Junior Josiah Lippincott and senior Ashley Wright submitted essays to the Douglas B. Rogers Conditions of a Free Society Essay Contest and received second place and honorable mention respectively.
St. Vincent College’s Center for Political and Economic Thought held its third annual competition. Lippincott’s essay entitled “The Death of the Separation of Powers and the Rise of the Administrative State: A Critical Analysis of Congress’ Role” is featured on the center’s website. He also received $1,000. Wright, who won third place in the contest last year, had her name published on the webpage as well. Henry Thompson from Clemson University won first place.
“I was not planning on applying this year, but a friend mentioned it kind of out of the blue, and I was wondering if I should apply,” Lippincott said. “I looked at the topic, and I realized that was something I actually could do. I saw the headline saying, ‘Congratulations,’ and I remember being amazed. The $1,000 I won, I’m using that to pay down taxes I owe.
On April 15, the Conditions of a Free Society money, written on the topic of administrative state, is going to go to the IRS to pay for the administrative state. It’s that point of irony that’s especially delicious to me.”
The essays were required to be at least 2,500 words in length and focus on the themes James Madison mentioned in Federalist 47 when he wrote, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
“With the competition, we hope to encourage undergraduate students to join the Center for Political and Economic Thought at Saint Vincent College in discussing the important themes of Western Civilization — individual freedom, limited constitutional government, free market economics, and the philosophical and moral foundations of America and the West,” St. Vincent College Program Manager Mary Beth McConahey said.
Both writers heavily used what they’ve learned from classes they’ve taken in the past. Lippincott said he drew from Associate Professor of Politics Kevin Portteus’s American Congress class.
“It was on the separation of powers,” Lippincott said. “I couldn’t have written it without taking Dr. Portteus’s Congress class. In my essay, I showed how the act of delegation fed the administrative state, which in turn fed the Congress’s willingness to delegate more powers. This is a subject of huge importance to republican government, but something fairly unknown.”
Wright, an economics major, found interest in the competition last year because it was more economically focused, but applied again because of the class she took on Winston Churchill last semester with President Larry Arnn.
“We talked about tyranny and liberty and how the Constitution protects liberties and is kind of a shield for the common man,” Wright said. “I took some of the ideas we talked about in that class and wrote them up, like where Aristotle talks about the definition of what a dictator was in ancient Rome. Then, I used a lot from an essay Churchill wrote called ‘What Good Is a Constitution?’”
Wright said the year before she first applied, another Hillsdale student received honorable mention, and the college was the only institution to have two students recognized in the contest.
“The kind of research we do is not critical analysis, but it’s addressing really pressing topics in our current environment,” Lippincott said. “It demonstrates the rigor Hillsdale enforces. It says something really good about the quality of thought and critical analysis that goes into the courses.”
