From the President’s Desk

During the spring semester, Hamilton College awarded AHI Undergraduate Fellow Marta Johnson the Katharine Eckman ’09 Internship. The internship, established in memory of Katharine C. Eckman (Hamilton Class ’09), provides a generous summer stipend for a student interested in politics, government, and public policy. Ms. Johnson, an economics major at Hamilton College, recently concluded her internship, which she used primarily to help the AHI in planning future programming centered on the theme of ‘limited government.”

Former undergraduate Lachlan Markay, now an investigative reporter at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy is not only the first Heritage employee with that job title, he has assumed a lead role in investigating the “Fast and Furious” scandal. You can find a link to his recent speech to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network conference on our website.

The AHI’s headquarters has been used increasingly as a site for the recruitment of AHI Undergraduate Fellows by for-profit and non-profit businesses. In 2010-2011, AHI Undergraduate Fellows were admitted to a variety of law schools and graduate programs. The Charles Koch Foundation has awarded AHI and AHI-Rochester fellows with employment, and Koch representatives will be conducting interviews at the AHI again this year. Recent visits by representatives from the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation are leading to undergraduate and graduate opportunities with those prestigious organizations.

Perhaps the most important news about the AHI is that organizations are awarding our Undergraduate Fellows for achievement, and businesses are hiring them.

Continued Success of the Annual Colloquium

In April 2011 we held our Fourth Annual Colloquium at the Turning Stone Resort. Senior Fellow Theodore Eismeier organized the event centered on the theme of “Law, Technology, and American Constitutional Government: Curing the Mischief of Faction in the 21st Century.” The event was extremely well attended.

In 2012 we will be holding our Fifth Annual Carl B. Menges Colloquium on April 12 at the Turning Stone Resort. More than a dozen scholars in the fields of history, philosophy, economics, and political science have accepted our invitation. Students from Skidmore College, Colgate University, Hampden-Sydney College, and Hamilton College will be in attendance.

Recent Grants and Gifts

In 2011 we received a $150,000 grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, the largest in the AHI’s brief history, to support three years of programming.

Also in 2011, we received a $20,000 grant from the Apgar Foundation to support our newest affiliate in Rochester. We continue to receive support from the Thomas Armstrong Foundation with annual awards that range from $2,500 to $5,000. The AHI has received a second grant from the Koch Foundation in the amount of $9,000 to support programming in entrepreneurship at AHI Rochester.

In October, Liberty Fund, one of the most distinguished organizations of its kind, “established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals,” gifted us with hundreds of volumes and DVDS that form the “Library of Liberty.” These materials will be located in our renovated office space, which was recently dedicated to James Piereson, a stalwart supporter of the AHI who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and President of the William E. Simon Foundation.

New Rochester Affiliate

The AHI is also delighted to announce that we are growing by introducing our first new affiliate in Rochester. Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Rochester has been established to promote the study of a free society. Free in the sense that individuals have certain inalienable rights that cannot be taken away without contradicting the fundamental principles of life. “We draw our values from the ideas set forth by Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Herbert Spencer, and other freedom loving individuals,” noted AHI Senior Fellow Michael Rizzo who heads the affiliate in Rochester.

AHI Rochester provides a forum for interested undergraduates to explore these questions through a variety of programming. Students participate in seminars where they read how the great thinkers of the past and present answer these questions. Professors and businessmen are invited to speak to help better understand the successes and failures in the world today. “By educating ourselves, we become better advocates for peace and freedom in our own lives and will become leaders in the never-ending debate of free markets versus planned economies,” said Rizzo.

The Ongoing Work of Our Fellows:

Caleb Nelson, one of the most impressive young legal scholars in the United States, delivered in the Hamilton College Chapel the AHI’s Fourth Annual David Aldrich Nelson lecture in Constitutional Jurisprudence on “The Constitution and the Benthamite Interpretation of the Common Law.” Professor Nelson and his sister Claudia, a distinguished professor of English at Texas A&M, have joined the AHI team as academic advisor and Senior Fellow, respectively.

As part of our program to enhance public civic literacy, we sponsor a Mohawk Valley Monthly Book Club that reaches out to area high-school teachers. Resident Fellow Dr. Christopher Hill now offers continuing education classes, and his class “Law, Liberty, and Western History” is filled to capacity.

This past fall semester, Marc Elias, Firmwide Chair of Political Law at Perkins Coie in Washington D. C. served as a Visiting Fellow. During that time, he taught a class “Modern Campaigns and Elections” for the Department of Government at Hamilton College.

In 2010, Oxford University Press published The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas. This encyclopedic work was edited by AHI Charter Fellow Robert Paquette and AHI academic advisor Mark Smith and includes contributions from AHI Charter Fellow Douglas Ambrose and AHI advisors Eugene D. Genovese, Stanley Engerman, Daniel Littlefield and Peter Coclanis.