What Public Policy Schools Should Teach

Governing is hard, serious work. Even when we dislike the agenda of the party in power, we should prefer savvy professionalism to bumbling amateurism. When officials seek to shift international priorities, address the cost of living, revamp health care, or overhaul federal research, there are grave consequences to leaving these efforts to inept social media influencers and riled-up novices. 

In the Trump administration, governing professionals have been in short supply. We see the consequences daily. The ham-fistedness of DOGE, incoherent and illegal tariffs, Signal-gate, locker-room beer chugging, the tragedy in the Twin Cities, a meme-fueled War in Iran. Yes, Trump is exceptionally indifferent or hostile to governing experience, and many seasoned conservatives won’t work for a Robert Kennedy Jr. or Pete Hegseth.

But the political right also suffers from a too-small pool of expert public-sector leaders. One reason is that the pipeline which prepares individuals for this work is exceptionally indifferent or hostile to conservatives. University-based policy schools are a big part of the problem.

Although more Americans identify as conservative than liberal, policy programs tilt far to the left. In many programs, the number of conservative faculty is negligible, with left-leaning faculty outnumbering their right-leaning counterparts at leading policy schools by 7-to-1. While the leftward lean of university faculty and administration is old news, the lack of ideological diversity in policy schools has a particular import. After all, policy schools are explicitly charged with educating students to navigate issues like taxation, policing, abortion, and immigration.

A half-century ago, Harvard University president Derek Bok explained that programs like his institution’s famed Kennedy School of Government “prepare a profession of public servants” who can “occupy influential positions in public life.” Similarly, Aaron Wildavsky, founding dean of UC–Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, observed four decades ago that institutions like his were “designed to be organizations that would 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 related to public life.

Success in business demands training in finance, accounting, marketing, and organizational management. Though success in public service draws on some similar technical skills (such as budgeting, statutory analysis, and statistics), it also requires a working familiarity with our public institutions, constitutional processes, and civic traditions. That means understanding of federalism, localism, and civil society; the trade-offs between liberty and order, community and personal autonomy, opportunity and equality; and competing visions of human flourishing and the common good.

Governing in America is no mere technocratic enterprise; it can’t be reduced to spreadsheets and regressions. It involves navigating clashing values and priorities—debates that cannot be reduced to a data table. This is the work that policy schools should be equipping their graduates to tackle. It’s tough to do so, however, when nearly half the intellectual firmament are absent (or present only as caricature).

There are legitimate debates about how much viewpoint diversity matters when it comes to a mathematics department or in a plant-biology lab, but things are different when it comes to public policy. A policy school faculty full of those certain that climate change is a manmade, immediate, existential threat will have a hard time grasping, much less explaining, competing views. A faculty filled with scholars certain that school choice is a corporate-driven, racist scheme to undermine public education will tend to ask certain kinds of questions in their research and emphasize certain sorts of arguments in their classrooms.

It isn’t hard to understand why right-of-center students have made themselves scarce in policy schools today.

But early-career conservatives are hungry for the kind of education a policy school could provide. The world of right-of-center think tanks and similar institutes run a host of fellowship programs and seminars related to conservative thought and public life. One of us founded and runs a program literally titled the “American Conservatism and Governing Fellowship.” Such initiatives are never short on applicants.

We appreciate the argument that it’s difficult to find a lot of accomplished conservative candidates for academic postings in sociology or gender studies. The same argument doesn’t hold when it comes to public policy, especially when it comes to the sort of “professor of practice” slots that constitute a large swath of policy school faculty. After all, American politics today is very much a 50-50 proposition. Yet, even the appointees to those non-academic slots are overwhelmingly of the left.

For years, we’ve seen firsthand—via our teaching, research, and policy work—the regrettable consequences of policy schools operating as one-party states. Too many left-of-center policy professionals operate with a caricatured understanding of the right. They don’t know what they don’t know. They confidently speak the language of power, oppression, equity, technocracy, and social justice; but fumble with the language of originalism, subsidiarity, nationalism, and ordered liberty like it’s a second language.

This has two troubling consequences. One, there aren’t enough Republicans prepared to responsibly approach crucial roles in government. Two, there aren’t enough Democrats who approach their work in government with sufficient awareness of institutional limitations, progressive missteps, or sources of public division.

We’re not giving a pass to the right’s know-nothings or Trump’s performative minions. There’s plenty of blame to go around for a generation of would-be Republican policymakers more familiar with podcast riffs than public policy. This isn’t all on policy programs, by any means, and we’re not suggesting these programs can “fix” any of it. But we do think they can help.

Doing better begins with aspiring leaders who’ve learned from and who reflect the whole of America’s conservative intellectual tradition. Recruiting a richer mix of students and faculty is no easy thing.

That said, a useful place to start would be by signaling that a range of thought is welcome, and that all students will be acquainted with some of the foundational thinkers and texts associated with the conservative governing tradition. Here are a dozen suggestions that might help. Of course, many, many other texts—of varied ideological provenance—deserve to be taught. But think of this list as a useful cheat sheet or starting point for policy programs serious about their charge.

• The Federalist Papers: America’s greatest contribution to political philosophy and the user’s guide to America’s system of government. These essays describe the what and how of the world’s first, longest lasting, and most successful republican constitution.
• Reflections on the Revolution in France: Edmund Burke’s seminal work on the importance of political stability and the preservation of longstanding institutions and traditions. His prescient warnings about the chaos and violence resulting from ideological, revolutionary thinking remain apt today.
• Democracy in America: Tocqueville’s brilliant analysis of what makes American society and governing unique. To this day, it is still the finest explanation of our nation’s nearly inexplicable capacity to voluntarily form associations for the common good.
• Capitalism and Freedom: Milton Friedman’s insightful take on the link between free markets and other forms of liberty—and how they work together to foster human flourishing.
• The Conservative Mind: Russell Kirk’s groundbreaking description and explanation of the beliefs and dispositions that constitute English-American conservatism.
• The Constitution of Liberty: F.A. Hayek’s brilliant account of how free people create and adapt institutions that preserve liberty and enable individuals and societies to thrive.
• Seeing Like a State: Political scientist James C. Scott’s analysis of how centralization and technocracy ignore and then undermine practical wisdom, community, and tradition—often to disastrous effect.
• The Quest for Community: Robert Nisbet’s explanation of the societal contributions of voluntary associations and small-scale communities—and how the modern state undermines human connections.
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia: Robert Nozick’s case against big-state efforts to bring about justice through muscular interventions in daily life.
• To Empower People: Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus’s case for maximizing the benefits of civil society by consciously promoting the work of non-governmental bodies.
• A Matter of Interpretation: The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s blistering defense of democracy and originalism against a presumptuous, meddling judiciary.
• Bureaucracy: James Q. Wilson’s careful, classic exploration of why it is that government agencies tend toward complexity, bloat, inefficiency, and sclerosis.

Policy schools that teach these texts will need scholars who can confidently and competently do so—who can teach these as if they’re speaking in a native tongue. And this is why policy schools should start with these texts. A commitment to teaching them well is an on-ramp to committing to hire faculty who can do so. That will help to broaden the faculty, send a critical signal to students, and enrich the discourse. 

There are plenty of policy scholars and practitioners who needn’t play devil’s advocate to make the case for free markets, critique complex government programs, insist that personal responsibility is as important as individual rights, or argue that practical wisdom is often preferable to technocratic decision-making.

Policy schools can make their curriculum more robust while promoting ideological diversity and equipping their students for the real world of governing. That seems like a win-win.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.