[music] [music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Walter Sterling, president of Saint John's College here in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Walter, a pleasure to be with you today.

It's great to be with you, Alexander.

You are president of one of the pioneering institutions of higher education.

It's home to the oldest erected church in North America, Santa Fe.

It's also home to one of the most ideologically diverse faculties.

Tell our viewers about your distinctive mandate here at Saint John's.

So it's great to have a chance to talk with you about this today, Alexander.

Saint John's College is known to many people as the Great Books College.

We have a sister campus in Annapolis, Maryland, where, in some ways very traditional, in some ways a very radical liberal arts education anchored in study of the great books of the West, from classical antiquity to the present, was put in place in the 1930s as part of a movement that also involved the University of Chicago, Columbia, other places that are associated with study of the great books as part of a core curriculum.

At Saint John's we went all in.

Our students do a four year integrated humanities, liberal arts, sciences, mathematics, languages, music, arts, program, anchored in the study of the great books, but involving all those other disciplines that get laced through, a broadly chronological study of Western classics.

It's a fully integrated program.

We're not departmentalized our students do this whole program.

Our faculty teach throughout it.

That's been our model since the 30s.

And this campus was erected in 1964.

We're celebrating our 60th anniversary as another campus, pursuing the same projects, we're one college with these two campuses.

Indeed, we think we're situated in one of the most beautiful state capitals, historic, culturally rich, an incredible location.

We're nestled in the foothills of the southern Rocky Mountains, here at over 7000ft.

It's an amazing setting for contemplation and reflection.

So that's our project.

And we do, as you suggested, stress dialog across difference around the table.

Our classes are all small, student driven, discussion driven classes.

And we prize the diversity of points of view.

We use the vocabulary of, learning from our differences and discovering our shared humanity.

How has the Socratic method evolved in your mind, and how is it most relevant now in this tech age, this digital age of AI?

Have you seen in the way that it materializes, a different shape of Socrates in 2025?

Or has it really been a consistent and concrete idea of that Harkness table and deliberative process where, you have shared learning, and a kind of deliberative democratic process around a table.

So I want to say both.

There's certainly a continuity from the dialectic that's captured in the platonic dialogs up to what happens around our seminar table.

And of course, many other classrooms, across the country at all levels, where the idea of active learning, learning through questioning and drawing out from, a student their own points of view and testing them and so on.

There's nothing new about that.

You know, really what the liberal arts and liberal education are about at the deepest level is human freedom, an education for freedom, an education befitting free people in a democratic society or in any society.

That's the aspiration.

And there's so many ways in which our freedom, our agency, our ownership of our own thinking, is jeopardized these days.

That I think there's a sharper edge to what it means for us to sit around a table face to face, real voices, a real living conversation, a tangible, unhackable book on the table, that deepens our attention, draws us into shared inquiry instead of fragmenting our attention.

I think the stakes are higher for that than ever.

And it looks more like something future looking that we need now than it does a kind of, pattern or a much less an anachronism from the past.

Unfortunately, you know, the humanities, translated into liberal arts, have been stigmatized and politicized in a way that if you speak to not even a general audience, but an informed audience, they would be suspicious that there is the tendency for liberal partizan indoctrination.

But that's not what you mean.

Liberal arts is not a political agenda, but you said it's an agenda for freedom and free thought.

Do you think that we need to redefine it?

I mean let's just start with the view that the idiom of the liberal arts, the phrase liberal arts, the phrase liberal education, rings a bit hollow these days for many.

It can sound like soft disciplines like just some subset of the humanities, as opposed to STEM or as opposed to more rigorous areas, as opposed to, more pre-professional education.

It can sound like a bastion of progressive thinking that, folks on the conservative end of the spectrum are suspicious of.

It can sound like something that's just for the elite, a kind of luxury education.

It shouldn't be any of those things.

It should be, the beating heart of what we want a college education to be for everybody.

A transformation, a transitional time into mature adulthood, which includes career preparation, includes preparation for citizenship.

But fundamentally, it's about having an education that's as broad and deep as possible.

An education in and for deep freedom and self-possession as you go out into the world.

I think the kind of faculties, individual faculties of soul and intellect and character that we want, all of our young people to grow into, to flower, that's what we want a college education to do at bottom, everywhere.

And we want to grow from that.

Preparation for career, preparation for life, preparation for citizenship.

It shouldn't be politicized.

In a sense, it's deeply political because we're trying to prepare free citizens, but it should be pre partizan.

We should welcome, a range of opinions on everything around the table.

That's what we learn from, it should be civil and collegial and all of those things.

But it should be committed to this transformational project that is always at the heart of education, college education, liberal education.

But again, I would say needed now more than ever.

So that's what we stand for.

I think that every institution of higher education has that as part of their mandate, part of their vision and mission.

It gets weighted differently with other things, but it shouldn't be viewed, the liberal arts, liberal education shouldn't be viewed as one slice of what we do.

It should be viewed as the deep reservoir of what we're trying to do with all of higher education, in my opinion.

One of the things that you focus on and have written about is you're not interested as much in the end outcome of the competition of, you know, marketplace of ideas as much as the shared inquiry and finding, areas of disagreement as much as agreement.

And that makes the education here different where I think your graduates have the capacity to reconcile their differences, maybe better than, graduates of other institutions.

In recent years, obviously, there's been a lot of debate around the categories of academic freedom, freedom of expression, very heightened after October 7th.

But really for a decade now, we've been wrestling in this space, concerns about cancel culture, ideological capture, groupthink.

But in many other ways, just wrestling with how we have a place for free expression, academic freedom, a wide range of viewpoints on our college campuses.

That concern is often coming from the political right, but not exclusively.

One of the things that I believe strongly in is that while that view is, well, that idiom of freedom of expression, academic freedom is very important, I support it.

We support it, we endorse it as the coin of the realm in higher education.

It suggests a world where there's a kind of contest of ideas.

And I'm asserting my opinion and somebody else is asserting theirs.

And we have a kind of Darwinian struggle out of which we see knowledge creation, or we see the truth emerge and so on.

It's a powerful metaphor and marketplace of ideas, that contest of ideas, the debate metaphor, and it has its place.

But our vision of what happens around a seminar table, around our classroom table is conversation and shared inquiry and shared learning.

You want the same range of experience and opinions.

You want a wide range of the sayable and thinkable, but you're putting less focus on your own right to assert and more emphasis on a kind of epistemic humility, a spirit of self-critique, a kind of empathetic, inviting gesture, where you want to hear what's other, and encounter it and have it move you and change you and see what you're not seeing, as opposed to just asserting what you're seeing.

The more I thought about it in recent years, as we've had these national debates, the more powerful that has seemed to me not as a rejection of the other, but as a deepening of it, how important it is for us to come around the table to sit in conversation across difference, not leading with the idea of something oppositional, but leading with the kind of invitation that we can learn together and go deeply into things, together across those differences.

What do you say about the dearth of opportunity once you graduate to apply that same philosophy, right?

You eloquently identified the context here of our politics, the divisiveness.

So when you see in the real world across disciplines, you know too much the opposite of the incentives that you set up here.

How do you keep the faith among your students and your graduates that you know, that these opportunities can exist in a very real pragmatic way, in professional endeavors too?

I mean, first of all, as much as we might see incentives and practices that are different than that, I would start from a place that in every human soul there's a longing for, connection, for finding common ground, for reasoning together, and so on.

In a certain sense, it takes a lot of, things happen to that longing to channel it in other directions and, cut it off and so on.

So, can look like we're, swimming against the current, but in a way, we're trying to tap into, I think the deeper currents of human nature.

So that's one point.

The other thing I'd say is that, the world is ripe for reform.

You know, the very things that we're talking about they're broadly felt allergies to, hyper polarization, hyper partizanship, in the center mass of our society, there broadly felt anxieties about how technology has amplified siloing and sorting and groupthink and, you know, extreme rhetoric, towards different points of view.

Amplified the loudest, angriest voices and so on.

So, you know, I think we're tapping in to a felt need, a growing felt need that's broad in society.

And I think it's a moment where educators should shift out of a kind of defensive, apologetic posture and, feel like we're we're the ones that need to be part of the remedy.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks view us, as part of the problem, amplifying some of those phenomena out there, and I think it's on us to show that every day in our classrooms, we are producing the kinds of, citizens, citizen leaders, coworkers, family members, friends, spouses that are going to comport themselves in a different way in our pluralistic society and our democratic society and our modern life.

We need remedies for those phenomena.

I think this kind of education is powerfully addressing that.

And I think our graduates go out in the world equipped to be, in a sense, the peacemakers, the ones who see ambiguous and nuance, where others see binary oppositions and antagonisms.

And I think that's what we should be trying to do across our educational institutions.

One of the things you emphasized in a column you wrote for the Santa Fe New Mexican as you were inaugurated here, is that, there's a myth about Saint John's or maybe broadly about liberal arts, unaffordability and inaccessibility and also you are emphasizing your roots in this community, with scholarships that you give to New Mexican students, folks who were born and raised here, as well as, people from outside of the southwest.

But, the whole beef against the liberal arts and the, let's call it the ideas education, if not liberty education, has been that it costs a lot of money, and it doesn't give people practical skills to work with.

But you're modeling something different here that is both affordable and accessible.

Let me roll it up for a second just to say, you know, we're at a time where higher education is facing a tsunami of challenges, and we don't need to catalog them.

But sometimes I say the biggest is just the loss of trust generally in higher education, because it kind of rolls up all the other challenges, both real and perceived.

Among those are concerns about practicality.

Is it doing what it ought to do in terms of equipping us for career?

Is it too expensive?

And in that sense, is it maybe just elites perpetuating, elites?

And then there are a range of other concerns, including the kind of politicization that we were talking about.

At Saint John's in particular, this education can look esoteric in a way, and we've fought very hard to show that it's not like that at all, this equips you very well for career, very well for life.

And it's not meant to be an education for the few who are the most intellectual or most withdrawn from the world.

It's meant to be an education for all.

And we try to show that and live it out better than ever.

We've made commitments to affordability.

We did a major tuition reset a few years ago.

We just committed this year to full tuition scholarships, for students whose families have household incomes of $75,000 or below.

We provide a scholarship right off the top of our tuition.

That brings the tuition price down to $25,000, prior to any additional aid for all New Mexican residents.

So in many, many ways, we're both trying to make it more affordable and make the affordability more visible to folks.

We now more than ever, provide paid internships.

We guarantee one for all of our undergraduates in their four year journey here.

We have more, local partners, regional partners for employment, for internships, more partner programs for professional and pre-professional programs.

So we're doing more of that than ever.

And that's important to show people that this is choosable.

But, the last thing I'd say, the deep kind of education we're providing, broad and deep, integrating, the liberal arts and the sciences, mathematics and so on.

It's an education for the future, the disruptive environment we're in, right?

Nothing has a shorter shelf life than narrowly technical skills.

And what's going to advance folks in their careers now more than ever, are going to be the kind of deep human skills, the deep powers of communication, synthesis, analysis, a broad range of disciplinary, literacy, that you need in the kind of technological and evolving, workplace economy that we're in.

I like that idea of an interdisciplinary literacy.

And yet, I don't think you should be bashful about, taking on ChatGPT, taking on the culture which says efficiency will rule only.

Do you stand proudly as a campus that can be intellectually diverse, and say, we are the human future?

I don't know if you would call yourself an anti AI or anti ChatGPT president, or educational leader, but I would say there's a place for that.

Absolutely, I agree.

I mean look, I think the technologists of the future, need a deeply humanistic education today.

And that's what we stand behind today, 60 years ago, 80 years ago, it's the deep current of what we're doing.

And there are people who are, I suppose, critical of the liberal arts or liberty studies, whatever we're going to call them, who think it's just unessential.

Because, ChatGPT can summarize The Republic for you.

But that is the thesis that you don't accept.

Absolutely.

And again, I think most of us, as much as we see the power of these tools, we see in that power threats to our humanity, risks for our humanity.

So we need, right?

We need to carry within ourselves the resources to assess, interpret, fend off or embrace what these tools can do.

Now more than ever, the question of what remains for the human, what's deepest about who we are, our freedom, our agency, our connection to the good, the true, and the beautiful, and the just, right?

That's what we need.

And that's how we're going to manage these tools which aren't going to go away.

We need spaces of learning, communities of learning that really deepen our human faculties, of intellect and character, so that we can address, use, and understand these incredibly powerful tools.

I'm tempted to say, God help us if we give up on that, and hand ourselves over more fully to the tools that are invading our lives in so many ways.

When you read the texts that you do here, do you think you generally come to the conclusion that, there's been plight of human suffering and agony as a result of human agency, but do you generally come to the conclusion that our judgment is sound?

I think that's an open question for our students, to decide for themselves.

But...

But is a prerequisite to, investing in this concept, the idea that it is, normatively good in that our judgment can be more sound than unsound?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And I think it's something that's validated by our experience, both of diving into these kinds of books, texts and inquiries, but also the way it empowers us for life.

-If I could give an example, -Yeah, please.

you read Thucydides, Peloponnesian Wars, as our students all will, and discuss that work and all the questions it raises about war and peace, just and unjust politics, and so on.

And it's like you've got x-ray vision into the world of the headlines in the world today.

And, you know, our students have that experience again and again.

Students do elsewhere.

But we've made education so thin in so many places.

You want that power to look at what's happening in Ukraine, look at what's happening in Israel and Gaza, look at what's happening around the world and realize, why, as humans have studied these patterns before they've left us ways that we can, deepen our understanding and see much more, insightfully, and take a much longer view, and develop real, acumen for thinking our way through these things, which, if we deprive ourselves of that humanistic, liberal education, we're going to be buffeted, so much more by the noise and not see what underlies it.

Do you think we've yet to truly see the backlash against the depletion of jobs as a result of AI, and people are going to come running to Saint John's and institutions like it when they see that, deleterious force.

That's posed to hurt, our fellow human beings, like.

Well, the disruption is coming, and it's going to accelerate.

And, let's hope, and I do think that it will fuel interest in this kind of education.

One of the futurists I like is Yuval Noah Harari.

And if you read what he says about education in the context of what technology is about to do to the jobs that exist, it points towards something like this, in my opinion.

We're going to have to go deeply within ourselves, develop a whole range of faculties that will be nimble, and that we'll carry with us through a rapidly evolving and disrupted economic and career life in the coming decades.

So, I try not to prophesy, but we all know tremendous disruption is coming, and we're at the early stages of it.

Yes.

I do think it points towards, this kind of education And over the years, we talked at the outset about the politicization of higher ed.

You know, there would be surveys of professors and they would answer in a way that would lead you to think they are uniformly progressive as opposed to conservative.

Folks would study financial contributions to political campaigns of professors.

And, of course, that was probably a flawed way of looking at it, but it became the status quo of people's presumptions, of what goes on in higher ed.

But when you say here that you have an ideologically diverse faculty, and probably student body too, what do you mean by that?

Well, first of all, I mean that it would be hard to tell what folks politics are because we don't sort in the more visible ways that you see elsewhere.

We all do these studies together.

We know we have around the table, political, religious, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality.

We've got all kinds of diversity.

We know it.

We see it around the table, and then we study The Republic together.

We study Shakespeare together, and we don't sort, and we don't lead with our politics.

But it's also been studied, and it passes the eye test for those of us that are here, that we're just more balanced, our faculties more balanced, our students are more balanced, then at least those parts of higher education that can't deny.

-Meaning... -Most people don't deny that there's, strong disproportion in terms of party allegiance and, left, right, imbalance in the professoriate.

Meaning you believe that if you were to self-identify here, you would have a range of people who call themselves conservative and liberal, and also have disparate definitions of what -those things mean.

-Mm hmm.

Yeah.

And that kind of imagination is what is so missing in American political life.

And, you know, for those watching, who have eligible young people thinking about college, think about here because it's just a different environment.

I think that's right.

It's a wonderful way of life.

It's a fulfilling way of life for folks from all different ideological, persuasions, if you want to put it that way.

It's a way of being that combines what we do with the classroom, with a sense of community.

Do you have an idea of what it will take for people to really be of that mind that, we need human beings at the center of decisions.

I could say more than technology, but right now, it feels like the general sentiment is we need technology at the center, and human beings, manipulating that technology.

I fear that we're charting, new territory where, we're losing that sensibility and it's, you know, and it didn't happen through the pandemic, the Great Recession, 9/11, I mean, these are some formative events that could have shaped an outlook about humanity that I don't think we are feeling right now.

And I just wonder if and how we get there.

I mean, so far I've talked a little bit about, and you're alluding to it, technological disruption and the way it's defining economics and work life and sort of thinking in a future oriented way about this education in response to what you just said.

I don't want everything good about this education to be motivated by, fear and crisis.

But the truth is, I think that, we have growing fear and anxiety about technological dystopia of various sorts and political dystopia.

And I do think those point towards recovery of, deep humanism, and deep freedom through education.

I think these are cross-currents.

They're, you know, there are all kinds of pressures that are going to remain on higher education, education generally that, ranging from disinvestment to demographic contraction to ever more increasing pressure to, justify investment in terms of career and, you know, workforce development and all those things.

But there's this other side to it where people are really afraid about of how our society is evolving.

So I point to books like Jonathan Haidt's, Anxious Generation, which all by itself, catalyzed a growing phone free movement in schools that resonates a great deal with us here and our approach to the classroom.

Chris Hayes book, just recently, The Sirens' Call, on attention capitalism.

And then the experience were all having of the fraying of our political order.

And, the tremendous uncertainty around, geopolitics, and conflict globally.

These point us back to the books, back to the liberal arts, back to liberal education.

I would say, whether we like it or not.

I think they do.

And I think you see a lot of crosscurrents in that direction right now.

Walter, I should have asked you the question differently, which is, do you envision a day when there's a bonfire of phone burning, not book burning, but phone burning?

As just that, punch in the gut reaction to what's going on.

We may well see, folks, in the hills here burning their phones with intentionality there.

There's a group of Luddite teens out there who presumably aren't going to see this.

[laughs] Who are doing just that kind of thing.

They've been written about and, yeah, I don't like to say we're going to smash the machines, Yeah.

but, we're going to free ourselves from them.

We need to.

Walter Sterling, president of Saint John's College here in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Thanks for your insight today.

Such a pleasure, Alexander.

Thank you.

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