ISI Still Stands for Timeless Truths

I just arrived home from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Summer Honors Program and if anything can give you hope for Western Civilization it is this annual gathering of 50 students from different educational, religious, and conservative backgrounds aimed at immersing themselves in Russell Kirk’s classic The Roots of the American Order (1974).

So I was a bit befuddled to come across a recently published lament for the decline of ISI into a polarized and politicized organization. The article is by a former Honors Fellow, who remembers his own experience of study, intellectual exchange, and deep conversations while on the program ten years ago with great fondness. But he believes that in the past decade, ISI has gone the way of all flesh—losing its “its antiquarian, tranquil appreciation of great books” and the liberal arts for an all-consuming obsession with current events and contemporary politics.

I was actually a faculty mentor for the Honors Program the author attended, and I have continued mentoring these college students for the past 10 years. I believe one has to even out the narrative of ISI’s “decline” somewhat on both ends.

First of all, ISI has never been so apolitical as the author remembers. ISI has always been concerned to help students connect the dots between discussions of the philosophical and theological principles found in Great Books—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Locke, Montesquieu, Lincoln—with questions about the current health of our own social and political regime. Two Jewish college students sitting at a dinner table at a recent ISI seminar addressed this issue rather well. One from Yeshiva University in New York said that this ISI conference was really the most political conference he had ever been to; he himself was really only interested in theological questions. The other, from Stanford, responded that the ISI conference struck him as altogether more philosophical and theological than he had expected; his interests were strictly political. 

That exchange struck me as summing up the space that ISI occupies in the world of conservative programming for college students. Too philosophical for some, too political for others—attempting to get political folks to dig down to philosophical principles while getting academics to connect a few dots from their world of ideas to current policy concerns. ISI does not push particular political positions, so much as it tries to model for students how to derive policy from principle with some attempt at integrity. ISI’s president, John Burtka, has published a book on models of statesmanship, which is completely in line with this continued emphasis on combining the life of the mind with the engaged political life.

Secondly, ISI has not “sharply shifted” away from Great Books and liberal arts conversation towards politicization, presentism, and activism. The author’s evidence? He notes that Patrick Deneen, a critic of liberalism, or Michael Knowles, a talk-show host, were on the schedule of speakers this year. Notably, the author selects only two of 10 in the line-up of speakers for disparaging comment, but more importantly, perhaps the author was unaware that Deneen addressed competing interpretations of Plato’s Republic and Knowles led us in a deep dive into Dante’s Divine Comedy. Deneen discussed whether Plato has been or should be read as a utopian or anti-utopian thinker; Deneen was not “reading Plato to attack proponents of immigration.” Michael Knowles was discussing Dante’s travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven and the necessity of finding good guides like Virgil and Beatrice, Bernard, and the Virgin for one’s lifelong intellectual quest, not presenting “conspiratorial screeds about how Marxism is controlling America.” 

I think our author would actually have been surprised and pleased with the Honors Program. Seeing these names on the roster of speakers, he has constructed straw-men and has raised bugaboos about their effect on the conversation at the program. Anyone who actually attended the conference might have found too much theological discussion—even from the “political provocateur” Michael Knowles who immersed himself in Dante—not only the Divine Comedy, but Convivio, De Monarchia, and De Vulgari Eloquentia! Perhaps ISI is still doing what ISI does best, what our former Honors fellow remembers with such nostalgia, which is luring even users of the fast-paced, click-driven media to sit down for a week-long intellectual conversation about Great Books and long evenings devoted to contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But the author goes on to make two further and deeper points about ISI’s intellectual trajectory that deserve attention. He is not just concerned with politicization and polarization in the abstract. No, that complaint is a prelude to a more specific ideological concern. He accuses ISI of losing its capacious focus on “high-minded conservative liberalism,” which he defines as “defending the idea of a restrained national government, local democracy, and free markets,” which he says are “three principles general enough to allow people of drastically different political persuasions to coexist harmoniously.” The author issues a warning that ISI is now “fawning over nationalism”—“an ideological orientation inimical to the principles that undergird ISI in the first place.” He warns that ISI is now “indoctrinating” students in a “simplistic narrative” of “the nationalist right” that is opposed to both the pluralism of local customs and the international rights regime of liberal universalism.

But ISI has not deep-sixed the capacious framework of Russell Kirk’s Roots of the American Order for some sort of simplistic right-wing narrative. Indeed, the entire Honors Program continues to be organized around the complexity of a Western inheritance rooted in five heritage cities—Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. Rather than being simplistic, this flexible framework is occasionally unwieldy precisely because of how multi-valenced the inheritance of each of those cities is. 

Kirk himself is incredibly ambitious in his attempt to sum up briefly the inheritance of represented by “Jerusalem”—the Law and the Prophets, the history of the Jewish people, and the striking transformation from a strictly linear or monotonously cyclical sense of time and history make up his brief 20-page chapter on “Jerusalem.” If you devote one day to discussing Kirk’s text along with several primary sources to accompany it and invite two speakers to try to flesh out what Kirk gives us and what Kirk might have left out, one still has only scratched the surface, ripped the band-aid of unwitting ignorance off, and tried to launch students into a program of lifelong learning. What are we to do with an “Athens” chapter that treats Solon and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, but makes no mention of Homer, Herodotus, or the great tragedians? Two chapters on Rome—Rome classical and Rome Christian—only reveal the tip of the iceberg regarding the relationship between republic and empire or the effect of Augustine’s Two Cities on thinking about church and state relations. What can one say about London—medieval London, Protestant London, Enlightenment London, and Imperial London—in a single day of discussion and speakers? 

The author is very much mistaken if he thinks the upshot of the ISI Honors program week is simplistic indoctrination or chest-thumping nationalism. Any child of the twentieth-century rightly abhors nationalism, but one must distinguish between nationalism and healthy patriotic concern for the regime under which one currently lives. An ISI Honors program week is the very opposite of simplistic nationalism. ISI provides a wild and whirling tour of intellectual questions and provocations to further study—concerned with the local, the national, the civilizational, and the global contours of a just, well-ordered, flourishing, free society.

Finally, and most importantly our author thinks that ISI has fundamentally caved into right-wing nationalist political activism because it has capitulated to cultural despair and given up on political hope. This is a grave and legitimate concern in our current political moment, and I do not wish to treat it lightly. At first the author asserts that “ISI has always been remarkably good at cleaving to the brightest parts of Western Civilization.” The “decline of ISI,” he tells us began with a recent turn towards cultural pessimism in the past decade. Presently however, author abandons his own narrative of the former health and current decline of ISI and seems to intimate that in his eyes—appreciative former Honors fellow or not—ISI’s program was vitiated from the beginning: “The American conservative movement was founded on a narrative of decline,” he writes, “For all of its many virtues, ISI bought into the 20th-century conservative narrative of decline lock, stock, and barrel. This began with its founding.” 

“Ultimately ISI’s emphasis on decline could only ever end in indoctrination, nationalism, and tragedy,” he declares.

I would challenge this interpretation of ISI’s institutional DNA and narrative of inevitable decline, by once again directing attention to Russell Kirk’s Roots of the American Order as the classic work that gives a framework to the conversation ISI promotes. Kirk pits the idea of progress and the idea of decline against each other and does not easily sacrifice one on the altar of the other. Anyone who has read both Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress and Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History knows that neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on cultural hope or cultural despair. The entire thrust of Kirk’s Roots is that with a civilizational heritage so deep and so rich, we have no right to despair of finding the bright threads of tradition, the living stream of culture, in our Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman past. 

Only presentist amnesia and ignorance of the rich tapestry of our own complex past can issue in violent, radical despair. Kirk’s entire historical project is a project of cultural hope—an argument that there is something worth “conserving.” As Chesterton said, a patriot does not fight because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. Far from being despairing, Kirk has even been occasionally accused of naïve optimism in the possibility of finding a coherent tradition on which to graft our cultural hope. The thrust of Kirk’s history is civilizational and the patriotism he promotes is capacious. 

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute continues doing what it does best—rectifying our ignorance of the richness of the history of Western Civilization and thus inspiring hope and patriotism for the continuance of genuine liberty.