Experience Your Education
Cultivate Leadership
A warm welcome to the Franco-American British (F.A.B.) Fund for the study of Liberal Democracy, founded and taught by Harvard and Oxford academics, our institute uniquely combines the highest standards of academic course content alongside direct experience of political systems and direct engagement with political leaders. This innovative combination not only edifies, deepens and enlivens the scholarly study of politics but it cultivates an intimate understanding of the significance of leadership on both public discourse and policy outcomes in liberal democracies. Indeed, our academic programs are distinct for the following two reasons – one structural and the other methodological.
Private lecture inside the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
First, by fusing academic analysis together with systematic and daily engagement in the actual political arena under study, we’ve designed the most integrated and comprehensive political science seminars. Every political leader, every public policy or political institution as well as every idea or theory that we study and analyze in our morning classes, we shall then directly engage with and experience in the heart of the political system that very afternoon. Thus, in our inaugural and intensive “Power and Democracy” 2024 summer seminar in Washington D.C., our students will leave the George Washington or Georgetown campus after class and head straight to the political action as we go from the Supreme Court to the Pentagon, from the House of Representatives to the White House, from the U.S. Senate to the leading Think Tanks, from private invitations at the Chinese embassy to events at the National Press Club … first, we think but then … we do. In all our F.A.B. Fund seminars, we experience what we study and we cultivate a sense of democratic leadership in others and in ourselves. Intellectual analysis divorced from living political experience, rationality divorced from dynamic political communication, from what Aristotle called ‘pathos’ (emotion) and ‘ethos’ (character), often leads to serious misunderstanding in politics. We’ve created these vital seminars precisely because the full scope and significance of political ideas, and their profound implications, can’t be fully grasped in the absence of their living contexts just as leadership can’t truly be understood or cultivated without engaging directly with leaders and the systems in which they find themselves.
Hence, all of our politics courses take place in Capitol cities, intimately bound to those vibrant centers of deliberation, decision-making and action. We ensure that our students bridge the yawning gap between the theory and the practice of politics. What is characteristic of our ‘Power and Democracy’ summer seminar in DC also extends to the world’s first two transnational and experiential politics seminars. The F.A.B. Fund’s ‘First Wave Liberal Democracies: USA, UK and France’ and our ‘East Asian Liberal Democracies: Taiwan, Korea and Japan’, both headlining in 2025 and taught by leading scholars on each nation. Once again, we’ve united academic study with direct political engagement as these intensive comparative courses take our students from Washington to London and Paris … or … from Taipei to Seoul and Tokyo, respectively exposing them to the leading political actors and their institutions as we’re ushered into the hallways of power and decision-making. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these direct, practical and living experiences in the acquisition of complex conceptual knowledge.
The Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol
Our second innovation is essentially methodological and it combines the above with a longstanding, vital and highly effective pedagogic method utilized only in the United Kingdom; namely the Oxbridge ‘tutorial’. We’ve democratized this unique Oxford and Cambridge tradition of one-on-one tutorials that students enjoy with leading scholars. Inherent to an Oxbridge education and reserved for only 33 American Rhodes Scholars every year, our commitment to equal opportunity opens up this exclusive tutorial mode to all of our students. Therefore, alongside their daily morning classes, all F.A.B. Fund students experience rigorous tutorial sessions with our leading scholars of politics; bringing that dynamic Socratic method of personalized and individual instruction at the core of this longstanding Oxbridge method to all.
Why study politics with us now?
The January 6th insurrection in the heart of the most influential liberal democracy on earth stunned the world – not least many Americans themselves. In its third century, the strength and vitality of the American ‘experiment in self-government’ seemed as self-evident and immutable as the vaunted universal truths outlined in the stirring Preamble of its most famous Enlightenment document: the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, vigorously inspired by the unprecedented post-war power and example of the United States (from the birth of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan to the creation of Bretton Woods, the IMF and the World Bank), few questioned the historic and continued ascendance of liberal democracy as an inevitable and welcome political force in world affairs.
However, not long after the collapse of its greatest foe in the form of the Soviet Union, an ever-growing number of citizens and academics within Western democracies and the USA itself, saw a gradual dimming of the heady exuberance and rhetorical moral grandeur around the imminent rise of liberal democratic forms of government. Whilst the number of democracies in the world doubled after the fall of the Berlin Wall up to 2004, we’ve seen a steady decline in democratic forms of government since 2014. Indeed, these early hopes gradually met with the strange spectacle of sinking public trust, punctured by stark ideological polarization, ‘illiberal’ rhetoric and action as well as the jarring and unabated rise of ‘democratic backsliding’. Our bright-eyed Western optimism thus slowly gave way to shades of citizen despair and disaffection all the way from Washington, across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom and into the heart of Western Europe itself to the great dismay of millions of citizens from around the globe.
What is happening to our liberal democratic tradition? Regardless of our personal political stance, answers to this critical question are vital. A deeper understanding, and perhaps even the fate, of all political systems grounded in individual liberty, human equality and the rule of law … hinge on our responses and reactions. The F.A.B. Fund for the Study of Liberal Democracy is dedicated to helping our students come to terms with what might be the greatest intellectual challenge of our age and, as a result, help reinvigorate citizen activism. We ought not underestimate the deep symbiotic relationship between knowledge and experience, between ideas and action – a relationship that is either too abstract or totally severed in typical academic politics courses. It is the innovative combination of idea and action, of analysis alongside experience of our complex political systems … that is best suited to help forge viable answers and revive a sense of political hope in our traditions.
In all Western democracies, the notion … ‘of the people, by the people and for people’ … is not only a lofty ideal but it is the very birth right of each and every citizen. In that spirit, we welcome you to Washington, to London, to Paris, to Brussels and beyond … as we honor your intention and desire to understand these complex times, reignite the significance of citizenship and help change our world for the better.
The Lincoln Memorial at dusk
F.A.B. Fund seminars combine vigorous academic study with direct access to political power, uniting students and citizens within democracies and between nations.
Why take our core politics seminars?
By meeting with political leaders and key policy-makers face to face, our students have the opportunity to experience and cultivate a sense of the significance of leadership in others and therefore, help cultivate it in themselves. Moreover, being able to ask incisive and thought-provoking questions directly to politicians and policy-makers, reaffirms the profound importance of citizenship and underscores the essential truth that the exercise of power must always be accountable to the people in a liberal democracy.
A most intensive politics course
The F.A.B. Fund is thrilled to present you with the first politics course that systematically combines and links outstanding academic instruction (taught by our Harvard and Oxford academics) to direct and real-time engagement with the actual political arena under study. We seek to ensure that our students bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of politics.
Concepts in context
Ideas are inherently complex and theories even more so but witnessing their use (and abuse) in actual political debates, clashes and decision-making helps our students anchor their meaning and illuminate their impact on policy. As we attend many live Senate and House hearings on a vast range of issues, the significance of actually seeing ideas in action will become apparent.