Yesterday, Mayor Corey Booker’s campaign was back in Camden:
“This is an election that all of America is going to be watching,” Booker said before about three dozen students and supporters in Camden, where he met with Mayor Dana L. Redd.
My worry with Mayor Booker is simple. For all his reputation of being a man of the people, he seems to buy into the myth of young talent as a policy solution. And that’s a problem.I’ve followed Mayor Booker from afar and have heard the same things most of you have. He’s an unbelievably talented politician. He’s a rising star. He’s “turned Newark around.” And that he has about as good a chance as anyone of being a contender for the presidency one day.
My parents heard him speak at my sister’s medical school graduation and they both made a point to call me, raving about his speech, and tell me to base my own commencement address on his.
One of the biggest local critiques of Mayor is exactly this story, that he’s used Newark as a stepping stone. But what worries me is something different. I’m worried that he seemed to think that the way to help Newark was to create an administration that would bring in a whole class of young professionals (read: Ivy Leaguers) themselves seeking to use Newark as a stepping stone. It’s that theory I have a problem with.
It was when visiting Yale that I first heard whispers about Mayor Booker’s open door policy with the university (and particularly, Yale Law School, from which he graduated). I heard that his administration was recruiting and encouraging Yale students to come to Newark for internships, summer jobs and even to take a year off of school to get real-world policy experience.
Which all sounds great. But only sort of. Such an open door policy indicates an idolizing of young talent, one that empowers a traveling class of visitors and intellectual fads, and subtly insinuates that a city cannot help itself and needs imported “talent” to make progress.
A professor of mine once said that he thought he could “fix” any city by dropping 500 Ivy League graduates into it. I, respectfully, disagree. I saw that strategy up close in New Orleans, and several things happened:
- Decisions were made by a traveling class of “experts” who were gone before the results were in.
- And, the city was left with a patchwork of the latest policy fads, none fully implemented.
There’s a reason so few established companies are run by people in their twenties. There’s a reason we value experience in management. Stability is worth something, and when we’re young, we don’t have it. The idea that a city needs a group of recently graduated Ivy League imports to “fix” it is a dangerous one, particularly when it means replacing qualified locals with under-qualified Yalies. It’s dangerous because of the power dynamic between the new-comers and residents (who often find themselves resenting bosses half their age) and it’s dangerous because imports too often value national trends over local traditions, meaning the city is left with whatever was the flavor of the moment long after the policy people have moved on to a Senatorial campaign.
This doesn’t mean that recent graduates aren’t useful, talented or well-intentioned. It just means that we need to be skeptical of seeing them as a policy fix. We see this young hero worship in education, with Teach for America. We saw it in Newark with the Mayor’s open door to Yale Law School. And we saw it in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In all of these places, individuals did wonderful work. But their bigger impact was to alienate and disempower the local communities they sought to “fix.”
Cities aren’t training grounds for young policy-makers. And the problems in cities are far more complex than not having enough “young talent.” Using a city as a training ground for future leaders breeds local resentment and it does so for a reason. It leaves local leaders trying to hold together an incoherent system long after their city stops being a trendy place for students to cut their professional teeth.
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