Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) was founded in 1953 to further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political, and ethical values that sustain a free and humane society. With ISI’s volunteer representatives at more than 900 colleges, and with more than 50,000 ISI student and faculty members on virtually every campus in the country, ISI directs tens of thousands of young people each year to a wide array of educational programs that deepen their understanding of the American ideal of ordered liberty.
ISI annually conducts more than 300 educational programs around the country, including lectures, debates, student conferences, and summer schools. ISI also offers graduate fellowships for aspiring college teachers and distributes more than three million copies of ISI books, journals, and affiliated student newspapers on college and university campuses across the country. These programs work at different levels and in different ways to nurture in the rising generations an appreciation of our nation’s founding principles—limited government, individual liberty, private property, a free market economy, personal responsibility, and ethical standards.
ISI is a non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt educational organization. The Institute receives no funding or any other aid from any level of government. For more information about ISI, visit our website at www.isi.org.
In 2003, ISI launched a new initiative, the American Civic Literacy Program, designed to study and strengthen the teaching of America’s history and institutions at the college level. During the fall of 2005, ISI contracted with the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy (UConnDPP) to conduct an annual national survey in order to learn to what extent colleges and universities are teaching America’s history and institutions to undergraduate students.
The American Civic Literacy Program is governed by ISI’s National Civic Literacy Board.
