Image can be everything

WE'VE ALL HEARD a lot about House Speaker Newt Gingrich's college course.

Maybe it's time he heard of mine.

For almost 20 years, I have taught an undergraduate political science course called "Political Corruption." The course won't be found anywhere on cable television (which, given my rambling and arm-waving lecture style, is probably just as well), but it always enrolls a large and enthusiastic group of students who are concerned about politics, morality and the question of where and whether the two intersect.

Speaker Gingrich claims to be puzzled why some people are upset about his book contract and his PAC's role in funding his college course. For some reason, it seems, people persist in being bothered when the speaker of the House of Representatives accepts large sums of money from a range of high-powered donors.

They worry when he agrees to a very large book advance from a publisher that has a stake in important policy issues, and aren't quite reassured when he decides to take the money in royalties instead.

Show me a law that has been broken, he says, and then wonders why the issues won't go away.

Well, take a seat and get out your notebook, Mr. Speaker. My students and I talk about some ideas that just might help you understand.

One thing we consider is the difference between legality and morality. The two are not the same thing, a lesson taught us by two very different men. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail that laws enacted by illegitimate authorities are immoral and that one has not just the right, but the duty, to break those laws in the name of a higher morality.

Richard Nixon, in his inimitable way, made the other side of the argument with his contention that his actions were moral so long as there was no conclusive evidence he had broken the law.

In my class, however, we study cases showing that that one can stay within the the law and still raise questions of morality and ethics through one's conduct.

Perceptions are another major concern. In a society where the people's views and values are supposed to count for a great deal, appearances can be critical. Many people wonder why the man who led the charge against Jim Wright's book deal is so untroubled by the ethics of his own conduct.

They also have a hard time believing that businesses and individuals would so lavishly fund the speaker's lecture series just because they believe in education or out of a misplaced nostalgia for bright college days. It looks a lot more like a way to gain favor with a powerful man not a quid pro quo, perhaps, but a way to buy some well- placed good will.

For generations British civil servants and cabinet members have been required to avoid not just conflicts of interest, but also the appearance of such conflicts. They don't always succeed on the latter score, but our speaker doesn't even seem to try.

Finally, in my class we look not just at modern notions of corruption, but at a classical sense of the term one in which corruptness is present, or absent, in a whole leadership class and indeed in a whole political order. The issue in that sense is not who took what from whom, but rather (as Thucydides, who ought to have a place on the Gingrich syllabus, argued) whether or not leaders can command the loyalty of a society. When they cannot, there is big trouble: leaders cannot lead, followers will not follow and government cannot govern.

And that, some of my students have argued, may be where we are today. Outright lawbreaking by officials is rare by historical standards, but many citizens believe we are on the wrong track. They see a system stacked in favor of wealth and power, and against them and their families. Whether specific laws are being broken, and whether this is just a matter of perceptions, in a democracy such a gap between state and society is a crisis in the making.

I would have thought that a man who rode into power on the back of precisely those discontents would be more sensitive to their origins and depth. But then, he hasn't taken my class. Maybe there is time, though; the mid-term is still a few weeks off, and I'd be willing to give him a later due date on his term paper.

Copyright 1995
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