Term II Begins in Savannah
The students who will make up Ralston College’s fourth graduating class underwent their matriculation ceremony in Savannah this week, formally enrolling themselves into the College community. Before the faculty, special guests and alumni, each matriculand swore allegiance to truth (veritas), freedom (libertas), beauty (formositas), and fellowship (sodalitas). After signing the Matriculation Book, the students joined the faculty for the first formal meal of the term at the College’s Athenaeum.
With Term II now underway, the theme of the current year’s MA in the Humanities—Fellowship—threads through every dimension of study and community life. This term, students examine fellowship through seminal works of Greek and Roman antiquity, including Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, and Virgil’s Aeneid. These texts frame conversations about friendship and eros, justice and civic order, memory and mercy, destiny and empire—from the wrath and reconciliation of Achilles to the civic renewal of the Eumenides, from Plato’s ascent of love to Virgil’s meditation on founding and rule.
The inquiry extends beyond the classroom through lectures and discussions that draw antiquity into conversation with the present. The College’s Thursday gatherings—occasionally open to the wider Savannah community—invite leading thinkers to explore topics ranging from Ficino’s reading of Plato’s Cave and the moral architecture of the built environment through to Heraclitus and Stoicism, the Oresteia in America, Plato and artificial intelligence, and Augustan statecraft.
At Ralston, the fellowship of co-legere—reading together—remains the bedrock of College life. Through shared study, meals, and conversation, students cultivate not only understanding but also the habits of attention and generosity that make a common intellectual life possible. In this living community of thought and friendship, the College continues its founding work: renewing the humanities as a fellowship of truth, beauty, and freedom.
Who should apply to Ralston College?
Ralston students come with serious academic and professional experience across the arts, sciences, mathematics, engineering, music, psychology, and criminology. They hold degrees from a wide range of institutions—public and private, national and international—including universities such as Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.
Our alumni have gone on to full-time roles in academia and in the worlds of art and culture, technology, business, media, publishing, marketing, medicine, and law. If you’re ready to pursue truth with rigor in a community dedicated to beauty and fellowship, we encourage you to apply. Deadline for early acceptance is December 18th, 2025.
Looking ahead: Next year’s unifying theme will be Beauty—an exploration of the forms, measures, and meanings by which we recognize, make, and live with the beautiful.
