Chicago Thinker

Read the full article by Chris Low on our website

“University professors are entrusted to facilitate that exchange, to teach critical thinking to our children, and to serve as role models for civil discourse. That special respect, that trust, demands a very serious obligation on the part of university professors and leaders to meet the standard that deserves such trust. During the pandemic, university presidents and professors, falsely clothed by their titles, reminiscent of the Emperor’s, were exposed as lacking what it takes to be leaders.”

Read the full article by Dr. Scott Atlas on our website.

Read the article by Jonathan Kang on our website

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The Chicago Thinker is proud to announce the Acton Institute as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit.

Named for the English historian Lord John Acton, whose warning that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely shaped modern thinking on liberty and morality, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is an ecumenical think tank built around a single idea, that a free society and a virtuous one are inseparable, and that the market economy rests on a moral foundation it cannot do without. Its mission is to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles, with human flourishing as the end.

Through Acton University, its lecture and conference series, the quarterly Religion and Liberty, the peer-reviewed Journal of Markets and Morality, and a wider publishing and film program, Acton convenes religious leaders, entrepreneurs, scholars, and students across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions to treat economics as a moral discipline. Its ten core principles, including the dignity of the person, the rule of law, the creation of wealth, economic liberty, and the priority of culture, set out a framework in which free markets and human dignity reinforce rather than undermine each other. Acton’s contribution is to make the case, against a culture that often treats freedom and virtue as rivals, that each depends on the other.

The Chicago Thinker is proud to present DRW as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit.

Founded in 1992 by Don Wilson, DRW grew out of a conviction that disciplined quantitative thinking and a willingness to challenge prevailing wisdom can uncover opportunities the consensus has missed. Three decades later DRW is one of the largest principal trading firms in the world, with more than two thousand employees across nine global offices, active on exchanges across five continents and a significant source of liquidity in fixed income, commodities, FX, equities, and crypto. It still trades only its own capital, which is the structural expression of an idea The Chicago Thinker shares, that real innovation comes from independence of judgment rather than deference to crowds.

In this sense DRW is a working argument for the values free enterprise is supposed to produce. Liquid, transparent, two-sided markets do not appear by accident, they are built by firms willing to take risk, price honestly, and bet against the consensus when the data says the consensus is wrong. The same intellectual curiosity and contrarianism that let Wilson see quantitative modeling as underutilized in 1992 has since pushed DRW into crypto through Cumberland, into venture capital, real estate through Convexity, and carbon markets through Artemeter and Climate Vault. It is the Chicago School premise in motion, that free markets, sharpened by the people willing to think for themselves inside them, remain the most powerful mechanism we have for discovering truth about price, risk, and value.

The Thinker is happy to present The Intercollegiate Studies Institute as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit.

Founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov with a young William F. Buckley Jr. as its first president, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was built to push back against the leftward drift of American higher education and to reclaim the university as a place where the principles of ordered liberty could still be seriously studied. More than seventy years later, ISI remains committed to that founding mission, inspiring college students to discover, embrace, and advance the ideas and virtues that have made America free and prosperous.

Through campus chapters, lecture series, summer schools, graduate fellowships, and the Collegiate Network of independent student newspapers, ISI gives young conservatives and classical liberals across the country a serious intellectual home and a national community of peers and mentors. Its publications, from Modern Age to the Intercollegiate Review, carry forward the conversation that Buckley, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises once held with ISI students in person. The Western tradition, the American founding, and the case for limited government, kept alive in the minds of the next generation

The Thinker is proud to announce the UChicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, with funding support from the Chicago Forum’s Zell Speaker and Event Series and Zell Family Foundation, as a partner for this year’s American Identity Summit

The University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression builds directly on the university’s founding conviction, expressed by William Rainey Harper himself, that freedom of inquiry is inseparable from the work of discovery and rigorous scholarship. Its mission is to promote the understanding, practice, and advancement of free and open discourse at UChicago and beyond, carrying forward the tradition that produced the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Report and that has long made the University a global reference point on these questions.

The Forum convenes students, faculty, university leaders, and outside thinkers around the hardest questions facing higher education today, from political polarization and institutional neutrality to artificial intelligence, book bans, and the erosion of trust in academic life. Through the Zell Series, the Academic Freedom Institute, student grants and fellowships, partnerships with Doc Films and the Logan Center, and a growing Student Advisory Board, it offers the rare thing a university most needs in this moment, which is not only principles on paper but the practice of holding them in real argument.