Apologies for diving into the morass of Virginia state politics, but the latest controversy surrounding Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell is pretty interesting. To make a long story short, McDonnell casually mentioned his master’s thesis in conversation with a couple of Washington Post reporters, who promptly dug up the 93 page document from Regent University’s archives. Incidentally, Regent University has a bit of a reputation around these parts, having been founded by conservative televangelist Pat Robertson.

You can read the whole thing here, but the long and short of it is that McDonnell’s thesis includes some pretty controversial social views, which could spell trouble for a candidate whose campaign is premised on economic competency (one of the small ironies of this episode is that McDonnell is now accusing his Democratic opponent, Creigh Deeds, of scaring voters with “divisive social issues”). To give you a better idea of why Democrats are so eager to use McDonnell’s thesis against him, here are a few highlights from the Post:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.” He described as “illogical” a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

I haven’t had time to read through the whole thing, but my initial impression is that it’s something of a cross between “The Party of Sam’s Club” and the religious evangelism of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Which is certainly interesting as far as academic exercises go, but should a decades-old paper matter to Virginia voters? Steve Benen seems to think so:

But the circumstances with McDonnell are a little different. For one thing, he was 34 when he wrote, among other things, that working women and feminists are “detrimental” to American families. It’s harder to dismiss bizarre ideas as a youthful flight of fancy when the author is 34 years old.

More importantly, though, this was not just an academic exercise for a student at a TV preacher’s college. McDonnell’s thesis included a 15-point action plan he wanted to see Republicans follow. Soon after, McDonnell was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he “pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper.”

I can think of two possible responses:

1.) There is such a thing as a sincere change of heart. McDonnell hasn’t disavowed everything he wrote, but he’s definitely walked back some of his more controversial views. In light of the fact that this was written 20 years ago, I’m inclined to give McDonnell the benefit of the doubt. Politicians should at least pretend to be open to empirical or ethical persuasion, and unless the pol in question has a history of being an egregious liar, I’m willing to accept the “changed my mind” explanation at face value.

2.) Benen suggests McDonnell’s thesis should be judged differently than other academic documents because it includes a “political blueprint.” Well, so what? Plenty of academics offer formal and informal advice to policy-makers. Moreover, I’m wary of the chilling effect academic witch-hunts have on the interaction between experts and politicians. Presumably, we want our political leaders to get advice from academics, who are disinterested and frequently more knowledgeable on a particular subject. Academic documents are also fundamentally different from political ones – they’re less vetted, more exploratory, and ultimately less subject to artificial political constraints. I think this is a good thing, and I’d like to see more practical interaction between the academy and policy-makers precisely because academics have more freedom to come up with good ideas.

Bob McDonnell and Cass Sunstein don’t have much in common, but the parallels between Sunstein’s confirmation hearings and McDonnell’s thesis are worth considering. Sunstein, of course, has a long academic paper trail which Republicans gleefully misappropriated while he was confirmed as Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. After watching the proceedings, I suspect Sunstein’s colleagues are decidedly less inclined to get involved in politics.  In other words, if we routinely treat academic papers like candidate issue briefs, academics aren’t going to enthusiastically volunteer for the indignity of having their work torn apart by political flacks.

Granted, McDonnell’s scholarship isn’t really comparable to Sunstein’s, but the principle – that academic papers shouldn’t be judged by the same standards as concrete political platforms – is basically the same. McDonnell should stand on his record and his actual proposals, not some decades-old document whose relevance to the current race is tenuous at best.

UPDATE: A friend writes: “As a Virginia Republican, I’m more embarassed by the fact that our former attorney general and future governor went to Regent University.”

Among other relics from middle school, my CD case still contains well-worn copies of both Pinkerton and The Blue Album, so I read Jeffrey Rosenberg’s Rosenfeld’s undergraduate thesis on Weezer’s odd career arc with great interest (via). My interest waned, however, as the piece wore on; not because Rosenberg’s Rosenfeld’s ideas were stupid or uninteresting, but because his thesis is written like every other piece of turgid, academic prose.

OK, that’s unfair. There are, in fact, accessible academic works floating around out there. And Rosenberg’s Rosenfeld’s thesis really isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s pretty darn interesting – more interesting than anything I wrote as an undergrad (a low bar, to be sure). But it is written in the oddly stilted, formal style of most academic papers (THIS IS MY THESIS STATEMENT), and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. I mean, I understand why an undergraduate’s writing style would be modeled on other academics’. But a paper on the fall and rise of America’s premier geek-rock band needn’t be impenetrable to a broader audience.

Actually, I’m pretty convinced that Rosenberg’s Rosenfeld’s  thesis would have made for a great Rolling Stone article. The introduction: a brief account of Weezer’s odd comeback. Next, a page or so on the distinction between highbrow and middlebrow art and rock music’s odd place in between (complete with a history of the rise of mass consumerism in the 19th century). Finally: a discussion of Weezer’s turn-of-the-century critical resurgence, contextualized with examples from the article’s earlier paragraphs.

I would totally read that article. I’m also fairly certain it could convey the same amount of information that Rosenberg’s Rosenfeld’s thesis so admirably lays out. So why not write (some) academic papers in a more accessible format? Like Rolling Stone articles, but with footnotes (perhaps our next generation of academics will look to David Foster Wallace for inspiration).

I understand why certain disciplines demand specialized terminologies. Conveying complex ideas in familiar shorthand to a knowledgeable audience makes a lot of sense if you’re presenting a paper on advanced microeconomics. And hell, I don’t really want to read that stuff anyway. But a paper on Weezer? Why not make it accessible to the rest of us?

One of the genuine benefits of blogging is the proliferation of experts with blogs. It’s nice (or terrifying, depending on your perspective) to go straight to the websites of a few trained economists when a genuine crisis hits, for example. I find this to be a lot more informative than relying on the Washington Post’s interpretation of the state of the economic debate. So why not generalize this approach to academic fields – sociology, history, political science – whose interest extends far beyond academia? This strikes me as a win-win situation, as scholars would receive more recognition for their studies, and people like me would have the benefit of more (and better) reading material.

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Also, this song is still pretty awesome: