Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values and chair of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, will serve as UCHV’s acting director for the 2025-26 academic year while director Alan Patten is on leave.
Macedo began teaching at Princeton in 1999 and served as the director of UCHV from 2001 to July 2009. During the 2023-24 academic year, he served as the acting director of UCHV’s Program in Values and Public Life. He is also chair of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
“It is reassuring to know that the Center will be in Steve’s experienced hands during my sabbatical leave,” said Alan Patten, director of the Center and the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics. “Under his leadership, UCHV will continue to offer a full menu of events and programs in 2025-26.”
Macedo writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality. Most recently, he published “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us” in March 2025 (Princeton University Press, with Frances Lee).
He is past president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (2018-21), vice president of the American Political Science Association (2002-3), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014-present), and a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (2024-present).
“I look forward to helping the Center to continue to expand its reach,” said Macedo, “while strengthening our core commitment to the careful and fair-mined study of the important moral and practical controversies that confront the citizens of diverse democracies.”
