My guest today is Will Howell.
Will is the inaugural dean of the School of Government & Policy at Johns Hopkins, which welcomes its first class in fall 2028. His argument is that the standard policy masters degree is no longer fit for purpose. I happen to agree.
Readers may remember our June episode with Will and his co-author, Terry Moe, on their book Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.
Two disclaimers: I took Will’s class as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and I’m a Journalist-in-Residence at his school now.
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Shadrach Strehle for their support in producing this episode.
For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:
Welcome. You’re starting a new school.
I’m part of a whole community of folk who have come together to build this new School of Government & Policy at Johns Hopkins, located in DC. We’re building it from the ground up. It’s an incredible adventure.
Readers roughly my age may remember the Newseum, the news museum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue. We’re sitting in the basement, which is where this school is going to exist. This new School of Government & Policy — SOGP?
SGP. A lot of thought went into that. We’re getting after building the school, and we thought, “Why do we need the O? SGP. Keep moving.”
You don’t want it to be a normal school. But it’s very easy to fall into the trap of being too novel, or to slip back into the old way. I want to talk to you about the old way of doing what you’re doing — educating a new generation to work in government at all levels — and what you might get wrong.
When we think about traps one might fall into, the biggest is that you can convince yourself you’re doing meaningful, impactful work out in the world when you’re not — and you have powerful incentives to convince yourself of that. What does it then mean to build in systems of accountability?
At the same time, you’re trying to think imaginatively and capaciously about new ventures. We don’t want to just import past practices. We’re not reading off the instructions from Ikea for a desk: now we’re at step three in a 13-step process, and we know what the thing’s going to look like. It’s much more organic, vibrant, and ambitious than that. But as we proceed, quite literally day by day, we’re thinking, “Is that really the right thing to do? How would we know otherwise?” Not to slow us down, but to hold ourselves to account. We want to do something that matters for the world.
You’re hearkening back to a conversation we had a few minutes ago with some other folks here at the school about counterfactual policy impact, which we love to talk about at the Institute for Progress (IFP). All the pressures run toward convincing yourself that you’re always breaking novel ground and changing the world. If your goal is to build an institution that’s even more of a protagonist than the things around you, it’s very hard to protect yourself from the pathology of thinking, “I’ve done it. I’m a hero.”
But where you might run for safe harbor is to say, “Here are those other institutions that are obviously doing it right, so we’ll mimic them.” That leads to a set of pathologies that are troubling as well. We want to do both. We want to break from the pack — try some new things out, and reorient where a school of government and policy might sit in a larger political environment and how it might matter for the world — while also holding ourselves to account.
For that reason, we’re going to be collecting lots of data. We’re going to be checking each other at every turn. The norms and culture of the place are going to invite in people who think differently and who might push back on our intuitions. Not so that we tie ourselves up in knots, or say, “It’s all so complicated, we can’t do anything at all.” We’re going to move forward, but with our eyes as wide as they can be, seeing as deeply as we can into the phenomena we’re trying to attend to.
Let’s talk about the particular education one might get here. I want to get into it through the history of the kind of educational project you’re working on. This is a school of government and policy. You’re going to offer a master’s degree starting in fall 2028. That kind of master’s — a master’s in public administration (MPA) or public policy (MPP) — has a long arc. Readers of the June episode will remember that I took your class as an undergrad at UChicago. When I graduated with a degree in political science, I thought, “I should go back to school. I like learning about this stuff.”
Me too.
There’s nothing wrong with that. But I got what was, in the end, good advice from a member of the political science department, who said, “I don’t think you have a plan for what you’d do with that degree, or even what you want out of it. You just like school.” I was like, “That’s true. I do like school.” I want to hear your perspective on what the job of this kind of program has been over the last 50 or 60 years, and what might be wrong with that.
Where did going to get a master’s in public policy or public administration even come from?
Starting about 50 to 60 years ago, there was a belief that there are two phases to the policymaking process. Associated with those phases is a clear division of labor. Producing people who might participate in that division of labor requires two separate degrees: public administration and public policy.
The notion here is that at mid-20th century, we have this robust, well-functioning, stable administrative state and a robust, well-functioning Congress — Congress is more politically contested, but it’s reasonably stable. It’s the job of Congress to figure out what policy looks like, and the job of the administrative state to faithfully abide by the orders handed down from on high in order to set those policies in motion — to implement them.
What’s needed — and this traces back to the Progressive Era — is neutral competence. What we need is expertise. What schools of government, policy, and public administration might provide are people with the requisite skills to simply deliver on their mandate, which for people who get master’s degrees in public policy is to figure out what optimal policy is. So there’s a real [premium] placed on cost-benefit analysis and program evaluation, and a careful effort to think about how you collect and assess evidence in order to figure out, say, the optimal class size for kids in public schools.
That’s on the policy side. Then there are these other folks who are handed their instructions and have to figure out how to implement them. That’s why we have schools of public administration: to train the folks who will sit in the agencies that abide by the orders handed down and ensure that they’re faithfully rendered.
Say your public policy student has learned the optimal class size for students in Washington, DC, and that’s handed down. What might the public administration student need to go make that happen?
You need to know the details of the regulatory process. You have to think about what rulemaking looks like. And you need a set of personal skills to figure out how to operate. The presumption is that you’re working within well-defined, reasonably stable, high-functioning administrative agencies, and we’ll train up the experts who will do that work.
That’s not in any way the world we live in. The idea that our institutions are reasonably stable and well-functioning is itself problematic. The idea that how policy is implemented doesn’t bear at all on how policy ought to be written is misguided. What we need are feedback loops. What we need is to think about this as one singular enterprise. We also need to recognize that we live in an era of profound volatility, disruption, and distrust in our governing institutions — volatility born of the tumult within agencies caused by new technological innovations — read AI.
Tell me about it.
You’re in the throes of this. It’s also a period of profound polarization, where the idea that the truth rendered by program evaluation will ultimately triumph is wholly insufficient.
It’s not just a lack of trust in our political system, but in expert authority. Even if you’re outside the agency as an expert in program evaluation, we don’t trust you as much as we used to.
The idea that a new school ought to simply roll out a traditional MPP or MPA is misguided. It doesn’t take advantage of the knowledge we’ve accrued over the last 50 years by looking at the facts on the ground that have shifted. If we want to create people who might make a difference in the world — in the service of problem solving, or enhancing human welfare — we need a different kind of school. That’s what we’re trying to build.
The ’50s and ’60s exhibited these features, so we developed this kind of master’s program. But the concept of the administrative state — the idea that you wanted an expert class to carry out implementation — did not originate then. What were civil servants learning at the turn of the century, and what changed after the Second World War that led to this particular way of educating them?
The growth of the administrative state was a decades-long undertaking. It was subject to a fair bit of political contestation. But for the most part, there was a widespread recognition — certainly by the preponderance of the Democratic Party, and by a big chunk of the Republican Party — that this state was worth investing in. It was worth investing authority in, and channeling resources and ambitions through, as policies are written. You see the consummation of both those sentiments and the artifact of the administrative state at roughly the mid-20th century.
But a set of things shift. That’s also when you start to see rising levels of polarization between the two parties, which have grown ever more over the last half-century. Born of that, you see all kinds of political contestation and disruption that is troubling for Congress’s capacity to write coherent policy, for instance, which then makes a muck of the whole enterprise.
The other piece, which Terry and I talk about in our book, is a concerted effort by conservatives who object to the liberal components of the administrative state to take a sledgehammer to it, and develop a set of rationales for doing so.
There are other currents, too: the rise of proceduralism, which you could see from the left, and which, when layered on this administrative state, renders it wholly incapable of fulfilling some of its basic objectives. The administrative state is not especially well-functioning. It’s not as agile or as rational in its organization as one might want. This whole thing becomes troubled: the capacity of the administrative state to function well, what’s going on in Congress, rising levels of polarization. The simple model that says, “What we need is neutral expertise — are you a policymaker or an implementer? Get the requisite degree,” isn’t the world we live in anymore.
I’ve got a little sister who will graduate college in a couple of years. In what ways would the traditional MPP not prepare her for a life of working in civil service?
You will learn some things that certainly do bear on policy. Take the example of trying to figure out the optimal class size. There’s been a tremendous amount of work in education policy trying to figure that out. If you have too few students in a classroom, opportunities for cross-fertilization between students are diminished. If you have too many, there’s all kinds of disruptions. What does that optimal middle look like? A lot of careful work has gone into that.
But knowing that it’s 17 or 21 is barely a start in thinking about how we might refashion schools, and what skills are required to do that work such that kids learn more. For that, we need to think a lot about the design of political institutions. We have to think about creating people who can work in contested environments, who can pull together projects that span not just a school board but courts and mayors and their involvement in education policy. You have to widen your frame of reference and draw together a new set of skills if you want to be in the business of making a difference.
The curriculum is in flux — you’re working on it now — but what might I learn at SGP that I might not learn at another school providing a similar-sounding master’s?
We started our discussions by bringing in a lot of people working in agencies, in the civic sector, and in governing institutions to ask, “What are the skills that you need, or that you look for, when you hire?” It’s rare that academics take a beat to say, “What’s required of our graduates, and how do we retrofit an education to ensure that they have those skills?” That’s where we start.
Then we have this broader ambition to create people who won’t just navigate existing institutions, but will think about what’s required to fix them, so that they do a better job of solving public problems. So there’s a lot of emphasis in the degree on things like project management, knowledge of systems and organizational functions, and new technologies that will allow them to think about how to reform the processes and institutions that impede problem solving.
Our North Star for the school is with respect to outcomes. We want to think about what it means to have a set of governing institutions that actually solve public problems.
Imagine I’m an early-career policy analyst who wants to go back to school. I care about education, and I’m horrified by the decline in reading scores over the last 20 years. The Department of Education is a shell of itself institutionally. It doesn’t do a lot of the things it used to do, whether you like that or not. So the traditional path of “I’ll go learn to do public administration, then I’ll get a job at the Department of Education…”
“I’ll bring them the good news that they should change class size…”
That doesn’t seem like the right path. What would someone like that come out of this program equipped to do?
Think about the full range of institutions involved in the education of kids. In some ways every political institution — the courts, legislatures, councils, mayors, the president himself — bears on it. You would do well to take stock of all the institutions weighing down on it. The answer isn’t to run around to each of them and inform them what optimal policy is.
There are systemic reasons why assessments of optimal policy aren’t bearing as much as we might like on the decisions being made. So there are questions of institutional reform that carry all the way through the education space, which we want our graduates to be paying attention to, so that they structure a school board in a way that gives the people who work within it, or are elected to it, the right kinds of incentives: incentives that align with the outcome that matters to you — student learning — as opposed to the independent interests of parents or of contractors to schools.
This is the stuff of institutional innovation, learning, experimentation, and reform that we want to bring into view — not as an interesting thought exercise, but because we want our institutions to do a much better job of solving public problems. The one you’ve lifted up is that kids aren’t learning enough in reading.
“Is our children learning?”
In the past, we’ve had folks on Statecraft who were big advocates of evidence-based policymaking. In some ways I read it as a well-intentioned model of engagement in the policy process that suffers from some of the pathologies you’re talking about: a model of assessing evidence, then trying to bring it to bear on questions like the optimal class size. I’ve come out of a different tradition entirely, so in some ways I’m looking across the water and saying, “Oh, I don’t like that,” without really knowing.
Is evidence-based policymaking something that resonates?
I certainly don’t want to be the one arguing against the relevance of evidence-based policymaking.
That’s the problem. You can never say, “I’m pro–non-evidence-based policymaking.”
What I don’t like, when I think about graduates of this school, is the idea that there’s going to be a study that convinces a student what optimal policy is, and she’s going to go around and shake it at existing institutions and expect them to take it up. She’s got to be much more sophisticated than that. Some of it is that there are places within existing institutions where that evidence might productively be brought to bear.
The right piece of evidence at the right time, to the right audience.
Exactly. How do we train people up so that they see those right pieces, right times, and right locales, so that evidence might inform decision-making? That’s a real win. There’s another piece, though, which says that those moments are fleeting, and there are all kinds of other considerations bearing on decision-making that, from an evidence-based decision-making perspective, are distortionary. So the work of institutional reform is thinking anew about how we recalibrate our institutions so that the truth might prevail — so that those institutions might ultimately be able to deliver on their intended outcomes.
I have not yet found the guest who will say that evidence-based policymaking is a bad idea. We’re just coming out of a conversation before we started recording about cases where useful or new pieces of evidence have swung the tide in policymaking. In my time working at IFP, there have been cases where it turns out you can tell policymakers, “We just learned this. Here it is.”
But then think about those institutions. As a matter of course, they aren’t bringing in the full body of evidence available to them.
That’s not how they work day to day.
There aren’t habits or practices embedded in these institutions that are in the service of not just drawing on existing expertise, but building out new expertise.
Very rarely are they going out and trying to find out a new thing that nobody knows.
Or practices of experimentation, innovation, or learning. That’s the stuff of institutional revitalization and reform, too: building out those capacities. The bet is that if we have better institutions, we’ll have better outcomes, and our school wants to be a part of that project.
We’re talking about making people better at institution building, and you’re building this institution. I know you spent a lot of time getting feedback. You’re going to trial things when this first class comes in, and I’m sure you’ll have excellent practices for iterating.
Yes. But I wouldn’t say of course that’s true.
I say it because I know you. But maybe defend it.
I don’t think there’s a default habit in most schools to go out and say, “How did that go?” We’re going to be thinking a lot about how we extract as much learning as we possibly can as we go, because we’re going to be trying things out anew.
Institutions of higher education are often not themselves learning institutions. They tend not to actively update or change their minds institutionally. They produce new knowledge, maybe, but they don’t change their behavior much without being pressured from the outside.
But they’re institutions of higher education. Why aren’t they learning in themselves?
We could run with that in any number of directions. In some ways, institutions of higher education are incredibly vibrant, certainly at the individual level, where people are exploring new research. It’s thrilling to be a part of these communities. It’s also the case that institutions of higher education are very conservative in their orientation. They have habits that are very hard to disrupt.
When you add on top of that a set of budgetary pressures, their attention drifts away from whatever their mission might once have been and toward whether they can keep the lights on — are they generating enough revenue? That creates other kinds of pressures. When you think about the role of philanthropy, it too can be distortionary in trying to generate new practices.
A thing that drew me here — a reason to disrupt my own life, after 19 fantastic years at the University of Chicago — was this opportunity to build anew. That opens up the space of what’s possible. If what’s on offer is, “Here’s a set of existing people, institutions, practices, rules, and procedures, and you can nudge them a little bit one way,” you’ll only get so far.
It’s almost always easier to start a new thing in the federal government than it is to change the course of an existing program. That’s true at every institutional level.
Future generations will curse us for the burden of the inheritances we produce. But for now, we’re going to do our level best to create something new.
The Trump shock is now almost 10 years old. But the shifts in polarization and institutional trust that you named, which make the traditional master’s in public policy less fit for the moment, have been happening for a long time. Yet this is one of the very first attempts at disrupting that model.
What were the pressures against observing this problem and saying, “We should either change the existing program dramatically or start a new thing”?
Some of those pressures are budgetary. Some of it has to do with the professional incentives of people who are given the opportunity to do something new, but who are held to metrics that are routinely of the form, “You want to try something new? Who else is doing it? Let’s do the landscape analysis and figure it out.” The pull of those pressures is toward conformity.
Talk to the potential future student. These days the ambition of “I want to be a civil servant” is not doing so hot. There’s other routes, and often they run through electoral politics. You work on a campaign, or five campaigns over a couple of years, and then you’re swept up to the highest heaven and you’re an adviser in the next White House, maybe.
Although I think we have the same kind of problem convincing young people to run for public office.
But even being a field director in Iowa, you could imagine, takes you to a higher status quicker. You might make that bet: if I fly out to Iowa three months from now and start stumping for my candidate, that’s my meal ticket — instead of spending the next two years learning the work of public administration…
So that I can get a job in a broken institution only to be summarily fired, and have a whole bunch of people screaming at me the whole time.
And they’ll make more money than me, then they’ll get hired to be consultants, and they’ll make even more money. What’s the sell?
The sell, such as it is, is not, “It’s great, actually.” I think that’s disingenuous. If you have great outside options, I understand their attraction relative to a space where, in the aftermath of something like DOGE, you say, “Wait, that’s where this is going?” It isn’t just that you might lose your job. It’s crushing. Why go down that path?
I think the answer is that democracy requires well-functioning institutions. This is work that matters. It’s precisely because these institutions are broken that we need you now more than ever. We want to be a school that doesn’t just train you up. We want to build a community and a sense of purpose that orients you to the task at hand. It’s not something that’s going to get fixed in a matter of months or years. This is the work of a generation. But it’s work that matters for the future of our country.
The other argument one might make is that even if your dream of success runs through politics, you might very well be better off having learned the things we’re talking about. In the Bush administration, programs run by people from campaign backgrounds scored worse than programs run by folks who did not come out of that field. So if you want to be an effective political operator, this kind of education seems just as important.
For sure. Imagine the graduate who wants to run for Congress. She would do well to understand the administrative apparatus that’s going to take her policies and make a mess of them, and to think creatively about how to work with it.
The other piece is that the reason the administrative apparatus is a mess is born in no small part of decades of political neglect, and she could bring into her sights, as an elected representative, the work of institutional revitalization. That would be very good for our politics: if Congress got its own house in order, but then also set its sights on how we build more effective institutions.
Part of the challenge in unleashing the expertise required to revitalize our institutions is that it has no place in our politics. As soon as we switch from Rs to Ds, the Ds are going to want to pass a bunch of liberal policies. When we switch back to Rs, they want to undermine the liberal policies and pass the conservative policies. Where is the space to take a beat and say, “Maybe how we’re figuring out how to solve public problems is itself deeply flawed”? There’s so little room for that, and we need to recover it.
The reasons for our partisan polarization and our distrust in experts run very deep, and there’s no one causal element. But you do sense that the forced division between policy and administration encouraged a kind of politics that said, “We don’t have to worry about implementation. Other people do that. I went to school to come up with brilliant policies. Implementation is the thing they do over there.”
Then those who are over there are thinking, “We have to work with this.” There’s no place for them to go with whatever learning they have, and they wouldn’t know how to circle back to the policymakers to share what they discovered when they tried to implement a particular order and were unable to do so. They wouldn’t know what it would mean to re-engage in the policymaking process. Which is by way of saying that this distinction was broken from word go — quite apart from rising levels of polarization and AI and volatility, all of which exacerbate the problem.
The way I framed it may make it seem to readers as though this is the path for you if you want to save the civil service, and I don’t think that’s the pitch you’re making. One of the things I find so compelling about SGP is that whether your vision is revitalized machinery for a liberal presidency, or you think — as I do — that there’s a lot of failures in the conservative attempt to govern the administrative state and use it productively to solve public problems, you would do well to figure out how the system works.
We have at SGP a core commitment to the rule of law and constitutional government. From there flows a commitment to pluralism and a recognition that the purposes of government are obviously contested — that building effective institutions isn’t in the service of a liberal or a conservative agenda — and we decidedly want to bring into our community students and faculty with very different orientations, who would imagine these better-functioning institutions serving very different objectives.
Beyond the curriculum, what will be different, as you and your team intend it, about, say, tenure, or the way research is produced?
We were talking earlier about forces in higher ed that are in the service of conformity. I’d add tenure to the list. I don’t want to get into an argument about whether tenure is good or bad. But there are certain kinds of investments — of expertise, of contributions to knowledge, of impact — that are not legible in the existing tenure process. As long as that’s true, investments in those domains will be lower than they might otherwise be.
Domains like teaching itself?
For sure. Domains, too, like writing a paper that is incredibly smart and might have a profound impact on the outside world, but that for one reason or another can’t find its way into a first-tier journal. The work of trying to write the really sharp white paper and get it into broader circulation won’t attract 54 citations in your home discipline, but it might profoundly bear on decision-making in the outside world. As long as it’s not incentivized, people who are trying to make their careers as academics are going to spend less time doing it.
Among the objectives we have in this school is to be much more entangled with governing institutions, affecting both what they do and how they’re constituted. If the only thing we reward is whether you’re publishing in first-tier academic journals, we’re not going to find our way to having the kind of impact we want to have. So we’ve got to think anew about what tenure looks like.
For those of us who are not inside the academy: what does the existing practice of tenure look like? The existing system values and measures you against publication?
At a first-tier research university, that’s 90% of the game. And sure, lip service is paid to teaching. If you teach poorly enough, or if you’re an atrocious colleague and you’re not doing any administrative work, that can be a disqualifier. But the game really is about what your corpus of published work is and where it came out. A lot of good stuff comes from that. The argument is not that nobody should be doing it.
It’s a proxy for something. Citations are a good way of seeing whether other people have referenced your work.
For sure. But if you think there are other kinds of expertise and impact that you also want to put check marks by, you’ve got to think anew about what tenure looks like. So as a community, we’re doing a lot of deep thought about how we’re going to structure or reimagine what tenure might look like.
You expect to still have tenure?
We’re not giving up on it. You could say, “We’re starting afresh. We’re just going to write out contracts: you, we’ll hire for a year, and you, we’ll hire for five.” I don’t think that would be advised, given that we want to convince the very best folk to come to our school. As long as everybody else has tenure, it’s hard to be a first mover.
I would welcome the chance to have an open-ended conversation about what collective disarmament on tenure would look like. But we do want to open up the aperture in thinking about what’s legible when we evaluate impact, expertise, and contributions, relative to a world where it’s about publishing exclusively in disciplinary journals.
In a world where you include a bunch more criteria that we value as contributing to tenure, does that mean that on the margin, people produce less research in first-tier research journals? And the small-c conservative defender of the academic institution says, “Isn’t that terrible? We have a community of practice and shared knowledge, and there’s all these goods there.”
Are you defecting?
Let me try to have it all, and then you can tell me I can’t.
I don’t think you can, but let’s hear it.
There are other kinds of expertise outside disciplinary channels that, when brought into view, rewarded, and unleashed, won’t just encourage academics one by one to divert some of their effort at the cost of contributions to their disciplines. Once you bring those things into view, it puts you, dear scholar, in a position to write a different kind of article for your home institution’s premier journal — one that will be disruptive, innovative, and creative. There’s real expertise to be had that isn’t being invested in. If we got into the business of doing that, rather than writing the 12th conventional take on a topic that’s well understood in your home discipline, yes, you might write fewer articles, but boy, those articles are going to sing. They’re going to be productively disruptive to your home institutions.
The optimal kind of academic who comes to this school isn’t just somebody who wants to have an impact on the outside world, though that’s decidedly true. It’s also the kind of person who says, “I’m a political scientist, but I have a lot to learn — not just from a philosopher or an economist who I have as a colleague, but also from a philosopher who’s doing work in the frontier labs, or an economist who has done a lot of work at the Office of Management and Budget. When that comes into view, it’s going to make me rethink a set of foundational questions that are already being talked about in my home institution, such that when I slip back into those corridors and write those papers, there’s going to be an opportunity for impact that we fail to appreciate when all we do is valorize a traditional mode” — you’re nodding. Are you letting me have it all?
I like the fewer-but-better thing. We’re reducing the quantity, but we think we can make it up in quality. I’m open to this.
Here’s my question. One thing you and I agree on is this idea that there’s a false division between public policy and public administration, and instead of having two separate fields, we should take the best virtues of both. But there are also risks to doing that across academia. I had Dan Wang on to talk about our mutual appreciation for the work of James C. Scott. Although we adore him, he had a book toward the end of his life, In Praise of Floods, where he combined political science, sociology, and anthropological work with interesting stuff from ecology and indigenous voices from Southeast Asia. The result was a book that neither Dan nor I thought was any good. It was too interdisciplinary. It had some nice parts, but it was a mush of all these things, and it didn’t sparkle in any one way.
Do you face this argument, “You want us all to combine this stuff and it’ll be the best of everything, but it might be the worst of everything”?
It could go horribly wrong. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier: it’s important that we don’t start believing that everything we produce is special. There are all kinds of multidisciplinary spaces, be they journals or conferences, that fall flat. They level-set at the lowest common denominator. We could do that.
There are whole domains of academic work that, to my eye, are that. We try to combine chocolate and vegetables, and all of it is terrible.
“We’ll have our chocolate and our vegetables in the room, but we’re going to keep them separate.” And then what have you accomplished by putting them under the same roof? It’s not clear. This is why I say that as we proceed, we need to do so at once with a lot of conviction and a tremendous amount of humility. That’s true when you think about interdisciplinary work. It’s also true when you think about bringing together academics and practitioners. That happens routinely in higher education. You have a panel…
One of each.
They each do their thing, and at the end of it, they say, “Wasn’t that lovely?” Then they go their separate ways, and nothing comes of it. That’s the standard mode of operations when you bring together practitioners and academics. What would it mean to be deeply involved — to undertake research together, to learn from one another? That’s our aspiration.
You mentioned one domain where it’s better to bring two artificial fields together — the work of public policy and public administration. To be in governance, you want the best of both. What are the other domains where you feel fairly strongly we’re going to want to mix chocolate and peanut butter?
We want to have some folks who do political philosophy and ethics, even as we are a school that’s about getting stuff done. And some folks who can talk descriptively about what our political institutions are, what the regulatory process looks like, and where they came from. You can see a role for historians, or for administrative law folk.
The provenance of a bunch of the stuff we’re talking about.
If you’re going to set to work on reforming an institution, you would do well to know not just where it came from, but why. What were the impulses of previous people who thought of themselves as reformers? Yet we’re trying to sort out the mess that they left us.
Many such cases.
There are a variety of academic/policy institutions that try to bring in more of some outside discipline. IFP spent a lot of time with the economists, and we thought, “Our policy advocacy will be better if we can root ourselves in some economic concepts that most people are not intimately familiar with.” History seems awfully absent from a lot of these conversations, and I appreciate that you’re flagging it.
My sense is that we often look at the problem as it exists now, and the interest is, “How will we fix it?” There’s no mental model of why it would be useful to know why we built it this way. Do you agree?
It isn’t just that we’ll be better educated and can hold forth at a cocktail party…
“Actually, did you know that the Progressive Era…”
History’s interesting in its own right. But there’s a wealth of learning to be had in looking at that history, if what you’re trying to do is deploy people who might set to work on institutional innovation. There are trade-offs everywhere. The idea that there’s an optimal type of institution, and we just have to recover it and ensure that it’s protected evermore…
“Let’s go back to the one I remember.”
That’s not going to get us there. There’s a lot of learning to be had there. There’s also — as we operate in uncertainty — value in reasoning by way of analogy, which is something historians are quite good at. And then there’s taking stock of what you’re up against. These institutions weren’t just dropped down from on high, such that it’ll be easy to topple them. There are profound political forces that have assembled to maintain them in the ways they’re constituted today, and you need to bring that into view.
A couple of months ago, I wrote an essay which luckily capitalized on a wave of Nixon interest. The thesis was that Republicans are trying to do a very similar thing with the administrative state to what Nixon tried to do, and some of the same mistakes are being played out. I would like more historical reference in our attempts to reform the administrative state, instead of trying things again that didn’t work last time.
Looking ahead: there’s an AI fellowship that one of your faculty is currently running. You anticipate a pretty substantial role for learning about and engaging with AI.
We have a terrific core group of faculty right now who are thinking deeply about AI and matters of governance. It’s a multidisciplinary group: we’ve got folks from law, econ, and philosophy. We want this group, and our faculty more broadly, to be thinking about questions that fall into two domains.
One is: What does it mean to govern with AI? How might our governing institutions be reconstituted so that they could be more effective? AI has to be a part of that question, because in some ways it can unleash new capacities for problem solving that would be in the public interest — just as AI can make a mess of operations, and we need a set of folk who are thinking critically about that. There’s also the question of what it means to govern AI itself: to put boundaries on its development, to think about what a regulatory framework is.
One thing I’ve been encouraged by, in the way this fellowship is running, is that you focus on questions like interpretability, compute governance, alignment, and chain-of-thought monitoring: the kind of grokky technical details that may be a good case of interdisciplinary overlap.
It’s hard to know how to govern these systems if you don’t understand these systems. What Seth Lazar, Gillian Hadfield, and Nick Caputo, who are already here — and we’re looking forward to Zoë Hitzig joining us soon — are doing is not trying to think about what it means to govern AI from afar, or some rough approximation of what AI presently is. They’re thinking critically about what the frontier is about to become, and what it means to govern that. To undertake that, you need to be close to that frontier. You see that in the papers they’re writing, the teaching they’re offering, the co-authorships and professional relationships they’re forging. There’s a real effort to get into the knotty details.
As you think about building this new institution — five years from now, you’re bashing your head against a wall and saying, “We didn’t get it right. We blew it.” To the extent that keeps you up at night, what do you imagine?
It really does. There’s a long list. Can I read out some?
I would love that. The forking paths of disaster.
How might it go horribly wrong? We can’t stand up a set of operations that allow us to keep pace with practitioners, and we lose their trust. We want to work with certain governments, and they’re saying, “Help us,” and we say, “We’ll get back to you in six months.”
Or they think you’re a pain to work with.
Or we’re difficult to work with.
That’s an academic failure mode that already exists. You can see examples of it.
That’s the world we live in, in most places. Then there’s what we talked about: you start believing your own bullshit. You think everything you’re doing is so new. As dean, I have powerful professional incentives to declare victory at every turn, so that when you bring me back a year from now, I’m going to tell you how great everything is. Not just for my own professional incentives, but because I want the school to succeed. I want people with talent to come. How do I do that? I start spinning a tale. There are reasons to do that, but there are real traps there. May we not fall into those.
It’s getting people with different kinds of expertise and different sensibilities — not just to put up with one another, but to meaningfully engage with one another. We haven’t talked much about this, but a core commitment of this school is a deep commitment to pluralism: disciplinarily, epistemologically, ideologically. Here too, it’s no easy thing to not just instantiate diversity and pluralism, but to put it to good purpose. We don’t have those habits. We have to figure out ways of standing them up. There are a lot of ditches to drive into. But we’re going to do our level best.
There’s a level of goodwill, commitment, and enthusiasm to forge a new path in this emerging community, and while I’m woken up repeatedly each night, I also find it profoundly satisfying.
Let me leave you on a high note. In five years, you’ll hopefully have graduated two full classes. Is that the math?
I think it’ll be a couple more than that. We start in fall ’28, they graduate… You’re right.
That never happens, that I get the math right. Let’s memorialize that. Graduating two classes would be a success in itself. But at five years, what will make you say, “This has gone brilliantly”?
Let me say some ways that it doesn’t go well, because I think that’ll bring it into view. If they all graduate and say, “That was great, but I’m going to go and do investment banking,” that would be disappointing. If they don’t get a job at all, that’d be a disaster. I think we’ll start to see them going down paths that put them into positions where they can do the work of institutional innovation and reform. Mind you, that work has a payout that we aren’t going to observe in the first year.
We’ve got to look 10, 15, 20 years out to really take stock of the impact our graduates are going to have. But we’ll see them moving in that direction, not just with energy and enthusiasm, but fortified. They’ll have a sense of what the landscape is, how to navigate it, but also how to reconstitute it. And we’ll see glimmers of that work being undertaken as soon as they leave our doors.
