UF President Ben Sasse announced William Inboden, a former Senate campaign donor and close friend of Sasse, as the new director for the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education in a press release Monday.
Inboden is the current director of the Clements Center for National Security and a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, both at the University of Texas at Austin.
Inboden will replace John Stinneford, the inaugural director of the Hamilton Center. Stinneford will transition to a senior fellow position at the Hamilton Center and will return to teaching at the Levin College of Law, according to the press release.
UF established the Hamilton Center in 2022 to educate students on the Western intellectual tradition and the ideals of the American founding, according to its website.
“I am profoundly grateful for the excellent foundation built by inaugural director John Stinneford and am honored to lead the Hamilton Center’s next phase of growth into a college within the University of Florida,” Inboden wrote.
Sasse and Inboden have shared a nearly three-decade-long friendship.
Inboden told the Niskanen Center in April 2023 Sasse is one of his closest friends.
The two met as undergraduate students in the early 1990s and studied together under Jon Butler and Skip Stout at Yale University in the early 2000s.
Inboden recollects Sasse sketching out his ideas on cocktail napkins at New Haven dive bars as exemplary of his academic rigor.
“Even among Yale Ph.D. students, Ben was still a cut above,” he told Mother Jones in 2016.
In his 2004 dissertation, Sasse includes Inboden’s name in the acknowledgments section as one of “many friends and fellow students [who] have been long suffering in their toleration of too many oral drafts of this project as I struggled to arrive at the argument.”
Inboden returned the gesture in his 2008 book Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment, referring to Sasse as one of “those friends who contributed in so many intangible ways, which are hard to measure but impossible to disregard.”
Sasse and Inboden’s relationship continued as they pursued careers in academia.
In 2011, Inboden spoke about foreign policy at Midland University while Sasse was president. Eight years later, Sasse gave a keynote address at the Clements Center while Inboden was the director.
Their relationship became political when Sasse entered the U.S. Senate.
Indboden donated a combined $4,500 to Sasse’s US Senate campaign.
In 2016, Inboden announced he would be writing in Sasse on the presidential ballot.
Two years later, he wrote an article praising Sasse’s proposal for the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, which Sasse served on as a commissioner.
Inboden has a long history in American politics and national security.
He began his political career in 1995 as a congressional staff member for Sen. Sam Gunn. He left to work for Rep. Tom Delay after two years in the position.
Inboden is credited as one of the original visionaries of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which established the Office of International Religious Freedom to “assist other governments in the promotion of the fundamental right to freedom of religion.”
From 2002 to 2004, Inboden worked at the Office of International Religious Freedom and became a staff member for the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.
He became the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council in 2005.
In 2013, Inboden began his term as the executive director for the Clements Center for National Security at UT Austin.
“The Hamilton Center is an important part of UF’s interdisciplinary commitment to rigorous scholarship, to excellent teaching, and to intellectual diversity,” Sasse wrote. “The Hamilton Center is uniquely positioned with Dr. Inboden at the helm.”
UF Spokesperson Cynthia Roldan confirmed that Inboden will begin Aug. 1.
Contact Garrett at gshanley@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter @garrettshanley.
Garrett Shanley is a third-year journalism and history major and The Alligator's Fall 2023 university administration reporter. In his free time, Garrett can be found watching Wong Kar-Wai movies and brooding.
