On Stanford stardom and how to be the least smart person in the room
By Veronica Anghel, Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at The Europe Center
Imagine a stately room in an Eastern European government building. The topic at hand is NATO post-Crimea, the meeting is high level, all national institutions who should be there are there. ‘Cosmic’ security clearance only, as the jargon goes. The matter is not your regular ‘We condemn Russia, we are concerned.’ This is crunch time, concrete steps for concrete actions — what will a neighbor of Ukraine do, how will we organize? The institution I represent is the host. I had been assigned the organization of the first head of state meeting for the Eastern Flank. The meeting starts. One of the cosmic colleagues asks: ‘Are we taking notes? Who’s taking notes?’ Together with the rest of the cosmic gathering, they look at me. I am the only woman at the table. Wrong gender and wrong age, thus wrong assumption too. Yet I say nothing, no snappy comeback at hand, of which, since then I have devised plenty. I take my victory from hearing my ideas spoken by my bosses. Team effort, I say. Hierarchy, I say. That did not last long. A month later, I withdrew from this chapter of personal history altogether. A case of irreconcilable differences. I needed more than small victories. A Ph.D. had to be conquered, own words had to be spoken by the author.
I lived in Vienna and Bologna for the next three years. The first day I arrived at Stanford, the campus was housed in calm, bothered only by the whoosh of bicycles. I cast a shadow on the softly lit lawn outside Encina Hall, defiantly green for any January I have ever known before. This is it. Unfettered freedom and the laws of logic — all I ever need. The created conscience of my species, all here. Karen, the program administrator of The Europe Center, shows me our space. She makes me feel like home. We walk around, a team lunch is set. I have arrived. That is my boss’s office. She is galaxies ahead of all of us. I call her Anna, she calls me Veronica, we schedule coffee. Starstruck, but peak adrenaline helps. I meet my postdoc colleagues. We don’t fool around — Tinka serves gender violence policy for lunch, Jaqueline talks medieval Irish laws as we hit the gym. In the first conversation with Mike, we barely scratch the surface: ‘How’s your part of Europe?’, he asks as if he didn’t know. ‘Stuck, searching for answers in all the wrong places,’ I answer as if I had it all figured out. The second meeting promises a third. Speaker stardom from the morning’s policy advisers to the evening’s Pulitzer prize winning poets is an unparalleled treat. The discovery of the Rodin garden is mind-blowing. Paris on the Farm. It takes weeks before I have the first paragraph of my own writing.
The first article I ever published was on presidential power. The second on government formation. Neither result will ever shake the scientific world, but I discovered patterns under apparent chaos. And that shook me. Party politics took most of my postdoc life. It also led to increasing concerns about the state of democracy in Central Eastern Europe, about the never-ending tensions between elite actions and institutional effects, about the strenuous, long fight to build rule of law, not rule of laws. Party politics also brought me here. Years of fieldwork in Hungary and Romania will only make sense in the light of shared theory and peer reviewed efforts. I grow in the confidence that democratic ‘backlash’ theories hide deeper waters, complexity that is difficult to capture by linear explanations, complexity that entangles decades of mismanaged transition. I see the good parts, the transformative post-1989 imported institutions, taking the mainstream political and academic hits, absorbing the rhetoric of top-down reform, of inadequacy with ‘Eastern expectations.’ Yet scores of rational choice political scientists and institutionalists have processed years of data to show elite behavior being constrained by the very institutions which are now deemed ready for reform and adaptation to ‘special, eastern ways.’ In the meantime, informal institutions and practices that impede transformative institutional effects hover undetected by the fast-observing eye. This latter point is where my academic anxieties lie, what beckons the search for the right words and data. And so, I walk in the steps of Stanford’s giants.
The week before COVID-19 demanded our undivided attention, I was scheduling a meeting with Frank. All set to ask him for an autograph on this worn copy of The End of History and the Last Man, I had carried with me from Europe. His signature would have trimmed the chapter “No democracy without democrats.” How is this part always left out of the conversation about the failure of liberal democracy? ‘Write that book, Frank. Remind us. Where is this cultural identities thing going?’ I don’t know where we would have taken it from there. I missed it. Yet COVID has stolen so much more from us than the quality of our academic conversations. So much loss, not least of democracy and democrats.
To know I’ve made a good choice is to find myself being the least smart person in a room. In these few months at Stanford, I learned infinitely more than I could offer. The challenge now is to match the new standard and rise to the opportunity it presents. In the meantime, I am immensely happy to be less cosmic and make strides to be more useful down to earth, in a world where we constantly challenge our assumptions. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professors Anna Grzymala-Busse and Michael McFaul for making this experience possible. I also thank my European friends, Claus Offe and Erik Jones, for entertaining months-long written conversations on these issues, where I get to be less smart also in emails. My stay at Stanford is made possible by a Fulbright grant.
