Contents

1. Message from the Chairman
2. 27 Universities and Colleges Participate in the JMC’s First Annual Constitution Day Initiative
3. A Day for The Constitution, an article by Bill McClay
4. JMC, Veritas Fund to Launch Five-Year Capital Campaign to Advance Young Scholars’ Careers
5. Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions to hold its First Conference
6. Roosevelt University, University of Wisconsin, Boise State University Working to Reinvigorate Education in America’s Founding Principles at the High School Level
7. Suggested Reading: Conserving Liberty
8. Suggested Reading: Teaching America
9. A Scholar’s View: James Madison’s View on Property
10. Postdoctoral Fellowship Paves Way to Tenure Track Position for Young Scholar
11. Campbell’s Legacy: Classical Liberal Education at Carthage College
12. Review and Preview

Message from the Chairman

America and Brigadoon
Editor’s note: the following speech was given by Jack Miller at the conclusion of the JMC’s Faculty Development Summer Institute in Pasadena, California on August 12. Mr. Miller directed his remarks to the young professors who participated in the two-week institute and who are in the early stage of their careers teaching U.S. history, government and political thought.

Brigadoon is a mysterious Scottish village that magically appears for only one day every one-hundred years. Its inhabitants lived in a permanent state of happiness and enchantment.

This musical was first produced in 1947 and I remember seeing it at that time on one of my first high school dates. I began thinking about it lately in connection with what is happening in our country today. To me, the United States has been like a “Brigadoon,” a place where the individual is supreme; not the king, not the church, not a select few and certainly not the government. It was a place where each individual had a chance to achieve their own dreams based on their own effort and their own ability. They could find their own happiness.

That’s the kind of America I grew up in and I desperately want it to continue so it can be passed on to our children, our grandchildren and their children so they can live their lives in that kind of country with those kinds of opportunities. Not promises and not guarantees but the vision so memorably expressed in our Declaration of Independence that; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

To secure those “unalienable rights,” our founders created a document, our Constitution, which has proven to be the basis for the finest form of government ever devised by man. Recognizing the imperfections of “man”, our founders laid out a number of principles in our Constitution to help guide this experiment in self-governance. Amongst others, these principles include:

…the freedom of religion, of speech, of the press and of assembly all of which are vital to a free people;

…that the powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. In other words, limited government.

…the sanctity of private property— the basis for a free market economy— which affords each one of us to succeed according to our capabilities. Our founders felt that without the ability to enjoy the fruits of our labor, happiness was unobtainable.

…that we are a nation governed by the rule of law, not of men. And a number of others.

That vision, that dream of each of us enjoying “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” can only be realized if we stay true to the principles laid down in our Constitution. And that can only happen if the people of this country know what that vision is and know and believe in those principles.

And that is your mission and should be your driving passion, to pass along that dream and those principles. Over time, during your teaching careers, there will be thousands of you passing on that dream and those principles to millions of young people. And based on the strength of that, we will be able to keep our “Brigadoon” not for just a year and not for just 236 years, but for much, much longer. We are, it seems to me, on the cusp of losing what has made our country so great. But you,
each of you, can help save it, can help preserve the enchantment and the promise of this wonderful country of ours. And for that, I want to thank you, each and every one of you.
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Twenty-seven universities and colleges across the nation participated in the JMC’s first annual Constitution Day Initiative. JMC faculty partners conducted a variety of campus programs to recognize Constitution Day on September 17.

The theme for this year’s Constitution Day Initiative is “The Limits of Federal Government Action in Domestic Affairs Under the Constitution.” Campus programming on this theme included public lectures, panel discussions, student essay prizes, faculty and graduate student symposiums, and a public concert event.

The Andrea Waitt Carlton Family Foundation provided the lead gift for the Constitution Day Initiative, and all participating institutions provided matching funds for the programming on their individual campuses.

Participating colleges included Duke, Brown, UCLA, Michigan State, University of Virginia, Cornell, Emory, Notre Dame, University of Arizona, Villanova, Boston College, Claremont, Loyola University Chicago and Roosevelt University.

Major Events in Chicago

A highlight of the initiative is the participation of two United States Supreme Court Justices, Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia in separate programs at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Justice Breyer helped launch the college’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States on September 12. Justice Breyer gave a talk on his national best-selling book, “Making Our Democracy Work—A Judge’s View.” A book signing and reception were held afterwards. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Breyer is known for his pragmatic approach to constitutional law.

On October 18 Justice Scalia will participate in a conference on “Judicial Takings” at IIT. Justice Scalia and academics from around the country will examine the judiciary’s role in ensuring that baseline definitions of property remain stable over time. Justice Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1986. During his 25 years on the Court, Scalia has advocated “originalism” in constitutional interpretation and has strongly defended the powers of the executive branch.

According to Dean Harold J. Krent of Chicago- Kent College of Law, a member of JMC’s faculty partner network, Justice Scalia previously has voiced concern over the power exercised by all three branches of government to redefine property rights. “We were delighted to have Justice Breyer help us launch our program in September and we are looking forward to Justice Scalia hosting a critical dialogue about fostering stable understandings of property rights. I am grateful to the JMC for its support and recognition of the importance of property rights under the rule of law,” said Krent.

Another highlight of the JMC’s Constitution Day Initiative was a debate on “Executive Power” between Alberto Coll and John Yoo at the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago on September 15. The event was sponsored by DePaul University, The Federalist Society, The American Constitution Society, and the JMC.

Professor Coll was a deputy assistant secretary in the US Department of Defense from 1990 to 1993 and currently is the president of the DePaul University International Human Rights Law Institute. John Yoo served in United States Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration. Dr. Yoo’s writings and areas of interest include the Constitution’s separation of powers and federalism. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Law since 1993.

A new Constitution Day portal on the JMC Web site provides articles relating to this year’s theme and Constitution Day. The JMC produced a pocket-sized reference booklet on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Copies were distributed nationwide to the 27 participating partner programs. Contact Emily Koons (ekoons@gojmc.org or 484-436-2064) for a copy.
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By Wilfred M. McClay
Vice-Chairman of the JMC’s Academic Advisory Council

Americans love to celebrate, and we do it for all kinds of reasons. We celebrate our great presidents; but we also celebrate our common laborers. We pay homage to lovers on Valentine’s Day, and parents on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. We pause to consider our good fortune on Thanksgiving Day, to remember and mourn our honored dead on Memorial Day and Veterans Day; and of course we whoop it up on the Fourth of July, our great day of national independence.

But where, amid the wing-dings and solemn observances, is the U.S. Constitution? Why don’t we celebrate it just as vigorously as we celebrate the Fourth, with parades, speeches, and fireworks? After all, every nation has leaders, heroes and independence days. But only one nation on earth has ever had a 224-year-old written Constitution at the center of its national life, a charter of its liberties and arbiter of its conflicts, the sovereign expression of “we the people.”

The French have lived under many different constitutions and regimes over the centuries, so that for them the nation and the government are two distinct things. Not so for Americans. Yet we fail to grasp the importance of this difference. We revere our Constitution, but we do so blandly and automatically, without troubling ourselves to know very much about it.

It was precisely a concern about our pervasive ignorance that impelled the late senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who kept a well-thumbed copy of the Constitution in his pocket, to establish Constitution Day. Unfortunately, he did it by senatorial fiat, attaching an amendment to the omnibus spending bill of 2004 stipulating that all educational institutions receiving federal funding would henceforth be required to hold an educational program pertaining to the United States Constitution, on or near September 17 of each year. (On that date in 1787, the writers of the Constitution met for the last time to sign the completed document.) A worthy and well-meaning act by Byrd; but fiats are not self-executing, particularly when they do not reflect a broader political movement or educational consensus.

As a consequence, Constitution Day has languished. A great many colleges and universities observe Constitution Day, but do it in a perfunctory way, such as mounting a small and temporary rare-document exhibit at the campus library. That’s not enough. There is a great missed opportunity here. Several good organizations, such as the National Constitution Center, the Bill of Rights Institute, ConstitutionFacts.com, and ConstitutionDay.com have sought to fill the breach and help make Constitution Day into a more substantial holiday. This year, the Philadelphia-based Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History (with which am affiliated) has gone a step further, launching a Constitution Day Initiative to support well-designed Constitution Day programs on college campuses. This has resulted in first rate Constitution Day programs on 30 campuses all over the country, with distinguished speakers ranging from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to historian Pauline Maier, to Lt. Gen Josiah Bunting III, to Justice Antonin Scalia, and featuring debates over issues such as the status of the Tenth Amendment and the constitutionality of health-care reform. If this year’s crop of programs is any indication, Constitution Day may be seeing its time come at last.

If so, it will be addressing a real and enduring need. The great American historian Gordon Wood ended his recent book The Idea of America with a moving account of a lecture on the American Revolution that he delivered in Warsaw in 1976, during the bicentennial of the American Revolution — four years before the emergence of the Solidarity movement, at a time when Poland was firmly in the hands of Communist tyranny. At the end of his lecture, a courageous young woman stood up and challenged Wood, asserting that he “had left out the most important part.” He had, she pointed out, omitted any mention of the Bill of Rights, “the constitutional protection of individual liberties against the government.” And, Wood confessed, she was right. “I had taken the Bill of Rights for granted,” he admitted. “But this young Polish woman living under a communist regime could not take individual rights for granted.”

It was an electric moment, and its lesson for us is clear. “We forget — we take for granted — the important things,” Wood rightly concludes. That is why we so badly need such historians, and monuments, and days of remembrance. Long live Constitution Day.
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The JMC and the Manhattan Institute’s Veritas Fund have launched a fundraising campaign to sustain and grow the joint postdoctoral fellowship program. The two organizations formed a partnership in 2009 to fund postdoctoral fellowships for promising young scholars who teach courses on a variety of subjects relating to the American Founding and Western tradition. By combining resources, the two organizations have rapidly expanded the number of fellowships, reached more campuses and strategically positioned young scholars for a career teaching college students about the foundations of our country. To date, 79 fellowships have been funded at campuses across the country.

Veritas Board Member Thomas W. Smith will host a reception and dinner in Greenwich, CT in November to launch the campaign. The JMC and Veritas Fund will work together to raise the funds needed to continue sponsoring fellows on the 23 campuses currently involved with the program, and to increase the number of fellows on six flagship campuses— the University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University, Boston College, Yale University, Notre Dame University, and the University of Virginia. These fellowships not only impact the lives and careers of the award recipient, but also the individual campuses on which they teach. Fellows provide essential staffing resources for their hosting academic center and teach courses that otherwise often would not be taught.

“It is hard to exaggerate the leavening effect that our postdocs have on our program. Their impact on undergraduates in class has been profound. I can’t tell you how many of our students have told me how delighted they were to have the opportunity to take a course that is both intellectually rigorous and focused on questions of American values,” said professor Michael Gillespie, co-director of the Gerst Program at Duke University.
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The Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions (YCRI) will hold a conference examining the political thought of Abraham Lincoln on October 22 in the Hall of Graduate Studies.

The conference grew out of a book project idea by Professor Steven Smith, co-director of YCRI. Smith’s new anthology of Lincoln’s speeches and writings will be published by Yale University Press in the spring of 2012. The selections intended for this volume express the major themes of Lincoln’s statecraft. Professor Smith’s introduction takes a closer look at the idea of Lincoln as a philosophic statesman, and guides the reader through the rest of the volume.

Interpretive essays follow the selections structured around four themes. Professor Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago) looks at the relationship between Lincoln and the Framers. Professor Danilo Petranovich (Yale University, YCRI) explores the tension in Lincoln’s thought between his ideas of Union and democracy. The question of executive power has received renewed attention in recent years, and Professor Benjamin Kleinerman (Michigan State University), shows how this theme repeatedly recurred throughout Lincoln’s presidency. The question of Lincoln’s religion is the theme of the final interpretive essay. Professor Smith focuses on the Second Inaugural Address that has been called “Lincoln’s greatest speech.” By a close reading of this speech Smith shows how Lincoln balanced the conflicting claims of divine providence and human responsibility.

In addition to the four contributors to the new Lincoln volume, the Yale conference will feature several notable Lincoln scholars. Professors Eric Foner (Columbia University), David Bromwich and Stephen Skowronek (both of Yale University) will reflect on the interpretive essays and the entire volume in the final roundtable discussion moderated by Steven Smith.

YCRI is an interdisciplinary project launched in the spring of 2011 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 JMC thanks to the generous lead gift from businessman and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein.
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JMC faculty partners on three campuses provided some 200 high school teachers education in America’s Founding Principles. Roosevelt University’s “High School Teachers’ Academy,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “American Democracy Educators’ Forum,” and Boise State University’s “Teaching American History,” all brought area high school teachers together in their respective locales to discuss themes in American history and enhance participants’ subject knowledge.

Roosevelt University’s Montesquieu Forum, in partnership with the JMC, sponsored a one-week program for 20 Chicagoland teachers on the theme,of America’s founding freedoms. “The High School Teachers’ Academy” is made possible by a generous multi-year gift from the Northern Trust Foundation and by the Harvey Miller Family Foundation. This is the second year in a three-year pilot effort that the JMC and RU hope will form the basis for a new masters’ degree for teachers interested in deepening their understanding of our nation’s Founding.

The University of Wisconsin held a two-day program for high school teachers focused on the theme of popular sovereignty for the first annual “American Democracy Educators’ Forum.” Teachers received two credits from UW for their participation, and will continue engagement with the American Democracy Forum, a partner program funded with a lead gift from Richard Uihlein, a prominent Wisconsin businessman and philanthropist.

“The event, I think, was a success. We had excellent substantive discussions and the teachers worked in groups to form group learning plans with activities on popular sovereignty,” said Professor John Zumbrunnen, co-director of UW’s American Democracy Forum.

Professor Scott Yenor of Boise State University served as a faculty advisor to the university’s “Teaching American History” program. Over 150 Idaho public school teachers have attended the program, which is sponsored by the College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs, the Center for School Improvement and Policy Study, and the National Association of Scholars.
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By Mark Blitz
Hoover Institute Press Publication

Originating in Hoover Institution discussions held under the auspices of the Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society, Conserving Liberty defends the principles of American conservatism, clarifying many of the narrow or mistaken views that have arisen from both its friends and its foes. Author Mark Blitz asserts that individual liberty is the most powerful, reliable, and true standpoint from which to clarify and secure conservatism— but that individual freedom alone cannot produce happiness.

He shows that, to fully grasp conservatism’s merits, we must we also understand the substance of responsibility, toleration and other virtues, traditional institutions, individual excellence, and self-government. Blitz first sketches the elements of conservatism that appeal to individuals, reminding us that to consider ourselves first of all as free individuals and not in group, class, racial, or gender terms is the heart of American conservatism’s strength. He then shows that we need certain virtues to secure our rights and use them successfully—responsibility being the chief among these virtues. The author also explains how institutional authority works, why it is necessary, and where it supports the intellectually and morally excellent. He clarifies how natural rights and their associated virtues can be a base from which to secure and preserve necessary institutions.

Mark Blitz is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. He served as an institute faculty member at the JMC’s 2011 summer institute in Pasadena, CA.
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Edited by David Feith
Rowman & Littlefield

In Teaching America, a volume edited by Wall Street Journal Editor David Feith, more than 20 leading thinkers sound the alarm over a crisis in citizenship— and lay out a potent agenda for reform. The book’s unprecedented roster of authors includes Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Senator Jon Kyl, Senator Bob Graham, Secretary Rod Paige, Alan Dershowitz, Juan Williams, Glenn Reynolds, Michael Kazin and many other experts on American education, government and public life.

Their message: To remain America, our country has to give its kids a civic identity, an understanding of our constitutional system, and some appreciation of the amazing achievements of American self-government. The books contributors go on to say that young Americans know little about the Bill of Rights, the democratic process, or the civil rights movement. Three of every four high school seniors aren’t proficient in civics, nine of ten can’t cut it in U.S. history, and the problem is only aggravated by universities’ disregard for civic education. Such civic illiteracy weakens our common culture, disenfranchises would-be voters, and helps poison our politics.

JMC President Mike Ratliff contributed to the volume, with a chapter entitled “Donor Intent: Strategic Philanthropy in Higher Education.”

David Feith is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal. He was a Bartley fellow at the Journal in 2008 and 2009, and an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs in 2008 and 2009, and an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs magazine from 2009 to 2010. He is director of the Civics Education Initiative, and graduated with a degree in history from Columbia University in 2009.
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By Professor Michael Munger
Duke University

Americans believe that property is necessary for liberty. But how can my liberty be enhanced by an institution that excludes me from so many things? In his article for the National Gazette in 1792, James Madison addressed this paradox squarely. The quaint thing about his resolution of the paradox, almost pathetic in retrospect, is the completely assured way in which Madison describes how property, far from being a threat to liberty, is its very foundation. In our modern age, property seems to mean nothing more than that portion of the fruits of our labor that government deigns let us keep. How did things change so much?

Madison, of course, was a primary architect of the Constitution. He defined property, in that 1792 article, as “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual. In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right, and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.”

Madison continues: “In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.” His conclusion? “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may equally be said to have a property in his rights.” This is no Buddhist koan, a semantic paradox like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” What Madison meant, and what the U.S. Constitution should mean, is that rights of conscience and rights of property are of a piece, mutually reinforcing. Each American owns his or her rights, and our right to own property is what affords autonomy and independence from the collective will.

Our freedoms are not guaranteed by majority rule, or by “rights” of political representation. Those things are threats to our true rights. Otherwise there would be no 1st Amendment protection for the press, for speech, or for rights of conscience. Likewise, and on the same level (because the same essential thing), there would be no 5th Amendment protection against the taking of property without due process and without just compensation.

Madison drives home the point later in the piece, when he describes a “just” government, presumably the kind of government the Founders hoped the Constitution might create. His words ring true, but hollow, for us today, for many of Madison’s premonitions of injustice have come to pass if fact. “A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species; where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.”

The American Constitution creates a powerful institution, government, to protect our rights to property, and to defend our property in our rights. The core of those liberties are those properties, of both industry and of conscience, that we have fairly obtained for ourselves by work and reflection. Yet our industry is now yoked to a “partnership” with government for the rich, who are told that corporations and equal protection under the law are privileges, granted by the good graces of government and by no essential right. And the consciences of the poor are to be shaped by dependence on public viands to sustain the body, the mind, and the soul. Relieved of all responsibility, they are robbed of all rights.

Our government, because it protects my rights and my property, has come to claim that my rights are a privilege, and my property is not my own. I would answer, and I suspect that Madison would agree, that such claims are akin to believing that your dog owns your house.

Editor’s Note: Michael Munger is a professor of Political Science at Duke University and Director of the PPE Program. He is the author/co-author of four books and has written more than 100 articles and papers published in professional journals and edited volumes. Professor Munger was a member of the teaching faculty at the JMC faculty development summer institute in Pasadena, CA in August 2011. He is also a member of the JMC Academic Advisory Council.
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JMC Fellow Brent Cusher held a postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes College and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Leadership and American Studies at Christopher Newport University, a public liberal arts college in Virginia. Three JMC postdoctoral fellows have received tenure-track appointments at CNU in the past two years. Professor Cusher shared his thoughts about the value of a JMC postdoctoral fellowship with The Declaration.

How did the postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes College impact your career?

My Jack Miller Center/Veritas Fund postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes College was invaluable for my career development. Rhodes is an excellent small liberal arts college with good students, and the Department of Political Science at Rhodes is filled with skilled teacher-scholars, all of whom were generous with their time in helping me navigate the choppy waters of my first years in the profession. The opportunity to teach two courses—an introduction to political science on key political questions, and an interdisciplinary humanities course covering the Renaissance to today—gave me experience working with students at many different periods of their education and from different disciplinary viewpoints. The fellowship, moreover, carried with it a small teaching load, which freed up my time for developing my own research.

Colleagues at Rhodes were always willing to read my scholarly work and give me suggestions on how to improve it. Finally, the fellowship had the greatest possible impact on my career to this point: it helped prepare me to land a great tenure-track position in the Department of Leadership and American Studies at Christopher Newport University.

How will you be involved with the Center for American Studies? What courses will you teach?

My graduate training and especially my Jack Miller Center/Veritas Fund postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes have given me the resources to apply insights from the great books of political thought to these courses in leadership studies. My position at CNU is in the field of leadership studies. In the fall, I will teach one section of a course on self-knowledge as it pertains to the process of leading others, as well as two sections of “Values Leadership,” a course in ethics and leadership. Obviously, the Founding Principles play into this topic. My course schedule for the spring is not yet finalized, but I will be teaching at least one section of “Leadership through the Ages,” in which we will read Thucydides, Shakespeare, Plutarch, the Bible, and other great texts. It will be a delight to take part in CNU’s Center for American Studies (CAS) in time. I am currently a departmental colleague of Elizabeth Kaufer Busch who, with her husband Nathan Busch, serve as co-directors of the center, so there should be a good opportunity to work more closely with CAS in the future. At CNU, leadership and American studies are housed in the same department, the rationale being that a good foundation in the history and political principles of our country is necessary for the education of responsible citizens and leaders. I think that a relationship between leadership studies at CNU and the CAS would be very profitable.

What is the value for students in studying the Founding?

Much of my scholarly research centers on the origins of political society, and accordingly I am a firm believer that students must know the origins of their country in order to understand the country in which they live. When America was new, the principles animating it were articulated in a particularly clear and powerful way, so the project of studying the Founding remains a clear and powerful way to teach these principles to our students. Furthermore, the writings we encounter from the Founding period contain engagement with timeless questions of politics and humanity, whether we look at Madison’s vision of human nature from The Federalist, or Jefferson’s own vision expressed in the Declaration of Independence, or Washington’s views on the importance of religion for healthy civic purposes. Studying the Founding allows students, then, to enter into a conversation with these towering figures, engaging with these important political questions for themselves.

What is the greatest benefit of attending the JMC Summer Institute in Charlottesville last summer?

There have been too many benefits of attending the JMC Summer Institute for me to name! Most likely the best feature of the Institute is that it brought together extremely smart and motivated people from different disciplines at entirely different stages of their careers, with one overarching goal: to learn from each other about America’s Founding principles and about teaching those principles to undergraduate students. The opportunity to meet these scholars, many of whom have become close colleagues and friends of mine, was priceless.
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Gregory Campbell recently retired as the president of Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Dr. Campbell is a member of the JMC’s Academic Advisory Council and a former professor of history. Under his leadership at Carthage, two major curricular reforms restored structure and emphasized classical approaches to arts and sciences education.

The following is an excerpt from a video interview Dr. Campbell did on the importance of a classical liberal education and the teaching of America’s Founding Principles and history with the JMC’s Vice President of Development and Communications Mike Deshaies. To watch the video, please visit www.jackmillercenter.org.

Mike Deshaies: Carthage College is a well-known proponent of a classical liberal education. Tell us why you think a classic liberal education is so important.

Greg Campbell: There is no better way to train analytical minds than an education in the arts and sciences. Americans change jobs several times, on average, in their careers. They’re going to have to learn new things.The country moves, the economy moves, the world moves, very fast, so a narrow training today won’t be good for very long if it’s simply a specific skill that you’re learning. But learning how to learn, becoming educable, being able to grow and develop, and most of all, to have an enthusiasm for doing that, the curiosity, the joy of finding something new that will keep us fresh and help our careers to develop across a long lifetime. I think there’s no better way to hone and to develop that kind of inquiring, learning mind, than an education in the arts and sciences.

MD: Please describe the Western Heritage program at Carthage College, and in particular the Great Ideas Program.

GC: We’re very proud of the Western Heritage program. We have worked over a number of years to create it. It goes back, actually, as far as 1989. It has developed particularly well in recent years. The Western Heritage courses are required of every single Carthage student. There are two courses, so that means that every freshman takes a Western Heritage course each term during his or her freshman year.

It’s a course in great ideas. It is a course that emphasizes original texts. What they are learning to do is to engage their minds with some of the most provocative thinkers who have defined the culture in which we live. Our students are products of a culture, Western culture, whether they know it or not. It’s far better for them to know it than not to know it. So we want to expose them to at least a sliver of the debate, the great conversation that has taken place cross the centuries that really defines our culture.

The reading list this year (2010-2011) starts with Homer and goes through Plato and Aristotle and the Bible, Virgil. There is an optional selection on Augustine. It comes on up into Renaissance times, and actually, they use paintings as texts. That’s the first term. And then they pick up from there and they have Dante, Shakespeare, Rousseau, John Locke, Jefferson, Marx and Engels, and Darwin. We think that if you expose young people to some of the most profound thinkers in human history they will be challenged to do better thinking themselves.

They’re going to have to enter, in other words, into that great conversation that has spanned the centuries among thinkers and writers and will continue, and they will become a part of, and each generation becomes a part and adds its own thoughts and perspectives and passes those on to the next. And the wonder of it is that it asks questions, it doesn’t give all the answers because these people across the centuries have not agreed among themselves and the students soon figure out they can’t agree with everybody they’re reading, one after another. And lo and behold, when that dawns on them, then they have to start thinking for themselves: “What do I think about what I’m hearing? Where do I stand?” And that makes them free, independent-thinking people. And that is a liberating experience.

MD: In your mission statement, you say that Carthage College recognizes that the quest for truth is a lifelong journey. Tell us how Carthage prepares students to pursue truth after they have graduated.

GC: We started out with the objective of having a vision statement for the college that would fit onto a coffee cup. It needed to be short, it needed to be succinct, and it needed to be strong. And it needed to be, most of all, true.

After a good deal of discussion, we came up with seven words: “seeking truth, building strength, inspiring service, together.” That first part, “seeking truth,” says a lot. Those two words are chosen with great care. It is not always the case in academia these days that people talk about truth. There’s a tendency to shy away from the very idea of truth. We do not shy away from that at Carthage. We do believe that there is something to be discovered, not just invented.

And you don’t seek something you already have. So there’s absolutely no claim on our part that we know what that truth is. I haven’t arrived that far yet, and I don’t think we’re going to. But we’re questing. We are seeking. That’s an inspiring enterprise in and of itself. It makes for useful and happy lives, and that’s why we’re here — why we’re teaching college. If you believe that there’s real meaning in life, and if you’re seeking to discover it and to push the frontiers of your understanding, that’s a healthy way to live.

MD: Describe your views regarding how important it is for college students to deepen their knowledge of America’s founding principles and history. In the United States, we’re very fortunate to have founding fathers who had great vision.

GC: They were practical men, but they were men of ideas and vision and goals. A free life. An ordered society in which everybody participates and helps to decide what’s going to happen. Those are very powerful ideas. Of course, a few decades later, Lincoln’s comment, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people,” that is not to be denigrated or forgotten. That is to be held onto, because that is an inspiring vision and has been not only for us but for people around the world. It isn’t just unique to Americans. It is something that communicates to virtually any human being.

If we understand more about our history, we’ll understand that it isn’t all wonderful. If we teach 12-year-olds truly about American history, we’re going to teach them about the blemishes as well as about the accomplishments.

But it is important to deal with that whole story and all the good that was there, too. It took a lot of courage for people to leave their homes and come here with a vision. They were going to create better lives for themselves in a new world. I do believe that there are great ideas at our origins and in our development, and we will do very well to hold onto them and to pass them on to the next generation and to future generations after them.
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The July-September quarter just completed was our busiest ever. We conducted two Summer Institutes for professors, one at UVA and one at UCLA. Altogether 80 scholars participated or taught in these intensive two-week programs. As a result of these new accessions to our community, we expect to reach our five-year goal of 500 Miller-associated scholars by the end of 2011, a full year ahead of our goal. In addition, three of our partners conducted summer programs for high school teachers, giving 200 teachers a stronger preparation to teach American government and history.

As the 2011 academic year commences, new partner efforts such as the Hume Forum at Loyola University and the American Democracy Forum at the University of Wisconsin, will start their first full year of programming. In November the JMC will host the Eighth Miller ‘Summit’ on Higher Education, bringing together the directors of these partner programs to exchange their best ideas and to share encouragement.

This quarter 26 Miller and Miller-Veritas Postdoctoral Fellows will begin or continue their teaching and writing to lay the foundation for successful careers. Also, the University of Chicago Press, in association with the University of Notre Dame and the JMC, has launched the peer-reviewed Journal of American Political Thought, edited by Professor Michael Zuckert. This significantly expands the opportunity for scholars to publish and build successful careers in areas related to the Miller project.

Finally, with just a few months preparation, we conducted our first Constitution Day Initiative in September, thanks to the encouragement of a distinguished steering group, and the support of a gift from the Andrea Waitt Carlton Family Foundation. It must have been the right thing to do as 27 campuses participated, including a variety of high visibility programs, such as Hal Krent’s launch of the new Supreme Court Institute at IIT Chicago – Kent College of Law.

Exciting times,
Rear Admiral, USN (ret.) and President, JMC
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