The Case for the College

I remember being flabbergasted twenty-five years ago when my mother-in-law, Cheryl Lowe, casually mentioned that she’d like to start a college one day. At the time—the late 90s—Memoria Press operated out of the Lowe family garage attic. Mrs. Lowe and Martin Cothran worked on their Latin and logic programs on weekdays, and Cheryl’s son, Brian (my now husband), came home from graduate school on weekends to ship book orders or tinker with a novel thing called a website. Memoria Press had two books then and “Highlands Latin School” (HLS) was only a four-hour-a-week cottage school, where I would teach. Starting a college was, to say the least, an ambitious idea.

In the last two and a half decades, however, Memoria Press has faithfully toiled toward the completion of a K-12 classical Christian curriculum, and our model school, HLS, has grown to 750 local students. In these endeavors we’ve witnessed countless demonstrations of God’s providence, but God has shown His glory in spades with Memoria College.

Almost ignored, Mrs. Lowe’s curious comment about a college lived dormant in the back of our minds during the busy development years. Then the unusual circumstances of 2020 unexpectedly offered time, technological opportunity, and a renewed commitment to purposeful living. That buried idea, refined as a Great Books Master’s Program for classical Christian educators, was excavated, dusted off, and, once unearthed, gleamed with shiny promise. To our delight (and perhaps to our surprise) an all-star faculty was eager to join the Memoria College crusade, and the first cohort of students began discussing the most enduring books of history before we barely knew what had happened. Memoria College’s five-week seminar courses opened to an enthusiastic audience in the summer of 2020, and the core fifteen-week courses began that fall.

It feels almost as if Memoria College appeared fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It’s hard to remember a time when this community of insightful students didn’t exist. We are certainly excited by the reception of our program, and really we should have expected it as interest in classical education has grown in the last several decades. We’ve witnessed that the adults giving a beautiful classical education to their children felt a hunger themselves to consume the Great Books too.

Memoria College was created to satisfy this appetite—it’s our chance to give adults the formal classical education they have long wanted so they can be better teachers, better parents, better human beings. Memoria College students want to learn. They want to think about big ideas. They want to read and discuss the treasures they either regretfully missed or are eager to revisit. More than anything, they want a like-minded community of peers who desire to spend their time in formative and consequential ways. No more struggling through the epics in isolation!

The goal of Memoria College is to offer a collegial environment of learning for those with Socratic wisdom—those who humbly recognize that there’s always a lot more to learn. History and experience tell us that reading the Great Books can enrich individuals and communities in countless ways. We hope you decide to join us as we unite in this quest for a greater understanding of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.