RELEASE DATE: September 25, 1996
To reflect more accurately the nature and scope of its public policy research agenda, the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research was officially changed to the Institute for Policy Research (IPR), effective September 25, 1996.
The announcement was made by Northwestern's Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies C. William Kern. The change was recommended by IPR's Executive Committee and approved by the University's Board of Trustees.
IPR's new director, Fay Lomax Cook, strongly supported the change. "We plan to retain our urban mission," explained Cook, "but issues we have traditionally studied-poverty, race, crime, and community, for example-are not exclusive to cities. They cross suburban, rural, and state lines, and must be viewed in a broader context, as national problems."
No other major changes are contemplated, Cook said. IPR will maintain its active research programs in poverty, community development, law and criminal justice, communications, feminist public policy, business and government, philanthropy, and environmental policy. It also will house the new Joint Center for Poverty Research at Northwestern as part of its Program on Poverty, Race, and Inequality. (The Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies will be the poverty center's home base at the University of Chicago.)
Th name change is the second for the research facility, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1993. The original Center for Urban Affairs was founded in 1968, in an era of racial riots and violence in the nation's cities. Its mandate was to look for solutions to these problems by promoting interdisciplinary urban policy research and training.
The Center acknowledged its widening research interests in 1977 when it added an explanatory phrase, "an interdisciplinary center for urban research and policy studies at Northwestern University," to all of its publications and printed material. Though urban issues remained a strong focus, the Center explained in its tenth annual report, "many of the significant issues being researched were the result of policies being played out in the urban environment, and were not inhe-rently urban issues." These projects included studies of public lands and the environment, unionization and labor, suburbanization, population and migration, race and ethnic relations, self-help, and child development.
In the fall of 1980, under the leadership of then Center director Margaret T. Gordon, the name was officially changed to the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research.
This name has proved both cumbersome and too narrowly focused, Cook explained, a sentiment shared by IPR's formal program review committees last year. In the past five years alone, Cook noted, the Center moved even further from its original focus on cities by establishing programs in philanthropy, feminist public policy, and business and government.
"The new name is not only more accurate," said Cook with satisfaction, "it is much easier to say."