), Director of the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, United States Department of Agriculture

Lamb: Your early career experience is extremely inspiring—how did you come to serve as the founding director of the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program just out of college?

Finberg: Actually, I spent a year interning in the Office of Congressman [Tony] Hall (D-OH). As a sitting Congressman, he had just finished fasting for 22 days to raise awareness of hunger issues. From there he founded the Congressional Hunger Center, a separate nonprofit organization, and I was one of the first employees to move from being an intern in his Congressional office to being the director of this nascent Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program. I am thrilled the program is still going and training the next generation of hunger fighters.  We have even had a couple of Truman scholars go through the program. It was great because here I was only a couple years out of school running a program, only because I was the only one there. Still, it was crazy to trust me with that kind of responsibility. Honestly though, it was just great, great stuff bringing folk together, creating an experience where fellows could spend six months in the field with a food bank or shelter and six months back in DC working on hunger and poverty policy. Back then at least, there was nothing that combined the field and policy experience.

How did you establish that relationship with Congressman Hall to where you think he was willing to put so much trust in you to develop such an innovative program?

When I was a sophomore at Tufts, I came down to DC for the National Prayer Breakfast and I heard him speak for the first time. I thought “wow”, here was a politician who cared about hunger and hungry people and loved God and I would like to work with him. So I wrote him a letter asking for an internship and never got a response. I wasn’t from Dayton, Ohio or anything like that.  I came down my senior year to the same breakfast, heard him speak again, and still thought “wow,” again, this would be great if I could work with this man. I had a friend who knew his wife, and tried to get an internship that way through giving him my resume. It didn’t work, that path didn’t open. I moved into a group house with a bunch of guys in DC trying to love God, love each other and figure all of that out. It turned out that the house was a block away from where Congressman Hall and his family lived.

So the line that I usually use is that I stalked him until he gave me a job, but what really answers the question is I started by learning about him, getting to know him and started to serve him.  Soon after I had moved in, his son, who was 12 at the time, was diagnosed with leukemia. So some friends and I would cook extra meals, mow his lawn, visit his son in the hospital—things that allowed us to interact but in a way that wasn’t…oh, can I go with you to your meeting at the White House?  When that paid off was nine months later when an internship opened up and he hired me in the Congressional office and then as Congressional Hunger Center staff. It worked out. I was able to deliver what he wanted—“a domestic Peace Corps focused on hunger” was the one liner—with the help of a lot of people. I never would have predicted that I would serve him for 12 years, but one thing led to another and the relationship was built—partly due to my willingness to serve him and his family early on.

Wow, fantastic. Can you talk about your decision to study at the Howard School of Divinity and pursue a Master’s in Social Ethics?

So after three years of serving as the founding director [of the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program], I took advantage of the wonderful gift that is Harry Truman’s legacy and went to graduate school in divinity.  I loved it. I really couldn’t get excited about a law degree or even a degree in public policy. So when it came down to whether I should study more macroeconomics or the Old Testament, I said, “Give me Moses any day”!

I wanted to stay in DC and keep working with the Hunger Center part-time, so I went to study at Howard [University]. As the only white guy in my class, it was a wonderful experience in [understanding] how the Bible could apply to both political and social issues.

How do you think the decision to study divinity impacted your career, especially in terms of being able to move across domestic and international hunger issues?

It is a fabulous foundation. Personally, my motivation to help hungry people, wherever they live, is rooted in my faith. Professionally, it gives me the language to relate to other people also motivated by their faith as to why they want to help others.  Being able to quote from the Bible as to why we should help hungry people helps build an immediate rapport.

Certainly, this seems especially important as international hunger, domestic hunger, and domestic obesity tend to be placed into silos in academic and public debate. How do you see these issues as interrelated?

Absolutely. It’s all about caring for our neighbor.  Whether you go back to the story of the Good Samaritan or the preface to that parable or the most important prayer in Jewish life, “love your God and love your neighbor”. How do you do that when your neighbor is starving? How do you do that if your neighbor, even if they may not live next you, contracts diabetes because of obesity at an early age? All of that, for me, relates to caring for your neighbor.  It gets even more basic when it’s very specific, scripturally or otherwise, that this is about hunger. Maslow is pretty clear: after breathing, eating is up there as a human priority. Anything else is built on the pyramid of having enough to eat—you can’t learn, you can’t be fulfilled. 

Is that what you find most exciting about your current position—to mobilize groups behind this idea of caring for your neighbor?

Certainly. It’s already happening. That’s what is great about hunger as an issue, it’s very bipartisan, it’s not liberal or conservative. You’ll have very politically conservative people who are willing to help hungry people. Maybe not through government, maybe they don’t agree with that. It allows for an intersection with a variety of different folks and it’s a fabulous part of my job to be able to work with such a vast array of folks. Yesterday, I got to meet with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs on work they are doing with WIC [Women Infants and Children] and the school lunch program and call Islamic leaders to congratulate them on the great job that they are doing with domestic hunger efforts.  That’s a great part of my job.

Along with enjoying your work, you also have a young family. Can you offer advice to other Truman Scholars on how you have been able to maintain a life balance while working to make a difference in public policy?

Life has seasons, just like years do. It was hard for me to see that early in my 20s, because I was running all out. Put the petal down and do as much and accomplish as much as you possibly can. That changed almost nine years ago when I got married, but it changed really five-and-a-half years ago when our daughter was born shortly before we left Rome, and now, with a two-year-old son, even more so. I am glad that my new job doesn’t have me traveling internationally anymore. It was fabulous to get my passport stamped all over the world and see some things in Sub-Saharan Africa especially and to travel all over Europe, South America and Asia. That season was fabulous, this season with young kids I want to be home.  My wife has made even more of a sacrifice; she is in public health and used to travel all over Africa, and her season as a mom is challenging and very different. But again, it’s seasonal. When the kids are a little older, she’ll go back to work and we will go back to putting in a few more hours.  Also, it’s about the decision to work in public service. It’s not private sector salaries, but we’ve made life choices so she can stay home, even in this expensive neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Thanks for being willing to be so open and share such a candid perspective. It’s been a pleasure talking with you today.

Thanks Jeni!

For more information on the Congressional Hunger Center and Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellows Program, please visit: http://www.hungercenter.org/

“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.