Professor of Latin David Butterfield on joining Ralston College
News 26th October 2024
Attracted by the rigor of its curriculum, the purity of its vision, and the desire of its scholars to study the Humanities seriously, Professor Butterfield is helping lead Ralston College’s expansion.
After more than two decades at the University of Cambridge, the Classics scholar Dr David Butterfield has joined Ralston College as Professor of Latin. In a recent article in The Spectator, Dr Butterfield elaborated on why he left a permanent position at one of the world's best universities to join a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, which is now instructing its third cohort in the degree of Master of Arts in the Humanities.
“There is a deep-seated loss of trust in what the essential character of an institution such as Cambridge is: elite, selective, competitive, rigorous,” he wrote. “The cleverest students sense that they are part of a faded spectacle, and I feel for them... Respect for universities is waning, as stories continue to reveal politicised teaching, grade inflation, authoritarian campus policies and lurid, even laughable, research grants. The ambitions of our whole education system are ultimately pegged to the achievements at the very pinnacle of academia. If Cambridge can’t resist decline, who can?”
The answer to that question emerged when Dr Butterfield arrived in Italy this summer to lead Ralston College’s inaugural Summer Latin Program. He was greeted by 25 brilliant young scholars from around the world whose combined academic and professional accomplishments were as strong as their desire to learn Latin ab initio.
Now the College’s first Professor of Latin, Dr Butterfield points to the success of this unique, nine-week immersive language program as evidence of what he had suspected before resigning his full-time position at Cambridge: students from all over the world are keen and hungry for an immersive and intensive educational experience which, unfortunately, they now struggle to find anywhere.
“Linguistic immersion is at the very heart of studying the Humanities. Few things better enable free inquiry than the ability to access the thoughts of those who lived in the past without intermediaries or ideological distortion,” Dr Butterfield says.
Why Ralston College?
Describing what inspired his decision to join Ralston College, Dr Butterfield says that its mission is ambitious, honest, and urgent.
“There are moments in life when the light changes and the mood shifts irreversibly. In these moments you realise how far you have wandered from the path you set out to pursue; in the happiest cases you see illuminated anew the route that leads to what you love, all the while in an environment that radiates warmth, curiosity and shared purpose.
“Such a moment I experienced the first, and the second, and the third time I had the pleasure of meeting Ralston faculty, teaching Ralston students, and experiencing Ralston fellowship." I am truly thrilled to be joining a scholarly society which, however small and however new, manifestly seeks to model the very best traditions of the university: a commitment to the humanities, to free enquiry, to open debate, to languages, to learning, and to truth.
“Some of the most talented scholars in the world have already forged at Ralston a community of unique quality, integrity, and ambition. I will be delighted to help corroborate and expand that project and to draw as many people as possible into the transformative experience of studying the Humanities from Greco-Roman antiquity right through to the modern world, with passion, rigour and humility.”
As Dr Butterfield wrote of his first encounter with Ralston College, in a piece for The Critic about the crises facing the Humanities, "it models just how different things can be if the Humanities are given the space to breathe and believe."
Immersive study has been at the core of Ralston College’s curriculum since it first opened its doors to in-person learning in 2022 and launched its Master of Arts in the Humanities program, which begins with a first term of study in Greece, where students learn to speak and read Ancient and Modern Greek.
Launching a parallel Latin program emerged as the natural next step for an institution that seeks to understand, illuminate, and interrogate the long history of the Humanities. As Dr Butterfield said in a wide-ranging interview about why he was leaving Cambridge for Ralston, this expansion of the program will allow for a more holistic and coherent approach to the western tradition. The College can deliver this goal by attracting such a high pedigree of scholars from around the world, all invested in an institution that fosters a shared academic vision lost from so many places where it once thrived.
A Growing Community
In a recent article in the New Criterion, Dr Butterfield described his experience of joining a new faculty:
“The College has successfully revived the quintessential spirit of collegiate life in the Humanities, by forging a tight-knit community of scholars and faculty.
“As open-minded, good-hearted students of the Humanities, all are committed to fostering the circumstances that allow free enquiry, free speech, and free association to thrive. And yet more importantly, all are yearning to answer the central question of human life: what is the life well lived?”
The addition of Dr Butterfield as Professor of Latin to the College’s faculty confirms our Master of Arts in the Humanities as the most competitive on offer in the United States, says founding President Stephen Blackwood.
“With Dr Butterfield as a member of our faculty, I am ever more confident that scholars will not find a more challenging and rewarding academic program in which to learn the greatest works of art and intellect. He is a scholar of astounding range and ability, an inspiring lecturer, and a beloved teacher. Moreover, he is a man who understands the vital truths of civilization and the role of the university in transmitting and fearlessly defending those.
"We are enormously grateful and excited to have Dr Butterfield join us.”
About Ralston College’s Summer Latin Program
Beginning in July 2023, a team of four professional Latinists led by Dr Butterfield, with one hundred years of experience studying that language between them, began their mission. 25 scholars, selected from five continents, took on the challenge of learning Latin ab initio, seeking not just to read it with confidence but also to speak it with fluency, as well as acquire some Italian.
In addition to extensive study time in Syracuse on Sicily and in Rome herself, the program included guided travel through several sites, including Agrigento, Palermo, Pompeii, Naples, and Florence.
In their concerted and concentrated linguistic study, which extended to communicating only in Latin during archaeological visits, travel and many meal times, students were enriched by the reading of literary, historical, and philosophical texts from the Roman, medieval and Renaissance worlds—directly accessing the works of Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Augustine, Benedict, Poggio Bracciolini and many others—during just two months of hard study.
To learn more about the current cohort of Ralston College's MA in the Humanities, visit here. You can start your application for the 2025–26 program here.