TU Professor Selected for International Honors

Friday, November 03, 2006

University of Tulsa professor Russell Hittinger has been selected for several international honors that will take him from Poland to Rome in the coming months.

Hittinger, who serves as Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and a research professor of law at TU, will present the Dec. 9 keynote address at Poland’s celebration of International Human Rights Day. The celebration will include an exhibition of historical Polish documents and a conference on human rights issues.

In addition to his human rights address in Poland, Hittinger was recently elected to the consilium (or governing board) of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church’s premier theological academy.

An internationally recognized contributor to contemporary debates in jurisprudence, law and ethics, Hittinger joined the TU faculty in 1996.

Dr. Janusz Kochanowski, Poland’s Commissioner of Civil Rights Protection, notified Hittinger in September about his selection for presenting the keynote address. For more than a decade, Hittinger has made frequent visits to Poland where he has served as an instructor and lecturer at Jagiellonian University and Dominican College. During this time, he has seen a generation of students become prominent members of the Polish government and business community, which likely prompted his singular honor during the upcoming human rights celebration.

His speech’s message will be two-fold: a celebration of one of the oldest constitutional traditions in European history and an examination of the challenges of integrating human rights protections among all members of the European Union.

“There has been a high degree of economic integration through the market among members of the European Union, but that same level of integration has been difficult to achieve with human rights issues,” Hittinger said. “On the political and social side, there can’t be the same level of absolute uniformity. There needs to be some pluralism in regards to the application of human rights within the diverse European constitutions.”

Following the return from Poland in December, Hittinger will prepare for his new leadership role with the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. The academy consists of approximately 40 international theology and philosophy scholars selected for lifetime appointments. The four-person governing board is elected from the membership to serve five-year terms. Hittinger, appointed to the academy in 2005, is one of only five Americans serving in the academy and the only American elected to the governing board.

As a member of the governing board, Hittinger will help determine the agenda for what subjects will be investigated by the academy. The topics can either be generated through papal request or self-generated from the academy. Unlike the other two papal academies that examine questions of physical and social sciences, the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas doesn’t generate policy decisions.

“This academy is not a think tank and the discussions involved are far removed from political things,” Hittinger said. “Rather, the purpose of this body is to generate discussion and examine timeless questions of philosophy and theology.”

Hittinger, who earned his doctoral degree at St. Louis University, is an Academic Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., where he was a research scholar from 1991 to 1996. He has taught at Catholic University of America, Princeton University, Fordham University, and New York University. His books and articles have been published by Oxford University Press, the University of Notre Dame Press, the Review of Politics, as well as in several law journals.