Alan Charles Kors
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Alan Charles Kors is an intellectual historian, specializing in French intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair in History at the University of Pennsylvania.
A self-described classical liberal, he is known for his outspoken views on a number of subjects. Kors has frequently advocated the end of academic speech codes and has called for color-blind admissions at public universities. At the University of Pennsylvania, he has won three awards for distinguished college teaching, and he has received numerous national awards for the defense of academic freedom. He signed an amicus brief by Academics for the Second Amendment, defending the right to bear arms.
Kors has also been active in the defense of academic freedom since his arrival at Penn. In the 1993 "water buffalo incident," he defended Eden Jacobowitz against charges that he racially harassed a group of black sorority sisters. In the very early morning hours, the sorority was celebrating loudly just outside the dorms. Multiple students had yelled from their windows, in various ways, for the sorority to cease. When the police later came to question students, Jacobowitz freely admitted that he yelled, "Shut up, you water buffalo." The sorority members eventually dropped the charges.
Kors co-founded---with civil libertarian Harvey A. Silverglate---and served from 2000-2006 as the chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is a frequent contributor to Reason magazine.
In 1992 President George Herbert Walker Bush named him to Council of the National Endowment of the Humanities. He was confirmed by the United States Senate and served on the committee for six years.
In 2005 President George W. Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal for his "scholarship, devotion to the Humanities, and...defense of academic freedom."
He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and he has served on the boards of several scholarly organizations, including The Historical Society and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Books
- The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses by Alan Charles Kors (Author), Harvey A. Silverglate (Author) ISBN 0060977728 (1999)
- Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History (Middle Ages Series) by Alan Charles Kors (Editor), Edward Peters (Editor) ISBN 0812217519
- Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (4 vol. set) by Alan Charles Kors (Editor) ISBN 0195104331 (2002)
- Atheism in France, 1650-1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief by Alan Charles Kors (Author) ISBN 0691055750 (1990)
- D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris by Alan Charles Kors (Author) ISBN 0691052247 (1976)
External links
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