Message from the Chairman

Since selling our business in 1998, I have had the time and money to focus on philanthropy and have found that it is, in many ways, just like running a business. If you are serious about it, it can achieve much and give you a great deal of satisfaction. And you should be serious about it because you are giving away (or “investing”) hard earned money that could have been used for your own pleasure or passed on to your heirs.

In my own case, I feel that what I am doing is making an investment in causes I believe in. Of course, there are some that you give to just because you feel an obligation to do so. A friend is being “honored” so you buy some seats at the event, or you are approached by a friend to support something they are involved with.

But the vast majority of what I give is tightly focused on specific causes that I believe are important. Over these past 12 years I have had some very good experiences and some, shall we call, “learning experiences.” My biggest “learning experience” was when I gave a great deal of money to a medical center to set up a research program to study Peripheral Neuropathy, a nerve condition I have that causes significant pain in the feet and can affect
the hands. After just a few years, I learned they had veered off target and were studying some other condition. I was really disappointed to learn that my money was not being spent on what I had intended.

Learning from that experience, and using my business knowledge, I put together a small team, a Foundation Director and a program officer. I then developed a document, “This I Believe,” to focus on those things I really believe in and to clearly state those I don’t believe in. From that we drafted a more legalized Statement of Guidelines and Priorities. Both of these documents are designed to help keep us focused and to serve as guidelines after I have passed away.

Also, we don’t make lump sum gifts anymore. We will make multi-year commitments but will fund them after the first year only if the organization is staying on target, fulfilling “donor intent.” We also developed a Web site so those requesting our support, as well as others, can see what we will and what we won’t donate to. We also insist on complete transparency so we can be sure that “donor’s intent” is always followed. So why go through all this work to give money away? Well, in the first place, I strongly believe that because I was fortunate enough to be successful, I have an obligation to “give back.” Sure, I worked hard for that success, but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be successful if it weren’t for the wisdom, work and sacrifices of what others had given and made before me to create the society, infrastructure and the kind of country we have today. So, I wanted to
“payback.”

For some causes, the “payback” was simply a matter of writing a check, not a lot of personal involvement. But we very carefully check the mission statements and performance of each of the charities, or organizations we give to. Over the years we have dropped some and added others.

In a few cases, we actually created a new initiative when we found there wasn’t an existing one to do what we felt needed to be done. We established
a foundation for Peripheral Neuropathy that now works closely with a number of hospital and research centers. My wife, Goldie, started a program at a local university in Chicago for Women in Leadership Roles in Real Estate, which was her business profession. And one of the charitable endeavors that gives us great pleasure is providing scholarships to young Israeli military veterans who would otherwise not be able to afford college. And, most important in terms of time and funding, I started The Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. Playing a part in
helping it grow and succeed and seeing the impact it is having on so many college campuses has been a wonderful experience.

We have found that philanthropy, done well, can bring a great deal of satisfaction. As 2010 draws to a close, if you are considering a donation to a cause that you think is important to the future of our country, I respectfully encourage you to consider the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. You can be absolutely certain that we will honor your intent as we carry out our mission to give young people more opportunities to learn about our nation’s wonderful heritage. Also, we would be happy to discuss with you the possibility of a Miller Center supported program at your alma mater or local university.

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JMC Announces New Partner Program at Yale University

Luce Hall at Yale University, future location of the YCRI

The Jack Miller Center and Yale University announce the launch of an exciting two-year pilot project, The Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, (YCRI). The YCRI is an interdisciplinary project developed to revive the study of modern constitutionalism in the Anglo-American tradition. It is jointly hosted by the Departments of History and Political Science at Yale and is supported by the Jack Miller Center as a result of a generous lead gift from businessman and philanthropist, Thomas Klingenstein.

Co-directed by Professors Steven Smith (Political Science) and Keith Wrightson (History), the YCRI will provide students the opportunity to study, at a high level, the deep roots of out political culture, and the most powerful intellectual and institutional influences on the development of representative and democratic government worldwide.

According to Wrightson and Smith, undergraduates at Yale exhibit an eagerness to engage with these matters that are inadequately provided for in contemporary academic programs.

The aim of the Center is to reassert in history and political science curricula the study of constitutional government theory and practice; not simply to restore the historical tradition long absent in American universities, but rather to challenge and extend that tradition with new questions. Those questions will focus on the origins, development and diffusion of a political culture that emerged in England, was transmitted to America during the 17th and 18th Centuries, trans-formed and extended by the American Revolution, and tested in the American Civil War.The YCRI is intended to encourage research, advance the careers of young scholars, provide curriculum, and extend public discussion of key issues.

Program elements include post doctoral fellowships, seminar courses, a series of conferences on the com-parative crises of civil war and union from the English through the American Civil War, a public lecture series featuring distinguished scholars from history, political science and related disciplines, and selected research grants.
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Premier Historian of the American Revolution Honored with 2010 Award for Academic Excellence

(Left to Right) Gordon Wood, Jack Greene, and Mike Ratliff

Gordon S. Wood, Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University and Pulitzer Prize winning author, is the recipient of the 2010 Jack Miller Center Award for Academic Excellence. Professor Wood, who joined the faculty at Brown in 1969, is widely considered to be the preeminent historian on the American Founding. Wood was honored at a dinner on November 5 during the Miller Center’s National Summit on Higher Education held in Philadelphia.

The award was presented by Jack P. Greene, Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, and a nationally recognized expert in the political and social history of the original British colonies in America and the origins of the American Revolution.

“All of us at the Miller Center are honored to be associated with Professor Wood, who has done so much to deepen our understanding of the new American republic,” said Admiral Mike Ratliff, president of the Jack Miller Center. “Gordon, is a member of our Academic Council and a regular Teaching Fellow at programs such as our Summer Institutes. He has been generous in giving his time and counsel to the hundreds of young professors in the Miller Center community.”

The Award for Academic Excellence was presented by Jack Greene, who offered a thoughtful and gently humorous appreciation of Professor Wood’s career. After recalling their first meeting, in December 1964 in Washington at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Professor Greene remarked that over four decades Brown undergraduates “adored his lectures and seminars” and that Wood directed the doctoral work of more than thirty young scholars. He continued that: “Above all, however, Gordon has achieved a position of distinction in the greater academy of American intellectual and academic life that few people in any generation have been able to match. He has always addressed himself to a wider audience. The Creation of the American Republic, his first and still, in my view, his most distinguished work, is arguably the most important first book ever written by an early American historian.”

“The Creation of the American Republic is widely regarded as the foundational book for the so-called “republican synthesis” that dominated much of the
work in United States history for almost twenty years beginning in the late 1970s…. More importantly it explored, for the first time in detail and with admirable analytic clarity and intellectual boldness, how contemporaries defined and debated the myriad issues that confronted the new republican states during and immediately after the American Revolution, as they tried to construct formally republican governments out of the latently republican materials and traditions they had inherited from the colonial era. The volume showed how through debate, confrontation, and negotiation they managed to plumb the depths of theoretical political and constitutional issues and to tease out solutions that permitted the construction of a genuinely federal national state without sacrificing the original goals of the Revolution. More than anything else, this achievement gained for Gordon a place as the premier historian of the American Revolution, a position that he continues to enjoy forty years later.”

“This position has of course subsequently been fortified by a spate of penetrating articles and his influential book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, published in 1993, which argued persuasively that the reconception of social and political relations in the United States between 1776 and roughly 1830 represented an intellectual transformation that was genuinely revolutionary. His latest book, Empire of Liberty, extends his interests beyond the intellectual, the political, and the constitutional into the full range of subjects implicit in the ideal of a comprehensive national narrative for the first quarter century of the American republic.” Professor Greene also noted Professor Wood’s role as a public intellectual as a regular contributor to journals such as the New York Review of Books.

“On subject after subject, he has explored with penetration and thoughtfulness and without ideological blinders the limits of historical interpretation and the possibilities for historical explanation in a broad array of modes of historical discourse. Gordon has usefully collected many of the best of these review essays in his 2009 book, The Purposes of the Past.”
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7th Annual Miller Summit for Higher Education Held in Philadelphia

Scholars from college campuses across the United States gathered in Philadelphia November 4-6 to attend the seventh annual Jack Miller Center National Summit on Higher Education.

These annual conferences bring together dozens of professors who are at various stages in establishing programs on their campuses so that they can identify best practices, find opportunities to work together, share ideas and provide encouragement to one another.

Professors from more than 30 campuses and representatives from the Institute for Humane Studies, the Bradley Foundation and Liberty Fund attended the three day conference held at the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League Club in Center City Philadelphia.

The theme was “Remembering the Revolution” and featured a presentation by Dr. Bruce Cole about the American Revolution Center, scheduled to open in 2013 on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Dr. Cole, a member of the JMC board of directors and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is the CEO of the American Revolution Center, which will be the only museum in United States dedicated exclusively to the American Founding and the Revolutionary War.

Working sessions were held throughout the conference and were led by Dr. Michael Andrews and Dr. Pamela Edwards of the JMC academic programs team. Bernhardt Trout described his impressive progress as Director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Concourse Program; Lorraine Pangle provided an update on the successes of The Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts at the University of Texas; Dan Lowenstein discussed the newly launched Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions at UCLA; and Dean Hal Krent highlighted his successes in expanding pre-professional education in our constitutional tradition and plans for the coming year (including a program with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) at IIT-Kent Law.

“Altogether they provided a wealth of ideas and encouragement for those considering launching new programs, said Edwards. “It can be done and success can come more quickly than many imagine.”

“We have hosted these sessions for seven years,” said Admiral Mike Ratliff, president of the Jack Miller Center. “Indeed, the Miller project emerged from just such a gathering of professors at the University of Chicago in 2004 who reached out to Jack for his help to advance their efforts to provide college students the opportunity for a profound education in the great ideas that shaped the American political and economic order.

“For me, this sustained time with professors from all over our nation is an opportunity to put together a report card on how well we are succeeding,” continued Ratliff. “This was an exciting and high energy time. I have never been prouder than these past couple of days!”

The conference concluded with a dinner and the presentation of the annual Jack Miller Center Award for Academic Excellence to Professor Gordon Wood, the nation’s leading expert on the Founding and the Revolutionary War period.
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Michael Barone on American Education, the Founding and the “Glorious Revolution”

Michael Barone, a leading political analyst and pundit, was interviewed by the Jack Miller Center’s Mike Deshaies, vice president of communications and development. Mr. Barone discusses education in America’s Founding Principles and history.

Mike Deshaies: There is growing momentum to reinvigorate education in the teaching of America’s Founding Principles and history. If you would, share your thoughts about how important it is for students to learn about the Founding and about America’s heritage.

Michael Barone: I think it’s essential for American students to learn about the Founding and America’s heritage. We have a unique national story. We have, an absolutely stellar cast of characters – of people of great intellectual ability and personal integrity, people who risked all, people who thought very seriously about the problems and opportunities of self-government and of limited government. It’s a unique heritage and I think it’s a gift to the world. There’s something almost miraculous about the idea of having a group of people like Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton gathered in this enterprise of American independence and Constitution-making in what had been English colonies of only about three million people. It’s pretty astonishing that we had such brilliant minds working.

MD: Some have stated that the effort to enrich civic education should be focused at the high school level. Do you believe college students should study America’s Founding Principles and history?

MB: I’ve noticed a trend in some of our great universities to replace some of the wonderful scholars that we’ve had writing on the period of the Founding in the early Republic, with people specializing in something entirely different. I’m not trying to denigrate all the alternatives by any means but it is seen that many of our academics and administrators just don’t value the Founding as highly as the American people do. It’s not a matter of us bragging that we’re so wonderful; it’s that we are fortunate enough to be the inheritors of a great heritage. Our universities want to be sophisticated. They want to be au courant. They want to look at the struggles of the downtrodden, of people who were marginalized in the past. There’s room for scholarship of that sort, I think, and I think there’s some good scholarship done in these areas as well as a lot of stuff that, frankly, wouldn’t even qualify as good journalism. But I think that to neglect the Founding period is to neglect something that is extremely important in the history of our government, which every citizen should want at some time or another to reflect on, because the principles that the Founders stood for, the arguments that they made, the dilemmas that they confronted and attempted to deal with those are full of instruction for all of us.

MD: You’ve written about the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Great Britain and how it led to the American Revolution. Please give us your thoughts on this.

MB: The Founding Fathers weren’t writing on a blank slate. They were people who came from a certain part of history. They thought of themselves initially as Englishmen. Benjamin Franklin spent most of the twenty years before the American Revolution living in London, as a matter of fact, and begged the English ministers not to give the colonists cause to want to separate themselves from Britain. It seemed to me that the unusual events of 1688-89, referred to as a “Glorious Revolution” – the term, of course, was coined by people who were in favor of it, as you might gather – really turned out to be a significant step forward for representative government, for guaranteed liberties, for global capitalism, and for an anti-tyrannical foreign policy, principles which have characterized England and Britain ever since, and which had a profound effect on the history of the United States.

MD: You’re also author of a book called Hard America, Soft America, in which you argued that America is divided into two camps – one part hard, one part soft. How do you see America in ten years?

MB: I’ve regarded our K-12 education system largely as a soft system, not requiring much competition or accountability by either students or teachers. From ages 18 to 30, they live in hard America, whether it’s selective universities, the military, private sector, some public sector endeavors where there’s competition and accountability, or nonprofit endeavors of that same character. I was really prompted to write the book by the observation that it seemed to me American 18-year-olds are incompetent but American 30-year-olds are the most competent 30-year-olds in the world. I think that you don’t want a society that’s entirely hard or entirely soft. You want different degrees of hardness, of competition and accountability to apply to different kinds of people at different stages in their lives. I think right now there is a serious question of how much hard America and how much soft America
we’re going to have in the next decade. We’ve had a presidential administration and congressional leadership that has striven to put into law – and has had some success in doing so – measures which are designed or intended to soften society, to remove competition and accountability from a certain number of people by having lots of government provision.

MD: Many Americans believe that politics has become too partisan. Do you agree with this sentiment, or are the current battles between the two major parties something that we’ve seen pretty much throughout the nation’s history?

MB: Those who believe that we have bitter partisan-ship now, I would advise to read the political debates of the 1790s. The partisanship was very sharp; it was very bitter. It included a lot of personal vilification, some of it factually based, some of it not so much. There was good reason for partisan dispute at that time, because we faced some very basic questions about how to organize the federal government. And there was principal disagreement on this matter between people like Hamilton and people like Jefferson. And also we found ourselves in a world where there was a world war going on between Revolutionary, and then Napoleonic France, and Great Britain. George Washington strove to maintain American neutrality, as did his successor, and then, as it turned out, Thomas Jefferson.And America has never really faced that situation again. We’ve never been within the orbit of a huge international conflict in which we have been so sharply divided between two sides. That’s something that could tear a nation apart very easily and I think that we have George Washington to thank for the fact that it did not tear apart the infant United States of America.
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Suggested Reading

LION OF LIBERTY
By Harlow Giles Unger
(Da Capo Press, 2010)

Perhaps best known for his famous quote, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” Patrick Henry is often overshadowed in the popular mind by his colleagues Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. The central nature of his role in the movement for American independence cannot be understated, though. Harlow Giles Unger’s “Lion of Liberty” (Da Capo Press, 2010) attempts to bring Mr. Henry the wider recognition that he deserves.

“Lion of Liberty” shows us how resolutions authored and sponsored by Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses helped propel the earliest movement towards independence, and how, as Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, he provided essential executive leadership to his home state. Unger also sheds light on Henry’s very large role in passing the Bill of Rights via his active opposition to the Federalists and his fear of a strong central government.

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New Additions to the JMC Video Series

The Jack Miller Center’s award winning collection of video interviews continues to expand, adding several new videos of academic leaders discussing their efforts to improve civic education.

In the latest videos, Professor Harold Krent, dean of the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, Professor Elizabeth Kaufer Busch of Christopher Newport University, and Professor Thomas Pangle of the University of Texas discuss the programs on their campuses supported by the Jack Miller Center that are designed to enhance the teaching and study of the American Founding by undergraduate students.

These most recent videos accompany previous video interviews with individuals such as Pulitzer Prize winner Professor Gordon S. Wood, First Lady of Pennsylvania Judge Marjorie Rendell, noted University of Virginia political scientist Professor James Ceaser, and preeminent American Civil War scholar Professor Allen Guelzo.

The series, produced by BodenWorks, Ltd., has garnered industry awards, including the Gold EMPixx Award for the JMC video on the University of Virginia’s Program in Constitutionalism and Democracy.

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In Memoriam: Dr. John Strassburger

The Jack Miller Center notes with sadness the recent passing of Dr. John Strassburger, president emeritus of Ursinus College and board member of
the Jack Miller Center.

Dr. Strassburger received his undergraduate degree from Bates College, his master’s from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He was a respected and influential voice for quality liberal education in American universities. Inaugurated as the 12th president of Ursinus College in 1995, he developed the nationally acclaimed Common Intellectual Experience at Ursinus College, which exposes all undergraduate students to intellectually rigorous coursework on a variety of subjects.

In addition to his influential presidency at Ursinus, Dr. Strassburger was a distinguished scholar, authoring several papers and lecturing on  architecture, history and the liberal arts.

A lecture series sponsored by the Jack Miller Center and held in memory of Dr. Strassburger is currently in the planning stages and is scheduled to take place in the of Fall 2011.

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Yenor Explores Family Politics in Modern Political Thought

Scott Yenor—Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Political Science Department at Boise State University, and Director of Boise State’s American Founding Initiative—got into the academic business in order to engage in the exchange of ideas.

“Too often,” Yenor says, “ideas of constitutionalism, classical liberty, and limited government are ignored or held in contempt on our universities.”

The American Founders understood the importance and efficacy of limited government. A government that tries to do everything will become a caldron for special interests and for those closely connected to power. “Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property,” Alexander Hamilton writes, “presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens.” Such a harvest to the connected, accompany unlimited government as night follows day.

The prescience of Hamilton’s observations mean that these Founders should at least receive a place at the table in today’s intellectual discussion, perhaps even the pride of place at the head of the table. Yenor’s American Founding Initiative is dedicated to making sure that the Founder’s ideas are the subject of serious study. Yenor teaches American political thought, political philosophy, constitutional law at Boise State. His research has concentrated on the ideas of family and marriage in modern political thought, and his book—Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought—is coming out in February by Baylor University Press. He has also written on executive power, the Scottish Enlightenment, the philosophical
status of revealed religion, the corpus of American novelist Willa Cather, and the separation of church and state, and he is beginning a book on American Reconstruction and the Problem of Statesmanship.

Two years ago Yenor established the American Founding Initiative, which has begun with two speakers series—Constitution Day and Presidents Day. Speakers have included Charles Kesler, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steve Hayward. These series have been initiated with seed money from the Jack Miller Center, the Law and Economics Society at George Mason, Veritas Fund, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.

He is currently expanding the program to have a stronger curricular presence at the fast growing and dynamic Boise State.

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Vision into Action

The success of the Jack Miller Center’s mission to enrich civic education for college students depends on the support of visionary leaders who share our belief that the foundation of a
thriving democracy is a citizenry educated in the ideas and principles of the American founding. If you are one of these leaders and would like to support the Jack Miller Center, please contact Mike Ratliff, president, at 484-436-2065 or mratliff@gojmc.org.

For copies of the JMC’s 2008-2009 biennial report, Working Together to Strengthen Civic Education; five year development plan, The Way Ahead; Chicago Initiative brochure; and the Jack Miller Center video, please contact Emily Koons at 484-436- 2064, or ekoons@gojmc.org.

Please visit our Web site, www.jackmillercenter.org for exclusive video interviews with leading scholars, essays by JMC faculty and fellows, and the latest information regarding academic programs supported by the JMC on college campuses across the country.

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