Caroline DiFrango '23 won first place in the 2023 Philip L. Carret Thomas Jefferson Essay Contest. Foster Davis '23 placed second, Claire E. Lancaster '23 and Delaney Guidi '25 tied for third.
Caroline DiFrango ’23, Foster Davis ’23, Claire E. Lancaster ’23 and Delaney Guidi ’25 were selected as the winners of the 2023 Philip L. Carret Thomas Jefferson Essay Contest.
DiFrango, the first prize winner, received the $1,000 prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia, for her essay titled “Down Monument Ave.” Davis received second place and received $500. Lancaster and Guidi tied for third, and they both received $100.
On Nov. 23, 2021, a 7-foot bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from the New York City Hall where it had stood for 106 years. Because of Jefferson’s history as a slaveholder, officials unanimously voted to move the statue to the New York City Historical Society, where it will be on loan for 10 years. The original cast of the statue still stands in Washington D.C.’s Capitol Rotunda.
No statue of Jefferson stands on Elon’s campus. However, 25 years ago Phillip Carret, a New York investor and admirer of both Elon University and Thomas Jefferson, generously endowed Elon’s Carret Essay Contest with its focus on Jefferson. When creating the endowment in 1997, Carret mandated that the contest must include “the ideals and principles embodied in Thomas Jefferson’s life and career.”
This year students were given the following information before being invited to respond to the following prompt:
“Much as the Jefferson statue has been recontextualized from a seat of government to a site of historical commemoration, recent Carret contests have attempted to reconceptualize Jefferson’s legacy within the bounds of the endowment’s requirements. Is recontextualization sufficient in challenging harmful historical legacies, and what is the value and/or potential harm in continuing to focus attention on Jefferson?”
The four winners will present their essays on Student Undergraduate Research Forum (SURF) Day on Tuesday, April 25 at 10 a.m. in the Koenigsberger Learning Center, 127. A question-and-answer session will follow.