While his son contemplates a 2016 presidential bid, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul is busy starting up a new institute dedicated to teaching college students worldwide peace and prosperity.
“If we have no more wars, we’ll be successful,” Paul told reporters at a press conference Wednesday introducing the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He was joined at the press conference by present and former Congressmen Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), John Duncan (R-Tenn.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) The former three are all board members at the institute.
The institute will be run through Paul’s Foundation for Rational Economics and Education (FREE) organization, a non-profit that Paul started in 1976.
According to the institute’s executive director, Daniel McAdams, the 12-week summer school differs from a traditional think tank program because it will focus specifically on educating college and graduate students about non-interventionist foreign policies.
“We have to reach the young people and change the people’s attitudes,” Paul said at the press conference. “But I am optimistic… I haven’t had a young person come up and say: ‘We need more war.’ Young people are instinctively opposed to this.”
The website for the institute notes that the program “will aggressively promote student writing on foreign affairs on its website and will launch a student writing award program to recognize the best of college journalism.”
Earlier this month Paul launched his own K-12 homeschooling curriculum to offer students an “education in liberty like no other.”
