“It’s amazing to see that we have been getting as many as 120,000 visits (to the web site) each month,” says Joshua Cohen, co-editor of Boston Review and professor of political philosophy at Stanford University. “When we did the article by Glenn Loury on race and imprisonment, that story alone got close to 100,000 visits. The article on Ahmadinejad had 20,000 visits in one week.”

Carnegie Corporation funding of Boston Review began in 2003 with two Dissemination Program awards totaling $100,000 and continued in 2006 with an additional $75,000 for highlighting and disseminating the work of Carnegie Scholars and $7,100 for communications capacity building. In 2007, a grant of $40,000 was awarded for a conference on challenges in Iraq held in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. “Carnegie Corporation grants have helped us to get into a position to grow and have helped greatly with our ability to launch a new web site and to do outreach,” says Deborah Chasman, co-editor of Boston Review. “The Ahmadinejad article was picked up by Arts & Letters Daily, The Wall Street Journal daily blog and the Andrew Sullivan blog in the Atlantic. Our pieces really get discussed now, and we have been able to raise our visibility enormously with the help of Carnegie Corporation.”

When Vartan Gregorian, President of Carnegie Corporation, reinvigorated the Dissemination Program, he was mindful of Andrew Carnegie’s mandate “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge.” In Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century (Carnegie Corporation, 2007), Gregorian wrote that the program is “designed to lift issues of critical importance onto the national agenda” and stressed that “wide dissemination of the issues addressed through our grantmaking and actualized by the work of our grantees is an integral part of all our efforts.” Dissemination of knowledge is suffused throughout Corporation programs, including the Carnegie Scholars program, which began in 1999. The program has a highly competitive process to select scholars for their focus on significant ideas, but they are also chosen because of their ability to explain and communicate in ways that engage those outside their discipline.

“By emphasizing the role of the public intellectual with the Carnegie Scholars program, Patricia Rosenfield, director of the program, wanted to stress and give incentives for scholars to engage the larger world,” says Susan King, Vice President, External Affairs and Program Director, Journalism Initiative, Special Initiatives and Strategy, who has led the Corporation’s Dissemination Program since 2000. She adds, “With that as the core idea behind the Carnegie Scholars program, there was a stronger imperative to partner with organizations that respect good scholarship, advance well-reasoned intellectual ideas and reach influential audiences beyond the narrow world of the academy. Boston Review simply fit the bill.”

Since 2002, 16 Carnegie scholars have contributed articles to Boston Review. Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading authority on Islamic law, wrote two articles for Boston Review, and their book program published two of his books. Among other Carnegie Scholars, Lawrence Rosen, who is professor of anthropology at Princeton University, wrote “Orientalism Revisited” in the January/February 2007 issue; the article evaluates the discipline of Middle Eastern studies and its potential to influence policy. Since January 2006, scholar Stephen Ansolabehere has compiled the “State of the Nation” survey in each issue of Boston Review. A full-page presentation featuring data that Ansolabehere has gleaned from public opinion surveys, it gives insights about voters’ views on various domestic and foreign policy issues.

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