UF President Ben Sasse announced a close friend and former Senate campaign donor as the new director for the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, a civics center established by the Legislature in 2022 that received $30 million in new funds to support teaching and research about Western culture.
William Inboden, executive director of the Clements Center for National Security at University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in “American presidency, the Cold War, grand strategy, history and statecraft,” according to a news release, will lead the center beginning Aug. 1.
Inboden is the author of four books on foreign policy. His most recent publication was “The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink.” He has written about how both President Joe Biden and the Republican Party should look to Reagan as an example in foreign policy. The New York Times reported in March that Inboden met with Gov. Ron DeSantis to discuss the war in Ukraine.
He also has a long history in conservative politics and national security. He is credited as one of the original visionaries of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which established the Office of International Religious Freedom to “assist other governments in the promotion of the fundamental right to freedom of religion.”
Inboden has shared a nearly three-decade-long friendship with Sasse. He told the Niskanen Center in April 2023 Sasse is one of his closest friends. The two met as undergraduate students in the early 1990s and studied together at Yale University in the early 2000s. Inboden recollected Sasse sketching out his ideas on cocktail napkins at New Haven dive bars as exemplary of his academic rigor.
“Even among Yale Ph.D. students, Ben was still a cut above,” he told Mother Jones in 2016.
Their relationship became political when Sasse entered the U.S. Senate. Inboden has donated a combined $7,750 to Sasse’s Senate campaign and wrote in Sasse's name on the 2016 presidential ballot. Two years later, he wrote an article in Foreign Policy praising Sasse’s proposal for the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan commission tasked with preventing cyber attacks on which Sasse served as a commissioner.
Inboden will earn $360,000 a year in his role at the Hamilton Center, according to UF spokesperson Cynthia Roldan. The university did not answer questions about how Inboden was selected for the role or if other candidates were considered.
Inboden did not respond immediately for comment.
In the news release, Sasse thanked John Stinneford, the center's inaugural director, who will remain at the center as a senior fellow and will return to teaching at the Levin College of Law.
“The Hamilton Center is an important part of UF’s interdisciplinary commitment to rigorous scholarship, to excellent teaching, and to intellectual diversity,” Sasse wrote. “The Hamilton Center is uniquely positioned with Dr. Inboden at the helm.”
The Hamilton Center was founded in 2022 with a $3 million infusion of state funds, after an outside entity with ties to conservative think tanks lobbied for its creation. The center has since hired faculty and developed a public lecture series, fellowship program and courses on topics like Dante's "Purgatorio" and happiness and wellbeing.
State Bill 266, a sweeping set of education reforms signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, designates the Hamilton Center as a civic institute alongside similar centers at Florida State University and Florida International University. Under state mandate, the center must “educate university students in core texts and great debates of Western civilization and the Great Books” and develop curriculum on civil discourse.
The center's goal is to become a college that enrolls students, and it has received $30 million in funding from the Legislature, with annual updates on its progress starting 2025.
“The mission of the Hamilton Center — of research and teaching on the knowledge, skills, and values that undergird a free society — could not be more vital in our present moment,” Inboden wrote. “It is my goal for the Hamilton Center to become a helpful resource for all Gator students and faculty, and a valued addition to one of the most diverse and dynamic universities in the nation.”
Contact Garrett at gshanley@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter @garrettshanley.
Garrett Shanley is a fourth-year journalism major and the Summer 2024 university editor for The Alligator. Outside of the newsroom, you can find him watching Wong Kar-Wai movies and talking to his house plants.
