DON S. BROWNING

Award Comments

I am deeply honored to receive the Arthur E. and Joann Rasmussen Silver Book Award for Intellectual Leadership from the Institute for American Values, an organization I have been associated with almost from its beginning. I have so much respect for the Institute and especially its brilliant president, David Blankenhorn. There is little doubt that the success of the Institute is due largely to David’s ability to grasp a salient issue, attract major scholars to address it, organize and lead their research, and effectively disseminate its findings to public policy organizations, the government, and the general public.

Since so many important scholars have contributed to the work of the Institute, one wonders how it decided which ones to honor first. Of course, as the years pass, David and the Board will find other ways to recognize the many gifted people who have offered so much to the clarification of American values on the family, the role of civil society, thrift, and Islam/West relations – the major issues that the Institute has addressed over the two decades of its life.

It was in early 1990 that I first made contact with David Blankenhorn and the Institute. In the autumn of 1989, I had been teaching on the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Carol and I returned to Chicago and began preparing for a nine-month research period at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, just an hour’s drive from New York. In the stack of mail I collected upon returning home, I found a communication from a new organization called the Institute for American Values. Although I was rushed for time between these two trips, I placed this newsletter on the lamp table beside my bed and read it cover to cover before falling to sleep. I liked what I read and vowed to arrange a meeting when I got to Princeton with this man David Blankenhorn in New York City.

I soon set up this appointment. I assumed by the seriousness of the Institute’s newsletter and persuasiveness of David Blankenhorn’s own articles in it that I was on my way to meet a man in his mid-fifties. After all, he was the head of a New York think-tank; one has to be mature and well established, I thought, to rise to such heights.

When we met, I was surprised to encounter a young man in his early thirties. Although he had at that time his own modest office, he confided that only a few months earlier he had nothing more than a desk in another organization’s space. This desk, however, provided him with a prominent Broadway address in New York City, the business and news capital of the world. He believed, and correctly, that this was an important source of legitimation for a fledgling think-tank with lofty ambitions to communicate important ideas to the opinion shapers of our society.

When it came time for lunch, David took me to a local greasy-spoon café that served tasty soups in its cramped quarters. As I returned to Princeton, I found myself impressed by how a very young organization with a very young president was already attracting top scholars to think and write such mature thoughts about families and other issues pertaining to American values.

Not too many months later, David invited me to take part in a research project and also become a member of his Board. I was delighted to accept both of these assignments, and I have been happy with this association ever since.

The key to the success of the Institute is the genius of David Blankenhorn. Few individuals have his combination of fund-raising and administrative skills combined with the academic talent for attracting and choosing top scholars to address well-defined and salient social issues. In his academic leadership role, David often functions like a seasoned Ph.D. dissertation advisor in helping scholars define and pursue the questions that they are to address.

And then there are his skills in dissemination. This is where the Institute has really been unique. I know of no comparable think-tank or research group that has been as successful in communicating its findings and messages as the Institute for American Values. Experiencing this success is very energizing to scholars who are accustomed to seeing their work accumulate dust on musty shelves in little-used libraries.

The Institute is fully aware that, as successful as it has been, it should do even better in communicating its research and message. Not only in the field of marriage and family, but on issues pertaining to civil society, child socialization, thrift, and more recently Islamic/West relations, it has had stunning success in comparison to similar organizations. David Blankenhorn – a small town Mississippi boy – has been truly exemplary in his management of the big media outlets of a highly complex society.

It has been a genuine pleasure for me to contribute to some of the reports of the Institute and wake up the day after their release and read about them in the leading newspapers of the country and possibly hear about them on morning television programs. That does not happen to scholars very often who sometimes must wait months, if not years, for reviews of their work to appear in obscure and seldom-read journals. The Institute has been a leader in bridging the distance between scholarship and the world of public and popular discourse.

It has been a great pleasure to be associated with it over the years and a high honor to receive this recognition tonight.