A Testimonial in Honor of Alan Charles Kors, recipient of the 2023 Philip Merrill Award of the ACTA

Delivered October 27, 2023

It was my great pleasure and honor last week to join Robert P. George and Allen Guelzo in delivering tributes to the great Allen Charles Kors, who was awarded the 2023 Philip Merrill Award from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). It was a special evening. I think/hope all of our remarks were recorded, as well as Alan’s powerful acceptance speech. If they were in fact recorded and are made public, I will post them here at The Redneck Intellectual sometime in the weeks or months ahead.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. 

I take as my theme tonight a well-known verse from the Book of Ecclesiasticus: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.”

We are here to celebrate the remarkable career of a remarkable man, our guest-of-honor, Alan Charles Kors. 

I shall leave it to others to tell the story of Alan’s outstanding career as a teacher, as a writer, and as a fighter for a free society.  Instead, I would like to share with you a few thoughts on Alan Kors, the man.

That I should do so is somewhat presumptuous given that I have probably only been in the same room with Alan on no more than half a dozen occasions.

But every now and then you meet someone whose impact on your life is immediate and profound. For me, that person was Alan Charles Kors.

To meet Alan, even just once, is to be forever shaken from one’s dogmatic slumbers.

A Personal Note

I first met Alan Kors 28 years ago when we were lecturing together one summer at Bryn Mawr College in June of 1995.  I was just starting out on my academic career, and Alan was a distinguished senior scholar by then.

The fact is that I did not really want to be there.  My wife had just given birth to our first child only a few weeks before, and I just wanted to be at home with them.

I will never forget that warm summer night when Alan and I sat outside on a picnic table until the wee hours of the morning drinking wine, smoking cigars, and having an intense conversation about life’s most important questions.

What I found most remarkable about Alan that night is that he took the time to talk to me about my new son and the meaning of fatherhood.  I barely knew Alan, but he was genuinely happy for me. I could see that—I could see it in his face. At that moment, I saw his common decency, and I was struck by the intensity of his benevolence.  

He didn’t have to do that. He was a somebody and I was a nobody, and yet he took the time to talk to a young man just starting out on his career as a professor and a father.

I’ve never forgotten what Alan taught me that night, which was that we can all make the world just a little bit better if we take the time, every now and then, to share in someone else’s joy.

For that conversation alone, I will always be grateful for Alan’s friendship.  I should add parenthetically that the baby boy of whom we spoke that night is now himself a young professor and the father of a newborn son.

It is my hope that both will someday meet Alan, or someone like him.

Alan’s Moral Character

For many scholars of my generation, Alan is not only a brilliant scholar, but he is a model of moral character, whom we all admire.  

Anyone who knows Alan knows he is a moral force of nature.  This is the source of his greatness.

Alan is, first, a man of independence.  Throughout his career, he always seemed to take the road less traveled—and that seems to have made all the difference. He did it his way, on his terms, and always with honor, even when it hurt his professional career.

When I think of Alan, I’m reminded of that line from the film, Rob Roy, when Roy, played by Liam Neeson, is asked by his son to define what honor is, and the father answers: “Honor is a man’s gift to himself.” I’m pretty sure that’s all Alan ever needed. He knew he was right, and that’s what matters most.

I’ve never met a man as intellectually honest—and sometimes even brutally honest—as Alan, nor have I ever met a man who has united his moral principles with his moral action as completely as Alan has. 

If integrity is the principal of being principled, then my friend has it in spades.

What separates a real mensch from a mere academic is that the real man not only “talks the talk” but “walks the walk.” And that, Alan has always done.

Alan is a warrior.  One might even say of him what Herman Melville said of Captain Vere in Billy Budd, that he is “intrepid to the verge of temerity.”

I don’t mean that as a back-handed compliment. In an age characterized by academic fecklessness and cowardice, Alan is and has been throughout his career fearless and courageous. He speaks truth to power.

Alan was the man we needed most in the 1980s and 1990s when political correctness and wokeness were coming to dominate higher education. He stood, sometimes alone, against the forces of academic barbarism, whilst others cowered in the faculty lounge.

I do not think, however, that Alan’s warrior-spirit is driven entirely by what the Greeks called thymos or spiritedness.  To me, Alan’s fighting spirit is driven by something much rarer:  common decency and his respect for the notion that all men and women should be given the freedom to fulfill their highest purposes, dreams, and aspirations.

The acronym of the organization he co-founded, F.I.R.E., might be the best and most fitting way to describe Alan. We might even say of him what was once said of the great Abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, that he is a man “All on fire”—all on fire for liberty and justice. For those of us fortunate enough to know him, we all know that his moral fire has lit the way for the rest of us.

Alan has done something that few can say they’ve done: he made America a bit freer than it otherwise would have been.  Like David, he stood up to the Goliath of Political Correctness, and he won.

If there were a Nobel Prize for Freedom, surely Alan would be one of its first recipients.

Conclusion

Finally, we should not forget that Alan was never alone on his journey.  Standing at his side through thick and thin has been his remarkable wife, Erica. 

I’m quite certain that Alan would not have been able to accomplish half of his achievements without the love, support, and inspiration of Erica.  She loaned Alan to the cause of freedom, and for that we are deeply thankful.  The good news is that she can now call in the loan. 

And so, whatever we say in thanks to Alan tonight, we also say to Erica!

I end this testimonial to my friend Alan Charles Kors with a personal message from me to him. 

In the words of Tennyson:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Thank you.