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1/ It's bureaucracy week in Intro to American, and I'd like to share with you a story I tell my students this week every semester. It's a story that's dear to my heart, and it's the reason this week is my favorite week to teach in that class.
2/ It's 1995. Baby Jeff is a freshman at UCLA taking Intro to American. The professor is Tom Schwartz, of Police Patrols and Fire Alarms fame. This week Schwartz is talking about the bureaucracy, which means of course he's teaching Police Patrols & Fire Alarms.
3/ For the non poli sci folks, PPFA is a big article which talks about different ways Congress oversees the bureaucracy; the analogy is that certain oversight methods are like cops patrolling a neighborhood, and other methods are like fire fighters waiting for an alarm to sound.
4/ Anyway, Schwartz picks a student to play act being a fire fighter, and another to play act being a police officer. The fire fighter is a frat bro-looking guy, sandals, polo with popped collar, khaki shorts, sunglasses hanging from his neck.
5/ The police officer is kind of a hippy-looking young woman, barefoot and in a cotton tee with the neck stretched out, hanging off her shoulder. Schwartz even says, "Do you know you're not wearing any shoes?" The whole class laughs.
6/ Schwartz has broey fire fighter guy sit on the stage & wait for an alarm to get pulled, and sends the hippy girl to patrol around the 300+ student lecture hall. While that goes on, he lectures about how waiting for an alarm to get pulled is easier and more efficient.
7/ The demonstration ends, the two students go back to their seats, and the class moves on. I lost track of broey firefighter guy, but a couple months later I sat behind hippy girl in another class. She offered me gum & we talked. Turns out we lived in the same dorm.
8/ We hit it off a bit, spent some time together and grew into very close friends. Eventually we would start dating, get married, and have a couple kids. This November we'll have our 20th wedding anniversary. Hippy girl was @rachellazarus.
9/ As a poli sci professor, I love that the first time I encountered my wife it was as part of a classroom demonstration of a concept that I still think about. And I love telling students that story when I teach PPFA. The article will always have a special place in my heart.
10/10 Postscript - I would go on to grad school and take classes from Mat McCubbins, who also taught PPFA. So I also get a kick out the fact that I got taught the article from both original authors, once as an undergrad and once in grad school.
