In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Antón Barba-Kay, a philosopher and scholar whose life includes time as a student at St. John's College and as a professor at Deep Springs College. As a scholar, Antón has focused on exploring how the internet and digital technology in general have come to shape our inner lives and our experiences of reality. Rooted in classical and German philosophy, Dr. Barba-Kay engages with questions of aesthetics and interior formation as he articulates a view of digital technology as a "natural technology" - i.e. "a technology so intuitive as to conceal the extent to which it transforms our attention" and our sense of self. This has obvious implications for the design and practice of education, which Dr. Barba-Kay is uniquely placed to explore.

Antón Barba-Kay is a fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego, and a distinguished fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. He received a B.A. from St. John’s College, a B.A. in classics from Cambridge University, and a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; he has been (tenured) Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University and taught at Deep Springs from 2020-24 (two of those years as Robert B. Aird Chair of Humanities). In addition to his scholarly publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy, his essays about culture and technology have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, Dissent , The Hedgehog Review, and The Point, among other magazines. A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation –his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes–was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.

A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/web-of-our-own-making/92F7F830EBEC409F05A526E64DDD1D9D

Deep Springs College: https://www.deepsprings.edu/

St. John's College: https://www.sjc.edu/

On this episode we chat with Dr. Troy Vine with the Ruskin Mill Centre for Practice in the United Kingdom about a new Master of Arts program in Transformative Learning that will be launching this fall, offering a unique opportunity to explore the contemplative model of science pioneered by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and practiced by Henry David Thoreau, Rudolf Steiner, and other out-of-the-box thinkers. Not only is this a different, more holistic way of doing science - it is also a pathway to inner transformation.

After gaining a doctorate in particle physics from University College London, Dr. Troy Vine became interested in Goethe’s theory of colour. Studying with leading authorities on the topic, he has published extensively on Goethe’s colour science, both as writer and as editor. With artist Nora Löbe and physicist Matthias Rang he wrote the book Seeing Colour: A Journey Through Goethe’s World of Colour, published by Floris Books in 2022. Troy is in the final stages of a second doctorate, this time in philosophy, at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a thesis focusing on the history and philosophy of Goethe’s colour science. Troy has taught Goethean colour science and the history and philosophy of holistic science more generally for over two decades, including at Schumacher College, where he was programme lead for MSc Holistic Science. Troy has recently drawn on this experience to design a MA programme in Transformative Learning for the Ruskin Mill Centre of Practice, that will begin this coming autumn.

MA in Transformative Learning - https://rmcp.org.uk/ma-in-transformative-learning/

Seeing Colour: A Journey Through Goethe's World of Colour: https://www.florisbooks.co.uk/blog/2024/02/19/seeing-colour-a-journey-through-goethes-world-of-colour/

Thoreau College: https://thoreaucollege.org/

This is the 80th episode of the Microcollege podcast! To celebrate this milestone, we would like to do something a little different. For this episode we will be sharing an interview that took place live on WORT 89.9 FM, Madison, Wisconsin’s community radio station. On February 2, Douglas Haynes, host of the WORT show “A Public Affair," interviewed me and Grace Greenwald of the Springboard Foundation about the state of the microcollege movement, including the origins and development of Thoreau College.

Douglas was a great interviewer and this conversation serves as a reintroduction for myself and Thoreau College, as well as a status update on how things have changed in the past 3 and a half years, since the Microcollege podcast started on Henry David Thoreau’s birthday in July 2022. This podcast has proven to be an fun and amazingly effective way to explore, articulate, and promote this emergent model of education and the people and organizations who are making it happen.

I have made connections with people and ideas that have informed my practice as an educator and organizational leader. The podcast has helped Thoreau College connect with new students, instructors, funders, and collaborators and has contributed to the formation of networks and gatherings of allied organizations, scholars, and educators, such as the International Folkmode for Educators in Denmark in 2025 and the now annual summits of the Nunnian Consortium, most recently here in Wisconsin in January 2026. Most exciting of all, I have increasingly begun to hear from ambitious educators and dreamers who tell me that the stories and examples shared on the Microcollege podcast are helping to inspire and inform their own plans to establish new holistic, humanly scaled educational programs on the microcollege model at locations around the world.

This is so exciting and it makes this work seem ever more important and timely. In the past three and half years the sense of crisis in higher education and beyond has accelerated and deepened. Many legacy liberal arts colleges and smaller public campuses have closed, merged, or dramatically restructured during this time and the rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence and other powerful digital technologies have cast many aspects of education, culture, and life in general into disarray.

I feel so grateful to have this outlet as a platform for thinking about these complex times alongside creative and inspiring people who are crafting ambitious and original responses. Thank you to everyone who has been listening to these conversations - and also thank you to Liam McGilligan, the faithful producer of this show. To mark this 80th episode, please take a moment to leave a comment on the platform you use to listen to the show or send an email to me at admin@thoreaucollege.org to say what you appreciate about the show and/or what you would like to hear more about. That would be so exciting and inspiring for us!

WORT FM: https://www.wortfm.org/

Springboard Foundation: https://www.springboardlife.org/

Thoreau College: https://www.thoreaucollege.org/