Episode 61: Hildegard College: Restoring Polymathy and Redemptive Entrepreneurship
About this episode
Christopher Perrin discusses the vision behind Hildegard College with its founder, Dr. Matthew J. Smith, focusing on the importance of polymathy and beauty in education.
Description Christopher Perrin welcomes Dr. Matthew J. Smith , founder of Hildegard College , to discuss why he left a tenure-track literature career to build a deliberately small, relationship-centered “micro college” in Southern California. Smith describes modern higher education as expensive, bureaucratically bloated, and often unable to offer a unified vision of learning—especially when general education becomes a “Wild West” and majors drift toward professional specialization rather than formation. Hildegard’s alternative model centers on a common great-books curriculum organized around six foundational questions, paired with “entrepreneurial arts” that train students to design and launch real ventures rooted in meaningful work. The conversation explores why generalist formation matters in an AI-saturated economy, and why polymathy may be a more realistic pathway to flourishing than narrow specialization. Perrin and Smith then turn to Smith’s forthcoming book The Lost Tradition of Beauty , arguing that modern education has lost beauty as an intellectually serious category—reducing it to ornament or aesthetics rather than a transcendent that illuminates truth and shapes…
People in this episode
Host: Christopher Perrin
Guest: Dr. Matthew J. Smith
Topics covered
- polymathy
- redemptive entrepreneurship
- higher education
- great-books curriculum
- beauty in education
- AI economy
Keywords
- Hildegard College
- polymathy
- entrepreneurial arts
- general education
- beauty in learning
- AI economy
- great-books curriculum
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Hildegard College
Books & works: The Lost Tradition of Beauty
More episodes of The Christopher Perrin Show
- Episode 59: American Education: What It Was and Can Be Again
- Episode 58: The Divided Soul and the Prodigal Pattern: Duty, Desire, and the Way Home
- Episode 57: Remembering Well: Restoring History Through Sympathy, Story, and Place
- Episode 56: A Nice Definition of Classical Education: The Language, Metaphors, and Meaning Behind “Classical”
- Episode 55: From Fragmentation to Fellowship: The Intellectual Renewal Behind Classical Education
- Episode 54: The Festive School: Prayer, Feasts, and the Recovery of Wonder
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Christopher Perrin Show podcast page.