Jerry L. Martin was Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder. He has testified before Congress and appeared on radio and television. His publications have been praised by historian David McCullough and in the Times Literary Supplement.
In addition to a dozen scholarly articles, Dr. Martin is author or co-author of major reports that have received national publicity. Losing America’s Memory has been cited in hundreds of newspaper articles, including full-page reports in the New York Times and Washington Post and discussion by Sam Donaldson and George Will on the Sunday news program, “This Week.” Newspapers and television also gave nation-wide coverage to The Shakespeare Files: What English Majors Are Really Studying and E Pluribus Unum (discussed, among others, by David Broder in his nationally syndicated column).
His essay on the postmodern university appeared in The Imperiled Academy (Transaction) and was reprinted in Academic Questions and the Partisan Review. He also contributed essays to Studies in the Philosophy of Mind (Canadian Philosophical Association), The Core and the Canon: A National Debate (University of North Texas), Studies in the Quality of Life (University of Colorado), Innovative Models for University Research (North Holland), and Models of God and Other Ultimate Realities (Springer, forthcoming).
Martin has spoken at the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the American Political Science Association, the Society for Legal and Political Philosophy, the American Classical Society, the American Mathematical Society, and at over twenty universities.
He has been Andrew W. Mellon Congressional Fellow, Distinguished Annual Georgia Humanities Lecturer, and Bertram Morris Lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He served as state President of the American Association of University Professors and on the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Higher Education in Virginia. He is the founding President and current Chairman Emeritus of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
He received an M.A. in philosophy and political science from the University of Chicago, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University and a Doctor of Humane Letters from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. In recent years, he has taught in the graduate programs at Georgetown University and the Catholic University of America.
Martin has no current religious affiliation but his upbringing was Protestant. He and his wife live in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia.