A Student Think Tank Comes of Age

Three years ago, in the wake of the 2004 election, we all had a sense that something was wrong with our democracy.

After Barry Goldwater's ignominous defeat in 1964 the conservatives had gotten organized and by 1980 were on the warpath. Since that day, it seemed, progressives had been stumbling around blindly -- either trying to obfuscate the debate, looking like wusses, or eagerly helping conservatives to undo all the progress of a fifty-year national consensus Roosevelt had begun with the New Deal.

In those heady days, Howard Dean had showed grassroots activism could counter the traditional conservative individual-donor advantage, the Rappaports were getting folks together and Rob Stein was on the road with his famous powerpoint, the Center for American Progress was forming, and works like Don't Think of an Elephant and the Death of Environmentalism essay were making the case that single-issue advocacy wasn't enough to fundamentally shift American values. Words like infrastructure, values, ideas, media, and think tanks were the bread and butter of the progressive lexicon.

At the time, I had just returned from leading a group of 135 Stanford students to knock on doors and turn out John Kerry voters in Nevada. After catching up on some long-overdue homework in a diner in Las Vegas on November 3, I returned back to my dorm room in Crothers Hall -- literally in the phallic shadow of Hoover tower -- to think about what was next.

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At the base of that tower is a plaque explaining that it is the only federal monument to president Herbert Hoover. Small wonder. Though Hoover's ideas -- that Americans would be better without "communistic" programs like like Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FDIC -- had been seen as widely discredited by the 1932 election and the subsequent success of the New Deal, in that one lonely tower the spark had apparently been kept alive. Now, re-popularized by organizations like the Hoover Institution, we saw plausible efforts to take apart Social Security and gut the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If organizations like Hoover had restored the dream of a do-nothing government presiding over the economic ruin of middle class America, it was clear that we needed a "Roosevelt Institution" to bring back America's problem-solving spirit.

"How do we fight Hoover's resurgent right-wing rubbish?" I asked every email list I had access to on campus. "Roosevelt's 1932 solution: don't get mad, get even." We thought students would be an ideal source of bold new ideas and creative solutions. The full design capacity of the Roosevelt Institution, as initially conceived, was forty-eight students -- eight working groups of five student researchers each supported by a communications and administrative staff of eight student volunteers.

We were having a meeting two weeks later on the floor of my dorm room, putting together a one-page brief for the Open Societies Institute, Soros' progressive policy foundation. "Roosevelt Institution: the nation's first student think tank," it read at the top. "Are we really the nation's first student think tank?" someone wondered. I responded that we had all been doing a lot of reading and if there was another one, by that point someone in the room would have heard of it. A hand went up. "My friend at Yale started a student think tank."

The next morning I was on the phone to Jesse Wolfson of Yale University and we became a national organization. It turned out that student think tanks had also started at Oberlin, Cornell, Brown, and a couple other schools, and wanted to join up. Soon we had seven or eight dots on the map. We also got in touch with the Roosevelt family to make sure they didn't mind what we were doing. The word came back from Anne Roosevelt in Chicago: "We've been waiting forty years for this to happen."

Our launch event at Stanford in February was covered in the Stanford Daily; the San Francisco Chronicle read that and did a story, and the New York Times read that and did a story. All of a sudden the phones started ringing, and by May we had chapters in a dozen states. I and another Stanford student, Quinn Wilhelmi, took a leave from school to become full-time staff, and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which Anne Roosevelt had put us in touch with, offered to host a summer conference to get the team together.

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Two years later, with seven thousand members the Roosevelt Institution is at more than ten thousand percent of the original design capacity. Having formed stable governance structures, programs, staff, and funding sources, we've evaded many of the obstacles facing young organizations. Organizationally, we've made it.

But I think for the first time with the Policy Expo last month (video from our machinist friends at right)

, we've also shown that students can in fact form a policy think tank that produces real, useful policy in a systematic way. We released seventy-five student-authored policy ideas to solve three pressing challenges facing our generation: clean energy, access to higher education, and the work-family squeeze. Thirty-nine presentations were given at the Expo, which was attended by the heads of EPI, PSO, APSA, officials from CAP and MacArthur, and by Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Mike Honda. This wasn't "see if you can pull some folks together for a proof of concept," this was a model that worked.

We've had meetings with legislators and given testimony in DC and in the state houses; we've coauthored articles with "grown-up" policymakers and published volumes of "grown-up" policy journals; and our student fellows have been cited in the media and gone on to take important positions in government and the progressive movement.

Just as the blogosphere has re-empowered the citizen-journalist, the Dean movement and its aftermath have re-empowered the citizen-donor, and MoveOn and others have re-empowered the citizen-lobbyist, the Roosevelt Institution has re-empowered the citizen-policymaker -- in this case, the student policymaker.

By lifting up new voices, the progressive movement and organizations such as Roosevelt have brought new energy to progressive politics. At the Roosevelt Institution's third annual chapter leadership retreat, again hosted at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, a group of students again gathered to refine the Roosevelt chapter model and to select which policy challenges to work on in the coming year.

More importantly, perhaps, they immersed themselves in the legacy of Franklin, Teddy, and Eleanor Roosevelt, great progressive leaders who were not afraid to shy away from bold solutions to the problems of the day. Under that banner the students will go forth to chapters around the country, encouraging students propose ideas for a new, post-industrial New Deal that will once again provide strong communities, a strong economy, strong international partnerships, strong families, and a strong nation to Americans who can feel that, even in this global age, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.