This week marks 20 years since Chris DeMuth brought me to AEI to launch an education policy program. After earning a doctorate at Harvard and spending five years on the faculty at the University of Virginia, AEI finally provided me the kind of scholarly home I’d imagined back when I was teaching high school in Baton Rouge. This past weekend, I found myself ruminating about successes, missteps, and lessons learned over the years. Three simple takeaways stuck out.

Don’t be afraid. Academe is subsumed in a culture of intimidation and fear. Because of how tenure, honors, and professional opportunities are apportioned, faculty live in fear of offending the groupthink of the moment. (This is why I routinely hear from big-shot professors who privately lament current trends in the academy but then note, “I could never say this publicly.”) The problem is that fear is poison for those supposedly engaged in the work of ideas. I recall talking to DeMuth about this early in my AEI tenure, when the White House had made support for the No Child Left Behind Act a litmus test. I was critical of much in No Child Left Behind but was new to AEI and concerned about getting AEI crosswise with the Bush administration on its signature program. DeMuth told me my job was to worry about the policy, not the politics, and not be afraid of the fallout. It was good advice then, and it still is today.

Don’t chase the crowd. There’s a huge temptation to focus on what “everyone” is talking about. Scholars who rely on government funds or strings-attached foundation dollars are pressed to obsess on the fixation of the moment. This is what the campus ideologues have managed to do so successfully, for instance, with Critical Race Theory and gender fluidity. The thing is, our work is frequently most impactful when we’re working to shift the terms of the debate (skating “to where the puck is going, not where it has been,” in the words of hockey great Wayne Gretzky). At AEI Education, we were penning books exploring the promise of education savings accounts in 2017, the problems with political correctness run amok in higher ed in 2009, the perils of student loans in 2007, and helping seed the field of educational entrepreneurship back in 2006. Indeed, the Conservative Education Reform Network’s “Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda” series is rooted very firmly in this premise.

Don’t be a blowhard. Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. That’s a truism that especially applies when you’re dealing with complicated, important questions of public policy. When you spout off about things you don’t really know, and get called to account for it, it suddenly raises questions about whether listeners can trust all the things you’ve been saying. That’s one of the quickest ways I can think of to undermine your credibility. For instance, we’ve been hosting Working Groups in K–12 Education for about 15 years at AEI. I still recall, perhaps a decade ago, a session featuring a senior official for one of the nation’s most influential technology companies. Within an hour, he’d managed to turn a room of star-struck advocates, funders, and academics into a roomful of skeptics by rambling into a series of off-road detours.

Courage. A willingness to buck convention. Hard-earned credibility. These things may be in short supply in many quarters right now, but I’m glad to see them in practice every day at AEI.

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