Don’t Be a University
I'm not usually a fan of David Brooks's political positions, though I enjoy his lucidity and style. But in his Op-Ed piece in the February 22 issue of the New York Times, he makes some recommendations to potential Republican presidential candidates that are remarkably pertinent to Public Engagement:
Third: Don’t Be a University. Most campaigns organize their policy experts like academic departments — economists on one committee, social policy types on another, religious leaders on a third. They come up with utterly conventional recommendations.
You want to organize your committees according to priorities. For example, create a Flourishing Families Committee. Get economists, religious activists and psychologists in one room to figure out how government can reduce stress on struggling families. You’ll be surprised by how much interdisciplinary creativity you can unleash and how much closer you get to the problems of real people.
Most of all, you’ll break free from the useless categories most pundits use to define Republicans: social conservative, free market libertarian, neoconservative. If you define yourself by those categories, you’re dead.
Good advice can come from any direction.