Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or (ISI), is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953. According to ISI, more than 50,000 college students and faculty across the United States are members. As members, these individuals take advantage of programs designed to supplement a collegiate education and to provide access to resources that will help one achieve a genuine liberal arts education, which the organization defines as an education based primarily on the works of influential men and women in the European and Christian traditions.

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[edit] Ideology

The organization is typically considered paleoconservative, with Roman Catholic affiliations. In fact, the very reason given for the existence of ISI is that education in the modern university is insufficiently liberal (in the traditional sense) to meet the needs of a classical education. Further, the organization fights political correctness and liberal bias among campus professors.

In a 1989 speech to the Heritage Foundation , the ISI President, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., 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.[1]

[edit] History

A young Yale University graduate, William F. Buckley Jr., was ISI's first president. The current president, T. Kenneth Cribb, a former Reagan administration official, has led the institute since 1989 and is credited with vastly expanding ISI's revenue.

[edit] Programming

ISI runs a number of programs organized to fight alleged political correctness and liberal bias on collegiate campuses. First, it organizes campus conservative groups into a national overhead organization 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 [2].

In providing what ISI calls a "classically liberal education" to its member students, ISI runs other programs. It publishes a number of "Student's Guide to..." books, for example A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning, providing a classical introduction into several disciplines [3]. Second, it holds events such as conferences that feature prominent conservative speakers and academics, and provides funding for students to attend these conferences. With some of the funding, ISI is affiliated with the Liberty Fund.

Every year, ISI holds its summer Honors Program for exceptional conservative students, and offer transportation and room and board free of charge for students to participate in a colloquium usually held in Oxford, England [4].

In the summer of 2005, ISI Books, the imprint of ISI, published It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, 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 (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."

[edit] The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century

ISI published in 1999 a list of the fifty books that they they consider the worst and the fifty that they consider the best, among the nonfiction books of the 20th century originally published in English.

The is available available at http://www.mmisi.org/ir/35_01/50worst.pdf .

[edit] The Fifty Worst Books of the Century

For this list, ISI defined "worst" as "books which were widely celebrated in their day but which upon reflection can be seen as 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 Events.

The "very worst":

  1. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
  2. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935)
  3. Alfred Kinsey, et.al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
  4. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)
  5. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)

The "rest of the worst" (in alphabetical order):

[edit] The Fifty Best Books of the Century

For this list, 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 "very best":

  1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
  2. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947)
  3. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)
  4. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932, 1950)
  5. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (1934-1961)

The "rest of the best" (in alphabetical order):

[edit] See also

Collegiate Network

[edit] External links


[edit] Criticism

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