This spring, Justin Hawkins and Kate Bermingham, two student fellows in the Alexis de Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, participated in the fourth annual Conference on the American Polity, held this year at Princeton University. The students presented original research papers in philosophy and political theory and participated in panel discussions with other undergraduate presenters from Princeton University, Boston College, and the University of Notre Dame.
The conference, held every spring, is a weekend-long series of panel discussions and papers presented by students from various participation universities. “The Conference on the American Polity was an idea that was suggested to me by Randy Drew, one of our Forum alumnus.” said Dr. Patrick Deneen, Associate Professor of Government and Founding Director of the Tocqueville Forum. Deneen organized the conference after reflecting on the fact that, for all the research and writing the average undergraduate does every year, his work is typically seen only by the professor who assigned it—a trend that does nothing to advance a profound and deliberative discussion of the ideas that students spend so much of their time studying.
Seeking to ameliorate this lack of an audience and simultaneously provide students with a venue to discuss and debate their ideas, Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum collaborated with its sister program, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, to organize the first Conference on the American Polity, held at Georgetown University in 2008. Since then, the venue has alternated each year between Georgetown and Princeton, even as additional schools have begun sending their own students and faculty.
Dr. Deneen foresees that the conference will continue growing to include more schools and participants, and perhaps become the starting point for a series of regional conferences around the country.
The Georgetown students who presented original material were Justin Hawkins (COL ’11) on “Tocqueville and the Decline of the American Puritan Tradition” and Kate Bermingham (COL ’11) on “Liberal Individualism and the Encumbrance of Affectionate Love,” a portion of her senior thesis that addresses the effects of liberal democracy on each of C.S. Lewis’ “Four Loves.” Mr. Hawkins and Ms. Bermingham were accompanied by seven other undergraduates from various universities, who presented their work and received critiques from designated respondents along with the audience of students and faculty.
The intellectual stimulation provided by the quality and substance of the papers was noted by all in attendance. Chris Mooney (COL ’14), one of the Tocqueville Forum student fellows in attendance at Princeton, said that “attending the conference was worthwhile just because it provided the opportunity to experience true academic interaction between fellow students with passions for the same subjects.”
But it was the presenters themselves that spoke most highly of the conference. “It is a unique honor to be able to present my work in this setting,” Mr. Hawkins said, “and the opportunity to present an academic paper to an audience and receive pointed criticism is valuable experience for my prospective academic work on the graduate and Ph.D. levels.”
Ms. Bermingham expressed similar thoughts: “this conference was an opportunity for me to see if my paper had substantive potential beyond the immediate context in which it was written.” But she also noted that it served a more far-reaching purpose: “[the conference] reminded me that the work we do at Georgetown is part of a broader scholastic community and long liberal arts tradition.”
It is that long liberal arts tradition that the Tocqueville Forum seeks to foster on Georgetown’s campus. The Tocqueville Forum itself was founded in 2006, according to its Mission Statement “to reinvigorate higher education at Georgetown and elsewhere by cultivating civic knowledge. The Forum accomplishes this end by advancing a probing yet sympathetic understanding of the United States and its roots in the Western philosophical and biblical traditions.” The mission and work of the Tocqueville Forum has even attracted the attention of the national media when the Wall Street Journal featured the Forum in a 2007 article entitled “The New Campus Dissidents.”
Dr. Deneen says that he was motivated to begin the Tocqueville Forum because of concern that the classical, liberal arts tradition to which Georgetown was once so strongly committed was being lost. “I believed that it was necessary to create an institution within Georgetown to maintain that tradition,” Deneen said, “in the belief that in its absence, that tradition would eventually attenuate and die.”
The Conference on the American Polity is just one of the efforts organized by the Tocqueville Forum to promulgate the western tradition among undergraduate students at Georgetown. The Tocqueville Forum student fellowship program is currently comprised of almost seventy undergraduate fellows selected in the fall of each academic year to participate in reading groups, student retreats, lectures by visiting lectures, book discussions, and to act as contributors and editors for Utraque Unum, the Tocqueville Forum’s student-run journal of undergraduate research named for the motto of Georgetown University and published biannually.
Yet with all this activity sponsored and organized by the Forum, Dr. Deneen has even broader plans for the future. “I aspire to bring more faculty – whether at Georgetown or from elsewhere – into our conversation and begin to be able to offer courses…Perhaps someday we might have a minor or certificate program in the Western Tradition.” Meanwhile, Deneen is pleased with the success that the Forum has had thus far and is optimistic about the Forum’s ability to continue attracting serious students who are aware that they do not yet know all that they ought to know. “I hope that we can continue to undertake the activities that have become mainstays in our programming,” Deneen said, “But to continue what we’re doing, and with the caliber of students we have been attracting, would remain highly satisfying.”
By Justin Hawkins
