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R E C E N T L Y

In the letters of my name
By Isaac Zaur
Seduced by bad romantic verse, an editor of a college literary journal sets out to find his poetic stalker
(01/20/99)

Darwinian admissions
By Megan Olden
Are selective universities turning a blind eye to some students in need?
(01/18/99)

Only the nearly perfect need apply
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With medical schools rejecting the vast majority of their applicants, what's an aspiring Hippocrates to do?
(01/15/99)

Bad chemistry
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When your lab partner is an obsessive compulsive, not even the data is safe
(01/13/99)

Camille on Campus
By Camille Paglia
As academics allow our state education to languish, private parochial schools may lead to more cultural divides
(01/13/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

Why would Marc Weiss, a tenure-track professor at Columbia University, give it all up to coordinate tour bus parking?

BY ELI LEHRER | One moment Marc Weiss is speaking fluent academese, handing out reading lists and giving mini-lectures on the philosophies underpinning downtown redevelopment. The next, he sounds like a veteran politician, waxing rhapsodic about community empowerment, federal programs to replace troubled public housing and the wonkish details of tour bus parking in Washington, D.C. Weiss, 49, who gave up a tenured post at Columbia University to make urban policy in Washington, walks a tightrope between two worlds. He still displays the windy diction and slightly rumpled suits of a tenured academic, but in the last seven years he has learned the charm-school tools of the political insider. He hands out flattery gracefully -- "very nice sweater," he tells a reporter -- and has perfected the grip-firmly-and-make-eye-contact handshake of those who understand how to oil the political machine.

For a man who once lived in the quiet corridors of urban policy departments, meditating on the ideals and theories of how cities are built and destroyed, he has come a long way -- all the way to the most powerful and arguably the most troubled big city in America. While one can find professors-turned-policy makers in every marble-covered hall of the capital city, it's rare to run across a successful academic who so totally has given himself to the life of the policy maven. Even Henry Kissinger joined the Nixon administration only after Harvard denied him tenure.

Eating a bowl of minestrone soup and sipping a glass of orange juice, Weiss describes how he came to do the unthinkable. "After four years [in Washington], I realized that I didn't miss academic life at all," says Weiss with his characteristic intensity. "I didn't miss teaching, I didn't miss grading papers, I didn't miss any of it."

Combining a schmaltzy desire for social change, intellectual ambition and a penchant for organizing, Weiss has come to embody the pro-business, pro-government ideals of the New Democrats. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros called Weiss "the embodiment of urban and housing policy for the Clinton administration," and policies Weiss crafted contributed to steep increases in American home ownership over the past five years. Very much a member of Cisneros' brain trust, Weiss spends part of his time working on a book with Cisneros, now a television executive.

Although there are plenty of committed policy makers in Washington, few juggle as many different projects at one time. In order to complete his book, Weiss has a fellowship with a centrist think tank, the Center for National Policy. Simultaneously, Weiss works a second full-time job as a senior advisor to Washington's own Housing and Community Development department. There, he recently finished writing a 40-page report intended to outline what the city plans to do in order to return people and business to a city that's been losing both since the 1960s. His career trajectory has been one that many academics would dream of: He's gone from writing about a reasonably narrow group of policies to implementing them and from implementing those policies to a broader career as a voracious generalist who deals with every facet of urban policy.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. The cost of public devotion: a personal life

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PHOTO COURTESY OF MARC WEISS