# Walter Berns American constitutional scholar and political philosopher, associated with the Straussian tradition and later a longtime fellow at the [[American Enterprise Institute]]. Berns wrote extensively on the U.S. Constitution, the [[First Amendment]], capital punishment, and the moral foundations of democratic citizenship, and became an influential voice in the neoconservative movement (see [[Neoconservatism]]). Berns was a Cornell faculty member during the [[Willard Straight Hall Takeover]]. Publicly named as a target by protest leaders and subjected to personal threats, he resigned in the aftermath — alongside [[Allan Bloom]] — and took a position at the University of Toronto. His departure is one of the most frequently cited faculty exits in the conservative memory of the event. --- ## See Also - [[Willard Straight Hall Takeover]] - [[Allan Bloom]] - [[Neoconservatism]]