The Novak Fellowship, an interdisciplinary community of undergraduate scholars, launched its fourth program year on September 6, with its largest cohort to date. Fourteen students from across the university met for the first time to discuss the intersection of politics, economics, and moral culture and how these intertwining systems can be shaped for the common good and human flourishing.
The Fellowship, a program of the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at The Busch School, is the brainchild of Professor Frederic Sautet, Ph.D, and is co-directed with the Ciocca Center’s Operations Director, Rebecca Teti. The centerpiece of the program is reading and discussing the late Ambassador Michael Novak’s prize-winning book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, which is one of the most serious attempts to explain the American system in terms of the human spirit, religion, culture and law, in the Tocquevillian tradition.
“The hope is that the program will expand beyond the reading group to include other special events and activities, and that the Fellowship will become a genuine community of students interested in these fundamental questions,” said Dr. Sautet.
The Fellowship takes its name from the late Ambassador Michael Novak, who ended his storied career as a professor at the Busch School, and whose writing about human liberty and the spirit behind economic systems brought him to the attention of Pope St. John Paul II. (Novak always said of all the honors bestowed upon him —including medals of honor from three formerly Communist nations and being named President Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN for human rights— his highest honor was that Pope John Paul II called him “my friend.”) Novak insisted that the human person was at the center of economic activity, once famously commenting, “Nothing in the entire universe, vast as it is, is as beautiful as the human person.”
“It’s been more than 40 years since The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism was first published,” Rebecca Teti said, “but it poses some of the same questions that are in the air in our current cultural conversations, so we thought it was time to take another look. “ Prof. Sautet adds, “A lot has changed since Novak first wrote, and the Fellows have very different perspectives on his arguments. But we hope they will take up his interdisciplinary approach, and his interest in practical wisdom: do the things we say and the plans we make in the abstract correspond to reality or not?”
For the first time, the Fellowship has a full cohort of 14. They are:
- Jamie Besendorfer, Senior, Business
- Faith Dickerson, Senior, History
- Ethan Donnelly, Senior, Criminology
- Maria Erquiaga, Senior, Engineering
- David Fritz, Junior, Accounting/ Philosophy
- Alex Harvey, Junior, History/ Politics
- Mia Heckler, Senior, Music/ Social Research
- Gavin Lewis, Junio, Business
- Becca Miller, Senior, Social Research
- Tara O’Neill, Senior, Finance/ Accounting
- Adam Pettyjohn, Senior, Engineering
- Mimi Phan, Senior, Business/ Pre-med
- Dean Robbins, Junior, Psychology/ Business
- Scully, Sean, Junior, Philosophy
Funding for the Fellowship is provided by a grant from the Templeton Foundation. Michael Novak was the 1994 Templeton Prize winner.