It is with the deepest sadness that I have learned of the sudden passing of William Cullen Dennis II (1941-2023), one of Liberty Fund’s longtime employees who helped shape the form and substance of the foundation’s mission in its middle years. Bill came from an old and prominent Indiana Quaker family in the town of Richmond. His great-grandfather was a professor of biology at Earlham College, while his namesake, and grandfather, William Cullen Dennis I, was college president from 1929-1946. His father was David Worth Dennis who served in the US Congress from January 3, 1969, to January 3, 1975. Like his forebears, Bill carried on his family’s tradition of intellectual and civic engagement.

There was a time when Bill represented the face of Liberty Fund to the wider public, but he had a long and distinguished career well before that time in both higher education and public service. Having studied with the eminent historian, Edmund Morgan at Yale University, Bill completed his dissertation, A Federalist Persuasion: The American Ideal of the Connecticut Federalists in 1971 and was soon given tenure and later a full professorship at Denison University in Ohio, where he had already been teaching American history since 1968. He held that position until 1984, during which time he also became active in environmental issues, serving for several years as the director of the Denison University wilderness program.

For those who did not have the pleasure of knowing Bill personally, you can still obtain a good sense of the person through his legacy, which includes such successful colloquia as “Turning Points in American History”  which was a joint project originally conceived with his longtime friend, fellow historian and former Liberty Fund colleague, GM Curtis. Bill also contributed a foreword to the Liberty Fund Edition of Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom and was a recent participant in the Liberty Matters roundtable forum on the same subject. But even better, you can get a good sense of Bill’s endearing personality and keen intellect in the three Intellectual Portrait videos, where he served as interviewer: “A Conversation with Richard Ware;” “A Conversation with Richard Cornuelle,” and  “A Conversation with M. Stanton Evans.”

For those of us who did know him, it is easy to understand why Bill became, for so many, the embodiment of Liberty Fund while he was here. He genuinely loved liberty, not just in abstract or philosophical ways, but upfront and personal. He embraced your liberty, which is to say, he was interested in what you had to say, even when you disagreed with him. The reason for that became clear enough. He liked people for all their various quirks and interesting differences, often relishing a good argument. The liberty of discussion was for him the prerequisite for really getting to know both the person and the importance of the principles of freedom and responsibility in general. Bill often said that he never actually left the foundation, but continued to abide in the spirit of its wider mission. Never have I seen a more thoroughly worn and studied edition of Pierre Goodrich’s Basic Memorandum.