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UVU announces new leadership for Center for Constitutional Studies

By Ashtyn Asay - | Feb 15, 2022
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Scott Paul, pictured on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021.
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Grace Mallon, the new executive director and visiting assistant professor at the UVU Center for Constitutional Studies.
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Verlan Lewis, pictured on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021.

The Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University announced its new directors and endowed chair Tuesday.

Scott Paul, the interim director of CCS, will take over full time as director of the center. Paul was named interim director in July 2020 when the previous director, Rodney K. Smith, passed away. Prior to his appointment, Paul had served as the executive director of CCS since 2018.

“I’m incredibly excited for the future of the Center for Constitutional Studies, it’s an institution that I’ve been involved with since its inception,” Paul said. “I’m very proud of where it’s come and honored to be a part of where it’s going to go.”

Some of Paul’s goals as he officially steps into this new role are to maintain the momentum and trajectory for the center set by his predecessors and to continue educating not just UVU students, but K-12 students as well, on the Constitution and legislative process — education that he believes is more vital now than ever before.

“I want to continue to develop our academic programming here at UVU and enhance the outreach that we do to our local community and now to an online community,” Paul said. “As you read about polls and data of a dramatic decline in civic knowledge among the general population and as you see really unsettling events play out around the country you grow concerned about our civic institutions … we feel the pressure to do what we can to improve civic education and civic engagement.”

Grace Mallon will serve as the center’s new executive director and visiting assistant professor. Mallon completed her doctoral research on federalism and intergovernmental relations in the early United States at the University of Oxford and served as one of the first research assistants for the Quill Project, a research project that focuses on digitally modeling the creation of constitutions and other important documents.

“Over the next two years, my goal is to make a wealth of new research from the center on American constitutional history available to the public,” Mallon said in a press release. “The research is being produced by our brilliant undergraduate researchers. I am so excited to work with these gifted students and to see what they do next with the skills that their UVU education and their CCS research training have imparted to them.”

Verlan Lewis will serve as the center’s new David & Laurea Stirling Endowed Chair of Constitutional Studies. Prior to this appointment, Lewis served as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Lewis’s book “Ideas of Power: The Politics of American Party Ideology Development” was published in 2019.

“The mission of the center, which is to promote the instruction, research, and study of constitutionalism, is so important,” Lewis said in a press release. “I look forward to working with the wonderful students, faculty, and staff at CCS. My own life has been profoundly shaped by great professors who have taught and mentored me, and I hope that I can pass on some of the good that others have shown to me.”

Paul is excited to work with Mallon and Lewis, who he believes will be a great asset to the students at UVU.

“How fortunate the Center for Constitutional Studies is to have Dr. Verlan Lewis and Dr. Grace Mallon join us here. Any institution would be pleased to have scholars of their caliber join,” Paul said. “Certainly our center will benefit from their knowledge and their expertise, and UVU students, in particular, will benefit from learning from these two world-class scholars.”

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