My friend Meghan, when advising me on how to be an academic, once told me the story of Frank H. Westheimer. Dr. Westheimer spent his life studying enzymes and making invaluable contributions to our understanding of the biochemical process, but when he was a young graduate student he was not that ambitious. He came up with a dissertation topic, and broached it with his advisor, James. B. Conant. Conant replied, “Congratulations. If this works, it will be a footnote to a footnote in the history of Chemistry.” Dr. Westheimer would tell that story—and Meghan told it to me—to encourage students to be bold.

I have spent this week reading a lot of articles that are “footnotes to footnotes.” We are studying cabinet formation and coalition building in parliamentary democracies—a topic that is awfully timely, given last week’s happenings in Italy—but the articles I am reading aren’t telling me much of anything. The “footnote to a footnote” example—which is all too frequent in scholarship—is not how I want to spend the next year-and-a-half. But the easiest things to prove are usually easy for a reason. If I want to write an easy thesis to get my degree, I have to spend a year-and-a-half on footnotes to footnotes.

I had a meeting with my supervisor about my research topic. She says that I have great imagination, but need some methodological grounding. It would be easy to pick a narrowly defined topic, ask a “footnote of a footnote” question, and come up with an answer. But I don’t want to do that. My advisor is good; she supports my foolish indulgence. The big question is, for me now, (and probably for most academics): how to produce meaningful, effective research that is methodological and not just speculative? It’s teaching me vision within substance.

When I was back home in Atlanta, I visited with my friend Bob Pattillo, the chief behind the Gray Ghost Fund/Gray Matters Capital, a social entrepreneurship private equity fund that invests in social enterprises. Mr. Pattillo was in the microlending business before it became popular, and knows a growing, socially beneficial thing when he sees it. He is now in the business of “hyper-affordable” schools—low, low budget private schools in very poor areas.

Here’s how a hyper-affordable school works: let’s say you are a rickshaw driver in India. You make $240 a year. You can send your daughter to one of these private schools for $26/year. Now, this is over 10% of your annual income, but families in Atlanta will gladly pay over 10% of their annual income to send their kids to Westminster.

Now normally, private schools are not more inclusive and accessible than public schools. But these schools in India are the exception. The state schools in India are terrible. Many teachers are political appointees who don’t show up to school for months at a time. Read this New York Times assessment. These low-budget, hyper-affordable schools are within the reach of India’s poor families, and can (and do) educate large amounts of students at minimal cost. But they run on shoestring budgets, and can’t make capital investments—school expansion, teacher training, and more.

Firms like Mr. Pattillo’s are giving these schools the capital to secure their infrastructure and expand. In this way, they can meet the needs of people in India, Nigeria, Mexico City, and other places they are exploring. Education is a public good. Investment in the public schools is the most important thing we do domestically as a government. But especially in poor countries, due to efforts like this, when the government has failed, students can still be educated.

I’m thinking of doing research with Gray Matters Capital to see the feasibility of these accessible and affordable schools, political obstacles to their establishment, the political effects on education spending—both volume and efficiency—and barriers to entry for this market in a way to expand these schools to students who need them. Now, this, if it works, would not be a footnote to a footnote.

ERB