On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Stephen Blackwood, president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. For his return to the podcast, Stephen provides a one-year update on Ralston College’s first round of graduates. The two dive into the kinds of students that they have been accepted and encouragement for those looking to apply. They also discuss Ralston’s overall goal of intervening in higher education to create a college that is worthy of the tradition it seeks to transmit.
Today’s episode of Anchored is brought to you with support from America’s Christian Credit Union. Find out how ACCU can be the banking partner to your school or family by visiting americaschristiancu.com/CLT.
On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Stephen Blackwood, president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. For his return to the podcast, Stephen provides a one-year update on Ralston College’s first round of graduates. The two dive into the kinds of students that they have been accepted and encouragement for those looking to apply. They also discuss Ralston’s overall goal of intervening in higher education to create a college that is worthy of the tradition it seeks to transmit.
Today’s episode of Anchored is brought to you with support from America’s Christian Credit Union. Find out how ACCU can be the banking partner to your school or family by visiting americaschristiancu.com/CLT.
Jeremy (00:03.889)
Welcome back to the Anchor Podcast, folks. We have returning with us today, the president of the new Ralston College in Georgia, Dr. Stephen Blackwood. Dr. Blackwood has been on the Anchor Podcast before, born in Alberta, grew up in a big family in beautiful Prince Edward Island. If you're a fan of Anna Green Gables, you've heard of Prince Edward Island before. He studied classics as an undergraduate, received an MA from
Dale Howson, a PhD from Emory University. He's held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge. Dr. Stephen Blackwood, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast.
Stephen (00:45.584)
Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Jeremy (00:47.625)
So I am so eager to get these updates because last time we had you on the anchor pod, Raulston College was still kind of a hypothetical. I think you had your first class coming together, but now you've graduated students, they're out the door, more students are coming in. Give us the updates. How are things at Raulston College?
Stephen (01:08.31)
Well, it's been an exciting first year and a half or so. We admitted our first class in May of 2022, and they started in Greece. We sort of said, you know, meet us at the Parthenon on August 1st or something like that. And anyway, it's a school year. It's a one-year master's in humanities is what we're offering right now, Jeremy. So it's a single-year graduate program divided into four terms or quarters. Each are two months.
Stephen (01:37.674)
long. The first one is immersion and intensive study of Greek in Greece. It's, I say it's sort of like a boot camp meets the grand tour. So you're both spending, you know, every waking minute learning as much Greek as you can under the tutelage of the finest Greek teachers in the world. It's absolutely astonishing what they learn and having the opportunity to have the ancient world opened up to you and going to Delphi and Olympia and the cave of Pythagoras and...
and sharing meals together and so on. So it's a pretty special program. And then they come here to Savannah. Then in fact, this cohort, our second cohort has just arrived in Savannah. We had our first college dinner together last night. And here in Savannah, they have a, you might say it looks in some respects more conventional academic schedule. They have seminars and lectures, ongoing study of the language, some dining and dinners together.
And of course, they're here in spectacularly beautiful Savannah. So how's the college going? We're very proud to have our first graduates out in the world. Our graduation on June 3 of our first 22 graduates. We have our second cohort now, as I mentioned, here in Savannah. We're expanding next year. We'll have a Latin stream of this program. So some will start in Greece. Others will start in Italy. And
We've been expanding our campus footprint in wonderful and exciting ways in historic Savannah. We're very fortunate to have the support of friends of the college who've made it possible for us to operate in some of the most beautiful spaces in the country, right on the edge of Forsyth Park and throughout this beautiful city. So we're hiring staff and faculty. We're expanding. We've got the...
some of the most amazing intellects and scholarly talents, but above all, teacherly pedagogical talents that I've ever encountered on our team. And we're more than anything, I'd say, we consider ourselves extremely privileged to have the chance to welcome these students into the college and to give them the best education.
Stephen (03:57.098)
we possibly can.
Jeremy (03:59.217)
I want to hear more about your students. I mean, are these students, are they just coming out of the undergraduate? Were they classically educated growing up? Tell us a little bit about the profile of some of these first students you worked with.
Stephen (04:12.554)
Yeah, we've had very humbling and remarkable demand. So we've had something like a thousand initiated applications both years, both last year and this year. And those came from 49 states. We're not yet authorized to give international student visas. It's a kind of a process you gotta go through for that. So all of our students right now have to be American persons. That's to say green card holders or citizen holders, citizens of the United States.
And so we've had applicants from 49 states, and those are really coming from a pretty wide range of backgrounds. We've had people in tech from Facebook or Amazon. We've had people teaching elementary, junior high, or high school. We've had people who were musicians and dramatists. We've had people in the arts. We've had journalists. We've had painters.
The whole range of aspiring architects and writers, people who wanna return to careers they've already achieved pretty significant things in, and people who are looking to make pretty significant changes in their lives to reorient themselves, let's say, to things they wanted to consecrate their lives to. It's not that uncommon in our world that you get...
people in the early mid 20s, late 20s? Okay. Well, we have students stretching all the way, starting into their 20s, into even a couple into their early 40s, if I'm not mistaken this year. So we don't set a formal cutoff for applicants. That said, the average ages would be in the mid 20s, let's say we've got a kind of cluster of
Jeremy (05:40.549)
I mean the age range are we talking about? Yeah, recent college.
Stephen (06:08.79)
people and they just finished their undergraduates to not too many years out of that. But as I say, we have some people who are a bit further along in their adult lives than that. So it's a pretty equal, we get pretty similar numbers of qualified students between men and women. And from, as I say, a pretty wide range of backgrounds from the arts to the sciences. And that's an interesting thing.
to note because what we find is that the longing for serious education in the humanities, that is to say thinking about perennial human questions, the kind of things that any conscious human being has to ask, how do I live a meaningful life? How do I deal with suffering, death, disease? What is justice? Is redemption possible? Who and what am I? What is the good life?
These are perennial questions. Really the humanities, Jeremy, as I understand it, are really just the record of what other human beings have thought about their human experience. And as each of us try and charts our own course through this mortal life, you know, it's a darn good thing to be able to turn to others who've been there and see what they've learned and see what we can learn from what they've learned.
Jeremy (07:30.697)
Now, I'm going to ask this question because I know we've got folks thinking this question in their heads right now. And you know, a thousand applicants, not many seats. Some people may be thinking, should I even apply? It's so selective. How do you respond to someone who's kind of overwhelmed with the demand for what you're doing? How can they present themselves as a serious applicant for all of a sudden in this incredible program?
Stephen (07:55.074)
Well, the first I will say is that not all those applicants are qualified. Those thousand people who start applications, they don't all finish them. Some are realized that they're applying after they're undergraduate at Oxford or wherever, and they're not eligible. They don't have the papers to reside in the US, and we can't provide them. So we lose quite a few that way. We have others who are just not qualified. And it's a very intellectually
that I think any less of those applicants. They're just some people who are ready for what we have to offer and some who are not. I'd also say that we're looking to pretty nearly triple our number of students next year. So there's a significant increase in the intake. So I would say to anyone, everyone do not despair. Also, our selection process is perhaps a bit different than many institutions. We...
We are very serious about finding the students who are right for us, who have both the intellectual ability but also the, let's say, the attitude to thrive in our program. We're most interested in finding the people whose lives can be most transformed by what we have to offer. And that's not just ability. Like you have the raw, what's called the horsepower and the kind of the brain power, but also
that you are the kind of person who's going to make the very most of this, the intellectual humility, the courage, the willingness to be shaped and formed by what we are going to do our very best to offer to you. And so I would say, do not despair, send your application in.
Jeremy (09:38.505)
Fantastic. And then I'd love to talk about the curriculum. You've been immersed in the Western classical tradition for many, many years. I'd love to hear kind of about the process of deciding what you ended up saying yes to and what you had to say no to. What are some of the key texts that y'all are digging into together?
Stephen (09:57.674)
Well, we are, as I say, the first term this year was all study of Greek, both ancient and modern. And to give you some sense of where those students came out, they came out after those eight weeks with a pretty significant amount of Greek. So, you know, what would amount to many years of study at most universities? In fact, we have students last year who...
did not even know the Greek alphabet because you're not required to know anything. On the other hand, very clear, this is not for classicists. We're just trying to give people the basic tools that have been necessary to humanistic inquiry for all of sort of Western civilization. And we had students last year who were not, didn't even know the Greek alphabet, which is how most human beings are when they're in their mid-20s, by the way, these days. And one of our students last year graduated in June.
wrote recently to say that he would have completed his own independent reading of the entire Greek New Testament by Christmas. And we have some students who are back, they have a senior Greek seminar, some of our former students, and they expect to read the entirety of Plato's Republic this year. These are students who didn't have any Greek, you know, 15, 16 months ago. So we're pushing, we push very hard. We have a very inspiring and innovative teacher.
who really is able to cut through and deliver, let's say, to open the pathway to learning a language very, very quickly. So first term is Greek, second term is next year, the first term will be Latin for half and Greek for the other half. So that's the first term. Then we have three terms or quarters here in Savannah. They're also two months long. And those broadly speaking, look at the ancient world for term two, the medieval world.
for term three and then the final term for the modern, the post-medieval and modern to contemporary world. And the time is split during those weeks in Savannah between ongoing language study, between lectures that help to situate the overall trajectory as we move chronologically and to slow reading seminars which are really, you might say the bedrock of the...
Stephen (12:22.258)
In my experience, there's no better way to grapple with real questions than to read a really difficult book that grapples with those questions as carefully and as slowly as you can. And so then you asked, you know, what actually are we reading and thinking about? Our views on that are not at all unconventional. You know, we're right now the students are reading the Iliad, for example. They'll be moving on to read some Aristotle and some Plato, some Augustine.
some Dante, and then they'll be worked their way through the moderns, through Descartes and Kant and other great figures of the modern world. We do have to make some very hard choices, of course. You can only read so much in a year, no matter how hard you work. And sometimes reading faster is worse. And so got to make very, very tough calls on that. And our faculty work very hard to put a coherent, a coherent and tight, disciplined and focused curriculum every year. The paradox is
You need to go very carefully into one thing to have that become a portal into a bigger picture. And so we work hard to make hard choices and to develop a chronology that balances very, very close reading of some of the greatest works of literature and philosophy and theology.
with historical and artistic overviews of long trajectories. So you're able to kind of trace a thread. And we do that in every given year following a given question or topic. So last year, our theme was the human self. What is the self? How does it develop? How does it change over time? What is its nature? And this year, our theme is the whole, the W-H-O-L-E. What is the whole of things? What is the relation between the parts and the whole?
How am I related to the wholeness or a sense of what's fundamental or most real? And so we're tracing the theme of the whole this year and, cause you need some kind of a through line because civilization is broad, Western civilization broadly construed is very broad. And in a single sort of 10 month program, you can only read so much. So we make some hard choices, but the things that one would read with us are not by any means historically anomalous.
Jeremy (14:47.749)
President Blackwood, you've put so much of your heart and time, energy, sweat into starting a new college. It's an incredible undertaking. And then you've gotten to this incredible moment where it's up and running and successful. When you look back in 20 years on that first year, what are a few of the memories you're going to cherish most?
Stephen (15:10.37)
So a wonderful question. It was profoundly moving for me to welcome our first students to the program. It's been a labor of many years for several of us to bring this college into being. And then we had the transformative support of visionary philanthropists to enable us to build what we hope will become and become known as one of the very, very great university.
somehow in, let's say, in keeping with the greatest institutions of education of history. We're aiming to emulate those. And so for us, after all these years of working to build the foundations for that, finally to welcome our students and we met them in Athens, it was enormously moving for me to see these bright, enthusiastic, dedicated, serious young men and women.
not only there, because we had no history. So what did they, what were they thinking? You know, the college that never had a student before. And here we had this amazing crop of highly talented and serious young people turning up to give everything they had for a year to their education. Memories that will stand out for me are our weekly dinners are a really kind of important corporate ritual.
where we dine together over some couple of hours and it's a multi-course meal and we're all wearing our academic gowns. It's an elevated and rich conversation. It's a lot of fun, absolutely animated conversations happening in 47 directions at any given time. But it's also a ritual that brings and defines and elevates and recollects us. There were some just fantastic lectures throughout the year. And...
I think I would say finally two things. Seeing the way the students forged a community, the friendships that they built. I did exit interviews with all the students and in virtually every case, the community itself was something that the students found themselves most transformed by. And I think it bears saying, Jeremy, that the...
Stephen (17:35.374)
We've got a lot of wide scale sort of alienation in our culture right now. And a lot of people have never been part of a coherent community or felt that they had a non online sort of dimension with when which to really live life with real human beings here and now. And so we're trying to discover, but also transmit and kind of illuminate the ways in which we can do that together. And then finally, I think I would need to say that the graduation ceremony.
Stephen (18:06.058)
which was amazingly conducted entirely in Latin. And my Latin is not so fluent to be honest, though I knew what the words meant because I'd spent time with the program, but it was a beautiful ritual in which the students, they're starting at the back, moving to the front, kneeling to become members of, to be admitted to their degrees. The chancellor was there. What I'm trying to convey is that, and we have beautiful music.
I'm trying to convey, and this was universally the view of the parents and others who came, that it was a deeply moving and inspiring ceremony. So for me to see our first students made and admitted to the degree of Master of Arts was a moment of great happiness, but also all the more so because what they were.
Becoming in that moment was to take as you might say taking up the mantle of this beautiful tradition of human freedom Of the human being human connection to what is transcendent and highest and best and taking on with their with their own With their own oath taking on And committing to their own a transmission of that transition that tradition to others
Jeremy (19:28.237)
You are a visionary. To start a college, you have to be a visionary. When you think about 10 years or maybe even 20 years and the place you hope to see Raulston College have in American academic life, but also shaping culture, potentially a big impact on the K-12 side as some of your students are gonna go down schools and be heads of schools and teachers. Yeah, tell us about how you see the vision in 10 to 15 years out.
Stephen (19:59.15)
Well, there's different ways of answering that question. I'd say we're certainly looking to build one of the best universities in history. That's our aspiration. And we're not, you know, we're not high on our hubris or something. We think it's a difficult task, but it's a necessary one and we're going to do our damn best to do it. And so, you know, we're ambitious. We want to build an institution that is worthy of the tradition it is seeking to transmit.
that is worthy of the students that it admits and that is worthy of the culture that it seeks to affect. So broadly speaking, I would say that our aspirations, in a sense, divide into three areas. The first is, of course, we are looking to make a systemic, a disruptive intervention in the system of higher education. I think we've been way too long, being sort of subservient to the status quo.
People have been writing books about the problems in American higher education for almost 100 years. I mean, you think about one of the most famous ones, God and Man at Yale written by William F. Buckley, I think it's 1951 or 2. More than 70 years ago, Closing the American Mind by Ellen Bloom. That's almost 40 years ago that book was written. What have we done? And I just think the best way to solve any kind of stagnant system is just to start over.
Jeremy (21:16.338)
Yeah.
Stephen (21:25.658)
I think competition is in some sense the answer. Stop complaining about it and just go and try and do it better. You know, we're not an anti or a negative or fundamentally critical place. We're just trying to do our best to transmit things to the young in a way that we hope will be inspiring and transformative for them. So the one is a systemic intervention in higher education. I think that's how really industry wide change is always brought about.
Stephen (21:54.85)
We are looking to play a role in the regeneration, the revitalization of our culture at large, in a reinvigoration of a culture of human flourishing, of a rediscovery of the forms of life and culture that are necessary for the realization of individual human potential.
I think we have a massive squandering of human potential, where you're one size fits all, alienated, inadequate human culture. And I think we just need to, we need radically to reopen that back up and to rediscover the whole range of pathways and the forms of life and culture that are necessary to the individual human realization. And that large scale, you might say, that ambitious aim to play some role.
in re-inspiring and revitalizing our culture in a deep, you might say tectonic way, that can only be achieved, only be achieved in and through the lives of real human beings. So our highest and best hope is that we can give our students some deep sense of who and what they are, what their potentials are, and how they can realize those and transmit those.
those things that they come to encounter through us, you might say the highest and best to others, and those others to others and so on. I'm not a believer that human culture can be affected in some kind of a video game kind of way, or in some legislative way, or some piece of technology is going to be the fundamental answer. I don't think there's an answer in human life that isn't at the human scale.
And that involves one human being at a time.
Jeremy (23:51.145)
That's a fantastic answer. Do you anticipate some of these recent?
Jeremy (23:58.825)
pursuing education.
Stephen (24:00.522)
Yeah, well, let me just take a minute and say how much I admire what you and your colleagues are doing. Mr Tate. It's it's really It's a it's a it's an inspiration to see entrepreneurial energies and a confidence in the in you might say the fundamental paradigms finding such purchase in your success and long may it continue and grow the
Jeremy (24:07.357)
Thank you.
Stephen (24:28.766)
The answer is certainly. I think that, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, I think that one of the most exciting things happening right now in education is there's this just, vast amount of creative energy at the K to 12 level, which is actually, it's much easier to do something at than it is in the higher educational level. It's found in colleges and it's hard, I can tell you. It's not easy. It's not to say it's as difficult as people think in the 19th century.
there were colleges founded nearly every week. And so we shouldn't get into the idea that, oh my goodness, you could never do that. That is a sign of a dead culture. When you get to that point, when people don't actually believe that you can transmit what you have, you know, the fundamentals of your own culture to the young, that is a sign of profound decrepitude. But let me say that I think in the, one of the things we're going to see is, and I think we're seeing this in all kinds of industries, that people going, you know, the sort of direct consumer.
uh ways of doing things rather than saying we don't have to depend on you know these big you know lumbering institutions to make big changes. Say no I can read these books, I can teach my children, I can uh you know we can get a few families together, we can get a teacher, get a teacher. I knew families during COVID who uh who had literally one not just one room, one living room, school houses and why not? I mean that actually is a far more uh paradigmatic form of human of education.
than the K to 12 school is, or the public school on the corner. That's a relatively recent invention. I'm not saying it's a bad one, although there are big problems with the way it's administered in our country here in the United States. But what I'm saying is, there are a much richer range of paradigms, historically, for education, than today we have open to us. So,
I've just published a paper with a literary scholar named Bernadette Guthrie, which I would be delighted to point your listeners towards, simply for the reason that one thing we discovered as we were looking at the range of trying to think through what are the range of forms of education or formation that are necessary to this realization of human potential, human beings being very different from each other. And one thing we did is we looked at six case studies of historic...
Stephen (26:53.302)
pathways. The gymnasium of which our case study was Alexander the Great, one of the most influential figures in human history. The monastery, of which our example was Hildegard of Bingen. The guild, of which our example is the Painter Rubens. The university in which we rely on John Henry Newman. And then
The home, which our example is Jane Austen, and then the book of self-education, which our example is the amazing Frederick Douglass. And I give you that overview because of those six people, all of whom are obviously household names, only one went to college and that's John Henry Newman. And so I think that's probably not a bad ratio. We should have a lot wider range of forms of education. And I think that the Classical School Initiative is absolutely at the heart of that.
Because actually, far fewer people should be needing to go to college at all, because they've already received the key, you might say, tools to live a rich and meaningful life. Now, perhaps you go to vocational school or maybe you go off to college and you get something else, but I really think the classical education movement, which aims to give people the fundamental tools of humanistic inquiry, to make them literate and numerate.
This is clearly the best answer today to a stultifying, one-size-fits-all, very low-outcome educational system.
Jeremy (28:33.385)
I love it. Again, Dr. Stephen Blackwood, I'm thinking about the words, an intervention in higher...
Congrats on a super successful launch. If you're listening to this, definitely, where do they go? The website and how can they find out more information to apply?
Stephen (28:53.35)
You can Google us at Ralston College, R-A-L-S-T-O-N, Ralston College, and we're at www.ralston.ac.
Jeremy (29:02.942)
Dr. Black, thanks for being with us.
Stephen (29:04.714)
It's a huge pleasure, Mr. Tate. All the best to you and onward and upward.