Molly Selvin
views her work as “public
policy on the fly.” As an editorial writer at the Los Angeles
Times, Selvin has written three or four opinion pieces a week for
the last 10 years. She has tackled the criminal and civil legal systems,
local politics, the environment, reproductive health as well as child-welfare
issues and has no qualms about sounding a wake up bell for the 900,000
readers
of the Times.
Researching a series on
LA County’s foster care system, Selvin
rode along with a social worker making house calls. Her three-part
series called for reform and scathingly labeled the bedeviled system, “the
parent of last resort.”
Selvin, who lives in L.A with her husband,
David Rubenson, and two children, is particularly proud that the
paper argued in support
of a new charter for the city of Los Angeles in the 1990s. “We
did a lot of writing that convinced the voters to adopt it,” she
says. “It brought the Los Angeles city government into the
21st century.”
An historian by training, Selvin won a Fulbright
fellowship to the University of Munich in 1999, where she taught
courses on U.S. constitutional
law and urban politics. This year, she became a Senior Fellow at
the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research (SPPSR), a
program that fosters dialog
between leaders, practitioners, students and scholars on policy
making.
But
it is the daily pressures of the editorial room that she finds
especially energizing. “The goal of an editorial,” Selvin
says, “is to argue a point of view in a condensed space.” It
is a goal she struggles to achieve with every column and when it
works she is rewarded with the thought that she may have helped shape
public policy.  |
