History
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." 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, |
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Past ISI president and former Reagan administration official T. Kenneth Cribb led the institute from 1989 until 2011, when current president Christopher G. Long took over. Cribb is credited with expanding ISI's revenue from one million dollars that year to $13,636,005 in 2005. 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. 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, 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.
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“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
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