One part of the story of Passover that has stuck with me throughout my entire life is that of the Four Sons. This specific story revolves around four children who ask four questions about the nature of Passover, ranging from questions about the laws of Passover to others about the holiday in a broader context. My three siblings and I would quarrel over who was which son, with all of us claiming to be the revered “wise” son, as we all wanted to be wise. However, there is one son in this story who doesn’t ask a question about Passover, not because he does not know what to ask, but because he does not know how to ask. I understood then, as I understand now, that you do not want to be that son.
***
When I was 18, I didn’t want to attend the University of Michigan. Two of my three older siblings graduated from the University, and so did both of my parents. Partly because I thrive off competition and partly because I have a natural tendency to zag when everyone else zigs, I not only wanted to be different from them, but I also wanted to be better than them. I had better grades, better test scores and better extracurricular activities than all of my siblings. I should have been better than all of my siblings. But of course, in the most tangible way anything could be to an 18-year-old, I was not. Like my parents and siblings before me, I was going to be a student at the University.
When I arrived on campus a little more than two years ago, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend my time as a student: work as hard as possible at all times to make up for my own perceived deficiency. Whether it be class, extracurricular activities or anything even remotely career-oriented, I needed to succeed. The overall benchmark that I set for myself was being admitted into the Ford School of Public Policy. While it was the place to be for fellow aspiring law students at the University, it was also my personal benchmark that I was chasing more than anything. I told myself that, after sophomore year, when the Public Policy School released its admissions decisions, I would set a new goal for myself.
I’m not going to detail what the past two years looked like until now. Not because I don’t want to or because I don’t think it is important, but because there is nothing to detail. I did exactly what I said I was going to do. I showed up to nearly every class. I joined clubs that had complicated and unnecessary applications. I secured leadership positions, got letters of recommendation and attended lots of office hours. I never deviated from the goal I had set and, as a result, I have nothing interesting to say about those two years. And now, I have been a Public Policy student for about two and a half months.
The week before I started my junior year of college almost two months ago, I sat in Weill Hall during my orientation for the Public Policy School, officially a Public Policy major. I was excited, but mostly because I had met my benchmark and was eager to pick another. At that point, though, I was excited because I didn’t know what it meant to be a Public Policy student. However, I was about to find out.
Sitting with 100 other people — my peers whom I would be taking classes with for the next two years — I learned what it meant to truly be a public policy major. Over the course of the two-day orientation, the word that stuck out to me the most was “network.” It had been repeated almost ad nauseam. In order to be successful as a public policy major, we had to build our network. That word — “network” — to me, is pretty much a phrase that activates me into a sleeper agent, but instead of initiating plots to overthrow governments, I become a cynical asshole.
But when I heard that word during that orientation, I wasn’t imbued with cynicism like I normally had been throughout the many networking opportunities I had been a part of in college. Instead, I was suffocated. My pursuit of academic validation was not fulfilling personally or intellectually. I had always been a spectator to the person I thought I wanted to be, and seeing peers as my network instead of real people before hearing about the educational aspect of the Public Policy School, broke the illusion that I put myself under. It made me deeply, emotionally uncomfortable. There had to be more than just another benchmark. In that way, the Public Policy School didn’t lie to me. I lied to myself.
However, I’m sure that was obvious. To say the least, my mindset was childish. But it took an ensuing identity crisis after realizing how childish I had been to understand the secret of the Public Policy School: superposition.
***
I have heard all throughout college about the “Michigan Difference” and have been told firsthand by employers that career opportunities may come to me just because I am a U-M student. I heard as soon as I sat down during orientation that I was sitting with my future network. I heard how wonderful it was that I got to meet my classmates (network) after doing an icebreaker (networking) bingo activity to end the day. It was as pervasive in the Annenberg Auditorium as it was everywhere else on campus.
I know what networking is, of course. I have a LinkedIn, obviously. I want a career, duh. But I always thought that my education and my career existed in symbiosis, feeding off of one another, equally propelling me forward. While the academic aspects of Public Policy School were discussed, the networking cloud hung over us. Whenever I talked to someone I had just met at orientation, the idea that they were part of my network had already been implanted in my head. We heard from professors, but we also heard from career counselors and specialists and advisors. There is an exclusive Ford writing center that can help you with assignments, but also cover letters and resume building. These not-so-subliminal messages combined with a looming, disastrous job market for me and the rest of my classmates after graduation make it hard not to be constantly thinking about my career, both when I was sitting in my orientation and as I type this right now.
In that sense, the Public Policy School is both a job training program and an education program, each existing in superposition with the other. At any point, it could be one or the other. In a lecture hall, you are a student; outside, you are a job seeker. Since a college degree now doesn’t guarantee you a career anymore, securing your future has joined, or maybe even surpassed, learning as an undergraduate priority. I’m not saying this as a critique against the Public Policy School, but rather as a matter of fact. Look no further than actual learning at college being outsourced to artificial intelligence, because time is better spent learning how to strengthen the connections between who you know as opposed to strengthening what you know. The reality that your net worth is your network is one that the Public Policy School has to contend with. Even clubs, pre-professional fraternities and sororities and exclusive majors like business and public policy exist within the context of education — you will learn something, maybe even a lot, in each group — but they exist to provide you a specific group of people and experience to constantly leverage for yourself, whether it be now or decades down the line. Whether I like it or not, my network now includes 100 other Public Policy majors, many also intent on law school, with others focused on going right into the job market. Had I not gotten in, I would have been swimming in a sea of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other, less specific pre-law students looking for a way to make themselves stand out, drowning in career-based anxiety even more than I already am. Of course, that is potentially thousands of other U-M students. U-M students are already weeded out of the thousands of college applicants. And then, of course, there are tens of thousands of students nationwide who are also applying to law school. These continued qualifiers — college student, U-M student and Public Policy student — work to make the pool of applicants more exclusive so you, or in this case me, have whatever slight boost you can get to your job prospects.
None of this is surprising, nor is it exclusive to the Public Policy School. In fact, it is a feature of higher education institutions everywhere. More and more jobs require a college degree, yet there are fewer openings. There is less focus on education out of necessity for students and the school itself. If there is no additional benefit, career-wise, to universities, then why go? While an important question, we often act not as if we don’t know the answer, but as if we don’t know how to ask it of ourselves. We become that dreaded son.
***
In a literal sense, there is no secret to what the Public Policy School is. It is education on rigorous, evidence-based policy analysis focused on achieving the most public good. I believe that to be true. I want that to be true. That’s why I applied, after all. There’s no nefariousness traditionally thought of politically liberal U-M bias or secret Public Policy School formula.
Belief in the Public Policy School requires a belief in the American political project, that we are a nation founded on certain principles that are stronger than any one political figure. We need to believe that policy is decided on its merits through honest debate. We need to believe in experts and trusted public officials. We need to believe that change is slow, and that it is good that it’s slow. We need to believe our country’s own myths about itself.
The Public Policy School’s unique problem lies in its second superposition: existing in the 21st century as a policy school while treading the murky waters of the political reality of President Donald Trump’s administration.
There is nothing more representative of Public Policy School’s problem than Policy Talks. These talks are hosted by the Public Policy School, and feature an array of “policy experts,” including former elected officials and public servants. Policy talks discuss and debate approaches to modern public policy problems, in an effort to broaden the public knowledge on whatever topic the respective talk is on. A recent policy talk focused on center-right perspectives in the modern-day political context. Such beliefs traditionally held purchase, power and popularity in the American government and operated in accordance with Public Policy School values of technocratic policymaking, hence their presence at a policy talk. Now, the conservative movement has been subsumed by President Donald Trump, focusing on staffing his administration with Nazi sympathizers. There is no center-right anymore, because they lost the debate not due to their merit but their meekness.
A larger problem with these beliefs is that Trump is president again and doing basically whatever he wants. He is not evaluating policy on its merits, making the choices in the way that I am advised to make, given certain situations, when I sit in class during the week. He is flailing around haphazardly, and a minimum of 40% of Americans approve of it reflexively. I don’t agree with Trump, and I’m sure most of my professors and classmates don’t agree with Trump, but that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t deciding policy based on television commercials and late-night talk shows!
So what is the point? Why am I supposed to lionize our institutions and the attitudes that uphold those institutions when the main man in power completely ignores them to institute rapid changes whenever and however he wants? Why should I care about the Constitution when the president doesn’t? When we believe so hard in our processes, and those processes fail and produce the conditions necessary for Trump to get re-elected, we become that same unquestioning son. We forget to question those processes. We forget how to ask ourselves questions about our system in general. For decades, we have believed so much in our systems, so much so that when systems are no longer worth believing in, we have nothing left but our belief.
I don’t know the answers to the questions I pose, but I do know this: Try as we might, no one is going to forget that Trump was president for eight years and dominated politics for more. He has erased the freedom that America has historically stood for. It will not come back. There is a new reality that I, and the Public Policy School, must contend with.
***
Ironically, I have been thinking about political philosopher Francis Fukuyama a lot recently. He most famously posited that history is over. He believed that Western, liberal, democratic institutions had grown so good at dealing with problems of their respective day through process-oriented solutions that they would come to dominate the globe. In the context of now, I think it is self-evident that he was wrong.
Fukuyama did not consider the story of Passover. He did not understand the final, most secret, superposition.
Nor did I. I also exist in superposition. I am a student, yet a future careerist at the same time. I don’t know how to reckon with that. Coming into college, I had a goal that allowed me to ignore such an existence. Now, not only do I not have a singular goal, I cannot hope to come up with one that balances my two states of being.
Furthermore, America exists, at the same time, as the wise son who knows exactly what to ask and the son who does not know how to ask anything. Maybe America is every son, including the two I haven’t mentioned. In some decades, like the 1980s when Fukuyama held positions within former President Ronald Reagan’s administrations, the wise son was leading America, knowing which questions to ask and how to deal with problems. In other decades, the wicked son or the simple son was at the helm. Right now, we exist as the son who is completely helpless as to what questions to demand of our political system. He does not know. We do not know. Perhaps it is time we start to think about that.
Statement Columnist Gabe Efros can be reached at gefros@umich.edu.
