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Atlas’s Teach Freedom Initiative continues to expand its efforts in discovering scholars who understand the role and importance of setting up academic centers as alternative channels to educating the young in the principles of liberty and the market. Exposed to leftist ideas most of their college lives, students these days resort to programs and outreach activities being offered by academic centers which are imbued with a sense of mission to provide a genuinely liberal education. For the past four years Atlas has supported the following centers:
Through Teach Freedom Initiative, these centers have launched amazing conferences, summer programs, and student-oriented activities geared towards uplifting students’ souls in their pursuit of learning and matters of truths.
The Center for Vision & Values is a growing institution at an established one-of-a-kind college, Grove City College, with a distinct perspective: to educate the world about the transforming power of Christian faith and individual freedom. The mission objective of the Center is to encourage and to support Grove City College faculty and kindred scholars in faith and freedom scholarship and to teach their ideals and ideas to their students, the nation, and the world beyond.
CVV has sponsored several major conferences since its inception, such as: “Mr. Jefferson Goes to the Middle East: Democracy’s Prospects in the Arab World” (Atlas was listed as a sponsor of the panel “The Importance of Markets to the Middle East”), April, 2006; “The Living Legacy of Ludwig von Mises Conference,” February 23-24, 2007; and “From Nicaea to Nietzsche: The De-Christianization of Europe,” April 12-13, 2007. With the help of Atlas, CVV has also offered internships to students within this program, including an internship at an African free market think thank, Ghana’s Imani Center for Policy and Education. According to Executive Director Lee Wishing,
“Atlas is indispensable. Atlas’s long-term commitment to making the world a freer and more humane place is indispensable too. I have correspondence in my files with Atlas going back to the fall of 1994 when we first started talking about establishing a center at Grove City College. We officially launched the Center in April 2005. Atlas was part of an idea that took 11 years to bloom. Atlas encouraged the seed of a vision and Atlas has encouraged us and guided us at every step of our development. ¡Viva Atlas!”
Contact information:
Lee Wishing
Administrative Director
lswishing@gcc.edu.
(724) 458.3332
The Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University promotes inquiry into the principles and processes of free government and seeks to advance understanding of the responsibilities of statesmen and citizens of constitutional democratic societies. The Project supports studies in the political thought of America’s founders and leading statesmen, including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Lincoln, as well as thinkers who shaped the ideas of the American founders, such as Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, and Montesquieu, or who have shaped the public mind over the course of American history, including Stowe and King.
With the help of a TFI grant, the Center has held several public lectures at Villanova University and three colloquia for faculty and students on themes connected with freedom, the free market, and civic responsibility. It has also established a non-partisan student group (“The Franklin Group”) dedicated to the exploration of American ideas and the commercial republic.
Contact information:
Colleen A. Sheehan, Ph.D.
Director
colleen.sheehan@villanova.edu.
(610) 519-7421
At Rhodes College, Professor Daniel Cullen has spearheaded the creation of the Project for the Study of Liberal Democracy. The program is devoted to fostering teaching, research, and deliberation about the philosophical and moral foundations of a free society and the functioning of a constitutional democracy. In his continuing effort to build the program, Professor Cullen has organized several lectures on topics such as the twentieth-century economic thought, the intellectual legacy of Benjamin Franklin, the works of Adam Smith, and the culture of foreign aid and global income distribution.
Contact information:
Daniel Cullen
Professor of Political Science
Rhodes College
Cullen@rhodes.edu
(901) 843-3661
The Adam Smith Program at the University of Richmond seeks to preserve the study of the history of economic thought. It aims as a place to which visitors and students alike can come and connect with others and engage in stimulating conversations about the continuing importance of classical liberalism in economic and political analysis today. At its inception stage, ASP intends to offer scholarships to students doing research on Smithian themes. It will also house the Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought, now in its 10th consecutive year, offers week-long sets of workshops that host students and faculty from across the world.
Contact information:
Sandra Peart
Dean, Jepson School of Leadership Studies
(804) 289-8008
The Department of Economics at the University of Detroit Mercy has launched the Graduate Economics Symposium to offer students a blend of market-based fundamentals anchored in Catholic social thought and grounded in a liberal arts tradition. So far this year it has sponsored three major symposia dealing with topics on the state of the market and the economy. The program is under the directorship of Professor Harry Veryser who has a strong interest in Austrian school of economics, as well as religion and economics (he is on the board and lectures for the Acton Institute).
Contact information:
Harry Veryser
Assistant Professor of Economics & Coordinator UDM Graduate Program in Economics
(586) 263-6235
The Center for Global Development, Technological Change and Entrepreneurship in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas aims to stimulate the comparative study of theories, institutions, policies, and ideas that make societies free and prosperous.
The Center intends to become an online resource center that uses state of the art technologies as tools for promoting an open scholarly exchange of ideas. The Center is organized around four broad themes: the American and European Union experiments, international factor mobility and development, globalization and technological change and entrepreneurial development in the informal economy. As part of its student outreach efforts, it intends to offer courses and workshops, essay contests, online lecture series, internships, a summer abroad program and a postdoctoral fellowship program.
Contact information:
Elena Labastida
Director
mlabasti@utdallas.edu
(214) 212-4784
The Forum for Citizenship and Enterprise at Northwood University provides resources for understanding and practicing the principles and virtues promoting liberty, ethical conduct, and free enterprise. Forum programming is designed to cultivate citizens best able to maintain the rights and responsibilities of a constitutional republic consistent with America’s Founding Principles.
For 2010-2011, Forum programming includes community and campus speaker and panel events, reading/discussion groups for faculty and students, partnerships with likeminded institutions, and an academic conference on teaching core texts of liberty.
Contact information:
Glenn Moots
Director
moots@northwood.edu
(989) 837-4255
By way of implementing the international component of TFI, Atlas and the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (McGill University) in November, 2006 held a conference, “Finding Common Ground: The Challenge of Freedom in the West and in the Muslim World,” in Montreal, Canada. Twenty-five Muslim and non-Muslim scholars participated in a discussion on the challenges of freedom. Related to this, Atlas launched an essay contest on the same theme in Canada, the US, and the Middle East. About 100 students participated in this contest.
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[...] seed grants to new centers that could become leading outposts [...]