Academic Centers
Partnerships
Atlas’s Teach Freedom Initiative continues to expand its efforts in discovering scholars who understand the role and importance of setting up academic centers
rs 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 past three years Atlas has supported such centers.
Through Atlas’s TFI program, the Center for Vision & Values (Grove City College), the Matthew Ryan Project (Villanova University), the Study of Liberal Democracy Program (at inception stage,Rhodes College ), and the Adam Smith Center (University of Richmond) 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, together with Atlas, has sponsored several major conferences: 1) 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; 2) The Living Legacy of Ludwig von Mises Conference, February 23-24, 2007; and 4) From Nicaea to Nietzsche: The De-Christianization of Europe, April 12-13, 2007. Atlas 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!”
With the help of a TFI grant, the Matthew Ryan Project has held five 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.
At Rhodes College, Professor Daniel Cullen, in his continuing effort to build the Center for Political Economy and American Constitutionalism, has organized several lectures on “Twentieth-Century Economic Thought,” on the intellectual legacy of Benjamin Franklin, on the works of Adam Smith, and on the culture of foreign aid and global income distribution. He also offers an interdepartmental faculty colloquium on Professor James Otteson’s Actual Ethics.
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.
In Latin America, Atlas has had special relationship with the Francisco Marroquin University(Guatemala), founded more than 30 years ago by a group of Guatemalan businessmen who had a deep interest in economics and the philosophy of freedom. While UFM offers a range of degrees from a variety of schools, it is best known for its courses on the foundations of the economic way of thinking. Over the years many leading US scholars have travelled to UFM to deliver lectures or to conduct seminars. Recently, Atlas co-sponsored a conference with UFM and the Milton Friedman Foundation to honor the legacy of Dr. Milton Friedman and to help ensure that his ideas will continue to impact our society.
In Asia, the University of the Philippines School of Economics uses its TFI grant by holding a series of bimonthly seminars, and a forum for scholarly research on the workings of the Philippine economy and the international economy. The “Friday Seminar Series” is attended by graduate students, faculty, and invited guests from the policy world, the press, and NGOs, with the purpose of laying down the foundations of free-market thinking in the minds of students at the University of the Philippines. The first of these lectures, “US Regulatory Principles and Practice,” was held on June 13th, 2007. Featuring Professor Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland, it dealt with regulatory and governance reform issues in the interphase of the state and the market. About 40 participants from various regulatory agencies attended.
Atlas hopes to discover more academic centers, in the United States and abroad, so that it can continue with its mission of planting the seeds of freedom within the young.
