Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, use programs intended to supplement a collegiate education and provide access to resources that help achieve an education based primarily on works of influential men and women in the European and Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
traditions. The group supports "limited government, free market economy, and Judeo-Christian moral traditions".
ISI's flagship journal, The Intercollegiate Review, is sent to students and teachers free of charge. ISI also publishes two other scholarly journals, the quarterly Modern Age, and the annual The Political Science Reviewer, as well as a web journal, First Principles.
Core values
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Paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism is a term for a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity. Chilton...
and traditionalist conservative
Traditionalist Conservatism
Traditionalist conservatism, also known as "traditional conservatism," "traditionalism," "Burkean conservatism", "classical conservatism" and , "Toryism", describes a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and...
positions. The influence of several important twentieth-century Roman Catholic thinkers is also apparent at ISI. In fact, the very reason given for the existence of ISI is that education in the modern university is insufficiently liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
(in the traditional sense, ie, classical liberalism
Classical liberalism
Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets....
) to meet the needs of a classical education
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
. Further, the organization fights what it perceives as political correctness
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
and liberal
Social liberalism
Social liberalism is the belief that liberalism should include social justice. It differs from classical liberalism in that it believes the legitimate role of the state includes addressing economic and social issues such as unemployment, health care, and education while simultaneously expanding...
(in the modern sense) bias among campus professors.
In a 1989 speech to the Heritage Foundation
Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. Heritage's stated mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong...
, the ISI President, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr.
T. Kenneth Cribb Jr.
T. Kenneth Cribb Jr. is a former Presidential advisor—to President Ronald Reagan—and currently the president of the traditionalist conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute....
, stated:
We must...provide resources and guidance to an elite which can take up anew the task of enculturation. Through its journals, lectures, seminars, books and fellowships, this is what ISI has done successfully for 36 years. The coming of age of such elites has provided the current leadership of the conservative revival. But we should add a major new component to our strategy: the conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus...We are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming.
History
In 1953, Frank ChodorovFrank Chodorov
Frank Chodorov was an American member of the Old Right, a group of libertarian thinkers who were non-interventionist in foreign policy and anti–New Deal...
founded ISI as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, with a young Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
graduate William F. Buckley, Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
as president. E. Victor Milione, ISI's next and longest-serving president, was the enterprising individual whose efforts realized Chodorov's plan through publications, a membership network, a lecture and conference program, and a graduate fellowship program.
Over the years, ISI has established itself as a leading conservative educational organisation. In its own words, it "is today the educational pillar of the conservative movement and the leading source of information about a free society for the many students and teachers who reject the post-modernist zeitgeist." President Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
has expressed himself in the same direction:
Current ISI president and former Reagan administration official T. Kenneth Cribb has led the institute since 1989, and is credited with expanding ISI's revenue from one million dollars that year to $13,636,005 in 2005. Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator is an independent, non-profit organization that evaluates American charities. Its stated goal is "to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America's largest charities."-About:...
gives ISI an overall rating of 61,51, which is in the range of "excellent". They note that 84.4% of expenses go to program expenses. In 2010, they gave ISI a 4-star rating for the 7th consecutive year, which is a result only one percent of charities accomplish.
One of the principal intellectual fathers of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
, who secured a place for the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
in American conservative thought, with an emphasis on the role of prescription in political and social life, and an opposition to utopianism. The history of ISI during its first fifty years (1953-2003) is narrated by Lee Edwards in Educating for Liberty.
Programming
ISI runs a number of programs organized to fight alleged political correctnessPolitical correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
and liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
bias on collegiate campuses. First, it organizes campus conservative groups under ISI and maintains contact with the groups. Second, it holds the yearly "Polly Awards" which sheds media scrutiny on questionable campus events across the nation.
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
speakers and academics, and provides funding for students to attend these conferences. In this funding capacity ISI is affiliated with the Liberty Fund.
Every spring, ISI invites applications for its Honors Program
The ISI Honors Program
The Honors Program is an undergraduate fellowship offered annually by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute since 1995. It is a selective year-long academic program that offers fifty undergraduates an opportunity to receive personal intellectual mentoring from professors committed to an exploration...
. Open to undergraduates in all disciplines, the Honors Program offers blue-chip students the opportunity to study the roots of Western Civilization with the best and brightest faculty and students. ISI has offered over 500 Honors Program fellowships to students from across the United States since the program’s inception in 1995.
ISI Honors Fellows receive an invitation to a week-long all-expenses-paid summer conference, personal intellectual mentoring, a library of ISI books, and invites to weekend colloquia throughout the academic year. The 2007-2008 ISI Honors Program Summer Conferences were held in Québec City
Quebec City
Quebec , also Québec, Quebec City or Québec City is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec and is located within the Capitale-Nationale region. It is the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about to the southwest...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
on the theme of “Law in the Western Tradition: Common, Constitutional, Natural, and Divine.”http://www.isihonorsprogram.org.
In the summer of 2005, ISI Books, the imprint of ISI, published It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good
It Takes a Family
It Takes a Family is a 2005 book by then Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. The title is a response to the 1996 book It Takes a Village by then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the book, Santorum states that the family structure is necessary...
, by Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum, which premiered at #13 on the New York Times best sellers list. The controversial book gained the focus of state and national attention during the unsuccessful 2006 reelection campaign of Senator Santorum.
One of ISI's stated goals is placement of conservative and libertarian student newspapers on major college campuses in America. ISI administers the Collegiate Network
Collegiate Network
The Collegiate Network is a non-profit, non-partisan tax-exempt 501 organization that provides financial and technical assistance to student editors and writers of almost 100 independent, conservative and libertarian publications at leading colleges and universities around the country. The project...
(CN), and each year, the CN provides financial and technical assistance to a network of member publications.
In the fall of 2006, ISI published the findings of its survey of the teaching of America's history and institutions in higher education. The Institute reported, as the title suggests, that there is a "coming crisis in citizenship."
ISI Books
Intercollegiate Studies Institute operates ISI Books, which publishes books on conservative issues and distributes a number of books from other publishers. The rate of publication is about 20 books per year. Focus is largely on the humanities and the foundations of Western culture and its challenge by political correctness. The Founding Fathers have been highlited in a series of books, as have a number of modern thinkers. Publications also include material arguing against the scientific principle of evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
.
Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century
ISI published in 1999 a list of the fifty books that they consider the worst and the fifty that they consider the best, among the nonfiction books of the 20th century originally published in English. ISI defined the "worst" books as those that were "...widely celebrated in their day," but on reflection are "...foolish, wrong-headed, or even pernicious." The list of worst books has several books in common with the list of harmful books published by the conservative magazine Human EventsHuman Events
Human Events is a weekly American conservative magazine. It takes its name from the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence...
.
The top five "very worst":
- Margaret MeadMargaret MeadMargaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
, Coming of Age in SamoaComing of Age in SamoaComing of Age in Samoa is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth on the island of Ta'u in the Samoa Islands which primarily focused on adolescent girls. Mead was 23 years old when she carried out her field work in Samoa...
(1928) - BeatriceBeatrice WebbMartha Beatrice Webb, Lady Passfield was an English sociologist, economist, socialist and social reformer. Although her husband became Baron Passfield in 1929, she refused to be known as Lady Passfield...
and Sidney WebbSidney James Webb, 1st Baron PassfieldSidney James Webb, 1st Baron Passfield PC OM was a British socialist, economist, reformer and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. He was one of the early members of the Fabian Society in 1884, along with George Bernard Shaw...
, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935) - Alfred KinseyAlfred KinseyAlfred Charles Kinsey was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, as well as producing the Kinsey Reports and the Kinsey...
, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human MaleKinsey ReportsThe Kinsey Reports are two books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others and published by Saunders...
(1948) - Herbert MarcuseHerbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
, One-Dimensional ManOne-Dimensional ManOne-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a book written by philosopher Herbert Marcuse, first published in 1964....
(1964) - John DeweyJohn DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, Democracy and EducationDemocracy and EducationDemocracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education is a book written in 1916 by John Dewey. .Dewey's philosophical anthropology, unlike Egan, Vico, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Nietzsche, does not account for the origin of thought of the modern mind in the...
(1916)
ISI defined "best" as "volumes of extraordinary reflection and creativity in a traditional form, which heartens us with the knowledge that fine writing and clear-mindedness are perennially possible."
The top five "very best":
- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry AdamsThe Education of Henry AdamsThe Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams , in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately...
(1907) - C. S. LewisC. S. LewisClive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
, The Abolition of ManThe Abolition of ManThe Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," and uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of...
(1947) - Whittaker ChambersWhittaker ChambersWhittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
, WitnessWhittaker ChambersWhittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
(1952) - T. S. EliotT. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Selected Essays, 1917-1932Selected Essays, 1917-1932Selected Essays, 1917-1932 is a collection of prose and literary criticism by T.S. Eliot. Eliot's work fundamentally changed literary thinking and Selected Essays provides both an overview and an in-depth examination of his theory...
(1932, 1950) - Arnold J. ToynbeeArnold J. ToynbeeArnold Joseph Toynbee CH was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934–1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global...
, A Study of HistoryA Study of HistoryA Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961, in which the author traces the development and decay of all of the major world civilizations in the historical record...
(1934-1961)
See also
- Center for the American IdeaCenter for the American IdeaThe Center for the American Idea is the leading program of the Free Enterprise Institute, a Houston-based think tank, founded in 1976 by Rolland Storey to advance the principles of liberty and free enterprise through continuing education programs for teachers....
- Collegiate NetworkCollegiate NetworkThe Collegiate Network is a non-profit, non-partisan tax-exempt 501 organization that provides financial and technical assistance to student editors and writers of almost 100 independent, conservative and libertarian publications at leading colleges and universities around the country. The project...
- Traditionalist conservatismTraditionalist ConservatismTraditionalist conservatism, also known as "traditional conservatism," "traditionalism," "Burkean conservatism", "classical conservatism" and , "Toryism", describes a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and...
Literature
- Lee Edwards: Educating for Liberty. The first Half-century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Washington, DC 2003, Regnery Publishing. ISBN 0-89526-093-X
External links
- ISI Homepage
- ISI's Report on Higher Education
- ISI Honors Program
- First Principles--ISI Web Journal
- The Lee Edwards Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives contains several oral histories about the ISI.
Criticism
- Right-Wing Welfare Digitas. March 1996.