Shaping Public Policy: The Washington Internship Program

Dartmouth students participate in a wide variety of off-campus academic programs each year ranging from Language Study Abroad to biology and earth sciences field work projects in Central America. The Department of Government sponsors two off-campus offerings a spring term internship program in Washington, D.C. and a fall term foreign study program in London, England. One faculty member from the department is assigned to supervise each program, a task I performed in Washington during the spring of 1980 and again in 1983.

The Washington program is a unique off-campus offering because the students participate in full-time working internships with Congressional, executive branch, or private sector organizations while also fulfilling all the normal requirements of a regular three-course academic commitment. In addition to their internship assignments, the fifteen students selected for the Washington program attend two evening seminars each week, they analyze their internship experiences in weekly journals, and they complete one major term-long research project which is designed to make a significant contribution to their sponsoring internship office.

The goal of the program is to combine relevant academic courses with the experience of analyzing public policy in a fieldwork setting. There are a number of important supplementary benefits which can emerge from this type of intensive learning experience, not the least being the high degree of initiative, discipline, and organizational skills the students must develop in order to balance the competing demands involved in carrying out full-time jobs while also fulfilling a very heavy schedule of academic commitments.

The individual internship assignments and research projects vary over a broad range of domestic and international policy issues depending on the interests of the participating students. During the 1983 spring term, Karen Martinsen '83 completed an economic analysis of the manufactured housing industry for the International Consulting Group; Wallace Butler '84 formulated policy proposals for economic development initiatives in Namibia for the Lutheran Council of Churches; David Cumberbatch 'B4 prepared a position paper on educational vouchers for the National Urban League; Dan Skiest '84 reported on the AIDS outbreak for Senator Paul Tsongas '61 (D-Mass.); Stan Sokol 'B4 developed legislative proposals to deal with the acid rain problem for Rep. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.); Jim Stronski '84 analyzed legislation dealing with the humane treatment of laboratory animals for Rep. Richard Ottinger (D-N.Y.); Mark Tully '84 evaluated the implementation of coal leasing applications on public lands for Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.); and Barbara Whipple 'BS prepared a background report on press coverage of El Salvador for the Latin American Division of the International Chamber of Commerce. While space limitations make it impossible to describe each of these projects in detail, the following .overview illustrates the diversity of some of the other student research initiatives.

Allyson Bouldon '84, a government major from Chicago, decided to use the Washington program as a laboratory to test her long-range career interests in law and politics. Active in the Undergraduate Council, the Committee on Undergraduate Life, and the black theatre dance group, Allyson secured an internship with the Public Defender Service where she was assigned to assist a PDS lawyer deal with cases involving juvenile defenders. About three weeks into the term, Allyson was asked to investigate the case of an eleven-year-old boy who was accused of setting fire to two desks in his school classroom. After looking into the case, Allyson discovered that the young boy was from a fatherless home. She reported this to her PDS supervisor, and told him that she recalled reading an earlier article that indicated unusually large numbers of juveniles from fatherless families resort to arson as a means of attracting attention and enhancing their sense of masculinity. She also recalled that the article discussed a new "Firehawk" program that had been established on the West Coast in an effort to deal with this problem.

Allyson's supervisor, who had never heard of the Firehawk program, was fascinated. He instructed Allyson to try to locate the article and to prepare a background research report on the Firehawk plan. The information she presented in her report was staggering:

Nationally, 54.6% of arrested arsonists are juveniles aged 8-16. Of this group, 80% are male, and many are from fatherless homes. These figures make juveniles responsible for nearly one million fires annually. With arson-related damages costing the United States an estimated 1.3 billion dollars each year, it is clear that juvenile arson presents serious policy problems.

The Firehawk Foundation program was developed in San Francisco in 1979. The program is designed to reduce the incidence of juvenile Presetting by pairing fatherless children who have been identified as firesetters with firefighter volunteers who act as long-term companions to the children. By interacting with the children on a one-to-one basis, the firemen help to enhance the children's sense of self-worth and to channel emotions such as frustration and anger into nondestructive behavior. Within one year, the program had achieved a 100% success rate. After being paired with a firefighter, none of the previous juvenile offenders had started any additional fires.

After reading Allyson's report, the judge responsible for the case agreed to release the eleven-year-old boy if he could be paired with a firefighter in Washington. Unfortunately, there was no Firehawk program in the area, so Allyson negotiated with a local fire department and they agreed to take the case on an experimental basis. The national Firehawk Foundation was so impressed with Allyson's work that they hired her for the summer to start a formal Firehawk program in Washington during her off-campus leave term. Over the summer, Allyson engaged in discussions with the Fire Commissioner and other city officials in Washington about the Firehawk program, and she successfully organized a new Firehawk program for the city of Washington, D.C. This past fall Allyson returned to her home in Chicago where she worked in an advertising agency.

Henry Erbe 'B4 from East Northport, New York, is a varsity soccer player, a member of Green Key, and a guitar player and singer in student rock bands. Henry had a very ambitious research project in mind when he entered the Washington program. He had spent the winter term of his junior year working as a student intern for a Massachusetts state senator in Boston. He had also secured an internship with Rep. Silvio O. Conte (R-Mass.) during the spring term, and he wanted to compare the legislative process at the state and national levels during the course of his spring term assignment. Once he arrived in Washington, Henry discovered that the complexities of the Congressional process made it very difficult to complete any meaningful comparative national-state legislative analysis during the course of a tenweek term. He also realized, however, that his winter term internship with Senator Webber in Massachusetts had provided him with a unique background to work in Rep. Conte's Congressional office.

One of the major problems Henry had dealt with in Massachusetts involved the high levels of unemployment in the older Berkshire County communities, such as North Adams, which were in Senator Webber's district. As a result of this experience, Henry completed a research report for Rep. Conte which analyzed the need for federal government industrial development bonds to promote economic revitalization. He then formulated specific Congressional legislative proposals which would target such bonds to small businesses in depressed areas such as those he had encountered in Massachusetts.

A month after he left Washington, Henry wrote me the following:

Last week I called up Rep. Conte's office to see if anything had come of my research project. Much to my surprise, I was informed that Conte had recently introduced H.R. 3408 [which] contains two of my five recommendations. ... It was a very worthwhile feeling!

Although there is no guarantee that H.R. 3408 will be enacted into law, I share Henry's "worthwhile feeling" in being able to incorporate some of his policy ideas into a House bill.

David Fuhrman '84, a government major from Buena Park, California, was the co-captain of the 1983 Dartmouth football team. David, who is considering a career in law, arranged an internship last spring with his Congressman, Rep. William Dannenmeyer (R-Calif.). Shortly after David arrived in Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 1977 California statute which imposed a moratorium on the certification of new nuclear power plants until the United States has developed a demonstrated technology for the permanent disposal of nuclear wastes. Although Congress had passed legislation in December 1982 calling for the establishment of a national nuclear waste disposal plan, there is considerable controversy whether any existing technology can deal effectively with this highly volatile policy issue. Since Rep. Dannemeyer serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee and his California constituency was directly affected by the Supreme Court ruling, David was asked to prepare a research report on the current technologies of nuclear waste disposal, including any foreign innovations which might be considered in the U.S.

During the course of his research, David focused on a special vitrification process developed in France, which employs borosilicate glass to solidify nuclear waste. This process entails converting fission wastes into a solid form in glass which is one of the most stable materials currently available for containing oxides and preventing leakage.

David used the French he had learned in an earlier off-campus program to discuss the vitrification process with appropriate officials and trade representatives associated with the French Embassy in Washington. As a result, he was able to compile a comprehensive research report on the pros and cons of the vitrification technique for Rep. Dannemeyer. In his report, David advised Dannemeyer that the U.S. Department of Energy was planning to conduct its own vitrification experiment in West Valley, New York, in an effort to determine whether this technique might be useful in dealing with our national waste problems.

Rep. Dannemeyer received David's report just prior to the appropriations mark-up of a bill containing funds for the West Valley project. After reading the report; Dannemeyer concluded that this type of experiment was promising, and he urged support for federal funding for the project. By the time David left Washington, funding had been approved by the House Appropriations Committee and was pending in the Senate. Although there is no way to know whether the vitrification process will help to solve the waste problems of the trouble-plagued nuclear industry, it may provide answers to some of the questions Congress has thus far been unable to resolve since it passed legislation calling for a national waste disposal plan.

Patricia Kinsman '82, a government and philosophy major from Vernon, Connecticut, was an active member of the Dartmouth Women's Alliance and the Women's Studies Program while also serving as the president of the Council on Student Organizations. Tricia had a very specific reason for spending her last Dartmouth academic term in Washington. Long interested in women's rights issues, she wanted to find out more about the pragmatic compromises involved in practical politics to determine whether she would like to devote her energies to this area following her graduation from college.

Tricia worked with the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), an internship which turned out to be a very worthwhile experience for her. The basic goal of NWPC is to exert more influence through the ballot box by helping qualified women candidates run for public office at the local, state, and national levels. Tricia took on the assignment of preparing an election manual to be distributed to NWPC candidates in all 50 states. Within a period of ten weeks, she produced a comprehensive booklet which covered such topics as the mechanics of the election process, fund-raising strategies, targeting candidates for promising races, and the role of the media in political campaigns. Tricia's manual received the immediate endorsement of the NWPC headquarters office and is being published for use in the 1984 elections.

Because the student internships and projects cover such a wide range of diverse concerns, the job of teaching in the Washington program can be quite demanding and often very tricky. One of the most difficult decisions a faculty member faces involves the question of how much supervision to provide to the students. While it is important to intervene in obvious situations where students may be confronted with totally disinterested internship supervisors, it is equally important not to smother the students with so much attention that they are unable to do any learning on their own.

Two of the students in the 1983 program experienced considerable initial difficulty formulating their research projects, but in the end, they finished up the term with flying colors. Amy Josefsberg,'84, a government major who served as chair of the Collis Center Governing Board at Dartmouth, experienced initial difficulty working out a satisfactory research project in the office of Congressman Dante Fascell (D-Fla.). After a month of unsuccessful negotiations, she finally decided to "sell" Rep. Fascell on a project that interested her the most the serious problems of drug abuse among young people in her home city of Miami, Florida. Since Fascell represented the Miami area and also served as a member of the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Amy proposed that the committee hold a special hearing on drug abuse in junior high schools in Miami during the Congressional summer recess. On the final day of the spring term, Fascell advised Amy that the Select Committee had approved her proposal, and invited her back to work in his office based on her strong performance in the spring.

Meredith McClintock '85, an economics/government major from Colts Neck, New Jersey, and a member of the College debating team, experienced a different type of problem on her research project. Meredy served as an intern in the Presidential Personnel Office of the White House. Many of her assignments involved working with sensitive personal records of executive appointees, and her supervisor was concerned that she should respect the confidentiality of these records in her research report. As a result, Meredy focused her research project on procedural modifications in the executive appointment process. She proposed the development of a management information system which could help facilitate the review of executive appointments, and she also presented a number of imaginative ideas on how computer monitoring could be utilized more effectively to screen prospective appointees.

All's well that ends well. The students viewed the Washington internship program as an opportunity to test themselves, and their ideas, in the arena of national decision-making, and in so doing, they succeeded in making a variety of important contributions to the public policy process. Professor Dick Winters of the government department has already begun to select participants for the 1984 internship program. I hope he will be as fortunate as I was in helping a creative, committed, and very gifted group of Dartmouth undergraduates explore the Washington scene this spring.

Stephen Bosworth '61, chairman of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State,greets Karen Martinsen '83 prior to an evening seminar. Behind Bosworth stands JacobGillespie '61 of the U. S. Information Agency, and beside him is Wallace Butler '84.

Intern Allyson Bouldon '84

Intern Henry Erbe '84

Intern David Furman '84

Intern Patricia Kinsman '82

Left to right: David Cumberbatch '84, Frank Smallwood, Allyson Bouldon '84, Dan Skiest '84, Mark Tully '84, David Fuhrman'84, Wallace Butler '84, Stan Sokul '84, Barbara Whipple '85, Karen Martinsen '83, Henry Erbe '84, Amy Josefsburg '84. (Missing:Patricia Kinsman '82, Jim Stronski '84, Meredith McClintock '85).

The students must develop initiative, discipline, and organizational skills to balance the competing demands of full-time jobs and heavy academic commitments.

The students viewed the internship as an opportunity to test themselves, and their ideas, in the arena of national decisionmaking.

Frank Smallwood '51, Orvil Dryfoos '34Professor of Public Affairs, is also theDirector of the Rockefeller Center for theSocial Sciences at Dartmouth.