‘Universities Have Lost Their Way’: Ralston College President Stephen Blackwood

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Universities today are increasingly plagued by ideological nihilism, bloated costs, and the growing infantilization of students with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” says Ralston College President Stephen Blackwood.

And far too many students are being funneled into universities as the default step after high school, he says. “We’re trying to make universities the kind of catch-all for job training, and universities have historically not played that role,” Blackwood says.

Ralston College is an attempt to restore a rich and transformative humanities education, one that ponders the deepest questions of life and that seeks out what is true and what is beautiful.

“We thought it was necessary, at this time in Western civilization, to revive the conditions for human flourishing, to reinvent and revive the university and the fundamental role that communities of learning have played throughout the entire trajectory irreducibly in Western civilization,” Blackwood says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Dr. Stephen Blackwood, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Stephen Blackwood:
Great to be back. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
It has been three-and-a-half years, amazingly. I looked, and it feels like just yesterday. You’ve actually had multiple classes now come through Ralston College in your Master’s of Humanities program. I’ll tell the audience, just before we did this interview, I actually called one of the students who I’ve gotten to know, and I’ll explain a little why I’ve gotten to know her later, but in one word, she said it was transformative. I’m sure you were happy to hear that.

Dr. Blackwood:
Indeed, that’s what we aim for. What’s the purpose of an education at the highest level other than to transform the possibilities, transform the ways in which you’re able to enable your own potential, enable the realization of your own potential?

Mr. Jekielek:
When we first interviewed, it was still a bit of a twinkle in your eye. I mean, a lot of infrastructure was being built. I saw there were multiple buildings in Savannah that had already been appropriated for this purpose, but it was still a ways to your launch.

Dr. Blackwood:
Yes, that’s right. In April 2021, we were still a year away from announcing the launch of our first program, admitting our first students, and all of that. And since then, as you say, we’ve graduated two cohorts from this one-year graduate program. It’s a one-year master’s in the humanities.

It’s kind of a boot camp in Western civilization that starts with two full months learning Greek in Greece, and then continues with another three two-month terms or quarters in beautiful Savannah, Georgia, where students trace the trajectory of Western civilization through the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. A lot has gone down since then.
There were many years of pre-launch work to get the college up and running. Colleges, though people should be founding them much more often than they are, you can see why they don’t. There’s a lot to it. It’s not just a slide deck and maybe getting a single product out. There are so many different pieces of it, from needing to have a coherent vision that is able to inspire, of course most importantly students and faculty and staff, but also, very critically, supporters and philanthropists. You need to have a place for it that people want to live in. All of that has to come together both from the inside and the outside in order to produce a really sort of dynamic, living, and exciting entity that is coherent and able to deliver the things that it says.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why did you jump into this in the first place?

Dr. Blackwood:
With any startup, there can be different answers for that, but our answers were pretty simple. We thought there were pretty significant widespread problems in higher education, and you can approach those through any different number of lenses, whether it’s the cost crisis, the vocationalization of the university, the infantilization of students, the ideological distortion, or any number of other things. You might just say, at some fundamental level, the universities have lost their way.
But you can’t start something as a reaction. You can only build out of a positive vision. I often say I don’t like brutalist architecture. I think it’s ugly, demeaning, and degrading. But anti-brutalism isn’t a program for building a single darn building. You can only build a building out of a sense of the proportions, ornaments, and human scale that you want to incarnate in a particular building. You have a plan. And so our vision is a positive one.
And, you know, at the end of the day, we thought that what we could do would be important and transformative. We thought it was a beautiful vision. We thought it was necessary at this time in Western civilization to revive the conditions for human flourishing, to reinvent and revive the university, and the fundamental role that communities of learning have played throughout the entire trajectory, you know, irreducibly in Western civilization.You simply do not get the culture of the West without certain kinds of educational institutions generating and sharing, you might say, the fundamental insights to the next generation.

So we had, as every entrepreneur or entrepreneurial venture has, a certain vision for what we thought we could do better and more beautifully in the current landscape. And I think we were right about that. It’s not to say that it’s easy. I can tell you very, very well it’s not easy founding a new college, but it’s worth it because of the impact you can have in the lives of the students.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned a number of areas where you see a problem. Before I go into more about this positive vision, let’s talk about the brutalism. By the way, I share your dislike of that architecture.

Dr. Blackwood:
We can go through those problems. This is a multifactorial problem, and I try to resist giving overly reductive assessments. It’s not that difficult to describe some of the problems. At the same time, we mentioned cost, something like $2 trillion now, I think, in student loans, often for degrees that were not worth the paper they were printed on, or for unfinished degrees, or for people who didn’t have to go to college in order to get the career that they then went on to do. We’ve got a big, big cost problem.
Mr. Jekielek:
To just jump in on the cost problem: I was just looking at a table this morning which showed that basically certain types of degrees are, let’s just say, the loans are forgiven almost to the tune of a hundred percent, creating a weird sort of incentive structure, whereas other types of degrees, like for example, especially in STEM, I saw engineering for some reason was the least forgiven. I don’t know why. There’s a very weird dynamic around that. For some people, you can sort of bank on having effectively a free degree because you know what the policies are going to be. And then for other people, it just simply didn’t exist, arguably for those roles that are really needed the most.
Dr. Blackwood:
The economics of higher education are complicated at the best of times, but what we have through the federal student loan program, which I think is very well-intentioned fundamentally, and, you know, obviously you should want there to be the resources available to those who don’t have the funds of their own to secure the educational opportunities that they think will enable them to realize their potential. I’m all in favor of that.

The trouble is that the involvement of the federal government has led to a situation in which there’s no normal market corrections on the supply of money. And so that leads to, effectively, a rise in cost. There’s no necessity that costs be kept low. Virtually anyone can get a student loan to go. But those numbers have risen very significantly, and we’ve seen them far outstrip inflation. With the rise in the cost of higher education, there is a huge growth in the administrative state at universities, the bureaucracy. There are far more staff administrators than there are faculty, for example, at most universities by significant margins.

We’re sending way too many people to college. It may be surprising to hear me say this, given that I’m one of the few people who’s been involved in the founding of a new institution of higher education in the last 75 years. But nonetheless, it is my very considered view that we have way too many people going to university. We’re trying to make universities the kind of catch-all for job training, and universities have historically not played that role. They’re actually not very good at that role, and it leads to their offering all kinds of programs that are kind of neither hard-charging educationally, you know, mathematical physics or philosophy or history or whatever you might want to say, biology, nor, on the other hand, you know, really clearly going to get you a position in a career.

By contrast, vocational colleges, where you go to learn electrical, plumbing, carpentry, many of those places have placement rates in the high 90s within a few months of graduation. With universities have never, that’s never been what they’re good at. They’re meant to be dedicated to non-instrumental forms of learning that are really at the heart of what human culture is and which are, you might say, higher order.

It’s higher education. They have an irreducibly important role to play in a culture for a small set of people who wish to and have the ability to study those things so that they can be shared more broadly, whether it’s an architect learning to build a beautiful building, such that the way in which that enables everyone who looks at the buildings that that person builds to admire and somehow to participate in that beauty. Let’s imagine just by way of metaphor, I often say I can’t play the piano like Martha Argerich or Glenn Gould can. I can’t play the violin like Joshua Bell can. But because those people can play the way they can, we can all hear the music.

Something like that is the argument for why it’s so important that we have people really thinking about fundamental human questions in such a way as it enables us to have the whole range of, let’s say, cultural possibilities that lead to the realization of human potential and all of its incredible and magnificent diversity. But most of what’s happening at the university does not pertain to that right now.
I would argue that we have far too many people going to university and that we should have a broader range of pathways as we have in the past in history. We should have job training programs. We should have the guild. We should have things like the monastery. We should have self-education. We should have, you know, professional organizations that are able to certify people directly.

You know, historically, if you look at the range of pathways human beings have taken, there was actually a much wider range. Today we have a far too homogenized system. And then you have the infantilization of students. It’s a huge problem at institutions that are meant to be treating them fundamentally as high-potential agents ready to go out into the world. Instead, we’re treating them effectively like babies.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why did that shift really happen? Was it a philosophical shift in terms of what the role of the university should be? There are certainly financial incentive structures that are kind of growing the cost, because the money’s available, but why did that shift happen?

Dr. Blackwood:
That’s a really good question, and I think, like the question at large, it is also multifactorial. You have, generally, a growth in bureaucracy, which is partly related to the cost question or the availability of money, and you know those bureaucrats all need something to do. That’s not to say that these people are not trying to do good work either, but I would say, more importantly, you have two other factors. One is this sense that there’s a kind of consumer-client logic that’s become embedded at the universities. You might say, well, in one sense, that could be a good thing because, you know, people are, after all, looking for something that’s worth the money that they’re borrowing or paying for.
But on the other hand, it also leads to a situation in which it’s very hard to fail people. If you look at failure rates, it’s very hard to tell someone, you know, you shouldn’t be here. That, of course, then leads to a sense in which students are in a position of making demands. That’s fine to a certain degree, but then when it becomes saying that I feel threatened by the things that someone else is saying, or this client mentality does lead to a world in which students can make demands, and the university has to say, well, we want the money that they’re paying, and so we might have to meet those demands.
But then I think you also have this whole rise of a kind of therapeutic sensibility. If you looked even in the last 10 to 20 years at the rise of students who are self-reporting mental or psychological conditions, it’s a huge shift in the last quarter of a century. And so that, of course, has led to the whole rise of a kind of administrative psychological infrastructure in order to supposedly or allegedly, and I’m not questioning the intention of meeting the needs of students, but it’s very far from obvious that the university should be in that at all. I mean, that’s not what the university is for. And so you end up with all this combination of factors, with, I would say, a very distorted series of incentives that really have very little to do with what a university is really about.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is a university for? Is it purely for theoretical knowledge?

Dr. Blackwood:
There are two fundamental roles for the university. The first is to transmit the knowledge that we have, that which human beings have gained and gathered through hard-won effort, insight, and trial and error, whether that’s in the humanities or the sciences, to transmit that to the next generation. So there’s the transmission of knowledge, which is not easy, by the way, because you can forget things. And, you know, how many of us really feel we have a solid grasp on the wisdom of the past?

It’s even in our own family life. It’s quite hard to remember that thing that Grandma gave to me or an insight that she helped instill in Mom or Great Grandma and Grandma. Are those still with me today? It’s pretty easy to lose things through the generations.

You actually need not only universities, but also other forms of cultural transmission, but certainly universities. One of their pivotal fundamental roles is the transmission of knowledge from the past. And then, of course, the counterpart to that is the discovery of things we don’t know. We have problems in our own time and place that we don’t have answers to. And the university is meant to be a place dedicated to that.

That doesn’t mean the university is the only place for that, but just as you can play music anywhere, you can have music in your house or on the street corner or wherever you like, a hall that’s devoted to music, like a symphony hall, is a place that is entirely dedicated to that pursuit. And the universities, similarly, are meant to be places that are devoted to the preservation, transmission, and discovery of knowledge.

Now, of course, they also play a role in a very upstream way, you might say, in the influence over what a culture is at any given time, and I would say right now the universities are far too much under the sway of a kind of ideological nihilism or neo-Marxism, which denies the existence of higher order goods, whether you want to understand that as truth, beauty, goodness, love, redemption, justice—truth, beauty, goodness, love, redemption, justice—this whole kind of range of metaphysical realities, which, frankly, are the things that I think make human life meaningful.

And yet, there’s a very dominant view right now that those things aren’t really real; they are just constructs. This is the kind of neo-Nietzschean position, the construct of the will to power. This conversation is not an act
in some exchange of rationality, but really those are just names we give to our efforts to dominate one another for our own power, ends, or self-interest, narrowly conceived, or however you might put it. And so I think this is a very widespread and dominant position, which is clearly very entrenched at many universities.
And what that produces downstream is all kinds of corrosive and toxic effects: ugliness in architecture, partisan rancor and alienation in our political and civic life, a failure to tell the truth in journalism, a narrow darkened horizon in arts and culture broadly conceived, broken families, and all of that, leading to alienation one from another. And so, you know, one of the, you might say, one of the purposes of the university, I would say, should be the beacon of, the disseminator of, the sharer of a more accurate and dynamic and a positively productive vision of what reality is broadly conceived and what the human being’s relationship to that is. You might say to be a sharer of or a progenitor of the fundamental ideas and ideals, the principles that lead to human flourishing.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is this the Western version of this? Your master’s in humanities is mostly about the Western tradition if I understand it correctly. Your students said that there was a lot of deep ceremony and heraldry in their graduation. Why is that?
Dr. Blackwood:
The graduation is, of course, the ceremony, the event at which students are admitted to their degrees. And I say admitted carefully here because that’s what the old language of becoming a member of the university used to say. We say, admitto te ad gradum magistri artium. That is the language that we use, the Chancellor admits the student to the degree of Master of Arts.
Now, what does it mean, to admit? You have to remember that the university effectively kind of emerges out of the guilds, and so a degree is simply a degree of membership. You start with the Bachelor, which comes from the old French, bas chevalier, the first rank of knights in the Middle Ages. Then you progress to the magister or master, and then to the doctor or teacher. These are like moving from a beginner carpenter through to a master carpenter. These are degrees of recognition of your mastery, but also degrees of membership within the university.
And so the reason I say that is because this is the big moment. This is the moment in which a student is becoming a master, a member of this university forever. As with anything else in life, if you want to mark an occasion, the question is, well, how do you mark that in a way that is adequate to what you’re trying to mark?
So if you get married and you’re going to take vows to enshrine a commitment that is lifelong till death do us part, what does that look like? You could just say, well, we’re just going to move in together, and some people do that. But if you’re going to have a ceremony to mark your decision to take a vow to someone, well, what do you do to make it seem like we’re really doing this? We’re really entering into this.
What people do is they have people come around to witness them and they dress up in the nicest clothes they can find and they try to find language, often language that we’ve inherited from many other people who have taken those words in the past, beautiful language, you know, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, you know, for better or for worse, you know, and so on and so forth. And then they take those vows intentionally, looking each other in the eye, in the presence of family and friends, and, as some would say, in the sight of God. And when that goes well, you really know something has happened.
And so when it came to our graduation ceremony, that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to have a ceremony that would be adequate to this ontological transformation in the students where they go from being, you might say, mere students or wayfarers to being full members of this university. They actually kneel as graduates and they rise into a new identity, which is as masters of the college.
And we, of course, through one of my colleagues, Dr. Joseph Conlon, designed a ceremony that was very much our own, and you might say fresh and kind of new in a sense. You know, it was modified in ways to be right for us at this point in history, but also it was very much in keeping with and in continuity with ceremonies going back a thousand years, including some of the language we use. And what we’ve found is that it’s actually deeply meaningful to people.
And I think that there’s a lesson here, not just for us as a university or for other universities, but it speaks to something of a real absence of things that mark occasions, that elevate us into the identities we are trying to be worthy of in our culture at large.

Mr. Jekielek:
The ritual and ceremony and rites of passage in every traditional culture, even traditional living communities today, are full of these things. As a culture we have been losing this very quickly.

Dr. Blackwood:
I think quickly and devastatingly so. The fact of the matter is that, broadly speaking, we understand ourselves as human beings through certain kinds of patterns. And a lot depends on what are the patterns that you live your life around. And a lot depends on having patterns that you might say affirm or elevate or ennoble you into a person with dignity, with a horizon of higher order goods, in a community of others.
The truth is you can’t simply reinvent yourself every day, kind of get up and say, well, who do I want to be today? It takes structures in order to maintain a kind of vibrant and solid human identity. And I think we’re living in a moment, and I think this is actually a result of the kind of widespread nihilism I was just talking about that simply disregards the very existence of higher order goods, including the dignity of the human being as one of those higher order goods that our culture needs to protect and affirm.

Mr. Jekielek:
I was starting to talk about how it’s really the Western tradition that your master’s program covers. There isn’t a Confucian element to it.

Dr. Blackwood:
That’s right, Jan, we’ve started with a program in the humanities, in what you might say is broadly conceived as Western civilization. And I’ll tell you a little bit about why we’ve done that in a minute. But, of course, we’re very open to the expansion of our programs into the other great humanistic traditions, whether that’s effectively ancient Chinese, Arabic, or Sanskrit. You might say these are the four great, as people would say, four great rivers of humanistic inquiry throughout all of human civilization.

You might say Greek and Latin in the West and then ancient Chinese in the East and then, in India, of course, Sanskrit and Arabic in the Middle East. And so these are all great traditions. But, you know, we’re a college in Georgia that is in a city, in a state, in a country that is very fundamentally situated within Western civilization. But that’s not the only reason we’ve chosen that.

I also think fundamentally that Western civilization has something irreducibly wonderful and fundamental to offer the world. Whether that might be understood in terms of the dignity of the human individual, the universality of rationality or some thinking capacity, or some capacity to grasp higher-order goods directly in the possession of the self, or of the ways in which you might say these realities or ideals, which I’d say are based on a grasp of what the nature of reality is, the ways in which these unfold through the history of Western civilization, which both comes to embody those in various, you might say, deeper and better ways in different times and periods, but the ways in which these ideals are also, by nature, a corrective when we fail to live up to them.

We can perhaps refer back to one of the ancient Greeks; I think it was Soocrates, who said this is very important in an age that makes so much of—not that our sex or our ethnicities or immediate histories are not very important and significant aspects of our identity, of course they are—but that they’re not totally determinative, or they can’t reduce people simply to those, you might say, kind of accidental traits. There’s an underlying human nature that is free and universal that you might say is manifested in those but also transcends those.
And so there’s this wonderful line; I think it’s by Socrates, who says that being Greek, he says, is not about a race. It’s not a genetic determination.
It’s a way of thinking. He says, dianoia. It’s a way of thinking. He says, dianoia. It’s a way of thinking through things. And you might say that insight is at the very most fundamental center of what Western civilization, at its best, stands for. That there’s a universality to the free nature of the human being that extends to all of us and enables us to share a horizon of higher-order goods that we can work towards together.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s amazing to hear what you’re saying now because, in speaking with, again, some of these students, maybe I’ll share a little bit of the story. You know, when we first did our interview three and a half years ago, as you know, there were some young people that watched that interview, and they ended up signing up for the program, and amazingly, kind of, you know, got through the very stringent selection process, which, you know, you sort of intimated a little earlier, why that’s important, and have gone through the program.

And so I’ll just share a few things. The thing that really struck me from what one of them said, one of them that I’ve gotten to know better recently, is that it made a lot of these thinkers and thinkers in the past suddenly become a very real part of her, I don’t know, thought process, I guess. And it enlivened the tradition, I think was exactly what she said, which is kind of what you’re talking about here.
Dr. Blackwood:
One way to understand this is that we, as human beings, need to be connected both, let’s say, horizontally, with other people in our own time, you know, friends, family, members of our community, and so on. But also we need to be connected vertically, you might say, through time and space and with the past. Before we get to connect with people who are dead, it’s worth pausing for a second to just remember that all of us, through our memories, are maintaining a relationship to our own past.
So if you didn’t have a memory of who you are, just to make this really clear, you couldn’t recognize yourself in the mirror. You wouldn’t be able to recognize your mother. You wouldn’t be able to recognize your own front door without a memory that is preserving for you these things so you can recognize them in the present.

The only way human beings have of slowing down what would be just an uninterpretable fire hose of data, you know, just coming in through your senses, is by memory that slows it down, so voices, shapes, people, and events become recognizable. And so if you can use, as a metaphor, then you can imagine how much your own memory enables you as you get older and more mature, and you come to understand things more deeply. It sort of can slow things down so you can actually see them on a wider, deeper, truer scale and perspective. Something very similar to that is that our study of thinkers and history from the past enables us to do so.
In a very real way, there’s a trans-historical community. We often say at Ralston College that we’re making the ancients our friends. You might say there’s a very real sense in which you can commune with Plato or Dante or Descartes or Gerard Manley Hopkins in and through their writings. They come alive for you as friends. You know, Petrarch famously wrote letters to the ancients. That’s to say people who lived 1,500 years or 2,000 years before he did.
One of the things that is absolutely fundamental to a flourishing educational culture, and not only educational but to a human culture writ large, is that it is able to make these riches, these insights of the past present to us now such that you can commune with them just as you can go and walk through a beautiful building built by your grandfather. That’s a gift that the past has, you might say, thrown forward into the present.
It’s our communion with those things and our internalization by them, the illumination they give to us, that enables us then in turn to play our role in that handing of the baton, to pass those very same things on through our own building and restoration and care and rebuilding and invention, and so on, onto those who will come after us.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to ask you two questions here. The first one is, having read some Homer and Dante and been incredibly excited by these amazing writings, why is it that you need to go to school to get a master’s to look at these authors? I mean, these are presumably two of the authors. I know there’s, of course, many really important thinkers in the Western tradition. That’s the first question. The second one, kind of on the other end of things, is the thing people have always asked, right, when I was myself pursuing something a bit more theoretical: what’s the practical application of that? So I’m giving you two sides of a question here.

Dr. Blackwood:
Sure. I’ll say a few things. The first is that, no, I don’t by any means think you need to go to university. I think these things exist. These are like a great storehouse of treasures that is open to anyone, anytime. We’re at a golden age from the point of view of access from a technical perspective because of the sheer existence of these books, pictures of beautiful paintings and sculpture, works of music, and so on, on the internet that are freely available to anyone. And if I might add, the internet archive, which has famously recently been hacked, and we’re having problems with other questions about this incredible storehouse of knowledge that has all these books available to anybody, you know, basically to read.

We really need to say that and to celebrate that. This is what the universality of human dignity demands, I would say, is that we do make things broadly accessible. But there’s technical access, and then there’s, you might say, something like actual access. Like, you know, you can say, well, we all have access to the internet, but how do we spend our time on there? And so what I’m trying to get at here is that just as with my example of architecture,

It’s true that, yes, you can go on the internet and Google buildings, look up images of buildings, but what are the buildings in your own life that you’re living in relation to? And so what I’m arguing is that the university plays a key role in disseminating, or you might say the ideas and ideals that can nourish and animate an entire culture. And, you know, whether that’s through architecture or art or music or politics or whatever the case may be.
On the one hand, these things can and should be read everywhere. But actually, paradoxically, you don’t get them being read everywhere if you don’t have vehicles of transmission that, you know, I actually think that you can judge a culture very seriously by the extent to which it makes those highest-order goods available to the widest number of people. People who never left, you know, never went further than a few, you know, maybe 100 miles from their home. They were actually quite good at the piano and played for their family.

What I’m trying to get at here is the way in which this isn’t some, you know, thing just for the elite or some kind of, you know, rarefied thing that only a few should be doing. If these things are worth thinking about, it’s because they lie at the heart of human existence, and we should be delving deep into them in order to share, you might say, those riches with the widest number of people. And if we believe in human dignity, then what that means is that we need to have a culture that actually gives people the range of ways of realizing themselves in relation to what is highest and best. And so that’s on the one hand.
On the other hand, I would say that you ask the argument about, you might say, to put it in slightly different language, you know, what are you going to do with that? You know, well, what are you going to do with that? You could say it could be mathematical physics or philosophy. Well, what are you going to do with that? That’s a fair question. It’s coming out of a sense of, how are you going to support yourself?

Not being a wealthy man, that’s always been a question I’ve had to answer, and it’s a question that most human beings need to answer. And so I’m not taking that lightly. That’s one of the core things that most human beings need to be able to think about, is how to have a roof over their heads, and money for groceries, and support their families, and so on. I also want to suggest that present in that question is a presumption about what is useful.
You might say, what are you going to do with that? It’s based on the idea of, what good is that? What use is that? And I want to pause here to insist, Jan, that use is always relative to an end. A washing machine is very good for washing your clothes, but it’s not very effective as a security system. An iPad is good for looking things up on the Internet, but it’s actually not very good as a mode of transport.
Things are only useful to the end you are putting them towards. So then let’s ask, what would be the most useful thing relative to a human being, of the most value, over a whole lifetime? I would say the most important thing for most people at most times in history, across cultures, is something like passing the deathbed test. By that, I mean that you come to the end of your life, whenever it is, and you’re asking yourself the question, did I live as I should have lived?
Was my life worth living? Did I make the decisions I should have made so that I am able now that I am dying to think I lived a life worth living in my own eyes? And, you know, that’s a pretty big question. And, you know, many people get to the end and they think the answer to that question is no.
If you want to live a life that you yourself regard as worth living, then you might say that the most useful thing to a human being would be the things that would enable you to say yes to that question when the time comes. That is really what the humanities are for, is enabling you to navigate questions of morality and mortality and the fleetingness and difficulty and suffering of life in relation to the things that make it worth living. I’m not saying the only way to get to those is by going to university, but what I am saying is that it really does invert the language of utility.

Because I know all kinds of people who made the mistake of thinking that the most important thing was to get a certain kind of degree in order to get a certain kind of job, in order to get a certain kind of income, all good things in themselves, but then for what? Because you can do a lot of things instrumentally in life. I’ve done that myself, where you do this in order to do that, but you can’t live life that way. At the end of the day, you can only live life. Life has to be lived for itself.
How do you do that? What enables you to do that? You might say that the things that enable you to do that would be the most useful thing. And then I want to say just in closing on this, in response to your question, one last thing, and that is that we’re living under a very widespread mistaken conception that instrumental reasoning is the most useful or most powerful thing. That’s just actually not true.
Even if you look, and maybe especially if you look at the great discoveries of science, whether it’s in physics or mathematics or whatever, very, very often, I would say most often, those, you might say, lightning bolt discoveries come out of non-instrumental thinking or reflection. So actually, it’s those moments where you take your, you step back from, you know, this particular problem you’re obsessed with. We’ve all had this experience, right? You’re really, really trying to get this right or, you know, how do I solve this? And a lot of life is like that.
But it’s actually then only when you step back and you stop thinking about that, that you somehow gain access intuitively to a wider, deeper, richer, fuller grasp of things. And so actually, it turns out that the non-instrumental forms of thinking, which are meant to put ourselves in relation to a bigger picture, actually are more generative and instrumental in the end. I mean, you don’t get any of modern technology, you don’t get any of computer science, you know, if it’s not for calculus, right? Where did calculus come from?
When you start asking these kinds of questions about even what turns out to be useful in application, you might say the application of this or that insight, those insights themselves on which those applications are based often come out of more fundamental, freer, speculative thinking. I think it actually needs to be pointed out that Western civilization, certainly medieval Europe, let’s say, for example, and modern Europe from which our own country really takes its political tradition, through Britain obviously, the monasteries played a huge role in the building of Europe. And they were fundamentally non-instrumental.
But they also became enormously productive, culturally, agriculturally, and so on. And so I think actually one of the answers to the crisis of our own time is that we need way more people thinking way more seriously about problems that cannot simply be solved by going off and trying to solve them. Now, that isn’t to say that we don’t need a whole, you know, active world of people in our political life and so on, you know, really focused in a day-to-day way on the problems that we’re faced with. Of course we do, but even they need time to step back and really think those things through.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m just thinking about some of the amazing technological breakthroughs that we’ve been watching, even in the last few months, like this sort of the famous, you know, rocket landing in the calipers which I think everybody has probably seen. It’s like it’s an amazing technological accomplishment, right? And you think to yourself, the people that are doing this, I would really love it if they had really good training in ethics, for example, or, you know, another topic has been gain-of-function research in biology, right? Potentially, you know, a massively damaging area of research.
I would hope that those scientists have also been trained in these kinds of questions, in the realities of, you know, that hubris begets nemesis, for example. These are incredibly important lessons and reflective of all of history. You’re preaching to the converted here, but I hadn’t heard it articulated quite the way you had.

Dr. Blackwood:
Elon Musk is an absolutely astonishing figure. And I think it’s worth pausing for a minute to ask why. I think, in his own words, too, that perhaps what most characterizes him is what you might call building from first principles, going back to the fundamentals and putting the pieces back together. You can’t do that if you’re not independent-minded. I mean, how do you even discover what the first principles are? And how would you know how to follow them?
I actually think that Elon Musk is a very interesting—of course he’s an astonishing figure, as I say—but he’s a very interesting example of precisely how unusual free thinking really is because he stands against a status quo in many industries as a figure of real renaissance and revival and radically free fundamental thinking.

And so, in terms of the education we aim to provide our students, perhaps you might say reduce it just to two things, and that is that we endeavor to make people fundamentally independent— you know, independent-minded, free-thinking— you know, not to be stuck in a herd mentality or even the convictions of their own past, but to step back and think seriously about what is true and what is not and how tensions can be resolved and so on.
So real, genuine freedom of thought, which is a hard thing because the herd mentality is deep in all of us for actually quite powerful evolutionary reasons. So freedom on the one hand, but on the other hand, you know, you used to think that was enough—that you just could create someone who’s really independent-minded. But I’ve actually come to think that it’s not enough, that you can see something true, but if you don’t act in relation to that, you can’t realize what you see. And so the need for moral courage, or courage of will for moral conviction or purpose, is, you might say, the counterpart to independence of mind.

If you can get those two things working together, for all of us, perhaps it’s a challenge to live up to that. You might say that’s a lifelong journey for every human being to go as far and fast and deep as you can into what is true. On the other hand, you have to live in such a way that you are true to that.

Mr. Jekielek:
Stephen, what’s next for Ralston College?
Dr. Blackwood:
We’ve got this one graduate program which we’ve launched as a way of showing what we can do and you know you’ve got to be humble in the way you build ventures. You’ve got to build them step by step, and we were really looking to create the first program at a really world-class level, which clearly we’ve done, and then to build iteratively from that. So we’ll grow out this Masters in Humanities program year over year, and the intention is then to launch an undergraduate program in the same spirit, an integrated humanities program at a world-class level.

We think by the time we’ve done that, we’ll have the best graduate and undergraduate integrated humanities programs in the world. And then, you know, once we scale that up to the size of a full college, let’s say of about 400 students, if we want to get bigger than that, then I think we’ll endeavor to follow the Cambridge and Oxford model of the collegiate university, which is a series of colleges that are all, you might say, semi-independent and self-determining underneath the umbrella of an umbrella university.
And so we certainly intend to continue to expand, to emulate, and perhaps rival, we hope, over time, the great institutions of all of human history, the greatest universities that have ever been are the models, the paradigms we take as our inspiration, and we’re going to do everything we can to be worthy of those.

Mr. Jekielek:
A final thought as we finish up ?

Dr. Blackwood:
I think I’d only say that I think now is a time in which we have both the necessity and the opportunity to build and rebuild. Broadly speaking, Western civilization is in real trouble. We’ve lost the mechanisms of transmission for the very fundamental principles and institutions of our civilization. It’s high time we did everything we could to get them back, and there’s no way of doing that.
The paradox of tradition, the paradox of civilization, is birth and rebirth. It’s only our having the courage in every age, in every time, to take the greatest that we have received and to give it to the young, to transmit, to light the fires in the next generation so they can continue them to the next. I think that we’ve been in an age of stasis over the last several decades, and it’s time we broke out.

Mr. Jekielek:
Stephen Blackwood, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Blackwood:
It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you.