This week we’re continuing our exploration into the ways that higher education contributes to America’s political, cultural, and economic divisions. Goldy chats with author Will Bunch about how our leaders almost established a university education as a public good, why the so-called “knowledge economy” has caused inequality to grow, and how we can possibly fix our educational divide.

Will Bunch is a national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of several books. He has won numerous journalism awards and shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting with the New York Newsday staff.

Twitter: @Will_Bunch

After the Ivory Tower Falls https://www.harpercollins.com/products/after-the-ivory-tower-falls-will-bunch

Better Public Schools Won’t Fix America https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/education-isnt-enough/590611

Goldy:

One of the reasons we call this podcast Pitchfork Economics is that Nick and I see pitchforks coming if we don’t fix the radical inequality that is tearing our country apart. And one of the things that is creating this radical inequality is the educational inequality that is a big part of our economic picture. On this topic, I recently read After the Ivory Tower Falls by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Will Bunch. It’s about the epic untold story of college in America, the great political and cultural fault line of American life. As I’ve said before, one of the best things about doing this podcast is we get to speak to the authors of the books we read, so let’s talk to Will.

Will Bunch:

I’m Will Bunch. I’m the National Opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I’ve worked for a long time at the Inquirer and the Daily News. In late 2022, I published my latest book. It’s called, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics ― and How to Fix It.

Goldy:

So I guess the place to start, Will, is why? Why did you want to cover higher education?

Will Bunch:

It was a little bit of a change for me because I’ve been a journalist for over 40 years and my main focus has been hardcore politics, going back to the first presidential election I covered, which was 1984 when Ronald Reagan ran for reelection. So I’ve been much more of a political writer than an education writer, but one thing that’s really marked my work since the early 2000s, which was also around the time I became an opinion writer, is I kind of embarked on a lifelong effort to understand the right, the conservative movement in this country and where they were really coming from. It kind of started back in those days. Being a dad, I just seemed to spend a ridiculous amount of time in my car, including in the afternoons because I was working this split shift. Every day I started listening to Rush Limbaugh, not because I liked Rush Limbaugh, in fact I was kind of repulsed by what he stood for, but it was a really good way for me to try and understand the mind of the political right in America.

One thing that struck me from day one and that I really wanted to get my arms around was the fact that it seemed like the biggest driver of resentment on the right was towards people with education. This was the heyday of when big corporations were destroying the Rust Belt or what we might call truck country in terms of moving jobs to Mexico or moving jobs to China, and I could never understand why Republicans weren’t mad at the CEOs who were killing these jobs or weren’t particularly mad at Wall Street. They gave lip service to that occasionally, but not really, but they really despised people like journalists, they caught onto that pretty quickly, and they despised college professors and Hollywood movie stars and people who didn’t seem to me anyway to be controlling their day-to-day lives, but there seemed to be this resentment of a certain type of elites, also the professional managerial class, people on that level.

I’ve been watching really for 20 years how that passion against that particular type of elite seemed to be such a driver of the conservative movement, the people who were calling talk radio, the people who were watching Fox News when that became popular. Over the next 10 years, I saw this idea really become more and more a part of American politics. You saw it in the numbers. You would look at the results of each election and every election, more and more the Republicans were becoming the party of people without college degrees, particularly white people without college degrees. And more and more, the Democrats were becoming a party of people with college diplomas, which was kind of interesting when you think about it because in these two tribes forming, people would go against their self-interest in certain ways.

You had people making over $200,000 supporting the Democrats, even though the Democrats said they would tax people making more than $200,000. You had people in places like West Virginia or Ohio who were desperate for better healthcare and better social services, but yet they were running for the party that was pledging to repeal Obamacare. So I really wanted to understand what people were starting to call the college, non-college divide, and it seemed to me that if you have a college, non-college divide, then the thing that’s driving that is college. So what is it?

Goldy:

That’s almost too obvious, but of course.

Will Bunch:

Well, it is, but I was somebody who spent a lot of time reading political journalism in newspapers and in magazines and online and what people were saying in Twitter. And certainly spiking with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I would see more and more pieces in the political press saying the real divide in American politics today is education, whether you have a college degree or not, but nobody would ever take it to the next level. Nobody said, “Well, why is that?” Because it’s not something that follows logically. I went to college in the late seventies, early eighties, and I studied political science, and we were trained to think that class and economics were the drivers of the two parties. I was there for Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 when his mantra was, It’s the Economy, Stupid. That’s how we were trained to think, but now people were voting against their economic interests in some cases to be a part of this social tribe, the educated, the degree holders versus the non-degree holders.

So I decided to take a deep dive, and I spent a couple years on this and I learned quite a bit. I really focused on the modern history of college because there’s a neat dividing line, which was 1944, and the passage of the G.I. Bill, because you can look before 1944 and college was important, but it wasn’t a huge part of American life. Only 5% of adults had college diplomas going into World War II. And coming out of World War II, you had the G.I. Bill, which really showed that if government got involved, if you made higher education a public good, the middle class and people from the working class and people who grew up on farms could really benefit, could really move up to the next level, and move up to a life where instead of making things in a factory or working with their hands, that they were now working with their brains and it was a big economic engine.

You had this golden age of college from the mid 1940s through the late sixties, early seventies when the American economy was booming, of course not for everybody, not for people of color. Women were still obviously held back in the job market, but you did have this generally more positive, more boisterous economy. At the same time, you had this real public investment in college, both financially and also just public support for the idea of college, that this was the American dream.

Goldy:

Let’s get into this a little more because this is an economics podcast.

Will Bunch:

Of course.

Goldy:

This notion of higher education being a public good, that really was at the core of the G.I. Bill and the legislation and support that followed, wasn’t it? This wasn’t something that you did to just improve these individuals. This was going to make our economy and our democracy stronger, and this was very much within the context of fighting the Cold War, wasn’t it?

Will Bunch:

You just said a lot there. You said a lot and almost all the things you said are true. College was seen as just this kind of thing that rich wealthy families passed on from generation to generation. All of a sudden, this light bulb went off at the end of World War II and people realized that this could be this gigantic economic engine. You could see as early as the early 1960s with Clark Kerr, the famous president of the University of California system, people talking about what we now call the knowledge economy. There was this new sense that knowledge rather than iron and steel and automobiles could be America’s economic advantage.

But you had these other things going on too that were also pro-college, and you mentioned both of them. One of them is, we had just come off one of the most traumatic 20 or 30-year stretches in American and world history where you had first the Great Depression and then World War II, which was the Second World War of the first half of the 20th century, and you had seen these new political movements like fascism, like totalitarian forms of communism. That understandably alarmed people, and it started a real conversation about the value of higher education is something that can promote democracy, that by promoting critical thinking, you can get more people to participate in civic life and be better citizens.

And the third leg of that, which you also alluded to, is the Cold War and the fact that that light bulb that I mentioned that went off after World War II, at the Pentagon, there was this sudden realization that people with more education made for better soldiers. It’s crazy now because you think of that now, it’s like of course, but back then when most people were not getting higher education, it wasn’t necessarily seen that way. People didn’t make that connection that a better trained army and navy with lots of college graduates would be a better fighting force than what we’d had before. The Pentagon was also very interested in the research capacity of these universities, that by having more vibrant universities, suddenly you had this place for making the kind of advances that they’d seen in World War II, like, unfortunately, nuclear weapons, but other things like radar and penicillin and other things that were developed during the war.

So you really had this perfect storm where in every way, people saw the benefits. The average middle class citizen was excited about their children going to college for the first time, and the G,I. Bill, like you said, was this experiment in college as a public good. The benefit was incredible. Not only did people get free tuition, and not just for state universities. If you got into Harvard, they would pay for you to go to Harvard and your room and board, and a stipend to live on. Something like that is just a dream for most of today’s college students, but they were willing to do that for veterans. And people who weren’t veterans, you didn’t get the same deal, but at most public universities, tuition was just ridiculously low, a couple hundred dollars. It really was clicking on all four cylinders for that generation.

Goldy:

And the public benefits it produced were immense. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I remember from your book, you say that the G.I. Bill produced tens of thousands of engineers and like 200,000 school teachers?

Will Bunch:

The numbers are huge. Like you said, just in the large body of teachers. You had this virtuous cycle because the more colleges expanded, the more they needed professors, and so you had these universities churning out professors in the liberal arts and the social sciences, in the humanities. You can major in English and there would be a job for you as an English professor, which isn’t really the case today. You had all of those things going on at the same time.

Goldy:

So that’s the happy part of the story. This is the two to three decade period in which the great American middle class was built. We lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class income, and wealth inequality dramatically decreased. There was still a lot of problems, it was largely for white people, but it did end up, as you say in your book, laying the seeds for the civil rights movement. But when did this notion of higher education being a public good start to end, why, and what were the consequences?

Will Bunch:

This isn’t the only consequence because obviously, as we all know, the US economy started going bad around the 1970s. That caused retrenchment in a number of ways, but the real change in public attitudes about college is political. And what I argue in After the Ivory Tower Falls is that this idea that higher education was going to get America’s young people excited about democracy and make them critical thinkers and start thinking about the world and thinking more globally, that really worked. And then you had the blowback, and the blowback was, wait a minute, America is not doing this democracy thing. It really started with the civil rights movement, which was started by the growing number of African Americans who were starting to go to college in the fifties and early sixties. You had the lunch counter sit-ins that started in Greensboro in early 1960s. When you talked to people, survivors of that era, that was the trigger. Even on majority white campuses, young people were just electrified by these sit-ins and the role that young people were playing in bringing about social change.

For a few years, you saw lots of college kids participating in things like Mississippi Freedom Summer and other events like that, and that ended up flowing directly into things like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which I devote a long segment in the book to, because really the first major campus-based protest where people were protesting to change the university to get more free speech for young people on campus. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement really flowed directly into opposition to the Vietnam War. I assume that most people listening to this are probably somewhat familiar with the history of the late sixties and campus protests and maybe have some general knowledge at least of what happened to campuses like Berkeley and Columbia and the young people who protested the war at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. It got more and more radical as the decade went on and it culminated in these incidents that are famous now, like the Kent State massacre in which four students were killed.

This caused a huge political and social backlash among older people, among conservatives, among people who weren’t still benefiting from… Because it wasn’t like everybody was going to college. In fact, today, the number of adults who get college degrees is 37%. So we went from five to 37%, and obviously more than that, have some college, community college or a couple years and then they dropped out. But among people without degrees, there was resentment against these kids who were protesting Vietnam or protesting white privilege in society and things like that. You saw the rise of these politicians on the right, and Ronald Reagan is really the avatar of this. He ran for governor of California in 1966, having only been a movie actor and something of a spokesman before that. He had a couple big issues, but the biggest one was he was going to clean up Berkeley. He was going to do something about this campus unrest and these hippies with their dances and their sexual liberation and all of that.

He beat an incumbent Pat Brown in a landslide, he won by a million votes. And two years later in ’68, Richard Nixon ran on this law and order platform, again promising to clean up unrest and with an emphasis on what was going on the college campuses. In conjunction with that political shift came this idea that we’re sending these kids to college practically for free, so of course they’re going to revolt against the system. What if we change the system? What if we essentially privatized it so that people attending college had financial skin in the game, that they’re getting the benefit from this, they’re getting the economic benefit of a career and a job where they’re going to make more money over time, so why are we giving them free or nearly free tuition to do this, especially when it seems to end up becoming revolutionary?

Goldy:

This was part of the neoliberal shift that started to take hold at the time where education under neoliberalism isn’t a public good, it’s a private good. Since you benefit from it, it increases your human capital, then you should pay for it, not the public. It’s not the taxpayers who should pay for this since they don’t benefit from you getting an education, you do, or at least that’s the economic justification that a lot of politicians fall back on.

Will Bunch:

You can see the roots of division that all of a sudden now, it’s us versus them. The trend has been going on now for 40 years, and it happened in this frog and boiling water sort of way, that it happened gradually. There wasn’t a lot of attention paid to the fact that we were going to take college from being an almost public good, we weren’t quite there obviously, but we were going to take college from being affordable and we were going to privatize it and make it more expensive. It wasn’t like the President of the United States in the Oval Office gave a speech one night and said, “We’re going to privatize college.” It’s just something that happened gradually and steadily over the years until it got to the point where Congress and the government had to expand loan programs because people were finding more and more that tuition was reaching the point where they had to borrow money more frequently to be able to pay for it.

Again, it’s like, it’s okay because they’re going to get better jobs with this degree that they borrowed money to obtain and so it’s still going to be a good deal for them in the long run. And before America knew what hit us, we had this student debt crisis, and people weren’t even really talking about the student debt problem I would argue until 2011 when you had had the Occupy Wall Street protests and the Occupy protests in other cities like Philly and Seattle. Then it became an issue. Then people started saying, “Hey, did you know that I have $80,000 in college debt and because of this Great Recession, I can only get a job as a barista at Starbucks.” But by then it was too late, by then it was a crisis>

Goldy:

I’m a few years younger than you so I graduated college in ’85, and one of the things that struck me in reading your book, by the way, is how much of it was familiar to me. You mentioned Trinity College in the book, I think you said you had an uncle who went there?

Will Bunch:

No, my dad actually went there-

Goldy:

It was your father?

Will Bunch:

Yeah.

Goldy:

You spent a whole chapter on Kenyon College. Those were two of the colleges I applied to. I ended up getting into Penn, so I went there. I believe you went to Brown, is that right?

Will Bunch:

Yeah, so we had similar experiences. It’s interesting because the college experience is such a diverse experience because the schools that you just mentioned are all private elite institutions, and they’re important for several reasons. The Ivy League schools in particular somehow kind of set the trends that just filtered down through the whole system. The basic economic model of college today, which is known as the high-tuition, high-aid model, was created by Harvard in the late 1970s. Of course they could get away with it because you had incredibly rich families willing to pay that high tuition to go to Harvard, which gave them the money then to offer fairly generous financial aid packages to low-income students. When that system filtered down to public state universities, it didn’t work as well, and then we’ve seen the states that are responsible for these state universities or responsible for funding them just gradually pull support over a long period of time.

Goldy:

In Washington state, we managed to implement half of it, the high tuition part of the model. We just didn’t get to the high financial aid and as a result, what you saw over three decades was Washington shifting from 80% state funding and 20% tuition to 80% tuition and 20% state funding. And it’s interesting, you talk in the book about all the fancy facilities that these schools have added and that’s true, but I remember, it must have been about six, seven years ago, I actually looked at the cost per student, what they were spending per student in inflation-adjusted dollars, and it hadn’t gone up that much. The tuition, the price had gone up dramatically. It had quadrupled in real dollars over about 15 years, but the cost, what they were spending per student, hadn’t increased. It was just a shift in how we funded it. And when we say tuition, we largely mean loans.

Will Bunch:

Yeah, for most families, absolutely. That change is largely the result of your state legislature pulling its financial support. Think about it, we’re talking about a blue state, liberal “Washington State”. And Pennsylvania, the numbers that I’ve seen are almost exactly identical. The numbers I saw, where they went from 75% to 25% taxpayer support of public universities, and you’re right, that money just had to be made up by raising tuition and the kids didn’t get a huge benefit from the higher tuition. It was just a make-up for the lack of public support. One of the problems in the public debate or in the political debate over college is that I don’t know if people even understand the terms very well, because we talk about how higher education has been privatized in America, and I kind of went into this not fully understanding that concept because to me, as a younger journalist, I covered city and town governments and so when you said privatizing, it meant that you know fired all the sanitation workers and you hired a private company to pick up the trash or something.

That’s not really what we mean when we say that higher education was privatized. What we mean is, quite simply, that we went from it being a shared burden that all taxpayers paid something to support to being a burden that was totally placed on the individuals who attend college. It’s crazy because we don’t do that and we would never do that for K-12 education. We totally have accepted and internalized the idea that K-12 is the responsibility of the whole community. And if you don’t have kids or if your kids grew up 30 years ago, it doesn’t matter, you’re still paying property taxes or whatever your school district uses to fund its schools. Everybody pays for K-12. And now here it is, it’s 2023 and we’re living in a society where everybody acknowledges that some education beyond K-12 is necessary. Not everybody has to get a bachelor’s degree, it’s true, but people need some sort of training beyond the age of 18, whether it’s trade school or apprenticeships or something, and yet we just cut our children off at 18. 18 comes and and people are on their own.

It’s created this dog-eat-dog system. And I didn’t even get into this in the book probably as much as I should because it’s something we’re talking about more in the couple years since I submitted it to the publisher, but you’ve got this mental health crisis among young people, and I think a lot of it is the pressure that this system puts on, that we basically tell our kids, “You need to get it right by the time you’re age 18 because that’s going to decide your whole life, whether you get into the right college or whether you get into college or whether you go to college. If you don’t get into college, you’re going to be seen as a failure and society is going to look down on you.” It’s crazy, the pressure we put on our kids. And I was going to say, one thing I do talk about in the book affecting the millions of young people who don’t go to college at all is these recent findings about the increase in so-called deaths of despair, people who turn to opioids, the sharp increase in the suicide rates, especially among working class men.

These Princeton sociologists who invented the phrase, deaths of despair, they were originally tracking this in middle-aged men, men in their forties and fifties, and in their latest update a couple years ago, they said, “Now we’re seeing these deaths of despair in younger people, but the main determinant of this is whether they went to college or not.” To me, that’s just a giant red flag that people should look at that and say, “Whoa, what are we doing here? If we’ve created this system where half the people aren’t going to college and yet not going to college is making them so despondent about their lives that you’re seeing more suicide or more drug overdoses, we should be having a conversation about how to fix that.”

Goldy:

Okay, so let’s have that conversation. How do we fix it?

Will Bunch:

What I tried to do in the book, I made it clear… Like I said at the start of this interview, I came at this as a political journalist wanting to learn how college and higher education was affecting politics and affecting society more broadly. I don’t have an education degree, I’m not an Edtech person or ed reformer, so in the book, what I tried to do in talking about how to fix the problem, I talked about it very broadly because I think our basic framework for how we look at the role of education is so out of whack that we need to start by adopting the right framework. And again, I think it starts with the very basic idea of understanding this notion of public good versus privatization, and I believe strongly that we should get behind the idea that higher education should be a public good.

Obviously it’s expensive, but in a country that spends so much money and spends so much money on things like prisons and the Pentagon and different priorities, we can find ways to do several things. We can find ways to make public universities free or at least nearly free, but we should also do the same for trade school. There’s a huge demand for people to learn trades. There’s a huge demand for people to get apprenticeships or certificates that are built around job skills, and we should be looking at how to make those a public good as well. We should do that. I think we also are on the right track with what President Biden is doing with college loan forgiveness because we basically-

Goldy:

Or at least attempting to do.

Will Bunch:

Yeah, he’s attempting to do it. It’s only partial. It doesn’t solve the whole problem, but we cheated a couple generations. My generation, I’m a boomer, I guess you’re on the bubble between the baby boom and Gen X, but we benefited from a system when college was more reasonable and more affordable, and taxpayers picked up more of the cost for our generation to attend college. And then we cheated the generations that came after us or society cheated the generations that came after us, and I think we owe it to them to admit that we made a mistake and it would just be a huge boon for people suffering under this weight, an economic boon, a mental health boon, so I think we should pursue this aggressively as we can. I think we should also support the idea of “liberal education”, which doesn’t mean liberal in the political sense necessarily, but liberal education-

Goldy:

I know.

Will Bunch:

Although that holds it back, people associating it with those crazy [inaudible 00:32:42] on campus, but you know that by liberal education we’re talking about more focus on the humanities, more focus on social sciences. It’s fascinating when you go back to that Golden Age I talked about in the fifties and sixties and you look at how many people majored in subjects like English, like philosophy, like sociology-

Goldy:

I was a history major.

Will Bunch:

History is classic, and it’s all dying.

Goldy:

And I’ll tell you, I know at least the privileged elite Ivy League education I got as a history major, it didn’t teach me anything that was particularly useful in the real world other than it taught me how to learn, which is something, especially in this modern economy, we constantly have to do because it’s changing so fast. Forget about all the things about making you a better citizen, giving you a richer outlook on life in terms of all the reading. Everything the humanities does, it gives you this skillset that makes you a lot more flexible and resilient in a fast-changing economy.

Will Bunch:

Yeah. And what’s crazy is, employers actually want that. Employers want people who can think on their feet and who can adapt when the new technology inevitably comes out in five years. They don’t want people who are trained to code one computer system and then ChatGPT or something comes along and all of a sudden their skills are outdated. That’s fine, but they want people who have the ability to learn new skills. When you look at what’s going on more broadly in American society, when you look at the problems of misinformation and how many adults are falling into rabbit holes like [inaudible 00:34:46] and things like that, and how many people were willing to believe Donald Trump’s big lie and participate in January 6th, and when you look at the high rate of climate change denial in this country, all of that just screams out for liberal higher education. It wouldn’t solve those problems necessarily but it would help quite a bit, I think, and it just makes a case for the kind of education that we were talking about in the forties and fifties and that we’ve gotten away from in this focus on careerism.

So I talk about those three things. I also actually devote the last chapter of my book to a related idea, which is that we should push for a kind of universal national service. Notice I didn’t use the term, mandatory national service, because even the people, even today, even the most enthusiastic supporters of… We’re talking about things like variations of Teach For America or the Civilian Conservation Corps. Biden does have a modern update that he’s pushing, called the Civilian Climate Corps, where people work on outdoors, climate-related projects, that sort of thing. I think people should do it at 18, which is the critical age. To me, 18 is the age we’re losing people, so why not promote a gap year for everybody? It would help people focus on what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives and give people a break instead of this [inaudible 00:36:23] pressure to get into Penn or Brown or whatever. But for people who aren’t college-bound, it would give them a chance to do something different before they entered the workforce.

Goldy:

I can tell you, the 18-year-old me would’ve hated that idea.

Will Bunch:

Well, you try and make it exciting enough that the majority of kids are going to want to do it, and it’s complicated. I realized, as somebody who regularly talks about politics or economic issues that have a political bent to them, right now so much of what we talk about is how divided America is and how we can’t get along, and are we on the brink of a civil war? But it’s funny because we never talk about, is there something we can do about that? The thing about a civilian service is you are taking kids from cities and taking kids from the Rust Belt and taking kids from the south and taking kids from Philadelphia and hopefully bringing them together, to use Donald Trump’s favorite project, sweep the forests or whatever, to build storm drains or help out struggling schools in West Virginia or something, things that are in the public good, you’re bringing people together.

We used to have something like that in America, but it unfortunately was war, right? When you had World War II or Korea, people from all over the country… My Italian-American father-in-law ended up down in Alabama, stationed before he was sent off to Germany. You meet other people, you get out, but war is not something that we ought to be promoting. But to do the same thing for civilian projects, like climate change, that are actually needed, I think would be fantastic. It’s a solution. It just drives me crazy that we devote so much mental energy to talking about these problems, and we devote such little mental energy to proposing, what if we tried this? Maybe it won’t work exactly the way you’d hoped it would work, but we’re not trying to fix this problem. We’re just watching this anger and bitterness from this college, non-college divide in this country get worse and worse. We did solve a similar crisis in this country once by having a civil war, but do we really want to do it that way again? I don’t think that we do.

Goldy:

Well, some people do.

Will Bunch:

Yeah. Look, there’s always going to be some people [inaudible 00:39:06]

Goldy:

Some people are [inaudible 00:39:08] for it. Well, one final question. We ask all of our guests, why do you do this work?

Will Bunch:

Journalism, or broadly?

Goldy:

Everything you do. I’ve been following your work for years, including this book. Why do you do it?

Will Bunch:

Journalism is a good fit for me because I love the creativity and the art of writing, and I’ve always did that. When I was eight or nine years old, I imagined myself maybe becoming a novelist or writing fiction, but then as I grew older, I became more interested in the real world and what was happening in the world starting I think with the late sixties. And then for better or worse, I really came of age in the Watergate era and that kind of did two things. It created this general excitement about journalists, and it kind of cemented this idea that the stuff that we saw in the sixties, the campus protests and being more revolutionary, that didn’t change the world, but journalism is something that can change the world. Look at Woodward and Bernstein and these other folks covering Watergate. I really bought into that, and it wasn’t quite like that, so I had kind of a rebirth in the early 2000s, in the years between 9/11 and probably the start of the Iraq War in 2003 and I guess into 2004, where I really kind of questioned everything.

I still thought that journalism and writing was a force for good but I felt it wasn’t changing the world in a positive way like I hoped it would, so I became very interested in new ways of doing things. It just so happened that that was kind of the era of the blogging revolution and so I became a blogger, even though I worked for a newspaper at the Philadelphia Daily News, but I had a very kind of liberal, experimental… Liberal in terms of open to new ideas and new things, and they were willing to let me try being a blogger, even as a mainstream journalist. So it was kind of a weird hybrid, but it worked for me. It’s evolved over the years into my column and it’s helped give me a platform to write three books now about politics, and I love it. I wouldn’t do anything else.

Speaker 3:

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