The Ethics and Public Policy Center announced today that Ryan Anderson will soon take over as its president, replacing its long-time leader Ed Whelan, who will become a senior scholar there working on legal and constitutional issues. This is wonderful news for all involved, and for a great institution.
I have a special place in my heart for EPPC, which was my professional home, and a really wonderful home at that, for more than a decade after I left the Bush Administration. It was Ed Whelan who brought me on, and who, over his 16 years at the helm, built an extraordinary team of scholars and helped the institution punch far above its weight. It was also Ed who came to see in recent years that the time had come to find a successor who had his eye on the future and could build the institution into a home for the rising generation of socially conservative scholars and thinkers.
Ryan Anderson is an ideal choice to do just that. With a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Notre Dame, he is himself a talented scholar who will have a lot to contribute to the key debates now shaping the right and the country. And he has shown himself to possess the mix of courage, fortitude, openness to debate, and commitment to human dignity that it will take to foster and sustain a lively scholarly community that works to elucidate, apply, and protect the core ideals of our society.
We conservatives know the challenges of continuity and renewal, and so always rejoice in seeing a great institution pass from one able set of hands to another. Congratulations to EPPC.