CSLD Leadership
Directors
Donald Downs
Donald A. Downs is a professor of political science, with affiliate professorships in law and journalism. His books include Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment and The New Politics of Pornography. More than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law; Cornell `69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University; and the recently released Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. He has also published several articles dealing with law, politics, theory, and academic freedom. He has been involved in scholarship and politics concerning academic freedom and other issues, and has been a leader of the free speech and academic freedom movement at Wisconsin.
dadowns@wisc.edu
Lester Hunt
Lester H. Hunt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has also taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, and The Johns Hopkins University. He has written extensively on ethics and political philosophy, and is the author of Nietzsche and the Origins of Virtue (1990) and Character and Culture (1998). He is currently working on a book on anarchy and the justification of the state.
lhhunt@wisc.edu
Daniel Hausman
Daniel M. Hausman is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of philosophy at Wisconsin. Hausman's research focuses on ethical, epistemological, and foundational issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy, and on related questions concerning causation and health measurement. His main work on economic methodology is his The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (Cambridge, 1992). His recent publications include Causal Asymmetries (Cambridge, 1998) and Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy (with Michael S. McPherson, Cambridge, 2006).
dhausman@wisc.edu
Jeremy Suri
Jeremy Suri is professor of history at Wisconsin. His research interests are international history, politics, social movements, and globalization. Suri’s work examines the interactions among states, peoples, and cultures -- especially in the twentieth century. He is interested in the decisions of leaders and institutions, as well as the influence of ideas and social movements. He strives to "globalize" our understanding of relations among societies and America's often contested place in the world. In addition to many articles, his books include: Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Harvard University Press, 2007); The Global Revolutions of 1968 (W.W. Norton, 2006); and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Harvard University Press, 2003). Suri has won the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and has won numerous honors for his research, including the 2003 Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award. Last year the Smithsonian Institution named him one of the 36 leading young scholars in all fields in the United States.
suri@wisc.edu
Diana Hess
In addition to her work at UW-Madison, Professor Hess also develops and teaches professional development programs for teachers, school administrators, and lawyers in the US and other nations. For ten years she was the co-director of the US Supreme Court Institute in Washington, DC—a program that teaches high school teachers about the Court and its cases. Hess collaborated with the State Bar of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Supreme Court to create “From the Courtroom to the Classroom”-- a similar program in Wisconsin that focuses on Wisconsin courts and is taught each spring to teachers from across the state. Hess serves on the law-related education committee of the State Bar of Wisconsin, the board of the Virginia civic education program, the governance committee of the American Educational Research Association and the writing committee of the NAEP national civic examination. She is also on the editorial board of a number of prominent research journals and has a regular column in Social Education, the major practitioner journal in the field of social studies. Professor Hess earned her doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle. Before graduate school, she was the associate director of a major national civic education organization—the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago—and a high school teacher and teacher union president in Downers Grove, Illinois.
hess@wisc.edu
Howard Schweber
Howard Schweber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and an affiliate member of the faculties in the Law School, the Legal Studies Program, Integrated Liberal Studies, and WISCAPE. He teaches classes in a variety of subjects relating to law, constitutionalism, and political theory, for which he was the recipient of the 2006 William H. Kiekhoffer Award for Distinguished Teaching, having previously won the Steven and Margery Russell Award for Outstanding Teaching at Cornell University in 1999. Schweber is the author of The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism (Cambridge 2007), The Creation of American Common Law, 1850-1880 (Cambridge, 2004), and Speech, Conduct and the First Amendment (Peter Lang 2003). His current work focuses on liberalism, citizenship, and questions of constitutional theory from a comparative perspective. Prof. Schweber is a member of the editorial board of the American Political Science Review; he is also the past coach of the UW-Madison College Mock Trial Team, makes regular appearances on Wisconsin public radio and television stations, and recently appeared in the 2008 University of Wisconsin Latke-Hammentaschen Debate.
schweber@polisci.wisc.edu
Simone Schweber
Simone Schweber is the Goodman Professor of Education and Jewish Studies. She studies teaching and learning about genocide, specifically as they relate to the promotion of a healthy, pluralistic, liberal democratic society. She is author of the books, Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice (Teachers College Press, 2004) and Teaching the Holocaust (with Debbie Findling, 2007).
sschweber@wisc.edu
John Witte
John Witte received his BA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968. Following three years as a naval intelligence officer he attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received a Masters of Philosophy (1974) and a Ph.D. (1978) in political science. Since 1977 he has been a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He was Director of the Follette School from 1998 to 2001. He has been a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He has been a visiting professor in Hungary, Poland, England, Australia and New Zealand. His research interests include education and tax policy and politics. He has written six books and over 60 articles or book chapters. His work on taxation is primarily on the federal income tax, but also on local tax and finance issues, including the property tax. His education research has focused on educational choice. A book on educational vouchers, entitled: Princeton University Press published The Market Approach to Education in 2001. His current research, supported by the U.S. Department of Education, and numerous foundations, is on charter schools and a new longitudinal study of the Milwaukee voucher program is slated to go through 2011.
witte@lafollette.wisc.edu
Harry Brighouse
Harry Brighouse is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has diverse interests, including but not limited to: the theoretical foundations of liberalism; the place of democracy in liberal theory; the aims of education; what constitutes a good childhood; the place of the family in a theory of justice; education reform, especially as it concerns choice and privatization. He has worked on a number of school reform ideas such as school choice, democratic schools, and small schools, in the light of an egalitarian theory of educational justice. This project is being faciliated in part by a generous scholarship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
His most recent work entails analyzing the place of the family in egalitarian liberalism, leading to a book with Adam Swift called Family Values. His other books are School Choice and Social Justice, ,Justice, On Education and, edited with Gillian Brock, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Brighouse is also co-editor, with Randall Curren and Mitja Sardoc, of Theory and Research in Education. Brighouse has also published essays on American education policy for the Times Educational Supplement and other journals and magazines.
