This year Colorado celebrates 150 years of statehood and the framing of our constitution by Colorado’s founding fathers. But how many Coloradans read our constitution, or even know it exists? Come and receive a beautiful copy of the Essential Colorado Constitution, edited by Dr Vandiver, and learn why our constitution is perhaps the best in the nation—and how the US constitution is incomplete without the state constitutions. Dr Vandiver will also share fascinating facts about Colorado's 1875–76 constitutional convention, in which delegates debated regulation of monopolistic industries and protection of natural resources, public funding for religious schools, and whether to recognize Almighty God or “His Satanic Majesty” in the constitution’s preamble.
This event is open and free to the community. Light refreshments will be provided.
About the Speaker
Dr. Josh Vandiver
Josh Vandiver (Harvard AB, Princeton PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at CU Colorado Springs. He primarily teaches American politics, constitutional law, and political theory. His research centers on classical Greece and Rome, classical reception in modernity, and contemporary radicalism.
Starting in mid-2026, he will be co-editor of the peer-reviewed Journal for the Study of Radicalism (JSR), currently celebrating its twentieth year of publication by Michigan State University Press, now in collaboration CU Colorado Springs. The JSR is the leading international journal devoted exclusively to research on radical leaders, movements, and thinkers on both the Left and the Right.
A fifth-generation Southern Coloradan, Dr Vandiver was born in La Junta and raised in the town of Swink. He began his undergraduate education at Colorado College, where he fell in love with the classics and the humanities. After transferring, he completed his AB in Government at Harvard College, then went on to New College, Oxford University, as the Lord Harlech Fellow before completing his MA and PhD in Politics at Princeton University.
Dr Vandiver is a co-director of the Center for Legal Studies and serves on the advisory board of the Heller Center for Arts and Humanities. He is an associate director at the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual (CSGI), for which he edited and published in 2025 The Essential Colorado Constitution, the first pocket-sized edition of the state constitution.
Beyond campus, he serves as a vestryman at Grace and Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church.
