Aquinas College Founder Honored

The founder and president emeritus of Thomas Aquinas College near Santa Paula has received a national award that includes $10,000 cash.

Ronald P. McArthur accepted the award from the Heritage Foundation’s Salvatori Center for Academic Leadership at a ceremony Saturday night in Washington. “It’s like a small Nobel Prize,” said Leonard P. Liggio, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and chairman of the award’s selection committee.

McArthur founded the Catholic liberal arts college 22 years ago, basing its curriculum exclusively on the reading of the “great books” from 2,500 B.C. to the early 20th Century.

“A degree in the great books provides a sort of broad culture,” Liggio said.

Across the nation, only St. John’s colleges in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M., are comparable to Thomas Aquinas, Liggio said. Its establishment came as a reaction to the increasing specialization of university degree programs around the nation, Liggio said.

With an enrollment of more than 200 students from around the world, the college has proven very successful, but the small group of professors who worked together to start it faced formidable odds, McArthur said before receiving the award.

“We started with no money, and we had to go around and try to raise the money before we had any students,” McArthur said, adding that he was gratified to be recognized for his efforts.

McArthur said he would give away some of the award money and that he was not sure what he would do with the rest.

The Salvatori Center was created in 1991 at the Heritage Foundation--a conservative, Washington-based think tank--with a $1-million grant from the Henry Salvatori Foundation of Los Angeles.