Morning Wire XX
[0] A growing number of Americans are turning away from the establishment education system amid lowered standards and the rise of politicized curricula.
[1] But what are the viable alternatives to that system?
[2] Some innovative educators are working to build just that.
[3] In this episode, we talk with one of these educators, Stephen Blackwood, the founding president of Ralston College, who's striving for the revival and reinvention of the traditional university.
[4] I'm Daily Wire editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[5] it's Sunday, May 19th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
[6] Joining us now to discuss the current crisis facing American academia, and some of the solutions to that crisis is Stephen Blackwood, founding president of Ralston College.
[7] Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
[8] Pleasure to be here.
[9] Thank you.
[10] So you're the founding president of Ralston College.
[11] It's a liberal arts college located in the beautiful Savannah, Georgia, where my wife lived for a while, actually.
[12] First, tell us a bit about your background.
[13] I know some ancient texts play into your studies, including Boetheus.
[14] Well, you know, I'm just a simple farm boy.
[15] Born in Alberta, Canada, grew up in beautiful Prince Edward Island on the East Coast, on a little family farm.
[16] So really had a sort of experience of nature and, you know, animals and, you know, all that sort of rural life involves.
[17] I also grew up in a really big family.
[18] I'm the oldest of 10 children.
[19] And so I kind of grew up immersed in this whole question of what a beautiful and wonderful and complicated and sometimes difficult things.
[20] a human being is.
[21] So that was my sort of deep background.
[22] That's where I really came from, if I can put it that way.
[23] My family moved to the States to be 30 years ago this year to Virginia.
[24] I went off to college and had an encounter with, let's just call it, the foundational ideas and ideals of Western civilization through some of the greatest texts and works of art and literature ever written.
[25] That was very formative for me because what it gave me was a way of understanding these deep realities that I had sort of grown up intuiting in my family and in nature, my family's religious life and all of those things.
[26] So it gave me a kind of philosophical, rational structure to try to understand, let's say, and never really completely penetrate these great and deep mysteries or these most powerful realities that we all have some intuition of.
[27] But it gave me a really solid grasp into those kind of great questions.
[28] And so I did my undergraduate in the classics and then a master's and then my doctorate at Emory University on a figure named Boethius, a fifth century Latin poet politician who left us one of the greatest works of consolation literature, that is to say, works of literature for people in hard times who are facing death or suffering or tragedy, loss of any kind.
[29] And this is just an absolutely searingly beautiful work.
[30] I know you're well familiar with it.
[31] But even today, you know, anyone could pick that up at a used bookstore, having a hard time.
[32] And I can tell you those words are going to leap off the page.
[33] So that's broadly speaking where I came from.
[34] And you came to found a college in Savannah, Georgia.
[35] What inspired you?
[36] you to establish Ralston?
[37] Well, of course, working with a small team of people.
[38] It wasn't by any means just me. But the insight was fairly simple, really.
[39] It was based in a very, if I dare say so myself, actually a true analysis that higher education was broken and that the best thing that we could do to remedy that would be the best thing you could do in any other stagnant industry.
[40] And that would be competition.
[41] Start new things that are better, faster, cheaper, more beautiful, more important, more attractive, whatever.
[42] And I don't mean to suggest that that makes it easy.
[43] I can tell you from firsthand experience, it sure as heck is not easy.
[44] But what it was based in was that, I think, fundamentally accurate analysis that higher education was broken, and the best thing we could do to reform and renew it was to start new colleges and universities.
[45] And that's what we decided to do.
[46] So you sought to build something that offers an alternative to what's become of establishment academia.
[47] What sets this college apart?
[48] Can you summarize the philosophy of the college?
[49] You betcha.
[50] You know, I'll say a few things there.
[51] John, the first is that it's very important to us.
[52] The college be based in a positive vision.
[53] The fact of the matter is you can't build anything out of a kind of merely critical or reactionary vision.
[54] You can't, you know, anti -woke is not a program for building something.
[55] It's a program for fighting against something.
[56] And, you know, I often use the analogy of architecture.
[57] I do not like, in fact, I very much dislike brutalist architecture, which we have altogether too much in this country.
[58] But anti -brutalism is not a program for building a single darn building.
[59] You can't give an architect, tell them anti -brutalist.
[60] You've got to say, well, what actually do you want to build for?
[61] What are the positive principles, ratios, ideas, ideals, human scale, you know, traditions that you want to incarnate in this new building.
[62] And so that's the same with the college.
[63] And so we've defined ourselves around four fundamental values or commitments.
[64] The first is to truth, of course, no university worthy of the name really can be dedicated to anything other than truth.
[65] That's what the universities are about.
[66] The transmission of what we know and the discovery of truth we don't yet fully grasp.
[67] So absolute commitment to truth.
[68] Second, to the freedom that the pursuit of truth depends upon.
[69] Above all, that's freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, of course, but also freedom of conscience, freedom of association.
[70] These are absolutely the bedrock of our ability to pursue the truth.
[71] Third, to the apprehension of beauty, of the beautiful in all of its forms.
[72] And finally, to the fellowship or friendship that makes it possible for us to pursue these things together.
[73] And also paradoxically is the result of pursuing these things together.
[74] So we become friends with the people we pursue truth together.
[75] But we also need others in order to pursue that.
[76] We all know that, that we think better when we talk it over with people.
[77] And people help us see what we don't know.
[78] And we try and help them see things that they don't fully grasp.
[79] So those are the four fundamental principles or commitments that the college is founded on.
[80] And beyond that, I would simply say our aspiration is really very simple.
[81] It's to establish, to build one of the finest universities in history.
[82] I didn't say it was easy, but it's simple to say.
[83] And we actually believe that the ingredients of a great university, though they've been forgotten, it's kind of like a family recipe that's been lost, that the actual ingredients are not that complicated.
[84] It's kind of like, as I sometimes say in it, by analogy, the ingredients to being a great parent are not that complicated.
[85] We all know what they are, unconditional love and discipline and, you know, really thinking about and providing opportunities of the right kind.
[86] in the right way to your children.
[87] These are not secrets, and everyone knows them.
[88] That doesn't mean it's easy to be a good parent.
[89] It's actually very, very difficult to ask anyone who is one.
[90] But something similar is true with the university.
[91] The actual ingredients are not that complicated.
[92] We've just forgotten what they are in our time.
[93] We've lost touch with the recipe, but they're not that hard to describe.
[94] You need great teachers, scholars who love what they know and who are really profoundly knowledgeable and they want to transmit that knowledge to the young.
[95] You need young people to students who want to learn and who want to learn what you have to teach.
[96] Then you need to have buildings, a campus that facilitate certain kinds of conversation and community.
[97] And then, of course, you need to have certain kinds of defining rituals that bring that community together around its fundamental pursuits.
[98] But, you know, we could go into that further and we could, you know, tweak around the edges here and there, but fundamentally the ingredients of a great university.
[99] And we've really thought this through.
[100] You go back to the Middle Ages the thousand years ago when Oxford and Cambridge and Paris and Bologna in these places, these great universities.
[101] were being founded, you can look at that in the Renaissance, in modern period, you can look at 19th century Germany, 16th century Cambridge, all the way up to 20th and 21st century United States.
[102] When universities are at the best, they have these fundamental ingredients, and we're looking to rediscover those and to put them together in a way that is right and appropriate for our time and place.
[103] Well, as you say rightly and profoundly, you have to have a positive vision for something you're building.
[104] You also mentioned, though, that you're answering a crisis in the American education system as well.
[105] It strikes me, for example, that for your foundational pillar of seeking truth, you have to first actually believe truth exist to seek it.
[106] To embrace freedom, freedom of thought, you have to first believe that freedom is inherently valuable.
[107] In other words, these are answers to some really troubling themes that we see in American academia.
[108] Can you discuss that?
[109] Of course.
[110] Let me first say, I hope just for your listeners' benefit, I think what you have said just now is extremely profound, and absolutely necessary to the life of any university.
[111] You know, just as when I became a citizen in the United States, 15 or 16 years ago now, I had to swear an oath to uphold the principles of the Constitution, in the Constitution itself, obviously, so too any organization or institution.
[112] It has terms according to which it can be what it is.
[113] And you can't be a university without holding to freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry and belief in the discovery of truth any more than frankly you can become a citizen of the United States without upholding the First Amendment and the rest of the Constitution.
[114] So you can see where this is going, of course, is that in our time and place, not every one all the time, but the vast number of our universities have really fundamentally forgotten, if not explicitly betrayed, their fundamental value proposition, which is the pursuit, the transmission, and the discovery of truth itself.
[115] So let me say another couple of things here.
[116] just quickly, John.
[117] And the first is that, you know, this is not a new problem.
[118] I know that this is in the news these days.
[119] I know we've had some very high -profile situations on campuses, which are just shocking in so many ways.
[120] I know that we've had other forms of outside the university activism that is no doubt traceable to the university.
[121] And I know that we've even had high -profile testimony of university presidents in Congress recently.
[122] And those are all things that should give us extraordinary pause and cause for alarm because of what they say about what's going on in the inside of these universities.
[123] But it needs to be said, this is not a new problem.
[124] You can go back to perhaps the most famous book written about this in all of, you know, American recent last hundred year history is William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale.
[125] That was written in the early 1950s.
[126] That's more than 70 years ago that that book was written.
[127] And it was a clarion call then where you can go to the closing of the American mind by Alan Bloom, probably one of the deepest critiques of the university in history.
[128] And that's nearly 40 years ago now.
[129] And then there's, of course, Roger Kimball's tenured radicals in the early 90s and many, many, many other books besides.
[130] My point is, we have not lacked for really trenchant and clear seeing criticism of the university.
[131] We have not lacked for good diagnosis.
[132] What we have lacked for is the will and the vision to do something about it.
[133] You know, in that 70 years since Buckley wrote his book, what have we accomplished?
[134] What have we actually done to turn this ship around?
[135] Now, of course, I know, and these are many of my friends trying to work from within the universities to reform them.
[136] And I support those efforts in every way I can because I think they're absolutely vital antidotes.
[137] But what we have to admit is that in the time that we've been taking this reform from within strategy, we have failed utterly to turn the tide of any major university in this country.
[138] And so, you know, my argument fundamentally is that what we need to address this problem is competition in new beginnings.
[139] But you can look at the problem within these universities from any number of different ways.
[140] And I don't want to dwell on the negative.
[141] But I think, you know, first of all, you have astonishing ideological capture.
[142] You have the universities, broadly speaking, and again, I know there are exceptions and so on.
[143] And, you know, I'm not talking about this person or that person in particular.
[144] But broadly speaking, the atmosphere of opinion is, one that is highly ideological in the vein of a kind of neo -Marxist nihilism.
[145] And, you know, the problem is that that worldview is profoundly corrosive of human life.
[146] You know, when you reduce everything to power, what it means is that every conversation, every relationship, every institution is only about power all the time.
[147] And the result of that is that it makes it impossible to have any good faith relationship with anyone.
[148] You know, even what we would call love or good faith dialogue or rational conversation.
[149] These are all just constructs of the will to power.
[150] It's an ultimately cynical perspective.
[151] And so the point I'm making is that when that idea spreads from the universities as it has into all of our other cultural institutions, into all of the aspects of what makes up a culture, whether it's our architecture, whether it's our art, whether it's our policies on family life, whether it is our journalism, whether it is our nonprofit world, any other aspect of what makes a culture a culture, it deadens, corrods, and destroys that, you might say, free and beautiful relationship that human beings can have, and it closes and darkens the horizon.
[152] And so this is a very, very big problem.
[153] I would say it's an existential problem, but it's not the only problem at universities.
[154] We also have the problem, just very briefly.
[155] We have the problems of vocationalization.
[156] We treat the universities as if they should be, you know, trade schools.
[157] Well, they're just not good at that.
[158] their trade schools are much better at being trade schools.
[159] And in fact, in history, we had a much wider range of pathways for the realization of human potential than we do today.
[160] There's a great deal of arrogance in our time that thinks that we're doing things better than ever in the past.
[161] Actually, our universities are pretty lousy, and they're not good at getting people jobs.
[162] And in earlier periods, we had a wider range of possibilities.
[163] Internships and the guilds, the monastery, the home, self -education.
[164] You can go through and look at most of the people you admire from the history of Western civilization and other civilizations beyond did not go to university.
[165] We need to recover that truth.
[166] Beyond that, I would say there's, of course, a huge cost crisis driven largely by federal subsidy through the student loan program, which, however well intended, has been a disaster for students in terms of the debt burden.
[167] It's fundamentally the driver of the increase in cost because there's no normal mechanisms to shut off the tap, no normal market mechanisms to shut off the tap.
[168] And then you have the infantile of student life, this kind of nanny state that has taken over culturally in the universities, and then ultimately the evacuation of the curriculum, where we're simply not teaching the things that people need to know.
[169] And then, of course, you have a loss of standard.
[170] How you get into a university and how you get out of the university have become extremely ideologically based, rather than driven fundamentally by kind of objectivity about the caliber and quality and both the aptitude and the attitude of the student, his or herself.
[171] So you've got this kind of a broad range of issues.
[172] This is not a simple problem, but at the heart of it, I would say the biggest problem is this ideological capture, the consequences of which we see spreading around our country like wildfire.
[173] One of the things you said that struck me is this darkening of the horizon.
[174] And I look at the universities, my own experience there.
[175] I look at what's happening on campuses now.
[176] And I do see something very dark.
[177] There's a lack of hope there.
[178] I think it sort of flows out of a darkened view of the past.
[179] And I think this brings us back to your college and your goals in terms of engaging with past texts, past beautiful, wise texts and works of art. That wisdom from the past that we can learn from there is a hope there.
[180] And there's also a breaking of this ideological capture that you mentioned by looking back to the past for ancient wisdom.
[181] Can you discuss that in terms of the focus of your educational program?
[182] You betcha.
[183] Let me just first zoom out and draw to our listeners' attention, John, the fact that every institution, that every species, you know, every conscious species at least, depends upon a transmission from one generation to another.
[184] You know, if the mama bears don't teach the baby bears how to be a bear, you know, they're not going to be a hunt in the woods.
[185] And fundamentally, they're the same as true of any culture.
[186] It needs to have mechanisms of transmission of what it is, of what it understands, of how it approaches your reality itself.
[187] And so there's a direct connection in the United States right now between the skepticism and cynicism about the very fabric of our country, you know, the First Amendment of the Constitution, for example, and about our political institutions, the balance of powers, there's a direct connection between a radical skepticism about whether this whole republic is even worth preserving, on the one hand, and the failure to transmit the truth and value of those things in our universities and in our education system at large.
[188] And so what I would say is that, Roger Scruton, the late British philosopher, had a beautiful phrase when he said, you know, a culture is just the things we have loved.
[189] And transmitting a culture is just teaching others to love them too.
[190] And I think when it really comes down to it, where conservatives have failed, so they've failed to teach the young what they love.
[191] They failed to transmit this beautiful inheritance from the past.
[192] And then just say a word about what the humanities are.
[193] The humanities are really just the record of what other human beings in the past have thought about human experience.
[194] You know, I don't know about you, John, but, you know, I find life pretty, pretty tough to figure out.
[195] Day to day, life is difficult.
[196] And I'm blessed to live in a great country in a relatively peaceful place at this point in time for all of the terrible things that we see in the news and beyond.
[197] But, you know, life is hard.
[198] Every human being has to deal with mortality, with questions of what is the right way to live, with loss, with love, with betrayal, with questions of justice.
[199] And, I mean, why would you not want to avail yourself of the greatest that other people have thought?
[200] You know, the humanities are just, imagine that you want to grow a great crop because you're hungry and you want to have good food to eat.
[201] And you've received from the past the greatest seeds to grow.
[202] I mean, that's kind of what, you know, the humanities are like casting forth the seeds of understanding into the future to us.
[203] I mean, why would you, you know, why would you not want that?
[204] And so that's really all, when we talk about the transmission of knowledge, and when it really it's bedrock, you know, the university gets a bad name because it often devotes itself to things that are too distant from the real world.
[205] But really at the bedrock, you know, the humanities are about enabling people, what I call, to pass the deathbed test.
[206] What's the deathbed test?
[207] It means there you are on your deathbed, you know, at the end of your life, and you're asking yourself, did I live a good life or not?
[208] Did I live a life that I think was worth living?
[209] And there's surely not anything more important to any of us than that.
[210] And what does that involve?
[211] It means something like, do I feel like I live truly in relation to the things that I thought were most important, whether it's our family or friends or community or country or whatever the case may be?
[212] And the point of making is that the humanities are fundamentally about enabling people to live lives that they can be proud to have lived, that they can regard and know to be worth living.
[213] And so what we're doing at Ralston College is trying to enable the whole program, the whole college is set up to enable our students to directly connect with, you might say, that fundamental deep river of human wisdom through time.
[214] And that's both enabling to have direct contact with those things from the past and not micromanaging it, not tell them here's what you have to believe about this, but actually provide the context where they can have a humble and serious and life.
[215] changing encounter with a great work of art or wisdom or beauty from the past.
[216] And then also to create the context of a community.
[217] We talked about freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, you know, what the rules of the road, what is the context in which we can do that with each other?
[218] And so, you know, those are the fundamental ingredients.
[219] But I just want to say one of the thing here, John, and that is that we used to have a can -do attitude in America.
[220] Now you talk, people think, well, what could we ever do about, you know, these big problems, you know, whether they're in the university or health care or culture.
[221] And I think, well, you know, what are you talking about?
[222] We're living in the United States for America.
[223] I mean, just to give you an idea, you know, we have thousands of universities, depending on what you count, two year and four year in this country.
[224] But it's something like one every institution was founded every two weeks for two centuries, John.
[225] And actually a lot of them happened over 50 years.
[226] So it's something like two a week for 50 years.
[227] And now we have this kind of passivity with respect.
[228] to our cultural stagnancy in the crisis of Western civilization.
[229] And you want to say, hold on a second.
[230] There's people in this country who are wealthy enough to found universities in every state in this country and give them billion dollar endowments.
[231] And so one of the things that we're trying to show is that it's completely possible.
[232] The recipes from the past, they still work.
[233] We can renew and revive the fundamental mechanisms for the transmission of not only the United States, but of Western civilization at large.
[234] It lies only to us actually to have.
[235] have the courage and the vision to do that.
[236] You just convinced me to enroll in Ralston College.
[237] We are going to be watching with interest what you do with Ralston College.
[238] I can't wait to come visit the campus in Savannah.
[239] Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
[240] Thanks so much for having me on, John.
[241] That was Stephen Blackwood, founding president of Ralston College, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.