2024 President’s Report

2024 President’s Report

by President Dr. Andrew Seeley

2024 was a challenging year, particularly with the sudden move of the Augustine Institute to its new campus in St. Louis. Below, I highlight our achievements and areas of focus for 2025. I do so in the light of a clearer understanding of who we are and our general areas of contribution.

Who we are: The Boethius Institute is a fellowship of Master Teachers of traditional liberal education devoted to continuing and deepening that tradition through teaching, mentoring, speaking, writing, providing resources, and collaborating with like-minded institutions. 

What we do: The Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education serves the ongoing renewal of liberal arts education by assisting scholars and leaders to grow in their understanding and practice of the traditional liberal arts and sciences, while also growing in practical wisdom about the goals and means of education. Our Fellowship unites those passionate about liberal education in a bond of friendship and common effort on behalf of the advancement of liberal education throughout the world. Through the Arts of Liberty website, we offer an array of curricular and formational material for use by teachers, students, and lifelong learners.

In particular:

• We develop understanding, friendship and collaboration through annual symposia of our senior and associate fellows. 

• We provide formation and mentorship for present and future leaders of the renewal formally through our Fellows in Formation program, along with offering formal and informal direction to other scholars and education leaders.

• We develop new curricular resources ourselves, as well as identifying and promoting those developed by others.

• We provide specialized content formation for classroom educators in the traditional liberal arts and sciences.

• We contribute scholarly talks, articles and books in the academic forum and related cultural and academic arenas.

• We offer individualized services to developing programs of liberal education in the United States and abroad.

• We collaborate with other institutions on conferences, publications, and other offerings, and contribute to common counsel about the education renewal.

2024 Achievements

Fellowship: We added John Brungardt as our first Associate Fellow.

Formation and Mentorship: We continued our Fellows in Formation program into its second year. 

We have offered informal advice to many who have contacted us. 

We have participated on one dissertation committee.

Curricular Resources: Fellow Lucas Fonseca Dos Santos has begun translating Arts of Liberty materials into Portuguese, with Jean Guerreiro, another Fellow, reviewing them.

We are contributing suggestions to Gavin Polhemus on his new physics textbook for high school grounded in historical developments.

Scholarly Contributions: We contributed papers to the Benedictine College conference on education and to ICLE’s national conference.

We offered public talks at Immaculata Academy in Louisville and St. Mary’s Catholic School in Taylor, Texas. 

We participated in the Circe Forma Symposium. 

We contributed presentations at a conference in Aracaipa, Peru. 

We have contributed promotional notes for books by Jared Stout and Ben Reinhardt. 

We will be presenting at a conference in Brazil on the Catholic renewal in May 2025.

Content Formation: We continued our quadrivium courses for Masters students at the Pascal Instituut.

Collaboration: We have helped prepare for an Adeodatus conference on Tolkien as a canonical author. We are working with the Catholic Studies program (University of St. Thomas,  St. Paul, MN) and Catholic International University to initiate a series of symposia on the works of Christopher Dawson to begin in 2026. 

We participated in the St. John Henry Newman Institute Catholic Education Leaders Summit.

Administration and Advancement: We filed our first 990 (2023).

We are ending the calendar year with a $13,000 increase in available funds, largely through our services to the Pascal Instituut and UJPII (Costa Rica).

We published 4 bulletins to our mail list and social media:

• The global liberal arts renewal
• Imagination in the Quadrivium and literature
• Lincoln and rhetoric after war 
• Literature

We were invited to and have submitted a $100,000 grant proposal to the St. John Henry Newman Institute to launch our quadrivium recovery project. The grant was awarded January 6, 2025.

We have significantly increased our email list by requiring registration for Arts of Liberty downloads. We have also received positive website feedback from a new survey of users.

2025 Efforts 

Fellowship: We must develop the fellowship of Senior and Associate Fellows. 

Formation and Mentorship: We will launch a new cohort of our Fellows in Formation.

We are planning a week of scholarly activities August 4-9 at the Augustine Institute, which will include symposia for both Senior and Associate Fellows and Fellows in Formation.

Content Formation: This same week we will host our first mini-conference for mathematics teachers. 

Scholarly Contributions: We will participate in more conferences: Adeodatus winter forum on Tolkien, Adeodatus summer conference, Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC), and Notre Dame’s di Nichola Center for Ethics and Culture (DCEC).

We will launch our quadrivium project by developing web resources and commissioning a source book.