Grove City College will host the 16th annual Austrian Student Scholars Conference Feb. 20 and 21 in the Hall of Arts and Letters on campus.
Undergraduate and graduate students will present papers on Austrian economics at the conference. A panel of Grove City College faculty will judge the papers and determine which student scholars earn cash prizes.
The conference is more than a competition. Students from universities around the country and the world will gather to discuss Austrian economics in the tradition of great intellectuals such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard and Hans Sennholz, a leader in the field who chaired Grove City College’s Economics department for four decades.
“The conference is a tremendous opportunity for our students to develop their skills as writers, communicators, and debaters of ideas that are of interest to them,” conference organizer Dr. Jeffrey Herbener, chair and professor of Economics and Sociology at Grove City College, said. “In several cases, the contacts our students have made at the conference have proven important in their pursuit of their callings.”
In addition to the student paper presentations, two keynote speakers will address the conference. Dr. Christopher Coyne will give the annual Sennholz Lecture. Coyne is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the associate director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at George Mason’s Mercatus Center. Coyne serves as the co-editor of The Review of Austrian Economics, the co-editor of The Independent Review and the book review editor of Public Choice.
Dr. T. Hunt Tooley will give the Mises Lecture, named for the Austrian school’s leading proponent and one of the twentieth century’s leading social philosophers. Tooley is a professor and chair of the History Department at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. He specializes in modern european history and is the author of “The Great War: Western Front and Home Front” and “National Identity and Weimar Germany.”
Students should submit their proposals to present a paper to conference director Dr. Jeffrey Herbener via email jmherbener@gcc.edu by Jan. 15. To be eligible for the cash prizes, finished papers should be submitted to the director by Feb. 1.
Austrian economics was first introduced to Grove City College in 1956 when Sennholz, a protégé of von Mises, became head of the economics department, a post he held for four decades. Under his direction, the College became the world’s leading undergraduate institution for the study of Austrian economics and thousands of students were introduced to the Austrian school. The College has been the permanent home of Mises’ papers since 1978 and the 20,000-page archive has been the source of four books of his previously unpublished manuscripts.