What Public Policy Schools Should Teach

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | July 3, 2026 | Frederick M. Hess and Andy Smarick

[karpov]

...

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.

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TOPICS: Education; Government
KEYWORDS:

[BobL]

“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.”

Well, that may be true in other parts of the country, but not in MY school district, otherwise I would NEVER subject my kids to these monsters.

(so says every FReeper who rationalizes his priority of buying the boat and the F150 by throwing his kids to the wolves running our public schools)

[HIDEK6]

“Lean” is not a synonym for rigid.

[PGR88]

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.

I attended a well-known "public policy" school. The furrther in time I am removed from it, the more I feel it was a waste of 4 years. I would have been better off just reading classics, joining the marine corp, or starting a business. It was a finishing school for intelligent, upper-middle class kids who always planned to go on to law school or Wall Street.

Of course, in the subsequent decades, this school, and the entire university it sat within, has gone hard left/deep-state in its outlook. "Public policy" became fashionable in the early "Progressive Era" (and when these schools were founded) and has always been a euphemism for government elites arrogance and their presumed right to "social engineer" society.

Now they've become purely woke-socialist-fascist in their outlook