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Fellowship supports scholars like George Washington University Professor Sam Goldman who ‘shed light on the central importance of free speech’

As the inaugural recipient of a free speech fellowship, George Washington University Professor Sam Goldman is planning to write a book about the influence of conservative scholars on education since the 1950s.

Goldman (pictured) will receive the Richard D. McLellan Prizes for Advancing Free Speech and Expression on Thursday during a gala hosted by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

“Sam Goldman is the perfect example of how we will realize this program’s mission,” center CEO Jeffrey Nelson told The College Fix in a recent email.

Through the new fellowship, the Michigan center aims to promote the comprehension and practice of essential freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

“By the generous support of Richard D. McLellan, a prominent Michigan lawyer and lifelong advocate for free speech, this award seeks to support talented thinkers and communicators capable of rearticulating the central importance of the First Amendment, offering a better understanding of the freedoms it secures for all,” Nelson said.

“Though their benefits can be hard to see, they’re fundamental to who we are as Americans, so the larger purpose is to incentivize new works that shed light on the central importance of free speech to the American political tradition,” Nelson told The Fix.

In a phone interview with The College Fix, Goldman expressed his gratitude for the award as well as his inspiration from both Nelson and the center’s namesake, Russell Kirk.

Kirk, a politics scholar and author, defended “academic freedom, properly understood, not as a right to say anything or engage in political activism, but to pursue the truth in one’s own best professional judgment,” he told The Fix.

“And that is an ideal that is still relevant and inspires me,” Goldman said.

A political science professor, Goldman serves as the executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom and Democracy and director of the Politics & Values Program at George Washington University.

He said he initially did not plan to become a professor; however, internships at thinktanks like the Manhattan Institute and editorial journalism introduced him to the works that would further shape his career.

“I was interested in politics and ideas, and I wanted to write and speak and argue, but I didn’t know exactly how,” Goldman said.

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For example, he said philosopher Allan Bloom’s book “Closing of the American Mind” introduced him to a new way of thinking.

“So, in part, my book is an attempt to look back historically and better understand where some of these ideas came from and what the people making them were trying to do at the time,” he told The Fix.

The book will feature chapters on figures like Peter Viereck, Willmoore Kendall, Leo Strauss, and Robert Nisbet, going from the 1950s into the present.

“As a series of career portraits, it will illustrate their different criticisms of the Academy, and attempts to identify the economic incentives that lead to academic misbehavior, but also offers their remedies for those problems,” he told The Fix.

According to the Kirk Center, the working title is “Mad Professors: Conservative Intellectuals and the Closing of the American Academic Mind.” The publisher, Basic Books, has scheduled it for release around next fall.

“It’s designed as an introductory text for people wanting to understand conservatism in higher education going back to World War II,” Goldman said.

“One of the broader arguments is that it has been a consistent theme. Some suggest that conservative criticism of the academy is a feature of the late ’80s and early ’90s culture wars: I’m going to argue that it’s one of the defining themes of the whole post-war conservative movement,” he said.

Nelson at the Kirk Center said Goldman’s earlier writings made him an ideal candidate for the new fellowship. He pointed to the professor’s articles in The Wall Street Journal and The American Conservative and his two previous books, “After Nationalism” and “God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.”

“Also a leading theorist of the Freedom Conservative or FreeCon movement, all of these achievements and attributes make Sam the perfect person to receive the first writing fellowship,” Nelson told The Fix.

Also receiving McLellan Prizes from the center are Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer, author, and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Josiah Joner, a former editor-in-chief of The Stanford Review and recent graduate of Stanford University.

Nelson said he hopes the award will set a precedent for future projects.

“We believe that these awards will take their place among the most sought-after prizes and will provide a needed incentive for writers and related thinkers to advocate afresh for the central importance of the First Amendment’s defense,” he told The Fix.

MORE: ‘School of Conservative Studies’ in works by Russell Kirk Center

IMAGE: Samuel Goldman

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