Troy University Professor Dr. Allen Mendenhall has accepted a position with the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, based out of Washington D.C.

Mendenhall has been a professor at Troy since 2020 and serves as Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor of the Sorrell College of Business. He’s also the Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. He’ll begin his time with the Heritage Foundation in May. 

“I have really enjoyed my time at Troy, in particular have enjoyed the students that I’ve taught in the Free Enterprise Scholars Program that we ran at the Johnson Center,” Mendenhall said. “It has been incredibly fulfilling and rewarding and we’ve now had three years of students going through that program. It’s been really exciting.

“If it weren’t for that program, I probably wouldn’t have been hired by the Heritage Foundation to begin with. It’s because of the success of that program that I even drew the attention of the Heritage Foundation at all.”

The Heritage Foundation approached Mendenhall after he was awarded for his work at Troy University. 

“It was not an opportunity I was looking for, it was one that came to me somewhat by surprise,” he said. “I was a recipient of the Heritage Academic Freedom Prize two years ago and as a part of that I traveled to (Washington) D.C. and met with many people that work at Heritage and really fell in love with that place.”

A think tank is a research institute that performs both research and advocacy on particular topics. The Heritage Foundation was founded in the 1970s and has played a major role in the conservative movement in the United States since that time. Mendenhall said that the Heritage Foundation stood out to him from other think tanks.

“I respected the work of the Heritage Foundation and appreciated what they were doing and its commitment to meaningful change,” Mendenhall emphasized. “So many think tanks in D.C. will produce policy papers and general kinds of work products but don’t really care as much about actual change as they do going through the motion. 

“Heritage was not just going through the motions, it was really trying to have an impact on society and that meant working through Capitol Hill and journalism and media and it meant producing important studies that were useful to people out there in the working world.”

While Mendenhall does not have his specific title with the Heritage Foundation yet, he has his eyes set on the corporate world.

“My exact title and job description are to be determined but I will be working on issues involving Corporate America and the capital market, more specifically issues such as ESG,” he said. “I’ll continue to work on other issues that are important to me, like higher education. I’ll be doing many different things like researching, writing, doing media appearances, a little bit of fundraising, development work and coalition building and networking. It will be a wide-ranging position.”

ESG is stands for environmental, social and governance. It’s the framework that assesses how a company performs in those three areas and is an investing principle prioritizing those factors. ESG will be a focus for Mendenhall.

“I am generally opposed to the ESG movement for many reasons,” Mendenhall continued. “No. 1, I think it pushes companies into political causes when companies don’t need to be there. Companies already help society be a better place by producing goods and services, hiring people and creating opportunity in communities. These are important functions and for corporations to get sidetracked into political work is wrong.” 

Mendenhall and the Manuel H. Johnson Center launched its Free Enterprise Scholars Program in 2022 in an effort to “end wokeism” in the corporate world. Free Enterprise Scholars participate in the Johnson Center’s fall and spring reading groups, attend a monthly Johnson Center event and write an op-ed about free enterprise along with take a Moral Foundations of Capitalism course, attend academic conferences and take field trips.

“ESG is very difficult to explain in a succinct way because it involves not only an investment strategy where by different companies are screened out out of different investment portfolios, but it also involves corporate engagement where companies are buying shares of publicly traded corporations and then trying to engage or push those corporate boards into politics in a way the corporation wouldn’t have been otherwise,” he said. “As an example, if you see a corporation so-called ‘going woke,’ you might look to whether some of its shareholders are activists who are buying shares of the companies for the sole purpose of pushing the company into political activism that is irrelevant to its actual business model.”

While the Heritage Foundation is based out of Washington D.C., Mendenhall will remain in Alabama and focus his efforts on the Southeast.

“I would like to continue the Heritage Foundation’s efforts to affect change, especially in the Southeast region,” Mendenhall said of his goals. “The Southeast often gets written off by think tanks in the conservative movement as sort of an automatic red state win, but the reality is a lot of state legislatures, and legislators, are much more purple than the Electoral College map would suggest. There is a lot to be done on the state and local level, not just in Alabama but throughout the Southeast, and I’m excited to work on some of those issues.”