By Free Republic | Created at 2024-10-31 10:41:01 | Updated at 2024-11-06 08:52:10
5 days ago
A New Liberal-Arts University Arises -- Savannah’s Ralston College
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | October 23, 2024 | Stephen Blackwood
Posted on 10/31/2024 3:40:43 AM PDT by karpov
Ralston College counts among its first graduates a 24-year-old man who, in his third term of study, asked me what he could do to help ensure our fledgling institution would endure for 100 years.
His query deepened a conviction that had guided me for the previous decade as I traveled the world in search of philanthropists and world-class academics to help found a university dedicated to preserving and advancing knowledge: It is what young people want but cannot easily find. Answering their call has been inspiring and, at times, challenging.
While it is a challenge that my colleagues and I intend to meet, our efforts make clear that sustaining a new institution of higher education—even for one year, let alone a century—will rely on two things: a more widespread acknowledgement, first, of the existential danger threatening universities and, second, of the hunger among today’s youth for a space where free inquiry and the pursuit of truth are firmly upheld.
The dozens of business leaders, academics and public intellectuals who have supported Ralston College since its incorporation in 2010 were never more persuaded of its mission than last fall, when several university presidents could not provide Congress with cogent explanations for how they had—or had not—responded to widespread protests on their campuses.
I watched with great interest. Not since the 1950s had the higher-education sector in America been under such keen scrutiny, and indeed such intense suspicion, though it had long deserved to be.
We have had clarion calls from perspicacious critics for more than 70 years: From Bill Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) to Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), we have not lacked for trenchant critique of our colleges and universities.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: college
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1 posted on 10/31/2024 3:40:43 AM PDT by karpov
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