Why The Hamilton Center?

The Hamilton Center at the University of Florida was founded in 2022 to create a new model of excellence in American higher education.

The Hamilton Center faculty of leading educators, intellectuals, and practitioners are devoted to exploring the great ideas of Western civilization, the enduring lessons of history, and the great cultural, moral, and political challenges of the modern age.

Too often, the university world is dominated by narrow specialists and one-sided ideological agendas. Hamilton is different. Hamilton professors explore big questions about justice and injustice, good and evil, power and statesmanship, love and death, democracy and tyranny, God and history, human excellence and human equality. The Hamilton culture of learning cherishes free speech and free inquiry and seeks to expose college students to the rigorous study of great texts, great leaders, and great ideas. Working across every field of the humanities and social sciences, Hamilton graduates are well-prepared for every arena of civic and professional life.

The Hamilton Center offers major, minors, and general education courses in four major fields:

• Great Books and Ideas
• Politics, Philosophy, Economics, and Law (PPEL)
• War, Statecraft, and Strategy
• American Government, History, Literature, and Law

The Hamilton Center is now widely recognized as one of the world’s preeminent academic programs devoted to the study of Western civilization and American civic life, and it is now leading a network of similar programs at other major universities across North America.