2023 Programming Magazine EV Final - Flipbook - Page 9
Summer Seminar
From June 5 – 10, 2023 the Institute hosted 19 applicant students from around
the globe, and 6 renowned scholarly experts from across different academic
disciplines to participate in an intensive educational experience. The summer
seminar provides participants with the opportunity and resources to
investigate and discuss the theories, research, applications, and evidence of
the classical liberal tradition. Our inaugural seminar was extremely
successful. We received universal positive feedback and acclaim from
participant students and faculty alike.
The schedule, topical themes, and staff for this event were directly inspired if
not wholly replicated from the traditional summer seminar model developed
by the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), founded in 1961 and led by F. A.
Harper once he completed a visiting position at Wabash College in 1963. IHS
ran undergraduate summer seminars for several decades until
discontinuing the programs in the mid-2010s. Since that time, many faculty
members across the broader classical liberal network expressed a pressing
need for a renewed summer program.
This need represents a significant opportunity for the Stephenson Institute to
fill a valued role in the promotion of classical liberal ideas. The summer
seminar serves as an accessible opportunity for motivated and interested
students to deepen their knowledge, enhance their own research projects,
meet and network with similarly interested students and faculty, and learn
about career opportunities across academia, the legal profession, public
policy, private industry, journalism, non-profit sectors.
Our daily lectures and discussion sessions were hosted in the Goodrich
room of the Lilly library, an idyllic setting for such an event, as the space was
explicitly designed by P. F. Goodrich to architecturally convey the intellectual
and theoretical project of human freedom and personal liberty across the
arc of human history.
