Community invited to join students, faculty and staff on Sept. 19 for Constitution Day at Maryville College
Sept. 11, 2023
Two hundred and thirty-six years to the day that everyday Americans were introduced to the U.S. Constitution, members of the Maryville College community will celebrate the historic document with a public forum.
Constitution Day is celebrated annually every Sept. 17, the day it was signed in Independence Hall. To commemorate the occasion, Maryville College faculty members invite the public to take part in “Thirteen Challenging Questions About the Constitution,” a guided forum that will feature an open-ended discussion of ongoing Constitutional issues. Light refreshments will also be served.
The event will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 19 — the anniversary of the first public printing of the Constitution, in the newspaper The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser on Sept. 19, 1787.
“Consistent with Maryville College’s whole-person, liberating education, this event will be a genuine conversation that leads everyone to draw their own conclusions about multiple important aspects of our country’s foundational compact,” said Dr. Doug Sofer, associate professor of history and one of the organizers of the event. “We’ll suggest some possible ways different scholars and other thoughtful people have discussed these questions.”
The event is free and open to the public, and citizens are encouraged to join the MC community in exploring the document that established the framework for the national government, put in place basic laws and guaranteed certain basic rights for its citizens.
Attendees are invited to gather outside, in front of Pearsons Hall, at 11:30 a.m. After a short introduction, the 13 questions — one for each of the states that ratified the Constitution — will be asked. Dr. Mark O’Gorman, professor of political science, and Dr. Aaron Astor, professor of history, are assisting Sofer in the drafting of questions for the new Constitution Day format, which previously featured a trivia-style game. The new format, Sofer said, will provide scholarly discussion about the resilience of the Constitution in American society.
In the event of rain, the observance will take place on the Pearsons Hall porch.
“In the last few years, the Constitution has received a lot of attention from elected officials, lawyers and media representatives, pushing their interpretation of the Constitution,” O’Gorman said. “That is why it’s always good to revisit the core U.S. document that forms the basis of our political society, and genuinely read where and how our Constitution provides for our rights and our government.”
The Constitution Day celebration became an annual event at Maryville College and colleges and universities across the country in 2005, when Congress passed legislation declaring that “each educational institution that receives federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of such year for the students served by the educational institution.” In the event the 17th falls on a weekend as it does this year, institutions are encouraged to hold such an observance during the preceding or following week.