The RGCS Charles Taylor Student Fellowship is the same program that was previously called the RGCS Student Fellowship. Thanks to the support of generous alums and other donors, it has been renamed for professor emeritus and McGill alum Charles Taylor '52.
RGCS, a unit of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds, brings together the study of political theory, political and legal philosophy, constitutional and public law, and empirical political science about constitutional institutions (the judiciary, federalism, separation of powers, etc.). It aims to unify these within an overarching research agenda on the foundations, institutions, and principles of political societies. "Constitutional" is construed broadly. It encompasses both the modern sense of the word (the fundamental institutions of a society's formal political and legal order, including institutional and legal norms limiting and directing political decisions) and the ancient (concerned with the match between political regimes and the societies they govern, and so concerned with the norms and rules governing family life, economic relations, and social orders). RGCS includes some fifteen faculty researchers in Political Science, Philosophy, and Law; postdoctoral fellows; a group of Ph.D. students; and this Charles Taylor Student Fellowship of undergraduates and Master's students.
Since 2010, the Fellowship has provided intellectual community and academic opportunities to an interdisciplinary group of students interested in reading and discussing books on politics, law, and ethics outside the formal classroom. The Fellowship has been able to help them pursue research opportunities, attend conferences and seminars around the world, and meet with leading scholars, writers, and visiting speakers. The core of the Fellowship lies in the conversation: 18-20 students meeting in the Ferrier library, patiently working their way through important books and arguing about the ideas they contain— discussions that make up the heart of student participation in RGCS and in the Yan P. Lin Centre. For many students, these conversations have provided a valuable transition between a liberal arts education and advanced graduate study in the social sciences, philosophy, or law. For many more, they’ve been a capstone liberal arts experience in their own right.
The Fellowship is open to Arts undergraduates (U2 or later) studying political theory and related fields (including political science, philosophy, intellectual history, and the other social sciences, but background preparation in political theory and philosophy is a primary consideration), as well as students in the MA programs in political science and philosophy, and in the BCL/ JD program in Law.
It is an ungraded, non-credit activity. Fellows receive a small stipend, plus free copies of the books. The Fellowship meets most Thursdays of the academic year for two kinds of activities.
The first, and primary, activity is a reading group with discussion moderated by one or two members of the RGCS faculty, dedicated to patient and thorough reading of major texts in the history of political, social, and moral thought. Texts in recent years have included Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments; Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws; Tocqueville's Democracy in America; Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and Freedom; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. These long major texts are complemented with relevant shorter texts and contemporaneous works of literature, ranging in recent years from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Franz Kafka's Trial and Richard Wright's Native Son.
The second activity is linked to the RGCS Lecture Series, which features speakers on the values, institutions, and principles of a free society. They take place in the same time slot, Thursdays 4:30-6 pm. Fellows are expected to attend all of the lectures. The first question at the lectures is reserved for a member of the Fellowship. There are also dedicated dinners with the speakers following the lectures; normally half of the Fellows attend each dinner.
Other activities: Fellows will also be occasionally invited to other talks, seminars, and conferences in political theory, political philosophy, constitutional law, and the history of political thought; unlike attendance at the lectures, participation in these is optional. There are sometimes small group meetings with visiting speakers outside the RGCS Lecture Series, especially the speakers who give the annual Yan P. Lin Centre Lecture.
Sometimes RGCS is able to secure space in the audience for Fellows at other kinds of events; these have included lectures by UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon, essayist Roxane Gay, novelist Margaret Atwood, Nobel laureate in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, and Templeton Prize winner Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. When possible, RGCS supports other academic opportunities for Taylor Fellows, including support for travel to academic conferences, seminars, summer schools, and workshops; ARIA research assistantships with members of the RGCS faculty; and self-organized summer reading groups. See here for McGill coverage of RGCS' support for students who took part in academic events around the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth.
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