Our Team
Dr. Murray Bessette is director of academic programs at the Alexander Hamilton Society and founding principal at Meritus Consulting.
Previously, he served as senior vice president of education at Common Sense Society from 2021 to 2024. In this role, he was responsible for designing and implementing its fellowship programs, including the Carolina Fellowship (in Bluffton, SC), the John Quincy Adams Fellowship (in Washington, DC), the Founders Foreign Policy Fellowship (Northeast, US), the Britannia Fellowship (Cotswolds, Britain), the Caledonia Fellowship (Edinburgh, Scotland), and the Europa Fellowship (Fehérvárcsurgó, Hungary). Bessette was also responsible for creating and directing its K-12 initiatives, which included a complete charter school curriculum, the American Civics Project, and a comprehensive series of teacher development programs—including seminars, workshops, and webinars—and for planning and executing the programming for its academic events.
Prior to joining Common Sense Society, Bessette served as director of academic programs at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation from 2016 to 2021, where he established its academic programs—K-12, college, China studies and Poland studies—in the lead up to the opening of the Victims of Communism Museum. He also was lead program organizer of the Foundation’s flagship events, which regularly include participation of US Representatives, US Senators, and former presidents and other senior governmental officials from Central and Eastern Europe.
Before joining the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Bessette was a tenured associate professor at Morehead State University where he taught and mentored undergraduate and graduate students, coordinated the undergraduate government program, and led the development and implementation of a new MA in government, as well as undergraduate and graduate certificates in intelligence studies.
Bessette has edited or authored numerous books, chapters, articles, and reviews; organized and presented at dozens of international and national conferences and panels; and co-directed more than $3 million in US federal grants. He was a Lincoln fellow of the Claremont Institute, an academic fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and has served as co-director of the Bluegrass State Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, president of the Kentucky Political Science Association, an academic advisory board member of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, and as a reviewer for Interpretation, Citizenship Studies, Cengage Learning, and Palgrave Macmillan. He holds a doctorate in political science and a master’s in American government from Claremont Graduate University, a master’s in political philosophy, a honours bachelor’s in political science, and certificate in globalization and governance studies from the University of Alberta, as well as an executive certificate in counter-terrorism studies from the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel.
Dr. Gregory McBrayer is senior consultant at Meritus Consulting, as well as associate professor of political science and director of the core curriculum at Ashland University. He teaches courses in political philosophy and international relations. Prior to coming to Ashland, he was an assistant professor at Morehead State University, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University, and a visiting assistant professor at Gettysburg College. He has published articles in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy and Kentron: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Antique, as well as reviews in Interpretation, The Journal for Hellenic Studies, The American Journal of Islamic Social Science, and Political Science Quarterly. He is the author (with Mary Nichols and Denise Schaeffer) of Plato’s Euthydemus (Focus, 2011) and is the editor of Xenophon: The Shorter Writings (Cornell, 2018).
Dr. David Rose is senior fellow at the American Institute of Economic Research, senior consultant at Meritus Consulting, and professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he previously served as department chair, director of graduate studies, senator, and associate director of the honors college. He is currently in his second term on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
He was President/CEO of a speaking group, The Discussion Club, for 14 years, which brought in top-level speakers from around the world for lectures and debates in a formal setting.
He has participated in a wide variety of academic leadership searches, sometimes serving as search committee chair. He founded the Hayek Chair in Economic History and led that search as well. He has advised academic leaders at several schools and was a participant in the Pew Education Roundtable and the Knight Collaborative.
He received his doctorate in Economics in 1987 from the University of Virginia. He has published scholarly articles in a wide range of areas. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the HFL Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the John R. Templeton Foundation.
In 2008 he received the St. Louis Business Journal’s Economic Educator of the year award. His book, The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2011), was selected one of CHOICE’s outstanding titles of 2012. His latest book is titled Why Culture Matters Most (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has given many seminars, workshops, and lectures on three continents. He frequently contributes to policy debates through radio and television interviews as well as in Op-Eds in outlets like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Word on Business, The School Choice Advocate, Forbes, The Washington Times, and The Christian Science Monitor on topics ranging from social security, monetary policy, fiscal policy, judicial philosophy, education reform, and healthcare reform.