Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

University of Michigan / Institute for Social Research

U.S. academic, center-left orientation

Owned byRegents of the University of Michigan (Michigan public university)
FundingPrimarily federal grants (NIH, NSF, Social Security Administration) and private foundation grants (MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation); no advertising or subscription revenue; ISR does not receive direct allocations from the University of Michigan's state-funded budget
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

ISR was founded on February 1, 1949, through the merger of two University of Michigan research groups: the Survey Research Center (established in 1946 under Rensis Likert) and the Research Center for Group Dynamics (which had been founded at MIT by Kurt Lewin in 1945 and relocated after his death). From its inception, ISR was designed to be self-sustaining through outside grants rather than university or state budget line items, a structure that remains in place. Over the following decades, ISR grew into the institutional home for several of the nation's most widely cited longitudinal studies, including the Surveys of Consumers, the American National Election Studies, Monitoring the Future, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and the Health and Retirement Study. In 2021, Kathleen Cagney became the first woman to serve as ISR director. In 2026, ISR received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences. As a mainstream academic social science institute, ISR reflects the broadly empirical, evidence-driven orientation of that field, which skews center-left relative to the general U.S. population. Under the Trump second term, ISR and the University of Michigan have publicly documented the impact of federal funding cuts: a Social Security Administration–funded research project at U-M was ordered to halt, and ISR's data archive center (ICPSR) launched an effort to preserve government datasets it described as being at risk of removal or alteration. These responses place ISR's public communications in a posture broadly critical of the current administration's research-funding and data-access policies.

Sources

  1. University of Michigan Institute for Social Research – Wikipedia
  2. History – Institute for Social Research
  3. News Releases – Institute for Social Research
  4. U-M squeezed by Trump cuts; Social Security research project halted – Bridge Michigan
  5. UMich creates program for researchers impacted by Trump funding freezes – Michigan Daily
  6. ISR retirement study receives U-M's largest-ever research grant – Look to Michigan
  7. University of Michigan, ISR, Center for Political Studies – MacArthur Foundation
  8. Federal Funding Updates – U-M Research

Profile compiled 2026-07-17; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record