The Birth of Ralston College

"The long march through the institutions was a neo-Marxist strategic plan," recently wrote Ralston College president Stephen Blackwood, "the amazing thing is how completely they pulled it off." "Universities", said Blackwood, are "the water main that is distributing a worldview that is corrosive of what is best in the human being." 

They have turned into social activist centres where the treasure-trove of our cultural history has been recklessly cast aside, and where students' hunger for serious engagement is often met with the thin-gruel mantra that "there is no truth, but only power". The result is a civilization in peril where the very fundamentals of Western culture are under assault. 

Attempts to remedy the crisis proved futile and the Marxist beast too wild to tame, but things are changing. There is now a solid recognition within the 'right', that a grave problem is upon us, and the equally solid realization that a proactive strategy is of the essence.

Dennis Prager's assertion that “sending your child to college is to play Russian roulette with their values, because there is a good chance he/she will return from college alienated from you, America, and Western civilization”, has been with us for some time - what is new is the growing realization that our tuition, alumni donations, and taxes are subsidizing the destruction of our society. 

Blackwood sat with his friend and colleague Jordan Peterson to discuss the dire state of higher education. The two luminaries talked about the true purpose of education, and lamented over the devastating impact that pseudo-disciplines becoming dominant in universities has had on society.

They mused over how the Gulag Archipelago made Marxism morally repugnant and discussed 'canonical works', cultural renewal, and the birth of Ralston College - a new university headed by Blackwood and founded with the support of some of today's brightest minds. Ralston's board of visitors includes, among others, Jordan Peterson, Heather MacDonald, Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, Harvard's Harry Lewis and Fire co-founder Alan Charles Kors.

"We are in a desert, a lonely and dry place where the narrative fragments," a thoughtful Blackwood told Peterson. "That's all the deities," responded Peterson with excitement, "the Israelites come to worship the 'false idols' because the narrative fragments and that is precisely the moment paradoxically, at which we can rediscover ourselves." 

"You called our cultural temporal moment a kind of inflection point" said Blackwood, "what is the inflection point?"

"On the one hand" replied Peterson, "we're making tremendous technological progress in all sorts of directions simultaneously...and on the other hand we seem more confused about the foundations of our culture and the potential directions that we're moving in...that seems especially acute in educational institutions."

Today's universities are institutions of "active discouragement," added Peterson, "especially for men." Judging by current statistics, "there won't be a man left in the humanities and Social Sciences in 15 years."

Hatred for the 'patriarchy' - "the feminist part of the postmodern neo-Marxist monster - has decided that emasculated and weak men are preferable to tyrants; and that those are the only options because there's no such thing as genuine competence." 

As universities stand now, virtually all of the female-dominated disciplines are politically correct, something Peterson attributes to “reasonable women's” inability to regulate the behaviour of the “unreasonable women”. 

Ralston board of visitors counts within it several “reasonable women”, including The Diversity Delusion author Heather MacDonald, who speaks of students being "taught to hate the greatest works of Western civilization and to hate, frankly, each other." They spend four years on campus seeing things through the lens of victimhood and oppression, explained MacDonald, "which is a tragedy and an extraordinary loss of opportunity." This has mostly affected the Humanities but fast invading the STEM fields.

Critics have been lamenting over toxic campuses for years but "handwringing and despair," as Blackwood put it, only prolong the status quo. The time has come for real action. Creating real competition within higher education is the only way to remedy the situation - by giving students and parents the opportunity to reject indoctrination-as-education. 

Based in Savannah, Ralston College has been authorized for operation and awarded its degree-granting powers by the state of Georgia. It will offer degrees in philosophy, arts, economics, natural science, religion, and politics. 

Students who seek to have "their views and feelings unquestionably affirmed, will not find Ralston congenial and should not apply," states the university, but seekers of intellectual independence and self-knowledge will find in Ralston fertile ground for discovery.

Ralston is the antidote to the chaos of modern-day campuses. Imagine a university that does not regard Western culture as patriarchal tyranny, where the divorced-from-reality division of the world into 'the oppressors and the oppressed' is rejected flat out, and where competence is recognized and promoted. A university where both sexes are judged upon merit, where the pseudo-disciplines of gender studies are shunned, and where 'ideological pathology' never passes for academic knowledge. An institute where 'canonical works' are investigated not for 'offensive' references but for their lasting insight and beauty.

We need to “incorporate the greatness of the past” as a way of awakening students' own greatness, said Peterson. "Each great philosopher, each great thinker is a fragment of the ultimate ancestral being". You get a fragment from Nietzsche, Plato, Shakespeare and "there's something that makes all those people great...if you're exposed to each of them then you absorb what's you're exposed to and have the possibility to imitate and absorb that greatness...and that can come to awaken that within you, and that is the purpose of the universities."

"Many young people I know are not interested in fighting some cultural war," said Blackwood, "they simply want to discover the deepest truth of themselves."

"It's the apprenticeship idea," agreed Peterson, "before you can be a painter who can paint, you have to inculcate that discipline skill...that is painful repetition and hard, grinding work, it's the sacrifice of the present for the future. Universities are exactly that - to encourage people to develop the discipline."

It is not about a student taking a humanities degree and coming out 'more well-rounded'. It's about recognizing "discipline as the precondition for freedom", realizing that you are ready to take responsibility and shoulder the cross - "that's what students are dying for," argued Peterson, "that's why men are abandoning the universities."

Referring to their joint visit to Cambridge's King's Chapel - a place "so beautiful that it's just beyond belief," Peterson stressed the value of aesthetic beauty for students as a way to "establish a relationship with eternity". The relationship is lacking in many universities, he told Blackwood, as he described the "soul demeaning" Toronto building where he taught as "nothing but cinder block, the cheapest form of construction, nothing that's beautiful...boring, dull utilitarianism...it's ugly right to the core and it's corrosive, it eats away at the heart of the university."

Ralston College matters not just because it is associated with some of the most visible, globally respected and followed luminaries on the planet - Peterson's name alone will guarantee that Ralston, and perhaps more importantly, the motives for founding it, are well noticed. It matters because it does not aim for solitary success, as Blackwood explained, but to inspire a movement.

Quality educational outlets are sprouting everywhere. From The Academic Agent's Lifetime Learning courses teaching Foundations of Rhetoric, Logic, Politics, Writing and Economics, to coding bootcamps that offer tuition for a fraction of universities' time and cost. There is the successful initiative Minerva that just seven years after launching has, according to the National Review, "received over 25,000 applications and admitted fewer than 140 students, yielding an acceptance rate of less than 1 per cent - a figure lower than that of Harvard, MIT, or Stanford."

There is "a movement in K-12 of classical academies," said MacDonald recently, noting Hillsdale College as a provider for parents who want their children exposed to classical learning. "That's an encouraging sign," she added, calling for donors to "give that movement more steam." Indeed, there is already Charlie Kirk's successful DivestU initiative, with alumni withholding tens of millions of dollars' worth of support from Universities that no longer represent their values. There are also mounting calls for donors' millions to be spent on building universities from scratch.

Education is key to change within society. We need many Ralstons to follow suit and change the status quo. "We need more universities wedded to ideas of classic virtue," argues National Review's Frederick Hess, "...more tech-infused models that provide cheap, rigorous, nimble alternatives to the status quo, more certification and apprenticeship programs that make it feasible to sidestep college altogether." Hess draws attention to the significance of Corona putting many US colleges on bankruptcy's footsteps, and that "it's been predicted that more than a hundred colleges will be pushed to the brink of financial ruin, thus creating a surplus of move-in-ready campuses - if there was ever a moment to launch a wave of institution-building, this is it."

Ralston matters because the conservative and centrist ethos of taking on responsibility is one the young, especially men, are craving. The conservative message that responsibility gives your life meaning, and to "shoulder your damn burden," as Peterson puts it, is in fact a selling point. Ralston ethos of initiative, drawing inspiration from trailblazers Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Bernie Marcus, is the antidote to the dead-end victim mentality. 

It is scary to think that Yale's William F. Buckley wrote about the duel between Christianity and atheism, between individualism and collectivism as long ago as 1951, or that nearly four decades have passed since Bezmenov aired his ominous warnings. 

Ralston matters because its very existence puts us on the right path to sanity - I maintain that it takes just one indoctrination-free generation to set society back on the right track.

Hannah is a London based journalist covering culture and current affairs. She writes about photography, film and TV for outlets in the UK and US, and covers current affairs with particular interest in the Jewish world. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and photographer. Her films were screened in festivals worldwide and parts of her documentary about Holocaust survivor Leon Greenman were screened on the BBC. You can find more from Hannah here.