Holy Cross Receives $75,000 Grant to Enhance Political Science Offerings

WORCESTER, Mass. – Two faculty members in the political science department at the College of the Holy Cross have received a $75,000 grant from the Manhattan Institute’s VERITAS Fund for Higher Education at DonorsTrust.  Donald Brand, professor, and Daniel Klinghard, assistant professor, will use the funds during the 2010-11 academic year to develop courses in political science, and to support their newly created Charles Carroll Program lecture series.

Named after the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Charles Carroll Program, will bring a series of highly regarded speakers to campus to lecture on topics ranging from historical political figures to market economics.  “Educated by the Jesuits, Carroll was a member of the Continental Congress and a U.S. Senator from Maryland,” says Brand.  “Yet, despite his role as one of the country’s founding fathers, he remains largely unknown.”

“The Charles Carroll program will draw attention to his life and work,” says Klinghard, “which is particularly important to our community given the College’s Jesuit, Catholic tradition.”

In addition to establishing the lecture series, Brand, Klinghard and Sarah Luria, associate professor of English, will use the grant to develop course offerings.  Brand’s course “Capitalism in Crisis” will critically examine the nature of 20th-century American capitalism and its relationship to the liberal democratic political system. “More specifically, it will focus on the capacity of our system to respond to fundamental economic crisis to assess the prospects for the long-term survival of free market systems,” says Brand.

Klinghard and Luria will co-teach a year-long course titled “Hamilton, Jefferson, and Us,” in the College’s Montserrat program for first-year students.  During the first semester, students will examine the writings of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, drawing controversies and ideas from their political lives into contemporary debate.  In the second semester, they will trace the influence of Hamilton and Jefferson's ideas into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The VERITAS Fund at DonorsTrust is a donor-advised fund that seeks out professors at top-tier universities who are committed to bringing intellectual pluralism to their institutions. Working with these professors, the VERITAS Fund supports college and university programming that helps introduce a new generation of students to broader perspectives than are available on most campuses.