Constitution Day Conference 2025
Story and photos by Hank McIntire
The Center for Constitutional Studies (CCS) held parts 1 and 2 of its annual Constitution Day conference Sept. 10 and 17, 2025, on UVU campus.
Part three of the conference will be held Monday, Nov. 17, 2025, beginning at 10 a.m. in SB 134 on UVU campus.*
The theme of the conference is American Cincinnatus: George Washington’s Constitutional Legacy.
Part 3 Conference Schedule | Monday, Nov. 17, 2025 | SB 134
- Session 4 | Lecture by Sai Prakash | The True Father of the Constitution: George Washington as the Indispensable Man
- Session 5 | Discussion with Nathaniel Philbrick | Washington's Leadership during the Revolutionary War
Presenters
- Sai Prakash | His scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and Presidential Powers at the Law School. Prakash’s most recent book,The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers, was published by Harvard Belknap Press in 2020. He also authored Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive (Yale University Press, 2015). The former book focuses on the modern presidency while the latter considers the presidency of the Founders.
- Nathaniel Philbrick | He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., and earned a BA in English from Brown University and an MA in America Literature from Duke University, where he was a James B. Duke Fellow. He was Brown University’s first Intercollegiate All-American sailor in 1978, the same year he won the Sunfish North Americans in Barrington, Rhode Island. After working as an editor at Sailing World magazine, he wrote and edited several books about sailing, including The Passionate Sailor, Second Wind, and Yaahting: A Parody. In 2000, Philbrick published the New York Times bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The book is the basis of the Warner Bros. motion picture Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard. The book also inspired a 2001 Dateline special on NBC as well as the 2010 two-hour PBS American Experience film Into the Deep by Ric Burns.
The Sept. 10 session (Part 1) examined Washington’s time as commander in chief of the Continental Army. More than 100 Junior ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) cadets from high schools throughout Utah attended the lecture by Kevin Weddle in the Science Building auditorium.
“Like the greatest of statesmen, George Washington proved capable both of defending his country in war and of governing it in peace,” said Matthew Brogdon, senior director of CCS, in welcoming attendees to the conference. “He exhibited the virtues of courage, civic charity, temperance, justice, and wisdom.”
Guest speaker Kevin Weddle, military historian and former chair of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College, focused his remarks on Washington’s development as commander in chief during 1777, a period of the most active military campaigning of any stretch during the Revolutionary War.
“Being a commander in chief like Washington was very, very rare,” explained Weddle. “Very few military leaders who held even the highest commands were also dual-hatted as commanders of their nation’s principal field army. Only Ulysses S. Grant held a similar position, which he held for a little over a year, while Washington was commander in chief for the entire eight years of the American Revolution.”
“The year 1777 was a year of crushing lows and joyous highs, yet Washington weathered it all and came away a more confident and more competent commander in chief,” Weddle continued. “He was far from perfect, but he learned lessons and applied them and continued to improve and adapt. And through it all he developed a reservoir of trust with Congress that gave him breathing room to make mistakes and bounce back.”
Sessions 2 on Sept. 17 (Part 2) consisted of a panel discussion led by Nicholas Cole, director of the Quill Project and history professor at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and Carson Holloway, professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska–Omaha.
The topic of conversation was Washington's statesmanship during the framing of the U.S. Constitution and the creation of the presidency.
“Regarding Washington’s role in the creation of the Constitution, he is almost entirely absent from the record of the Convention,” observed Cole. “However, both those who supported the idea of a new Constitution for America—and those who opposed it—thought that Washington’s support and his involvement in its drafting was critical to its passage.”
“Washington was concerned with the dignity of the nation,” added Holloway. “He was famous among those who knew him well for the care and caution with which he approached any decision he had to make. He thought about this very carefully in his contributions to the establishment of the Constitution.”
In Session 3 on Sept. 17 (Part 2), Holly Megson, of Pembroke College, University of Oxford, spoke on Thomas Jefferson’s role in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.
“In his own design of his tombstone, Jefferson declared himself the author of the Declaration of Independence,” said Megson. “A more appropriate epitaph might be that of draftsman. It was by no means a one-man endeavor.”
“Several of the influences that informed much of Jefferson’s work were the Declaration were the British Declaration of Rights from the 1600s, Jefferson’s own draft of the Virginia Constitution, and George Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights. It was all language that Jefferson drew from. There were very clear ancestors to the Declaration.”
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*Part 3 of the conference, scheduled for Nov. 17, consists of holding the sessions that were originally scheduled for the afternoon of Sept. 10. These were postponed due to the tragic events that took place that day on UVU campus.
Conference Schedule | Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025 | Part 1
- Session 1 | Kevin Weddle Lecture | SB 134 | Watch video
Conference Schedule | Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025 | Part 2
- Session 2 | Panel Discussion with Nicholas Cole and Carson Holloway | Watch video
- Session 3 | Reonstructing the Authorial Origins of the Declaration of Independence | Holly Megson | Watch video
Conference Schedule | Monday, Nov. 17, 2025 | SB 134 | Part 3
- Session 4 | Lecture by Sai Prakash | How Washington's Presidency Shaped our Modern Understanding of the Constitution
- Session 5 | Discussion with Nathaniel Philbrick | Washington's Leadership during the Revolutionary War
Presenters and Panelists
- Kevin J. Weddle | A distinguished military historian and the former Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He is a native Minnesotan, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and served more than 28 years on active duty in the U.S. Army before retiring as a colonel. His critically acclaimed book The Complete Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), earned six national and international literary awards including the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and the Society of the Cincinnati Prize. He spent the 2024–2025 year as a research fellow at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and has previously been a fellow at Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is completing a book on George Washington development as a military commander, Washington at War: The Making of a Commander in Chief.
- Nicholas Cole | A senior research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and director of the Quill Project (www.quill.pmb.ox.ac.uk). Quill examines how groups of people negotiate some of the most important texts that govern our societies and daily lives: constitutions, treaties, and legislation. The project's flagship work concerns the constitutional history of America, but it also examines British and European topics, such as the peace process in Northern Ireland. Dr. Cole studies American legal history, the development of modern political thought, the reception of the classics in the modern world, and the development of digital techniques and methods that can support humanities research. Before coming to Pembroke, he was a junior research fellow in history at St. Peter's College, and a departmental lecturer in American History for the history faculty. He has also been a visiting Fellow at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia.
- Carson Holloway | A visiting fellow at Utah Valley University and a Washington Fellow at The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. His research focuses on American constitutionalism and the liberal nationalism of the American Founding. He is the Ralph Wardle Diamond Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is co-editor, with Bradford P. Wilson, of the two-volume work The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is also the author of Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration: Completing the Founding or Betraying the Founding? (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His scholarly articles have appeared in the Review of Politics, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and Perspectives on Political Science, and he has written for The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The New Criterion, National Affairs, Law & Liberty, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and National Review.
- Holly Megson | A senior documentary editor with the Quill Project at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. She is responsible for the current U.S. Constitutional projects in collaboration with Utah Valley University. Within this role she coordinates with faculty and student research assistants at UVU, oversees the National Archive grant projects and the upcoming Declaration of Independence project. Prior to joining Quill, she graduated from Pembroke College, University of Oxford, with a BA in History.
- Sai Prakash | His scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and Presidential Powers at the Law School. Prakash’s most recent book,The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers, was published by Harvard Belknap Press in 2020. He also authored Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive (Yale University Press, 2015). The former book focuses on the modern presidency while the latter considers the presidency of the Founders.
- Nathaniel Philbrick | He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., and earned a BA in English from Brown University and an MA in America Literature from Duke University, where he was a James B. Duke Fellow. He was Brown University’s first Intercollegiate All-American sailor in 1978, the same year he won the Sunfish North Americans in Barrington, Rhode Island. After working as an editor at Sailing World magazine, he wrote and edited several books about sailing, including The Passionate Sailor, Second Wind, and Yaahting: A Parody. In 2000, Philbrick published the New York Times bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The book is the basis of the Warner Bros. motion picture Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard. The book also inspired a 2001 Dateline special on NBC as well as the 2010 two-hour PBS American Experience film Into the Deep by Ric Burns.