Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or (ISI), is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953. Its members, over 50,000 college students and faculty across the United States, 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. The group is known for having distinctly American Conservative views.

1 Core values
2 History
3 Programming
4 Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century
5 See also
6 External links
- 6.1 Criticism

[edit] Core values

Although ISI does not have any official partisan or religious affiliation, the Institute tends towards paleoconservative and traditionalist 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 (in the traditional sense) to meet the needs of a classical education. Further, the organization fights what it perceives as 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, when the organization was known as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. Current ISI president and former Reagan administration official T. Kenneth Cribb has led the institute since 1989, and is credited with vastly expanding ISI's revenue.^{[citation needed]} One of the principal intellectual fathers of the Intercollegaite Studies Institute was Russel Kirk (1918-1994), who secured a place for the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke 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 (Regnery, 2004).'

[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 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 as well. 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]. It also holds other events, such as conferences, that feature prominent conservative 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. 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, Canada on the theme of “Law in the Western Tradition: Common, Constitutional, Natural, and Divine.”[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] 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.

The list is available available here.

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 top five "very worst":

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