Keeping Libertarianism Alive in the Academy: Organizations,Scholars,and the Idea Pipeline

Abstract

In this article, the authors draw on the literatures about academic career pipelines and the sociology of ideas to understand how an outside group of organizations provides resources to aspiring scholars as young as high schoolers and as senior as emeriti professors. One of the goals of these organizations is to promote libertarian ideas in the academy. The authors show how, in contrast to other academic pipeline building, libertarian-leaning organizations fear that their perspectives encounter resistance in the progressive field of higher education. Therefore, to keep libertarian ideas alive, they pursue strategies to guarantee a supply of graduate students for eventual academic jobs and provide professors with relatively easy access to funding, granting them autonomy vis-à-vis their home institutions. This funding may be used in part for programs that specifically hire libertarian PhDs, which in turn provide young scholars with a step ladder into the academy. The authors call this set of strategies an “idea pipeline.” On the whole, these efforts are designed to make a career studying libertarian ideas more desirable and viable for those inclined toward these viewpoints and to ward off the demise of libertarian thought in the academy.

Hayek’s theory is that . . . you need to influence people who are doing cutting-edge research. And if those ideas get legitimacy and get some kind of purchase in the academy, then there’s going to be a trickle-down effect to people who teach those ideas. . . . Our hope is that if we can have a certain market share—whatever it is, 10 percent—of all professors who are sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to these ideas, then we have a chance to actually have our ideas on the table.

—A senior-level staff member at the Institute for Humane Studies

From my kind of outsider perspective, [the Institute for Humane Studies] seems to be interested in making sure if there are young people who . . . are libertarians, and are interested in becoming academics, then they’re trying to help them achieve those goals.

—A libertarian assistant professor of economics at a regional state university

What I’m thinking about is not just what the academy looks like now, but what it’s going to look like a generation from now. That’s the bet we’re making.

—A senior-level staff member at the Mercatus Center

Literature in the sociology of ideas investigates the processes by which academic specialties or approaches emerge, gain prestige within particular disciplines, and—sometimes—fall out of favor again (e.g., Bourdieu 1988; Camic and Gross 2004; Collins 1998; Kuhn 2012). Within this line of inquiry, a smaller body of work investigates the persistence of some otherwise unpopular ideas, pointing to the role of “unconventional” interest groups in supporting this longevity (Simon 1999; Tan 2021). Indeed, actors outside of academia may have an interest in maintaining such outré research subspecialties, much as they do with emerging or established subspecialties (Barnhardt 2017; Medvetz 2014; Teles 2008). But these actors face an important practical challenge in doing so: marginal ideas require adherents, in the form of productive researchers and teachers, to persist (Frickel and Gross 2005). Yet, especially in the case of heterodox perspectives, the structures that enable aspiring scholars to build careers in them may not exist. Bringing together extant literature from the sociology of ideas with literature about academic careers (e.g., Hurst et al. 2023), we show how organizations outside of the academy can form an idea pipeline: structures for keeping esoteric viewpoints alive by cultivating careers in the academy.

We do so by zeroing in on the case of libertarian-leaning philosophy and economics subspecialties. ¹ Although sociologists and other social scientists have made essential insights into how market-oriented faculty members and organizations of the past have served as key agents in the shift to international neoliberal policy (Burgin 2012; Fourcade 2009; Mudge 2018), they have paid less attention to libertarianism in contemporary higher education (cf. Wasserman 2019). Yet libertarian academics have lively research agendas in a number of disciplines that stand apart from their mainstream colleagues. For instance, public choice economics is a subfield favored by libertarians. It uses market principles to cast doubt on the efficacy of government and carries ideological underpinnings distinguishing it from more widely accepted views in the study of political economy (Alesina, Persson, and Tabellini 2006; MacLean 2017). There is also Austrian economics, which challenges prevailing disciplinary conventions by rejecting mathematical modeling in favor of qualitative methodologies (Wasserman 2019). And although moral, legal, and political philosophy for much of the past five decades has been dominated by Rawlsian theories of justice, libertarian philosophers often delve into the normative aspects of markets, including the idea that capitalism is a moral system (Brennan 2018).

In this article, we track how outside organizations such as the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF), the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), and the Mercatus Center work to carve out still more space for libertarian academic subspecialties. A primary goal of these organizations is to increase the number of scholars who take libertarian ideas seriously. Their hope is to achieve at least “10 percent” market share in colleges and universities, despite a perceived bias against libertarianism. To do so, established professors work with outside organizations to spark enthusiasm for libertarianism among the younger generations, hoping to recruit students into pursuing a life of the mind. In later stages of their careers, senior scholars find relatively easy access to research and teaching grants, which provide libertarian academics a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis their home institutions. This funding may be used for programs that specifically hire likeminded PhDs, which then provides young libertarian scholars with their own stepladder into the academy. On the whole, the idea pipeline that is developed by outside organizations and their affiliated faculty makes joining the professoriate more viable, and even desirable, for scholars interested in libertarian ideas, and it keeps their esoteric viewpoints alive in disciplines where they might otherwise die on the vine.

Literature Review

Career Pipelines

The “pipeline” metaphor has long been applied to careers inside and outside of academia. It was used prominently by government agencies and universities in the 1970s and 1980s to determine how to generate a science, technology, mathematics, and engineering workforce that would allow the United States to compete internationally in technological development (Blickenstaff 2005). In this early conception of the metaphor, pipelines are infrastructures that support new influxes of students into the ranks of existing disciplines, composed of two important elements: a flow of career aspirants and the “linear sequence of steps necessary” for novitiates to become full-fledged scientists or engineers (Metcalf 2010;2). The infrastructures consist of educational institutions from high school to graduate school to postdoctoral fellowships, workplaces where advanced degree holders can be employed, and the means for progressively advancing through a career (Cannady, Greenwald, and Harris 2014). The pipeline metaphor, in other words, rests on the assumption that what happens at each step is conditioned by what came before, and aspirants must be sufficiently prepared and given incentives to successfully make it to the next level (Witteveen and Attewell 2020).

In later decades, researchers concerned about gender and racial/ethnic underrepresentation in established fields adopted the pipeline metaphor to analyze inequalities in career outcomes. Sociologists argue that an aspirant’s ability to make it to the end stages of an academic career is structured by the availability of resources, supportive mentorship, and high-quality professional training from various organizations (Hurst et al. 2023). This preparation enables scholars to satisfy the preferences of gatekeepers that control access to jobs (Rivera 2020; Williams et al. 2019). When students from demographically diverse groups enter the pipeline but prematurely exit or do not achieve the same levels of professional success as members of other groups, the pipeline is said to be “leaky” (Cannady et al. 2014).

Repairing a leaky pipeline hinges on both enabling members of underrepresented groups to meet gatekeeper expectations and encouraging gatekeepers to reconsider assumptions about applicants. These interventions are taken by academic units within colleges and universities, which may create programs to help young scholars advance to the next stage of their careers (Adida et al. 2020). External organizations may take on this role as well. For example, foundations provide fellowships to graduate students from underrepresented groups, granting them additional time and resources to position themselves for success (Stewart, Williamson, and King 2008; Vélez-Ibáñez, Szecsy, and Peña 2013). Inside or outside of the academy, actors who repair leaky pipelines must have sociological imaginations that allow them to see the connections between their intervention efforts and the requirements of gatekeepers at various career stages (Anteby, Chan, and DiBenigno 2016; Rivera 2020).

Idea Pipelines, via the Sociology of Ideas

Unlike in settled fields, in which correcting leaky pipelines for underrepresented groups involves supporting students as they move through an already existing pipeline infrastructure, the aim of other pipeline builders is to support areas of thought where this infrastructure may exist only partially, or not at all. Proponents of this second set of pipelines must first work to ensure that clear pathways to building careers in the field exist before they can direct aspirants to it. We refer to this latter group of actors as needing to build idea pipelines: structures for keeping esoteric viewpoints alive by cultivating careers in the academy.

Organizations inside colleges and universities, such as campus-based institutes, help build idea pipelines by creating community around faculty’s shared intellectual interests (Frickel and Gross 2005). But outside organizations, such as philanthropies, are frequently key to bolstering idea pipelines, as well (Barnhardt 2017). Actors outside of academia have limited influence inside of it, but they may aim to influence scholar decision making by providing opportunities that encourage scholars to focus on perspectives they wish to support. Although scholarly decision making is complex, work in the sociology of ideas has shown that both intellectual and nonintellectual factors—such as the pursuit of academic status (Bourdieu 1988; Collins 1998), pressures to remain productive (Foster, Rzhetsky, and Evans 2015), and signals from colleagues about their interests (Crane 1972; Gross and Fleming 2012; Zuccala 2006)—can influence the direction of scholars’ research. Resources provided or withheld during graduate school can also shape which opportunities scholars move toward and which they avoid (Hurst et al. 2023; Stewart et al. 2008). Organizations that build idea pipelines strive to intervene in some (if not all) of these factors.

For instance, Aldrich (2012) attributed the success of the interdisciplinary subfield of entrepreneurship studies in part to the Kauffman Foundation, which early on provided support for graduate fellowships, research centers, and the creation of unique datasets. Aldrich credited professional associations and the conferences they sponsor with developing an “invisible college” allowing geographically dispersed scholars to communicate with each other (see also Zuccala 2006). Without interventions by “institutional entrepreneurs” making a career in these ideas more viable, the subfield would not have reached “maturity.” Additional examples of new philanthropy-led subspecialty areas include the Ford Foundation’s support for women’s studies in the 1970s (Proietto 1999), the Russell Sage Foundation’s seed funding for behavioral economics in the 1980s to 2000s (Mascarenhas 2011), and the Olin Foundation’s support for the previously fringe paradigm of law and economics programs at law schools in the 1980s (Teles 2008). However, the construction of idea pipelines does not have to be targeted toward novel perspectives. Pipelines may also be built for subfields where a vibrant community once thrived but has since diminished in prominence (Simon 1999; Tan 2021). Intellectual movements, after all, can be episodic in nature and, if they do not succeed in gathering adherents, the ideas can disappear (Frickel and Gross 2005). Organizations and scholars recognize that for any viewpoints to flourish, professors must be able to build their careers around them.

Creating idea pipelines, though, whether for new or fading perspectives, faces a practical challenge: overcoming indifference, or even resistance, from various stakeholders. This is especially true within the academy where intellectual legitimacy and financial support redound through the advocacy of high-status figures within established disciplines (Frickel and Gross 2005). For instance, it took time for entrepreneurship and behavioral economics to gain momentum because there was a dearth of aspirants in the beginning phase of the idea pipeline. The perspectives were innovative, and few professors had yet to teach the ideas to the next generation of scholars. In other cases, contentiousness can surround the ideas, which limits their growth by cutting off the flow of potential aspirants and critical resources. Mainstream scholars may challenge the development of a pipeline that cuts against the methodological, analytical, or theoretical assumptions that most scholars in the area have staked their careers on (Au 2021; Frickel and Gross 2005; Teplitskiy et al. 2018)

Members of the campus community may also consider an idea pipeline unwelcome for ideological reasons. In our case, although progressives are in the majority on most American campuses (Gross 2013; Gross and Fosse 2012; Ladd and Lipset 1975; Lazarsfeld and Thielens 1958), some libertarian scholars take active roles in the conservative movement (Doherty 2007). Among our interviewees are those drafting texts for right-leaning state and national think tanks within the Charles Koch political network and serving as facilitators in the “constituency mobilization” that takes place at Koch-organized seminars for wealthy donors and conservative political organizations (Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez 2016, 685). Moreover, libertarian beliefs about the beneficence of capitalism are frequently conflated with support for the “neoliberal order” (Gerstle 2022), which puts libertarian scholars’ ideas in conflict with most of their colleagues’ ideological priorities.

Libertarianism, therefore, is often treated as tainted and illegitimate in the academy (Shields and Dunn 2016). This is true even in economics, in which libertarian scholars tend to be far more sanguine than their mainstream counterparts about the ability of markets to self-regulate and doubtful about the efficacy of any type of government regulation. ² Under such circumstances, proponents have to build an idea pipeline in a context not just of friction, but of active resistance (Cigarroa 2022; Gluckman 2021; McCabe 2018). Libertarian scholars have written about their role in the academy (Doherty 2007; Zwolinski and Tomasi 2023), and this research offers insightful accounts, especially when read as a history of ideas. However, there is not yet a sociology of libertarian academics that looks at how contemporary faculty develop programs related to their ideas, distinguish themselves from conservatives and progressives, coordinate action within and outside their campuses, or find support to become professional scholars.

Taken together, the challenges faced by libertarian-friendly subspecialities such as public choice and Austrian economics can be existential. The ideas could die without active support. Although school administrations or state legislatures may put pressure on some colleges and universities to introduce more ideological heterogeneity into the curriculum, these efforts are unlikely to scale nationally or expand the ideas beyond a few scattered departments already recognized as libertarian leaning (e.g., Larimer 2021; Saul 2018; Vanderpool 2011). It is only when nontraditional actors take an interest in an academic niche that intellectual movements may enjoy a resuscitation. “Undead” forms of knowledge find resources in “unconventional” places, for example, among wealthy businessmen and philanthropists who begin engaging in academic work to support these marginalized ideas (Simon 1999; see Beets 2015, 2019, respectively, for a description of wealthy philanthropists John Allison’s and Charles Koch’s support of libertarian ideas). Given unpopular academic subspecialties’ challenges and constraints, we turn our attention to libertarianism to illuminate the conceptual value of idea pipelines in studies of higher education.

Data and Method

The analysis in this article is part of a larger study about how libertarian academics seek to carve out space in the academy, and how outside organizations support that goal. The data come primarily from semistructured interviews with 42 libertarians, as well as with 4 scholars who are not libertarians but have relevant knowledge about libertarians’ pipeline-building efforts in the academy. We also interviewed 11 representatives of the academically oriented libertarian-leaning organizations, such as the IHS, the CKF, and the Mercatus Center. Of the 46 total scholars, 38 are professors and 6 are graduate students (21 economists, 16 philosophers, 7 noneconomics social scientists, 2 nonphilosophy humanities fields). Two professors left their academic appointments for research positions in think tanks.

The majority of our participants, including three of the four nonlibertarians, had connections with the libertarian-leaning organizations. This was an intentional outcome of our sampling strategy, which sought out highly networked individuals to better understand how organizations support professorial career trajectories. Libertarian-leaning organizations (and the scholars supported by them) use a variety of terms to characterize their perspectives (e.g., classical liberal, libertarian, liberal), and they do differ from one another. For simplicity, we use libertarian as a catchall for viewpoints generally understood to be part of the Liberty Movement (Zwolinski and Tomassi 2023). Austrian economists, public choice economists, and economically inflected philosophers were all represented among our sample. In a small number of cases, we interviewed scholars who described themselves as having libertarian political views, but said that their research was not aligned with any libertarian-leaning subfields within their disciplines. We conducted the majority of these interviews between spring 2022 and spring 2023, but we also make use of four interviews with organization leaders and libertarian scholars that were conducted during previous projects on campus politics (Binder and Kidder 2022; Binder and Wood 2014), which are useful for commenting on how these organizations’ tactics have changed over time.

Although some of the scholars we interviewed are public figures known to be libertarian, a significant portion are not. Those who are not publicly “out” as libertarians often worry that if their beliefs about certain social and economic issues are exposed, they might suffer negative professional consequences (Shields and Dunn 2016; see also Brennan 2022). This reticence meant locating respondents was not always easy. Therefore, we relied on a few key informants, including referrals from organization representatives, to help us develop a purposive sample. We also asked each respondent to connect us with like-minded professors and graduate students.

Forty-four of the scholars we spoke with are (or until recently were) affiliated with schools in the United States, and our sample covers all regions of the country. Two respondents are faculty at non-U.S. institutions (Europe and Southeast Asia). In terms of institutional prestige, our sample of scholars is diverse. Some respondents matriculated in the Ivy League or other top-tier economics and philosophy departments. A few were educated at middle rung state universities. This institutional diversity carries over in the job placements of the professors we interviewed.

In contrast to the institutional variation found in our sample, the gender and race of our respondents is rather homogenous, reflecting the greater appeal of libertarianism to White men in the general public (Lizotte and Warren 2021). Despite efforts to diversify our sample, we were able to speak with only 7 women faculty members (although 3 of the 11 organization leaders were women). We interviewed one Middle Eastern scholar, one South Asian scholar, and two Latino scholars (all of whom were men). No one in our sample was Black. We did not collect information on respondents’ ages, but among our faculty interviews, 15 received their PhDs before 1990. Twenty-one finished graduate school between 1990 and 2009. The remaining four scholars got their degrees after 2010. Our graduate student respondents, of course, are younger.

Nearly all our interviews were conducted via video conferencing. Most conversations were between one to two hours, with some lasting much longer. Speaking to respondents and transcribing the audio files was divided among the members of our research team, with the additional help of a professional transcriber for several interviews. Once they were created, the text files were uploaded to the online qualitative data analysis software program Dedoose. We jointly developed an initial code list and divided the coding duties. During the open coding phase (Timmermans and Tavory 2022), we had weekly research meetings to discuss revisions to the analytic categories we were discovering, and we routinely checked for intercoder reliability (O’Connor and Joffe 2020).

In publishing our findings, we use the real names of scholars and organization representatives when they gave us permission to do so, but we mask the identities of others, as requested. Additionally, some of the topics covered in this article are potentially sensitive, such as opinions on the efficacy of career help or the changing strategic mission of organizations. So even for respondents otherwise open to publicly associating themselves with this project, there are aspects of our data for which it is still prudent to withhold identities. And because of the potential for job market discrimination (real or perceived), graduate students and untenured faculty members were all assured that we would conceal their identifying information.

Casting a Wide Net: High School–Age “Newcomers”

Seeking to generate a flow of the libertarian curious and, potentially, libertarian committed into the idea pipeline, outside organizations start early. The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), operating on the premise that students do not otherwise learn free-market concepts, focuses on pulling in the youngest students, with a mission to alert high schoolers to “the consequences and contradictions that flow from the illiberal policies of collectivism, interventionism, and the welfare state” (Foundation for Economic Education 2024). Although the vast majority of students who have contact with FEE do not become professional academics, a number of scholars we interviewed had been initially exposed to libertarian ideas from philosophers and economists through collegiate internships and weeklong seminars sponsored by the organization. These opportunities attracted students who “had read everything libertarian literature has ever produced” and “loved” the ideas, according to Larry Reed, FEE’s past president.

In 2008, Reed oversaw a major strategic shift of the organization. FEE’s new mission, Reed told us, is to fill the largest void in the pipeline by reaching out to 15- to 18-year-olds—“the relative newcomers to liberty.” To recruit such neophytes, FEE cultivates a nationwide network of teachers and parents who home-school their children, invites students and instructors to one-day seminars, and uses punchy digital content (in place of the original source material it previously used with collegians) so as not to bore its young audience with “a lot of dead economists.” Of the shorter in-person seminars aimed at teenagers, Reed said, “now we get hundreds [of students] who attend, rather than 30 or 40 of the already converted.” As for its audience for the online videos, FEE now reaches “millions.”

Some of our faculty interviewees worried that FEE’s shift away from lengthier seminars and bookish readings resulted from the organization “trying to be hip for the kids,” and the strategy may just end up “dumb[ing] things down.” But Reed assured us that FEE continues to play a key role in building a pipeline for libertarian academics-in-the-making. For those young participants who show a knack for the ideas, FEE staff are quick to make introductions to other organizations in the libertarian network. Or, as Reed put it, “We can take the newcomers to a point where their attitude is, ‘Hey! I like these ideas, and now I want to make a career out of them,’” and then FEE can “open some doors” by connecting them to the IHS “if they want to be a teacher” or to think tanks “if [they] want to be a policy person.” In other words, FEE builds enthusiasm among the youngest echelon of students whose regular instructors are unlikely to be familiar with libertarian perspectives, thus replenishing the flow of people who might someday be interested in teaching and researching those ideas themselves.

Like other leaders of libertarian organizations, Reed believes that this work is necessary because libertarian viewpoints are not welcome in higher education. Colleges and universities, Reed said, are often “havens of the left” in which only progressive “conformists” are likely to succeed without additional support.

Creating a Large “Opening” for Future Opportunities: Programming for Undergraduates

Just as FEE has made strategic changes, so too has the IHS, an organization “rooted in the classical liberal tradition,” which “supports the achievement of a free society” (IHS 2023). Currently more focused on “supporting graduate students, scholars, and intellectuals who are driving human progress,” IHS historically has fostered entry points into libertarian thought for undergraduates, which its staff specifically referred to as a “pipeline.” Much as Binder and Wood (2014) and Binder and Kidder (2022) showed that an outside organizational channel has been built to mobilize conservative college students into political activism, IHS has provided outside resources and experiences tailored to collegians interested in studying libertarian thought. In this way, IHS plays an essential role in the idea pipeline by explicitly wanting to ensure a flow of aspiring libertarian scholars. As Sebastian, a philosopher at a public research university put it, IHS’s goal is “helping kids go from being an undergraduate who’s interested in this stuff, to applying to graduate school, to becoming a successful academic.” And although the organization no longer places as much emphasis on undergraduates, our interview sample is filled with scholars who, as college students, had significant contact with libertarian viewpoints through IHS seminars.

Fletcher, a former leader at IHS, sat down with us for an interview related to a different project in 2008, when the organization’s focus on undergraduates was especially strong. When asked why IHS devoted so many resources to college students, he warned, “It’s going to sound a little clinical . . . but think of our programs as a pipeline” and that “at one end of the pipe, the opening’s quite large.” Fletcher said these programs sought “to attract as many students as possible” by “running 15 week-long seminars per summer, with about 80 students per session,” during which time “we would teach them about classical liberalism, effectively, for a week.” At its height, IHS’s pipeline reached “between 850 and 1,200 students” each year, including from “Serbia and Poland and Argentina, and the U.S. and Canada and Australia.” Students would then “go home and rave about the program and how great it was and how much fun they had.” This created “a cyclical effect, where they market” the program to their peers. By word of mouth, IHS reliably crafted new cohorts every year.

Finding the bodies to fill the following summer’s seminars, though, was only one part of the strategy. Coming “back to my pipeline analogy,” Fletcher said, the summer seminars helped the organization “spot the people we’d like to invest in [and] develop relationships with.” In interviews for our current project, a summer instructor told us that “one of the faculty’s jobs with these seminars, beyond simply giving their lectures, is to evaluate students to see who should be directed towards future opportunities in the IHS network.” He added, “It’s a multi-prong evaluation. How smart is this person? What is their academic potential?” Further still, “part of it is how friendly” they are “to libertarian ideas.” Being libertarian is “not the only factor, [and] it is not necessarily a decisive factor,” this instructor explained. But “it is a factor that’s taken into account in how likely [a participant is] to receive an opportunity in the future.”

The downside of having such a wide aperture on the undergraduate end of the pipeline is that the program can attract unserious students who might be “just clowning around for the summer,” as Maddox, a social scientist, put it. The filtering process described by the summer instructor is meant to winnow the field to those most committed to future academic careers. In a parallel process, some students who attend IHS seminars decide, “well, people seem okay here but I realize I really do not share the values of this organization,” Fabio Rojas, a sociologist at Indiana University, told us. “And that’s the last you hear from them.” According to Fletcher, IHS ultimately sets out to support “30 or 40 Ph.D. students” pursuing graduate work in areas of interest to IHS and, then later, to bolster these same scholars’ faculty careers. “So, there are people who entered our pipeline . . . 8 years ago, 10 years ago, or longer—20 years ago—as an undergrad,” and then “we just stay with them.” Fletcher likened this to training potential “Olympians,” where investments in talent at a young age compound through the life course. The total cost of such resource allocation is not inconsequential. Referring to calculations the organization had made, “coaching” a student from their undergraduate years to the time they are faculty in tenure-track jobs, can run as high as “$100,000,” including multiple college-level seminars, eventual graduate fellowships and conferences and, later, workshops and other forms of funding for professors.

Among those who stay in the pipeline—exemplified by the scholars we interviewed for this project—came many testimonials about how IHS’s undergraduate resources both piqued their curiosity and allowed their libertarian inquiries to flourish in otherwise inhospitable college environments. Alex Taborrok, now a chaired professor of economics at George Mason University, said that when he was young it was difficult to find other people “interested in these ideas [because] . . . you couldn’t just go on the internet or to Amazon and find books.” One of “the absolutely key connecting institutions,” he said, was IHS. In addition to taking “a week of classes with top libertarian thinkers,” he also remembered his delight when, “at the end of the conference, they took us into this room” where there was “this long line of books, and they said, ‘Help yourself to any books that you want.’ Oh, my God,” Taborrok said, “This was like finding El Dorado.” Because “you just couldn’t find this stuff” from other sources at the time, IHS’s support was “quite important” to Tabarrok’s intellectual development. He sees the organization as helping him connect the dots between being a budding scholar “just starting to get into” libertarian ideas to his professorial career today.

Getting Connected through Professors

As any organization’s leader is aware, it is unwise to expect that “if you build it, they will come,” to borrow a line from the movie Field of Dreams. Rather, IHS relies on people in their network to send students to them. Matt Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, said his “first encounter with IHS” occurred during the summer after his sophomore year. A visiting libertarian professor at his college, who “was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford,” recognized that Zwolinski “was interested in this stuff and mentioned IHS to me.” Getting exposure to “a bunch of different lecturers” and hanging out “with other students who were interested in the same kinds of things,” Zwolinski said, was “really exciting.”

Like Zwolinski’s professor, the faculty members we interviewed understood that little attention is paid to libertarian ideas in college courses and they, too, were keen to connect curious students to IHS. Joe Calhoun, an economist at Florida State University, said he is a “big supporter of IHS. . . . Whenever they have a program, a contest, or anything available,” he would “post it on my Canvas page and encourage students to apply.” Loren Lomasky, a philosopher at the University of Virginia, said, “As you can imagine,” there are “a lot of students who show up to my classes” and office hours “because they’re kind of libertarian, and . . . think I’m like minded.” It is these students he encourages to apply for summer seminars because “I have great respect for [IHS] . . . and I have a lot of respect for the students I try to help” as they are “moving in that direction.” Bruce Benson, a retired professor of economics at Florida State University, said that “if a student came to me and asked, ‘How can I learn more about these ideas?’ I would often guide them towards IHS.”

In sum, IHS has kept the libertarian idea pipeline alive by pulling undergraduates into its orbit and referring them on to future opportunities. This work is necessary but difficult, because, as Fletcher told us, it is common belief within the libertarian pipeline that the academy is “dominantly unfriendly to these ideas.”

“Growing the Mindshare”: Graduate Student Support

The number of high school and college students who have contact with libertarian organizations is much greater than will ever pursue an academic career. Graduate students, on the other hand, have already cast their lot with the professoriate. At this stage, the work of libertarian organizations may look similar to what might be expected in an ordinary career pipeline: mentoring young scholars professionally and intellectually, as well as funding their work. Yet graduate students outside of a small handful of departments are unlikely to know faculty at their home institutions versed in libertarian thought. So, libertarian-leaning organizations are active in helping aspirants meet with senior scholars. This may involve introducing students to scholars within their field, but interdisciplinary connections also are important because a mentee’s discipline may lack like-minded professors. Ultimately, libertarian-leaning organizations and the mentors they support may even help guide young scholars into their first academic jobs.

IHS once again holds a prominent position in the space of “trying to increase mindshare among academics,” according to a senior staff member of a different organization we interviewed. Emily Chamlee-Wright, the current president and CEO of IHS, counted “2,500 scholars who have gone through our programs as graduate students and then earned careers in the academy.” For its part, the Mercatus Center, the think tank located at George Mason University, spends “somewhere in the high seven figures every year” on graduate students, according to a senior staff member, for a total of “about 1,000 alumni from all of our programs.” Of course, compared with all faculty members in the United States, “we are a tiny drop in the bucket,” the staff member said. However, the center’s influence is compounded by working alongside the Liberty Fund, the Earhart Foundation (before it dissolved in 2015), the Templeton Foundation, the CKF, and the Cato Institute to strengthen graduate students’ interests in libertarian ideas. Because IHS and Mercatus have had the biggest footprints in this segment of the pipeline, we focus on these two organizations.

Seminars and Workshops at IHS and Mercatus

Not unlike the weeklong seminars it once coordinated for undergraduates, IHS hosts seminars for graduate students. Knox, studying at a public flagship university to become a philosopher, said he had recently attended a weeklong colloquium on “different classical liberal ideas.” A highlight of the conference for Knox was when “one of the big-name IHS dudes” took the time to critique his dissertation. “[He] totally disagrees with my viewpoints.” However, Knox framed this as a positive interaction: a chance to hear constructive feedback to improve his argument that he could not have received elsewhere. Along these same lines, IHS organizes manuscript workshops for graduate students at which they can connect with audiences capable of providing insights they might not get from their thesis and dissertation committee members.

Interviewees suggested that IHS and Mercatus events run the ideological gamut, but they are especially important for strengthening participants’ knowledge of libertarian theory. Adam Martin, an economist from Texas Tech University, said that the Mercatus Center’s Adam Smith Fellowship brings graduate students from many disciplines together “to read books in Austrian economics, Bloomington political economy, and Virginia political economy. ³ They’re introducing students to institutional analysis,” which is “the sort of stuff they wouldn’t get in a regular econ or philosophy program.”

In addition to focusing on foundational libertarian ideas and students’ research projects, IHS and Mercatus offer guidance on other parts of the academic career. Harry, an assistant professor at a regional public university, attended an IHS workshop on “how to be a better teacher.” Pointing to the assumed political landmines associated with being a professor with heterodox perspectives, Harry said “talking to other libertarian academics helps, because I think we do struggle with this; I do not want to be indoctrinating my students.” Meanwhile through Mercatus, Harry attended a training on “Here’s how to write a better op-ed. Here’s how to turn your academic research into a policy paper.’” As a more out-of-the-box example, Rojas told us that IHS “had one of Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriters come in and give a public speaking workshop. And I wrote down every word that dude said. . . . IHS understand[s] that sometimes you need a professional polish that graduate programs aren’t producing.”

IHS, in particular, invests in helping put a “polish” on candidates’ job search efforts. Bailey spoke of sending “my job market materials to them. They revise them, or they connect you to another faculty to help you with it.” Asked if he thought IHS gave him a leg up in getting a job placement, he said, “They were definitely a huge part of it.” According to Rojas, IHS has “learned that a lot of graduate programs are not good at giving support to their own students, much less ones who are interested in libertarian or classical liberal ideas.” Or, as Maddox put it, “IHS provided—what do you call it?—the hidden curriculum.”

Fellowships

Among the most important resources given to graduate students is fellowships, which help young scholars focus on improving their research while also meeting their material needs. A number of our interviewees had enjoyed this type of funding through IHS. This included Sebastian, who worked out an arrangement between his university and the organization, which minimized the number of semesters he needed to work as a teaching assistant while still providing a comparable salary and the same health coverage as other graduate students in his cohort. Carl reported that his funding requests to IHS were “modest,” but the money he received “helped me to not just eat ramen noodles when I was in graduate school.” Such resources are provided, IHS’s Chamlee-Wright said, not only to make sure there is food in the pantry but “to set them up for success in the academic job market.”

Over the past two decades, the Mercatus Center has increased its funding for graduate students within the idea pipeline. A senior staff member at the think tank told us that graduate fellowships are “part of scaling some of our existing programs.” When this staff member arrived at the organization in the 2000s, “We had 12 graduate students,” all at George Mason University, and “the question we asked ourselves was: How do we increase that number?” Mercatus “started a series of extramural fellowship programs,” in which PhDs from a range of universities now gather to “read Adam Smith, [Friedrich] Hayek, and talk about ideas.” According to this staff member, the fellowship programs have been very successful in attracting a greater number of graduate students to work with Mercatus. The organization is pleased that its growing graduate portfolio is among the “things that actually cash out,” in the pursuit of “develop[ing] talent.”

Networking

There is a joke that trying to get libertarians moving in any one direction is like herding cats. This is because an ideology premised on individualism does not necessarily encourage people to work together. Yet despite this reputation, libertarian-leaning organizations provide ample opportunities for networking across disciplines, which benefits graduate students intellectually, professionally, and while on the job market.

IHS’s Chamlee-Wright said that her organization provides many resources to graduate students, but “the biggest thing, once they’re connected to us, [is that] we can connect them to other scholars in our community.” Building such a network around libertarian ideas is appreciated by young academics, who worry about being misfits (or worse, pariahs) in their disciplines. Seth, now a full professor, mentioned the organization’s “moral support” when he was a graduate student. He recalled that after seminars, “the program officers would call me up to see how I was doing.” Such a call might be to recommend a book he should read or to connect him with the people best able to help his career. “‘I see you’ve got a one-year position at such-and-such place,’ they’d say. ‘You should go introduce yourself to so-and-so’” on that campus. Clarifying that although IHS staff members “were not in a position to set up job interviews,” they were able to forge professional ties within higher education for the good of graduate students’ future careers.

In general, IHS staff members are active in connecting young scholars with help tailored to their specific needs. For example, after Mateo attended an online seminar “about how to apply for the job market,” IHS e-mailed him, asking if the organization could assist in other ways. Pursuing a social science PhD in a discipline with a tiny number of publicly known libertarians, he asked for help being introduced to like-minded senior scholars. IHS set him up with a mentor in his area of study. Mateo has since had “multiple Zoom meetings” with this professor, and he feels these conversations are more relevant than those with his mainstream dissertation adviser.

For some, IHS’s support in expanding their networks is decisive to their careers. For example, Flynn spoke of IHS staff members “who are very good at knowing what [job positions] are open,” particularly those not in conventional career paths for PhDs. “A lot of the opportunities seem to be in these more interdisciplinary areas” that “you just would never hear about” when talking to typical directors of graduate studies. Maddox offers another success story. He told us that an IHS staff member introduced him to a senior scholar who ran a CKF-funded research center at a selective liberal arts college. In their initial meeting the two “hit it off.” As Maddox explained, the senior scholar “found out I wasn’t a weirdo and just said, ‘I’m setting up a postdoc. Can you do X, Y and Z?’” With a simple “yes,” Maddox secured his first job out of graduate school.

Summarizing the graduate segment within the network, IHS and Mercatus have been crucial benefactors in the careers of many libertarian academics. Ryan Stowers, the CEO of CKF, which is a major funder of both Mercatus and IHS, said,

The graduate student value prop[osition] has always been a very important driver to our philanthropy. Ideas matter; you need people to generate and synthesize and pound the heck out of these ideas. Where are they going to come from? They’re going to come from Ph.D. programs—really important!

There are other organizations that support (or have supported) the idea pipeline for libertarian academics, such as the Liberty Fund and the now defunct Earhart Foundation. But by a large margin, IHS and Mercatus do the most to ensure that promising graduate students learn about libertarian viewpoints, get networked to other scholars, and gather the skills and cultural resources of “the hidden curriculum” to succeed in the academic job market.

“Connectivity throughout the Arc of Scholars’ Careers”: Resources for Professors

As scholars move into professorships, libertarian-leaning organizations continue to play a significant role in the idea pipeline by helping faculty prepare for tenure, acquire professional status, and build research centers. Having publication outlets for libertarian-friendly papers and dedicated venues for meetings, are felt by respondents to be especially important. This is because libertarians, like conservatives (Shields and Dunn 2016), believe their colleagues can be dismissive of, or hostile toward, their viewpoints. At this stage, IHS and Mercatus continue to be important players, but other organizations, such as the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE), the Liberty Fund, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Mises Institute, and Public Choice Society also figure in. CKF and other donors play a critical role in bringing support full circle: their funding means that professors can dedicate their teaching and research toward areas of unique interest to libertarianism, thereby propagating the idea pipeline for future scholars.

Conferences and Networking as Refuge

Spaces to connect are crucial for reinforcing the idea pipeline. APEE, of which several of our interviewees are members, “gives young scholars a place to present their papers, give it a trial run,” said Peter Boettke, an economist at George Mason University. Boettke pointed out that providing resources to junior faculty is a benefit in the other direction, too, because if organizations do not cultivate new participants and leadership, some organizations might “die on the vine” because of their older membership. He had seen this happen at the Mont Pelerin Society, at which, he said, “you have more obituaries at a meeting than you do new papers!” Keeping the pipeline filled with young blood, in the face of “an aging population” is, practically speaking, existential for generating libertarian ideas.

Among the most lauded of all such meeting places are those that allow scholars to immerse themselves in the full spectrum of libertarian thought, especially the colloquia hosted by the Liberty Fund, an organization with a $350 million endowment from its founder, industrialist Pierre Goodrich (Liberty Fund 2023). At Liberty Fund seminars, participants “get together for two or three days, and you have a set of readings,” said Michael Munger, a political scientist at Duke University. “There is a strong norm that no conclusions will be drawn, and that no deep truths will be identified. You’re just trying to learn more about this reading.” Dan D’Amico mock-indignantly said that Liberty Fund seminars are “very indulgent to participate in.” Likening the colloquia to a Catholic retreat where “you stop everything, and you hang out and think about God,” he said that in Liberty Fund’s case, participants “do that with Adam Smith, James Buchanan, and F.A. Hayek.”

Like others, Eric Mack, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Tulane, extolled the experience, not only for the sheer pleasure of it, but for its effects on participants’ networks. “It helps people’s careers.” Elaborating, he explained that “a junior faculty member” can “come back to campus” and tell their colleagues, as Mack himself has done, “Well yeah, I was talking to [famed economist] Gordon Tullock this week.” Such an unusual experience can lead to “forming relationships. And all of a sudden, they’re getting people to write recommendations for them.” Similarly, Chandran Kukathas, a political scientist at Singapore Management University, told us about being fortunate enough to have attended a “star-studded” debate between David Friedman and Robert Nozick, two titans in libertarian circles.

The weekend seminars sponsored by the Liberty Fund, as well as those coordinated by IHS, serve an additional function. As Fletcher, the former IHS staff member, pointed out, “one of the dominant values that IHS provides is, overwhelmingly, a community and a network.” Chamlee-Wright agreed with this view. “Intellectual community is really the lifeblood of a rewarding, rich, meaningful academic career,” she said.

That sense of camaraderie can be really valuable, especially if you feel like you’re someone who hasn’t found your place within your home institution. Feeling like you’re always doing battle—that can feel like a really lonely place. So that sense of intellectual community can be a real lifeline.

Publication Venues

Another way organizations keep libertarian ideas alive is by providing outlets for publishing. On the more radical side of the libertarian sphere, Florida State’s Bruce Benson and Loyola University of New Orleans economist Walter Block have turned to venues such as the Mises Institute’s Journal of Libertarian Studies. As a junior faculty member fresh out of his PhD program, Benson had a “pretty interesting” paper on property rights. However, he told us, “I didn’t think it would go into a mainstream economics journal.” So he turned to this specialized outlet, and after the paper was published there, he got quickly connected with other “anarcho-capitalist” scholars and their organizations, professional linkages that would go on to define his career.

Catering to those with a more classical liberal bent, several interviewees regularly seek publication in Social Philosophy and Policy. We were repeatedly told that this journal is crucial to maintaining the libertarian idea pipeline. Describing the content, Eric Mack noted, “almost all” the articles are based on “very good stuff which would deserve to be published in other [mainstream] journals.” But, he added, those papers “might very well not” see the light of day “because of the [anti-libertarian] bias of reviewers” and “the bias of editors.” So, were it not for the existence of this journal, “there are probably some people who would’ve basically been driven out of academia.” According to Chandran Kukathas, while the journal’s articles are as “rigorously refereed” as those in any top-tier outlet, the original impetus for starting the publication was “to make sure that libertarian views were getting into the mainstream.” To this point, the journal’s current associate editor, Bas van der Vossen, conceded that mainstream readers might occasionally dismiss some of the articles as “a little far out” for taking on perspectives nonlibertarian philosophers and political scientists “wouldn’t take seriously.” But, for scholars engaged with libertarian ideas, what others consider “far out” can still be a boon for their curricula vitae and an important intellectual contribution within their academic niches

Individual and Institutional Grants

Individual grants—often easily obtained in the libertarian idea pipeline because funders reach out to cultivate scholars—is another benefit in senior faculty careers. Dan D’Amico, who writes about incarceration, said that he’d been approached several times by CKF, whose money he was happy to take, especially as the program officers’ approach to funding was “You wrote this [article and] we find it interesting. Would you be willing to extrapolate on these other relevant things that you haven’t gotten the opportunity to talk about yet?” Adam Martin, of Texas Tech, had applied to CKF for a large grant, but staff’s response to his application was, “We didn’t particularly like your proposal, but take $50,000 and do whatever you want. . . . We trust you to do something interesting.” Senior CKF staff members have written that the foundation’s support of such scholars is a critical contribution to the “diversity of ideas” in the academy, criticizing progressives’ use of “strong-arm tactics” to prevent other viewpoints from being heard on campus (Hardin 2015).

According to a staff member we interviewed in 2018, who has worked in both the foundation and institute named for Charles Koch, the amount the foundation gives to faculty research has grown over the past 15 years. Whereas in 2008, “our total grant-making was about $8 million,” with “about two dozen faculty” grantees, by 2017, the foundation’s total grant-making had grown to $90 million, with a significant portion flowing to “nearly a thousand faculty members.” Although CKF is not alone in this space, it is the foundation most frequently mentioned by the academics we interviewed.

Beyond grants made directly to scholars, philanthropic donations for various campus initiatives also benefit the idea pipeline. Research centers and institutes afford faculty autonomy by increasing professors’ leverage with school administrators (Dolan et al. 2019). These features were recognized by CKF when it embarked on a strategy to establish centers for the promotion of individual liberty and free markets on campuses across the country. This strategy was based on “observations about how to have a disproportionate impact, given how outnumbered we all are,” as Charlie Ruger, then director of university investments at CKF, said at APEE’s 2016 annual conference. ⁴ In the same session, an economics professor at a liberal arts college said that the Koch grant his center received—the largest in his institution’s history—“helped us convince the university to do things it wasn’t comfortable with.” Referring to the negotiating power this gave him (and reflecting the size of his institutional grant), his favored retort to colleagues asking him to change something about his center was “I’ll give you two million reasons why I’m not gonna do that.” In that year, CKF supported 53 research centers at colleges and universities around the country (Latham 2018), and between 2005 and 2019, Koch gave out more than $450 million to more than 550 colleges and universities (UnKoch My Campus 2021).

The autonomy granted by outside funding means that centers and departments supported by CKF may be more libertarian leaning in their focus on free-market economics and capitalism as an ethical system than most departments nationwide (see, e.g., Beets 2015, 2019). An illustrative example is the Department of Economics at George Mason University, which has received funding from Charles Koch since the 1980s. One quarter of the funding CKF has disbursed over its decades of existence has been directed to George Mason (UnKoch My Campus 2021), in part for the support of its specialty in the libertarian-leaning subfield of Austrian economics (Doherty 2007). ⁵ George Mason is now the only remaining economics department in the country where graduate students can specialize in this subfield. But for most centers and institutes, CKF’s strategy supports the libertarian idea pipeline by being a source of funding for minor empire building by senior scholars across the country.

Philanthropic support also serves indirectly as a source of employment in a tight labor market for junior faculty, such as into undergraduate philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) programs, some of which have long-standing support from CKF. As Michael Munger, who heads up a PPE program at Duke, told us, “Many philosophy departments don’t have jobs except in PPE.” The interdisciplinary foundations of these programs means that graduate students who have trained in PPE are most attractive to staff them. Simon, a philosophy professor who served as the PPE director at a regional university, said that when he was recruiting faculty,

I had to have people who had some background in economics. . . . And once you say, “social scientists or someone in humanities with actual knowledge of economics” . . . I think, almost by default, you’re going to have people who have certain libertarian sympathies.

In summary, from supporting meeting spaces, to providing publishing outlets, to funding departments and programs that hire young libertarian scholars, outside organizations play a major role in the lives of faculty who are part of this idea pipeline.

Conclusion

Returning to the three quotations that started this article, organizations such as IHS and the Mercatus Center, with the financial support of the CKF and other philanthropists, hope to create a libertarian “market share” in higher education. Their vision for achieving this goal requires motivating students to be “interested in becoming academics” so that “a generation from now” the ideological tilt of the ideas discussed in colleges and universities looks different. In other words, libertarian-leaning organizations are operating under the assumption that for libertarian viewpoints to thrive (or even just survive), future faculty members need a pipeline to ensure that these ideas continue to flow into and out of the academy. From the educational cradle of high school to the metaphorical grave, organizations cultivate aspirants for the professoriate, and as scholars progress through the pipeline, they are provided the intellectual, social, and financial resources to succeed as scholars.

What we describe in this article is similar to the career pipelines built in other sectors of higher education, such as for women and underrepresented minority students in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering, insofar as new people are brought into academic areas of study with the support of organizations within and outside the academy. But because libertarianism is politically unpopular among some stakeholders in the campus community (including some administrators and faculty members), libertarian-leaning organizations and the scholars with whom they collaborate believe the very existence of their ideas is at stake. If young academics are not engaged early and supported throughout their careers with resources and job opportunities to enable them to explore libertarian ideas further, the intellectual side of libertarianism could “die on the vine,” as Peter Boettke stated. Much like the scientific and intellectual movements studied by Frickel and Gross (2005), viewpoints flourish or perish on the basis of their ability to mobilize adherents. Thus, the idea pipeline is deeply consequential to libertarianism’s viability in the academy. If one were to take the metaphor farther, we might even say that, for our respondents, the idea pipeline is understood to be an ideological lifeline.

Although we have been able to reveal a great deal about the libertarian idea pipeline, our data does not allow us to make claims about the overall efficacy of outside organizations’ efforts. Because we intentionally selected a sample of highly networked academics, we cannot compare outcomes between unaffiliated scholars and those within this built-up idea pipeline. And because we spoke, by and large, to those currently in academia, we are not able to describe whether and how the libertarian idea pipeline may be “leaky” in its own right. Additionally, readers may wonder whether these organizations are changing hearts and minds among students, who might otherwise go on to be progressives. These organizations’ critics have speculated on this point for many years (see, e.g., Bailey 1999). But our data does not allow us to adjudicate on this matter. Despite these limitations, our deep dive into the intellectual networks supported by the organizations we study here, and our conversations with the scholars that benefit from them, enable us to highlight how an idea pipeline functions.

There are important theoretical and empirical implications to our concept of idea pipelines. As we have indicated, previous research describes other instances of outside organizations playing crucial roles in sustaining emerging academic subfields (Arthur 2009; Mascarenhas 2011; Proietto 1999; Schmitt et al. 2023), but more should be done to understand how actors external to the academy selectively enable career paths in ways that may influence the intellectual directions taken by scholars. Beyond libertarians, how has the conservative right built up its ideas pipeline? Although much has been written about the organizational inroads made by the conservative movement during the latter quarter of the twentieth century (Hertel-Fernandez 2019; Himmelstein 1992), analysis of how the movement has worked inside the academy to develop graduate students and professors within a conservative idea pipeline has been little explored (cf. Teles 2008). Similar questions could also be asked about how outside organizations may have facilitated the leftward shift of the academy in the postwar years (Gross 2013). And, of course, there are any number of ideas potentially being funneled into disciplines and subfields for nonpolitical reasons worthy of investigation as well.

As for the libertarian idea pipeline, it is not clear what lies ahead. IHS has, for the time being, moved away from supporting undergraduates, as has FEE. Recently, CKF has also shifted some of its funding toward what Ryan Stowers, the organization’s chief executive, described as “broader post-secondary learning spaces,” as opposed to traditional colleges and universities. These strategic organizational changes are on top of a volatile political climate where many libertarian intellectuals (inside and outside academia) feel disconnected from the increasingly populist orientation of the Libertarian Party (Doherty 2022). Additionally, the Republican Party remains vocally critical of higher education because of its perceived role in left-wing indoctrination. To wit, conservative politicians regularly threaten to withdraw the historic tax benefits of some colleges and universities (e.g., Patel 2024). Although this discourse may seem to lend ballast to libertarian organizations’ claims of a hostile space in academia, it is likely that any policy changes that constrain schools’ ability to operate would hurt libertarian and nonlibertarian scholars alike. ⁶

In short, the idea pipeline we detail in this article rests atop shifting sands. Some aspects of the pipeline, once put into place, will endure for decades (such as tenure-track hires). Other aspects of the pipeline can disappear on the whims of funders (such as individual grants and money for seminars). Ultimately, trying to grasp the opportunities and obstacles faced by libertarian academics is a dynamic situation.