PoliSci prof. urges academics and politicians to work together

“Politics gives me the heebie jeebies,” confessed Terry Sullivan. “Politics is the business of using ideas as tools, not of understanding ideas as truth.”

Strange words coming from a political wonk. But for Sullivan, a visiting professor of political science, putting truth back into the political equation has been worth an entire career of heebie jeebies.

Sullivan, who hails from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is spending the year at Stanford’s Hoover Institution as a Glenn Campbell National Fellow. He is an expert on the presidency and works on mathematical models of leadership and presidential operations, but he is best known for being the co-founder and executive director of the White House Transition Project, which has assisted new presidents in making the jump from campaign mode to governing mode for over a decade.

A no-nonsense political firebrand with a vast knowledge of insider politics, Sullivan isn’t a huge fan of politicians. But he likes academics. That’s why he thinks that politicians and academics need to collaborate. That partnership was the driving force behind the White House Transition Project.

“Clinton had a pretty disastrous transition,” Sullivan said. “So, in 1996, a group of scholars put together a project that would allow us to lend what we knew about the White House to national politicians — so they wouldn’t screw up their first days in office. It often hasn’t occurred to them — governing isn’t at all like campaigning.”

Sullivan aimed to streamline the transfer of power and set up an institutionalized mechanism to chronicle the experience of the past administration and give that information to the next administration. In transitions, Sullivan says that years of invaluable experience are lost because no one asks the outgoing administrative staff what they’ve learned.

In order to ease the transition from campaign mode to governing mode, scholars with the Transition Project compile data, protocols, interviews and other resources into guides for incoming staff, to preserve what Sullivan calls “institutional memory.” This is especially useful as new staff members are often reluctant to ask for help from their predecessors.

“Most White House staffs come in thinking they’re going to do things differently, but they end up doing the exact same thing,” Sullivan said. “The presidency is an institution and an enormous burden. You don’t have that much choice. You have to do things the same way.”

And so far, Sullivan says that the simple effort to capture the experience of the former administration works. This time around, the 2009 presidential turnover, nicknamed “No drama Obama,” didn’t run into the problems (and shenanigans) that characterized George W. Bush’s transition into the White House.

“Bush going out did a lot of things to prepare for a smooth transfer of power — and after discussion with Obama’s people, we had a rule that people had to exit the building in order of age,” Sullivan said, explaining the logic that the young people would leave first so that they couldn’t pull any last-minute shenanigans. When the Bush administration settled in at the White House, the keyboards had no Ws and phones were glued to the receivers.

“There were so many stupid little transition problems,” Sullivan said.

That’s where Sullivan feels academics can make their mark on politics. They can see a problem, for instance a presidential transition, and devote the time and resources to solving the details. But obtaining that mindset, for Sullivan, comes from being exposed to the intellectual rigor of a university — and that’s why Sullivan says he came to Stanford.

“The value of elite education is exposure to the truth,” he said.

Sullivan feels that those opportunities to get at the truth abound at Stanford — “while one in 25 [at UNC-Chapel Hill] might have had experience working for national politicians, ten out of ten here will have had that experience,” — but he worries that students fall into the trap of the infamous “Stanford bubble,” where they prioritize prestigious honors and high-profile opportunities over their studies.

“The much better range of opportunities might [actually be a] drawback,” Sullivan said. “Stanford students have way too many opportunities to do things out of class, and not in class — but the classroom is where truth is.”

Sullivan hopes to take that message to politicians, and believes that his research and teaching can help politicians see the need to collaborate with academics.

“Being part of academics is being part of the march of knowledge through time,” he said. “Best of all, our interest is actually useful. We are using the transformation of data about what happens inside the decision making process to help decision makers.”