Stephen Blackwood on the making of Ralston College

Beginning a new university sounds almost like a fantastical undertaking, yet that's exactly what Ralston College, under the guidance of President Stephen Blackwood, has done. They recently appointed Dr. Jordan Peterson as Chancellor. Peterson garnered international fame for refusing to speak words university heads said he must, namely preferred pronouns. Peterson has since publicized the issues in our contemporary centers of learning. And as goes the university, with a stifling of free speech and a reversal of liberal values, so too has our culture.

It's hard to ignore that American institutions of learning are in crisis. Masses of students who take out loans to attend universities find, upon graduation, their degrees don't have enough earning power to pay back those loans. Coursework in near every discipline has been overwhelmed with critical race and gender theory, components of equity studies, and a fascination with overturning its foundations to expose their "rotten" underpinnings. In models of consumer education, the student customers are always right. There's also for profit universities, and course programs that feed graduates into professional realms void of job prospects.

Through it all, there's been a kind of learning loss, a depletion of rigor, of academic intensity, intellectual curiosity, open discourse, and a distinct decline in wonder. The old useless courses have been replaced with newer, even more useless courses. In the 1970s and 80s there were jokes about the uselessness of college, with offerings such as "basket weaving" derided for their lack of real world practicality. In the 1990s, poetry, or my own discipline playwrighting, took the prize for pointless undertakings with no professional application.

But our 21st century problems in higher education make those previous concerns seem essentially simplistic and almost sweet. As employers required college degrees for nearly all jobs, the cost of those necessary educations skyrocketed, forcing students to take out loans. Administrative costs ballooned with tuition so universities ate up more and more of that free money, leading to increases in tuition and loans. Meanwhile, students were told to follow their bliss and pursue their passion, regardless of whether it would facilitate a real-world, post-grad benefit.

Social justice emerged as a passion — the idea that a person must political to be compassionate, the concepts of "doing the work" and "fighting oppression" became disciplines. Academic institutions rose to the challenge. Basket weaving, poetry, and playwrighting were replaced with the even more absurd critical race and gender studies. Undergrads left university believing the foundations of reality are actually oppressing them, that being anti-racist means focusing entirely on race as the main, innate characteristic of all human beings, and that male and female are equivalent to what the basket weavers, the poets, and the playwrights would have called the soul.

The state of North American education is in disarray. It is not serving students, society, academic inquiry, rigor, or scholarship. If, as a culture, we value these things, there must be a change. And not one that is regressive or supports the existing broken system — like forgiving student loans in a bailout to schools who issued worthless degrees. The change must create new academic traditions that uphold our values while questioning them to better understand where they come from and why they are essential.

With this in mind, I spoke to Stephen Blackwood, a c0-founder of Ralston College, which was recently awarded degree-granting powers in Georgia. Ralston offers a one-year Masters of Humanities program I found incredibly intriguing. With my imagination in overdrive about the program's possibilities, I asked Blackwood about the MA.

"We aim to design from first principles," Blackwood said. "Like Elon Musk and others who think things through with fresh eyes. We didn't set out to imitate the status quo, but to build the best humanities program in existence."

The program is very in depth, while being open to flights of whimsy and imagination. And funding, Blackwood said, is available for tuition, accommodation, travel and living expenses. It's for those who need it, because "we want to be able to admit on a need blind basis so that we can have access to the best students, regardless of their economic circumstances."

Blackwood said that's part of the goal, and that Ralston is "seeking students who have both the aptitude and appetite for hard intellectual work, who seek to be both free thinkers and deep thinkers."

"It's an immersive and integrated program, of philosophy, literature, language, and art of which the aim is serious and adventurous exploration of fundamental human questions through these different domains," Blackwood said.

The program is not geared toward professional placement, which is the purported goal of many degree-granting programs, whether they can fulfill that goal or not. This MA is about study, scholarship, and exploration.

Universities are speaking out about their failings with students and culture at large. Though, for schools like Harvard or Georgetown, those failures pertain to what they consider unholy foundations. Both these schools are working to expose, eliminate, and make restitution for their original sin of benefiting from the enslavement of black Americans prior to the Civil War. Harvard, meanwhile, is fighting a legal battle to ensure they can continue discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process. Boston University has a $10 million center based in the teaching of "anti-racist" scholar Ibram X. Kendi.

Blackwood offers Ralston as a response to those failures, as well as the infantilization of students and "activist theology."

"I'm not a catastrophist," he mitigated. "There are many excellent teachers in many of these big institutions, and there's pockets of wonderfulness everywhere and of excellence and so on.

"But at the same time, it would be simply untrue to say that these problems have not—in many places—reached a tipping point at which good faith people are asking, you know, 'why would I go there?'

"But it is also completely true that there are really intelligent and learned people of good will teaching and working there. I think it's important not to fall into a kind of catastrophism where we say that 'everything's bad all the time,' or that 'these are horrible places, they are a hotbed of illogical, craven, whatever.'

"We must not let the persistence of good lead us to deny the depth and breadth of the problems, which really are civilizational in character. There has never been a human civilization without mechanisms of its own transmission, and we have largely destroyed or lost ours.

"Many young people—thanks to what they are taught in school and university—now hold positions that are incompatible with Western liberal democracy.

"You simply can't have a culture or civilization without mechanisms that transmit the conditions of that civilization's culture; if the mama bear doesn't teach the baby bear what she knows, there won't be any future bears. It's pretty simple, really.

"Culture takes preservation," Blackwood said. The MA program starts with a trip to Greece, the birthplace of western civilization.

Whether or not western civilization is worth defending—Blackwood believes it is— is almost besides the point of the civilization integrity sustained through teaching about that civilization, its foundations, and tenets.

"It's simply a fact that many of the most basic tenets, or customs or traditions or principles or ideals of that civilization, are under very blatant attack from the institutions that are most responsible for transmitting those ideals," he said.

And there are severe consequences, furthering the metaphor, for failing to teach baby bears which berries to eat and which are poison and should stay on the vine. "What is the consequence of that?" Blackwood asked. "Is that like, the bears are going to starve? Yes."

"You can't have music without people learning to play it. At a certain point, if people say, 'no, we're not going to teach any more Bach, we're never going to listen to it, we're never going to play it, we're never going to study it, we're definitely not going to let people ever encounter it ever,' there will be no Bach in the future, or Shakespeare or whatever. It's an assault on future possibility."

This is the same ethos that results in attempts to discredit the Constitution because its authors enslaved people. It is same ethos that causes Harvard, Georgetown, and others to throw money at descendants of those who were enslaved on university campuses, in a vain attempt to buy indulgences for their original sins.

The 20th century saw an attempt in the west to eliminate Christianity from the academic public sphere. The period of history prior to the birth of Jesus Christ known as BC, as in "before Christ," was changed to mean "before common era," removing Christ, while retaining the time periods constructed in relation to his birth.

This was done across the board. Christ the figure, the representative of moral good, of value of right and wrong, was removed from literature, philosophy, and even ethics, while leaving that which was Christ's influence. The idea was we could know right and wrong without Christ. We could have have a universal justification for kindness and civility even if we removed the foundational element that gave us those insights.

Yet Christianity remained the foundation of our governing documents, moral structure, and traditions. The moral underpinnings of our culture and society were still Christian in nature— kindness, do unto others, remove the plank from your own eyes— were recognizably foundational.

But now, those foundations are being so thoroughly attacked that Christianity has sort of fallen off the bottom. It's no longer underpinning our society and it's like there's nothing holding it up at all.

"If we don't have a basis upon which to make our decisions and judgements, a guide for how to discern what is right and what is wrong, where are we?" I asked Blackwood. "Even the existentialists said that in the absence of God, man must take responsibility. And now no one takes responsibility for anything."

For Blackwood, this goes back to the "degradation of individuals and their inalienable rights."

"There are at many at our most influential institutions of education who promote the notion that our civilization's very ideals are perverse--that they are merely the expressions of the will to power. One can and should have a genuine debate about the merits of these ideals, but it is a mere matter of fact that those ideas are under direct attack.

"No civilization is promised a future. There can be no preservation of the ideals of a culture when the people who were meant to transmit those to the young instill disdain for those very ideals," Blackwood said.

Even so, Ralston is not "anti" anything. It is not approaching education and a reemergence of intellectual inquiry from a negative perspective or to fill a void. Instead, they are "looking to be a response to those problems."

The creation of a new institution, Blackwood said, "has to be for the things that you think are missed, or important to pass on, or the kinds of contexts that you think are important to provide, whether it's context or freedom of inquiry. Or, you know, courteous disagreement, or genuinely passionate, this challenging of accepted opinion. At a minimum, it's safe to say that at most colleges and universities, there's a lot of people feeling as though they can't speak their minds. And that's a fatal thing for a culture because freedom of exchange is really the bedrock of how we discover and share what we know about the world."

This, too, is an issue in the arts, which are exclusively left-leaning. "So if you're a kid and you're interested in the arts," I expressed, "and you want to make beautiful things, there's really one avenue open to you unless you're going to take out your machete and start hacking through the underbrush all by yourself."

"It is to fund arts programs for young people that are not ideologically based at all, but allow for artistic expression and creativity outside of a political landscape outside of an ideological landscape so that we have creative minds doing their creative thing without the push to become arts activists," I suggested

"The truth is, there is no art that is subject that is subordinate to ideology," Blackwood said. "Art is impossible on those terms. Thought is not possible. There is no such thing as thinking that is not free. If it is not free it is not thought."

"Somebody who isn't thinking for themselves isn't thinking, they're just reciting what someone else thinks or following or saying it's what they think when it's not what they think. But they're not thinking. Art is the same."

Blackwood rejects the idea that everything is, or should be political. "There are things that are both far more important and more interesting than politics."

"I think what right and left, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, whatever the political context is, in any country--what clearly should unite us all is: how do we give people the best chance, here and now, to live meaningful lives? There is no other question that matters," he said.

"The only 'metric' that really matters for a culture is: did it enable human beings to live lives that they themselves regarded as meaningful? There's nothing else," Blackwood said. "If culture fails to do that, it has failed from the most basic human standpoint, the most fundamental criterion of our evolved human nature. Any culture that doesn't enable us to see, or consider our own lives as meaningful, has failed by the only standards that matter."