August 23, 2004
The Ethics and Public Policy Center is delighted to announce that Hadley Arkes and Wilfred M. McClay have each accepted a position as Senior Fellow at EPPC.
“This is a great day for EPPC,” said EPPC President M. Edward Whelan III. “Hadley Arkes and Bill McClay are two of this country’s most accomplished public intellectuals. They will help make EPPC even more effective as we pursue our mission of promoting the core American values embedded in our Judeo-Christian heritage.”
Hadley Arkes
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EPPC Senior Fellow Hadley Arkes is a leading expert on American political philosophy, public policy, and constitutional law. His activities at EPPC include co-directing the program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture.
Hadley Arkes is the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1966. He has written five books with Princeton University press: Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest (1972), The Philosopher in the City (1981), First Things (1986), Beyond the Constitution (1990), and The Return of George Sutherland (1994). His most recent book, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. His articles have appeared in professional journals, and he has also become known to a wider audience through his writings in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, and National Review. Professor Arkes has been a contributor, also, to First Things, a journal that took its name from his book of that title. For eight years he wrote a column for Crisis magazine under the title of “Lifewatch,” and he resumes that column occasionally with pieces for National Review Online.
Professor Arkes was the main advocate, and architect, of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act. The account of his experience in moving the bill through Congress is contained as an epilogue to his book, Natural Rights & the Right to Choose. Professor Arkes first prepared his proposal as part of the debating kit assembled for the first George Bush in 1988. The purpose of that proposal was to offer the “most modest first step” of all in legislating on abortion, and opening a conversation even with people who called themselves “pro-choice.” Professor Arkes proposed to begin simply by preserving the life of a child who survived an abortion–contrary to the holding of one federal judge that such a child was not protected by the laws. Professor Arkes led the testimony on the bill before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000 and 2001. In 2002, the House and Senate passed the bill unanimously and, with Professor Arkes in attendance, President Bush signed the bill into law.
Professor Arkes has been the founder, at Amherst, of the Committee for the American Founding, a group of alumni and students seeking to preserve the doctrines of “natural rights” taught by the American Founders and Lincoln. With the same mission, he has recently served as Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School, and Vaughan Fellow in the Madison Program, at Princeton University.
Professor Arkes received his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Wilfred M. McClay
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EPPC Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay is a widely acclaimed expert on American intellectual and cultural history. His activities at EPPC will include co-directing the Evangelicals and Civic Life program.
Wilfred McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History. He was appointed in 2002 to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Professor McClay has written several books, including The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina, 1994), The Student’s Guide to U.S. History (ISI Books, 2001), and Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America (Woodrow Wilson Center/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He is currently at work on a biographical study of the American sociologist David Riesman, and is editing two collection of essays, one called Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, which features sixteen essays by American historians on changing American understandings of self and person, and a collection of his own essays entitled Pieces of a Dream: Historical and Critical Essays.
Professor McClay is co-editor of Rowman and Littlefield’s book series entitled American Intellectual Culture. He serves on the editorial boards of First Things, The Wilson Quarterly, The Public Interest, Society, Touchstone, Historically Speaking, andUniversity Bookman, and is a member of the Board of Governors of The Historical Society.
Professor McClay received his undergraduate degree at St. John’s College (Annapolis) and his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University.
