Lawrence J. Mone has been President of the Manhattan Institute, one of the nation’s most influential public policy think tanks, since 1995. He joined the Institute in 1982, serving as a public policy specialist, program director and vice president before being named the Institute’s fourth president.

A Summa Cum Laude graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mr. Mone taught high school history in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for several years before earning a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982.

Under his leadership the Manhattan Institute has continued to sponsor and disseminate research on such topics as tax and economic policy, education, welfare reform and crime. The Institute has expanded its work with civic leaders in New York and across the country to promote free-market solutions to urban policy problems. And it has broadened its focus on the American justice system, examining issues like employment law and class action suits.

Since 1996, The Manhattan Institute has sponsored the publication of eight new books. A partial list includes: Fixing Broken Windows, by George Kelling and Catherine Coles, which details the authors’ community policing strategy, credited with reducing violent crime in New York and other cities; America in Black and White by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, is a comprehensive economic and social survey of blacks and whites over the past 50 years (Abigail Thernstrom subsequently took a leading role in President Clinton’s summit on race); and The Twenty-First Century City by Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, which describes how Mayor Goldsmith both saved tax dollars and improved city services by introducing competition and privatization.

The Institute’s quarterly magazine, City Journal, has become one of the nation’s premier sources of information on topics such as enterprise zones, deregulation, workfare and a host of other reform measures. Read by public officials and other opinion leaders around the country, City Journal has been praised by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as “a forum for some of our city’s—and our nation’s—most incisive thinkers, whose writings have enriched our public discourse and helped shape public policy.”

The Manhattan Institute has played a pivotal role in debates over public education policy, promoting alternative approaches like school choice, vouchers and charter schools. The Institute’s Center for Educational Innovation works directly with individual schools, helping teachers and administrators gain increased autonomy from the central board in return for accepting increased responsibility for student performance. The CEI has also created a series of small alternative public schools throughout the city, including the Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem, providing a top-quality, single-sex education to girls in one of the nation’s most troubled neighborhoods, and the Wildcat Academy, which helps a host of chronically underperforming students achieve academic success.

In the last year the Institute has also published policy memoranda on a variety of other topics, including the importance of mentoring, the usefulness of incarceration in preventing juvenile crime, and the effects of rent control regulations on the availability of housing.

Articles:

• In Whose Interest? New York Sun, 3-13-06
• Albany Inc. New York Sun, 1-12-06
• Kelly the Leader New York Post, 10-26-05