Academic gathering to cover Tocqueville to Trump
Diana Schaub
“Learning to Love Lincoln” is the keynote address for this year’s Undergraduate Conference on the American Polity, hosted by Skidmore, April 1-2. Subtitled “Frederick Douglass’s Journey from Grievance to Gratitude,” the talk, by Loyola University professor Diana Schaub, takes place on Friday, April 1, at 8 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. All are welcome. (Conference registrants were asked to read two texts before attending the talk: Frederick Douglass’s oration in memory of Lincoln and chapter 17 from his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.)
Schaub teaches political science at Loyola and is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Jill and Boyd Smith Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. She is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” and co-editor of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. Schaub has published her scholarship and commentary in a wide range of academic and popular venues.
The conference continues on Saturday, with presentation of papers by and for students and professors, followed by a group discussion led by keynote speaker Schaub that evening [details]. Students and faculty representing institutions from Texas Tech and Baylor, to Yale and Holy Cross, to Skidmore and Hamilton will present papers on Alexis de Tocqueville, LBJ in 1968, this year’s Donald Trump candidacy, U.S. slavery and capitalism, constitutional thought, and other topics. Skidmore political scientist Flagg Taylor, the event organizer, recalls Skidmore’s hosting the event two years ago, when “students really enjoyed meeting people from the various campuses and learning from people with very different intellectual backgrounds.” This time she hopes it will again “promote high-level intellectual discussion and allow the students to challenge one another and test ideas.”
The conference is made possible by Hamilton College professor Robert Paquette and the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, in Clinton, N.Y.
