A conservative home on campus.(Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute )(Book Review)

Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute By Lee Edwards Regnery, 343 pages, $27.95

Liberal observers of the conservative resurgence on American college campuses are beset by the vague feeling that national conservative groups are taking advantage of conservative students. The New York Times Magazine's infamous article, "The Young Hipublicans," offers examples of this dubious view of right-leaning students. Author John Colapinto's skepticism about the thoughtfulness of campus conservatives dominates the article, and he implies that young conservatives are pawns of right-wing activist groups whose interest lies simply in furthering conservative policies rather than teaching students to be clear thinkers.

Colapinto wrote that groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), Young America's Foundation, and the Collegiate Network "spend money in various ways to push a right-wing agenda on campuses." This heavy-handed judgment does an injustice to these groups, and particularly to ISI, founded in 1953, which has been called the intellectual anchor of the conservative movement for its emphasis on deep scholarship of the Western tradition. In Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Lee Edwards offers a sympathetic history of a group that has shaped modern conservatism by promoting education in the classics, and by putting a higher premium on independent thought than on politics.

ISI founder Frank Chodorov actually gave up voting in Presidential elections, "arguing that politics was not the solution, but the problem?' Digging into the letters and public writings of other key figures at ISI, Edwards offers an intellectual portrait of conservatives who realized that any political activism must be grounded in philosophy, history, and virtue, rather than an over-concern with current political issues or simple economic individualism.

Educating for Liberty recounts the growing pains that affected ISI and all of the intellectual Right in the 1950s and 1960s. ISI originally bore the more libertarian name and philosophy of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. It took a more traditional turn due in part to prodding from ...