About

The Notre Dame Leadership Seminars are a competitive, fully funded 10-day residential program for academically talented rising seniors, running July 18–29, 2026. Students select one of six seminar tracks, each taught by Notre Dame faculty and culminating in one transferable college credit. Approximately 150 students are admitted across all tracks each year. The American Experiment: Liberty for All? is one of the six available seminars and the newest, launching in 2026 with funding from a $652,642 U.S. Department of Education grant awarded to Notre Dame's Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government — timed deliberately to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

This seminar examines the founding principles of American constitutionalism through sustained Socratic discussion and close reading of primary texts: the Declaration of Independence, writings of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Tocqueville, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and speeches by Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Martin Luther King Jr., and Clarence Thomas. The central question — whether the Declaration's promise of liberty has been realized, betrayed, or remains genuinely contested — drives the curriculum from first principles through contemporary political thought. The seminar is led by Vincent Phillip Muñoz, the Tocqueville Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and Founding Director of the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government, whose scholarship on religious liberty and the American Founding has been cited in multiple Supreme Court opinions. Activities include faculty lectures, Socratic seminars, student Lincoln-Douglas debates, a field trip to a state house or federal court, and a closing research symposium shared with participants from the other Leadership Seminars tracks.

Notre Dame's Leadership Seminars are structured to attract students from diverse public and private high schools, geographic regions, socioeconomic backgrounds, and ideological perspectives — a deliberate design choice that shapes the seminar's intellectual character. The program sits within Notre Dame's broader Catholic intellectual tradition, and the campus setting is a meaningful part of the experience. For students seriously interested in American political thought, constitutional history, or political philosophy — and willing to engage primary texts rigorously rather than survey them — the American Experiment seminar offers a rare combination of expert instruction, peer intellectual community, and full funding at one of the country's leading Catholic research universities.