Message from the Chairman

For too long in our country, the ideals and principles that have made America a unique country amongst all the nations of the world have been ignored, forgotten and certainly inadequately passed on to younger generations.

Our goal at the Miller Center is to revitalize the teaching of those ideals and principles and our rich history on college campuses across the country (as well as encouraging its  teaching in high schools).

While there is still a long way to go, we are having phenomenal success in reaching that goal. Today we have 447 partners in our faculty network on 178 college campuses across the United States. More than 200 young scholars in our network have attended our rigorous, 14-day faculty development summer institutes conducted in partnership with leading universities and colleges.

We have helped a number of them find their first jobs on campus, and through our postdoctoral fellowship program, we have supported more than 40 newly minted Ph.D.s so they can teach, do research and get published (a major requirement for advancement). We are supporting academic centers of excellence in history and politics on 44 campuses and we are helping several professors develop new ones that will open later this year.

And now, after two years in the planning, starting with a conversation at a reception at our annual academic center building conference, our Center, along with the University of Chicago Press and Notre Dame University, will introduce next spring, a new academic journal named, appropriately, American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions and Culture. The purpose of the journal is to re-invigorate the discussion of American political thought, the ideals and beliefs at the core of what we, as a nation, are about, and the ideals and principles that support our freedom as individuals.

This will be a peer reviewed academic journal, edited by Professor Michael Zuckert, and published by the University of Chicago Press. Michael is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science and former chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science. He is the director of The Tocqueville and Constitutional
Studies programs at Notre Dame, a member of the JMC’s Academic Advisory Council and a member of the teaching faculty at our summer institutes for young scholars. Professor Zuckert will be assisted by two assistant editors and have clerical support provided by the university.

As the Middle East is exploding in struggles to gain individual freedom, this is a good time to launch this journal so that we can re-examine and reflect upon the principles that have been the strong basis of our own freedom in order to not lose that freedom through neglect or purposeful rejection.

Papers submitted by professors from around the country will cover topics from justifying and criticizing the institutions of constitutional democracy to first principles and how they are grounded in our Constitution and our ways of life. It will encourage debate about how American political thought is found in American literature as well as reflections on how we present our national character to the world at large and much, much more.

This journal, conceived, planned and supported by the Jack Miller Center, will become a powerful tool helping young professors and established scholars disseminate their scholarship to a national audience. It will also have a much wider impact in the educational field and beyond. It is one more giant step forward in achieving our mission of re-invigorating the study of our Founding Principles and the rich history of our country.

New Journal on American Political Thought to Debut in May 2012

Professor Michael Zuckert

The University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago Press, and the Jack Miller Center will launch the first journal exclusively devoted to American political thought in May 2012.

Initial support for American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions and Culture was provided by businessman and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein.

“When we discovered that there was no journal devoted to American political thought, our mission was clear,” said Dr. Rafael Major, the JMC’s director of faculty development. “For the past two years, the JMC has been assembling a distinguished Editorial Board of Directors composed of both American and international scholars to guide the journal in its early stage of development.”

Michael Zuckert, director of the American Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame, will serve as the journal’s first editor. Both Professor Zuckert’s
reputation as a scholar and the Notre Dame Administration’s commitment to make the Constitutional Studies Program the best center of its kind in the country, make Professor Zuckert an ideal inaugural editor. The journal’s editorial staff will be headquartered in South Bend, Indiana and is partially funded by the university.

According to Dr. Major, “It is vital for young professors interested in the American Founding to have an outlet for publishing their research. We worked with several Miller Fellows to facilitate a related group with the American Political Science Association last year and a new journal was the next logical step. In my view, it will be a premier resource, and hopefully a lasting institution in Academia.”

The journal will invite submissions from historians, literary scholars, economists, and philosophers in addition to political scientists. Every issue will feature book reviews on recent scholarship in American political thought.

In order to ensure the journal reaches university libraries across the country, the JMC has bought 300 individual subscriptions for faculty partners in the JMC network and 150 subscriptions for colleges and universities. The journal will begin accepting articles in June of this year. For more information on subscribing to the journal, please contact Dr. Major at rmajor@gojmc.org.

Leading Scholars and JMC Launch Constitution Day Initiative

Lecture Series at UCLA Commemorates 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

First Lecture in Five-Year Series Features Pulitzer Prize Winner Daniel Walker Howe

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions at UCLA (CLAFI) will launch a five-year lecture series beginning in fall 2011. The JMC is a supporter of CLAFI, which will host the JMC’s Faculty Development Summer Institute in Pasadena this August.

Each year, at least two lectures will be presented centering on events from the corresponding year of the Civil War. One lecture each year is expected to center on military events, while the other may deal with political, economic, diplomatic, or other developments during the year in question.

Professor Daniel Lowenstein

Daniel Walker Howe, emeritus professor at UCLA and Oxford University and Pulitzer-prize winner for his What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1845, will deliver the first lecture of the series in October 2011. Professor Ethan Rafuse of the US Army Command General College will deliver the second lecture on November 10.

Lecturers in future years will include luminaries such as James M. McPherson, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and Pulitzer-prize winner for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, and Professor Allan Guelzo of Gettysburg College, a leading scholar and biographer of Abraham Lincoln.

Consistent with CLAFI’s usual practice, in addition to their formal lectures, each visitor will have the opportunity to interact more intimately with a group of up to twenty students, faculty members, and others in a two-hour seminar on writings selected by the visitor. In the Civil War series, these could include speeches of Lincoln or other leaders of the Union or the Confederacy, contemporary letters and diaries, excerpts from the memoirs of participants such as Grant or Sherman, or even works of fiction about the period.

CLAFI was created as an interdisciplinary center within the UCLA Division of Humanities in 2009. The program provides a home on campus for students and faculty who share CLAFI’s principles that educated citizens should have a sound understanding of the history of free institutions and their underlying principles, and that a central purpose of a university is to encourage students and faculty to confront basic questions of human existence and society, drawing especially on great works and achievements of Western Civilization.

CLAFI’s inaugural public event, a four-day bicentennial celebration of Lincoln, was held in November 2009. Professors Howe and Gulezo both spoke at the inaugural event. CLAFI sponsored another public event in the spring of 2010, “Mark Twain on the Page and on the Stage.” In the current academic year, CLAFI has sponsored a series of six lectures on varied subjects, such as Shakespeare’s plays, Samuel Johnson’s politics, and Jewish influence on Enlightenment political thought. CLAFI also offers UCLA students a small but growing selection of courses on political philosophy and literature.

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JMC, Bradley Foundation Fellows Gather for 25th Anniversary Celebration of Bradley Fellowships

More than 100 scholars and guests participated in a two-day conference conducted by the JMC and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation on April 14-15 in Chicago.

The conference, Liberal Democracy and Liberal Education, celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Bradley Foundation’s graduate and post-graduate fellowship program, and highlighted the contributions of some of the most distinguished alumni of the program. For 25 years, the Bradley Program has offered the next generation of scholars the opportunity to pursue serious studies, conduct research, and enhance their competitiveness on the job market.

Professor Donald Downs of the University of Wisconsin delivers his comments on liberal education

The program included panels on “Civic Responsibility and Higher Education,” “Liberal Education, Civic Responsibility and Patriotism,” and “Civic Education and Economic Liberty” as well as a roundtable on “Liberal Education and American Society.” Speakers included distinguished scholars such as Robert P. George (Princeton University), James Ceaser (University of Virginia), Walter McDougall (University of Pennsylvania), Alan Charles Kors (University of Pennsylvania), and Kathy Eden (Columbia University).

“The 25th Anniversary Celebration was a glowing success. It was a gratifying experience for me to work with the Jack Miller Center, and I look forward to future opportunities for the two organizations to work together,” said Dianne Sehler, director of academic, international, and cultural programs at the Bradley Foundation.

Professor Robert George of Princeton University delivered the opening dinner talk, “Liberal Education: What’s the Point?” Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, closed the event with a post-dinner talk on contemporary politics.

Suggested Readings: The Idea of America, Reflections on the Birth of the United States

By Gordon S. Wood
Penguin Press

Gordon Wood’s, new book, “The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States,” was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal (The Visionary Generation, p. C7, May 14-15, 2011). Professor Wood is a member of the JMC’s Academic Advisory
Council, and a frequent lecturer at the JMC’s faculty development summer institutes.

The review was written by James Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, and chairman of the JMC’s Academic Advisory Council. In his review Jim commends Professor Wood for his refusal, unlike so many of his fellow historians, to politicize history. The following is reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal:

Reading history allows one to escape the blindfolds and categories of our day and enter into another time, when people thought and acted in different ways. Like the experience of foreign travel, it can refresh the mind and provide a sense of distance from the familiar. How sad it is, therefore, that so much academic history today does just the opposite, projecting current issues back onto the past, invariably for the purpose of promoting a contemporary ideological viewpoint. Instead of freeing us from the present, “history” of this kind ends by imprisoning the past.”

Fortunately, there are still historians who deplore, to borrow Gordon Wood’s unvarnished language, the “gross presentism of much current history writing” and the “effort to use history as an ideological weapon in contemporary politics.” And Mr. Wood certainly has reason to complain, for it is in his field of inquiry—the period of the Revolution and early republic— that the politicization of history has gone furthest.

Mr. Wood is our premier student of the Founding Era. He has been writing history for about a half-century, roughly a fifth of the days since the origin of the republic. He has scrupulously avoided appropriating his subject for modern-day political purposes and instead tried to understand it on its own terms and as a whole. Historians will of course bring to their study certain questions and concerns of their own time—no one can or should avoid this—but the greatest historians are those, like Mr. Wood, who do not make our criteria of importance the main theme.

“The Idea of America” consists of 11 essays on different aspects of the Founding that are drawn from the full span of Mr. Wood’s career, to which he has added a substantial introduction and conclusion. All of the essays have been updated or reconfigured, with an afterword appended to each. What the book may sacrifice in overall unity it more than makes up for in the richness of its reflections on the character and import of the Founding. It is Mr. Wood’s most “personal” work, providing us, along with much fine history, glimpses into the thinker and the man.

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Civic Education Initiative to Launch in September

An ambitious new effort to reform civic education in the United States will be launched in September with the publication of Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education, a collection of essays by leading advocates of improving education in American history and government.

The Civic Education Initiative is led by David Feith, an op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal, and Jordan Hirsch, an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine. Both are recent graduates of Columbia University in New York.

“I co-founded this project in 2009, while a student at Columbia University, after learning that not even twenty-five percent of American students are proficient in civics and U.S. history, the subjects meant to prepare us to be responsible citizens,” said Feith. “Almost sixty percent of high-school seniors can’t identify the halfcentury when the Civil War occurred, or recognize basic symbols of the civil rights movement.”

The essays in Teaching America will highlight the dangers of civic ignorance and launch a nationwide campaign for reform. Contributors include Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former Education Secretary Rod Paige, Senator Jon Kyl, former Senator Bob Graham, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, journalist Juan Williams, historian Michael Kazin, political blogger Glenn Reynolds, and charter-school leaders Mike Feinberg and Seth Andrew. The book’s contributors also include Jack Miller Center President Mike Ratliff, as well as Bruce Cole, the president of the American Revolution Center and a member of the JMC’s board of directors, and Emory University Professor and JMC Fellow Mark Bauerlein.

“The Civic Education Initiative intends to drive a nationwide reform agenda. Its guiding principle is that the next generation of Americans needs to understand and appreciate our country’s history, institutions and political process,” said Ratliff. “The Jack Miller Center shares this principle, which is central to preserving our constitutional system and the free and open nature of our society.”

According to Feith, Teaching America is “part history book, part battle cry, and part toolkit for policymakers, educators and philanthropists. The crisis in civic literacy needs to be front and center of a national discussion. With Teaching America we intend to flag this problem for a broader audience. It’s long overdue, and we’re proud to have produced it.”

Following the book’s release, its contributing authors will spearhead a broad public campaign to raise awareness of civic illiteracy nationwide. They will adapt their essays in newspaper op-eds and speak at schools, universities and other public forums. The Civic Education Initiative will also distribute Teaching America to members of Congress, state superintendents of education, and leading education reformers.

“The second phase of our work will begin next year with Challenge 2026. The year 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Founding of the United States, and it is exactly one generation of students, kindergarten through 12th grade, away from today. Hence our challenge: By 2026, every high school graduate should be able to pass the citizenship exam,” said Feith.

To help reach that goal, the Civic Education Initiative will begin by advancing the reforms laid out in Teaching America. Starting next year, it will then launch several additional efforts—for example, a Civic Ambassadors Program to pair authors (and other advocates) with schools in their communities. Obviously, this ambitious project needs the support of like minded organizations and financial resources to fund the many activities now in development. “We are already privileged to be working with leaders such as Admiral Ratliff, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Senator Jon Kyl and the other contributors to Teaching America,” said Feith. “With the help of many other concerned Americans we can make these partnerships all the more fruitful.”

Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Civic Education Initiative, please contact David Feith at david.feith@wsj.com.

A Scholar’s View: Assimilation and Citizenship

By Professor Roosevelt Montas, Columbia University

Assimilation is an ugly word. In the TV series Star Trek, it is what the Borg—a predatory cybernetic collective—want to do to humans, as they have done to countless other species.

Even before one wonders about the assimilating body, the idea of assimilation suggests the loss of identity, of selfhood, and of what makes one unique. It is no wonder that the idea of “assimilation” can be a non-starter when one wants to engage with people outside the cultural and political mainstream about ways of having their voices heard and about ways of being, properly speaking, citizens.

“Integration” is perhaps a more palatable term, implying a kind of mutual accommodation and collaborative alliance. The nomenclature can distract from the issue that actually matters: assimilation is not about diluting personal identity, but about qualifying for political agency. I prefer to describe the process of assuming civic agency simply as “education.” Etymologically, the word “education” stems from the Latin word for “rearing” or “bringing up.” The root verb, to “educe,” points to a process of “calling forth” or of “drawing out” a latent quality. In a multicultural and democratic society, the process of assimilation is best conceived of in terms of education; in terms of the drawing out of latent potentialities. Assimilation, in this sense, does not denote cultural dilution, but rather the attainment of an enfranchised status within a participatory venture.

As Aristotle pointed out long ago, we are, by nature, political animals—creatures of the city who live, work, and find meaning in voluntary collaborations. To educate is to nurture an individual into such a collaborative community, into a body politic—the optimal context in which an individual can unfold his or her full human potential. The process of education is, ultimately, this process of citizen-making: it is the process of rearing into a community as a member with the standing to speak and be heard; with the status of a political agent. This mechanism of education-as-assimilation—not assimilation of knowledge into oneself, but assimilation of oneself into a larger social collective—is indispensable for the functioning of any democratic society, but especially for a society like America.

Indeed, the constellation of ideas I am invoking has a particular American resonance. Consider the salience of three characteristics of the American national experiment: 1) the near universality of the immigrant experience, 2) the ubiquity of literacy among its founding generation, and 3) its character as a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society from the very beginning. These defining features of the national project delineate the centrality of education-as-assimilation in the American context.

It was the great African American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, who noted, when reflecting on the value of the liberal arts in black colleges, “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not, across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas.” Du Bois saw education as the essential pathway to a life of dignity even in the face of racial discrimination. In his struggle to open a space in the American landscape for fully-fledged black citizenship, he sounded not the tone of assimilation, but the clarion call of liberal education and the empowered social agency it makes possible.

Today, as America faces historic demographic challenges both from immigration and from internal economic and ideological polarizations, the central place of education in our national life must be re-emphasized and re-invigorated.

Roosevelt Montas is a professor at Columbia University and the director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum. He specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a specific interest in citizenship and American national identity.

Miller Fellow Accepts Tenure Track Position at Wofford College

Miller Fellow Kathryn Milne will begin a tenure-track position at Wofford College (South Carolina) this fall. Milne is currently a JMC/Veritas Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University where she teaches classes on ancient and military history. The ancient texts of Greece and Rome heavily influenced the Founding Fathers in their debates as they formed the Republic. She received a Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Q: How did the postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell prepare you for the next step in your career?

A: Researching and teaching at Cornell has been an amazing experience, and it has been my privilege this year to be a part of such a vibrant and inspiring intellectual community. I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to make great progress on my book manuscript and am happy that I will be able to start on the tenure track already poised to bring that project to fruition. As I continue to teach, I know that the experience I gained in the classroom at Cornell will help me to become a more effective member of Wofford’s vibrant, student-focused faculty.

Q: How did the relationships you built at Cornell, with both mentors and students, influence your scholarship and teaching?

A: I was extremely lucky to be a part of a reading group in military history made up of both faculty and students, where I was able to discuss my research ideas and take feedback on my book manuscript. Being able to air my thoughts to knowledgeable people with different backgrounds and expertise really helped me to make my research well-rounded. Watching the veteran professors here teach has also been a lesson in itself. I had Dr. Barry Strauss, our department chair, do a guest lecture in my class and I really felt quite schooled! In regard to teaching, my students used their knowledge of military science, psychology, and other subjects to bring some remarkable insights into the classroom, and I’m proud to say I learned a lot from them.

Q: How do you hope to have an impact on Wofford’s campus?

A: My position at Wofford represents part of their expansion into new subject areas, and I’m excited that my teaching will bring the study of ancient history onto campus for the first time. I hope that I can inspire student interest in the ancient world and especially what I consider my two specialty topics, leadership and the military.

Q: What courses do you plan to teach?

A: I am teaching a humanities class on Anthony and Cleopatra which discusses the roles and duties of men and women from the ancient world to today, a survey of the history of the ancient Mediterranean, and an upper level history seminar on Republican Rome. I’m also excited about Wofford’s interim semester which allows faculty to lead trips or teach a non-academic subject during the month of January. I’d love to take my students to Rome, or to Scotland, my own native country!

JMC Welcomes New Members to Academic Advisory Council

The JMC Academic Advisory Council is comprised of 24 of the nation’s leading scholars in history, government, economics, law, literature, and political thought. Below are nine recent additions to the council, which advises the JMC regarding a variety of academic initiatives:

Gregory Campbell: President of Carthage College.

Andrew Delbanco: Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities; Director of American Studies at Columbia University; and winner of the 2006 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.

Jakub Grygiel: George H.W. Bush Senior Associate Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University; Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis; and former editor of the Journal of Public and International Affairs.

Daniel Lowenstein: Professor of Law Emeritus UCLA and Director of the UCLA Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions.

Michael Munger: Professor, Departments of Political Science, Economics, and Public Policy at Duke University and Director of the Politics, Philosophy and Economics Program at Duke.

Lorraine Pangle: Associate Professor of Government and the Co-Director of the Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas-Austin.

Steven Smith: Professor of Political Science, Yale University; Master of Branford College 1996-2011; and Co-Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions.

Barry Strauss: Professor of History; Professor of Classics; and Chair, Department of History, Cornell University.

Keith Wrightson: Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History at Yale University and Co-Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions.

Philanthropy: Respecting the Best of Intentions

Americans tend to give generously to colleges and universities. In 2010, institutions of higher education raised $28 billion. Individuals donated almost half of that sum. Given the scale of investment, it is important for donors to be clear about the intention of their gift and for the receiving institution to respect this intent.

Unfortunately there are incidences when a donor’s intent is not fulfilled for one reason or another. Journal-ist and philanthropist Sylvia Kronstadt’s article “A Donor’s Declaration of Independence” relates her first-hand experience establishing a scholarship and her frustration with the university endow-ment model. The article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on April 3.

Kronstadt told The Declaration that she wrote the article because “… I was angry. I think higher education is using deceptive sales practices on many fronts, financial aid being one of them. I wanted people to know.”“I began early in the process to have a faint uneasiness about exactly what an endowment is and how it works,” said Kronstadt.

“I started asking questions that should have been very easy to answer. One paranoid or uninformed adminis-trator after another referred me to someone else to answer what were very fundamental inquiries about what would happen to our money within the endowment context. No one would respond. It was eerie!”

“I then openly expressed my misgivings, and basically pleaded with the administration to show me that I was wrong. My perception that the endowment was, at least in part, a scheme to puff up a university’s prestige was left unchallenged.”

Below is an excerpt of Kronstadt’s article. A partial tran-script of the piece is available to subscribers to the Chronicle of Education through the Chronicle’s Web site. The full, unedited version can be read on the JMC Web site (www.jackmillercenter.org):

When my father, an analytical chemist, died last May, my mother and I decided to honor him by endowing a scholarship fund for economically disadvantaged, academically deserving chemistry majors at our state university. Our intent was to provide one full-tuition scholarship annually to a student who had completed no less than a year of college-level course work with at least a 3.0 average and had demonstrated a commitment to a career in the sciences. We assumed that our substantial donation would continue to generate adequate funds for such scholarships in future years despite inflation, since we thought the university’s investment professionals were certain to achieve returns that would meet—or more likely beat—inflationary trends.

But the way endowments actually work made a naïve fantasy of that simple, heartfelt dream. The university would provide to our scholarship recipients only a fraction of what our money was expected to earn each year. We regarded the way in which endowments are managed as an unacceptable betrayal of our intention. We were deter-mined to help students now, and to do so in a high-impact way, giving them a year free of financial worries that could truly be transformative—resulting in better grades, priceless research opportunities, and a better chance at subsequent financial aid based on merit.

So, quite brashly, we created our own scholarship program, which we lightheartedly christened an “endearment.” The concept is a twist on amortization: We will “spend down” our contribution, but with the benefit of accruing interest. We calculated a worst-case scenario and found that we would be able to provide full scholarships for about 15 years, possibly more. We will continue to offer the opportunity that a full scholarship provides, and the process will unfold while we are around to monitor how the money is spent and to enjoy the reward of aiding truly needy, deserving young people.

This approach seems clean, simple, principled, and rather elegant. The notion that an endowment creates a “gift that keeps on giving” is seductive but disingenuous. Our gift really will “keep on giving,” as our students plunge with even greater freedom and enthusiasm into their studies and then enter the work force as well-trained chemists, perhaps someday choosing to create their own scholarships.

It is clear that the traditional endowment model is geared more toward enlarging and perpetuating itself than to-ward actually assisting students or advancing the institution’s overall mission. The great allure of an endowment, of course, is the vision of perpetuity that it engenders, the promise of a kind of immortality: “The money I donate for scholarships will live on, in my name, from here to eternity.” The discrepancy between rising tuition costs and penurious endowment payouts makes a lie out of that implied promise. This ivory-tower empire cannot endure if we are ever again to offer higher education that is affordable for the average person. Fundamental change is essential. Thus, I do not believe in perpetuity. And so our scholarship will not have eternal life—but it will have a quality of life that the endowment would have denied it.

Roosevelt University and University of Wisconsin at Madison Conduct Summer Academies for High School Teachers

Roosevelt University will conduct its second annual High School Teachers’ Academy on the History and Principles of the American Founding from July 11-15, with support from the JMC.

The program will bring together high school teachers from the Chicago area for a one-week series of lectures, workshops, and seminars designed to foster effective teaching of the American Founding. These daily sessions are led by JMC faculty partners, all of whom are prominent scholars in history and political thought. The program is modeled after the successful faculty development summer institutes for young college professors that the JMC conducts in association with leading universities and colleges.

The 20 participants will focus on the theme Liberty and Constitutionalism: Five Founding Freedoms. Returning faculty instructors are Professors Michael Zuckert (University of Notre Dame), Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago), and Maura Jane Farrelly (Brandeis University). New faculty instructors for the 2011 Academy are Professors Nathan Tarcov (University of Chicago) and Pauline Maier (MIT).

The American Democracy Forum (ADF) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a JMC partner program, will also host a program for seventh to twelfth grade social studies teachers from August 1-2, 2011. Participants will examine the understandings for popular sovereignty in the history of American political thought through discussions of shared readings and presentations by UW scholars. Teachers will have the opportunity to develop research-based curricula and build a professional learning community that will inform and enhance their current educations practices.

In addition, teachers will receive two credits from UW-Madison, ongoing engagement with the ADF during the 2011-2012 school year, and opportunities to develop and lead professional development activities at future ADF events.

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High School Students Compete in Essay Contest on the Declaration of Independence