Stanley Kurtz

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow in the Education and American Ideals Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For over a decade, he has been a national leader in the reform of both K-12 and higher education, authoring or co-authoring model legislation designed to protect campus free speech, reintroduce the study of Western civilization, restore the reading of classic literature, prevent high school walkouts for purposes of political protest, block mandatory DEI indoctrination, bring public policy debate back to college campuses, and more. He writes regularly on education issues for a wide range of outlets, particularly National Review Online, where he has been a contributing editor for over two decades.

While Mr. Kurtz is currently focused on education, he has written on a wide range of topics over the past quarter-century, from cultural barriers to democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the vicissitudes of the family, to the political agenda of the American left. His most recent book, The Lost History of Western Civilization (National Association of Scholars) offers both a critique of deconstructionist history and a new way of looking at America’s cultural conflicts. (A free pdf of the book can be downloaded here).

Mr. Kurtz has also published two influential books on President Obama, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold History of American Socialism (Threshold) and Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities (Sentinel).

Mr. Kurtz received his undergraduate degree from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He later taught at Harvard, winning several teaching awards for his work in a Great Books Program. He was also Dewey Prize Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Chicago.

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