The University of Arizona Alumnus / Winter 2009
O-phoria
by Ford Burkhart
Jan. 20, 2009, will be moving day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And at the UA, it will be just as exciting, as the campus debates day one of this new chapter in American history.
As Barack Obama takes the oath as the 44th president and the first African American to hold that office, the UA sidewalks and faculty offices will buzz with talk of bright possibilities and dark shadows of two wars, deep unemployment, and fiscal crisis. The O-phoria that began with his election on Nov. 4 will turn to sober questions about the first 100 days, and for the economy, the first 1,000 days.
If you could eavesdrop on UA professors on inauguration day, what might you learn? We asked a few to tell us what is on their minds.
(Alumni … wherever you are, please discuss, analyze, compare and contrast, in as many conversations as possible, during the first months of the Obama presidency. Send your thoughts to alumninews@al.arizona.edu.)
We began by asking the distinguished UA historian Michael Schaller to reflect on the transition and its impact on America.
On History in the Making: Michael Schaller
In January 2000, the United States enjoyed peace and prosperity and appeared to be harvesting its Cold War victory. Who could have predicted that less than eight years into the new millennium the country would be mired in a pair of regional wars and saddled with an economy in statistical free-fall? Not only retail upstarts like Circuit City, but also icons of American capitalism like General Motors and Ford face bankruptcy. The public even worries over the implications that its vanquished Communist rivals, Russia and China, seem poised to regain their status as world powers. Perhaps no president since Franklin Roosevelt has assumed office amid such anxiety. While historians predict the past much better than the future, it may help to reflect on what Barack Obama may bring to the White House. Like FDR, who transcended the twin burdens of a wealthy, elitist background and crippling illness to become a leader who connected to the “forgotten man” of Depression-era America, Obama’s multiracial heritage, personal journey of achievement, strong communication skills, and eagerness to recruit people as smart as rather than dumber than himself may be just the formula to revitalize the promise of American life.
Michael Schaller is a Regents’ Professor of history and former head of the Department of History.
On the Obama Style: Lehman Benson III
Barack Obama did not campaign to be an African American president, but just a president who could unify the country. Like Lincoln, Obama as president will have to heal a divided nation. There is an approach called Servant Leadership, which stresses selflessness and serving your stakeholders. Obama could be described as a servant leader. If you compare Lincoln and Obama, they both sought to get their enemies on their team, in Lincoln’s case to unite after a civil war. They both practiced collaborative leadership, which advocates cultivating a shared vision and getting the right mix on a team to reach your stakeholders and decisionmakers. To unite the country, Obama is bringing in people who opposed him, like Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and keeping President Bush’s defense secretary. Having a diverse set of advisors is wise. He will get feedback and pushback right away. He won’t need to ask someone to play devil’s advocate. His teammates will provide that by just saying what they believe.
Lehman Benson III is a professor of management and organizations in the Eller College of Management and is interim director of the Africana Studies Program in the College of Humanities. He studies judgment and decisionmaking and teaches an M.B.A. course called leadership and teams.
On the First Lady: Patricia MacCorquodale
Michelle Obama will be a role model for many different kinds of people. I hope she will assume an activist role like Eleanor Roosevelt, my favorite First Lady. Roosevelt advocated for the poor, the working class, and union laborers on visits to coal mines, Dust-Bowl farms, factories, and ethnic, urban neighborhoods at a time when middle- and upper-class women were expected to play primarily a homemaker role. Her newspaper column, My Day, provides wonderful insight into her personal passions, and her courageous responses to the events of the time. I’m sure Michelle Obama will be a first lady who takes an activist role much like Hillary Clinton or Rosalynn Carter. Being a lawyer and an African American shapes her voice and provides her with a variety of networks. Based on her experiences in Chicago, she may take a leadership role in job training or civic engagement for youth.
Patricia MacCorquodale, a sociologist, is dean of the Honors College. She studies gender roles, sexuality and race, ethnic relations, and women lawyers.
On the Environment: Lisa Graumlich
Our most pressing environmental issues are multidimensional, multijurisdictional, and very complex. Obama needs to create a culture where people seeking solutions embrace that complexity, and seek consensus among diverse stakeholders. One question might be: How do we mitigate the impact of the border fence? Any solution requires a complicated conversation between federal stakeholders and citizens of the United States and Mexico, and must deal with a host of creatures that move in various ways — or don’t get to move — across that fence. It will require many people to develop trusting working relationships in order to come to a solution.
Another example might be the future of biodiversity in the face of climate change coupled with changing land use. In what ways must we alter our parks, preserves, and easements to best adapt to species on the move?
Yes, we’ve lost time, but losing that time has intensified our focus on thinking through the most important things to do quickly. What do we actually think a resilient environment will look like? We’ve been trying to think through conservation in the next few decades in a landscape of increased human growth and urban development. Now, the events of last year have changed the conversation. I still feel hopeful. The stock market plunge forced us to take seriously how to balance sustainable economies and sustainable environments.
Lisa Graumlich is the director of the School of Natural Resources. She studies the impacts of climate change on the mountains of the world and collaborates with Western resource managers on science-informed adaptation strategies to help protected species adapt to rapid climate change. She has won the W. J. Cooper Award from the Ecological Society of America and is a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.
On Science: Gail Burd
This new administration should be great for science. Obama has a solid science plan, he is very supportive of research funding, and he will hire smart people to work on his team. In the past, scientific panels have been composed of people with similar political and religious beliefs, rather than people with the best qualifications and specific knowledge. People on the health advisory panels did not believe in the use of stem cells for research. People on alternative energy panels usually shared a preference for offshore drilling. The new administration needs to pull together the best minds, regardless of their affiliations, to make important scientific decisions.
Gail Burd is a university distinguished professor of molecular and cellular biology. Burd is the associate dean of the College of Science and the UA vice provost for academic affairs.
On the Economy: Paul R. Portney
The president inherits a troubled economy, sliding further into recession. Among other things, Obama made promises about healthcare and energy. Now, trying to square that with getting the economy back into shape is going to be very formidable. Bringing the uninsured into the healthcare insurance net and stimulating investment in alternative energy is going to require more money, at a time when we already have a big deficit. We are going to have a tough economy for another 12 to 15 months, at least. We are not going to recover immediately, but Obama will have some time toward the second half of his term to possibly begin to pursue the initiatives he says are needed for the country. Even with substantial Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he will be limited in his ambitions in the immediate future. In the short term, Obama must spend to keep the economy going. But he has a budget deficit to work down or we will leave a mess for our kids.
Paul R. Portney is the dean of the UA Eller College of Management. He holds the Halle Chair in Leadership and is a professor of economics. He was chief economist for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and is one of the 100 most-cited researchers in economics and business.
On Education: Ronald W. Marx
The failure of Congress to act on No Child Left Behind creates an opportunity for the Obama administration and Congress to improve it as the keystone for all federal legislation for education. Some see the accountability provisions as a recipe for labeling schools as failures. By 2014, every school must pass as “proficient” in reading and math. Everybody believes in accountability, but on the technical definitions, the UA can help. In Arizona, an increasing number of schools are not meeting the standards. The Obama administration can have an impact on teacher education in the STEM areas — science, technology, engineering, and math. America’s problems are headed for crisis proportions. The previous administration did not have a universally favorable standing with the science community.
Ronald W. Marx is the dean of the College of Education and a professor of educational psychology. At the University of Michigan, he was codirector of the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education, which won a Computerworld-Smithsonian Laureate award for innovation.
On America in the World: William Dixon
An Obama presidency will have a profound impact on America’s position in the world in at least two respects. First, the very fact that American voters would elect an African American whose middle name is Hussein must seem truly remarkable to both our friends and our enemies alike. The United States has taken a dramatic step toward restoring its image as a place where anything is possible. Second, Obama’s foreign policy will diverge quite sharply from that of his predecessor. We should expect to see more reliance on multinational institutions as instruments for achieving American goals and more of a willingness to engage our enemies to find areas of common ground.
William Dixon is the head of the Department of Political Science. He studies international conflict and conflict resolution and is past president of the Peace Science Society.
On Border Security: Jay Nunamaker
We hope President Obama will put a new focus on long-term border research. There are probably one billion instances of someone crossing the U.S. borders each year by air, by car, or walking from Canada or Mexico. How do you screen that many people carefully without having lines six or seven miles long? One way we are testing is to use avatars — computer representations of someone — doing the screening. We are already running experiments with that, but we need more science and technology that is aligned with border policy based on fact, on data. How large is the illegal immigrant population? What do they contribute to the economy? What burden do they contribute? We are hopeful that Janet Napolitano, as homeland security secretary, will help us bring that new focus to border issues.
Jay Nunamaker, a Regents’ Professor and the Soldwedel
Professor of Management Information Systems, Computer Science, and Communication, is the director of the new National Research Center for Border Security and Immigration.
On the Wars: Charles D. Smith
Afghanistan and Iraq are very different. Iraq is an urban society, but the Afghans are mostly rural, living in difficult terrain. We have failed to provide adequate civilian building programs in both cases. Success in stabilizing them is the way out of terrorism, not the military side of the war on terror. The Taliban has reasserted itself beyond 100 miles from Kabul and that’s an impending disaster. The calm in Iraq could be a façade, to set up the political question: Who lost Iraq? In Iran, the important thing is to talk, to negotiate. People formerly subject to Western imperial rule will not accept a carrot-and-stick game. In all these areas, including the Arab-Israeli problem, we need policies that offer hope to all sides as a way out of these dilemmas. Obama’s naming of Gen. James Jones to be national security advisor is a very hopeful sign.
Charles D. Smith is a professor of Middle East history and studies the Arab-Israeli conflict and the wider region including Iran and Afghanistan. He wrote Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
The Homework:
We suggest a few readings below, and we trust you will crack those books right away, just as you did in college!
Remember, the exam is open-book, and the only question is: “What does this moment in history mean to all of us?” Discuss in depth, everywhere and often, and especially on Jan. 20, 2009!
Required reading:
The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, by Jonathan Alter (Simon & Shuster, 2006). A reflection on how Americans rebounded from economic despair and paralysis and how F.D.R. reinvented the presidency during his first 100 days, mastering new technology to embody hope and optimism and establish a personal connection with his constituents. Sound familiar?
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, by Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times columnist (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). Friedman’s fifth book leads us through American energy policy, with warnings about our dependence on fossil fuel and the carbon dioxide that people in many countries create by driving cars and by using coal. He offers a new slogan: “Green is the new red, white, and blue.”
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, by David M. Kennedy, historian at Stanford University (Oxford University Press, 1999). Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for history, the book explains how the American people coped with an economic shock that closed banks and put millions out of work, and with a war that reshaped our age. It portrays two presidents, Hoover and Roosevelt, with whom Barack Obama has much in common.
Supplementary reading:
Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and International Order, by G. John Ikenberry, a Princeton University political scientist (Polity, 2006).
Ladies of Liberty, by Cokie Roberts (Wiliam Morrow, 2008).
My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936-1962, by Eleanor Roosevelt (MJF Books, 2001).
Rebels in Law: Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers, edited by J. Clay Smith, Jr. (University of Michigan Press, 2000).
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