Gabriel Weber
Staff writer
Diving deep into the functions of think tanks in America, presidents of American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, Robert Doar and Cecilia Elena Rouse, respectively, opened up a week of challenging conversations around “The Future of the American Experiment — A Week in Partnership with American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution.”
Rouse and Doar spoke at 10:45 a.m. Monday in the Amphitheater about how they lead their respective organizations, what has shifted with presidential elections and their greatest hope for their institutions. Their differing perspectives offered a broad overview of where they believe the United States is actually at.
Doar returns to Chautauqua after delivering a lecture on American poverty in 2021, and Rouse visits for the first time. Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer Deborah Sunya Moore, who served as moderator, offered the floor to Rouse in starting the discussion around her background and mission, as a warm welcome to Chautauqua.
Rouse started at Brookings a year and a half ago, after training as an economist in order to focus on the framework for addressing questions in public policy. While a faculty member for Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, she had an opportunity to actually participate in policy and ended up joining the Clinton Administration as a special assistant to the president at the National Economic Council; Rouse also served at the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama and former President Joe Biden.
“I had this opportunity to join the Brookings Institution. It brought together this love of research, the value of evidence and facts and insights, to the policy process with being much closer to the policy process in Washington and the Brookings Institution,” Rouse said. “So it was really the marriage of the two threads of my life.”
Brookings Institution was founded in 1916 and just celebrated its 109th birthday; originally, it was founded to provide evidence to help increase the capacity of the federal government. Now, it is devoted to providing nonpartisan research to policymakers and decision-makers.
Similarly, the 87-year-old American Enterprise Institute is an organization with a collection of independent scholars who are united by shared principles: less regulation by the government, lower taxes, free markets and free people, the United States as an international leader, and smaller government.
“We exist to allow people to bring good ideas to the public debate that are based on core values of (a) particular time,” Doar said. “My own view is that places like ours and Brookings are extremely important because we’re always empirical, always civil, and always nonpartisan.”
The institutions’ strategic focuses tend to shift with external factors — like presidential elections. Rouse noted that how people collect information has changed dramatically from Brookings’ founding, in that news is “discentered,” and artificial intelligence is on the rise.
“Getting one’s ideas to the right decision-makers is just more of a challenge in getting through the noise,” Rouse said. “How do we help people understand what is really credible information, and what is not? We want to be a source of credible information. That is part of what we are very much trying to value in this much-changed environment.”
AEI is committed to the long-lasting and underlying values of the country. In the current political environment, its scholars are concentrating on a fiscally responsible tax policy to lower tariffs, balanced branches of government, protecting democracy around the world with allies, and reform in America’s universities.
“(Universities) have gotten away from a liberal education, properly understood, and not allowed for enough viewpoint diversity. It had been hostile to certain elements of the political dialogue, especially people who support Israel,” Doar said. “We feel that that needs to be addressed. We are addressing it at the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina, the University of Florida, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, all over the country.”
From a different perspective, Rouse said Brookings doesn’t take as much of a top-down approach. Its scholars are interested in creating economic opportunity, addressing the most vulnerable in our society, building democratic institutions, and clarifying America’s role in the international world order; however, she has similar concerns about viewpoint diversity in education — if referencing differing causes.
“I wrote an article in the Princeton alumni weekly in 2016 arguing the importance of viewpoint diversity — I think that’s very important,” Rouse said. “I think it’s a question as to how we’re making progress on that, however. I don’t think it’s something that can just come from the top.”
Selecting scholars to participate in AEI’s public debate has to do with quality and expertise — while letting scholars know that AEI is an organization informed by certain conservative principles. Of the about 15 articles AEI publishes a day, Doar said he won’t like a couple, as the organization hires a variety of viewpoints.
In the same way, Brookings selects thinkers who are leaders in their field or up and coming. Brookings and AEI don’t provide tenure, and evaluate their scholars yearly to maintain productivity.
Both Brookings and AEI are rigorous in their preservation of scholarly independence; at Brookings, scholars raise a lot of their own money. The institution has turned away money because it felt like it could not reach an adequate separation in terms of independence.
“That is our credibility and goes to the heart of our trustworthiness,” Rouse said. “So it’s important to us that we have robust policies in place to maintain that (independence). So, we also have a quality review process that I think could always be improved. It’s not just about ensuring that the facts and the fact-checking is right, the citations are correct — we are trying to maintain that independence in terms of how scholars think as well.”
Doar said that AEI is very similar to Brookings in how they accept funding — there’s no directed research, and most of the money comes from individuals. However, AEI doesn’t accept money from the government and has their central office raise money, so their scholars do not have to.
In their yearly review of their writers, the organizations measure impact in consideration of who will stay. While Rouse acknowledged the longevity of impact, Doar emphasized what actually changes the way in which the country is operating.
“I worked for (New York) Gov. (George) Pataki on his campaigns. I worked for (former New York City Mayor Michael) Bloomberg and his campaigns,” Doar said. “The way I evaluate impact, did legislation pass? Did executive orders or executive action take place that followed on from work that we did? I believe in politics and public policy and the way we make decisions in the United States — the work of our scholars can influence that. But I don’t want it to be influencing it in the ivory tower, or off in some cloud somewhere. I want it to influence it in a way that actually leads to results.”
Last year, Brookings’ website had around 144 million page views, Rose said, but what does that really mean?
“We are think tanks aimed at trying to influence decision-makers. The thing that’s hard is that policymaking is like sausage making,” Rouse said. “There are many cooks who have been in the kitchen, and there have been many hands on any piece, any idea that might have started in the think tank world until it becomes an idea.”
Closing up the conversation, Moore posed a question coming back to the week’s theme: “What do you most hope for your organization in the next five years about how you influence our country?”
Doar’s hope in the next five years is for AEI to continue to focus on America’s underlying values and the Constitution.
“I do think it is not helpful to have your hair on fire before your hair needs to be on fire. I think that we need to understand that some of what’s going on is an example of democracy,” Doar said. “I want us to get back to a solid, successful pro-immigration policy that is pro-legal immigration. That’s a big challenge for us. And I would also just say we mentioned tariffs. I think tariffs are problematic for our growth and our economy. But I think reduction in immigration is going to turn out to be more problematic.”
Rouse pointed out that Brookings was founded in a moment like this — the controversial Woodrow Wilson was president, income inequality was prevalent with the top 10% of Americans earning 45% of the income and the 1917 Immigration Act required literacy tests. Quoting Milton Friedman on the role of the institution, Rouse encouraged fresh ideas and resilient hope.
“There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements,” Rouse said, referencing Friedman. “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
