FEATURED
Hamilton School to roll out new degree in ‘war, statecraft, and strategy’
A classical-based school within the University of Florida recently graduated its first three students – and the pipeline is growing even larger.
The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, first established in summer 2022 with a $3 million infusion from the Florida legislature, has continued to grow in the past four years.
The school’s “Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law” major now has 146 enrolled students, according to Professor Brandon Warmke.
The Hamilton School also offers a major in “Great Books and Ideas” and beginning this fall “will also offer two more undergraduate degrees— War, Statecraft and Strategy (WSS) and American Government, History, Literature, and Law,” according to its website.
Warmke attributes the success of this program to student’s eagerness to “study timeless things with faculty who take very seriously their role in introducing young people to the conversation of mankind.”
“Hamilton simply invites students to the pursuit of learning,” Warmke told The College Fix via email. “Many of them find that refreshing.”
“Part of our remit at Hamilton is to introduce students to the ‘best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine,’ as the [American Association of University Professors] once put it. We take that responsibility very seriously,” Warmke said.
Founded in 2022 as the Hamilton Center, the school hopes “to contribute a diverse array of viewpoints to the campus dialogue, and promote respectful civil discourse both in and out of the classroom,” then director William Inboden told The Fix in 2023.
The program offers courses like “Civil Discourse and the American Political Order,” “The History of Political Economy,” and Human Flourishing: Philosophical, Political, Economic and Legal Perspectives.”
Warmke teaches several courses at the school, including the civil discourse class. He commented on how the school breaks from broader trends at other universities.
“Unfortunately, too many corners of higher education have turned their attention to other things, including activism, social experimentation, and commentary on the politics of the moment,” he told The Fix.
When asked about the perception of the Hamilton School merely being a conservative school, Warmke said, “if the worry is just that students are exposed to ideas and arguments they wouldn’t otherwise come across, that strikes me as more of an indictment of the rest of academia than it is a criticism of Hamilton.”
The Fix reached out to the campus faculty union for comment on the center and its success.
Meera Sitharam, president of the UF chapter of the United Faculty of Florida, said in response to an email inquiry from The Fix on April 29 “the faculty union, via the collective bargaining agreement (CBA), ensures academic freedom for faculty, exercised along with academic responsibility (see Article 10).”
“The CBA further stipulates that shared governance rules, principles – stated in the faculty senate constitution, bylaws, resolutions, other shared governance documents, as well as past best practice – are adhered to,” she wrote. “These shared governance rules and principles govern faculty decisions concerning all academic and curricular content and procedures. Beyond this, the union doesn’t opine any further on academic and curricular content or procedures.”
However, Professor Sitharam has previously questioned the methods surrounding the center’s founding, Inside Higher Ed reported in July 2024.
“You look at who’s there, who they’re hiring and what’s the buzz around the center, what other people are saying around the center, including other people who were instrumental in setting up the center,” she said. “Should I just completely dismiss all that?”
In May of 2024, United Faculty of Florida filed a grievance against the University of Florida after the university investigated six faculty members for allegedly interfering with curriculum development at the Hamilton Center, The Independent Florida Alligator reported in July 2024.
The grievance was declared moot after the university said that the investigation would not be used for future evaluations for those six faculty members.
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