Funding Monticello College: A 21st Century Approach

Historically, most American institutions of higher education struggled to fund themselves. Non-profit institutions did not generally have mechanisms for generating revenue. Thus they relied on tuition, donations, and an endowment. Harvard, America’s first school, suffered this same fate. In 1636, without any endowment (the gift from John Harvard, the school’s name sake was quickly squandered) […]

Significant Developments on the Monticello College Campus

Let me take a couple of lines to bring you current with Monticello College news. My daughter Amber and I spent the greater part of  5 months (Jan-May 2014) in California teaching a program called Personal Financial Autonomy (the Utah segment begins in September). We met with great success and taught over 400 students in 12 locations. We arrived […]

The Debate Over The 2nd Amendment

Whether you support it or not, the recent dispute over the Second Amendment has the makings of a serious controversy in coming days. With the current refusal of as many as 300,000 Connecticut gun owners who legally possess rifles that have just now become illegal in that state, we are witnessing a profound example of civil disobedience. The amendment in question states: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the […]

A Liberal Arts Degree Is More Valuable Than Learning Any Trade

56 year-old Rivik Ranadivé is an Indian businessman, engineer, author, speaker and philanthropist. Ranadivé is the founder and CEO of TIBCO, a multi-billion dollar real-timing computing  company, and is credited with digitizing Wall Street in the 1980s with his first company, Teknekron Software Systems.   I’ve made it a lifelong habit to do things I know nothing […]

That Which is Seen and That Which is Not

The President of the United States believes that our role in the global community is to punish the Syrian government for military strikes on Syrian civilians resulting in hundreds of deaths and diminishing the Assad regime’s ability to deploy biological agents in the future. Whether or not it is the duty of the U.S. to […]

Why I Hate School But Love Education

On December 5, 2012, English rapper-poet Suli Breaks posted a video that took the internet by storm.  With over 500,000 hits in the first couple of days, and over 2.5 million to date, this youtube video went viral almost the second it was released. This young college graduate, turned self-styled poet, takes a strong stance […]

The Charles Schulz Philosophy






  Although this philosophy has often been attributed to the creator of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, there is no evidence that he actually penned it.  Regardless who the author is, it still makes my point. In our capacities as fathers and mothers, family protectors, and business decision makers, we all have to measure other people. […]

Return of the Manual Arts

We have spent considerable space in these posts discussing education, particularly the liberal arts. This post is dedicated to the lesser known side of our curriculum—the manual arts. Manual arts are not something that the average American thinks about in the 21st century. But a hundred years ago, the vast majority of Americans were engaged […]

The Dawning Of A New Era

We have been saying for years that the day would come when the concepts and results of a liberal education would again be valued in politics, business, and society in general, that citizenship would enjoy a renewed position of importance in our nation, and that statesmen would rise up in our capitols to provide courageous […]