Campus Close-Up: An Intellectual Home

Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR) is one of the nation’s premier university-based policy research centers. It harnesses the power of rigorous multidisciplinary collaboration to address the biggest societal issues of our time. Founded in 1968 as the Center for Urban Affairs with a grant from the Ford Foundation, IPR influences national, state, and local public policy in many areas, including public health, crime, child well-being, economics, politics, and public opinion. Today, it continues its work as a university-wide research institute and center under the Office for Research, which is led by Vice President for Research Milan Mrksich.

The institute’s director is Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a leading economic expert in antipoverty programs, food insecurity, and education policy. She is also the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy, where she teaches economics and social policy. She joined Northwestern in 2010 and assumed the IPR directorship in 2017. During a two-year leave from 2015 to 2017, she was director of The Hamilton Project, a research group within the Washington, DC–based Brookings Institution.

Schanzenbach sat down with Inside the Circle to talk about IPR’s impact and the importance of philanthropic support for its work.

What has most excited you about IPR, and how have you as its director been able to shape its success?

Ever since I arrived at Northwestern, the institute had been my primary intellectual home. Lots of our faculty, who come from 10 schools and 28 departments, will say the same thing. What really gets us excited is talking across the disciplinary lines and working together.

Before I took on my role at IPR, I had just taken a two-year leave of absence to run an economic policy think tank in Washington, DC, where I learned a lot about how evidence gets used in a policy setting. And I thought that I could bring particular strengths in terms of translating and making sure that our cutting-edge research gets into the public conversation.

How does IPR influence conversations around health disparities, racial inequality, poverty, politics, children’s well-being and other big issues in the United States?

We can’t make good decisions unless we have good information. Our faculty are doing trailblazing research on some of the most important questions out there. Northwestern faculty are really at the top of their game, breaking new ground. But one of the aspects that is so special about IPR is that we work hard to get that information into the hands of policymakers and policy influencers. We have a communications team that specializes in breaking down the difficult scientific concepts based on rigorous research and making our research accessible to people who aren’t experts.

How have IPR researchers responded to the societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial and economic disparities?

When we were faced with this hopefully once-in-a-century pandemic, every scholar wanted to take their skills to try to help think through how to make things better. Andy Papachristos, our world-leading sociologist who specializes in crime, dropped a lot of what he was doing to try to understand the national moment that we were experiencing around George Floyd’s death. Jamie Druckman ’93, a distinguished political scientist, teamed up with other researchers—here at Northwestern and elsewhere—to understand how people process scientific information and decide whether or not they will comply with mask and vaccine mandates.

I work on poverty and antipoverty programs, and I was able to pivot some of my research to real-time analysis of pandemic-driven dynamics associated with food hardship and hunger. I wanted to explore what policies we could implement to make things better. The work that I did turned out to be some of the most cited research from Northwestern over the entire year. I’m really proud of the rapid research reports we did, which were cited in the press and by the US Congress.

Sponsored research grants from the federal government and private foundations are the main funding sources for IPR. Why is individual philanthropy also important?

As we assess our peer competitors, we see that it’s been philanthropy that has enabled them to go from good to great.

We find we can really benefit from annual gifts of any size to support undergraduates who want to work as research assistants either over the summer or during the school year. That’s a win-win because it helps the faculty produce more great research, while also providing our students an opportunity to really collaborate with a professor and gain insight into the research setting.

Our faculty have many promising ideas that are in early stages of incubation and not quite ready for large investments from foundations. This is where a relatively modest influx of resources can go a long way, acting like seed funding to refine, sharpen, and propel bold research projects. Like so many other schools, we’re looking to create more ways to share the impact and potential of our work to excite our alums about the research we do. We want them to invest in our work because they believe in it—because they understand the value of helping accelerate research that can shape and save lives and create a stronger social fabric.

Do you have an example of such a supporter?

Yes! James Doyle ’92. When he was an undergraduate studying economics, he worked with a faculty member who was the head of what was then called the Center for Urban Affairs. James really became enamored with economic research. Whenever we talk, he’s always really excited about the great value that economics research brings to policy questions. He is an exemplary NULC donor and volunteer and most recently was a co-chair of the NULC Los Angeles Regional Board.

Can a donor direct their gift to a particular area of study?

Support for the broader IPR agenda is always preferred, but if a donor is interested particularly in crime mitigation, bipartisan policymaking, or public opinion, for example, we have the capacity to coordinate that gift to an area of study. We might have a group of six to eight faculty members who are all doing work in that area, and they could come up with proposals for how to use that gift.

How has the collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of the institute informed your own research and teaching?

IPR faculty have been at the forefront of the national trend toward interdisciplinary work and because we’ve had this long history of success, we do it better. Many other universities are still working out how to get cross-disciplinary groups to work together, understand each other, and play nicely together.

I’m an economist, and we are, as a discipline, kind of known to be jerks [laughs]. But not at Northwestern, because we understand the value of talking to each other and really learning from the great strengths that other disciplines bring.

My affiliation with IPR has certainly made my research so much better. Being around the psychologists and the sociologists has pushed me to think more broadly. There is not a week that goes by that I don’t hear from an IPR faculty member saying, “I wouldn’t have done this if it weren’t for IPR.”