FA C U LT Y H I G H L I G H T S
Beau Breslin stands in front of the preamble for his fictitious 2022 constitution, one of five that he imagines in his new book, “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.” book imagines a different history, “a Jeffersonian world,” where constitutional conventions took place in 1825, 1863, 1903, 1853, and 2022. Though fictional, the conventions are based on actual events — from questions about slavery to debates surrounding women’s suffrage — shaping the public agenda at those times. This fall at Skidmore, Breslin discussed his book with two leading constitutional scholars — Henry L. Chambers Jr. of University of Richmond School of Law and Keith E. Whittington of Princeton University — who offered their own perspectives on the book in a dialogue moderated by Flagg Taylor, associate professor of political science and director of the Periclean Honors Forum. Both offered their own perspectives but also offered praise for Breslin’s unique approach. Whittington, for instance, called it both “deeply learned” and “extremely imaginative.”
WHAT IF … ? As issues ranging from abortion to the future of the Supreme Court raise tough questions about the U.S. Constitution, constitutional scholar Beau Breslin’s new book imagines what might have been if each generation in American history had written its own constitution. Scribner Seminars encourage Skidmore first-year students to engage in critical thinking by exploring engaging and sometimes quirky topics that professors are passionate about. Collaborative research opportunities with faculty, likewise, give students the opportunity to participate directly in the research agenda of faculty. All of that is true, says Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government Beau Breslin, but it’s only part of the story. “The experience of a Scribner Seminar also challenges us — Skidmore faculty — to think outside the box,” said Breslin, who served as director of Skidmore’s First-Year Experience Program before becoming Skidmore’s dean of the faculty from 2011 to 2018. “What I love about the Scribner
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Seminar is the experimentation, breaking down disciplinary boundaries creatively, and crafting new ways of thinking about topics.” Breslin says his most recent book, “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law” (Stanford University Press, 2021), was profoundly shaped by his own experiences with students in his seminar American Liberty: Our Enduring Struggle With Constitutional Rights in 2011, as well as a summer collaborative research project with students. Like a Scribner Seminar, the book takes an imaginative approach to an important issue. Rather than offering a traditional academic monograph, Breslin presents a work
of counterfactual historical fiction that reconsiders a famous debate between Founding Fathers James Madison and Thomas Jefferson about the merits of enduring constitutions. “Madison thought constitutions should last for centuries in order to build up the necessary reverence for them to be authoritative in a country like the U.S. Jefferson disagreed — strongly!” Breslin explains. “Jefferson thought each generation ought to meet in convention and write its own constitution. In fact, he thought it was just another form of tyranny when a people was governed by a constitution written by a group of politicians long dead.” Of course, Madison won the debate, and the U.S. Constitution is now well over two centuries old. Breslin’s
“There really is no model for doing a book like this in much of the academic literature,” said Whittington, a member of President Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. Breslin sees that creative scholarship as an outgrowth of his experience in the classroom. “The idea for this book came from a Scribner Seminar,” explains Breslin, who gives special credit to two students involved in his 2011 seminar: Kate Cavanaugh ’14, who had taken the seminar the year before and was serving as peer mentor for the incoming class, and Ben Polsky ’15, then a first-year student. Polsky, a government and history double major, went on to work for the Atlantic Council and CBS News before earning a master’s degree in international public policy from
