IPS at 10 years

The Institute for Policy Studies was formed by a group of men each of whom had come to Washington between 1958 and 1962 to work in or on the edges of government. In their work and in talking with each other they found that their experiences and efforts in Washington changed their views of government and society. These men were in their 20s and 30s, all were white, all were university-trained. They had come to Washington believing that the American governing process was mostly responsive to public pressure and public needs; they found that the government was chiefly responsive to institutional interests that were divorced from public need. They wondered whether the major institutions of American life had not become inimical to the life and safety of the public. They had come believing that their educations were reasonably accurate in describing the United States - even in describing human behavior - and reasonably helpful in providing analytical tools by which to understand both; they discovered that both descriptions and analytical tools had to be totally remade if they were to be able to understand the world of policy, politics and power. But most important, they did not shrug off their discoveries: they listened carefully to the changes within them and decided to act upon them.

Their action focused around two perceptions:

• that government had become unresponsive and destructive in large part because all fresh political ideas and moral truths were smothered in the bureaucratic process; and
• that the universities were churning out false images and ideas because they insisted that social action be kept totally distinct from social theory except where it served the status quo.

So they decided there should be a place for thought which was

1. outside and independent of the government, taking no government funds, though capable of studying its behavior and talking with government officials in seminars and task forces, and
2. based on the premise that social theory must be informed by, as well as inform, social action.

They believed that it was time for a new kind of scholarship - public scholarships devoted not to a small body of students alone, but to flowing, changing communities out of the general public - communities which chose to be in touch and learn with such public scholars and provide them with the social basis of independence and creativity. By the fall of 1963 they had been able to bring together enough money from small and middle-sized foundations to open the Institute for Policy Studies. They also secured the help and support of a group of colleges and universities. The Institute began with nine Fellows, all men, and five secretaries, all women. The first major deepening in the Fellows' feel and social outlook came in 1964 with the arrival of several students from the Deep South, all Black activists in the non-violent civil rights movement. They came to be taught, but they were also teachers. They imparted an existential - and critical - understanding of oppression and desperation felt in parts of American society, a stronger urgency, and a feel for streets and fields rather than campuses and office buildings. Some of them became Fellows of the Institute. From 1965 on, as the Vietnam War expanded, intensified and illumined the American society, young white critics of government policy also found the Institute an important place to study and think; and they too taught the Fellows their sense of urgency and their outlook on organizing.

Through the late 60s, the Fellows of the Institute found their audiences expanded through their books, lectures, articles and teaching. They were heard by the growing number of citizens and scholars trying to change the country's direction. More and more the Fellows found it important not only to write and teach but also to work with or develop new projects that were trying to create a small space for life-giving, democratic process: an underground newspaper, a health collective, a new religious government, a popularly based regional planning and research collective. They also developed a technique of power-structure research and exposé that made it possible for citizens generally to understand the destruction raining down upon them while creating their own alternatives. Some of them developed the Institute into a center for a more accurate assessment of the Cold War. And some developed the philosophy and practice of reconstructing which caused a new way of understanding relations of institutions to people. The language of colonization was applied to the American situation. Fellows encouraged and aided in the development of long-term projects and institutes in New York, Gary, Atlanta, San Francisco, Cambridge, Mississippi, Columbus, Ohio, West Virginia, and transnationally. The newest such project, "the Transnational Institute for a New Society", is being established in Amsterdam as an on-going project of IPS, to do research on the relations of industrial countries with the Third World on the behavior of global corporations, and on the meaning of social upheaval in advanced industrial countries.

From 1964 to 1969, besides government officials and members of Congress who were members of its seminars, the Institute drew a number of students who flowed from campuses and from various colleges and universities, but their work was not organized in conventional academic ways. Students often spent their first few months at the Institute wandering like tops, set spinning by the initial shock of not having a rigid time-schedule set either by academic fiat or external demands. Then most of them settled down around a particular research or social invention project and started highly individual work - much like the Fellows. The Fellows taught them by being models, sometimes involving them in their own researches, sometimes carefully tutoring, sometimes encouraging them to undertake their own project. But many of these students and some of the Fellows grew increasingly uncomfortable at the notion that these students were being taught, and after cycles of agonizing over the diefferent modes of contact between student and Fellow, the Institute decided to change its program and recognize that at least some of the students were functioning as Fellows. As a result, some of the students were chosen to serve as Visiting Fellows.

This decision plus decisions to add to the faculty substantially increased the number of Fellows, and the number grew again in 1972 when the Fellows, troubled by the small number of women who had been Fellows, appointed five women as Fellows. This required a considerable increase in the budget. This increase proved difficult to sustain, however, so that the whole number of Visiting Fellows 1973-74 dropped from eight to one and the total number of women Fellows from five to two. In December if 1973, the Institute Board of Trustees examined the question of women Fellows and decided, despite budget restrictions, to increase the body of Resident Fellows by three additional women by October 1974.

Along with the increase in numbers, there was an even greater increase in the spread of subjects and areas being explored by the Fellows. Projects in workers control of blue-collar workplaces; the power of multi-national corporations; insurgent religioug communities and movements; the uses of story-telling in the creation of Black identity among young children; the structure of knowledge; and changes in sexuality and the family - all areas not only new to the Institute but different in tone and approach from the original research areas - were among those being undertaken by 1972. Styles of work among the Fellows diverged greatly. Public scholarship took on new meanings as the understanding of the Fellows deepened, as their work was challenged and criticized, as scholarship and standards in citizenship changed in the United States, and as Fellows at the Institute attempted to find fundamental rules and laws of social conduct and institutional change. Some Fellows continued to pursue the issues of policy studies that had been the norm in 1963, while others worked on questions much more closely connected to intimate communities. Suggestive work was pursued in institutional analysis and character, film, health policy, political theory, psychology and religion.

Other factors also contributed to a more diffuse and potentially more creative atmosphere. In 1972, the Institute decied to link a new student program with the Union Graduate School, a decentralized university headquartered in Yellow Springs, Ohio, but connected with a number of colleges, universities, and research centers around the country, in setting up a program of studies leading to the PhD degree. The PhD candidates - who had a more clearly worked-out relation to particular Fellows than had the earlier students - increased still more the numbers and range of research work being carried out at the Institute. So did the increasing tendency of the Institute to hire as secretaries people who in fact shared or paralleled the research and social invention interests and capabilities of the Fellows. This tendency also resulted in increasing involvement of the Staff in making decisions about the future of the Institute. And increasingly, Fellows and Staff experimented with new patterns of more collective projects in which Fellows, secretaries, and research assistants worked side by side.

Thus the period from 1969 to 1972 was one of expansion in the size, range of subjects, and range of work-styles of the Institute. At the same time the research and experience of the Fellows were moving them in the direction of a more fully worked out view of society than the one with which they had begun. They had begun by connecting the government's destructiveness with its bureaucratic processes and university's mystification with its separation between social action and social theory - both issues of method rather than interest or direction. By 1972 most of the Fellows had concluded from their work that a concentration of cast power in the hands of a few had become typical of the American policy, economy, and culture, and that the structures of racism and militarism, the exhausting workplace and the exhausted family, the mandarin university and bureaucratized religion, deforested and depeopled Appalachia and devastated Vietnam, were results if this concentration of power. The bureaucratic and objective-neutral methods of government and academy permeated the larger structure and process of governing the country - not simply as modest tangential contributions or ends in themselves, but as a means of clothing the violent nature of American life. On the other hand, most of the Fellows developed an analysis that saw decentralization of power into workable communities governed by all democratic participation as a necessary part of any life-enhancing future. This was an impulse shared by many scholars and activists all over the United States. In their various arenas of research and social invention, most of the Fellows began more clearly to focus on community-oriented alternatives (rather than, say, centralized socialism, the corporate state, or laissez-faire individualism) that might emerge from the present situation. Thus, during the same time in which the range and amount of Institute work was increasing and thus placing some strain on internal communication, the convergence in the results and implications of independent research and social invention carried on by the Fellows and their projects was increasing as well - so that a different kind of intellectual sharing was becoming easier.

By 1972, this dialectical process of wider dispersion and deeper agreement had combined to make workable the notion of an "Encyclopedia of Social Reconstruction: Plans and Practice for a New Society". For at this point it finally seemed that the breadth of interests at the Institute might now shift to development of alternatives that would be sharp enough to make an Encyclopedia not merely an inert collection of cold facts, but an array of what might be called hot facts: iidea-facts with power to shape both understanding of the social processes of regeneration and the reconstruction of society.

By 1973, therefore, almost ten years after the Institute opened, its Fellows believed that with the help of dozens of work-groups of scholars, journalists and interested activists, they were ready to attempt a five-year project to comprehend and explain American society and to develop practical reconstructive alternatives which grow out of our present condition.

The Institute Fellows and Staff, while they develop the Encyclopedia, will of course continue their other researches and practical projects. Seminars for government officials will continue, and the student program will take on new dimensions as a result of the Encyclopedia project and the Transnational Institute.