New York Times:
Hoping to Make Policy Waves, and Graduate, Too
By MICHAEL FALCONE
Published: May 25, 2005
STANFORD, Calif. - Most of the newly minted research fellows at one of the newest public policy institutions in the country have yet to be published in a scholarly journal or to present a paper at an academic conference. Most do not even have a bachelor's degree.
But the Stanford University students who recently founded the Roosevelt Institution, billed as the nation's first student-run policy research group, say the intellectual capital of college students is an untapped resource.
The goal of the Roosevelt Institution, organizers say, is to bring the ideas of students to the attention of politicians, policy makers and the news media rather than let them "end up in a professor's filing cabinet." Officially, Roosevelt is nonpartisan, but its philosophy tends to be liberal....
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The institution has already attracted hundreds of members at Stanford and is expanding nationally. Membership is free and does not require submission of a paper. New branches are popping up at 30 other universities across the country, and students at Yale, Columbia and Middlebury are among the first to organize their own Roosevelt Institution chapters based on the Stanford model....
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Roosevelt's president, Kai Stinchcombe, 22, said disappointment at the outcome of the 2004 election was the catalyst for the institution's founding. Mr. Stinchcombe, a political science doctoral student from Evanston, Ill., with a background in political activism, said a policy group of students seemed like something that should already exist but did not....
(NOTE: The groups link through the institution's Web site, rooseveltinstitution.org.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/education/25stanford.html