For over seventy years, the fundamental mission of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has been to identify, educate, mentor, and launch the next generation of leaders, committed to the virtues of Western and American civilization. Through digital media, conferences, lectures, seminars, summer schools, and faculty affiliates, ISI’s network touches hundreds of campuses and thousands of students around the country, conveying the principles of ordered liberty. And at ISI’s newly expanded national headquarters in the Brandywine Valley, we equip and connect students, faculty, and alumni for a lifetime of virtuous leadership at the commanding heights of American society.

As we look ahead to the celebration of America’s 250^th anniversary in 2026, ISI aims to achieve a cultural renaissance, restoring the best of our civilizational heritage and casting a vision for the next 250 years of American greatness and goodness. To do this, we must seize the occasion to restore the happiness and independence of the American people by imitating the thumos of the Founding Fathers and pursuing a bold agenda to educate for liberty in the twenty-first century.

This does not mean that ISI adopts a short-term mindset; far from it. Striking the proper balance between permanent things and present realities is an art, not a science. As former ISI president and trustee emeritus T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., noted in his inaugural Intercollegiate Review essay as president in 1990, “Even as we celebrate the current muscular revival of political conservatism, we must keep one-eye averted from the moving ball of politics and fixed on the permanent things.”

While we continue to cheer on the work of our friends and alumni currently serving at the highest levels of American government, ISI will also draw inspiration from classic authors like Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, who artfully engaged their audiences and cultural context with penetrating stories that revealed profound truths about the human person while capturing the imaginations of future generations and shaping civilization over the course of centuries, even millennia.

Present Day Challenges

To achieve this goal, we must confront two underlying challenges. First, and most obvious, are the declining attention spans resulting from the ubiquitous use of smart phones, social media, and, increasingly, Artificial Intelligence. The social and developmental damages the smartphone has inflicted on “Gen Z” have been well documented in Jonathan Haidt’s New York Times bestselling book, The Anxious Generation. In particular, rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising steeply for children and college students and the rates of outdoor play and time with friends are in decline. Thankfully, some states are taking notice and restricting cell phone use in the classroom, but elsewhere the status quo remains culturally entrenched. At ISI, we counter these trends by providing retreat-like settings for students to learn and foster environments conducive to genuine friendship and mentorship while discouraging excessive smart-phone usage. Furthermore, we produce digital content that engages students with deep questions about human flourishing, challenging them to understand the deeper historical and philosophical roots of current events. 

Second, the challenge of short-term thinking has been endemic to American culture for at least two centuries. By the time Alexis de Tocqueville toured America and published his famous travel memoirs in 1835, he described Americans’ impatient energy to move West in striking terms. In search of better conditions, Americans would unscrupulously buy and sell homes, plant and abandon gardens, and start and stop professions. This dynamic movement and overwhelming drive for manifest destiny across the continent was the hallmark of the American character.

To be clear, this energetic, entrepreneurial spirit led to singular accomplishments like the winning of the West and the rise of America as the greatest technological, economic, and cultural superpower in world history. There is much to celebrate in this ethos, and ISI’s very organization and headquarters were built with the wealth of entrepreneurs and titans of industry who wanted to pass the torch of freedom and virtue onto the next generation. Nevertheless, it’s important to acknowledge that unless this energy is restrained by virtue and ordered towards the good, it can serve as an obstacle to long-term thinking about a 250-year vision for America. Through ISI’s educational programs and content, we help young people to properly cultivate and channel ambition in ways that will pay dividends for their families, communities, and country for generations to come.

The 250-Year Vision

Considering these realities, the very idea of laying the foundation for the next 250 years of America’s future could seem downright outrageous. Imagine showing up for your first day as CEO of a Fortune 500 company and being told that you need to develop a 250-year strategic plan for the organization. In today’s fast-paced business world, you wouldn’t even know where to begin. Corporate CEOs tend to think about their companies’ profits in terms of quarters, and American conservatives tend to think about their movement in terms of two- and four-year election cycles.

While winning political battles is essential for conservative victories and cultural change, Lee Edwards, the late conservative historian and author of Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, prophetically reminded us of ISI’s mission: “it is the duty of ISI to remind conservatives that in politics there are no permanent victories or defeats, only permanent things like wisdom, courage, prudence, and justice.” With that admonition in mind, how does ISI begin to inculcate a long-term, civilizational mindset in the hearts of students participating in our educational programs when the distracted, short-term mindset has dominated American culture from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century to Jonathan Haidt today?

While there are many possible solutions, Dostoevsky’s claim, “Beauty Will Save the World,” resonates strongly with us at ISI as we seek to win the hearts of the next generation. Beauty is a striking force that can arrest the attention of those distracted by novel technologies or the lust for short-term profit and open them up to the possibility of truth and goodness, two qualities necessary for long-term thinking both in one’s individual life and in the context of a political regime. The heroic Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn expounds why this might be the case in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture when describing how his contemporary culture is numb to both truth and goodness:

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three.

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world,” was not a careless phrase but a prophecy. After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

If Solzhenitsyn is right about the power of beauty to restore truth and goodness in the West, then it’s incumbent upon ISI to focus its energies on re-enchanting the civilizational “imagination of the rising generation,” which Russell Kirk urged in a famous 1954 letter to ISI’s “first and only campus organizer” turned president, Vic Milione. Milione agreed with Kirk, and ISI eventually expanded its mission to include the whole of man, emphasizing the dignity of the human person and the fundamental moral, political, and economic conditions necessary for his or her flourishing.

Today, when we encounter students on campus, it’s most commonly these fundamental questions that are on the top of their minds: What does it mean to be a man or woman, mother or father? How do I live a life of virtue in a decadent culture? What obligations do I owe to my fellow citizens? How does faith in God shape the way I pursue my vocation? And how can we fight to restore the greatness of American and Western civilization?

At one point in Western history, these questions would have been easy for college-age students to answer, if still difficult to embody, because they would have been taught them in their homes, churches, and schools from a young age. Tragically, we can no longer assume this shared cultural upbringing today. We must start from the beginning, with foundations of Western Civilization, going all the way back to Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, London, and Philadelphia, where our nation’s experiment in ordered liberty was born. As the venerable economist Thomas Sowell forcefully wrote in Conflict of Visions: “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” ISI’s task is to civilize the next generation by identifying the very best leaders, offering them more than the shallow materialism and careerism taught in the modern university, and challenging them to embrace the difficult but rewarding path of heroism. Unless we provide a compelling and demanding alternative, teaching classical leadership and conservative thought that encourages students to emulate the virtues of great statesmen, philosophers, poets, saints, and entrepreneurs, we will not succeed in producing a cultural renaissance that bears fruit for the next 250 years.

A Strategy for Victory

It’s not too late to save America. We will not give in to the sin of despair. For the first time in decades, conservative students appear ascendant on college campuses, and there is growing demand nationally—and throughout the world—for serious conservative thought, rooted in history and philosophy, to guide young people through the epochal political, cultural, religious, and economic shifts that are taking place in 2025 and will shape the course of the twenty-first century.

The present opportunity for ISI to accomplish our mission of identifying, educating, mentoring, and launching the next generation of American leaders is unprecedented in my lifetime. ISI must seize the moment and take the mantle of leadership, guiding students like a trusted professor through uncharted waters.

We do not take this responsibility lightly, nor do we put our trust in our own accomplishments, ambitions, connections, or powers. We approach this task with humility, not born of cowardice, but out of gratitude for the professors, alumni, and friends who make our work possible. We approach the glories of the Western and American tradition with due reverence, acknowledging that we are merely stewards of this great tradition and that our students have the innate ability to receive this wisdom by the grace of God and with the opportunity to encounter it at ISI programs online and around the country.

Practically speaking, we’ll empower professors to teach the virtues we hold dear by expanding our campus programs fund to support faculty-led educational programs and enterprising students; we’ll expand our digital content, producing a flagship video series, podcasts, and new educational courses to reach and teach new audiences, thereby increasing the size of our audience and improving the quality of our in-person programs; and finally, we’ll leverage our connections to provide students with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, such as our Collegiate Network editors retreats, to encounter the greatest leaders of our day and place them in positions of influence in “the seats of power in the United States,” as M. Stanton Evans prophesied about the fruits of ISI’s labors.

Reflecting on his presidency, Ronald Reagan remarked about ISI: “By the time the Reagan Revolution marched into Washington, I had the troops I needed—thanks in no small measure to the work with American youth ISI had been doing since 1953.” That same work carries on today in the twenty-first century with a new generation of American leaders and students who are hungry to pursue truth and wisdom through the study of classical leadership and conservative thought. We at ISI have our eyes fixed on America 500 and depend on your partnership in our vital work to chart the course for the next 250 years of American civilization.

May God bless the labors of ISI to educate for liberty, and may He continue to sustain Western and American civilization, for our children’s children.

This essay is adapted and expanded from President Burtka’s opening remarks at ISI’s Gala for Western Civilization on May 2^nd, 2025, honoring Jamie Wyeth and Dana Gioia.