Advising the Next Generation

What to tell undergrad and grad students about political science and public policy

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/abraham-lincolcn-statue-161892/

How are you goin' to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them … ? It can't be done. These men were full of patriotism a short time ago. They expected to be servin' their city, but when we tell them that we can't place them, do you think their patriotism is goin' to last? Not much. They say: "What's the use of workin' for your country anyhow? There's nothin' in the game."

— George Washington Plunkitt, as told to William L. Riordon (Plunkitt of Tammany Hall)

I sinned in this newsletter even before my voice started to narrate my thesis. The block quotation above, taken from one of the finest pieces of political prose the United States ever produced, has been altered in a way that changes the meaning of the sentence — the ellipsis obscures that Plunkitt was talking about men who worked for the party, which is to say the Tammany Hall Democratic Party. These are not young men who deserved government office according to some Prussian ordering principle or some Confucian idea of merit—these were the door-knockers and street-brawlers and vote-getters who turned the Germans and Jews and Slavs and Italians into majorities, at least in paper. In that world and for those men, politics wasn’t about ideals or principles; it was about power and relationships, a relation even more feudal than the Middle Ages were, where a ward heeler owed the boys who got the votes jobs paid for from the city treasury.

Few worlds could be farther apart than the street politics of George W. Plunkitt, senator of the state of New York, and the idealisms of the many students who sat in the chairs within the cinderblock walls of my office in Amherst. Those students wanted careers, not jobs, and they wanted to pursue lives of service. Still, the office they met me in was named for John Thompson, a Massachusetts pol known for his alcoholism, his dominance in the state House, and his willingness to take bribes. The building that bears his name houses the school of public policy, the political science department, and a number of other programs dedicated to clean government.

Not only would Thompson and Plunkitt have found many common interests, both would have recognized a familiar ambition in the young folks I counseled. Public service is a noble term and anyone who, at the age of 20 or 21, is seriously considering public service is doing so at least partly out of the belief that they can make the world a better place. To do that, however, the young folks who talked to me needed a place—that is, a job. (There are young people who believe they do not need a paycheck and a 9 to 5 to make their way transforming the world, but they do not seek out advice from the middle-aged guy with the Nixon re-election poster on the wall.)

Over the years, I’ve come to know and advise, to the best of my ability, students who were destined to lead platoons in the demilitarized zone on the Korean Peninsula and students who wanted to become diplomats working with the State Department to advance women’s rights around the world. I’ve talked with folks from Communist countries and with trenchant Libertarians, with those whose parents were senior civil servants and those whose parents worked late hours in manual labor. Some have wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and some have wanted to make their hometown work better. (One was a mayor just a few years after coming to office hours—through no help of mine, I’m afraid.)

All of them wanted to make a difference, and all of them thought that a career in public service could help them.

I was happy to share whatever I knew. For some careers, like those in electoral politics, I had more to offer; for others, I could provide letters of recommendation. I eventually bought a guide to careers in international relations that I knew less about, like USAID and public health. I loaned it out to students so they could get a sense of what they could expect from pursuing graduate education and a career in those areas.

That world lies in tatters.

The past six months has gutted the federal civil service. My LinkedIn feed is full of first and second connections talking about being terminated because they were detailed to the wrong office in the State Department at the wrong time. Other connections worked for USAID or the Education Department. It’s trite but true that these same connections, back in January 2025, were starting to talk on those same LinkedIn feeds about how they would be working on a nonpartisan basis to support the incoming administration. They really believed in the notion of public service, and the public had voted for the administration, so they would work for it. (I mean, let’s not be too naive—they weren’t going to be happy about everything, and some were probably already walking out the door—but let’s also not be too cynical about this; these were people, after all, who had already served one Trump administration.)

It is not clear that I could counsel students regarding the attractions of a career, or even a stint, in public service the same way as I did before 2023. Yes, 2023, because once it became plausible that Trump would win again (and it was 50-50 from the moment he became the GOP frontrunner), I started emphasizing the risks a lot more and talking about the beauties of earning a paycheck in the private sector while the public sector sorted itself out. Even there, I was too optimistic—I did not think that USAID would be dissolved rather than cut, for instance.

Occasionally, the advice I gave weighs on me for how airily I discussed some of the risks. Melodramatically, I remember some lines:

All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question

till I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Yeats could dwell on whether he had played too great a role in bringing about civil war and bloodshed in Ireland—my guilt, whatever there is, is lighter than that, but still weighs around my neck.

Whatever guilt I bear, of course, is nothing compared to that born by the officials who decided to eviscerate and terrorize civil servants. More than the damage they have done to those in the federal ranks is the wreckage they have left where once resided the idea of public service itself.

When I met with those young people, I was an employee of the Commonwealth, as all Massachusetts public university professors technically are. In that position, each year I had to take a quiz on my ethical obligations; I could not accept a gift worth more than $25 (or was it $50?) from anyone having business with the state. As an alcohol commissioner of the Town of Amherst, furthermore, I’m subject to a lifetime ban on ever owning a bar in Amherst.

In an earlier incarnation as a federal employee, I once received a gift from a vendor we had done tens of thousands of dollars of business with; a coffee mug, some ground coffee, and a biscotti. I was terrified that this would come to the attention of federal ethics officials, so I made sure to leave it in the common area.

These are the day-to-day considerations of an American civil servant.

Contemporary senior executives and other officials in the U.S. federal government operate under no such code, legal or otherwise. Scandalously, the U.S. Supreme Court has all but legalized bribery if it is performed as “gratuities”—that is a sentence that sounds like a shrill liberal exaggeration but it is in no way a misreading of the Court’s holding last year.

If holding public office is a route for private benefit, what keeps any official aligned with the common interest?

(In the interests of bipartisanship, I should note that not a few Obama and Biden-era officials also cashed out, and I scorn them, too. But I defy anyone to say that there’s a serious comparison to be made between the worst excesses of their administrations’ personnel—which, again, I condemn, easily and frequently—and the ordinary behavior of the current administration.)

And so we arrive back at Plunkitt’s world. Plunkitt decried how civil service reforms had cheated deserving Tammany men of jobs that had instead gone to Republicans simply because they possessed qualifications. The U.S. situation today is worse. Qualified young people trying to be hired into the civilian federal government already faced long odds before the Trump administration, but once they got there they could imagine themselves actually doing something like the people’s work on a daily basis. Now, jobs have been cut; the mission is weak; and there’s little guarantee of any future with an agency because there’s no guarantee an agency has a future.

Some, still, on social media will encourage young people to pursue dreams of careers in public service because the country needs their work. Yes, and officers at the rear in 1916 encouraged young men to go “over the top” in the fields of France, fighting bullets with their chests. It’s always easy to fight your wars with someone else’s lives. That makes it no less irresponsible to urge folks to go into agencies where they might face lifelong consequences should they be caught up in a purge or worse.

The grim truth is that for the next few years it is probably best to encourage qualified and talented undergraduates to avoid directly engaging with public service at the federal level. They can pursue related careers (although cuts to contractors have also made that more difficult) while they wait for sanity, or at least certainty, to reassert itself. Like a resistance movement, they can strategize, train, and wait. For a few years, perhaps, municipal and state government will attract a higher caliber of students than might have otherwise been the case.

At the doctoral level, the situation is grimmer. I’ll talk more about this later, but in political science and related fields the argument for doctoral education has always been that if one does not find an academic job (or does not want one) then one could always work in think tanks, consulting, the agencies, or other policy-related work—what people generally refer to as alt-academic work. Well, the academic side of the equation looks grim, as universities enter at best a period of austerity, but the alt-academic side may be in for an equally rough period. Duck and cover has a great appeal here, as well.

Beyond such practicalities, there is a larger question. Plunkitt’s point about the demise of patriotism because of a dearth of jobs was funnily put, but there is a nugget there: why should anyone expect a state that has broken its promises and ruined its own foundations to be a reliable employer, much less one deserving of loyalty?

Not only is this bad for my discipline (why major in political science if there’s no jobs in government?), it will also be bad for the country. On a working level, the attractions of federal service become even less when your boss and your boss’s boss care little about, say, saving the lives of victims of flash floods or anything else that distracts from lining their pockets. All of this is compounded when one thinks that a great many younger folks might now think of the federal government not as a vaguely if inconsistently benevolent force but as one that targeted their family for deportation or their gender for persecution.

There is a reverse Gresham’s law—bad federal employees will chase out the good. They may even do so actively, through purges like those we have seen already. One or two college classes skipping out on federal service can quickly become four or five, and ultimately the transmission of affection and knowledge that makes any institution effective will be threatened across wide arrays of the bureaucracy. What advice am I supposed to give about how to cope with that?