On Thursday, Jan. 16,  the Carleton College chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society (AHS) had its first meeting in Hasenstab Hall after three years since the previous chapter disbanded. The chapter is part of the AHS’s national student-led initiative, which seeks to “bring an alternative point of view to college campuses,” according to the AHS website. 

The AHS is a non-profit, non-partisan national organization that focuses on educating college students on foreign policy and national security issues to promote careers in these areas, based on “the Hamiltonian perspective of strong and principled American leadership in global affairs” as stated by the organization’s mission statement.

The previous iteration of the chapter was started in 2019 by a group of Political Science majors. According to Greg Marfleet, Professor of Political Science and faculty advisor to the Carleton College AHS chapter, the founding students were Vince Cone ’22, Katie Hawkes ’21, Shane Kerr ’21 and Jesse Shufro-Zletz ’22.

“They really all had a strong kind of foreign policy interests and orientation and were just looking for ways to bring new speakers to campus,” Marfleet said. 

Between 2019-2022, the Carleton AHS chapter brought in figures like Jimmy Kolker, former ambassador to Burkina Faso and Nury Turkel, former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.  

However, after the founding cohort graduated between 2021 and 2022, the club experienced a decline. “And so it kind of languished for a year or two until Charlie Rhodes actually came up and started chatting with me about reinvigorating the AHS,” Marfleet said.

“The idea struck me when I was studying abroad over the summer,” Charlie Rhodes ’27, president of the Carleton AHS chapter, said. “The other members of my group were former AHS members, and they let me know about AHS and put me in contact with their leadership. Things, from that point, started moving very quickly.” 

“I knew it was possible to do it here at Carleton,” Rhodes said, despite not knowing about the previous version of the chapter that ended in 2022. As president of the club, Rhodes is in charge of long-term planning for events and communicating and coordinating with the AHS.

The club began its planning process in Fall Term of 2024 after Rhodes sent out an email to the Political Science interest group. “That’s how the board met, and from there we just started to have weekly or bi-weekly meetings to kind of get an idea of what we wanted to do to reestablish it for winter,” Jimmy Huang ’28 said; Huang is the vice president of AHS who is responsible for keeping communication with the college and the Student Activities Office (SAO). 

The board includes Rhodes, Huang, Manoka Kozaki ’26, who serves as the treasurer, Luke Heschel ’28, the events manager and Rivers Curry ’28, the communications officer.

The AHS at Carleton plans to have term-specific themes, which will be developed through reading series, discussions, and speakers. 

“This Winter Term, we’re doing Eastern European security, and maybe more implicitly, Russia and Ukraine,” Huang said. 

For this term, the chosen book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest” by Angela Stent. Weekly discussions in the club will be based on the book and unfolding international events concerning this topic. 

Additionally, the AHS is currently planning its first speaker event, which will be held in Feb. Kristjan Prikk, the current Estonian Ambassador to the US since 2021 and former Permanent Secretary of the Estonian Ministry of Defense, will be hosting a talk on security in the Russian border and Eastern Europe. This speaker event is being planned mainly by Rhodes, with collaboration from the Political Science department and funding from the AHS. 

“They provide us with funding for any materials that we may need based on a request basis. So this includes books, potential speakers,” Huang said.

In its first meeting, the AHS announced its Chapter Constitution, which, according to their Instagram, says that the club strives to “provoke thoughtful and productive conversation of international affairs and issues” and “to provide an open and fair space of opinions and analysis.”

These objectives pertain to the club’s commitment to “not necessarily align [itself] with the national organization,” Huang said. “Although we’re open to providing opportunities for members to participate in the national organization, our specific goal, as written in our constitution, is to promote nonpartisan conversations.”

The AHS is known for its American-focused, interventionist approach to foreign policy and national security. “It’s basically the traditional Republican, conservative, but still center-right kind of foreign policy,” said Marfleet. “It’s strong on defense. It’s strong on open trade. It’s strong on American leadership internationally.”

Although the club receives funding from AHS and constantly communicates with the organization, Huang said that “as a leadership team, we’ve kind of added a really strong emphasis to make sure that we watch what kind of message we’re putting out.”

“It’s good to make it clear that we’re not an ideological organization, at least on this campus,” Heschel said. “We haven’t been pushed [by the AHS] to promote any sort of particular views…we’re not even using one of their select speakers.”

Due to its position as a club, AHS is registered with SAO and has received funding from the Carleton Student Association (CSA) for specific events. 

However, Kozaki said, “Since it just started this year, we didn’t have a chance to request spring budget allocation the previous year.” Kozaki plans to request CSA funding for the club starting next academic year, which will allow it to fund the events and resources that are not covered by the national AHS organization. 

When asked about the importance of the AHS at Carleton, Rhodes said that “it could play an important role in facilitating discussions on recent international issues outside classes. We don’t feel like we have that much of that here, so having a formal place for people to learn more and be able to discuss, I think that’s actually very important.”

“It seemed to me like a good opportunity to do something that would be more cross-campus because a lot of clubs here…don’t involve the whole student body,” Heschel said, adding that, “what AHS allows us to do is to have this place and bring it to Carleton as a community with both the speaker events and the public meetings we have.”

On the foreign policy and national security topics discussed by the AHS, Marfleet said, “I guess there is a bit of a Carleton bubble on a lot of policy issues and positions,” Marfleet said that the club’s objective, in his perspective, “is to bring in people who can help broaden our viewpoint and maybe get us out of the bubble a little bit.”

Additionally, Marfleet said the club is important as a way of “getting students engaged in their education, [which is] the whole point of a liberal arts college.” He said that, AHS represents “students taking the initiative to identify voices that they’d like to bring to campus that might not otherwise be represented.”

As for the future of AHS, Marfleet said he hopes to “bring in some speakers from areas that aren’t well represented in the political science department’s curriculum,” including Africa, South Asia or Latin America. 

However, the board says they are still planning the theme for next term based on the interests of their growing membership.