September 1998
Editor's Note: The following is an edited version of President Alfred H. Bloom's remarks at Commencement on June 1, 1998.
As Swarthmore students you have come to embrace the highest standards of clear and creative thought and have invested your energies and talents in preparing to meet these standards throughout your lives. And by virtue of your eagerness to grapple with complex ideas; to draw fine distinctions among them; to see through them to their significant points; to create metaphors that elucidate them; and to express with coherence, subtlety, and artistry the insights you have gained, you will be bearers of a tradition of intellectual excellence that is at the heart of this College's distinction.
As Swarthmore students you have also come to embrace a particularly demanding standard of interpersonal respect, anchored in our Quaker tradition&emdash;a standard that requires you not only to extend civility and fair treatment to others but also to go beyond that minimum form of impersonal respect&emdash;to recognize and value the personal and intellectual qualities others bring, to genuinely consider their points of view, and to take responsibility for creating environments in which they are appreciated and empowered. By your practice of this more exacting standard of active, personal respect, you will be bearers of a second of Swarthmore's most prized traditions.
But today I want to consider a third, perhaps less often cited, outcome of your Swarthmore education, which is, in fact, grounded in the exercise of intellectual excellence and of active personal respect&emdash;namely, your embrace of consensus building as a preferred approach to institutional, community, and societal governance.
By consensus building I mean that approach to group decision making that starts from candid dialogue and proceeds through application of the group's powers of clear and creative thought to shape a negotiated view that all or almost all participants can endorse. It is an approach founded on active respect for one's colleagues and on the conviction, based on that respect, that decisions reached through a collaborative process will likely be of more lasting and comprehensive quality than decisions reached by individuals on their own.
This college, whether at the level of the Board, the faculty, Student Council, or its broader committee structure, has chosen to rely primarily on processes of consensus building to steer its course and guard its quality.
Through participating in these processes, you have helped set educational directions; helped shape community policies; constructed annual budgets; recruited new members of our faculty and staff; encouraged and guided the development of a more successful pluralistic community; and, over the past year, through long-term planning, helped establish College priorities for the decade ahead.
Through participating in these processes, and being exposed to them, you have acquired the habit of listening fairly to others' points of view and of honing and timing the presentation of your own. You have cultivated your own skill at introducing just that perspective, or just that bit of humor, which preserves a collegial atmosphere and keeps the constructive process on track. You have seen how engaging processes of consensus building enable the members of a diverse community to come to recognize the personal and intellectual qualities of their fellow members and, thereby, overcome tendencies to stereotype and devalue.
You have at times wished that this mode of governance demanded less of a commitment of time and energy, but you have nevertheless come to appreciate the sharper clarity it so often yields and the nature and quality of community it creates and sustains.
Through insisting on and facilitating consensus building within the institutions, communities, and societies you govern and shape, you will introduce a style of leadership that maximizes shared respect, shared understanding, shared conceptual effort, and mutual empowerment and that generates colleagueship, ownership, and dedication to common purpose. In so doing, you will distinguish yourselves in a third, vital way as bearers of a Swarthmore education.
We look forward with great anticipation to the steady stream of accomplishments, large and small, that lie ahead for you and for which, whether we deserve it or not, we will be pleased to accept partial credit. As you take on broader responsibilities across the spectrum of American and international life, we will rely on your exercise of intellectual excellence, active personal respect, and leadership through consensus building to communicate to those who do not know us what is so special about this institution and so essential about the kind of education it provides.
We will also rely on your wise counsel to help keep Swarthmore on a responsible course and on your financial support to help preserve its excellence.
And, most important, we will rely on your continuing attachment to a community which promises you a warm welcome, and that same sense of ownership, whenever you return.
Two former members of the Swarthmore Board of Managers have died: J. Gordon Lippincott '31, on April 29, and Helen Shilcock Post '36, on June 4.
Elected to the Board in 1969, Lippincott was a consultant who helped design the Campbell soup label, the Tucker automobile, and the interior of the Nautilus nuclear submarine. He is also credited with pioneering the new field of corporate identity.
While on the Board, Lippincott served on the development and property committees, and he also served as a member of Alumni Council. Along with his wife, Edith Bowman Lippincott '32, he helped establish the College's Peace and Conflict Studies concentration.
Mrs. Post became a member of the Board in 1966. A lifelong volunteer, she was secretary of her class for nearly 25 years as well as class agent and chair of the reunion gift committee. She also was a member of Alumni Council and served as Alumni Association secretary.
Also active in the community, Mrs. Post served as chair of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association Girls' 18 champion-ships and was active in the parents' auxiliary of Germantown Friends School.
Give a Swarthmore student a void, and his or her first instinct is to fill it. In this case Andrew Medina-Marino '00, taking two years off to do research, saw that "a lot of undergraduates were doing good, high-quality research, as good as any postdoctoral graduate student or scientist," but they had no outlet to showcase their efforts.
So, along with two labmates from Brown and Duke, he decided to launch the National Journal of Young Investigators (JYI), a World Wide Web&endash;only "publication." Medina-Marino hopes to have the first issue up in November. (The site already exists at www.jyi.org. You can log on and read about the journal's philosophy and how to submit papers.)
The journal will contain six to eight scientific papers each in three main sections: biology and biomedical sciences, mathematics, physical sciences (chemistry, physics, geology, earth science, and astronomy), and engineering sciences. To find material for the first edition, Medina-Marino and his staff have e-mailed more than 1,000 professors and undergraduate scientists in internship programs all over the country.
Medina-Marino is one of five members of the journal's board, but he has enlisted the help of about 45 other undergraduate students to act as reviewers. "We wanted the journal to be peer reviewed, and we see it as acting as an educational opportunity for both students who submit papers and for those who review them."
He's taking the current academic year off, he said, "to coordinate the entire endeavor, visit potential funding sources, and travel around the country to recruit student editors, papers, and support.
Some funding from private corporations is already in place to support their efforts, and a grant is pending from the National Science Foundation. Duke University is paying for the managerial portion of the journal, and Swarthmore is funding students to continue developing the Web site. The students are also being advised by editors at Science and Science Next Wave magazines about copyright, editorial review procedures, and other issues.
Majoring in biology and doing independent study on race relations, Medina-Marino hopes to continue work in biology in graduate school. In the meantime he and his staff are already making plans to continue the journal long after they're no longer eligible to be a part of it.
In the long run, he says, "it would be great to keep the editorial leadership for JYI at an undergraduate institution."
Like Swarthmore.
Joseph Wharton Professor of Economics
The welfare reform legislation of 1996 was clearly the most dramatic and sweeping change since the creation of the federal-state Aid to Dependent Children (later known as AFDC) as part of the Social Security Act of 1935. The new Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) replaced AFDC with a program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Will it work as intended to&emdash;in the phrase often used by President Bill Clinton&emdash;"end welfare as we know it?"
As a member of the Committee to Review Welfare Reform Research, a national group of scholars who will follow and assess studies that are being done on the effects of the new welfare laws, I've been watching the evolution of the new state programs.
For the uninitiated, the major differences between TANF and AFDC are:
• Federal payments to the states are made in the form of a fixed block grant rather than federal matching of state expenditures.
• TANF recipients are required to work after two years of assistance, though states may set work requirements sooner than two years.
• Individuals are limited to five years of federal welfare assistance in their lifetimes, though states may exempt up to 20 percent of their caseload from this limit.
Several factors explain the push for reform. First, there was a surprising rise in the AFDC caseload even while the economy was growing. Between 1983 and late 1989, the national caseload fluctuated around 3.8 million families, but after the mild recession of 1989, it started to rise, reaching 5.1 million families in early 1994. This was puzzling because employment was also rising sharply.
Second, the growing percentage of births occurring out of wedlock and the rise in the proportion of children living with a single parent drew greater public attention. The public perception was that teenage childbearing was skyrocketing, even though it was actually declining. (Between 1991 and 1995, birthrates for girls age 15&endash;19 dropped by 8.5 percent, but because non&endash;teenage childbearing was declining faster, births to teens as a proportion of all births were rising.)
Social commentators argued that AFDC was creating a dependent population that would not respond to improved employment opportunities, that it was inducing an increase in single-parent families&emdash;a reformulation of the "culture of poverty" arguments of the 1960s.
These factors, among others, influenced the shape of the 1996 reform. At passage, PRWORA was hailed by Republicans, by the president, and by some Democrats as a great achievement, a delivery on the promise to "end welfare as we know it." Critics of the PWRORA argued that giving nearly complete authority to the states to limit benefits would create a "race to the bottom." Many liberal Democrats decried the reforms as draconian, and two top officials in the Department of Health and Human Services resigned in protest of the president's signing of the bill. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted that a half-million children would soon be "sleeping on grates in our cities," which prompted one wag to posit that this would be the Republicans' and Clinton's "Grate Society Program."
Most states have chosen not to implement the most stringent work requirements or benefit cuts&emdash;at least not yet. In fact, to encourage work effort, many states have made it easier for recipients to have higher earnings and still receive some cash benefits. A few states have not only enhanced child care benefits but have extended child care subsidies beyond the TANF-eligible population and are even providing transportation assistance. Other states, however, have stuck with the relatively low cash benefits they provided under AFDC and have imposed stiffer work requirements than those required under the federal legislation.
Since 1994, caseloads for cash assistance (AFDC and now TANF) have been declining sharply, from 5.1 million families to 3.2 million in March 1998. Designers of PWORA have hailed this decline as a result of the implementation of the new programs. The caseload, however, was already declining sharply before the passage of the legislation. In my view, economists have not been able to rigorously explain the rise in the caseload in the early 1990s in an expanding economy and are unlikely to be able to explain the subsequent decline.
Now everyone is interested in trying to understand what is happening to those persons who would have received AFDC under the old program but are no longer on welfare today. Another central question is what will happen when families or individuals hit the five-year lifetime limit on TANF benefits?
I have been looking at studies of welfare waiver demonstrations in Florida, Iowa, and Minnesota that encourage those on welfare to increase their earnings by reducing the rate at which cash benefits are decreased as earnings rise. These studies show that, indeed, such incentives will increase the earnings of single-parent families on welfare. Because benefits fall more slowly as earnings increase, however, the reduction in total welfare payments is not proportional to the increase in earnings. Thus we may have greater work effort in the welfare population but not as many rapidly leaving cash assistance. It is possible that individuals on welfare will make a good-faith effort to get jobs
and increase their earnings but still not get completely off welfare and eventually run into the time limits.
Will the public and politicians still want to enforce time limits in these circumstances? Was it the idea that people on welfare did not work much that led to pressure for reform? If so, will the public be more tolerant of a system that generates considerable work effort, even though some persons will continue to need cash grants and services, such as child care, to escape poverty?
The welfare waiver demonstration in Florida had strong time limits, and there is some early reporting on the experience of a small sample (11 percent) who could have hit the limits by June 1997. For them, the limits seemed neither to speed up nor slow down the rate at which they exited welfare.
What's next for welfare reform? Two issues stand out: First, there is every reason to believe that the major declines in welfare rolls have been among those with the best qualifications for work (e.g., previous work experience and reasonable levels of education). Yet there is surely among the welfare population a percentage who will be unable to hold a job because of mental illness, substance abuse, or attitudes and behavior that even the most empathetic employers cannot tolerate. We do not know the size of that group, and no one seems to be thinking about what kind of safety net we might have for this "unemployable" population.
Second, the real test of viability of welfare reform will come when we have a major economic recession. The United States is currently enjoying the lowest unemployment rates in decades, and the ability of the labor market to absorb those coming off of&emdash;or those who would have been on&emdash;welfare could hardly be better. When the downturn comes, what will happen to these folks? In the old AFDC system, federal dollars would rise in a recession as the welfare caseloads increased. But the size of the block grant for TANF is fixed, and any new response to recession will have to come from state revenues. I see little evidence that anyone in the "welfare expert" community is thinking about what changes should be made to temper the impact of a recession on those low-wage workers who have so recently struggled to attach themselves to the workforce.
ALUMNI DIGEST / BOOKS BY ALUMNI / COLLECTION / EDITOR'S NOTE / FEATURES / LETTERS /
OUR BACK PAGES / POSTINGS / PROFILES / ARCHIVE / TALK BACK