All in the Game

Hard Choices

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

During a break at a recent conference I took a walk with a fellow dean, and in the course of a desultory conversation she displayed (more or less parenthetically), a distaste for the phrase "hard choices."

I wanted to press her on the point, but the bell tolled and we went back in. So I wrote asking her to expand on her remark, and she replied, saying first that she disliked the tone -- "repellently sanctimonious and self-righteous" -- with which the words are usually uttered, and second that she couldn't imagine a serious person (Oedipus? Hamlet? Julius Caesar?) announcing, "I see hard choices ahead."

Maybe not, but a quick Google search reveals well over two million uses of the phrase and many of them by very serious persons. What do they mean by it?

Well, in a lot of cases not much, since typically "hard choices" is just a catchphrase to be plopped into a sentence or a headline. "Road Map Involves Hard Choices" declares a recent CBS 2 piece. But when you read the article online there is no mention of any choices, although it is clear that both sides face one -- whether to sign on to the Middle East road map and take a chance on peace or to shore up an internal political position by playing to the hardliners.

Now that's surely a choice, but it's neither a hard nor an easy one. It's the situation that's hard, and calling the choices created by the situation "hard" adds nothing to our understanding of them.

On July 13, The New York Times reported on the "difficult choices" forced on professors who must decide whether to hold student athletes to academic standards or use "unorthodox" methods to help them out "even if those methods ... skirt university and NCAA regulations." But that seems to be a choice between doing your job and defaulting on it, and if that choice is hard you're in the wrong line of work.

Many choices called hard just come along with the territory. You have to choose between a new car and an expensive vacation (well actually you don't; just take out a loan). You have to choose between accepting this article for publication or that one (well actually there's no choice involved if one is better than another; and if both are equally good, mortgage space in the next issue). You have to choose between your diet and a cholesterol-rich dessert (not really, the choice is clear; it's the exercise of willpower that's hard).

In these and many other appearances "hard choices" seems to be little more than a rhetorical intensifier that overdramatizes a pedestrian difficulty and overstates the heroism of those who must deal with it. (I'm making hard choices 'cause a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.)

The trouble is that while there are innumerable invocations of the term (usually in the imperative form: "You or we" -- never "I" -- "must make the hard choices"), no one ever really explains what a hard choice is (and isn't). I have found only a few instances in which "hard choices" actually does real (as opposed to gestural) explanatory work.

In an April 22 article in the Rocky Mountain News, "Hard Choices Face New Mayor," a member of a previous city administration explains that in good times "you grow a lot of city government" and there's "not a lot of pressure for discipline" because the money flows freely. But when the economic bubble bursts, you're left with programs you can no longer sustain, and you have to start thinking about cuts. "Mayors and city councils think harder about what they do when there's less revenue."

So here is a clear and helpfully analytic use of the term, easily applicable to the world of the university: If you do not exercise fiscal prudence when the revenue stream is good, and instead commit to initiatives that seem exciting and promising, when the stream slows you're going to have to make the choices you declined to make earlier. They will be hard choices, indeed harder than they would have been had you said "no" more often, because there are now personnel, infrastructures, and client expectations that weren't there before, and it will be difficult (hard) to get rid of them.

What is not clear (at least to me) is the moral to be drawn. Don't spend the money when you (think you) have it? I don't think so. After all, even though your enterprise has outgrown the money available to support it, you do have something you didn't have before; and while you can't quite pay for it now, if you manage to limp along and get a little help from your friends, you just might be able to stay afloat until the next high tide arrives.

But if you are cautious (or, if you prefer, prudent) and finance only ventures that are fully paid for in advance, you will have a reputation for fiscal prudence, but precious little else. You'll get high marks from the auditors, but low marks from history.

This brings me to the double point I want to make about hard choices. Making them may be a bad idea. And urging that they be made may be a mask for strategies no one wishes to acknowledge.

The idea that making hard choices may be a bad idea never occurs to those who recommend them with the pious zeal of someone telling you to take a cold shower (and be a man!). But sometimes it is wise to make no choices at all and trust a bit in a future that will make them unnecessary. At other times a hard choice will end up being penny wise and pound foolish when the enterprise you chose against comes into its own nationally and you have to start from scratch. And you may be seduced by the rhetoric of hard choices (it seems so adult and virtuous) into caring more for the posture you strike than you do for the outcomes you desire.

You should also beware of men (and women) crying "hard choices" (and not only on the ides of March). What they really are saying, although not explicitly, is that the choices they have already made are going to be hard for you as you pass them down to those who look to you for guidance and leadership.

As one descends the chain of hard choices, responsibility is more and more attenuated. "You know I hate to do this, but my hands are tied by those above me and by the general economic situation which leaves all of us with nothing but hard choices." "Hard choices" thus becomes the fine-sounding substitute for throwing up one's hands and giving up.

But there is an even more sinister use to which the term is put (and here I get to my second point): "Hard choices" are always binary and zero sum. Either give up this or give up that. And if the binary formulation is forceful enough, one possible view of the situation becomes the only view, and alternative paths you might have explored are lost sight of.

Steve Vivian writes in G21 The World's Magazine: "We've gotta make a choice. We can't have both more affordable housing (which demands more construction) and simultaneously stop urban sprawl (which demands a stop to development) ... [R]eal life requires hard choices." Well, it depends on what kind of housing you build, and where, and on what kind of planning you do or don't do.

When he was governor of Vermont, Howard Dean put to lawmakers the hard choice of "whether to increase the cigarette tax or make deep cuts in government health programs" (Legislative Report, January 23, 2002). But surely these are not the only sources of revenue, and the only location of possible choices. The governor of Texas proposes to remove 60,000 adults from the rolls of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and generally scale back social services in the name of hard choices. The director of the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities warns in response that, "The hard-choices rhetoric is a smokescreen for a huge ideological shift not to take care of the poor and vulnerable" (The Dallas Morning News, April 23).

And whenever you hear, as you often will today, that the university can no longer afford the full array of programs across every discipline and that hard choices must be made and that every tub must sit on its own bottom, you can be sure that what is being announced is a shift in priorities that will have as its result -- is already having as its result -- the withdrawal of financial support from the humanities and social sciences (a response, of course, to the legislative hard choices that have resulted in the withdrawal of support from higher education in general).

And, yes, one last warning: If you come across someone who uses hard choices, best practices, benchmarking, and priorities in the same paragraph or even the same semester, lock up your worldly goods and run for your life.

Should we then abandon "hard choices" either because it means nothing or because it means something sinister?

No, it is a phrase that sometimes does honorable work. Hank Dunn has written a book titled Hard Choices For Loving People, a resource for professional and family caregivers who must decide when to move to hospice, when to execute a living will, when to withhold treatment, and how to deal with other "end-of-life" decisions. Now those are real choices and they are really hard, and the people called on to make them (as we all shall be) have clear title to words that have been cheapened by those who either appropriate them for self-aggrandizement or manipulate them for political ends. May all your Christmases be white and all your choices be easy.

Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes a monthly column for the Career Network on campus politics and academic careers. His most recent book is How Milton Works (Harvard University Press, 2001).