Educating for Liberty

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute was founded half a century ago to defend traditional liberal education in American colleges and universities against the onslaught of leftist ideologues. With its myriad of lectures, journals, fellowships, books, seminars, and mentoring programs, ISI 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.

In this absorbing, fast-paced book, Lee Edwards, the pre-eminent historian of the conservative movement, details how ISI has inspired the minds of collegiate conservatives for decades and prepared them to defend the American and Western patrimony in public office, research organizations, the media, and the academy.

You will meet in Educating for Liberty the remarkable men and women behind ISI and their vision for renewing higher education in America. Long before the advent of "compassionate conservatism," ISI promoted a robust humane conservatism through the works of Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and others. The Institute has also served as an open forum for traditionalists, neoconservatives, and classical liberals to debate the nature of American conservatism.

Edwards tells the dramatic story of ISI's original focus on combating socialism, its resistance to the cultural crisis of the 1960s and the 1970s, its battle against political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s, and its answer to the renascent anti-Americanism on college campuses after 9/11. ISI's unwavering mission from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism has been to lay the intellectual and cultural foundation for ordered liberty in America and to help the West triumph in the clash of civilizations.

The founders of ISI hoped their work would give rise to a better future for their children's children. In this superb history, Edwards recounts the rich fruits of their unremitting labors but cautions that the struggle to transmit the cultural and intellectual heritage of America and the West is unending.