Reinvigorating Public Universities with Classical Education | Will Inboden

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Dr. Will Inboden, a professor and Director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. The two discuss the Center’s importance to the classical ed movement, its future, and the five majors it offers. They also discuss his book The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink and the connection between statesmanship and Western civilization. Inboden concludes by advocating for classical education in higher education, even for the student who has already done years of classical schooling.

Transcript

Jeremy (00:02.576)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast. Folks, I am here in Gainesville at the University of Florida with the one and only Dr. Will Nboden, who is a professor and director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education here at the University of Florida. Dr. Nboden, a ton of buzz about this program. What an honor to sit down with you today.

Well, thanks, Jeremy. And likewise, it's a great honor to be with you and we're huge fans of the classical learning test here at UF. And so I'm glad that we can talk about so many items of common interest and concern. So we always love to start on anchor just hearing a little bit about our guests and their own educational background and journey. Education as a young boy, did you love school? Were you bored? What was that like? Yeah, so I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and my parents both love to read. And so they gave me a real

love of reading at a young age and loved fiction, but also history. So at a very young age was reading a lot of World War II histories. Tucson is a great place to grow up for aviation and military history buffs since there's the world's largest outdoor airplane museum is there, the Pima Air Museum. So I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid looking at the airplanes that I'd been reading about in these books. So, and I...

went to a Christian school for first through eighth grade for elementary through junior high. I had a big public school in Tucson for high school. OK, and you must have done well. So you ended up at Stanford. Is that right for your undergrad? Yeah, yeah. And it's even related to some of the themes of the Hamilton Center. Now it was an interesting time to arrive at Stanford because in high school I had had some at my public high school had some great AP English and history teachers who had started to inspire me and maybe rekindle a love for the

classics that I'd first been exposed to from my parents. I enrolled at Stanford as a freshman in the fall of 1990. And the timing matters because it was a couple years earlier that Stanford had junked its Western civilization program. Right. So, so for a number of years, that's right. Jesse Jackson had led the charge. That's right. So this was one of the early controversies in the 1980s. You know, it's kind of reminder of these cycles of history.

Jeremy (02:17.68)
that, is Western Civ only studying dead white men, right? And Stanford had had a very venerable, great books, Western Civ program required of all freshmen. And because of those protests and the early wave of what was then called political correctness, what we now know as wokeness, they had jumped that program. And so when I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1990, Stanford was going through a big rethink of what, if any, common core curriculum should we have.

And they had done a modified one called the humanities curriculum. And I took that over the course of the year, but you had to seek it out, right? It wasn't required. And got a wonderful exposure to, again, a lot of the classics of Western civilization. That was my first time reading Aristotle and Plato and Augustine's Confessions. And on up to Nietzsche and Freud. But it was also an early exposure to me on how academic trends and pressures can work.

and how universities were beginning to have something of an identity crisis on these kinds of issues. And so I had to be a little more proactive in seeking out a more classically oriented great books curriculum for myself at Stanford, and then went on to major in history with a lot of work in religious studies and philosophy and international relations. Wow. You know, I think any listener to this podcast, but maybe anyone in America

I think one of the few things that we all kind of agree on still is our inability to have meaningful conversations. Most folks have lost the ability, especially, you know, Gen Z with folks they disagree with right now that this is a, we're almost in, it's almost an emergency situation right now. I'm reading James Hunter's Foundations of Democracy where he kind of makes this case. At this time, when you were at Stanford, you're a young man, you're thinking about academia. Were you thinking about this as a basis for kind of

cultural cohesion and this tradition. Yeah, you know, I'm glad you put it that way. I don't think I was. I mean, I do now, right? I eventually came to that, but I don't think that fully occurred to me then. For me, it was just more a matter of intellectual interest and curiosity and having some sense that we in the United States in the early 1990s at that time for me are inheritors of this pretty particularly rich tradition.

Jeremy (04:40.016)
But I hadn't fully connected the dots between the classics of Western civilization, the American founding, and then America's identity as a country and role in the world in the late 1990s. I can tell a more coherent story on that now. But now at the time, I didn't fully appreciate it. I think it's almost something I eventually came to. And Stanford was a very politically turbulent place at the time.

exposed to students from very different viewpoints and backgrounds and worldviews than my own. There's a lot of wonderful things about that, right? I mean, that's partly why we go to colleges, to have our ideas and values tested and challenged. But even then,

I could also see some of the growing strains of intolerance or incivility and coarseness in our discourse. It's much worse now than it was then, but looking back, I can see that there are even some of the seeds of it then. And then I don't want to get too far forward, but similar themes propped up when I was in graduate school at Yale a few years later. Okay. And at Stanford as an undergrad, were you imagining a life in academia? Were you thinking about that at the time?

Not really. There's a longer story there, but just to give your listeners a couple of highlights, and I hope there's at least some high schoolers or early college students listening, because my time at Stanford is a good example of how doors can, we may have one set of plans and the doors may close and other doors may open. So when I initially enrolled there, majoring in history, I was thinking I would go to law school and become a lawyer. But I then,

worked at a law firm in my hometown of Tucson for a couple summers, just like in the mail room doing court runs and things like that. And all the lawyers there told me that they loved law school, but they hated their jobs. And they said, don't become like, don't become a lawyer. All right. Okay. So, so then I decided I wanted to become a pastor. I was very active in my church and then campus fellowship group. It was interesting, you know, going to seminary and becoming a pastor. Again, a longer story there, but the gist of it is,

Jeremy (06:46.8)
I arranged an internship with the chaplain of the Senate in Washington, D .C. during my junior year at Stanford as a mentoring time to prepare me to go to seminary. And about a week before I was going to start the internship with him, I got a message from his assistant that he'd become very ill and was taking a leave of absence from the job. He shortly after died. And so so I couldn't do the internship because the reason for going there just passed away. And so I had to scramble to find an internship.

and found one in the office of Senator Dan Coats, who was on the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time. And that inspired in me a little bit more of an interest in politics and public service and lost the interest in the ministry. After that internship, I then returned to Stanford for my senior year and wrote my senior history thesis on kind of religion and politics in the United States in the 1960s and 70s.

My advisor for that was the wonderful Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David Kennedy. And he's the one who really inspired in me and interested in doing a PhD. And so working with him got me interested in the PhD in academia and then the Senator Coats internship got me interested in politics and public service. And I've done some combination of those two things for the last 30 years. Okay. So you had to Yale, what was your dissertation? What did you focus on in your PhD studies?

Yeah, so the Yale part, this picks up on one of the Stanford threads too. So I enrolled at Yale in the fall of 1998. I'd worked on Capitol Hill for a few years and then decided I was done with at the time with politics and public policy and wanted to do the PhD. So I enrolled at Yale in the fall of 1998. A year or two before, in the mid 1990s, the Bass family of Texas had given Yale $25 million to start a Western civilization program.

And the number of vocal members of the Yale faculty who were quite radicalized had protested and persuaded Yale to reject that gift and to not do the Western Civilization program. It's been spearheaded by the late wonderful classicist, Don Kagan. And so similar to my arrival at Stanford, I now arrive at Yale two years after they effectively junk Western civilization again. So I'm kind of, there's a bad omen here.

Jeremy (09:09.584)
But again, for me, I arrived at Yale with an interest in studying American diplomatic and religious history, looking at how religion, especially Christianity, had shaped America's foreign policy and role in the world. But I also wanted to have some exposure, again, some deeper exposure to some of the classics of Western civilization, picking up on my undergraduate studies. And so I had to seek that out since Yale didn't have a formal program and was privileged to

to study a bit with Don Kagan, and then with Charlie Hill and the Yale Grand Strategy Program, again, where we start with Thucydides and Sun Tzu, and then go to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and then up through Machiavelli and so on. And so some of those deeper classical strains, as well as 20th century Cold War and religious history were all part of my studies at Yale. So it was a wonderful time, even if

was something of a minority among my fellow PhD students with my academic and professional interests. Okay. We've got to talk for a few minutes about the peacemaker here. So your book on Reagan's Cold War policy. I now have a signed copy. It's a big, big book. So many pages. No expectation. You'll ever read it, but if you do, hopefully you'd read it. I want to. And I have listened there to your Uncommon Knowledge podcast conversation with Peter Robinson. Great conversation there. I'm interested in what you learned from that study, from that work.

that you've carried over here to leading the Hamilton Center? Yeah, OK, great question. And even though I've talked a lot about the peacemaker, the Reagan book before, I've never had anyone put that exact question to me. So I really appreciate it. A couple of things. One of the first themes that comes to mind is the importance of leadership and statesmanship. And I try to profile Reagan as a great strategist and statesman. And the reason this matters is within

the study of foreign policy and international relations, the prevailing view among probably many or even most scholars is that individual leadership doesn't really matter, okay? But rather that foreign policy is governed by these impersonal structural forces and the tectonic plates and those elements are out there. I don't wanna fully disparage it, but there's a little bit of a sense of that leadership, individual decision -making, statesmanship, if you will.

Jeremy (11:33.008)
matters less as a driver of change in international affairs, of the affairs of nations. And so, and of course, one of the curricular themes of the Hamilton Center, and there are many, we're ambitious in our curriculum, we'll be training our students to think themselves as not just as subjects or consumers or producers, but as citizens, and hopefully as leaders as well.

and understand that individual leadership can make a difference in whatever particular realm you are, that character formation, that ideas, and that the human person can really make a big difference in world affairs. And so, and my book in some ways is a case study of Reagan, I think making a decisive difference in, you know, the peaceful, America's peaceful victory in the Cold War. But there's another aspect of the book as well.

which is over the course of research and writing it and understanding more how Reagan thought and also the tradition he inherited, I came to appreciate that he saw the Cold War fundamentally as a battle of ideas. And that between - Rather than just two superpowers. Exactly, yeah. And again, the prevailing view among a lot of other scholars had been the Cold War was just two superpowers, two large nation states, the United States and the Soviet Union with large military and large economy, kind of arguing over who controls what half of the globe.

And that's not altogether wrong, but it misses the most important part. And so Reagan sees the Cold War as fundamentally as contest of ideas between democratic capitalism, the free world embodied in the Western tradition, and Soviet communism, right, which is believes in a command economy, believes in a totalitarian political system, and believes in state mandated and enforced atheism. And so

Those are the opposing ideas in the Cold War. And that was Reagan's theory of the case, that this is a battle of ideas and that the United States is fundamentally leading this inheritance of Western civilization and the ideas of the free world to defeat the vile idea and ideas of Soviet communism. And there's all sorts of implications that flow from that for Reagan's strategy and his support for.

Jeremy (13:53.648)
Christian and Jewish dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and his denunciations of Soviet communism. And listeners can read more about that in the book. But that also, for me, I think connects to the Hamilton Center mission is we believe in the importance of ideas, right? I mean, we believe that ideas are some of the driving forces in history, in human affairs, that ideas have consequences. The title of the classic Richard Weaver book.

And so, you know, Reagan's Cold War strategy in a lot of ways is another case study in that broader theme. The final one, which I touched on earlier, is just a relation that Reagan had a, even though he was not an intellectual, he wouldn't pretend to be one, he was much better read than people appreciated. And he saw himself as the custodian of a precious inheritance. That inheritance is the values of the American founding, which in turn are encapsulated in a lot of values of Western civilization.

And for him, as a custodian of that inheritance, he wanted to cherish it. He wanted to carry it forward to the next generation. And he saw his leadership as a stewardship there. And he had a certain confidence in that, right? He was broad -minded. He was pluralistic. I mean, I think he shows a lot of the openness and dynamism of Western civilization and the confidence and optimism that it can have. But also, this is where he gets a number of his convictions about limited government.

about the importance of religious faith and civil society. You know, sometimes the book isn't a lot about his domestic policy, but sometimes he'll be caricatured as kind of this crass libertarian who only wanted tax cuts and limited government and rampant individualism and materialism and greed. But if you look at his speeches and his life more carefully, he's very clear that he thinks that

family is the fundamental building block of society. He thinks that civil society, especially churches and other religious organizations are the real sources of values and meaning. And that's what we need for limited government and self -government to work. And so he's much more of a, like I said, I think a self -conscious inheritor and custodian of that broader Western tradition. And again, those will also animate the Hamilton Center's curriculum.

Jeremy (16:16.848)
Let's talk for a few minutes just about this term itself, Western civilization, which you've used a few times. And we've got a great academic board at CLT and we've had even a number of folks on that say, maybe don't use the term. The term itself has become too loaded and kind of just contemporary discourse. The term itself, for folks wanting to champion the great books, the classical tradition, is the term Western civ. What are your thoughts on that? Divisive or something we have to defend?

Yeah, so I obviously your listeners have heard me use it a number of times now, so I use it appreciatively and I think it's worth defending. Okay, but I am not unmindful of the controversies, even the toxicity that may be attached to that term in some quarters. But that's where I also come back to. Well, the fact that some critics have maybe been disparaging of it, or even some proponents of it have acted irresponsibly.

doesn't mean that we jettison entirely. If we do, what other term do we use? If you can come up with one, let me know, right? And so rather, I think our approach with the Hamilton Center and our university leadership and I have said publicly, our ambition is to make University of Florida the top Western civilization.

program in the country. But part of that is we understand that there's gonna be debates and what that term means and we're gonna teach the debates, right? I mean, so it is not going to be treated as a set of dogmas or one narrowly fixed definition that everyone has to subscribe to, but rather we see it as a conversation, right? Now it's a bounded conversation. There are...

There are certain values that will come along with this. There's plenty of canonical authors that we will, of course, be teaching as core pillars of Western civilization. But sometimes it's exemplified by different cities in the ancient Mediterranean, Athens and Rome and Jerusalem. And what those exemplify, there were disagreements, fierce disagreements from Athens to Rome to Jerusalem. But they're all part of this broader tradition. And a lot of the tradition

Jeremy (18:25.872)
is about openness, about free inquiry, about tolerance and pluralism, and yet pervaded by a certain set of values, believing in inherent dignity of the human person, believing in the possibilities, but also the limits of reason, right? And so that's why both reason and faith and some sort of sense of transcendence.

are part of the Western civilization, the Western tradition. So we want to teach that as a conversation, as those debates, but you said too, bounded that there are certain historical antecedents that we can point to. I think it would be difficult to kind of exaggerate the importance of the launching of the Hamilton Center. I mean, this, I view as almost like, it marks a 3 .0 or 4 .0 of

the classical movement overall. This is top top, I think, US News and World Report, if we put stock in that, number four nationwide, University of Florida, launching - Among public universities. Among public universities, yeah. Launching this program, one of the questions I have for our mutual friend, Dan Peterson, at Regent School of Austin, or Keith Nix at the Veritas School in Richmond is, other folks are watching, universities around the country are taking note.

As you as you launch this program, what is that aspect of it like? In some ways there's a lot at stake here. Yeah, yeah there is and I'll say that I and my colleagues at here at Hamilton, you know the initial faculty we've hired and your listeners can go to our website and see it's a terrific group. We're up to by next month 34 new faculty. Including James Hankins, CLT board member. That's right, yeah so Jim Hankins of Harvard who's absolutely wonderful.

So we feel the burden of getting this right. I mean, we are very aware that this is a awesome and a lot of ways awe -inspiring opportunity we've been given. The resources that the state of Florida put into this, the tremendous support from our university president, Ben Sasse, our provost, Scott Engel, the board of trustees. But we don't take that lightly at all. We take it very seriously and we know that we want to

Jeremy (20:39.216)
do our very best. We're going to make mistakes, always comes with it, but we were pretty hopeful and optimistic and excited that we can be a part of building something great here. A big part of that is in my first year here, I've been so impressed with our University of Florida students and having these wonderful dynamic students in the classroom invigorates our teaching and inspires it. And I think shows that across a broad spectrum, there's real student interest in

the curriculum that they were developing, the kind of courses that we're offering, the approach we're taking of wrestling with big texts and big questions of life, of entertaining very different viewpoints and making sure that they're given scrutiny but also a fair hearing that love of neighbor pervades our discussions even if there is going to be really vigorous debate and disagreement. But yeah, we're, as I've...

I'm very fond of John Wintip's classic Sermon on the Arabella. We know that the eyes of the world are upon us here. I hope it doesn't make us egotistical. If anything, it's very humbling. We're welcoming broad expressions of support from across the country, excitement we're hearing from a lot of high school families in particular about coming here. We're honored to be working with some of our

partners and colleagues at University of Texas, University of North Carolina, Arizona State University. Some other universities are starting some similar programs. Ours in scale is a larger one, but we're all on the same side here of trying to bring new choice and opportunity and kind of reinvigorated values into humanities and social science education. So there's been a ton of excitement again, as I said, starting off here, a ton of buzz about the Hamilton Center.

And I feel like we've got these two things happening at once. On the one hand, you've got the history majors in free fall, humanities departments are being closed, ecologies around the country. And at the same time in pop culture, Netflix specials on history have never been more popular. And so are we becoming less interested or more interested in our founding, in our origins as a nation?

Jeremy (22:52.592)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I, you know, the optimist in me says that we as a broader country in some ways are becoming more interested or still as interested as we ever were in our country's origins and then the deeper antecedents behind those. But that's where there's a, you know, I'll try to put this gently, there's something of a gap between elite university education and how a lot of humanities and social science departments are done at most elite secular universities, which has become

much more narrow, fairly ideological in some ways, and has just seen, as you mentioned earlier, a significant decline in number of students majoring in those topics. And so we, speaking for my Hamilton colleagues and I, we recognize a certain opportunity here of the broad mass of Americans are still interested in learning about our country's history and founding and the values that go into that and reading great texts. But

Most universities have not been addressing that demand or have been going in a different direction. And so we think and hope that there's a space for us to step in and offer meaningful courses on the American founding and on military history and on up through the Cold War, my own specialization, but also going back and looking at the Renaissance and the Reformation, right? And the classical world and the origins of Christianity and the origins of Judaism.

even though the origins of Islam, the origins of the world's monotheistic religions, and reading the great texts and asking those big questions. And initially from what we've seen, our University of Florida students are very interested in that kind of stuff. And we hope that that will continue to grow. I didn't know this before enjoying lunch with you, but you actually co -taught a class with

President Sasse this past semester, is that right? Yeah, yeah, we did. It was a freshman honors seminar here at the University of Florida. It was called the American Idea. And what we did is, you know, the premise is that the United States is fundamentally an idea, right? We're not a nation founded on blood and soil, but rather a nation founded on a creed, on a set of propositional beliefs embodied.

Jeremy (25:03.12)
in the Declaration of Independence. And of course, we're recording this the week of Independence Day when our country commemorates its birthday. And so what we did with the class, and starting with that premise, we said, all right, well, there's a number of ideas, the meaningful ideas that one will find in American history, but also a number of really notable individuals who maybe embodied those ideas. And so each week we had profile one important idea and then one or two important individuals associated with it. So we had a week on

Liberty with Thomas Jefferson. We had a week on democracy with Madison. We had a week on faith with Jonathan Edwards and B .B. Warfield and Emily Dickinson, right? You know, poetry and doubt on faith. We had a week on equality looking at Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. We had a work on justice, a week on justice looking at Martin Luther King. We had a week on vision looking at Ronald Reagan and Condoleezza Rice. And it was a

wonderful time. Most of the readings were primary texts, right? So it was the original writings of these different thinkers or speeches that they had given and the students would read those and we'd have really vigorous discussions about them, both to understand these people and their ideas and their own right, but always connecting it back to this broader theme of the United States itself as an idea, as a country that exemplifies an idea. So

Yeah, it was a fantastic time and a real privilege to be able to teach with President Sass and of course these wonderful students. Yeah, I wonder if you can weigh in on this question. You know, parents right now having this conversation with their rising senior, you know, about where to go to college, what to major in, all of this. And some of the students coming out of these great, great classical schools, you know, sometimes have the sense of, you know, we've read the great books, have been doing this, you know, since kindergarten and wanting to kind of do something else.

What is the purpose, what is the value, even students that have received a classical K -12 education of continuing to go deeper into this in their undergraduate years? Yeah, so, Will, again, as a great believer in the classical school movement, I wanna affirm that students coming out of those schools are gonna be some of the best prepared students we're gonna have from what we're teaching here at University of Florida. But I also hope I can humbly say that we will,

Jeremy (27:20.976)
provide some deeper engagement for them, maybe more historical background in a number of these authors, putting some of these authors in conversation with each other, putting them in conversation with some of the contemporary challenges of the day. As I often summarize, we want students who are taking our classes and our majors to get knowledge, skills, and values. Knowledge as far as just deepening their understanding of what has happened before, or what has been written and said before. Skills.

We're mindful that when our students graduate, we do want them to get jobs, okay? Now, that's not only what we're doing, right? We are by no means see ourselves a professional school, but students are gonna learn how to write well, how to think critically, how to give oral presentations, how to argue something. We're gonna include some quantitative work as well in our curriculum, right? Because a lot of employers are gonna want those with the values part too, right?

Again, we are not just preparing the students for jobs. We're certainly not trying to indoctrinate them, but rather we're trying to either deepen if they already have an existing set of values or maybe help cultivate if they arrive without those, the values of citizenship, of understanding what it means to be a stakeholder in a free society, of understanding what it means to have a connection with the transcendent.

or a secular university, we're not doing particular religious training there, but we're pluralistic, right? We want to be a very friendly home for people of faith, of whom I would certainly identify myself as one. And then the individual mentoring and the seminars that our faculty will be leading will be hopefully giving the students kind of a deeper sense of vision for the future course of their lives.

And also, we're showing them more and more how to interact with fellow students from very different backgrounds who may not share some of their own presuppositions and values. I mean, that was, going back to my time at Stanford 35 years ago, that's one of the things I enjoyed most and valued most of them was being tested and challenged by fellow students with very different value sets and backgrounds than my own. In my case, it ended up kind of deepening and strengthening a lot of my core convictions because they weren't just...

Jeremy (29:34.591)
received by rote, but rather were things that I had really kind of tested and made my own. Sure. Yeah. Well, again, I view the launching the Hamilton Center really as a marker, as a milestone in this movement. But I'm wondering, as a historian, if you can speak on just the movement as a whole, are we in the midst of or in the beginning of a serious renaissance in true liberal learning?

I sure hope so. Yeah. And then, you know, I often summarize Hamilton as, you know, we are, we put ourselves in the classical liberal tradition, right? And that's a pretty broad one, right? But, you know, but, you know, it's, it's bounded by that certain set of values. And yeah, I think there's, boy, I'll try to summarize this because there's so many different strains to that question. In a lot of primary and secondary education in the United, across the United States, there's been a diminishment of quality. You know, obviously COVID kind of brought out

a lot of the problems with this, especially with the teachers unions and what we saw as kind of less of a full throw devotion to the welfare of students. We'll just leave it at that. And then some of the more ideological or politicized trends that have crept in some there. And then, you know, we mentioned earlier, but universities are really going through a crisis of legitimacy right now, too, as post October 7th, as the broader public and countries becoming aware that

a lot of what universities have been teaching or supporting or promoting to their administrations has been very contrary to the traditional values of classical liberalism. It does feel like a number of these strains are converging of the growing renaissance in K -12 classical schooling. Again, that's like I said, I was telling you earlier what my own kids have benefited from from their time at Regents.

But also at the upper end of the educational spectrum, universities, a number of them, as we mentioned earlier, also starting to want to return to the classical liberal tradition and reviving humanity's here. So it does feel like there's, I don't know what the final contours of it shape will take, but it does feel like there's a certain moment here and it's an honor to be swimming in the midst of it. Love that so much. What do the next few years look like? I know you're launching five new majors at the University of Florida.

Jeremy (31:53.712)
What will the Hamilton Center be if you can write history in three years, five years? What do you see coming? Yeah, so well, the historian to me is always very leery of making predictions, especially about the future, right? So the line goes, okay. But that said, I can give a window into what some, at least some of our plans are. And President Sasse, again, has been very involved in helping shape and lead these two. So first, we're gonna continue to grow our faculty. Like I said, we're up to 34 faculty members right now.

and over the next couple years have ambitious hiring plans to continue to grow that eventually maybe get up to 50 or 60 faculty. We will very soon be changing our name from Hamilton Center to Hamilton College. That won't change our authorities. We already have our own faculty lines, the ability to offer degrees. And yes, we're rolling out five new majors. I'll rattle them off quickly here, but the first two that we're unveiling this fall are

Politics, Philosophy, Economics and Law, so PPEL, Model of the Great Oxford Program. I think that may be the best major that exists. yeah. And there's not many PPE programs. No, there have been a few others being picked up at some other universities, which is good. Yeah, but I think... Dallas Baptist has one. Yeah. Yeah, I think University of Pennsylvania has one. University of North Carolina has one. There's a few, but we hope that ours will be extra distinctive. I should, sorry.

I should, speaking of distinctive, I should say all five of our majors will require a year long course in Western civilization. Okay, so that'll be the foundational one. So first major, P -P -E -L. Second major, great books and ideas. Again, looking at many of the classic texts of the Western canon, but also a number of the key ideas in Western civilization too. That's why it's great books and ideas.

The third one, history, strategy, and statecraft. It'll start with classics of the ancient world such as Thucydides and Herodotus, but continue on up to the present day looking at contemporary national security challenges. And so that major will be a particularly good preparation for any students who want to go into national security careers, to work for the intelligence community, the military, state departments, national service in that realm. The fourth major.

Jeremy (34:09.52)
American Foundations, Ideals and Law, a multidisciplinary look at American history, literature, political philosophy. That one will be a very good pre -law major in particular. And then the final one, Science, Technology, Ethics and Society, bringing humanities insights to the STEM revolution and bringing STEM literacy to humanities oriented students. So we're really excited about these five majors. We think and hope that they will provide students that

rigorous classically rooted education, but also prepare them for meaningful careers and then meaningful lives as citizens and family members. Love that. Brass Tacks, parents, students, administrators listening to this podcast. Next steps, where do they find out more? Yeah, so please go to our website.

Maybe we can dub it in. I can't remember what the exact website is, but it's like hamilton .ufl or something like that. But if we can put in, please go to our website. You can see more information on our faculty and our course offerings there. The University of Florida undergraduate admissions will be opening sometime in August or September if there's any high school seniors or parents of high school seniors listening to this.

And in the application portal, there'll be a place where you can check an interest in taking a Hamilton Center class or major. So you can find out more information on us there too. Fantastic. Again, we are here on campus at the University of Florida here in Gainesville with Dr. Will and Bowden, who is leading the charge here at the Hamilton Center. Dr. Bowden, this is so important work that you're doing. CLT, we're all cheering for you. I think it's going to be a wonderful ride.

and appreciate your leadership in this. Well, thanks so much, Jeremy. My goodness, I should have mentioned earlier when you're asking about parents and students interested in coming here, take the CLT, kids, right? It's a great test and it will count for your application to the University of Florida. Thank you.