It was the sixth session in a tightly-compressed colloquium, and the 18 conferees were weighing difficult questions. Was a republican form of government compatible with an empire? Was the Bill of Rights truly unnecessary, as the framers of the Constitution had argued that it was? And what exactly were rights in the first place?
To address these questions and many others, a handful of selected college students and recent graduates from across the nation had gathered in Seattle, WA, under the auspices of Liberty Fund, Inc., and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). They came with copies of the Federalist by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay; and with Friends of the Constitution—a collection of Federalist writings by various statesmen and gazetteers from the time of the ratification controversies. They came to examine the origins of democratic republicanism and its relationship to justice and liberty in society.
The purpose of Liberty Fund in organizing the colloquium, according to its literature, was to challenge the conferees to “examine, refine, and extend their ideas in the company of inquiring colleagues who are interested in the question of liberty.” In cooperation with Liberty Fund, ISI had invited several of its own undergraduate members to the conference as part of its mission to “educate for liberty”—to provide a forum for understanding the institutions of limited government, free enterprise, moral responsibility, and individual freedom.
The conference began informally on March 10, 2005 with a reception for the students in the Green Room of the Mayflower Park Hotel in downtown Seattle. The formal discussions began the next day, with two back-to-back morning sessions and one afternoon session in the hotel’s intimate Rose Room.
For two full days, the Rose Room housed several hours of intense conversation concerning the tension between liberty and order, human autonomy and the need to give up rights to form government. There were no lectures, and the moderators did not intervene except to suggest pertinent questions—a roundtable format especially favored by Liberty Fund because of its easy adaptability to the interests of the participants.
The participants debated a range of issues, moving from the separation of powers in the Constitution to its status as a “conservative” or “liberal” document. For ninety minutes they scrutinized the judiciary, asking whether its contemporary form reflected the intentions of the Constitution’s framers, and what could be done to prevent possible abuses in the Supreme Court. They then raised questions regarding the nature of the “good society” and the role of religion in a humane government.
Last of all came a debate over the meaning of rights and the nature of a republic. When the sixth session finally ended, the participants agreed that more questions had been asked than answered.
While the sessions formed the core of the conference, lengthy breaks enabled the students to continue the conversations informally, to strengthen friendships, and to explore downtown Seattle. During the evenings, ISI hosted “hospitality,” a time of drinking and talking until late in the evening. Participants relaxed around ethics and mathematics, The Lord of the Rings and the poetry of John Milton. On the last night before their departure, several students stayed up until 4 a.m. discussing philosophy of mind.
Participation in the conference was by invitation or application only. Most of the participants were selected from ISI’s 2004-2005 Honors Program, “Liberty and Order in the American Tradition.” The honors fellows had previously met during the summer at Oriel College in Oxford, England, where ISI hosted two honors conferences on the nature of conservatism. The participants had read seminal conservative works and had broached the questions that undergirded the Seattle conference: What is conservatism? What is liberty? How are the two related?
Both the participants and moderators at the Seattle conference represented a variety of academic strengths, ranging from majors in French and political science to literary studies and philosophy. Two students came from St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD, and Santa Fe, NM), a major-less school in which all students read the great books in the Western intellectual tradition. I was the sole student representative from St. Thomas.
The colloquium moderators were university professors with ties to Liberty Fund or ISI. Dr. Richard Gamble of the history department at Palm Beach Atlantic University led the first discussions, while Dr. Bradley Birzer led the latter. Birzer, a history professor at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, MI, is also the author of the recent book, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth.
Dr. Darryl Hart, formerly academic dean at Westminster Theological Seminary and currently director of ISI’s academic projects, presided over the conference.
Liberty Fund provided the books for the conference from its own presses. Its editions of the Federalist and Friends of the Constitution display Liberty Fund’s logo—the cuneiform symbol for “liberty” as it first appears in written form in ancient Sumerian documents.
For more information about undergraduate colloquia, honors programs, and educating for liberty, visit ISI’s website at http://www.isi.org.