Learn from the mistakes of others

A New Deal for Students

Columbia’s Tina Wadhwa reports on coeds turned policymakers at the Roosevelt Institution, the nation’s first student-run think tank.

Tina Wadhwa
Current Magazine, Winter 2005
Updated: Dec. 5, 2005 6:42 p.m. ET

The air was charged as ideas fired around the room in a chain reaction of passion and hope. Young, eager activists were drafting proposals, devising plans, and solving problems—history was in the making. The excitement was contagious as inspiration spread from one student to the next. It was just another meeting of the Roosevelt Institution, the nation’s first student-run think tank. These students were not about to sit back and watch the world change—they were going to change it themselves.

The Roosevelt Institution began only 11 months ago, in November 2004, and has already expanded to over 120 campuses across the country. Mattie Hutton, then a senior at Stanford University, formed the grassroots organization after talking to friends at other schools about policy. These conversations made her realize that she was not alone in her ideas for progress—students all over the country harbored similar notions about political action. The possibility of establishing a national network of student think tanks appealed to Hutton, and so the Roosevelt Institution was born.

As the number of Americans disillusioned with the policy process increases, the Roosevelt Institution strives to bring together an untapped group of progressives to provide innovative solutions to the problems facing today’s society. It sees the 15 million college students in America as “a progressive think tank waiting to be identified, recognized, and organized.” The boom of activist groups across campuses suggests that students on both sides of the aisle are more involved than ever. But without proper channels to politicize their passions, student efforts often go unnoticed by policy makers. The goal of the Roosevelt Institution is to provide a conduit through which student ideas can enter the policy process. Andrew Cox, National Outreach Director of the Roosevelt Institution and a junior at Yale University explains, “The Roosevelt Institution exists to help students with great ideas make them better and get them heard. If you have an interesting idea and are willing to work on it, we want to help you.”

On participating university campuses, interested students come together to form a chapter, which meets to discuss various issues within the community and their possible solutions. The chapters draft policy papers, make contacts with professors and expert advisors, and disseminate student work into the public discourse.

The work of the many chapters across the country is unified by their national policy journal, The Roosevelt Review, which aims to distribute the research papers and theses of the nation’s brightest students to a wideer audience. Previous issues have explored ways to improve health insurance for children, female-controlled contraception in South Africa, and corporate social responsibility in America. And these papers, unlike your government term paper, may well be read by actual policymakers. As Editor-in-Chief Jesse Wolfson, a junior at Yale, says, “The only difference between a term paper and a policy paper for a think tank is a communications department."

Wolfson hopes that his publication will help to dislodge the commonly held bias that student work does not meet professional standards by displaying its intellectual capital. The Review also hopes to leverage the Roosevelt Institution's brand to build connections between students and policymakers with common interests. The first issue debuted on October 3 at a conference in Washington, D.C., with over 200 fellows, students, professors, and members of the press in attendance. “My hope,” Wolfson says, “is to become a well-known, respected, and widely-circulating journal that will inform the decisions not only of elected officials, but also those of the citizens who put them in office.”

The Roosevelt Institution responds to current events as well as ongoing political debates. The University of North Carolina chapter is currently working on one such project—the Roosevelt Institution Special Center on Emergency Preparedness and Relief (SCEPR). Alicia Raia, the director of the Center, explains how it began in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “While students were engaging in noble causes, we recognized that there was a need for a long-term assessment of the government’s response to disasters, and a need to start a dialogue on the needs of communities and good practices that would prevent issues like these from arising in the future.” SCEPR will address the governments' demonstrated ability to respond to catastrophes, and will assess American preparedness for future disasters, whether national, international, or environmental. The projects will be reviewed and monitored by an advisory board of experts and faculty, which includes consultants to the Department of Homeland Security and a former U.S. Chief of Staff. The best submissions will be published in a web-based publication early next year. In addition, there will be a national policy conference where students can present their proposals as professional policymakers would.

No two campuses take exactly the same approach to policy reform. The Yale chapter likes to focus on community-based, local projects while Stanford members prefer to work on more national issues. Joshua Lipsky, a sophomore at Columbia University, started a chapter in February 2005. Initially they drafted transportation and education policies for a city council campaign in New York City. Now, the chapter’s biggest project involves working with Fair, a progressive alliance that wants to reform Columbia tuition policies. Striving for a Princeton-like model, they want students with a household income of less than $40,000 to be able to attend the university for free and aim to replace all student loans with grants. Lipsky's team is drafting a policy paper on this tuition reform, and their goal is to show the administration that tuition reform is feasible and to figure out exactly how it can be done.

All of these projects come together when leaders from chapters across the country convene to discuss their work. Last summer, they gathered for the first time at the Roosevelt Estate for their Chapter Development Conference and annual national meeting. They brainstormed ideas, discussed potential challenges, and planned the future of the Roosevelt Institution. “Being in that room with those people filled me with so much hope,” Cox remembers. “They were so passionate about making life better in America, and it’s amazing that people of this caliber are taking an interest in our generation.”

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