Chicago Thinker

Read the article by Jonathan Kang on our website

The Thinker is happy to present The Intercollegiate Studies Institute as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit.

Founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov with a young William F. Buckley Jr. as its first president, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was built to push back against the leftward drift of American higher education and to reclaim the university as a place where the principles of ordered liberty could still be seriously studied. More than seventy years later, ISI remains committed to that founding mission, inspiring college students to discover, embrace, and advance the ideas and virtues that have made America free and prosperous.

Through campus chapters, lecture series, summer schools, graduate fellowships, and the Collegiate Network of independent student newspapers, ISI gives young conservatives and classical liberals across the country a serious intellectual home and a national community of peers and mentors. Its publications, from Modern Age to the Intercollegiate Review, carry forward the conversation that Buckley, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises once held with ISI students in person. The Western tradition, the American founding, and the case for limited government, kept alive in the minds of the next generation

The Thinker is proud to announce the UChicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, with funding support from the Chicago Forum’s Zell Speaker and Event Series and Zell Family Foundation, as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit

The University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression builds directly on the university’s founding conviction, expressed by William Rainey Harper himself, that freedom of inquiry is inseparable from the work of discovery and rigorous scholarship. Its mission is to promote the understanding, practice, and advancement of free and open discourse at UChicago and beyond, carrying forward the tradition that produced the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Report and that has long made the University a global reference point on these questions.

The Forum convenes students, faculty, university leaders, and outside thinkers around the hardest questions facing higher education today, from political polarization and institutional neutrality to artificial intelligence, book bans, and the erosion of trust in academic life. Through the Zell Series, the Academic Freedom Institute, student grants and fellowships, partnerships with Doc Films and the Logan Center, and a growing Student Advisory Board, it offers the rare thing a university most needs in this moment, which is not only principles on paper but the practice of holding them in real argument.

The Thinker is proud to present the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at UChicago as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit.

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics is the hub of the UChicago economics ecosystem, pulling together researchers from the Griffin Department of Economics, Booth, Harris, and the Law School in a single sustained effort to push the frontier of the field. Named for Nobel laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, BFI carries forward their conviction that rigorous, evidence-based research can move the world, and it does so by translating Chicago-style economics into work that actually reaches policymakers, business leaders, and the public.

For undergraduates, BFI is the place where that tradition becomes accessible. Through forums, brown bags, research assistantships, and summer programs, students get to sit in the room where serious economic thinking happens and engage directly with the scholars shaping it. Frontier research, global impact, and the Chicago tradition alive and well.