The Trump Administration’s hiring of academics who compromise disciplinary standards threatens effective governance.
The impending appointments by President Donald J. Trump of a new chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics threaten government performance by academic toadyism. In the interest of being close to power, either by taking a formal position in government or by advocating on behalf of an administration, academic toadies eschew the process of carefully applying the findings of precisely formulated and tested hypotheses to recommend policies that improve people’s lives. Instead, they provide unfailing support for the President’s policies even if they are harmful.
Many academics aligned with both political parties have distinguished their discipline by serving in government and providing policymakers with valuable advice. The potential harm to the public caused by academic toadies, however, has recently grown because President Trump hires only people who agree with him unconditionally and will fire anyone who he discovers disagrees with him. Thus, it is possible that President Trump’s choice of Federal Reserve chair will act on the President’s uninformed and impulsive views of the U.S. and global economy without questioning their veracity. E.J. Antoni, who holds a PhD from Northern Illinois University, is currently the chief economist at The Heritage Foundation and has just been nominated by President Trump to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s unsubstantiated criticism of the Bureau as needing to “rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years” confirms that he checks the right boxes.
Academic departments must alert their students to this potential problem and encourage them not to become academic toadies. I am not advocating that academics who work for the Trump Administration should be automatically cancelled. I am advocating that academic departments urge their students who eventually engage with government policymakers to understand that they have a responsibility to maintain the scientific values and standards of their academic discipline.
Because law is intertwined with public policy, the nation’s law schools are a natural home from which academics go into or serve as advocates for a presidential administration. Consider toadyism by Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz was an advocate for President Trump at his impeachment trial where the President was charged by the U.S. House of Representatives for abuse of power based on offering inappropriate quid pro quos to a foreign nation to improve his re-election chances. Dershowitz justified President Trump’s behavior because President Trump believed that his re-election was in the public interest; thus, because President Trump did something that he believed would help him get elected in the public interest, the quid pro quo was not an impeachable offense.
Dershowitz assumes that the public has revealed a preference to re-elect President Trump, and he then works backward to conclude that President Trump’s behavior must have been in the public interest. As an academic, Dershowitz knows that he should state and justify this and all of his assumptions explicitly. If Dershowitz did so, it would be clear that this assumption was false because preferences, especially those by the public in the voting booth, only are revealed ex-post, and not necessarily known ex-ante. Indeed, as an empirical matter, Dershowitz’s assumption was false because the public rejected Trump’s reelection in 2020.
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