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Bradley C. S. Watson joined the regular faculty of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government in 2022, having served as Distinguished Fellow in Jurisprudence in 2020 and 2021. Prior to joining Hillsdale, he was the Professor of Politics at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania, where he held the Philip M. McKenna Chair in American and Western Political Thought, and was Co-Director of the Center for Political and Economic Thought, a research and public affairs institute dedicated to the scholarly exposition of freedom, Western civilization, and the American experience. He is also a Senior Scholar of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute. 

He serves on the boards of directors of several organizations, including The Philadelphia Society and the National Association of Scholars. He has held visiting faculty appointments at Claremont McKenna College and Princeton University, where he was a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has also been Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, and W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton. 

He has authored or edited many books, including Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea, Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence, Progressive Challenges to the American Constitution: A New Republic, Civil Rights and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy, Ourselves and Our Posterity: Essays in Constitutional Originalism, and The Idea of the American University. He was educated in Canada, Belgium, and the United States, and holds advanced degrees in law, philosophy, and political science.