 "Photo: HANSKY SANTOS/THE HOYA")
Professor Patrick Deneen, the director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, will resign from Georgetown at the end of the semester after seven years at the university.
Deneen will leave his post as the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies in the government department for a similar position in the University of Notre Dame's department of political science, leaving the future of the Tocqueville Forum uncertain.
While Deneen said that he has greatly enjoyed teaching at Georgetown, he hopes to play a more integral role at Notre Dame.
"I go from [a university] where I find myself often at the periphery … to one [at] which I have been recruited explicitly as [a professor] who can be a significant contributor to the life and mission of the institution," he said.
Deneen, the founding director of the Tocqueville Forum, which intends to preserve America's roots in Western philosophical tradition, cited poor reception of the center by the faculty and administration as one of his reasons for leaving.
"[Over] the years, it has been increasingly evident to me that I have exceedingly few allies and friends elsewhere on the faculty to join me in this work and dim prospects that the trajectory of faculty hiring will change," he wrote in an email to select students Sunday night. "I have felt isolated from the heart of the institution where I have devoted so many of my hours and my passion."
He added that he will have the chance to further the Catholic identity of Notre Dame, an opportunity that he believes was not available to him at Georgetown.
"I have decided that I would like to be welcomed as a contributor to the widely-embraced institutional mission of the university where I intend always to devote so much of my time, energy and passion, rather than someone who is largely regarded as an outlier," he wrote in the email.
Kieran Raval (COL '13), a student fellow in the Toqueville Forum, said Deneen was approachable to students and brought the study of America's Western heritage alive.
"He's a great teacher, and I've never actually had him in class," he said. "I think he's a great … beacon of the liberal arts tradition at Georgetown and … of classical learning."
In his email, Deneen wrote that he is concerned that it will be difficult to find a replacement to serve as director of the Tocqueville Forum.
Helen Decelles-Zwerneman (COL '14), another student fellow in the forum and one of Deneen's previous students, said she too is worried about the program without his leadership. The forum was one of the primary reasons Decelles-Zwerneman decided to attend Georgetown.
"As the director of the Tocqueville Forum, I'm not sure he's really replaceable," she said. "I hope that the forum can continue without him, but I can't see how it [will continue] to be as great as a group and … resource."
There is not a position similar to that which he had in the Tocqueville Forum waiting for Deneen at Notre Dame, but he has not excluded the possibility that he will assume such a role there some day.
"It's explicitly because of the kinds of courses I teach and the focus of my writing that I was recruited," he said.
is a member of the 
15 comments
The "Western canon" *is* "intellectually and morally superior to all other traditions". The West was the only place to develop systematic, rational philosophy, modern empirical science, and the Industrial Revolution, while the rest of the world had only savagery, barbarism, and stagnation. It's not an accident that the West dominated the rest of the world until it destroyed itself in a world war fueled by the collapse of its own philosophy. That's not because they are racially better than anyone else, and other parts of the world (like Japan and India) are perfectly capable of emulating Western values. But it is because the *ideas* of the West were and are better than anyone else's.I do not see eye-to-eye with Prof. Deneen on very many issues: I am an avowed atheist and Objectivist, and I have nothing but contempt for Christianity (although there is a redeeming trace of the Greek pro-reason element in some branches of it, particularly Thomistic Catholicism). But if his rejection of multiculturalist relativism is the reason he has been alienated from the academic establishment, then shame on the establishment: it deserves what it is going to get.As for whether the Tocqueville Forum alienates people who do not hew to the party line, I made no secret of my beliefs while I participated in its events, and I received nothing but courtesy and open, honest discussion: which was exactly what I was promised. So I doubt very much that it is the intolerance of Prof. Deneen that has alienated him from the Georgetown community, but rather suppose it to be the intolerance of the relativists, who are tolerant of every form of savagery and error except confidence in one's own rightness.