Podcasts
The Great Antidote: Ryan Streeter on Cultural Communities and the Civitas Institute
In this episode of The Great Antidote, host Juliette Sellgren sits down with Ryan Streeter, executive director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. They discuss Streeter's experiences at the intersection of think tanks, government, and academia, focusing on topics such as urban development, economic mobility, and the importance of fostering communities that encourage social cohesion and critical thinking.
Ryan Streeter is the executive director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Today, he tells us about his time in the intersection of think tanks, government, and academic communities. We talk about cities, the importance of mobility and growth, how to foster those characteristics, skepticism of government, and living in and creating a community that fosters social cohesion and critical thinking.
Want to explore more?
Want to explore more?
- Alain Bertaud on Urban Planning and Cities, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Raj Chetty on Economic Mobility, an EconTalk podcast.
- Scott Winship on Poverty and Welfare, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Charles Murray on Dignity and the American Dream, a Future of Liberty podcast.
- Jeremy Horpedahl, Americans are Still Thriving, at Econlib.
Read the transcript.
Juliette Sellgren
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit wwwAdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back today on what is the date? March 26th, 2025. I'm excited to welcome Ryan Streeter to the podcast. We're going to be talking about his role as the executive director at the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, but we're also going to be talking about so much more from politics to think tanks to culture and civic virtue and how all of those things intersect. So I'm really excited. Welcome to the podcast.
Ryan Streeter
Thanks for having me. It's really good to be here.
Juliette Sellgren (1:02)
The first question I have for you is, what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?
Ryan Streeter (1:12)
I would say probably not aware of the importance of saying yes to new experiences. Simply put, when faced with a big life decision, one that carries risk with it, one that seems like if it doesn't go the way you want, the discouragement or the pain will be too much to bear. You almost always regret saying no to something and almost always are glad that you said yes. So faced with a big move, a big lateral job, change a gap year in a semi dangerous country, people's parents aren't listening to this, right? I would say if in doubt, say yes to the experience because the world that it opens up to you, the people you meet along the way, the things you learn about yourself are almost always valuable.
This has been studied before, so this is both just a page from the book of life that I've lived, but a lot of my decisions made sense to me after I discovered some of the work that people have done on this. I think Steve Levitt from the Freakonomics coauthor did a big study in this where he asked a ton of people online about big life choices and then went back and asked them after a certain time period if they were glad or regretted their decision. And the majority of people are usually glad that they said yes to that thing that they weren't sure about. And then those that took a pass on that big thing regretted. And I think that's important for a culture which kind of promotes risk aversion I think a little bit too much, and I think for people, especially in on college campuses who've been sort of trained through their formative years and up through high school to make sure their CVs look perfect and to have done all the requisite things and to stay out of trouble and to say no to every possible thing that could make you look bad or bring shame or something like that.
I think we've generally cultivated a kind of risk aversion as sort of a status quo, and so I would just challenge that. So that's what I would say.
Juliette Sellgren (3:36)
I totally see where you're coming from, but this completely contradicts what the majority of people say on this front. So many people, it's protect your peace. It's say no while you can. I mean, I guess that also maybe more relates to when people talk about how much time you have in a day and not getting burnt out. True, but I see the risk aversion and it's wild that I don't know that still so many people give the advice of say no, say no more than you say yes. And maybe you do have to say no more than you say yes, but when do you say yes? And we don't talk about when you say yes and you just did. So I really appreciate that.
Ryan Streeter (4:29)
And not everything that's risky is good for you. There are certain things you definitely want to say no to. This is not my recommendation that you just say yes to every crazy idea that comes into your head or that friend that you shouldn't be spending time with suggests that you do. And I wouldn't want my counsel to be misconstrued there, but sometimes you say yes when you're faced with an opportunity that isn't what you would've originally thought because you just want to see how it goes. Before graduate school, I wanted to take basically a year in Europe, I'd been fortunate enough to go on one of those, exchange those people to people exchanges in high school. I had an anonymous donor actually in our community fund my way since the cost was a bit high for my family and I was fortunate to get this great experience and it kind of just had this desire to spend a little bit more time there and got admitted to a program at the University of Heidelberg, which required that you learn German first.
And so went over there and told everybody that I was going there to explore graduate school ops. Really just kind of wanted to have a year in Europe to hike around and all that stuff and needed a job where I can make as much money as I could in the summer to basically pay for that time. And I got married, my wife and I went on this together, and so she was a nanny and I got a job driving a semi-truck. I got my CDL class A license and drove a semi-truck around the country for three months, which paid pretty well and paid enough for us to and combine with what my wife earned for us to basically live for about 10 months over there and just drain our bank account down to zero without knowing exactly what would happen when we get back. Anyway, I made the decision while I was over there to apply to graduate schools in the states and go down that path and that's what I ended up doing. But had a year in Germany, made some great friends who were friends to this day, learned how to drive a semi-truck, saw the country, drove from coast to coast and up and down everywhere, slept in the parking lots of truck stops and all that stuff. And it gave me an appreciation for a sector of our society and economy I never would've had before.
And I'm a pretty good driver of large vehicles to this day.
Juliette Sellgren (6:50)
I don't think I would ever know that about you if…
Ryan Streeter
Most people don't unless they've known me a long time.
Juliette Sellgren
Not directly on topic. I learned recently that a lot of these trucks have beds in them that you sleep in the truck behind the place where you sit.
Ryan Streeter
Yeah, that's why you see there's that big space behind where the driver's driving and then where the trailer starts.
Juliette Sellgren (7:21)
I would've never thought about that. Obviously there is a lot of space, but maybe there's machinery. I don't know. It's the sort of thing you never think about until one of my friends is doing this and he was showing me a picture of where he was sleeping and I was like, what else? What else? So you said obviously, and it's just imaginable that it does change what and what you see and what sort of experiences you have, but what were you most surprised about in that experience?
Ryan Streeter (7:59)
I was most surprised by the just kind of the horse-sense and common sense of all the people that I was working with. You would meet other truckers at the truck stops and talk with them in the buffet line or while you're waiting for the shower and you would usually get a free shower when you filled up with a tank of diesel fuel to use showers and stuff and be talking with these guys. And it's a certain type of loner that spends all their days in a truck, but they get around the country and they meet a ton of people and they see the world in a new way. And so there's just kind of a certain wisdom that I didn't know existed that I appreciated, but that's one example. I've had other great opportunities just to say yes to things that I hadn't actually thought out in advance professionally, things that have come up and I've learned what that research has shown that there's a whole bunch of people in my life that didn't exist to me before. I said yes to that opportunity. It's turned out to, we've moved a lot and raised two now adult children in multiple cities, so it's hard for them to answer the where are you from question grew up. We've always lived in cities, so they grew up basically without backyards or garages and have a certain kind of street smarts that kind of comes with those sorts of moves and living in the places that we've lived. And I think it's shaped them into really remarkable people. And so we as a family have been grateful for all those kind of cool opportunities and really don't regret any of 'em. But they weren't easy decisions at the time. Sometimes you're like, okay, we're going to say yes to move to London, sort of think tank with an organization that's fairly new that we don't know a whole lot about and let's do it. And it turned out to be awesome, for instance. And so I would just encourage people to be kind of really open-minded and ambitious about your aspirations and willing to take those risks.
Juliette Sellgren (10:05)
Yeah, I mean it makes me excited to take risks, although I don't know, we'll see, I'm open hashtag open to work, except I already have a job open to other things. Well, I don't know, things can always change. So okay, you lived all over the place, but also you've worked kind of all over the place in terms of what specifically you're doing. And I think that's probably pretty common in terms of people especially working in the DC policy world with people in and out of admins and think tanks and stuff like that. At least especially historically this was the case because that's kind of what think tanks were for, but it's less common nowadays. And yet you've been kind of in the room where it happens, as one might say, but you've also been in the think tank. You've also been more entrepreneurial in kind of the think tank space, the institution building space I think I would call it maybe if you'd agree with that. And so could you give us a little bit of an overview of maybe before I ask a bunch of questions related to this, the places you've been either physically in terms of location and how that's been important or the job itself and the different points in your career trajectory, but also just life that are different that have been diverse and kind of brought these, I don't know, different perspectives and have led you to where you are now.
Ryan Streeter (11:51)
Yeah. I realize my CV does look a little bit like someone with professional ADHD, and maybe there's something to that for me, it makes a lot of sense. There's through the lines and consistency in the different roles that I've had, I discovered very early on, probably about the time I was finishing graduate school and defending my dissertation, I learned that just looking at the job market, I was less interested in pursuing a traditional academic path and trying to get more in an area where policy was made. I'd never set foot in a think tank before I got my first job at one. I didn't really know very much about that world and it wasn't a part of my background, not a part of my family background. I didn't know anybody in that world. I had hardly met anybody who'd even done a PhD in what I was doing or PhD at all.
That was all kind of a new world to me. And I was just fortunate enough very early on to get hired at the Hudson Institute, met some people there and discovered very early once I was there that questions of upward mobility, particularly upward mobility for people on the bottom half of the income distribution was really interesting to me. I loved cities from an early age and was always interested in especially the opportunities for mobility in urban America and coming of age in college and graduate school in the 1990s when we'd gone through this major series of reforms starting with charter schools and school vouchers in the early nineties to public housing reform in ‘92 where the bill was passed, it really kind of started with Jack Kemp's ideas to tear down these huge public housing complexes and replace them with kind of mixed income neighborhoods and all of that.
There was community policing became a thing during that time, and the capstone was welfare reform in 96 or in the course of five years had these major reforms. Most of the seeds of those ideas were planted 15, 20 years earlier, mostly in think tanks and mostly places like the American Enterprise Institute or places like the Mercatus Center at George Mason University or the Manhattan Institute and these places where I just found myself consuming what those places were doing early on, which made me interested in those issues. So when I got to the Hudson Institute, I really kind of focused on those things and that really kind of set off just a trajectory of looking a lot at the intersection of the various drivers of upward mobility for people. So that led me into questions of preparedness for the workforce, so job training and all those kinds of questions, especially for people that don't go to college, how the welfare system discourages work, which was a big theme in the 1990s.
And we did a lot of post welfare reform studies when I was at Hudson on how it was going and what was making things successful. And that led me to a real preoccupation just with the nature of places themselves, because some people were doing well in places and people were not doing well in others. And we started to discover that there were these common features to what made people more successful, more civic institutions, stronger intact families, partnerships between employers and nonprofit organizations and all those things. And so I kind of got started studying all those things back then and have maintained pieces of that all kind of throughout my career in terms of what I've done, research on, what I've written about, what I've organized symposia on and those sorts of things. And so I've done that in the context of think tanks. I've done that in the context of being a policy advisor at all three levels of government, actually all in the executive branch, federal, state, and local.
And then in the various roles that I've had both in the university and in the think tank world. So those have been themes that you see popping up in my work, which just kind of flow from just a real basic interest in these kind of key questions of human aspiration, what makes people prepared to actually form a dream and pursue it and follow their ambitions. And I'm especially interested in how that works for people that are not highly connected, that didn't go to the fancy school bowls that didn't grow up in the high-powered cities with high-powered families. I'm interested in those questions for people in cities that are kind of on the outside of opportunity, people in the heartland that have missed opportunity. And so those have just been some prevailing questions throughout my life. And then secondly, aside from the substance of my interest, I just learned pretty early on that I had an interest in a little bit of a knack for building things, building programs, starting research programs and actual organizations themselves. And so for the last 15, 20 years I've been involved in most of what I've been involved in is in building something either from the ground up or within an organization. And so that takes time away from research and writing. I mean, there's a price you pay. I mean, I would have been a more prolific author over the last 15 years if I wasn't trying to start stuff. But I haven't been able to help myself because I really enjoy building teams, recruiting talent, making an impact, creating something that's bigger than myself,
Juliette Sellgren (17:16)
Ryan Streeter
Yeah, it's good.
Juliette Sellgren (17:22)
I feel like in a way, you're the best person to ask this question to. So I talk to a lot of economists. I am training to be an economist. I spend my time thinking about government in more of a skeptical light; that that's in part what I believe. But also economists I feel like have the somewhat fortunate, somewhat unfortunate task of pointing out all the unforeseen costs and unintended consequences of things. Even if you fall in favor of a certain policy or government action or intervention or whatever, you still have to acknowledge the cost. And we are big on that. And so even though you have a lot of economists who are optimists, they're often also very skeptical and it's kind of like a negative, I don't mean it negatively, but this would have this consequence and that you don't want that. And then on the other hand, there's also the public choice tradition of within economics of saying, well, even if the policy's okay, the people making the decision have different incentives, and so will you even ever get the policy you want? Or what other costs are you accruing just by the nature of having a decision making process, which is not a market, but I feel like you are well placed to answer my question of in what ways can this be good, in what ways does it work that maybe economists or skeptical classical liberal libertarians kind of look, when we look at it, what are we missing? Because you've been involved and you've seen it and you've been in it and out of it. And so what do we get? What do we get wrong?
Ryan Streeter (19:10)
Yeah, I mean the skepticism is well-founded and it's possible to be skeptical of the general way that governments operate in general, the way that policy gets made within them and still go work in them and try to do some good. So I entered these roles with a very similar view to just government operations and government itself as you hold. And I think you have to look at the role of policy makers in the world in which they live, not the one that you wish existed. And right now, many, many decades after Great Society experiments in 1960s, excuse me, we've accrued a lot that needs to be undone. And so I think that one of the most important roles, constructive roles for policymakers right now is undoing the stuff that is skewing incentives in such a bad direction in the private sector so that we can have more dynamism, so that we can have more merit, more effort, more people participating broadly in the good things about, in all the good things of our economy than currently exist.
And so I think I referenced the 1990s earlier, and I was just fortunate enough to be at an age where I was just getting started with my career when all that great stuff was happening. No one's really written as much about this as I think those years warrant that in many ways, 30 years after almost exactly to the year, 30 years after the Great Society was launched in the mid-1960s, you had sort of a great reworking of social welfare kind of apparatus. Now, it didn't end up shrinking the size of government all that much, if at all, but it produced, I think, much better outcomes for what those policies were intended to do. Now we can always argue about whether those policies should exist at all, and there are people who not very many people question today whether we should have charter schools. It's almost like that used to be controversial, unless it's really not anymore, unless you're a member of a teacher's union.
But that was an era of great reform, and I think we're in another era now where really I think the biggest problems, other than the fact that we've got an entitlement state that badly needs reforming because of how much we're spending just on interest on debt to keep the thing going. I mean, our entitlement reform, which has been off the table in the current administration, the previous administration, no one's wanted to touch it for over a decade just from a long-term problem for America. That's kind of the biggest one. But when it comes to the rest of government, I just think that the way that the federal bureaucracy at the state level, the same way that it's grown into the administrative state that we see existing now is just kind of institutionalized all kinds of cronyism, corporatism, regulatory capture. And so it's almost like pick your sector.
I mean so many aspects of American society that are really affected by the skewed incentives that policymaking has created. So I think there's a lot of positive work for people to do to try to start scaling that kind of thing back. And if DOGE had a consistent theory of the case, I'd be more excited. Right now there's kind of slashing and burning, but being able to actually go deep in certain agencies and certain policies to really kind of disentangle incumbent interests from the federal government and make it an equal playing field for people in whichever sector is most important to the economy right now, I think that's a worthy effort and that's going to be a worthy effort for the next generation.
Juliette Sellgren (23:01)
So as a builder, as someone who likes to build things and kind of watch this great reworking, but is also watching the current moment and has lived in a bunch of different places, can you feel, I mean, not only the risk aversion that you talked about really early on when we've been talking, but also kind of this, I want to call it mission creep, the accrual of all this cronyism and all of these other kind of barriers. I mean that's what we call them to entry and building. How has that affected your ability to build things, but also just people that you observe in different sorts of communities, different places as you've kind of over time, but over different locations also?
Ryan Streeter (23:51)
Yeah, I mean unfortunately there is kind of a common mindset that exists in any center of political power. It's almost like, I mean, Washington Premier is the premier just example of the kinds of people that are attracted into that place are attracted there as opposed to attracted to Austin, Texas where I live now, or Nashville or Chattanooga or Silicon Valley or something. People go there to be a part of this kind of large extended network. They may go there to change the world when they're young. That's often what people go there for. They want to do good in the world and they get a job on Capitol Hill working for a member or something like that. But the monster has gotten so big and has created so many opportunities for smart people to make a lot of money being connectors to people knowing who's in, who's out, having that connectivity that it's become kind of a culture unto itself.
And I moved to Austin a year and a half ago from Washington DC that was the second time we'd lived there for, we've spent about 14 years of our professional lives living in Washington over two different times. And I always describe Washington to people who haven't spent a lot of time there as this unplanned experiment over multiple decades where all the nations’ first row students moved into one place. It's like I think Washington is just full of first row students. They have answers. Their hands are always in there. They know stuff. They want to tell you stuff, they want to talk.
Juliette Sellgren (25:26)
That's me. Unfortunately, I'm sitting here like, oh, true.
Ryan Streeter (25:31)
Well, I'm being a little facetious, but I'm not being unserious. And look, one of my kids lives in Washington, has a good job there. Some of my best friends are in Washington DC so I'm not making a blanket referenced to anyone's character negatively by describing it this way. It's just that the kinds of opportunities exist in Washington, attract a certain type of person, and you get them all together. And if you spend too much time there, even if you're from the heartland, it's really tempting to gain this kind of posture of self-importance or that you just kind of are in the know more than your family members back in the heartland or people around the country. And one of the benefits of moving around is I've learned that one of the things I love about Austin is that if you get together with people socially, which people do here all the time, because a very kind of engagement kind of community, everyone's from somewhere else.
Everyone's got building and making and creating stuff. I find that people ask each other more questions here than I get asked at cocktail parties in Washington DC. When you're in Washington, someone typically asks you a question to kind of tee up something that they want to tell you or a point they want to make, which can make salon dinners really fun and really interesting and you got all these smart people around. But here, especially in a tech intensive economy where people are starting and building new things, you have to be a really good interrogator because you have to actually be able to ask a ton of questions if you're an investor or if you're starting a new company, you've really got to be able to drill down and answer every question about what you're trying to build for the future. And dispositionally, I just find that to be a characteristic of people here.
And when I lived in London, it's sort of the same thing. London's kind of like New York, LA and Washington DC all rolled into one city. It's this financial center, this political capital, a media capital, and it draws in all these people to global city. I always found living there to be a lot of fun too because people were just inquisitive about all kinds of things. People came from different sectors, and Austin is that way for different reasons. You find that in other US cities. And so I think we've made it too attractive for people with a lot of talent and knowledge to ply their hand at being managers of the extended administrative state and benefiting off of that rather than going out and creating and building and making stuff. And if there's anything I could change about the country overnight, if I could wave a wand and change one thing, it would be that is to see more talent moving away from centers of political power and out to other places that are more creative, where you've got more builders and more makers.
Juliette Sellgren (28:03)
The way you've just phrased that is one step closer to seeing that be reality. I mean, even I'm sitting here, well, I've lived there my whole life. Maybe it's time to get out of there. But let's talk about the places where people are building things and making things and doing stuff other than administrating kind of along the lines of something we were talking about earlier, but also kind of leaning into the building things. And on the expansive frontier, that being a good thing. Is there a science, right? So you said earlier that sometimes some people in certain situations in certain cities can make it and have mobility, but in other cities they're just not, even though maybe on face value it's the same. And so is there a science of the institutions that work of mobility of what leads to flourishing for people? Is there a science, is there a way to figure it out or does it depend more on the culture of the place and how do we kind of parse that out?
Ryan Streeter (29:19)
Yeah, those are great questions. I mean, I think the honest answer to the question is we just don't know a lot enough to even answer the question super well. Is there a science? Not really, except that there is quite a growing body of literature in economic and social science just on social mobility itself. And I mentioned those public housing reforms back in the early nineties. A part of that bill that created this big change in America's public housing was the funding of the study that now everybody knows Raj Chetty kind of associated with Raj Chetty at Harvard and his work on mobility. That study started with that bill where they've tracked families over a long period of time and what happened to them. And so you see a lot of adjacent research to those kinds of issues that he and his colleagues have written about that gets quoted a ton.
And so the building blocks of mobility that emerged not just from his work, but from other things, including some stuff that I've done or my former colleague at AEI, Scott Winship has done a lot of work on this as well. There's a bunch of other people as well that have done really great, great work. You see just barriers to being able to pursue opportunity in the form of housing costs and those sorts of things. And that's been attracting a lot more attention in the last decade. And when I first got involved in public policy, if you went to a conference and there was a panel on affordable housing, it was almost always a question about subsidies or tax credits. It's like the progressive wanted subsidies, the conservatives wanted tax credits, and it was all about trying to make expensive housing less expensive. That whole body of work has really changed the way the discussion's happening now, just around the way that we artificially inflate the cost of land and the price of houses because of land use restrictions and all of that.
So there's grown a really big consensus around that, what to do about it and how to change it kind of state by state is still, it's very nascent and there's not been a lot of progress, but people are now talking about the issue differently. And that's one, and the reason people are talking about it is because it's become very aware that one key kind of early driver of immobility and the inequality as you measure in a particular metro area is going to be whether people can actually move to where the jobs are. And if you're just starting out your career or you have requisite education to do something in a skilled trade, but the economy's growing mostly in an area where the housing around is too expensive, you'll make a decision not to go there as a result of that. So we know that people make choices based on cost of living decisions.
And then the other thing is immersion. A lot of this research, including Chetty’s, is just the importance of intact families and social cohesion at the neighborhood level. And so social capital is a real thing. If you grew up in a neighborhood for the first 10 years of your life where nobody had college aspirations, kids were getting in more trouble than doing well at school and all that, and then you move into a neighborhood and spend your teenage years there where you're around a lot of people where there's intact families, the kids are talking about what they're going to do to apply for college someday. That becomes a part of just the conversation. You start orienting your review of the future that way. And that was one of the findings from the study that I mentioned that came out was that kids that moved at a young enough age into a neighborhood where you had those dynamics, their outcomes are a lot like the kids that grew up in that latter neighborhood.
So social cohesion, a sense of the future where opportunities, a real thing that people are talking about around you is also another really key ingredient. But no, no one's really worked that out into a real science yet. But we do know that those things matter a ton. And it seems like just when we think we have identified where the labor market's going to have the biggest problems, then something happens that changes where we're concerned. When everyone was talking about the working class back when Trump got elected the first time to President and the Hillbilly Elegy had come out, the now vice president had written back then Charles Murray is coming out, Coming Apart, but everyone was talking about this divide in America and there was a lot of interest in workforce development, apprenticeships. Everyone was worried that robots were going to make working class jobs obsolete.
And then almost overnight when AI really kind of took off and exploded, then the whole chattering classes, the media were like, oh, no, it's our jobs that are at risk. It's like the fever pitch of concern about this issue shifted to the professional class jobs, the people writing the articles about it we're most worried about. And so it's in terms of where the problems are going to be the biggest in terms of who's going to be left behind in tomorrow's economy, we're always trying to diagnose that. And so there will be certain drivers of opportunity that are important maybe 10, 15 years from now that we can't really think of right now that have to do with some of this technology. But we do know enough that if the opportunity is better over there than it is where I'm sitting here right now, I should probably go over there.
And immobility geographically has become a bigger thing over the last 15 years. People are just moving less than they used to for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which we understand, some we probably don't. And that's a problem. And it's a problem especially for people on the lower end of the income spectrum who used to be the most mobile people in America, because if all the jobs went away in your town, the only way to fix it was to move somewhere. So when you see a lot of historical migration from certain regions of the country to others, there's that dynamic that's going on. And one of the problems we have in America right now is that even in places where the economies are declining or stagnating or flattening out in areas of the American heartland, not enough people are leaving them. It sounds brutal. People are like, well, what about family? What about cohesion? I'm like, yeah, those are all really important things, but so is the future cohesion and health of your family. And so when people stay behind in an area where opportunities dissipated, you get all these attendant social pathologies that kind of crop up too, that people spend a lot of time writing about over the last decade. So not quite a science, but some building blocks that have definitely emerged give us enough to work with in trying to make better decisions about policy. For sure.
Juliette Sellgren (35:43)
Okay. Tell us about Civitas, why you're there, what you're doing there, and how it relates to everything we've been talking about, because it's kind of adjacent, kind of different. Just introduce us.
Ryan Streeter (36:01)
Yeah, thanks. No, it's a really fun thing to be a part of. Civitas is part of a larger effort at the University of Texas at Austin to create a center of inquiry and a center of education at the university that is kind of squarely focused on these core values of the Constitution, the big ideas of western civilization of economics and how a growing economy is made possible and rolling them all kind of together. And Civitas is kind of best thought of as the think tank in this effort. And that's what I run. So if your listeners are familiar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University or the Hoover Institution at Stanford, what we're building at Civitas is something akin to those types of institutions. So we have fellows that we're recruiting that some are at other universities and they're affiliated with us. Some are moving here and joining us that do work on economic abundance and dynamism on the law and policy, what's currently in the courts and how it's going to affect the way American policy looks in the future in a whole bunch of different areas, a range of different policy papers from education to energy to startups and housing and all those kinds of good things will come out of the work that we do.
And the work that we do is really just focused on individual political and economic liberty full stop. I mean, that's just kind of our core charge and mission is to further our understanding of what makes individual political and economic liberty more possible, where there are threats to those things, what kinds of things we can do to change them. And right. The Civitas Institute is joined at the hip and housed within the New School of Civic Leadership, which is the 19th college at the University of Texas at Austin, and it was created less than two years ago and has a very capable staff and leadership. Justin Dyers, the dean of the school, we work kind of hand in hand on this effort together. And he and his team have done a great job of recruiting new faculty to come and teach at the school, which is offering a couple of minors this year and will welcome its first freshman class next fall.
So they're moving very quickly. And the degree program will be an honors degree in American Civics, so it'll have, for people who know what a British PPE degree is, it has a lot of common features with that where you're studying the big ideas of great books type big ideas on justice and goodness and virtue, and the institutions that support and make those things possible in our society, the US Constitution, economics, even methodological aspects to being able to do economics will be a part of what students are trained in. And so it's a great effort and we're welcoming the first freshman class in the fall, which means people are getting their acceptance letters now. So we're starting to see what that class is going to look like. And it has all the markers of being just a really great crop of incoming students who really are curious about these questions, who want to be at a place like this.
So it's been fun to build this, and I should cast this against a larger backdrop, which some of your listeners may be aware of, but it's worth making people aware of because I think it's actually one of the more interesting areas of reform going on in America right now where there's a lot of optimism, where there's a lot of energy, and that is we're part of what's becoming something of a movement. There's no central organizer. It's one of these great American things where states are starting to copy each other and people are going about the thing in their particular area a little bit differently, but they're all similar in the sense that they're new centers of learning on college campuses that have a mission very similar to what we have. And so you have new schools that are cropping up at typically large flagship public universities.
So there's one at the University of Florida, there's one at the University of North Carolina, there will be one soon at Ohio State University and a couple other universities in that system, and a few others are making announcements currently about doing something similar. None of us knows where all this will go in 10 years and which ones will be really big and which ones will be really small and all of that. But we've been growing and we've been growing for very real reasons because people have seen a real need for this. And the creation of these schools is in response to the loss of those kind of core values of individual political and economic liberty and what they mean for a curriculum in a lot of university campuses, the kind of ideological monocultures that exist on university campuses. All the things that people have been complaining about with a lot of justification over the last five or six years about what the culture on college campuses has become is it is the environment out of which this whole movement has kind of rung.
And what's interesting is that now that we are up and running and now that in the Hamilton Center now Hamilton School at the University of Florida is also up and running and building a big program, the others are not quite as far along as we are, you're seeing it attract a lot of faculty from around the country that you didn't even know about before. And so people are kind of coming out of the woodwork. People are saying, I'm kind of tired of the way the environment is on my university campus. I feel like I'm watching what I have to say. I feel like being able to do my out in the open in a way that I really believe is true and needed has just gotten a lot harder to do. So I want to be a part of this effort. So we're getting great applicants to teach in the school, and we've made offers to, and people have accepted, we've had a first crop of faculty come this year.
We just make offers to a second crop this next year. There'll be 20 tenure and tenure track faculty by year three in the school and other affiliated lecturers and non-tenure professors. And some of the people that are joining this effort are not people that you would've known about before that. They were toiling away, making a name for themselves, publishing a lot, doing great work at the university where they are, but they're moving here because they want to be a part of this community. And so we're seeing a lot of people are good citizens. We're attracting people that want to be a part of a really grounded community of inquiry with colleagues that share broadly the same values, even though they will disagree with each other on a whole bunch of issues and create an environment of actual civil discourse and debate that universities are supposed to have.
And so it's been exciting. I mean, I think because of the attention that the situation of universities has gotten across the country, it's made our effort kind of more energized and appealing for people. People see this and yeah, that's what we need. I want to be a part of that. And you've probably seen these articles about all northeastern families who are sending their kids to SEC schools or all the applications at SEC schools in the south going up. That's definitely true. I mean, we are seeing that here. Applications to the University of Texas are at an all-time high. We've got a lot of people from out of the state wanting to come here, and it's for a lot of these reasons, they want to be in a place where the academic environment is what you ideally think a university's academic environment should be. And it also helps to have a really great football team. True. And to be in Austin, which is really, really fun place to live. So we have all those added bonuses for what we're doing and maybe some of the other schools can't quite compete with.
Juliette Sellgren (43:44)
So there are two kind of strains that I see when you talk about this that I think are definitely related. But I'm wondering if you could kind of paint the picture of their relationship for me. I mean, you've already kind of spoken on this a bit, but just to do a little bit more. On the one hand, there's the output and the mission and the actual functional role within the university. And then on the other hand, there's the actual institution and the culture within thin that function. People want to be a part of this community. And there are elements of the social cohesion and all of that stuff and the way we treat each other and the way that we pursue things like academics, but also the mission of the core values of the Constitution, what drives economic growth, what about all this other stuff? And those two seem very clearly and logically linked in my mind, but I've never really been able to explicitly state it. So how true is it necessarily that they are almost inherently related, and how do you foster that? I mean, that's kind of your job is to make sure that that's the case and that it functions on the ground and not just in thought. So how do you do that? How do you make success when those two things need to work in harmony and one of them is really hard to create?
Ryan Streeter (45:20)
Yeah, it's a great question. There's kind of almost an inherent tension in these efforts from the very beginning in the sense that they're seen as a corrective to the way university campuses have become places where there's just too much agreement about specific issues, whether they're political issues, race issues, identity issues, those kinds of things. And so the schools that are being created at these institutions are seen as adding to the diversity of the university to the people on campus that welcome us and see us as a good thing. It's because there's this balance that's created where you're creating more intellectual diversity on campus, and there's people that see that as a necessary corrective. I would say the people that are attracted to what we're doing are much more interested in that environment within the school itself, within the school itself, that we're creating an environment where on the one hand, we do share a core commitment to the principles that underlie the institutions that make American public life possible.
So we're going to attract people who generally see the founding documents in America as a good thing. They will have disagreements about what the individual provisions mean. I'm publishing a really great debate as a paper probably in the next week by three First Amendment scholars where this thing started out as an email exchange where they have disagreement, they're very prominent, and they have disagreements about religious liberty issues, and they're working out their disagreements in this kind of dialogue that we're publishing, which I think is great. All of them are committed to the importance of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. All of them have built careers around trying to properly understand it, but they have disagreements about this very important provision, which we think by publishing will help people understand where the tension points are and how the courts have interpreted around these issues over time.
And so I think we're going to attract a group of people that really care about that conversation viewed across the broader landscape of the university. It's seen as bringing greater ideological diversity to the university, but the people that are really involved in this effort and coming here are interested in having these kinds of aspects of debate within the school itself. So commitment to kind of core classical liberal ideas, and we're glad that we provide greater ideological balance on campus. But I'd say most the people that come to this effort are really interested in kind of modeling the kind of civil disagreement, debate inquiry, the spirit of inquiry, heterodox thinking within the institution that we're creating. And we think that's what students should be exposed to. And we think if you're going to be building an institute into something like a think tank, it should have those features within the very work that it produces. So I don't know if that really answers your question,
But those are the thoughts that come to mind that I thought would be interesting for people to understand because we have people on the outside of the university that really like what we're doing, and they support it and they're excited, but they're really excited because they see it as, it's like, finally we've got a counterweight all this stuff at a university that we don't like. And I think that's a healthy response for people to have right now. We are providing that, but then when you walk within our world, that's not what we're spending our time talking about every day. We're actually trying, we're grounded in these core principles and trying to help students and help readers of the kinds of things that we publish, really understand what the core issues are, what should really guide our thinking about everything from policy to how we educate our kids going forward. And that's what motivates people to sign up and be involved. And so those things aren't necessarily in tension with each other, but in terms of how people understand what we're doing, they do affect how people think about it, if that makes sense.
Juliette Sellgren (49:14)
Yeah. It's just a result of what the principle, on the one hand, it's acting on and embodying all of these things. We talk about civil society, which we say are good, but then are you doing it and you guys are actually doing it? And then the result of that is that there is disagreement and there is a counterweight just because that's maybe what the world should look like. And so the direction does matter. That is exactly what I was asking about. So thanks for that, and thanks for all the super thoughtful responses and the wisdom and taking the time. I have one last question for you, and that is, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?
Ryan Streeter (50:10)
Yeah. So not to end on a dark note or a downer note, but I think at the beginning, it often ends up that way at the beginning. Yeah, I'll be like the economist that you have on your show who are typically cheerfulness is not a, when I began my career, sort of like postgraduate school, getting into the world of policy and think tanks and ideas and public service and all those things, I assumed, and this seemed confirmed by the people that I had met, that people who work in these areas where you're influencing how the media thinks or you're in the media or you're decision makers and policy people that have influence through decisions. When they make decisions, they influence other people's lives. So in the halls of Congress or in the White House or in the pages of the most read op-ed pages and all that kind of stuff, the people who are responsible for doing that work, and that's where I've spent most of my career is with people like this.
I assumed early on that even the people I disagreed with kind of hardcore progressives on the other side of the spectrum from where I was philosophically, I assumed, I always assumed from the start that people were in, those areas were there because they had really strong principles. They were principled people and they rose to the ranks that they were in. They chose that profession over other things. They were really driven by a consistent set of principles that they really believed were true and important. And unfortunately, I've come to believe over the course of my career, that group of people that's truly principled, whatever those principles are on the right or the left or whatever, is a lot smaller than I thought it was. That interest still is a really big driver of what people do. And so when it comes to purity in policy or even ambitions for what you think you can get done when you're trying to do good in the world, it's affected.
It's made me a little bit more pessimistic of our ability to make really big changes just because in the end, I find that the group of people that are truly making decisions consistent with what they know is true or what they believe is true is just smaller than I thought it was. It's certainly, it become evident to be in our politics. I think it's definitely true in the academy. And I think on the flip side, part of the reason, if you could sense any enthusiasm in my voice at all about what we're doing here, I think that's actually why at this point in my career, I just love what we're doing here at the University of Texas because we are drawing principled people to this effort. We're drawing good people to this effort. We have a no jerks rule. We use a different word around the office, but we try to hire people that are also good people.
And so I'm fortunate enough now to be working around a kind of growing group of people that I consider to be very principled, and I've been fortunate enough in the various places I've worked to be surrounded by people who are very principled. It was that way at AEI. It was that way at Legum. It was that way. When I've worked for Bush or Pence or all these other things, I was always been fortunate to be surrounded by really good people. But I've had to work harder to find those people because I've found that people change their principles when it's convenient or hold to things that they know aren't true because it gives them a certain social status or it makes their job possible, and they don't actually really believe what they say they believe. They just kind of have to believe it in order to maintain the position of power that they have where they are. And so I'm sorry to have learned that lesson throughout my adult years, but it's actually worth thinking about when you're making decisions early on your career path about where you're going to work and who you're going to surround yourself with.
Juliette Sellgren (53:56)
Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.
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