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Chronicle of Higher Education > Roosevelt Home > In the News > Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Wonk This Way
3/2/2007
The Roosevelt Institution seeks to spread students' ideas, one policy brief at a time
By PAULA WASLEY
Quinn R. Wilhelmi, a reedy 22-year-old with shaggy hair, has come to inspire a crowd of college students. But they have come to hear someone else.
On a Monday evening, 50 students, most of them interns on Capitol Hill, listen intently as Bobby Shriver, a California lawyer-cum-politician and son of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, shares anecdotes from his political career. After the speech, as the auditorium starts to empty, Mr. Wilhelmi walks to the front of the room and asks for five minutes of the students' time. Only about a dozen remain in their seats.
Mr. Wilhelmi introduces himself as a dropout from Stanford University, a remark that elicits blank looks from this room of high achievers. But as he starts his pitch, the students perk up.
They learn that Mr. Wilhelmi is president and co-founder of the Roosevelt Institution, a two-year-old national nonprofit group that bills itself as the first-ever student think tank. They hear that his organization's purpose is to "rescue" students' ideas, now often languishing on hard drives and in filing cabinets, and get them into the hands of policy makers, one brief at a time.
Mr. Wilhelmi sells the idea of a student activism that is nationally organized yet locally focused, innately political but free of any single agenda, all-inclusive yet intellectually elite.
Like any activist worth his salt, Mr. Wilhelmi is asking these students to spend their college years changing the world — but in decidedly wonky ways. Forget the timeworn tactics of placards and protests on the quad. The Roosevelt Institution wants students to go to the library, put themselves on the front lines of policy research, and marshal all their networking might in the name of young people's unexploited intellectual capital.
At the end of the session, four or five students stay to ask questions and trade e-mail addresses with Roosevelt Institution representatives. Mr. Wilhelmi is philosophical about the modest returns. "It's always a crapshoot as to whether you're going to get a good audience or not," he says. "But we do this sort of thing all the time for 20 kids, and that's plenty."
The Roosevelt Institution was born of post-election malaise. Mr. Wilhelmi says many students at Stanford awoke on November 3, 2004, politically engaged but disappointed with the limited role students had played in the election.
"Politics asks us for our energy," he says, "but we are not often asked for our ideas."
Mr. Wilhelmi and a handful of like-minded Stanford students drew inspiration from the university's own Hoover Institution, the influential conservative organization founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover. They believed that the research and writing they undertook for classes could have real-world applications.
With students from Middlebury College and Columbia and Yale Universities, they created a national student organization that invoked the progressive ideals of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
The group's mission is twofold: to publicize students' ideas to legislators and to serve as a training ground for future leaders. Mr. Wilhelmi hopes the Roosevelt Institution can help unearth ideas like those of Wendy Kopp, whose 1989 senior thesis at Princeton University contained the kernel of an idea that grew into Teach for America, the enormously successful program that trains college graduates to teach in public schools.
"Every college student has one of those ideas in four years," Mr. Wilhelmi says.
Two years into the enterprise, the Roosevelt Institution has active chapters on about 45 campuses and fledgling branches on 80 more.
It has raised $400,000 in grants from left-leaning nonprofit organizations, such as the Open Society Institute and the Bauman Foundation, secured the sponsorship of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and gained the support of influential political and academic figures. William J. Perry, the former secretary of defense; Richard F. Celeste, president of Colorado College and former governor of Ohio; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation,among others, sit on its advisory board.
Although several of its founders cut their political teeth as Democratic campaign volunteers, the organization shuns party politics and liberal labels, emphasizing instead the progressive platform of its Republican namesake, Teddy, and its efforts to reach a political cross section of the student body.
The backbone of the think tank is its campus-based policy centers, groups of students who research, analyze, and propose policy solutions on a range of topics, including energy and agricultural policy, voting rights, and international security. The best of those ideas are published in a national student policy journal, the Roosevelt Review, which the group hand-delivers to Congressional offices and government agencies. Other ideas get exposure through the organization's online policy database, local and regional policy "expos," and publication in campus-based journals.
On the theory that students can have the greatest impact at the grass-roots, the Roosevelt Institution encourages its campus chapters to tailor their efforts to the needs of their local communities. At Yale last spring, students presented the mayor and the city's Board of Aldermen with an economic analysis of a proposed amendment to New Haven's living-wage law. The 48-page report concluded that an increase in the minimum wage, which is still under consideration by the city, would not harm local businesses.
At the University of Georgia, Deep J. Shah, a junior, was skeptical when a professor first suggested, in 2005, that he start a Roosevelt chapter. Mr. Shah figured few of his peers would want to devote time to extracurricular research and writing. But the unexpected crowds at the chapter's first informational meeting changed his mind.
A pre-med student, Mr. Shah was concerned about issues affecting his chosen profession, such as the cost of health insurance, but he had assumed there was little for him to do about them. He figured he would get his M.D. and, he says, "probably become part of the problem."
Then he started doing some research. At the Roosevelt Institution's first national symposium on disaster policies, held last March at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mr. Shah and two other Georgia students presented a paper on preparing hospital support workers for medical emergencies.
The paper, which was later published in the Roosevelt Review, argues that educating nonclinical hospital employees about diseases such as anthrax and avian flu and vaccinating them against those diseases would help keep hospitals functioning during a medical or bioterrorism crisis.
One year after Mr. Shah founded the chapter, the Georgia group now has 50 students who meet regularly to talk policy.
So far, the Roosevelt Insitution's influence is difficult to quantify. But the organization has attracted high-profile supporters. At an October conference on socioeconomic diversity in higher education at Yale, the Roosevelt Institution introduced a lineup that include some of academe's heavy hitters — including William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton, president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Anthony W. Marx, president of Amherst College — to speak with 100 students about such hot-button issues as financial aid and admissions policies.
According to Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, Jeffrey Brenzel, who helped the students organize the event, no one who was invited to speak refused, despite short notice.
Mark E. Boren, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a historian of student activism, says the Roosevelt Institution heralds a new level of sophistication among student organizations. "Historically, student activism has been issue-specific," he says. "Student groups have done think-tank-like things before, but because they have had to be centrally located, historically they're always reinventing the wheel, and their issues have had to be very local."
He believes the Roosevelt Institution's most innovative — and canny — strategy is marketing students as a demographic with political appeal and utility to policy makers. "It's not your mom and pop's student organization," he says.
For one, the Roosevelt Institution is more polished than its ragtag predecessors. The organization has a spiffy abstract logo, a professional-grade Web site, and an organizing manual that includes tips on soliciting cash and food donations and hiring English majors to edit policy papers.
Even its name has received the Madison Avenue treatment: According to the organization's business plan, the group ran a "brand personality" focus group to assess the appeal of its name. It found that students unfamiliar with the Roosevelt Institution nonetheless ascribed to it traits such as "academic," "intellectual," "noble," and "patriotic."
Not Like SDS
The Roosevelt Institution shares little in common with activist groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the 1960s-era leftist student organization that resurfaced in 2006 to mobilize a groundswell of student opposition to the war in Iraq. The SDS focuses on direct action, relying on familiar tactics like posting flyers and organizing public demonstrations.
Patrick R. Dunn, a graduate student at the University of Chicago and regional organizer for the SDS, notes the structural differences between his group and the Roosevelt Institution. "We are an anti-authoritarian organization about engaging people at the local level to interact with other people in their communities," he says. "They have a board of directors and a leadership model where people with insider connections in Washington and within the business world are critical in keeping the organization afloat."
Mr. Wilhelmi responds that his group is the opposite of hierarchical, and he notes that a former SDS president sits on the Roosevelt Institution's advisory board. "In fact, our organization is grass-roots, democratic, and highly diverse," he says. "Our staff are not at the top of the organization but rather at the bottom of the organization. What we do is put resources underneath and empower students in a way that elevates them."
As president, Mr. Wilhelmi's job is to muster those resources. From the Roosevelt Institution's headquarters here, just around the corner from the Brookings Institution and other established think tanks, Mr. Wilhelmi, who pays himself a small stipend, spends his days lobbying potential donors, shoring up his network of sponsors and advisers, and offering advice to chapter presidents and visiting fellows. A hyperarticulate young man with evident conviction, he has mastered the art of speaking in well-honed sound bites.
Mr. Wilhelmi is not really a college dropout. He is on a leave of absence from Stanford University. A junior majoring in religious studies, he expects to return to the campus in the fall. After that, he would like to try his hand at business, or write a book, or maybe become a minister. One thing is for sure. "Politics," he says, "is in my blood."
Powers of Persuasion
Members of the Roosevelt Institution use their powers of persuasion as much to enlist supporters as to achieve policy goals. Among the converted is Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
When Stanford students first asked him to join the Roosevelt Institution's advisory board, Mr Diamond was skeptical of how much time students would devote to formulating policy and of the organization's prospects for sustaining itself. "The problem with student organizations," he says, "is that students leave."
But the Roosevelt Institution has impressed him with its creativity and pragmatic strain of idealism. Mr. Diamond, who now sits on the advisory board, has identified a key challenge for the organization: to replenish its ranks with students like Mr. Wilhelmi.
Taking Mr. Diamond's advice, Mr. Wilhelmi says he plans to replace himself with a permanent staff of "grown-ups." For now, he spends his days doing what many people in the nation's capital do: shaking hands and trading business cards.
Before leaving the auditorium after his speech to the Capitol Hill interns, Mr. Wilhelmi asks a friend to critique his outfit, a black suit that hangs long and loose on his thin frame. Then, with a reporter in tow, he rushes off into the night.
As he darts through the streets of Washington, Mr. Wilhelmi recaps his organization's talking points. His breathless monologue ranges from the scholarly to the hip, dovetailing references to Barry Goldwater and the rise of think tanks with the political messages of Schoolhouse Rock, the popular animated television shorts. "That's a cartoon I'd like to make some day, 'How an Idea Becomes a Bill,'" he says. But now it's almost 9 p.m., and the young wonk is late for another meeting.
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