Two-Level Games in Real Life

Our students sometimes complain that the stuff we teach them about is too theoretical, too abstract, or too esoteric to be useful in "real life". We face a constant challenge in getting them to see the connection between the "airy-fairy theoretical stuff" and the headlines in the newspapers and on TV.

Every once in a while, however, a really great case comes along that almost perfectly illustrates the theory we're trying to get across. For those of us who have tried to get across the somewhat abstract notion of the "two-level game", Greece is right now providing that perfect example. If I had a European politics class (which I don't - I'm not nearly enough of a European expert to pull that off), I would love to game this out.

Greece, of course, just went through an election to try to fix the last election that failed to produce a viable government. This latest round seems to have solved that problem, only to have handed the likely new government a potentially insoluble problem: how to strike a bargain with its own population such that Greeks don't shut down the country with protests, fail to pay their taxes, or any number of other things they could do, while simultaneously reaching a deal with the rest of Europe (primarily, Germany and the EU central bureaucracy) on some kind of budget-saving austerity program.

As I've pointed out before, there may not be a solution to this problem. Germany and the international bankers may demand more pain than the Greek population (or a sufficient minority of it) is willing to bear. I heard one analysis this afternoon suggest that Greece's exit from the Euro is all but assured, simply because the chances of Greece voting (at the ballot box or in their daily behavior) over and over again to support austerity is extremely unlikely.

The new Greek government will find out soon enough how very real this "theory" is. These next few months should prove an excellent case study - although I doubt that the Greeks, or many Europeans for that matter, will appreciate the lesson.

The Temptations of Anger and the Challenge of Peace

I wrote a few days ago on the problem of Fear and its effect in disrupting peace. At root, that article was about a very basic question: what contributes to, or destroys, peace? And what can we do about it?

I suggested at the time that Fear is a disruptor of peace, but not necessarily the only one. As this question continues to rattle around in my skull, another possible answer has climbed to the surface: Anger.

That anger should disturb my peace is no surprise. The physiological effects of anger are well-known - it increases heart rate and respiration, floods the system with adrenaline, all the usual stuff. With Fear, both sides of the fight-or-flight reflex are in play - in fear, I may run away or I may lash out. In Anger, I am far more likely to lash out, which makes Anger more likely to disrupt not only my peace but the peace of others around me.

So why do we get angry? For all sorts of reasons, but I think there are a couple of broad categories. Most important, and perhaps most common: we get angry when things don't go our way, when something happens or someone does something that doesn't meet our expectations of how things are supposed to go.

A lot of this can be little stuff. Someone cuts you off in traffic, slowing your journey by a few seconds. The store is out of the product you made a side trip to pick up. Someone at work made a different choice than the one you wanted, or committed a thoughtless act that requires you to do something different from what your plans were.

Usually, we think that the anger from these little things is momentary - we get irritated, we get over it, we move on. And on the surface that is true. But there is an underlying, subtler set of effects. The adrenaline stays in the body for a while - sometimes for significant periods of time, especially with repeated prompting. A part of the mind ponders the slight or insult a little longer than we are conscious of. The spirit is diverted to a darker mood. And all of this makes it just a little more likely that we will react with anger to the next minor incident.

So what do we do? In every such response, there are two components. There is the external act or circumstance, and there is my expectation about that circumstance. Anger consists of my putting the two together and reacting to the discrepancy. In rare cases, I may be able to influence those external circumstances, and that may be a good approach. But in all cases, I can control my own expectations.

This is one reason, I suspect, why monastic orders have fostered a discipline of asceticism across history and around the world. It may be as much about learning to control and set expectations as it is about conforming to a particular set of material standards.

Those of us who are not monks, whoever, can still control our expectations. Most of us, most of the time, don't do so consciously - like much of the rest of what we do, our expectations of the world around us run on autopilot. There's nothing wrong with that - it allows us to be efficient and concentrate on stuff that really needs our concentration. But if we have habits of expectation - that we will always arrive at work within 20 minutes, that certain products will always be available on demand, that other people in our lives will always act in a certain way or speak in a certain tone of voice - those habits can get us in trouble when things go differently.

It should be noted that there are expectations that are consciously thought of and defended - indeed, that should be. Anger is not always an inappropriate response. It is, I think, the appropriate response in the face of genuine, malevolent evil. Like the protagonist in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, if we find ourselves faced with real evil then anger - even the use of force - may be the best response. But for most of us, most of the time, those encounters are extremely rare. Being cut off in traffic isn't evil, just inconsiderate (or maybe just thoughtless). So anger should be saved for those rare instances where it is the right response.

Beyond those few encounters, I think there's another lesson here in how I can provide more peace in my own life - by better managing and controlling my expectations. The fewer demands I make on the world around me, the more I cultivate conscious perspective on what's important and what can be flexible, the less angry I am likely to be. This doesn't mean that I won't be disappointed, or that I necessarily settle for mediocrity or bad outcomes. But it does go some way towards putting me in better control of my response to those outcomes. And like reducing fear, reducing anger is likely to produce more peace.

The Petty Temptations of Power

I've written before about the tendencies of state legislators to meddle in the affairs of universities they don't understand. Now comes this story from Michigan about the state legislature giving a little bit more money to universities (a 3% increase over last year's allocation, which was itself down some 14% from previous years) and marrying that tiny carrot with a series of sticks designed to prod those eggheads into doing what politicians want them to do:

Michigan Lawmakers Attach Strings to State Higher-Education Spending

There are all sorts of goodies in here, in typical legislative sausage-making fashion: everybody with a voice (or, more likely, lobbying dollars) gets to add their favorite ingredient. But the real poison pill is near the end:

The most far-reaching restriction bars the institutions from having a relationship with nonprofit "worker centers" that protest against a Michigan business, a provision supported by the Michigan Restaurant Association, after the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan picketed and sued a restaurant it accused of mistreating workers. At the time, a graduate student in social work at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was completing a field assignment with the group.

A single graduate student does a field assignment with an organization that somebody doesn't like - an organization exercising its First Amendment and legal rights - and legislators decide to slap a ban on all public universities in the state? Keep in mind that field assignments are for studying things. Will the distinguished gentlemen of the Michigan state legislature now be telling social work students - or anthropologists, or physicists - what they should or shouldn't be studying in their fields? Apparently so.

This is petty politics at its worst. Yes, it's a violation of academic freedom - not that politicians have the slightest idea what that is, or any respect for the concept. But more importantly, this is third world tribalism. It's the same kind of politics that leads the African dictator to give government jobs to his family and friends, or withhold contracts from people who are of a different tribe or clan. It's the political logic that says, "you are different from me - I will take everything I can away from you - I will keep myself and all I can reach 'pure' from your difference."

If the legislature and, ultimately, the voters of Michigan drive their university system down this road they will get what they deserve. I will shed a tear or two for the University of Michigan and Michigan State (not too many - I am an OSU alum, after all), because those have been great research universities. But their ability to remain so, especially in any field that has any political controversy attached to it, will be radically attenuated.

This suggests, at its core, a failure of pluralistic democratic politics. If every arena of difference becomes a life-or-death struggle, where the winner takes everything and the loser gets nothing, we will have failed as a society. Hopefully some in Michigan can get in touch with the better angels of their nature before they travel too far down the road of tribal division.

The Roots of Peace and the Problem of Fear

I spend a lot of my time thinking about war, conflict, and how conflicts are resolved. Somebody (I think it might have been J. David Singer) at a conference years ago said that if you scratch conflict scholars a little, you find peaceniks not far below the surface. Basically, we study what we do because we think that conflict (or, at least, certain forms of it like violent conflict) is bad, and we'd like to find better ways of dealing with it.

Because there is so much conflict in the world, those of us in the business don't want for things to study. There's plenty to keep us busy, and probably always will be. What we don't always do very well, however, is think about peace, beyond a vague sense that peace is the absence of active conflict.

A part of the problem here is that "peace," as a state in which you and I are not fighting, makes my peace dependent on what you do. And there is undoubtedly some truth to that. There are plenty of actors in the world who can disrupt an otherwise-peaceful situation by unilateral action - gunning down worshipers in a mosque, blowing up Catholic schoolchildren, or setting off a truck bomb in front of a daycare building. In that sense, we are all dependent on each other for peace.

But the danger in making my peace dependent on what you do is that I blame my lack of peace on you. My not having peace becomes your fault, which means that I don't have to examine myself or what I am doing or thinking or feeling. It becomes an excuse to externalize everything, especially the blame.

So here's a thought that occurred to me this morning, as I've been rattling around ideas about conflict and justifications for using force. What is my role in creating peace? What does it mean for me to be in a peaceful state? I think one of the roots - maybe the root, maybe one of several - is the absence of fear.

We often think of war and peace, or conflict and peace, as opposites. But as many have pointed out, conflict is ubiquitous and inevitable. It is how we deal with conflict that matters. Do we escalate to violence? To we lash out to hurt the other side? Or do we deal with the conflict constructively to find mutual solutions? That's a dichotomy that's pretty universal across the negotiation literature.

What determines the choice we make? In large part, the presence or absence of fear. If I am afraid of the other, I will likely decide that a mutual solution is not possible. In fear, I feel the need to lash out. The strong support among Americans for retaliation after 9/11 was not because we were angry or filled with hatred for al Qaeda - it was because we were afraid. Hatred, C.S. Lewis reminds us, is "the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear."

The scholarly literature on conflict is replete with the same logic - although we don't often frame it that way. What's at the root of the conflict spiral, the arms race, the security dilemma? Fear of the other. What drives enemy images, demonization of the other side, escalation of our perceptions of the other? Fear. Anarchy, the realists might say, is a problem precisely because in the absence of a central authority we are all afraid of one another.

The corollary to all of this is at the same time simple and very hard. If I want peace, I need to cultivate fearlessness. I need to find ways to become less fearful. Where I cannot change the world around me - and usually I can't - I need to do what I can within myself to conquer, subdue, and eliminate fear.

How to do that? That's a subject for another day - probably, for a lifetime. But for today, it is a beginning simply to know that the more I fear, the less peace I will have.

Athletics, Academics, and Student Success: Which Comes First?

I have long been uneasy with college sports, especially NCAA Division I "big money" sports (primarily football and basketball). I taught at a Div I school for a bit years ago, and it seemed to me then that the "student-athletes" weren't getting an education so much as playing in a minor league that happened to be located on a college campus. Those that make it big often leave before they finish their degree - to take one example, Ben Roethlisberger never finished at Miami of Ohio, a school that prides itself on academic excellence. And those that don't make the pro draft - which is a lot of college players - have long had degree-completion rates well below the national average.

Plenty of ink has been spilled about how the system of college sports is broken, and there are lots of ideas floating around about how to fix it - spin the sports off into "real" professional minor leagues, allow the players to be paid for their time, there is no shortage of possible fixes. I'm not qualified to express judgement on most of these solutions, except to agree with the general consensus that the system is pretty well busted.

That said, many universities do deserve credit in one area: putting serious resources into the academic success of their athletes. The "Forrest Gump" image - the "student" who is radically academically unqualified but who gets passed through on underwater basket weaving and "gut" courses because they're good for the team - stings in higher ed. When there are accusations of going academically soft on athletes, they are taken very seriously, if for no other reason than good PR.

So universities have started getting serious about helping their student-athletes actually succeed in real classes. Today's Chronicle has an article on the subject, which now leads some to ask: if the athletes are getting all this support from "learning specialists", why not the rest of our students? Do student-athletes deserve more support and a better chance at success than your average non-scholarship, non-athletic student?

It's a fair question, especially in an era of tight university budgets and pressure on public universities to increase their graduation rates. My own university, now launching a major student success initiative, is looking at this closely. While we are a Division I school, we don't have a football team, our basketball team makes the NCAA tournament about once in a generation, and our sports programs are generally not seen as revenue-generators to a significant degree. Nevertheless, our athletics department has achieved a remarkable success: it was announced yesterday that for nearly eight years running, the average GPA of student-athletes on our campus has been over 3.0, well above the campus average.

So the folks leading the charge on broader student success are naturally asking, what are we doing with athletes that we could or should be doing with everybody? As I listened to the announcement, I couldn't help wondering if maybe we are (at least in part) putting the cart before the horse. Maybe it's not the case that student-athletes at our school succeed academically because we work hard to give them extra help (though there certainly is some of that). Maybe their academic success comes from the fact that they're student-athletes.

This is a novel concept - we're used to that image of the "dumb jock" who couldn't get into college any other way except that he's good at a sport. But at universities like mine, with no football and largely non-revenue sports, we don't need to recruit those students. Yes, we will go out and get students who are good soccer players, good softball players, good baseball or volleyball players. Few of them will come to us because they envision a pro career, just as many of our students who are good at playing in a marching band won't go on to become professional musicians. So some of our correlation between athletics and academic success is just a lack of the selection bias problem that may plague some of the "big time" schools.

But I think there's another cause to the correlation, one that runs from athletics to success. These students have had to take the time to become genuinely good at their sports - good enough to play on a Division I team, even to get recruited to it. That takes discipline. Moreover, they've gotten to that level not because they think they're going to make a career out of it, but simply for the love of the game. That takes inner motivation - the desire to do something for its own sake.

As any college professor will tell you, discipline and motivation will go a long way towards success in the classroom. Without discipline, even intellectually gifted students become bored and do sub-par work. Without motivation, students at all levels won't put in the effort.

Student-athletes have already proved, in one arena, that they possess these traits in greater measure than the rest of the population. Sports is not the only way to do this, of course - this is why colleges love to recruit students who have become really good at something, almost anything really - music, poetry, art, dance, public speaking, organizing service projects, you name it. These students have what it takes to succeed.

So while it's good to focus resources on academically underprepared athletes, they already have a leg up on many of their non-athletic peers - the students who didn't really pursue anything in high school, who went to college because it was expected or because it seemed like the thing to do, or because they like the idea of a four (or five, or six) year party. Given their predilections, getting athletes to succeed is relatively easy. It's reaching some of the rest of our students that's going to be the real challenge.

Really Small Stakes

Henry Kissinger is reported to have said, "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." For those of us in academia, there's always been something viscerally right about this - most of us have seen plenty of conflicts where the costs (to participants and bystanders alike) far outweigh the significance of the issues. People in higher education may not be unique in their ability to focus myopically on things to the exclusion of any reasonable perspective, but surely we have become some of the world's best.

In that vein, I present the following story as yet another exhibit in the long-running saga of stupid fights that didn't need to be picked. I leave it without further comment, though your thoughts (as always) appreciated!

Administrator Hatches Plan to Deal With Pesky Student Reporters

Higher Ed Search Firms & the Legislative Process: An Update

A few weeks back I wrote about a story involving proposed legislation in Illinois that would ban the use of search firms in public universities. At the time I argued that this was a bad idea, and a good example of legislators trying to legislate something they don't understand. (I should have pointed out that these were the same Illinois legislators who may have been handing out university scholarships as political favors for years, but that's a different story).

Today we have an update on the search firm story from the Chronicle. Apparently, cooler heads have prevailed, and a total ban has been softened to a need to justify the use of a particular search firm at levels below president. In itself, this seems like a reasonable compromise, one that I would guess will find support in the Illinois legislature while the universities breathe a sigh of relief.

However, the resulting legislation may not change current behavior much - if at all. The devil, they say, is always in the details. In this case, the key paragraph from the Chronicle story is here (emphasis added):

The amended bill, which passed the Illinois House of Representatives and the State Senate this week, would allow universities to contract with search firms to help fill presidential vacancies, but it would limit their use in other cases. Before employing outside consultants to aid in nonpresidential searches, a university and its board of trustees would have to "demonstrate a justifiable need for guidance from an individual or firm with specific expertise in the field of the hiring." The bill would require the state's public institutions to enact policies that define the criteria for when hiring a search firm is necessary.

The first piece seems reasonable - universities will have to demonstrate the need for a particular search firm in a given instance. But the key questions are: to whom do they need to make that argument, and on what basis? The second question is answered in the last sentence - the universities themselves get to "enact policies" (read: write the rules) that determine when a search firm is "necessary".

If I have to justify that something is necessary, but I get to define what "necessary" means, I am very likely to draw my definition to closely match what I already want to do (it all depends on what the definition of "is" is...). And this is exactly what Illinois universities are likely to do. Universities in general are very change-resistant, and have become masters of writing policies and procedures and white papers and such that essentially justify what they are already doing, put into whatever language has political favor at the moment.

My guess is that the answer to the "to whom" question will be some Illinois education bureaucracy, where people with better things to do with their time will be sent long, complex documents explaining why a given search must have a search firm and how the envisioned search carefully adheres to that university's policy on such searches. And since bureaucrats generally have neither the authority nor the inclination to pick a fight with universities by overruling their decisions, these documents are likely to get a cursory look, a quick stamp of approval, and be filed in a filing cabinet somewhere, never again to be looked at - except perhaps by an auditor 15 years from now.

Do I know for certain that this will be the outcome of this particular law? Of course not - there's always the outside chance of real and lasting change. But in this case Illinois legislators are up against the combined weight of resistance of all of the state's public universities, from which most of said legislators got their degrees in the first place. Odds are that this bill will move behavior only at the margin - if at all.

Whether that's a good or a bad thing I'll leave to others to debate. But if there's one lesson here, it's that legislatures need to understand the very real limits of their power to effect change from outside the academy. In the end, this may end up being a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.