Conservative Think Tanks and Balanced Policy

“While agreeing with these criticisms, I think they largely miss the point. To fully understand Brooks’s paean to ideological diversity, we have to understand the history of Brooks’s own institutional home: the conservative think tank.”

“Conservative think tanks have always alleged liberal bias in academia in order to justify their own existence and their own necessary public role of ‘balancing’ policy debates. Brooks was merely continuing in this long tradition.”

“By any measure, conservative think tanks are at most 100 years old. They are best understood as research and public relations institutions, staffed by conservative policymakers with the primary intention of making, promoting and marketing conservatism and conservative policies.”

“Kristol developed the idea of the ‘New Class’. According to Kristol, the ‘New Class’ primarily resided ‘in our universities, in our foundations, and in our media too’, and was committed towards the position that ‘“constructive social change” is always something that government does for and to people, never something that people do for and to themselves – and most definitely nothing that American business does for or to anyone’. In other words, the media, the professoriate and foundations were all anti-business, anti-individual, and looked to the government to do everything.”

“This stance, this position of criticising other components of society – but especially academia – has, in short, always been essential to conservative think tanks and has been remarkably successful.”

“Such a position allows you to critique others for institutional intellectual homogeneity while practising it yourself.”

“But the reality is that conservative think tanks and academia are simply not mirror opposites of each other. First and foremost, academic research is subject to intense, sometimes overly rigorous, peer review, while the research of conservative think tanks is not. Holding both on the same level does a disservice to policy debates.”

“Finally, when it comes to their labour models, academia is conservative and conservative think tanks are progressive. Conservative think tanks have always monetarily rewarded intellectual labour. Academia, on the other hand, is now defined by increasing class stratification with highly paid administrators and star professors on one end and adjunct labour and shortchanged student ‘consumers’ on the other. Thus, when the public buys into the conservative think tank critique of the professoriate, it obscures the actual benefits and problems of academia while empowering institutions that have very little commitment to intellectual diversity themselves.”