Frederick Hess and Riley Fletcher:

Given that, do the faculty in these schools, charged with preparing students for public service and equipping them to navigate charged public debates, reflect the breadth of American thinking on government and policy?

Schools of public policy are explicitly charged with preparing their students to play significant roles in public life. That’s the job. Four decades ago, Aaron Wildavsky, founding dean of UC–Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, explained 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 who staff public bureaucracies and provide educated leadership.[2] As Harvard University president Derek Bok put it a half-century ago, programs like his institution’s famed Kennedy School of Government exist “to prepare a profession of public servants” who can “occupy influential positions in public life.”[3]

Policy schools make clear that they see this as their mission. Syracuse’s Maxwell School says that it is helping to “prepare new generations of leaders with an expansive foundation of knowledge and a socially responsible mindset.”[4] Matthew Auer, dean of the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, holds that his school is “training two generations of leaders who, if we get it right, will preserve and strengthen our democracy.”[5] The University of Michigan’s Ford School aims to “inspire and prepare diverse leaders grounded in service, conduct transformational research, and collaborate on evidence-based policymaking to take on our communities’ and the world’s most pressing challenges.”[6]