Alan Charles Kors teaches European intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair. He is Senior Fellow at both the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Goldwater Institute. Dr. Kors has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. He was editor-in-chief of the four volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment and served on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Dr. Kors has been elected four times by his colleagues to the University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility. He has received several awards for distinguished college teaching and served on the National Council for the Humanities from 1992 to 1998. In 2005, he was presented a National Humanities Medal for his contributions to scholarship in the humanities and his defense of freedom of expression and conscience on campus. In 2008, the American Conservative Union honored Dr. Kors with the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award.
Since the early 1980’s, Dr. Kors has been writing and lecturing widely on the absence of tolerance and intellectual diversity in academic life. His courageous defense of a student charged with racism in the infamous 1993 “water buffalo” case focused national attention on the limitations upon free speech in higher education. Dr. Kors is co-author of the 1998 landmark book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on American Campuses and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board he continues to serve as Chairman Emeritus.
Dr. Kors received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
