Student Organizations
The Austin School
The Austin School is the result of the merger of Twelfth
Revolution: Politics and History Club (see below) and the
Pinnacle Student Political Science
Conference (PSPSC). The Austin School was founded in
Spring of 2013 and officially took over the Twelfth Revolution
Lecture Seriees in Fall 2013. It is a non-profit
corporation with a board of directors and is looking to create
an executive staff. It works closely with The Austin
School: ACC Chapter and hopes to branch out and create a
UT Chapter in 2014/15. The chief aim of the Austin
School is to make Academic discourse more accessible to the
public. Toward this ends the Austin School maintains a Lecture
Series and hosts the Austin Conference in late April.
Twelfth Revolution: Politics and History Club
Twelfth Revolution: Politics and History Club was founded at
the Pinnacle ACC campus in Fall of 2007. It has held all but
one event at Pinnacle and is the most active Pinnacle student
organization.
Twelfth Revolution hosts an ecclectic range of lecture and
panel topics covering history, economics, politics,
journalism, religion, and philosophy. The club was named in
honor of Thomas Jefferson and his following quote:
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
(Taken from a letter by Jefferson, dated November 13, 1787, to William Stevens Smith, as quoted in Padover’s Jefferson On Democracy.)
The club’s unofficial logo has become Charles Wilson Peele’s 1791 portrait of Thomas Jefferson, modified with a circle and slash over Jefferson’s face ever since Spring of 2010, when the Texas State Board of Education voted to remove most references to Jefferson from Texas-approved school textbooks.
Schedules of Events: 2012-13 | 2011-12 | 2010-11 | 2009-10 | 2008-09
Pinnacle Student Political Science Conference
The conference is held annually. During its third year in 2011, I moved the date to the spring semester. The goal of the conference is to give students an opportunity to write a critical paper and present it before an audience. We usually conduct four panels, and the papers have been refreshingly good.
Austin Philosophy Forum
The Austin Philosophy Forum (formerly the Ethics Resource Center and frequently referred to simply as the Philosophy Forum) hosts four to six events per year. Each year has a specific theme. We show a movie for one event. For another event we give a talk on a featured philosopher. The remaining events are devoted to topic panels related to the year’s theme. The theme for 2011-12 is “Revolution and Evolution.”