Academic interests
Pangle's writings on ancient political philosophy attempt to show how Socratic arguments for the supremacy of the philosophic life shape, enrich, and ground the classical republican teaching on civic and moral virtue and on the spiritual goals of self-government. His studies of medieval and biblical political thought seek to revive the mutually challenging dialogue between the competing Socratic and scriptural notions of wisdom and of the cultivation of wisdom in civic life.
His interpretations of the thought of the American Founding, and of its philosophic foundations in Locke and Montesquieu, prepares the ground for his exposition of Nietzsche as the most radical critic of modern rationalism. These studies argue for the significance, within modernity, of a continued if eclipsed commitment to the life of understanding pursued for its own sake. At the same time, Pangle diagnoses the costs and the benefits—for civic virtue as well as for the life of the mind—of the diminished public or civic status of the moral and intellectual virtues in modern republicanism.
Pangle is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has won Guggenheim, Killam-Canada Council, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, and four National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He has been awarded The Benton Bowl at Yale University (for contribution to education in politics) and the Robert Foster Cherry Great Teacher of the World Prize, Baylor University. In 2007 he delivered, at the invitation of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Werner Heisenberg Lecture. A Festschrift in his honor was published as: Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle. Edited by Timothy Burns. Lexington Books, 2010.
Yale tenure controversy
Pangle was denied tenure at Yale University, in a scandal, during which a senior colleague explained, in a pronouncement (which became the theme of a protest panel at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association): "academic freedom is one thing, but there are two types who will never be permitted tenure at Yale: Leninists and Straussians." The Wall Street Journal ("Dry Rot at College," Editorial Aug. 31, 1979, p. 6), Commentary ("God and Man at Yale—Again," by Robert Kagan, February, 1982; Letters exchange, August, 1982) and other journals (The New York Review of Books, May 12, 1983, pp. 56–57, "Saving the Free World: An Exchange," statement by Eugene Genovese; Yale Political Monthly, Dec. 1979, pp. 2–11, "Academic Freedom at Yale: the Pangle Case"), published editorials, columns, and articles attacking Yale's denial of academic freedom. Yale or its spokespersons denied the imputations. Yale set up a judiciary panel, led by the historian Edmund Morgan, to hear the case—amid campus-wide protests and marches on Pangle's behalf (Yale Daily News, Sept. 10, 1979, p. 1, "2,300 Students Protest Tenure Policy"); the panel decided in Pangle's favor and rescinded the decision denying tenure by the Department of Political Science, on the basis of testimony from graduate students about what Political Science faculty had declared in public about the grounds on which Pangle was being denied tenure. Yale instituted a new procedure that took the decision out of the hands of the department and lodged it in a board, specially designed for Pangle's tenure review, that was composed of five scholars, two not from Yale (led by Peter Gay): Yale University News Release, Monday afternoon, Oct. 15, 1979; Yale Weekly Bulletin and Calendar, Oct. 22–29, 1979, p. 1; Yale Daily News, Extra Edition, Oct. 16, 1979, "Pangle Wins New Tenure Review: Original Decision Overruled; Professor says he is 'gratified'". At that point, Pangle resigned, having been offered a tenured position at the University of Toronto (see entries on C. B. Macpherson and Allan Bloom)—and because, as he declared, he no longer felt he could comfortably live with his colleagues in the Yale Political Science Department.
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Lorraine Smith Pangle is a professor of political philosophy in the Department of Government and co-director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests are ancient, early modern, and American political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of education, and problems of justice and moral responsibility. She has won fellowships from the Searle, Olin, and Earhart Foundations, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Pangle received her B.A. in history from Yale, a B.Ed. from the University of Toronto, and her PhD from University of Chicago in 1999. She is married to Thomas Pangle.
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