What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

American higher education is facing a crisis of ideological homogeneity. According to a recent survey, 72% of conservative faculty fear losing their jobs due to their speech. This alarming trend can partially be blamed on accreditation agencies. Since 2020, there has been a concerted effort to push diversity, equity, and inclusion policies into college accreditation, threatening the autonomy and values of heterodox institutions. To navigate this challenge, these institutions can look to the historical Western College Society, which, despite its imperfections, offers a model for colleges to provide funding and quality control for themselves.Accreditation and DEIThe government does not freely provide funds to all colleges. Instead, a college must be approved by an accreditation agency. These

In the last section of his Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises laments the loss of the “critical sense” that protected people from authoritarianism (Mises 1944, 108). According to Mises, this was the fault of the bureaucratization of education, which taught students falsehoods, especially in economics (Mises 1944, 82). A prime example was the academic class in the German Empire, which formed an “intellectual bodyguard” (Mises 1944, 82) of the empire’s policies.However, Mises wrote his book in 1944 before bureaucracy dominated American universities. In 1950, students were divided evenly between public and private colleges (Edwards 2000, 130), compared to 77 percent of students going to public universities today. America is undergoing the bureaucratization that Mises warned of. Yet this is not