Stephen J. Blackwood

Stephen James Blackwood (born 1975) is a scholar, cultural commentator, and social entrepreneur.
Early life and education.
Blackwood was born in Alberta, Canada, and grew up in Prince Edward Island. He is the eldest of ten children. He was educated at the University of King's College (BA), Dalhousie University (MA), and Emory University (PhD).
Career.
Blackwood is the founding President of Ralston College, a nascent university in Savannah, Georgia.
Blackwood lectures and writes on the intellectual and cultural development of the West, and specializes in the history of philosophy, especially Boethius. Oxford University Press published his book "The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy" in 2015.
Blackwood was a founding Executive Director of St George's YouthNet, an educational mentoring program for inner-city youth in the North End district of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was subsequently a teaching fellow in the Foundation Year Programme at the University of King's College. He is a Member of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism and sits on the Board of the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation.
He has argued in defense of the integrity of the private sphere and in opposition to Obamacare. His op-ed in the "Wall Street Journal" about his mother's loss of her cancer coverage as a consequence of the Affordable Care Act was read on the floor of the US Senate and entered into the "Congressional Record".
Blackwood was the host and moderator of a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Sir Roger Scruton at Cambridge University on November 2, 2018. He also moderated a debate called “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism” between Slavoj Žižek and Peterson on April 19, 2019.
Ralston College.
Ralston College is an institution of higher education that offers various programs such as symposia, but it has not yet admitted students to its proposed degree programs. It anticipates focusing on the liberal arts, and has declared a commitment to freedom of speech, enshrined in its motto "sermo liber vita ipsa" ("Free Speech is Life Itself").
Among the members of its Board of Visitors are Vernon Smith, Heather Mac Donald, Harry Lewis, Sir Roger Scruton, Ruth Wisse, Freeman Dyson, and Roger Kimball.