Ralston College counts among its first graduates a 24-year-old man who, in his third term of study, asked me what he could do to help ensure our fledgling institution would endure for 100 years.
His query deepened a conviction that had guided me for the previous decade as I traveled the world in search of philanthropists and world-class academics to help found a university dedicated to preserving and advancing knowledge: It is what young people want but cannot easily find. Answering their call has been inspiring and, at times, challenging.
Not since the 1950s has the higher-education sector in America been under such keen scrutiny.While it is a challenge that my colleagues and I intend to meet, our efforts make clear that sustaining a new institution of higher education—even for one year, let alone a century—will rely on two things: a more widespread acknowledgement, first, of the existential danger threatening universities and, second, of the hunger among today’s youth for a space where free inquiry and the pursuit of truth are firmly upheld.
The dozens of business leaders, academics and public intellectuals who have supported Ralston College since its incorporation in 2010 were never more persuaded of its mission than last fall, when several university presidents could not provide Congress with cogent explanations for how they had—or had not—responded to widespread protests on their campuses.
I watched with great interest. Not since the 1950s had the higher-education sector in America been under such keen scrutiny, and indeed such intense suspicion, though it had long deserved to be.
We have had clarion calls from perspicacious critics for more than 70 years: From Bill Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) to Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), we have not lacked for trenchant critique of our colleges and universities.
What has been done in that time? Not a single rearguard institution—those centers that have popped up for the study of capitalism or American ideals—can claim, despite the great work they undertake, to have changed the overall direction at any university.
In 2010, Ralston College arose from a simple but tectonic insight: that we no longer have the educational institutions on which a free and flourishing human culture depends.
The College was first an online community and podcast, which expanded significantly during the Covid pandemic when so many of us found ourselves with more time and appetite to connect and grapple with the depth, complexity, and beauty of human life.
Late in 2020, the College turned an important corner when we were awarded degree-granting powers by the state of Georgia and authorized for operation. We duly launched our first degree program, our Master of Arts in the Humanities, in 2022.
We no longer have the educational institutions on which a free and flourishing human culture depends.What do we offer that is new? Paradoxically, the new is now to be found in the old.
For their first term, Ralston students travel to Greece. Living as a tight-knit community on a small bay on the island of Samos, where Pythagoras taught and Epicurus was born, our students learn ancient Greek from scratch and in the manner that languages should be learned—by speaking, listening, and reading.
In our genuinely pioneering program, we teach Ancient Greek (from Homer through to the New Testament) in tandem with Modern Greek (its linear descendent, some three millennia later), so that students can express themselves in the language as soon as possible.
The results we have seen are remarkable, providing not just the linguistic wherewithal to read Homer, Plato, and the Gospel of John, but also the tools to appreciate the precise meaning, the authorial style, and the peculiar aesthetic that each text necessarily possesses.
Such an appreciation of works of artistic genius in their original form sets the tone for the rest of the program, by combining philological precision with profound investigation of the perennial human questions that give rise to the works of art and intellect that our program explores.
In a perfect world, students on such a course would be in a position to read all the greatest works of the Western tradition in their (six or seven) original languages, but practically—on a single-year course seeking to cover so much—that is impossible.
However, we are making progress. This summer, Ralston launched a two-month Latin program for immersion in that other linguistic pillar of the Western tradition. Traveling through Sicily, Pompeii, Naples, Rome, and Florence, our students study the language, literature, and history of the Romans in the very places that forged their culture.
These programs in Greece and Italy embody several defining commitments of Ralston College. We embrace a rigorous approach to humanistic study, one rooted in the habits and practices that have traditionally shaped a liberal-arts education: direct encounters with the greatest achievements of the human spirit, study of both ancient and modern languages, and a shared scholarly community with a commitment to the transformative challenge of intellectual enquiry.
Ralston generally avoids the dusty language of “classics” or “great books” in favor of the fundamental principles that animate these traditions.After Greece, our students travel to Savannah, Georgia, where the College has an expanding campus in the city’s National Historic District.
Their studies continue throughout the academic year as they explore works of philosophy, theology, and the creative and imaginative arts. Intense scrutiny of specific works is paired with ambitious and wide-ranging surveys of both content and form. The MA is also enriched by a wide-ranging program of concerts, symposia, and guest lectures.
As required by the state of Georgia, the College is now seeking accreditation, a years-long process that we have engaged with the same dedication and seriousness that has guided the College’s expansion to date.
Ralston’s focus on Western civilization and its languages is sometimes described as classical learning—a tradition for which I have great respect, particularly as someone whose life has been blessed by opportunities to study the humanities, guided by remarkable professors.
The term “classics,” however, while greatly attractive to many, can be to others a misleading or unhelpful category. Some associate the classics and the ancient languages with narrow elitism, for example, and this is a great shame, for what I have seen firsthand in our first two graduated classes is precisely the opposite: how access to the great works of the past has helped to liberate them from the narrow confines of the present and to make the ancients their friends. This is indeed why Ralston generally avoids the dusty and potentially misleading language of “classics” or “great books” in favor of the fundamental principles and realities that animate these traditions at their best: the pursuit of truth; the freedom on which that pursuit depends; the apprehension of the beautiful; and the friendship, or fellowship, that enables us to seek after and discover these things with others.
The current fractious moment in higher education may come to support my conviction that the younger generation is deserving of a university experience that is focused on questions at the heart of a meaningful life—love and loss, mortality and suffering, freedom, justice, redemption, and so on—rather than merely instrumental or activist ends. Such an education is indeed possible only if the genuine and free adventure of the pursuit of truth is not subordinated to the indoctrination and ideology now plaguing so many institutions.
It is of vital importance that the university remains a space where reasoned debate outweighs appeals to emotion or political dogma.It is of vital importance that the university remains a space where all sides of a question—any question deemed to have intellectual and educational value—can be explored without constraint, where objections can be freely stated, and where reasoned debate outweighs appeals to emotion or political dogma. At Ralston, our faculty members are free to broach any topic. That stands in contrast to the many universities where free enquiry is now constrained, if not in principle then in practice.
The education students at Ralston College receive is of course highly valuable for employment—our graduates are working in medicine, education, architecture and the arts, technology, journalism, the academy, and business—but, most importantly, it gives them access, for the rest of their lives, to the ever-enriching, inexhaustible riches of the humanities. After all, what is life about, and how do we live our lives well? There are no more fundamental questions than those.
The late Roger Scruton said that “a culture is just the things we have loved, and transmitting a culture is just teaching others to love them too.” This is what I believe also. But we must carry out this essential task in new and inventive ways. The time for new colleges and universities—institutions that will transmit our civilization’s fundamental ideals by inspiring the upcoming generation to love what is highest and best, and to defend that with both humility and courage—is now.
Stephen Blackwood is the founding president of Ralston College. Request an application for the 2025-26 academic year here.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
