The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) has announced receipt of the largest single planned gift from an individual to the Institute.  The donor, who has requested anonymity, has completed the fifth installment of $100,000, a $500,000 commitment to further the AHI’s mission to promote excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism.

AHI Charter Fellow Robert Paquette says that the gift “will touch the lives of hundreds of students and adults hungry for knowledge about American ideals and institutions. We are deeply grateful to this remarkably generous and patriotic individual.”

Paquette says the recent gift will be directed towards AHI student programs that have been created to provide for the innovative teaching of civic and economic knowledge to promote a genuine free marketplace for ideas.

AHI student programs include the AHI Undergraduate Fellows, Publius Society, Edmund Burke Association, Christopher Dawson Society, Entrepreneurship Club as well as the Fifth Annual Carl B. Menges Colloquium which will be held April 12-15, 2012 at the Turning Stone Resort in Verona, NY.  This year the colloquium is dedicated to “Limited Government” and the event keynote speaker will be social commentator Roger Kimball, Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.