Education Book Webinar: Renewing the Marketplace of Ideas on Elite University Campuses

In this free Education Book Webinar, Duke University Professor Don Taylor will discuss his forthcoming book, Renewing the Marketplace of Ideas on Elite University Campuses. Webinar attendees will have a chance to be part of the writing process by giving Professor Taylor feedback and asking questions to help him hone his ideas before the book is fully written!

Book Synopsis: This book will describe how the marketplace of ideas on elite college campuses can be improved using existing resources. In doing so, it will move beyond only describing problems in how students interact, debate and express themselves on campus by providing a plausible plan to make things better. The book will focus on the undergraduate student body at elite universities, the faculty who teach them, and the importance of the campus marketplace of ideas both to student education (private good) and society as a whole (public good). The book will argue that faculty hired with academic freedom and intellectual flexibility is the only comparative advantage of the modern University over a think tank in the production of knowledge, and the faculty must reassert intellectual leadership on campus if the marketplace of ideas is to be its most vibrant, and productive.

About the Author: Donald H. Taylor, Jr. Ph.D., M.P.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (’90; ’92; ’95). Professor of Public Policy in the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University. Don Taylor is a health policy scholar whose research focuses on how society cares for the elderly, including long term care, Medicare and Medicaid policy and how they impact the long term fiscal situation of the United States. He is the author of over 100 peer review papers and three books including Balancing the Budget is a Progressive Priority (Springer, 2012). He served a two-year term (2017-19) as the Chair of the Academic Council, the elected leader of more than 2,000 faculty at Duke University. From 2019 to 2024 he was the Director of the Social Science Research Institute. He has taught at least one class in 54 semesters across his 28 years at Duke. His current work focuses on the future of higher education and he writes the Two Ditches substack on the topic https://dontaylor13.substack.com/. Taylor is from Goldsboro, N.C. and he and his wife Martha have been married since 1992, and have three adult children.