As a member of our Board of Visitors, the late Sir Roger Scruton embodied the thoughtful cultural conservatism that has always animated Ralston. In 2018, he joined our founding President Stephen Blackwood and then-Chancellor Jordan Peterson for a recorded conversation on "Apprehending the Transcendent." Scruton’s “The Ring of Truth”, published two years prior, was a work he contemplated for over 50 years which touches on and sums up all of his great loves, first and foremost music, along with philosophy, hunting, poetry, history, and the romantic movement more broadly. He writes this work at the absolute peak of his powers and learning and offers up to all a true labor of love.

Our current Chancellor, appointed in September 2025, Dr McGilchrist first deepened his ties with Ralston through the Sophia Lectures on "Wholeness, Imagination, and the Cosmos," delivered to a rapt Savannah audience in 2024. A former Oxford academic and psychiatrist, his hemisphere theory of the brain—that Western culture has let narrow rationality eclipse holistic meaning—has helped reclaim the relational depth modernity often erodes. With breathtaking ambition, this book’s neurological diagnosis across 2,500 years informs the Ralston mission.

One of the earliest members of Ralston’s Board of Visitors, Elie Wiesel embodied the unyielding spirit of testimony that Ralston holds dear. "I love new beginnings,” he remarked when accepting his position: in our still fledgling start up he saw a bulwark against the dangers of forgetting. Night, his unflinching memoir of survival at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, shattered the postwar hush on the Holocaust, demanding a raw reckoning with the silence of God and the brink of human inhumanity. Wiesel's charge remains our principle at Ralston: to testify boldly is the essence of humane learning, the first defense against tyranny, and the living heart of a free society.