$10 million to launch strategic initiative
The Annenberg Foundation has granted the Hoover Institution $10 million to establish the "Annenberg Strategic Initiative," an endowed fund that will support entrepreneurial public policy development in the areas of economics, national security and foreign policy by scholars at Hoover and Stanford.
"The Hoover Institution is deeply interested in generating 'ideas defining a free society'—indeed, it is a guiding principle within our mission," said John Raisian, Hoover's director. "Funds from this magnificent and imaginative endowment will spawn such creative ideas and support those ideas that are especially new, sweeping and undeveloped. The Annenberg Strategic Initiative will allow scholars a means for taking intellectual risks in addressing new areas of inquiry with new approaches pertaining to important issues of the day."
For example, a new Stanford project focuses on the possibility of a world free of nuclear weapons. Hoover Fellows Sidney Drell, a physicist and nuclear weapons expert, and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz launched an initial conference a year ago, on the 20th anniversary of the historic meeting in Reykjavik between President Reagan and Soviet Premier Mihkail Gorbachev on this subject.
"The idea never took hold and virtually dropped out of sight," Shultz said. "As the problem of nuclear proliferation is now at a tipping point, we thought that this big idea with big consequences should be revived and examined. To launch such an effort required seed money, to see if the effort could sustain a major initiative. And seed money was hard to come by. We got some with personal encouragement from Lee Annenberg [widow of Walter Annenberg]. This idea has now taken off, as we just held a highly successful followup meeting involving numerous experts, including Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry and Sam Nunn."
Raisian will administer the funds with advice from a three-person faculty committee appointed in consultation with Stanford President John Hennessy. Shultz, a professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Business, will chair the initial committee, which will include Hoover Fellows John Taylor and Morris Fiorina, who also hold respective faculty appointments in the departments of Economics and Political Science.
