{"id":1001,"date":"2007-07-08T09:28:57","date_gmt":"2007-07-08T13:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1001"},"modified":"2007-07-08T09:28:57","modified_gmt":"2007-07-08T13:28:57","slug":"the-penultimate-policy-fallacy-the-reverse-of-fighting-the-last-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1001","title":{"rendered":"The penultimate-policy fallacy (the reverse of &quot;fighting the last war&quot;)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Florida&#8217;s universities are facing an interesting mix of budget pressures in the short term, with some possibility for substantial improvement in about 2-3 years but also a serious Sword of Damocles in a property-tax referendum in January and short-term misery if a state-level budget-reduction exercise is handled poorly (or illegally: by law, higher ed shouldn&#8217;t bear a disproportionate burden of any budget reductions after the governor signs the state appropriations bill). That&#8217;s on top of the legislature and governor each taking whacks at state university funding this year. Locally, a command by the governor to engage in a budget-reduction exercise and parallel requests by the state chancellor for each university&nbsp;has caused some panic. The faculty union at USF tried to address that panic in <a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.ourusf.org\/2007\/07\/07\/florida-university-budget-reduction-exercise-the-sky-is-not-falling\/\">a resolution and e-mail<\/a> on Friday, but in the past week I have several times heard the following phrases (or variants of it):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>At my last job, &#8230;<\/li>\n<li>The last time this happened, &#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I understand this attempt to leverage thumbnail-history wisdom. Carl Becker <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historians.org\/info\/AHA_History\/clbecker.htm\">certainly would<\/a>, and there is nothing wrong and much right with bringing one&#8217;s personal perspective to an issue. But when you&#8217;re talking about the effective redistribution of millions of dollars, personal recollection is neither a well-documented history nor a broad perspective. Unfortunately, in institutional circumstances people often bring to the table only the last experience they had, asserting its appropriateness. I call this the penultimate-policy fallacy, the false belief that whatever happened last is the best choice. Sometimes it&#8217;s institutional leaders who apply identical solutions in different circumstances; sometimes it&#8217;s mid-level administrators or individual faculty who have penultimate-policy myopia. <\/p>\n<p>This fallacy is the reverse of wanting to fight the last war, but it&#8217;s rooted in the same poor habit of thought: assuming an exact parallel in the last vaguely-similar event and wishing away the importance of context. This is dangerous whether you&#8217;re talking about Florida&#8217;s university finances&#8230; or&nbsp;a war in the Mideast. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Florida&#8217;s universities are facing an interesting mix of budget pressures in the short term, with some possibility for substantial improvement in about 2-3 years but also a serious Sword of Damocles in a property-tax referendum in January and short-term misery if a state-level budget-reduction exercise is handled poorly (or illegally: by law, higher ed shouldn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-higher-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-g9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}