About

The James Madison Seminar on the Principles of American Constitutionalism is a one-week residential seminar hosted by Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, open to upper-level high school students and rising college first-year students. It runs July 12–18, 2026, and is held not on Princeton's main campus but at the Chauncey Conference Center in Princeton, New Jersey, where participants are housed for the duration. Visits to historic Princeton and the university campus are included. The program costs $350, which covers room, board, and course materials — an unusually modest fee for a residential program at this institutional level. No financial aid is available.

The seminar is capped at 20 students. The 2026 instructors are S. Adam Seagrave, Associate Professor at Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and Sarah Beth Kitch, Associate Director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin — both specialists in American political thought and constitutional theory. The application deadline for 2026 was February 22, with decisions released in late March; future cycles are expected to follow a similar winter timeline.
The curriculum addresses the foundational questions of American political life: what equality and liberty have meant from the founding to the present, how they relate to one another and to political power, law, and civil society, and whether they are in tension or in harmony. Readings are drawn from primary sources — the Federalist Papers, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and other core texts of American constitutional history — with seminar discussion rather than lecture as the primary mode of instruction. The application itself is competitive; the program favors rising juniors, rising seniors, and rising college freshmen, though strong rising sophomores are occasionally admitted.

One note worth stating plainly: the James Madison Program's summer page lists five programs, but four of them — the Athens Symposium, the Oxford Convivium, the Moral Foundations of Law seminar, and the Statesmanship in American History seminar — are restricted to Princeton undergraduates, graduate students, law students, or secondary school teachers respectively. This is the only program on the page open to high school students.

The program is the right fit for a student who wants a serious, text-based seminar on American constitutional thought taught by working political scientists at a Princeton-affiliated institution for a price that almost any family can manage. Twenty seats, primary sources, genuine faculty instruction, and tuition of only $350. It is a small program and a narrow one, but within its lane it is one of the better-value humanities seminars available.