Politics ain’t beanbag. With an agenda as bold as the Trump administration’s, there’s a crying need for competent officials. When it comes to pruning bureaucracy, rooting out waste, crafting tariff schedules, or planning military action, expertise helps. You want savvy bureaucrats rather than would-be influencers and well-meaning novices in key positions.
It’d be good for everyone if there were a deeper bench of Republican policy professionals who really knew how government works. That’s why it’s such a big problem that the nation’s public policy schools serve as owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic Party.
Faculty at leading programs lean lopsidedly to the left; unsurprisingly, they emphasize predictable priorities, such as prison reform, homelessness, or healthcare. The technocratic progressives are joined by colleagues who go further still, recasting policy debates in identity-driven and baldly ideological terms to “expose” systemic racism and the evils of U.S. capitalism.
Right-leaning priorities are routinely marginalized or dismissed as backward-looking, as is the case with immigration enforcement, entitlement reform, educational choice, or tax-cutting. As a result of this bias, a broad swath of aspiring conservative policy professionals has sensibly opted to avoid these programs altogether. The result: Republicans are short on skilled policy professionals, while left-leaning students and scholars operate in a blue bubble in which they too rarely engage with those who think differently.
Policy schools exist precisely for the purpose of preparing their students for roles in and around government. Indeed, several decades ago, college leaders such as Harvard University’s Derek Bok and UC–Berkeley’s Aaron Wildavsky argued their policy schools existed to prepare graduates to “occupy influential positions in public life” and to “do for the public sector what business schools had done for the private sector” — namely, supply graduates to staff government jobs and provide educated leadership.
As Bok and Wildavsky would have recognized, policy schools can’t produce leaders if their students are only exposed to half the policy menu or political spectrum. When “diversity” in policy schools is mostly a matter of left-of-center technocrats interacting with far-left ideologues, progressives find it easy to tell one another that everyone thinks as they do. Meanwhile, right-leaning students learn to view themselves as unwelcome interlopers. That’s a formula for aggravating the kind of distrust and partisan hostility that graduates of these schools are supposed to navigate.
Policy programs can do better by exploring ideas and concepts that challenge the Left’s comfortable assumptions. They need to start introducing students to an array of intellectual traditions, enabling graduates to appreciate the complexities of the troubles of the day and equipping them to engage with those who hold different opinions.
That requires exposing students to Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Edmund Burke, James Q. Wilson, Thomas Sowell, and other iconic thinkers of the Right. A shocking number of the hundreds of policy students we’ve taught, mentored, and advised over the past decade haven’t even heard of some of these figures, much less read them.
That’s especially troubling because the penetrating social analysis of these authors helps explain why so many progressive policies yield unintended results or else get steamrolled by reality. These thinkers raise questions that tend to be uncomfortable for progressive technocrats to contemplate, which is exactly why their work is so crucial.
Now, while progressive scholars like to imagine they can represent conservative perspectives fairly, they generally don’t. Many of them are not acquainted with key bodies of conservative thought, and those who often approach right-leaning texts like a traveler fumbling with a foreign language.
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Students deserve faculty who can discuss these texts as if they were penned in their native tongue. In a happy and useful coincidence, it will turn out that many of those best suited for that task are themselves of the Right. There are policy scholars who needn’t play devil’s advocate to make the case that free markets are a promising way to allocate resources, argue that complex government solutions frequently stumble, assert that personal responsibility is as important as individual rights, and note that practical wisdom is often preferable to technocratic decision-making.
Policy schools have the opportunity to make their curriculum more robust, ensure that governments of all ideological stripes can draw on relevant expertise, and promote ideological diversity while equipping their students for the real world. Especially at a moment when a Republican president is seeking to make profound changes to the machinery of government, that seems like an obvious win-win.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
