Assumption has established the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Center for Scholarship and Statesmanship, an endeavor with a national reach that will cultivate thoughtful citizens who are inspired by the late senator’s example to appreciate the link between ideas and action.
The Institute is funded by generous grants from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, whose Madison Initiative focuses on strengthening the values, norms, and institutions of U.S. democracy – in particular, Congress – in a time of political polarization.
“Senator Moynihan is the most prominent example in recent American history of the tradition of the scholar-statesman that reaches back to Cicero, Edmund Burke, John Adams, and James Madison,” said Greg Weiner, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at Assumption, director of the Center, and author of American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.“It is a privilege to honor him with a Center that seeks to cultivate the next generation of scholar-statesmen.”
Located in Assumption’s Department of Political Science, the Center will host a biannual gathering of undergraduate Moynihan Fellows in Washington, DC, to discuss Senator’s Moynihan’s writings and to meet statesmen and stateswomen as well as prominent political thinkers. The Center will stimulate scholarship into Moynihan-inspired themes, especially among the emerging scholars so often mentored by Moynihan. The Center includes a postdoctoral research fellow, efforts to republish Moynihan’s writings, and colloquia for scholars on Moynihan-inspired themes.
The Center is guided by an impressive advisory board – all of whom enjoyed a close working relationship with the late senator – including Robert A. Katzmann, Ph.D., Chief Judge of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (Sen. Moynihan’s teaching assistant at Harvard University); Sen. Moynihan’s former colleague Sen. J. Robert Kerrey; renowned Harvard University sociologist and frequent Moynihan collaborator Nathan Glazer; Stephen Hess, former advisor to Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and senior fellow emeritus in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institute whom Sen. Moynihan served within the White House; Joel Motley, a former Moynihan aide and now a managing director of Public Capital Advisors, LLC; Wendy Schiller, also a former Moynihan aide and chair of the Government Department at Brown University; and George F. Will, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post who was a close friend of Sen. Moynihan.
