Past Winners

Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. was unanimously selected by the Purdue Board of Trustees on Thursday, June 21, 2012, to be the university's 12th president. Daniels assumed that role in January 2013, at the conclusion of his term as Governor of the State of Indiana.

He was elected as the 49th governor of Indiana in 2004, in his first bid for any elected office. He was re-elected in 2008 to a second and final term, receiving more votes than any candidate for any public office in the state's history.

President Daniels came from a successful career in business and government, holding numerous top management positions in both the private and public sectors. His work as CEO of the Hudson Institute and President of Eli Lilly and Company's North American Pharmaceutical Operations taught him the business skills he brought to state government. He also served as Chief of Staff to Senator Richard Lugar, Senior Advisor to President Ronald Reagan and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush.

Daniels' first legislative success created the public-private Indiana Economic Development Corporation to replace a failing state bureaucracy in the mission of attracting new jobs. In its first four years of existence, the agency broke all previous records for new jobs in the state and was associated with more than $18 billion of new investment. In 2008, Site Selection Magazine and CNBC both named Indiana as the Most Improved State for Business in the country. In 2012, Indiana became the 23rd Right-to-Work state. Indiana is now near the top of every national ranking of business attractiveness and is the top job-creating state in the nation.

On his first day in office, Governor Daniels created the first Office of Management and Budget to look for efficiencies and cost savings across state government. In 2005, he led the state to its first balanced budget in eight years and, without a tax increase, transformed the nearly $800 million deficit he inherited into an annual surplus of $370 million within a year. The governor also repaid hundreds of millions of dollars the state had borrowed from Indiana's public schools, state universities and local units of government in previous administrations, and reduced the state's overall debt by 40 percent. The second biennial budget replicated this fiscal discipline and built reserves equal to 10 percent of annual spending. Today Indiana has a AAA credit rating (the first in state history) and the fewest state employees per capita in the U.S.

During his first term, Governor Daniels spearheaded a host of reforms aimed at improving the performance of state government. These changes and a strong emphasis on performance measurement have led to many state agencies, including the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Department of Child Services and Department of Correction winning national awards. Governor Daniels' innovations include the 2006 lease of the Indiana Toll Road. This is the largest privatization of public infrastructure in the United States and generated nearly $4 billion for Major Moves, the state's record-breaking 10-year transportation and infrastructure program. The Healthy Indiana Plan was enacted in 2007 to provide healthcare coverage for uninsured Hoosier adults, and comprehensive property tax reforms in 2008 resulted in the biggest tax cut in Indiana history. Today Indiana has the lowest property taxes in the nation. Both initiatives received overwhelming bipartisan support.

In 2011, under his guidance, Indiana passed the most sweeping education reforms in the country. Because of these reforms, Indiana is dramatically expanding charter schools, providing parents with more school choice, revising teacher evaluations and expanding full-day kindergarten funding. In 2010, he established WGU Indiana, a partnership between the state and Western Governors University aimed at expanding access to higher education for Hoosiers and increasing the percentage of the state's adult population with education beyond high school.

Many organizations have recognized the governor's leadership. In October 2010, Daniels received The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's inaugural Medal for Distinguished Service to Education for his efforts to reform education. In January 2011, the governor was one of three recipients selected to receive the first-ever Fiscy Award, presented for leadership and commitment to responsible financial stewardship by the non-partisan Fiscy Awards Committee. Daniels also received the "2011 Friend of the Family Award" from the Indiana Family Institute, which recognized him for his strong record of pro-family, pro-life and pro-faith actions taken as Indiana's chief executive. In May 2012, the Manhattan Institute presented the governor with its Alexander Hamilton Award for his achievements in state government; including healthcare improvements, landmark education reforms and fiscal responsibility. The governor's conservation efforts have set aside record acreages of protected wetlands and wildlife habitats. In March 2011, Daniels was a recipient of the Wetland Conservation Achievement Award from the national conservation organization, Ducks Unlimited, for "making land conservation a top priority and for preserving thousands of invaluable acres across the state for future generations." In January 2012, he received the Chancellor Award for Conservation and Wildlife Protection from the Weatherby Foundation and in March 2012, he also was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Award from the Indiana Wildlife Federation. His efforts earned him the nickname "The Teddy Roosevelt of Indiana" by the Nature Conservancy.

Daniels received the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University in February 2013. The award recognizes an alumnus whose career embodies the call to duty in Wilson's famous speech, "Princeton in the Nation's Service." The award was presented during Alumni Day activities on February 23, 2013.

In February 2013, Daniels was asked to co-chair a National Research Council committee to review and make recommendations on the future of the U.S. human spaceflight program. The appointment to the Committee on Human Spaceflight runs through June 30, 2014. In March 2013, Daniels was elected to the board of Energy Systems Network (ESN), Indiana’s industry-driven clean technology initiative.

Daniels, who is also the author of the best-selling book "Keeping the Republic: Saving America by Trusting Americans," earned a bachelor's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1971, and his law degree from Georgetown University in 1979.

Governor Daniels and his wife Cheri have four daughters: Meagan, Melissa, Meredith and Maggie.

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Yuval Levin is the founding editor of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of public policy and political thought. He is also the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he writes widely on a range of domestic-policy issues, politics, culture, science, technology, and political philosophy.

Levin has served as a member of the White House domestic-policy staff (under President George W. Bush) working especially on health care and related issues. He was executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics—the body charged with advising the nation on the moral and policy implications of advances in biotechnology—and has served as a congressional staffer.

Levin is a senior editor of The New Atlantis magazine and a contributing editor to National Review and The Weekly Standard. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Commentary, First Things, Time, Newsweek, and others.

His work, and the work of National Affairs, focuses on the intersection of public policy and political thought, and especially on the ways in which a revival of the principles of the American political tradition could contribute to addressing today’s most pressing national challenges.

Levin is the author, most recently, of Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy, a study of the social and political implications of the science debates of the last decade. His forthcoming book, a study of the origins of our political order titled The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, will be published in December. He was the editor (with Christopher DeMuth) of Religion and the American Future and (with Meghan Clyne) of A Time for Governing.

He holds a B.A. in political science from American University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

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Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington DC, and is Senior Adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) in Seattle, WA. He is currently, inter alia, a Commissioner on the US Key National Indicators Commission, a member of the Global Agenda Council for the World Economic Forum and a member of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health.

Mr. Eberstadt regularly consults for governmental and international organizations, including such institutions as the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, USAID, and World Bank, and has often been invited to offer expert testimony before Congress.

Mr. Eberstadt has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His roughly 20 books and monographs include Poverty in China (1979), Foreign Aid and American Purpose (1988), The Tyranny of Numbers (1995), Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge (2007), Russia's Peacetime Demographic Crisis (2010), and, most recently, Policy and Economic Performance in Divided Korea During the Cold War Era.

Mr. Eberstadt earned his A.B., M.P.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and his M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. He is married to Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution; they and their four children live in Washington, DC.

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Dr. Edwin J. Feulner has served as the President of The Heritage Foundation since 1977. He was a founding Trustee of Heritage in 1973.

As a result of Ed’s vision and leadership, The Heritage Foundation has grown from a nine-person policy shop in rented office space to what the New York Times has called “the beast of [all think tanks], the almost mythical Heritage Foundation…the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.” Having guided Washington’s premier think tank through more than three decades of national influence, Dr. Feulner is widely credited with establishing The Heritage Foundation as the most dynamic and far-reaching public policy research organization in the world.

Presidents, Vice Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Ambassadors and other public figures have worked directly with Ed Feulner and The Heritage Foundation to implement effective public policies based on the principles articulated in Heritage’s mission statement: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

Dr. Feulner began his career as a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and went on to serve as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Chief of Staff to Representative Phil Crane, and founding director of the Republican Study Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He advised President Ronald Reagan on domestic policy issues. As the Chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on three occasions.

In 1989, President Reagan honored Dr. Feulner by awarding him the Presidential Citizens Medal for his work as “a leader of the conservative movement.”

Dr. Feulner recently has been named one of the “Seven Most Powerful Conservatives in Washington” by Forbes magazine. He has also been featured on Fox News Sunday as the program’s “Power Player of the Week.” The Daily Telegraph in London named Dr. Feulner one of the “100 Most Influential American Conservatives,” and GQ magazine included him in its list of the “50 Most Powerful People in D.C.” He was included in the Washingtonian’s list of the “45 Who Shaped Washington,” over the magazine’s 45-year history.

He has served as the Chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and President of The Mont Pelerin Society and The Philadelphia Society, of which he is a Distinguished Member. He is the Chairman of the Board of Visitors at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.

A syndicated columnist in dozens of newspapers across the country, Dr. Feulner is the author of many books, including Intellectual Pilgrims, Conservatives Stalk the House, Leadership for America, The March of Freedom, Getting America Right and, most recently, The American Spirit.

He has received honorary degrees from a number of colleges and universities. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, pursued further graduate studies at the London School of Economics and Georgetown University, and received his B.S. from Regis University.

He has been married for 43 years to Linda Leventhal Feulner. Ed and Linda are long-time members of St. Mary’s (Catholic) Parish in Alexandria, Virginia. He is a Knight of Malta and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. The couple has two children and three grandchildren.

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Edwin Meese III holds the Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based public policy research and education institution. He is also the Chairman of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California. In addition, Mr. Meese lectures, writes, and consults throughout the United States on a variety of subjects.

Mr. Meese served on the Iraq Study Group and the National War Powers Commission. He is a member of the Critical Incident Analysis Group, an international, interdisciplinary body established to examine and develop lessons learned concerning major threats to public safety and national security. He is also a participant in the Homeland Security Project of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

From 1998 to 2004 Mr. Meese was chairman of the governing board of George Mason University. He currently is a board member of numerous civic, legal, and educational organizations, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Federalist Society, Capital Research Center, Landmark Legal Foundation, Lutheran Family Services of Virginia, and the Trinity Forum. He was also elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Mr. Meese is the author of With Reagan: The Inside Story, which was published by Regnery Gateway in June 1992; co-editor of Making America Safer, published in 1997 by The Heritage Foundation; and co-author of Leadership, Ethics and Policing, published by Prentice Hall in 2004.

As the 75th Attorney General of the United States, the Nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer (February 1985 to August 1988), he directed the Department of Justice and led international efforts to combat terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime. In 1985, he received the Government Executive magazine’s annual award for excellence in management.

From January 1981 to February 1985, Mr. Meese held the position of Counselor to the President, the senior position on the White House Staff, where he functioned as the President’s Chief policy advisor.

As Attorney General and as Counselor, Mr. Meese was a member of the President’s Cabinet and the National Security Council. He served as Chairman of the Domestic Policy Council and of the National Drug Policy Board.

Mr. Meese headed the President-elect’s transition effort following the November 1980 election. During the Presidential campaign, he served as Chief of Staff and Senior Issues Advisor for the Reagan-Bush Committee.

Formerly, Mr. Meese served as Governor Reagan’s Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff in California from 1969 through 1974 and as Legal Affairs Secretary from 1967 through 1968. Before joining Governor Reagan’s staff in 1967, Mr. Meese served as Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County, California.

From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Meese was a professor of Law at the University of San Diego, where he also was Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management.

Mr. Meese is a graduate of Yale University, Class of 1953, and holds a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a retired Colonel in the United States Army Reserve.

Mr. Meese is married, has two grown children and resides in McLean, Virginia.

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William H. (Chip) Mellor serves as President and General Counsel of the Institute for Justice, which he co-founded in 1991. He litigates cutting-edge constitutional cases nationwide protecting economic liberty, property rights, school choice, and the First Amendment. IJ is headquartered in Arlington, Va., and has offices in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington state. IJ pursues strategic public interest litigation that combines courtroom advocacy with award-winning media relations, activism, and strategic research to secure constitutional protection for individual rights.

Under Mellor’s leadership, the Institute for Justice has litigated five U.S. Supreme Court cases, winning all but one: In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Institute for Justice successfully defended Cleveland’s school choice program from a lawsuit brought by the teachers’ unions and other school choice opponents to establish the constitutionality of school vouchers. In Granholm v. Heald, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s ban on interstate wine sales, allowing small wineries and consumers represented by IJ to successfully challenge a government-imposed wholesale wine and liquor monopoly. In Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court ruled against the Institute in a controversial 5-4 decision that held private property can be taken for private development. IJ mobilized unprecedented public outrage over the decision to secure legislative reforms or state supreme court decisions in 46 states that strengthened protection for property rights. In Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, the Supreme Court dismissed an Establishment Clause challenge to Arizona’s scholarship tax credit program because the Court recognized that individuals who donate to private, nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations spend their own money—not state funds. The Institute’s latest high court victory came in June 2011 in Arizona Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, where the Court struck down a key provision of Arizona’s system of government-funded campaigns, which showered money on campaigns that took government funding when privately financed and independent speakers opposing them spoke more than the government wanted.

Mellor co-authored with the Cato Institute’s Bob Levy The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom, which examines 12 Supreme Court cases that effectively amended the Constitution and profoundly reshaped the role of government in America. In The Dirty Dozen, Mellor and Levy argue for judicial engagement and for a Supreme Court that will enforce what the Constitution actually says about civil liberties, property rights, and many other controversial issues.

Mellor personally litigated lawsuits that broke open Denver’s 50-year-old taxi monopoly and ended the funeral industry’s monopoly on casket sales in Tennessee, achieving the first federal appellate court victory for economic liberty under the 14th Amendment since the New Deal. He launched the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago in 1998 and IJ’s Center for Judicial Engagement in 2011.

Mellor’s regular “Constitutional Crossroads” column is carried on Forbes.com. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, New York Post, National Law Journal, Reason, National Review, Investor’s Business Daily, and all the major television and radio networks. In his Fox Business show Stossel, John Stossel named Mellor a “Champion of Freedom” in a 2012 broadcast.

Prior to founding IJ, Mellor served as president of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a nationally recognized “think tank” located in San Francisco. Under his leadership, the Institute commissioned and published path-breaking books on civil rights, property rights, and technology and the First Amendment that formed the Institute for Justice’s long-term, strategic litigation blueprint.

Mellor also served in the Reagan Administration as Deputy General Counsel for Legislation and Regulations in the Department of Energy, and from 1979 to 1983, he practiced public interest law with Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver. Mellor received his J.D. from the University of Denver School of Law in 1977. He graduated from Ohio State University in 1973.

Mellor sits on the board of directors for the Property and Environment Research Center, Donors Capital Fund, and the Kern Family.

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Jeb Bush was elected the 43rd governor of the state of Florida in 1998 and re-elected in 2002. His second term as governor ended in January, 2007. He is Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors, and President of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization dedicated to improving educational quality. Governor Bush is also president of the consulting business Jeb Bush and Associates.

In 1987 and 1988, Governor Bush served as Secretary of Commerce under Florida’s 40th governor, Bob Martinez. In 1995, he founded the policy group Foundation for Florida’s Future which, with the Greater Miami Urban League established the state’s first charter school, Liberty City Charter School, in one of the most underserved parts of Miami-Dade County. Governor Bush also co-authored Profiles in Character (1996), a book recounting the stories of fourteen of Florida’s quiet civic heroes.

During his two terms as Florida’s executive, Governor Bush championed major reform of elementary and secondary education. He raised academic standards, required public school accountability, and created a school choice program. In addition, Governor Bush also cut taxes every year of his tenure in office and signed legislation advancing consumer-driven healthcare reform.

In 2010, Governor Bush partnered with former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise to create the Digital Learning Council. Under their leadership, the Council has developed a blueprint for local, state, and federal officials to integrate high-quality digital learning into education.

Governor Bush earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the son of President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush.

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Richard Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He is also Senior Lecturer and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Epstein served as Interim Dean of Chicago’s Law School during 2001.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 1972, Professor Epstein taught law at the University of Southern California. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and Senior Fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Legal Studies at the University of Chicago Medical School since 1983. From 1981 to 1991, Professor Epstein served as editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and, from 1991 to 2001, of the Journal of Law and Economics. In 2005, Legal Affairs magazine named him one of the twenty leading legal thinkers in the United States.

Professor Epstein is known for his scholarship in a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects. Among the courses he has taught are communications law, constitutional law, contracts, corporations, criminal law, employment discrimination law, health law, jurisprudence, labor law, patents, property, torts, Roman law, real estate development and finance, and individual and corporate taxation. His writings have appeared in professional, policy, and popular publications. In addition, Professor Epstein is the author of a number of books, including Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (1985); Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995); Torts (1999); and Skepticism and Freedom: a Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003). He is also the editor of Cases and Materials in the Law of Torts (8th ed. 2004).

Professor Epstein received B.A. degrees at both Columbia College and Oxford University and an LL.B. degree at Yale Law School.

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Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government, Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He is also the Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

A student and teacher of political philosophy, Professor Mansfield has written on Edmund Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, in defense of a defensible liberalism, and in favor of a constitutional American political science. He has also written on the discovery and development of the theory of executive power. Professor Mansfield has translated Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and three books by Machiavelli.

Professor Mansfield has held Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Humanities Center Fellowships. From 1973 to 1977, he served as Chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Government. Professor Mansfield served as president of the New England Political Science Association from 1993 to 1994, and he received the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Award and the Sidney Hook Memorial Award from the National Association of Scholars. In 2004, he received the National Humanities Medal, and in 2007, he delivered the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Widely respected for the range and depth of his scholarship, Professor Mansfield is the author of numerous books, including Taming the Prince (1989), America’s Constitutional Soul (1991), Manliness (2006), and Alexis de Tocqueville (2010). His commentaries, book reviews, and essays on contemporary political issues and academic affairs have appeared in the popular press and national opinion journals.

Professor Mansfield received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees for Harvard University.

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Allan H. Meltzer is the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Since 1989, he has also been a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Professor Meltzer has served as a consultant to the U.S. Treasury Department, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the World Bank, foreign governments, and central banks. He has been a member of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board and the President’s Council of Economic Advisor. From 1973 to 1999, Professor Meltzer chaired the Shadow Open Market Committee. From 1999 to 2000, he chaired the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, known as the Meltzer Commission, which proposed major reforms of the International Monetary Fund and development banks.

Professor Meltzer’s writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the business press here and abroad. He is the author of several books, most recently the authoritative two-volume A History of the Federal Reserve, and more than 300 papers on economic theory and policy. From 1973 to 1996, Professor Meltzer was co-editor of the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Journal of Finance.

Professor Meltzer is a past president of the Western Economic Association, Fellow of the National Association of Business Economists, and a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2003, he received the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute and the Adam Smith Award of the National Association of Business Economics. In 2009, the International Mensa Foundation presented its Distinguished Teacher Award to Professor Meltzer.

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