The Pope Center is ecstatic that our good friend Bob Paquette, a history professor at Hamilton College in upstate New York, is this year’s winner of the Jeanne Kirkpatrick Award. Bob has been an unheralded giant for many years in the fight to restore objective inquiry and ideas supporting liberty to academia.
In 2006, he penned this article for us chronicling his brutal battle to bring a beacon of liberty to the Hamilton College campus. He gave a rousing speech at the Pope Center’s 2007 conference condemning the tyrannical forces of political correctness in the Ivory Tower. More recently, he was my tipster for this article exposing UNC-Wilmington’s “Smutty Professor,” a juvenile, pornography-obsessed English professor with few credentials hired over 100 other applicants.
Bob was an awesome choice for the award. Kudos are also owed to the Bradley Foundation and the American Conservative Union for choosing a fighter from the trenches instead of some less-deserving celebrity.