The Tocqueville Program at Furman promotes the continuing relevance of Western and American political thought, attracts some of the nation\u2019s most prominent scholars to campus, and sponsors a popular student seminar in political thought.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to a $500,000 gift from former Furman trustee Ravenel Curry \u201963 and his wife, Beth, the program has a firm economic foundation on which to build and grow. \u201cThis pledge allows us to turn our efforts to an ambitious project of expanding the number of courses offered by the program,\u201d says Ty Tessitore, professor of political science who, with departmental colleague Ben Storey, is the program\u2019s co-director.<\/p>\n
The program, which began in 2008, takes its name from Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer and statesman who visited America in the 1830s to study and write about the young nation\u2019s experiment with democracy.\u00a0It was developed, according to the directors, \u201cin response to the growing civic and cultural illiteracy of students and the creeping ideological conformity that pervades faculty and students alike.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a recent article for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, the program was lauded as a \u201cmodel\u201d of intellectual rigor and was compared favorably to similar programs at Duke and Princeton. In 2010, student demand was such that it was necessary to double the space available in the course.\u00a0Tocqueville Lecture Series speakers have included such scholars as Francis Fukuyama (Johns Hopkins), Lee Silver (Princeton) and Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago).<\/p>\n
\u201cWe consider the Tocqueville Program to be the beginnings of a much broader effort to invigorate the teaching of the liberal arts at Furman,\u201d says Storey.<\/p>\n
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