The Roosevelt Institution
STANFORD
Progressive students start new think tank
Roosevelt's goal is to pool expertise, offer policy papers
Dave Murphy, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 27, 2005, Page A-17
When a presidential election leaves you smarting, create a think tank.
That's the strategy of hundreds of Stanford University students, who are assembling what they call the nation's first student think tank, the Roosevelt Institution, which offers analyses and suggestions on public policy issues.
"We wanted to see new ideas coming from the progressive side of the political spectrum," said institution President Kai Stinchcombe, who is studying for his doctorate in political science. "We sensed that there was sort of a vacuum there. There wasn't really an organized way for us to get involved in the policy process."
Stinchcombe said the decision came partly as a response to the re- election of President Bush in November. Stanford students began discussing the strategy a couple months ago and created a Web site (www.rooseveltinstitution.org), then drew about 400 students to their first public forum this month. Colleagues at Yale University have joined in, while students at Columbia University and Bates College are expected to follow.
"The more buzz we get on campus, the more buzz we get nationally," said Roosevelt Executive Director Quinn Wilhelmi, a sophomore public policy student. "I don't know if our goal is a Roosevelt Institution on every campus, but it's a Roosevelt Institution in every state."
The institution's name pays homage to former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as Franklin's wife, Eleanor, but also manages to tweak Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover. Although Hoover has a national reputation and five Nobel laureates among its fellows, Wilhelmi believes in the collective efforts and wisdom of the students.
"I believe we are at least as smart as the typical Hoover fellow," he said.
But Wilhelmi acknowledges that for the students to be taken seriously, the items they publish must be thoroughly researched and documented. "We are looking to build credibility for ourselves."
Hoover research fellow Bill Evers said the students will have challenges because they don't have an endowment or a building or a paid staff, and it will be difficult fitting in-depth research into their collegiate schedules. But he also has seen some student efforts, such as the Stanford Law Review, that are good enough to compete with professional publications.
Wilhelmi said Roosevelt has put together a business model and will seek money from private donors and foundations.
His Stanford group has created a dozen centers, each having six to 50 fellows and focusing on one policy area, such as justice, race and immigration, and religious perspectives. Students from different grade levels and majors will combine their research, Wilhelmi said, offering diverse approaches.
Stinchcombe said that in many cases, students already have expertise through class work. Take Jenny Tolan, a senior international relations major who received a Stanford grant to study for nine weeks at the Masoyi Home Based Care Project in Mpumalanga, South Africa, which treats AIDS patients and orphans.
She learned why married women in Africa and Asia are often more vulnerable to AIDS than single women are: Their husbands are unfaithful, and because women are treated like second-class citizens, they may not be able to insist on using condoms. So when she wrote a paper on her experience and how the spread of AIDS could be limited, she had to go beyond that typical precaution.
Among her recommendations are more reliance on female condoms, which men are less likely to reject, and the development of a microbicide, a spermicide- type gel that women could use to protect themselves from HIV. Experts believe such a gel could be developed in five to seven years, she said, but it needs more funding for research and development.
She made the recommendations in a paper to her teacher -- not to the wide audience that Roosevelt hopes to reach. "I never really thought about it as a policy recommendation," she said.
But people at the Roosevelt Institution certainly do. "She's the person who could well know the most in the world about this," Stinchcombe said.
E-mail Dave Murphy at dmurphy@sfchronicle.com.
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