Arthur Brooks: ‘I’m going to stay at it’
Arthur Brooks is now contemplating a fourth career.
Before becoming the president of the American Enterprise Institute nine years ago, he’d already had two successful careers, first as a professional French horn player and then as a tenured professor.
Next summer, he’ll leave AEI, one of the most influential conservative institutions in the country. This was announced last month at an all-hands meeting.
His planned departure isn’t a huge surprise to colleagues familiar with his academic work. In his research as a professor of public administration, Brooks concluded that organizations work best when the head doesn’t stick around for longer than a decade.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner in his office in downtown Washington, Brooks says he hasn’t figured out his next step. It could be returning to academia, or going into business. It could be something as different as his first two careers were from his third, although he wants to stay in the world of ideas. “We’ll see what the market will bear,” he said. “I don’t know.”
His successor, he says, should be someone not exactly like him, because another pitfall for organizations is making the mistake of trying to recreate success — which he’s had.
Under Brooks, AEI has grown significantly and moved into a large new home on Massachusetts Avenue, a renovated 1917 Beaux Art building that was once the home of Andrew Mellon, the billionaire businessman of the early 20th century.
AEI has also risen to the top among think tanks, according to Brooks, on the metrics that he uses as proxies for influence, including op-eds published at major newspapers and the frequency at which its scholars are invited to testify before Congress.
He himself has risen to prominence on the Right. He’s a guru to movement conservatives, as well as to many high-ranking Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Brooks has written best-selling books that aspiring D.C. conservatives use as guides and the latest of which GOP presidential candidates, most of them at least, had no choice but to read.
He has one more, a 12th, in the works for before he leaves office. “Unity: A Manifesto” will come out early next year.
“The biggest problem that we have in America today is disunity,” Brooks said.
Partisans are blowing small ideological differences out of proportion, he says, and fixating on them at the expense of agreeing on common ground.
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