The Foundations of Freedom Fellowship was begun by SFL in the 2008-2009 school year to provide an opportunity for high school seniors to academically engage the ideas behind liberty and prepare them for their college ambitions. The fellowship involves several components:
- A reading list is assigned that the fellow must complete, covering the intellectual justifications for liberty as a guiding principle in society.
- The fellow is required to complete a senior thesis on a subject related to liberty. The thesis may be in any academic area (e.g. history, philosophy, economics, sociology, etc.), and the subject may be anything that relates to liberty.
- A college professor or public policy expert is assigned to the fellow to act as an advisor throughout the fellowship. The advisor serves to teach the fellow about the intellectual foundations of liberty and develop the fellow’s thesis into a comprehensive analysis or argument about an issue of liberty.
One fellow was chosen for the 2008-2009 school year and applications for the 2009-2010 school year will be available in January, 2009.
2008-2009 Foundations of Freedom Fellow:
Alex Koren
Bio: Alex Koren is a senior at the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School. He first became interested in liberty through Lincoln-Douglas debate, which encouraged him to study philosophical and political works. In an effort to spread these areas of study to other students, Alex founded and currently leads his school’s debate and mock trial teams. In addition, Alex was a senior fellow for the Philadelphia Debate Institute, a project of Perspectives, a nonprofit that promotes youth debate education to underserved students, and is the president of his school’s Interact club, a high-school division of Rotary International.
Area of Interest: Political Philosophy
Alex Koren on the Foundations of Freedom Fellowship: “I have always been enthusiastic about libertarian ideals, and I enjoy sharing these ideas on freedom with others. However, because motivated high schoolers that want to take a stand on political issues are rare, I feel as though I have no one to turn to for support. I hope that the Foundations of Freedom Fellowship will give me the knowledge and tools I need to stand up for and spread knowledge on what I believe in.”
2008-2009 Foundations of Freedom Advisor:
Professor Aeon Skoble
Bio: Aeon J. Skoble is Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Bridgewater State College, in Southeastern Massachusetts. A native New Yorker, he received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Master’s and Doctorate from Temple University. His main research in moral and political philosophy include theories of rights, the nature and justification of authority, virtue ethics, practical reason and moral psychology, just-war theory, classical theories of happiness, and theories of legal interpretation. He is the co-editor of the anthology Political Philosophy: Essential Selections (Prentice-Hall, 1999) and author of Deleting the State: An Argument about Government (Open Court, 2008), as well as many essays in scholarly and popular journals. In addition, he writes widely on the intersection of philosophy and popular culture, including such subjects as Seinfeld, Forrest Gump, The Lord of the Rings, superheroes, Film Noir, science fiction, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and baseball, and is co-editor of Woody Allen and Philosophy (Open Court 2004) and the best-selling The Simpsons and Philosophy (Open Court, 2000). He is a contributor to the group blog Liberty and Power.
Professor Skoble on the Foundations of Freedom Fellowship: “I was very excited to learn about this great new program for high school students, and was happy to be asked to help get it started. Students at this stage in their education are perfectly situated to start learning about politics and economics in a theoretically sophisticated way, an opportunity they don’t always get. I have high hopes for this program’s success at furthering students’ learning about liberty in all its philosophical dimensions.”