Indiana University of Pennsylvania will celebrate
Constitution Day on September 18, 2017, with two events free and open to the community.
Constitution Day commemorates the September 1787 signing of
the US Constitution, which is 230 years old this year.
Sponsored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
and the Department of Political Science, events at IUP will lead off with a public
reading of the Constitution by members of the IUP community from noon to 1:00 p.m.
in front of Stabley Library, facing the Oak Grove. The first 100 participants
will receive a special “We the People at IUP” t-shirt, as well as a
pocket-sized copy of the Constitution and a star-shaped cookie. IUP President
Michael Driscoll will begin the event with a reading of the Preamble.
The intentions of the authors of the US Constitution will
be explored in the Six O’Clock Series presentation that evening: “A Casual
Conversation with the Framers of the U. S. Constitution” from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. in
the Hadley Union Building Ohio Room. Three of the Constitution’s
authors—Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—will discuss the
challenges in drafting the Constitution, and will speculate about what the
Founders would think of today’s politics. These Founders will be portrayed,
respectively, by IUP political science professors David Chambers and Steven
Jackson and by history professor Joe Mannard. Audience participation and questions
are encouraged.
“The
discussion will explore and examine issues important to the founders, like how
to run a country with people sometimes wanting different things, as well as how
to talk about those things, especially when opinions are very, very different,”
Gwen Torges, Political Science faculty member and Constitution Day
organizer, said. “How do we respect free speech, but protect ourselves from the
hurt that free speech can cause?”
“Democracies
don’t work very well if people don’t understand how the government works. One of the most important things that we can do is to read and understand our Constitution.
Constitution Day gives us a chance to pause and think about what ‘We the People’
want from our government,” she said.