In the winter of 1973, a veteran Utah legislator handed an intern named Rob Bishop BS’74 the most important bill of his session—funding for schools in Washington County—and told him to write the speech. Bishop handed in a tidy outline. Not what the lawmaker wanted. Write me something I can stand up and say. So Bishop went to a typewriter, turned the outline into sentences, and the next morning climbed to the Utah House gallery to watch what became of them. The legislator rose and read it on the floor—almost word for word as Bishop had written it.
Half a century later, Bishop can still summon the feeling. “Why,” he remembers thinking, “would you trust me with that?”
It’s a small story, and the kind the Hinckley Institute of Politics has been producing for over 60 years. Founded on May 10, 1965—a year before Harvard’s Institute of Politics—the institute has put more than 10,000 students, around 400 a year, into the rooms where decisions get made: statehouses, congressional offices, campaigns.
“You may not like politics, but politics likes you,” says Jason Perry JD’99, the institute’s director. “The decisions made in politics affect our lives every day. They shape the communities we live in, the opportunities we have, and the future we’re building together. At the Hinckley Institute, we give students the chance to step into that process, understand it, and learn how they can make a difference.”
The idea came from Robert H. Hinckley. His grandson Jim BS’71 MPL’77 MS’77—who now chairs the institute’s board—grew up on the stories. “My grandfather was a farm kid from Fillmore,” he says. “He went on a mission to Germany right before the First World War, and two things happened to him there he never got over. He got thrown in jail as a suspected anarchist. And he went up in an airplane for the first time, with Melli Beese, one of the first women in the world to fly one.”
Hinckley opened one of the country’s first Dodge dealerships in 1915, graduated from Brigham Young University the next year, and won a seat in the state legislature at 27. Franklin Roosevelt pulled him to Washington, where he chaired the Civil Aeronautics Authority, oversaw the building of Washington National Airport, and ran the program that trained civilian pilots on the eve of the Second World War. Afterward he helped start the network that became ABC. He titled his memoir I’d Rather Be Born Lucky Than Rich.
It was a large life. “And at the end of it, in his eighties, he told me the most important thing he ever did was none of that,” Jim Hinckley says. “Not the aviation. Not the television network. It was this institute.”
He came to it late, by way of frustration. On the University of Utah’s Board of Regents, he found working politicians unwelcome on campus—the students, like the country, had started to treat electoral politics as faintly shameful. He set out to change that. “[My parents] brought me up on the basis that politics is an honorable profession,” he once wrote, “and would always be so long as there were good people in office.” In 1965, with money from the foundation of his old ABC partner—the man behind Life Savers candy—he endowed the institute with a one-line mission: teach students respect for practical politics and the principle of citizen involvement in government. Or, as Robert Hinckley would say: “Participation. Participation. Participation.”
A student pamphlet from 1977 put it as well as anyone has since: The Hinckley Institute is about sending students out into the world, and bringing the world to campus. No university entity has sent more students abroad than the Hinckley Institute has through its internships. And the way it runs them is a statement of its own. “We’re not just for poli-sci majors,” says Morgan Lyon Cotti BA’01, the institute’s associate director. “We take pre-meds, engineers, anyone, because government touches everything.” For years, the institute took students to a conference at Harvard, where they sat with kids from Yale and Brown who described the scramble to land a single internship before graduation. Lyon Cotti says the Utah students are baffled: Wasn’t the point of college political institutes to provide internships to everybody? Cost isn’t supposed to stand in the way, either: The institute subsidizes housing and gave out more than $1 million in scholarships last year.
One of the most generous is the legislative internship: each spring, about 30 students leave class to spend Utah’s entire 45-day session as full-time staff—drafting floor speeches, tracking bills, fielding constituents—for a $4,000 stipend. Frank Pignanelli HBA’81 JD’84 interned in 1981, became one of the youngest Utahns ever elected to state office, and spent six years as House Democratic minority leader. “My education would not be complete without the Hinckley Institute,” he says.
Pat Jones BS’93 was less likely than most. She came back as a nontraditional student and finished her degree at 43. The institute placed her at KSL TV. “I showed up sure I’d be making copies and fetching coffee,” she says. “Instead, they handed me a morning segment to produce. That’s the secret of the Hinckley Institute: They don’t waste your time, and they don’t let you waste theirs.” Jones ran for office, served 14 years, and became the first woman ever to lead a party caucus in either house of the Utah Legislature. “The Hinckley Institute is the crown jewel of this university,” she says.
When she left the Senate, Jones spent a decade running the Women’s Leadership Institute—convincing qualified women, as she puts it, that they belonged in the room. As a supervisor, she went looking for the interns nobody else would pick: a young woman in a wheelchair, kids who didn’t look the part. “Those are the ones it changes. You don’t grow people by protecting them from the work.”
Ask Bishop—who served eight terms in the Utah House, the last as speaker, then nine in Congress—what his internship taught him, and he won’t mention policy. “The most important thing I learned was to shut up and listen,” he says. He once watched a state senator hear him all the way out, tell him he was completely right, and then vote no anyway. You have to reach more than a person’s reason, Bishop says: “You’ve got to get to the part of them that has to live with you afterward.” The building never let go of him. He proposed to his wife in that House gallery, and this spring, at 74, he went back to end his career, he says, where it started.
Where three worlds meet
How a single institute serves students, the public, and the political world
Two dozen alumni now hold elected office—and return as mentors, forum speakers, and donors.
More than 100 Hinckley interns a year go to Washington, and in 2023 they got a permanent home there: the Orrin G. Hatch Center, two restored brownstones near Dupont Circle named for the senator who served Utah for 42 years—and who, for decades, took Hinckley interns into his office by the handful. Perry was one of them. Now he runs the house, which is always full. “Fifty interns every single semester,” he says. “If we do some bunk beds, it can be 52. Which it is right now.”
One recent Tuesday night, students packed the center to hear Utah congressman Blake Moore’s chief of staff speak. The crowd consisted not only of U students, but also interns from BYU, Westminster University, and Utah State. The mix is deliberate. “This is the university’s embassy in Washington,” Perry says. “We see it as our responsibility to bring all Utah students together. The network you build in a house like this is a real social network, the one that’s going to help you in your life.” There is no substitute, he says, for proximity: “There is no experience like being in that room—seeing how policy is made, the compromise that sometimes has to happen, the way leaders get to the best solutions.”
The global program is Robert Hinckley’s oldest instinct at scale—he wanted students out of Utah, Jim Hinckley says, to see the wider world and then come back. Under former director Kirk Jowers, it grew past 50 countries. In the last decade, the institute has retooled the internship program around hubs—a core group of trusted host offices where new interns land among fellow U students—matching each student’s comfort level and interests to the right posting rather than throwing a dart at a map.
Even students who never leave campus end up in the room. The Hinckley Forums—roughly 100 a year, free and open to anyone—have brought six decades of the political world to Utah, from Hubert Humphrey in 1970 to Yitzhak Rabin in 1978 to a young Joseph Biden (a 1983 Hinckley Institute Fellow) to labor leader Dolores Huerta, who spoke on immigrant rights in 2018.
The institute also tells Utah what it’s thinking. The monthly Hinckley poll with the Deseret News routinely sets the state’s agenda. A recent survey found nearly 6 in 10 voters feel neither party represents them. The poll runs through the institute’s Dan Jones Center for Public Service, named for the pollster—Pat Jones’s late husband—who taught at the U for half a century.
Every Friday since 2016, The Hinckley Report gathers journalists and lawmakers on PBS Utah for a half hour of deliberately civil argument—a conscious alternative to cable news. The show began when Perry sat down with the station and named the gap they could fill together: “There was no place in the state of Utah where you got a nonpartisan approach to Utah politics,” he says. “How do we model civic dialogue? How do we talk about Utah issues in a way that when you finish an episode, you understand both sides of the argument—and you see how to have those same conversations at your own family dinner table?” Ten seasons and a regional Emmy later, the formula holds.
Once, the whole country tuned in. On October 7, 2020, the institute brought the Pence–Harris vice-presidential debate to Kingsbury Hall, staged behind pandemic plexiglass and watched by nearly 60 million people. There were exactly 60 student tickets—the hottest seats on campus.
The institute keeps finding new rooms to put students in: lately, a residential Leadership Community that puts public service–minded students on scholarship, and a U Service Corps that places students with nonprofits, schools, and public agencies.
The trouble Hinckley diagnosed in 1965—a country beginning to treat politics as beneath its best people—is not exactly solved; his institute’s own poll says as much. Perry does not flinch from the modern version. “Our mission is perhaps more critical than it’s ever been,” he says. “It is so easy to want to disengage, in a world where almost everything pushes our students to pick up a political flag one way or another—or to decide not to be part of it at all. That would be the mistake.” And he is unembarrassed about the recruiting pitch buried in the founding premise. “Do we need good people in office now more than ever? Yes, and we would love those people to be Hinckley interns.”
Sixty years in, the Hinckley Institute reaches places its founder never could have imagined, says Jim Hinckley. “We’ve got students in the British Parliament, in Cambodia, at The Hague. We’ve got forums anybody can walk into, a show on PBS every week. It started with a handful of interns and a seminar room. I could never dream up where it’ll be in 60 more years.”
Seth Bracken is editor of Utah Magazine.
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