The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or (ISI), is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. Its members, over 50,000 college students and faculty across the United States, 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 traditions. The group supports "limited government, free market economy, and Judeo-Christian moral traditions".[1]
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.
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Although ISI does not have any official partisan or religious affiliation, the Institute tends towards paleoconservative and traditionalist conservative 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, ie, classical liberalism) to meet the needs of a classical education. Further, the organization fights what it perceives as political correctness and liberal (in the modern sense) 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.[2]
In 1953, Frank Chodorov founded ISI as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, with a young Yale University graduate William F. Buckley, Jr. 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."[3] President Reagan has expressed himself in the same direction:
| “ | By the time the Reagan Revolution marched into Washington, I had the troops I needed—thanks in no small measure to the work with American youth ISI had been doing since 1953. I am proud to count many ISI products among the workhorses of my two terms as President. | ” |
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—Ronald Reagan, [3] |
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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.[4][5] Charity Navigator 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.[6] In 2010, they gave ISI a 4-star rating for the 7th consecutive year, which is a result only one percent of charities accomplish.[7]
One of the principal intellectual fathers of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was Russell Kirk, 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.
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.[8]
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.[9] 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.”[1].
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."
Intercollegiate Studies Institute operates ISI Books, which publishes books on conservative issues and distributes a number of books from other publishers.[10] 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 evolution.[11] ISI's book club offers a selection of some 200 books.
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.[12] 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 Events.
The top five "very worst":
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":