O U R    H I S T O R Y

ISI was established in 1953 to convey to successive generations of college youth an appreciation for the values and institutions that sustain a free and virtuous society. In two articles appearing in the early 1950s, ISI's founder Frank Chodorov outlined "a fifty-year project" to reform the university and society in favor of freedom. Chodorov chose a celebrated Yale University graduate, William F. Buckley Jr., to be ISI's first president. With the success of God and Man at Yale and the founding of the National Review soon after, Buckley later relinquished the position of president to Chodorov himself. From the beginning, 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.

In much less than fifty years, the work of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was already bearing fruit as ISI alumni assumed positions of leadership in the Reagan Administration. T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr. became ISI's president in 1989 following a distinguished career in the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice. Through his leadership, ISI remains the bedrock conservative organization educating each generation of American youth "for liberty."