Lewis E. Lehrman was a recipient of the 2005 National Humanities Medal for his work in American history. He co-founded the Lincoln & Soldiers Institute with philanthropist Richard Gilder, with whom he also established the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University which awards the annual Frederick Douglass Prize. Lehrman and Gilder co-founded the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Lehrman taught history at Yale University as a Carnegie Teaching Fellow and as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow earned his Masters in history at Harvard University. Lehrman is the author of Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point as well as a former member of the Board of Directors of the Project for the New American Century, and a Trustee to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He achieved national political prominence in a 1982 campaign for Governor of New York, in which he ran against Democratic candidate Mario Cuomo, losing the election by only two percentage points.
General Bunting is Chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board and Superintendent Emeritus, Virginia Military Institute. He has served as President of Hampden-Sydney College, Headmaster of Lawrenceville School, director of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, member of the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities and also of the American UNESCO Commission. An accomplished author, Bunting's first novel, The Lionheads, was selected one of the Ten Best Novels of 1973 by Time Magazine. In addition to several other novels and various edited editions, he has also written a volume on higher education, An Education for Our Time, which outlines the elements of a proper civic education. A Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford and decorated Vietnam veteran, General Bunting is often characterized as a "scholar warrior."
Dr. Hadley Arkes is Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. He was Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Arkes received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and has authored five books including: Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest, The Philosopher in the City, First Things, Beyond the Constitution, and The Return of George Sutherland, all published by Princeton University press. He is more widely known through his contributions to the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, and National Review as well as his role as advocate and architect of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act. Dr. Arkes was also the the founder, at Amherst, of the Committee for the American Founding and has served as Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School, and Vaughan Fellow in the Madison Program, at Princeton University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC
Dr. Stephen Balch is the founder, Chairperson, and former president of the National Association of Scholars, America’s largest and most active membership organization of professors and academic administrators committed to higher education reform. He holds a B.A. from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Balch was instrumental in the founding of a number of other important higher education reform organizations, including the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (on whose board he serves), the American Academy for Liberal Education, the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and the Historical Society. In 2007, he received one of the National Humanities Medals and is now engaged in a nationwide effort to encourage the creation of new academic programming designed to revive the study of the American Founding, free institutions, and Western Civilization in America’s colleges and universities. The author of numerous articles on the problems of higher education, his comments appear frequently in the media including Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and he has spoken before academic and general audiences on many campuses.
Dr. Fornieri is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is an expert on the political ideology of Abraham Lincoln and has written numerous books on the topic including Abraham Lincoln's Political Faith (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003) and Abraham Lincoln's Political Faith. He is the author-editor of Lincoln's America with Sara V. Gabbard, and the author-editor of Lincoln's American Dream with Kenneth L. Deutsch. He is also the editor of the book, The Language of Liberty: The Political Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, and co-editor of Lincoln's American Dream: Clashing Political Perspectives (Potomac Books, 2005). In 2005 he was awarded the Richard and Virginia Eisenhart Provost's Award for excellence in Teaching.
Dr. Robert George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a former Presidential Appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, currently resides on the President's Council on Bioethics and served as a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the 1990 Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, Professor George earned his doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University. His earlier books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993) and In Defense of Natural Law (Clarendon Press, 1999). More recently, his book, The Clash of Orthodoxies, was published by ISI in 2002 and another book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, was published by Doubleday in 2008. He was one of four winners of the 2005 Bradley Awards for Civic and Intellectual Achievement and, also in 2008, George received the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the highest honors that can be conferred on a civilian by the President of the United States.
John D. Mueller is a Fellow and Director of the Economics and Ethics Program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is also president of LBMC LLC, a Washington, DC, firm specializing in economic and financial-market forecasting and economic policy analysis. Mr. Mueller graduated in 1974 from Haverford College. In 1974-75 he was a Thomas J. Watson Traveling Fellow. In 2001-2002 he was among the first Fellows of Princeton University's James Madison Program. Besides investment managers, Mr. Mueller has advised many American and foreign economic policymakers on monetary policy and exchange rates, policies for reducing unemployment, and income-tax, welfare and Social Security reform. Mr. Mueller has been a Fellow of The Lehrman Institute and of The Lincoln Institute, and was a founding board member of the G.K. Chesterton Institute. Mr. Mueller is also an author whose articles have been published in periodicals ranging from the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and Washington Post to the Harvard Business Review, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, and the Chesterton Review.
Matthew Spalding is the Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He also also serves as project leader of Heritage's First Principles initiative. He is a graduate of Claremont McKenna College and has a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School, where his work concentrated on government, political philosophy and early American political thought. A Henry Salvatori Dissertation Fellow with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, he has taught American government courses at George Mason University, the Catholic University of America, Claremont McKenna College, and Hillsdale College. Before joining Heritage, Spalding was a Senior Policy Analyst at the Claremont Institute where he is currently an adjunct fellow. He also serves on the Board Academic Advisors at Mount Vernon Estate. An expert on political history and constitutionalism, as well as religious liberty and religious life in America, he is the author of numerous books including We Still Hold These Truths (ISI Books, Nov. 2, 2009), A Sacred Union of Citizens: Washington's Farewell Address and the American Character, and co-editor of the best-selling book, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. Spalding's work on The Guide earned him the prestigious Drs. W. Glenn and Rita Ricardo Campbell Award in 2006.
Mr. Edward Whelan III is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He directs EPPC's program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online's Bench Memos blog on judicial nominations and constitutional law, he was a leading commentator on the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Mr. Whelan has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government and was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel's Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and Departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Mr. Whelan also previously worked as Senior Vice President and Counselor to the General Counsel for Verizon Corp. and as a lawyer in private practice.