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Hello
John,
As part of our larger Richard D. McLellan Prizes for Advancing Free Speech and Expression Program, the Russell Kirk Center is pleased to announce that two prominent businessmen and philanthropists have established two distinct annual fellowships in their names of $12,500 for individuals pursuing important writing, research, or new media projects advancing America’s free speech tradition.

Michigan’s Dick & Ethie Haworth and Mickey Shapiro, beyond their lifetime of business success, have each also dedicated their public lives to advancing political, economic, and religious liberty. In the weeks ahead, I will tell you more about them and the impressive free speech fellows they are supporting.

With this letter, I am proud to introduce the first group of named Dick & Ethie Haworth Free Speech Fellows for 2025. Dick Haworth is chairman emeritus of Haworth, Inc., a privately held, family-owned office furniture manufacturer headquartered around the world. In a different realm, Dick became the first major CEO to publicly call for Michigan to pass a right-to-work law.
Ethie and Dick Haworth
Dick became CEO of Haworth Inc. when he was just 36 years old. Over the ensuing thirty years, he guided the company to international prominence. Some of you probably benefited from Dick’s innovative mind. He invented the first cubicle wall panels with internal wiring. These panels, which are commonplace today, were ingenious for their wiring and because they can be snapped together and eliminated a client's need to pay electricians to wire office spaces.

I once had the pleasure of touring Haworth, and the entire production process was remarkable. I couldn’t help but think that Adam Smith would’ve enjoyed discussing with Dick such a manufacturing marvel! Today, Haworth, Inc. is enjoying its third generation of family-run leadership with son Matthew ably at the helm.

Ethie Haworth’s work is equally consequential and is focused on medical innovation therapies, patient empathy and encouragement, and life-extending research through her care for young people with a serious blood disorder or a diagnosis of cancer.

The Ethie Haworth Children’s Cancer Center at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital is nationally recognized for excellence and innovation and is one of the largest children's cancer treatment programs in the Midwest. Ethie is also passionate about her work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation—bringing happiness to children facing an uncertain future.It is a privilege, then, to introduce you to the first three named Dick & Ethie Haworth Free Speech Fellows.

They are: Peter Bonilla, the executive director of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, and Thomas Matthew Vozar, assistant professor of humanities at the University of Florida's Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.

Additionally, Josiah Joner, former editor of The Stanford Review, was awarded a Dick & Ethie Haworth Free Speech Fellow in late 2024; however his prize went into effect in May 2025. A short description of each Dick & Ethie Free Speech Fellow follows.

Along with grand prize winner, Kristen Waggoner, we'll plan to celebrate the Haworth Free Speech Fellows at our prizes gala in Washington D.C. on November 19, 2025 ([link removed]) . Tickets will need to be purchased before November 12.
Get Tickets for the McLellan Prizes Gala on 11.19 ([link removed])


** Josiah Joner, 2024-2025 Dick & Ethie Haworth Free Speech Fellow
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Josiah Joner studied economics at Stanford University, where he served as the 68th Editor-in-Chief of The Stanford Review. At Stanford, Josiah covered various issues of free speech on campus and documented many of the university’s censorship efforts during the Covid pandemic. He has testified before Congress on protecting free speech in higher education and has appeared on major television and radio networks.
Project synopsis: Josiah lives in the Bay Area and is working on a project about free speech and censorship at Stanford and beyond.


** Peter Bonilla, 2025 Dick & Ethie Haworth Free Speech Fellow
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Peter Bonilla has served as the Executive Director of the MIT Free Speech Alliance since 2022, an independent alumni organization promoting free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity at MIT. Previously Peter was on the staff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for more than 14 years, ultimately serving as its Vice President of Programs and overseeing its faculty programming and development. Peter’s several hundred posts for FIRE’s Newsdesk include numerous commentaries on academic freedom issues, about which he has also written feature-length articles for The New Criterion and Academic Questions, among other publications. Peter also co-authored the story and dialogue for the free speech comic Finding Your Voice, and is a recipient of a playwriting fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Project Synopsis: Peter will edit and write FIRE’s Guide to Academic Freedom (working title), which is a resource that will provide practitioners with a historical and legal background on the fundamentals of academic freedom and its status in First Amendment law. This resource will also serve as an extensive guide--informed by numerous case studies from FIRE’s advocacy--to the evolving landscape of academic freedom and the modern challenges faculty face both inside and outside the classroom. Finally, in this era of heightened government intervention in higher education, the guide will discuss recent threats to academic freedom coming from the government and how individuals and institutions can respond.


** Thomas Matthew Vozar, 2025 Dick & Ethie Haworth Fellow
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Thomas Matthew Vozar is an assistant professor of humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, where he teaches courses on Great Books and Western civilization. His work includes Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2023), which received the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Book Award; Isaac Barrow’s On the Turkish Religion: A Latin Poem on Islam from Ottoman Istanbul (Bloomsbury, 2026); and the recently completed Polemical Erudition: Scholarship and Politics in the European Republic of Letters during the English Revolution.

Project Synopsis: Dr. Vozar will advance his research and writing for a book entitled, Liberty to Know: Areopagitica, the First Amendment, and the Anglo-American Free Speech Tradition. That work will examine how John Milton’s famous defense of a free press emerged and how it helped shape the modern free speech tradition in Britain and America. The project builds on my previous work on “liberty of philosophizing” and academic freedom during the English Revolution, which was published in the Journal of the History of Ideas and discussed in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I hope to see you at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., next month. Many thanks again to Dick & Ethie Haworth, and Richard D. McLellan, for supporting these talented free speech fellows’ efforts to advance our understanding of free speech and expression.

For those of you interested in helping to sponsor this event, you can learn more here ([link removed]) or be in touch with our own Ashley Jordan ([email protected]), Kirk Center donor relations officer.

Yours in Ordered Liberty,

Jeff Nelson

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