Read the remarks given by Michael W. McConnell, Richard & Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, at the 2012 Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture: “Spending, Public Debt, and Constitutional Design.”

A scholar of political philosophy and constitutional law, Walter Berns has written extensively on American government and politics in both professional and popular journals. He is the John M. Olin University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and served as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has also taught at Louisiana State University, Yale University, Cornell University, Colgate University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Chicago. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in political science at the University of Chicago and has published many works on American government and society. His articles have also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Berns served on the National Council on the Humanities from 1982 to 1988 and the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress from 1981 to 1985. He was also a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2005.

Over the past year, the recently dedicated Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Memorial and the planned Eisenhower Memorial have renewed controversy about the meaning and purpose of public memorials. What do America’s memorials and monuments tell us about our nation and our identity as citizens? How should we memorialize past events and individuals?

At an event on Friday, May 18, 2012, that was co-sponsored by AEI’s Program on American Citizenship and theNational Civic Art Society, a distinguished panel discussed the important role of public memorials in civic life, using the recent controversies over the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Memorial and the proposed Eisenhower Memorial to guide the conversation.

In mid-September 2011, as part of AEI’s Program on American Citizenship, we celebrated Constitution Day (September 17), the day thirty-nine members of the Constitutional Convention signed the draft constitution. In conjunction with that remembrance, we thought it appropriate to honor our longtime colleague and friend Walter Berns with a panel dedicated to discussing his scholarship on the Constitution and the American regime it supports.

What follows are the formal presentations given by Jeremy A. Rabkin (professor, George Mason University School of Law), Leon R. Kass (Madden-Jewett Chair, AEI), and Christopher DeMuth (former president, AEI, and distinguished fellow, Hudson Institute), as they discussed Walter’s contribution to the study of the Constitution. Following these presentations is a brief set of remarks made by Professor Berns at the conclusion of the event.

UNDERSERVED
A Case Study of ROTC in New York City
By Cheryl Miller
(May 4, 2011)

The post-9/11 moment and the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy have found students, faculty, and administrators newly supportive of the military and ROTC. Already Harvard and Columbia University have reestablished ties with the Navy ROTC, and other elite schools—Stanford and Yale—look poised to follow.

As welcome as these changes are, however, the lifting of elite-school bans against the ROTC will be a lost opportunity unless the military and civilian leadership push for more substantive changes to the ROTC program, broadening its base and seeking more geographic and institutional diversity.

View the full report as a PDF

With Peter Skerry of Boston College—one of the nation’s leading experts on immigration and assimilation—we have established a private working group to address the challenges of Muslim integration. This project seeks to bring together a select group of interested and knowledgeable individuals (Muslims and non‐Muslims) to explore areas of difference as well as common perspectives.

ARTICLES & COMMENTARY

Peter Skerry, “The Muslim-American Muddle,” National Affairs, Fall 2011. A decade after 9/11, America has reached a political and intellectual stalemate regarding the Muslims in its midst. Many Americans continue to fear their Muslim neighbors and fellow citizens, if not as potential terrorists then as terrorist sympathizers—or, more generally, as the bearers of an alien culture shared by America’s enemies.

Peter Skerry and Gary Schmitt, “Why won’t media—or Muslims—address Islamism in America?,” Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 2011. America’s freedoms aren’t in danger from Islamists. But we can’t ignore Islamist influences on Muslim-American organizations. It is not enough for Muslims here simply to assert their rights but also to address questions whose continued neglect fuels understandable anxieties.

Peter Skerry and Gary Schmitt, “Silence from Muslim-Americans,” Boston Globe, January 29, 2011. Amid the uproar earlier this month over the assassination of Salmaan Taseer, the secularist governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab, Muslim-American organizations have been largely silent. At a time when mainstream Muslim leaders have been trying to demonstrate their embrace of religious tolerance and pluralism to their fellow Americans, few have had a word to say about this People’s Party leader whose denunciation of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy law led to his death at the hands of a Muslim zealot—a zealot who has since been celebrated by fundamentalists around the globe.

This project considers the question of whether the military has narrowed, to its detriment, the demographic pool from which it draws its young officers and how this affects civil‐military relations over time.

The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC)—the principal source for the recruitment of military officers—has lost its “national” character, becoming increasingly Southern and rural. Not only have elite colleges and universities kept ROTC programs off their campuses—ignoring their own pre-Vietnam War tradition of providing the military with class after class of military officers—so too has the military virtually dropped out of many major metropolitan areas to the detriment of its ability to recruit from a diverse and talented segment of America’s youth.  ROTC, properly understood, provides a critical link between the professional military and the nation at large—a link that is increasingly tenuous and needs to be maintained if citizens are to understand the military’s role in a democracy and, in turn, the military is properly attuned to the values and principles of the citizenry it serves.

To bring attention to this vital issue, we released a major report on the status of ROTC in America’s largest and most diverse urban center: New York City.  Our goal is to provide research supporting a renewed look at the ROTC’s development and specific policy proposals to university administrators, key members of Congress, and the executive branch.

REPORTS & COMMENTARY

Cheryl Miller and Jonathan E. Hillman, “How to Get More Ivy Leaguers into ROTC,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2011. The chief obstacle to ROTC’s expansion today is not antimilitary sentiment but a Pentagon that prefers to allocate its resources to surer recruiting prospects, primarily in the South and the Midwest.

Cheryl Miller, Underserved: A Case Study of ROTC in New York City, a report of the AEI Program on American Citizenship,  May 2011. With over 8 million residents and the largest university student population of any city in the United States, New York City demonstrates the challenges faced by urban ROTC programs—and their great potential.

Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller, “Semper Phi,” The Weekly Standard, December 23, 2010. With the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, elite colleges now have a chance to make good on their promises and bring the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) back to campus.

Cheryl Miller, “The Other ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” The Weekly Standard, November 13, 2010. Is the Solomon Amendment a dead letter? The statute, enacted in 1996, forbids federal funding to universities that prohibit military recruiters or Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) units from their campuses. Yet today, nearly 15 years since the amendment’s passage—and despite President Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to “vigorously enforce” the law—ROTC is still absent from some of the nation’s most selective schools.

Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller, “The Military Should Mirror the Nation,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2010. The nearly three million members of the U.S. Armed Forces have been at war for nearly a decade. While combat troops are being withdrawn from Iraq, surge forces are still deploying in Afghanistan and many soldiers are on their second or third tour of duty. Americans hold this service and sacrifice in high regard–but they do so increasingly from a distance. This is a threat to our country’s civic ethic of equal sacrifice.

In mid-September 2011, AEI’s Program on American Citizenship celebrated Constitution Day (September 17), the day thirty-nine members of the Constitutional Convention signed the draft constitution. In conjunction with that remembrance, we thought it appropriate to honor our longtime colleague and friend Walter Berns with a panel dedicated to discussing his scholarship on the Constitution and the American regime it supports.

At the event, AEI president Arthur Brooks announced that henceforth the Citizenship Program’s annual Constitution Day celebration will be named in honor of Walter Berns in appreciation of his scholarly legacy in this field and his many years of contributing to the work of the American Enterprise Institute as a resident scholar.

ABOUT WALTER BERNS

A scholar of political philosophy and constitutional law, Walter Berns has written extensively on American government and politics in both professional and popular journals. He is the John M. Olin University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and served as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has also taught at Louisiana State University, Yale University, Cornell University, Colgate University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Chicago. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in political science at the University of Chicago and has published many works on American government and society. His articles have also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Berns served on the National Council on the Humanities from 1982 to 1988 and the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress from 1981 to 1985. He was also a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2005.

PUBLICATIONS AND EVENTS:

“Walter Berns and the Constitution: A Celebration,” January, 2012. Read the formal presentations given by Jeremy A. Rabkin (professor, George Mason University School of Law), Leon R. Kass (Madden-Jewett Chair, AEI), and Christopher DeMuth (former president, AEI, and distinguished fellow, Hudson Institute) as they discussed Walter’s contributions to the study of the Constitution. Following these presentations is a brief set of remarks made by Professor Berns at the conclusion of the event.

Leon R. Kass, “Teacher and Patriot,” September 27, 2011. It is absolutely fitting and proper to honor Walter Berns in connection with Constitution Day. The U.S. Constitution, and the underlying ideas and ideals of “constitutionalism,” have been the central focus of Walter’s intellectual life.

Walter Berns and the Constitution: A Celebration of the Constitution, with Opening Remarks by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, September 20, 2011. For more than fifty years, Walter Berns has analyzed the American constitutional order with insight and profundity.  It is only fitting that as we mark Constitution Day—September 17, the day thirty-nine members of the Constitutional Convention signed the draft constitution—we examine his work on the meaning of the Constitution and the American regime it supports.  At this event, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave opening remarks in celebration of the Constitution, and Leon R. Kass (Madden-Jewett Chair, AEI), Jeremy A. Rabkin (Professor, George Mason University School of Law), and Christopher Demuth (D.C. Searle Senior Fellow, AEI) discussed Walter Berns’s lasting contribution to constitutional studies.

Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg, “Polls on Patriotism and Military Service, 2010,” AEI Outlook, June 30, 2010. This study, a compilation of public opinion data on patriotism, examines what it means to be a patriot and what people think about military service and the draft. A special section looks at young people’s attitudes on these topics. The study includes all of the latest polling data as well as important historical trends for comparative purposes.

Walter Berns, “Lincoln at Two Hundred,” Bradley Lecture, February 9, 2009. Abraham Lincoln was the greatest of our presidents. He saved the Union, which made it possible for him to free the slaves. But he did more than this; without him we probably would have had no reason to celebrate the bicentennial first of the Declaration of Independence and then of the Constitution. It is therefore altogether fitting, Walter Berns said in the fifth in the 2008-2009 Bradley Lecture Series on February 9, that we mark the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.

Walter Berns, “From the Ashes Comes the Rebirth of Patriotism,” AEI Outlook, October 1, 2001. The terrorist attacks of September 11 have inspired a greater outpouring of patriotism by the American people than have many previous wars, and numerous displays of the American flag symbolize that patriotism. The flag represents more than free speech; it reminds us of those who fought before us to preserve our freedom.

Walter Berns, “On Patriotism,” Bradley Lecture, September 16, 1996. No one is born loving his country; such love is not natural, but has to be taught, or inculcated, or somehow acquired. A person may not even be born loving himself, but he soon enough learns to do so, and, unless something is done about it, he will continue to do so, and in a manner that makes a concern for country and fellow countrymen—or anyone other than himself—difficult if not impossible. The problem is as old as politics, and we Americans are not exempt from having to deal with it.