Mark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 was published in May 2008. He recently co-edited a collection of essays entitled The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, published in 2015.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a 2017 winner of the Bradley Prize. At Hoover, he is a member of the Military History/Contemporary Conflict Working Group. In addition, he serves as dean of students for the Hertog Political Studies Program and for The Public Interest Fellowship, and teaches for the Tikvah Fund in the United States and in Israel.

He studies and writes about, among other things, constitutional government, conservatism and progressivism in the United States, liberal education, national security and law, and Middle East politics.

He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995).

He is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions published by the Hoover Institution: Renewing the American Constitutional Tradition (2014); Future Challenges in National Security and Law (2010); The Future of American Intelligence (2005); Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases (2005); Varieties of Conservatism in America (2004); Varieties of Progressivism in America (2004); and Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic (2003).

He is a contributor at RealClearPolitics, and has written hundreds of articles,essays and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications, including The American Interest, American Political Science Review, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Forbes.com, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, London Review of Books, National Journal, National Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Policy Review, Politico, The Public Interest, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal.

Professor Philip Bess teaches graduate urban design and theory, with a particular interest in Catholic and classical humanist intellectual and artistic traditions in the context of modern American life and the contemporary culture of architecture and urban design. From 2004 to 2014 he was the School of Architecture’s Director of Graduate Studies.

Under his direction between 2006 and  2018, the Notre Dame graduate urban design studio completed master plan proposals for Lewis University, IL (2006), Cooperstown, NY (2007), Northampton, MA (2008), Ventura, CA (2009), Skaneateles, NY (2010), Lafayette, LA (2013, under Visiting Critics John and Jennifer Griffin), Providence, RI (2016), and Tulsa, OK (2017). In the Fall of 2011, the graduate urban design studio began an ongoing, episodically funded, multi-year project called After Burnham: The Notre Dame Plan of Chicago 2109, which envisions metropolitan Chicago at the bicentennial of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, and is devoted to exploring whether and how Notre Dame’s professed classical humanist ideals might be applied at the scale of the modern metropolis. The 2011 and and 2012 Chicago 2109 studios explored general City of Chicago and northeast Illinois regional issues, with subsequent studio proposals for LaFox, IL (2014), Zion, IL (2015), and south side Chicago’s Midway Plaisance (2018).

The work of the graduate urban design studio has received regional, national, and international recognition, from the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU):

• 2011: CNU Charter Award Academic Grand Prize, for Skaneateles, NY
• 2013: CNU Illinois Chapter Award for Best Regional Plan, for Chicago 2109
• 2014: CNU Special Academic Charter Award, for Chicago 2109
• 2015: CNU Charter Student Award of Merit, for Lafayette, LA (John and Jennifer Griffin, Studio Critics)
• 2015: CNU Charter Student Award of Merit, for LaFox, IL
• 2016: INTBAU World Congress Excellence Award in Urban Design, for Chicago 2109
• 2017: CNU Charter Student Award of Merit, for Providence, RI
• 2019: CNU Charter Award Academic Grand Prize, for the Chicago Midway Plaisance

In his youth a member in good standing of both the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Steelworkers union, Professor Bess has been a cab driver in both Boston and Chicago. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2004 he lived and worked in Chicago, and at various times taught architecture and urban design at Notre Dame, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Michigan, Miami of Ohio, Calvin College, and Andrews University. From 1987-88 he was the director and principal designer of the NEA-and-Graham-Foundation-funded Urban Baseball Park Design Project of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR); and in Boston in August 2000 he directed and coordinated the ultimately successful “Save Fenway Park!” design charrette, from which came contemporary Fenway’s famous “Monster Seats” and other prominent renovations.

Professor Bess lectures widely, and is the author of numerous articles and three books:  City Baseball Magic: Plain Talk and Uncommon Sense About Cities and Baseball Parks  (Knothole, 1991);  Inland Architecture: Subterranean Essays on Moral Order and Formal Order in Chicago  (Interalia / Design, 2000); and Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred  (ISI, 2006). He holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Whittier College, a graduate degree in church history from Harvard, and a graduate degree in architecture from the University of Virginia. In 2013-14 he was a William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions; in May 2015 he received the degree Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa from The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California; and he is a Fall 2019 Fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

David joined the Bill of Rights Institute as president in 2013 and has worked for twenty years at the intersection of civic engagement and education reform. Having taught courses in American politics and public policy in the history and political science departments of Boston College and Hillsdale College, he was also founding director of a national civic education program for high school teachers at Hillsdale College, as well as the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Studies, in Washington, D.C. David has designed online educational programs used by more than half a million participants and is a nationally-recognized proponent of civic education that engages the hearts and minds of students. Author of Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue (HarperCollins, 2013), David has written for the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, among many other publications. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Boston College, where he received fellowships from the Pew, Earhart, and Bradley Foundations.

John Briggs (B.A. Harvard; Ph.D. University of Chicago) is the author of Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Award from Harvard University Press, 1988) and Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Johns Hopkins, 2005). In addition to courses in Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and C. S. Lewis, he teaches the history and theory of rhetoric and composition, as well as a course on Lincoln’s speeches. He has published articles and book chapters on Shakespearean catharsis; the political underplot of Timon of Athens; defective scientific forms of proof in Othello; Bacon, science, and religion; Lincoln and Shakespeare; Frederick Douglass and Macbeth, the neglected role of literature in the teaching of composition; Peter Elbow and the pedagogical paradox; and the idea of magic in the rhetorical theory and practice of Elbow and Kenneth Burke. An essay on ideas as phenomena in the work of Bacon and E. O. Wilson has appeared in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Modern Thought (Ashgate, 2005). Recent projects include a study of catharsis and poetic justice in Romeo and Juliet and Lincoln’s reading of tyranny in Macbeth. Briggs is currently serving as the Director of the University Writing Program.  He was the winner of the 1995-96 Faculty Teaching Award. He has been chair of the CHASS Executive Committee and a consultant to the College Board. Currently, he is on the editorial board of Literary Imagination.

Paul Carrese is the founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. For nearly two decades he was a professor of political science at the United States Air Force Academy. He is author of “The Cloaking of Power: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and the Rise of Judicial Activism,” and co-editor of three other books – on George Washington, constitutionalism, and American grand strategy. His most recent book is “Democracy in Moderation: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Sustainable Liberalism.” He has held fellowships at Harvard University; the University of Delhi (as a Fulbright fellow); and the James Madison Program, Politics Department, Princeton University.

During Christmas break of my junior year in college, I had a professional crisis. I was almost finished with my undergraduate experience, and I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living.

I was curious about a lot of things, and I could see myself doing any number of jobs. My father suggested that I take an Education class because he thought I would be a good teacher. I thought he was wrong, but I took the class anyway.

The course itself was dull, but the instructor required all the students spend ten hours observing in a real classroom. I began the observation hours still convinced that teaching was not for me, but by the end of the two days of observing, I was hooked. In fact, I was convinced that I would be a teacher for the rest of my life.

I’ve been teaching at Hillsdale since 2006, and I strive to communicate what it means to be genuinely human. I have the opportunity and freedom to do what all professors should do: teach. As a friend once told me, good teaching is the overflow of a full life. In my classes, I therefore try to fill my students’ lives with as much goodness, truth, and beauty as I can.

The undergraduate years are over in a flash, so in the Education program at Hillsdale we offer students the ability to spend four years studying the best of what has been thought, said, and written.

Barbara is an education industry executive with deep, hands-on experience in K-12 education policy, practice, and operations. She served as President of StandardsWork from 2003-2009 and has recently returned to its helm as part of an organizational commitment to advancing the vital role of strong curriculum, the importance of deep content knowledge in students, and the impact that evidence-based instructional practices can provide teachers.

Barbara’s talent is in leading collaborative work. During her seven years away from StandardsWork she served as Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and Deputy Director of Great Minds (formerly Common Core, Inc.). At NCTQ she led the teacher preparation group in rethinking both its district-facing work and its biennial review of teacher preparation programs at over 1400 colleges and universities. At Great Minds, a non-profit organization that creates content-rich curriculum in the full range of the liberal arts and sciences, Barbara ran operations during a period of dramatic growth due to the successful authorship and market launch of Eureka Math (aka EngageNY Math). In addition to overseeing the research and development of a compatible English language arts product, Barbara spearheaded the design, development, and high quality execution of Great Mind’s online and site-based professional development offerings.

Barbara started her career in education as a teacher of learning disabled students in Norfolk, Virginia and has trained teachers on behalf of two educational publishing companies. She has served in key leadership positions at the U.S. Department of Education under two secretaries of education: Bill Bennett and Lamar Alexander.

During Barbara’s leadership at StandardsWork, the organization executed many high-profile projects on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education, the National Assessment Governing Board, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, the Indiana Higher Education Commission, the District of Columbia Public Schools, National Endowment for the Humanities, Texas Education Agency, the Center for Education Reform, and others.

A fearless champion of classroom-based education reform generally, and content-rich curriculum in particular, Barbara is a tactical leader with a keen ability to translate strategic initiatives into desired results. Her degree is in elementary and special education from the University of Iowa. She lives in Barnesville, MD with her son, husband, two Arabian horses, and dog Eevee.

Tim has taught at Colorado College since 1965. He served as Acting President from August 2001 to January 2002. Before that he was Dean of the Faculty and College from 1992 to 1999. He chaired the Political Science Department from 1985 to 1991. He received a Ph.D. (with distinction) from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) in 1971, an M.A. in 1965 and a B.A. from Kenyon College (with Honors) in 1961.

He has published many essays and edited books, including The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (2005), Reassessing the Liberal State (2001), The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education (2000), and most recently contributed to Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Authors and Arguments (2011). He was co-editor with Shirley Letwin of a multi-volume series for the Yale University Press, Selected Works of Michael Oakeshott, and was editor of the International Hobbes Association Newsletter. Most recently he edited Machiavelli’s Legacy, “The Prince” After 500 Years (2015). He has lectured at forty-four colleges and universities in America, and in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal. He was a Distinguished Academic Visitor to the Government Department of The London School of Economics and the Bell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa. He teaches political theory.

David is an established leader in Philadelphia’s education community and one of the few people who both “talks-the-talk” and “walks-the-walk” in their dedication to students. Dave is the former CEO and Co-Founder of Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia charter school, which opened it’s doors in 2007. Boys’ Latin was PA’s first and only single-gender charter school and has a student body that is 98 percent African-American and 74 percent economically disadvantaged. In its first four graduating classes, Boys’ Latin sent 85 percent of its graduates to postsecondary institutions, 80 percent of which were 4-year colleges.

In addition to Boys’ Latin, Dave is a founding board member of the Philadelphia School Partnership and a former board member of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He currently serves on the boards of the Center for Education Reform and the North Carolina Outward Bound School.

Dave lives in Philadelphia with his wife of 30 years, Zina Oliver-Hardy, and has two adult sons.

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago. He was the chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. He has been engaged for more than 40 years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advances and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues. His most recent book, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song, seeks to promote American identity, character and citizenship. Along with co-editors Amy Kass and Diana Schaub, Dr. Kass is presently working to expand this project by creating video discussions and curricula materials that demonstrate how short stories can be used to enhance our understanding of the Meaning of America.

Panayiotis (Pano) Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin. From 2017 to 2021, he served as the 24th President of St. John’s College, Annapolis. After earning degrees from Northwestern University (B.A.), Boston University (M.A.), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), he taught at Stanford University, the University of San Diego, and Loyola University Chicago.

He served most recently as dean of Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University. An outspoken advocate for liberal education, he oversaw the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, comprising a network of more than 100 colleges and universities. Among the earliest participants in the Teach for America program, President Kanelos is as passionate about teaching as he is about writing and scholarship. He founded the Cropper Center for Creative Writing at the University of San Diego and is a noted Shakespeare scholar, having served as the resident Shakespearean in the Old Globe MFA Program and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Shakespeare Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago.

Dr. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), which received the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and was designated one of the nation’s outstanding educators in the Templeton Honor Rolls for 1997-1998.

Dr. Carol Reynolds weaves energy, humor, and history into everything she does.   After a career as a professor at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, “Professor Carol” and husband Hank moved to a ranch and began creating Fine Arts courses for students and adults.  Her unprecedented Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Arts, History, & Culture and Exploring America’s Musical Heritage reach across the world.  Her new course History of Early Sacred Music will appear this summer, as well as online courses on Russian Music, Research Skills for Students Entering College, and a new series on American Music.  A pianist and organist, she is a popular speaker for the Van Cliburn Series, The Dallas Symphony, opera companies, and museums.  She works frequently in Eastern Europe and Russia as Study Leader for The Smithsonian.

Bernhardt L. Trout is the Raymond F. Baddour, ScD, (1949) Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director of the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing. He received his S.B. and S.M. degrees from MIT and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition, he performed post-doctoral research at the Max-Planck Institute.Trout’s research focuses on molecular engineering, specifically the development and application of both computational and experimental molecular-based methods to engineering pharmaceutical formulations and processes with unprecedented specificity. Since 1999, he has focused on molecular engineering for biopharmaceutical formulation, primarily liquid formulation, but also lyophilized formulation. A major aspect of his research focuses on developing both microscopic and macroscopic models to design stable formulations efficiently. In 2007, with several colleagues from MIT, he set up the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing, a $85 million partnership with the objective of transforming pharmaceutical manufacturing. In addition to Novartis, he has worked with many other pharmaceutical companies in research or consulting. He has published over 190 papers and has 22 patents issued or pending.

Peter Wood is an anthropologist and former provost. He was appointed president of the NAS in January 2009. Before that he served as NAS’s executive director (2007-2008), and as provost of The King’s College in New York City (2005-2007).

Dr. Wood was a tenured member of the Anthropology Department at Boston University, where he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. He also oversaw the university’s scholarly publications and served as acting university librarian.

He received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987 from the University of Rochester. His dissertation, Quoting Heaven, examined the emergence of an American folk religion and pilgrimage center in rural Wisconsin. His undergraduate degree is from Haverford College (1975) and he has a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University (1977).

Dr. Wood is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003) which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. These books extend his anthropological interest in examining emergent themes in modern American culture.

In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Wood has published several hundred articles in print and online journals, such as Partisan Review and National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bradford P. Wilson is Executive Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Lecturer in Politics, and Faculty Fellow of Butler College at Princeton University.  His interests include American constitutional law, American political thought, and Western political thought.  Wilson is the author of Enforcing the Fourth Amendment: A Jurisprudential History and co-editor of three books: American Political Parties & Constitutional Politics, Separation of Powers and Good Government, and The Supreme Court and American Constitutionalism.  He is also the editor of The Constitutional Legacy of William H. Rehnquist, published in 2015 by West Academic Publishing.  He has coedited a two-volume edition of The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton, published by Cambridge University Press in November 2017.  His writings have appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, the American Political Science Review, Academic Questions, and law reviews, and as chapters in edited volumes.  Wilson has served as President of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions since 2006.  He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Moscow State University and Moscow’s International Juridical Institute in 1994-95, and, from 1984 to 1987, served as Research Associate to two Chief Justices of the United States, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.  From 1996 to 2004, he served as Acting President and then Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars and was Editor of the journal Academic Questions.  He has been an editor of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy since 1982.  He received his B.A. from North Carolina State University, his M.A. from Northern Illinois University, and his Ph.D. in Politics from The Catholic University of America.Wilson and his wife Elle have three children.