Thank you. When you get a standing ovation before the speech, it’s all downhill from there! Adding a speech now after we have hit so many of the key points about what Wyoming Catholic is doing seems perhaps terribly repetitive. But as Trustee Delserone told my Theology class earlier today, the bread-and-butter of a professor is to make the same point over and over again. So here we go.

I want to thank everyone for coming; the board members, the members of my advisory council, friends of the college, my family, faculty, staff, students. In a special way (at the request of Julia Arbery), I want to thank the first daughter emeritus of the college for attending. Her presence is always, always welcome. And then a special thanks to Chairman Sniffin, to Glenn Arbery, Paul O’Reilly, and Kevin Roberts. I am deeply humbled by their willingness to come, these wonderful men who I have been privileged to mentor under, to call friends. But what you might not know about these wonderful, great men…

…is that they’re all insane.

You see, the kind of people who are involved in starting a college—and even President O’Reilly, while he gets a college that’s relatively further along in its time—it’s still an insane thing to be involved in starting one of these tiny little colleges. Absolutely nuts, in fact, such that people generally say, the sure sign that you’re thinking about being involved in a startup college is that you’ve never done it before.

Dr. Robert Carlson always called it, with a slight crazy look in his eye, if we’re being honest, a quixotic quest that we were doing. That, if you think of Don Quixote, we woke up with a vision, a profound vision of greatness. Which is wonderful, not yet a sign of insanity. And we also realized that that profound vision of greatness was not yet realized in the situation in which we were. Again, no longer a sign of insanity. And then we further realized that not only was this vision we had not present, it seemed actually impossible to fit into the current reality in which we found ourselves. And we decided we were going to do it anyway.

That is fundamentally the quixotic quest that we started. And certainly, certainly it seems like a terrible time to start a college. We’ll leave aside concerns about economics and recessions and demographics and the like. We maybe don’t even need to look at the vast network of legacy institutions that are comprehensive, dominating the landscape, possessing endowments larger than Iceland’s GDP. We don’t need to talk about how it’s a time of consolidation of colleges and that tiny colleges are constantly getting merged or closed. We could just perhaps note the historically low confidence in the very institution of higher education right now. In the most recent poll, only 36% of adults have a positive view about higher ed.

The good news is that that’s higher than every other but three institutions on the list. So when you look at all that, you think, why? Why does anyone think: well, our response to this situation is going to be to start a college. So just really quickly on the downer side of the evening, let’s just note how desperately it’s needed.

The fundamental reason there’s a lack of esteem or trust for higher education is that higher education in general has become profoundly impersonal. It’s not one thing. It’s tried to keep a neutrality on the vision about what it means to be a human person. And in response to trying to be neutral about the question of what the human person is, we multiply programs and aims and ends endlessly because we’re not willing to say there’s some comprehensive vision of the true and the virtuous that should define what an educational institution does.

In this fragmented vision, we invest billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars. And the only thing worse than a fragmented vision of the human person is a well-funded fragmented vision of the human person, which is able to multiply the problems and create more new departments and bizarre permutations 20 years later than we ever thought possible.

Who would have thought that a major battle in the world of higher education would be over what a woman is? And yet, that’s the situation we find ourselves in. And we have built these absurdly funded fragmented institutions to an absurdly large scale. These institutions in Bernal are larger than most towns in Wyoming, which is maybe not the biggest feat in the world. But I still feel it’s worthy of comment. It’s not actually the kind of place where you go for human flourishing. And then on top of all that, we decide to get obsessed with saying, well, the reason you go to these absurdly large, bloated, fragmented institutions is so you can get a credential and get a job, so that you can lay waste your hours focused on getting and spending, to coin a phrase.

What we’ve done with this fragmented vision of the human person is, we’ve swapped it. We made a deal. We’ve said, as in general in the institutions of higher ed, we’ve said, well, look. If you’re going to shoot for truth, goodness, and beauty, you have to have a comprehensive vision of the human person. And we were doing that in creating competent professionals and people capable of leading republics and businesses. But let’s change our plan. Let’s instead shoot for making competent middle managers. And then it turns out that if you actually shoot for just making competent middle managers, you’re not very good at doing that.

We’re emerging from a fragmented, fractured, well-funded, but bloated institution. And the students that end up at these institutions are beset by loneliness, in the midst of massive crowds, drunken promiscuity, materialist, relativist views of realities that yield desperate attempts to find meaning among rabid political activism before dissolved into a kind of nihilistic despair at what it means to be man. That’s the landscape, put bluntly, of American higher ed.

It seems appropriate at that point to say, yeah, at some level the average university student maybe is not capable any longer of reciting Hamlet’s speech about man. And yet, it’s roughly how they feel. Luckily, in this particular group, we are capable of reciting Hamlet’s speech about man.

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither, though by your smiling, you seem to say so.

A despair. An institution, higher education, in its initial form promised us a great, exalted view of the capacities of the human person. And in general now, its graduates yield us a despair. Man delights not me. Nor, if you can figure out what it is, woman.

So it’s certainly a challenging time, right? A time that inspires madmen to quixotic quests. And I am incredibly thankful for the madness of the founders of TAC and the madness that has preceded my own role in this wonderful pursuit of an education proportioned to a human person.

An education intended to be offered in the human mode to promote authentic human flourishing. It is Christian education’s privileged task to draw on the full picture of the human person, recognizing both the nobility of the human person’s reason, but also the reality of our brokenness.

It’s true, for fallen man, the world’s disenchanted. His relationships are broken, his vision of himself earthly, deluded, content with base desires. And as to God, no thoughts given. It’s true. A Christian education is a spiritual work of mercy meant to extend the message to these broken men and women that the human person is a person who was not only once created for greatness, but has been redeemed through the work of Christ. And, in part through the very work of Christian education, this person is meant to be drawn out from alienation and brokenness into communion, integrated virtue, and knowledge. And even more, the full promise of the human person, the Church tells us, is seen in the saint who has achieved after their death full communion with God. And yet the mark that the Church gives us for that saint is heroic virtue. When we look to canonize men and women, we look to see heroic virtue. So the full vision of the human person that the Church offers us, that the Christian education is geared toward, is the creation of heroes. Men and women who heroically pursue wisdom and virtue. And that call is for all the baptized.

And not only is Christian education meant to tell people, hey, you could be heroes, but it’s actually meant to help you be a hero.

Christian education in this quixotic frame of mind that we find ourselves in is right in the order to starting hero academies. For those of us involved in the founding of Wyoming Catholic College, this truth about the human person, this yearning to educate heroes, exploded within us even more forcefully than Don Quixote’s desire to be a knight errant.

We have been set on fire with a vision of heroism, an anger at the institutions that have abandoned this vocation, and a longing to create hero academies. We want to create places where we read and study the stories of heroes and their quests, the stories of Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Augustine, Dante, and more. Places where we reflect carefully about what makes someone great-souled, as we study Aristotle’s ethic and Aquinas’ moral theology. Where we discuss leadership and political philosophy and rhetoric. Where we contemplate the mysteries of nature and nature’s god, and wrestle with the relation of speculative and practical wisdom for the hero’s journey.

And more, where we ground this in heroic experience. In riding horses, climbing mountains, traversing deserts, kayaking over rapids, sitting by the campfire, singing ancient songs, wearing cowboy hats, and reciting the bards’ heroic oaths. Even at times, oaths that remind us that the very process of study is a heroic adventure. As we might say together:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Okay, but how do you do that? That’s the question. It’s one thing to have the mad vision. It’s another thing to say, ok, I’m going to put the barber’s basin on my head and go out and ride as a knight. What are we actually going to do when it comes time to create a hero academy?

Now, President Garfield had said that the ideal college is Mark Hopkins at one end of the log and a student at the other. And he’s got a very American view of things: let’s keep it very simple. And there’s something fundamentally true about that, that the fundamental nature of an education is that intimate friendship between the teacher and the student. But there’s also something that doesn’t quite work about it. Because the thing you’re doing on that log, if you’re really doing education, needs to be protected. It’s fragile. Knowledge for its own sake doesn’t make a lot of sense. Careful, principled study through philosophy, learning to speak Latin, memorizing poetry, that’s a fragile, rare breed to find out in the wild. You need to build a greenhouse around this education happening on the log, to keep it safe. To nurture it.

And you need to put a little more in the log. You need to have a shared culture, an atmosphere in which that education can really happen. You need to think about where you put it. As Dr. Roberts has noted, Lander is a really good place to put the ball.

You need to think about whether you’re going to let cell phones inside that greenhouse. You need to think about what kind of conversations, what kind of activities, what kind of shared beliefs, what kind of life of worship. And by the time you get to all of that, you start thinking, okay, this log is getting a bit small. Or at least it’s not just the log, it’s the greenhouse we’re building around it. And then you realize that that professor that’s sitting on the end of the log, the professor is part of a tradition that stretches back. A tradition of a league of extraordinary men and women who have quested for wisdom, for virtue, and for greatness. They’ve left us great books and testaments of their thoughts. They’ve left schools of thought, disciples who became teachers of new students down through the years. And so at the minimum, that professor sitting on that log is not some lone warrior, but is in fact the embodiment of a society of heroes that have gone before him or her.

And then John Paul II adds something about a Catholic college. He says that a Catholic college pursues its mission through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ. It pursues its mission through the formation of a community. You see, the college community is a bit like the Christian model of the community in the Christian church. It is both the instrument for the thing that is doing and the subject of what is happening. And so our college is both the instrument of the education and the community that is here. It’s the instrument of the education and the subject of it. It’s a community that’s built up to help us provide for our outdoor adventures, for eating together, living together, worshiping together. A community of men and women who not only discuss the great books, but much horse stalls. A community where some care for the choir while others keep the vans running. A community where we together keep our hallways clean and our parking lots plowed, and our minds ordered and cleared.

President Garfield’s log is nowhere near big enough for such a community, but it is this community that both itself becomes heroic and which forms heroic students. It is our journey together, the sacrifices made by people in the kitchen and the administration, the faculty, the students, the parents, the board members, the benefactors. The gritty determination to make this impossible thing happen here in Wyoming. To merge that grittiness in a grace-filled atmosphere of prayer and worship and study: alumni, parents, boards of directors, networks of benefactors, new apostolates that spring up in relation to the college, partnerships with industry, a network of friendly schools.

All of this is part of that craziness that we started when we decided to start Wyoming Catholic College. Because when we found Wyoming Catholic College, we weren’t just making a log, we weren’t just making a greenhouse, we’re making a network, a movement of education, standing the shoulders of those who’ve come before us and hoping to see other things come after. That is replacing that impersonal giant structure that is so damaging to our young people. And we’re at the beginning of it. We’re looking for new models of funding this school. New models for how to convince partners in industry to hire graduates. New models for how to collaborate with other networks of schools. Models for how to recruit from other high schools.

It’s a network of friendship that we are invested in, and that network of friendship is why John Paul II says that the Catholic College is the instrument of redeeming culture. And everyone who joins us in this network is part of the heroic journey, is joining us in this pursuit of wisdom, in being transformed here in the wilderness. And we’re doing it because it’s just good to be transformed. It’s just good to have heroic virtue. And yet we’re also confident that that good will bear fruit in this network, in this relationship: slaying the behemoths that obscure the good, the true and the beautiful, and inviting others to join this amazing quest. A heroic adventure.

I thank all of you and those not in this room for the sacrifices you’ve already set forth and for the journey that lies ahead. Let’s go be crazy.