About Monticello College
Why Monticello College? Because we build Americans.
Achieving the American Dream in the 21st century will require something very different than the last century. Tenacity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and a very specific set of self-reliance skills, much of what was exhibited by the founding generation, prepare our students to be independent of the burdens of the previous generations.
Being an American means that we live following a set of American ideals. It begins with the lost ideal of georgics and is followed by four equally forgotten principles:
Georgics | Liber | Providence | Public Virtue | Liberty
Monticello College builds Americans by providing a Liber education based on the liberal arts and the manual arts. History, literature, science, foreign language, philosophy, leadership training, and a number of other subjects are taught while living on and operating the farm where we grow most of the food that our students and faculty consume during the school year.
We also teach the manual arts of traditional plant growing, harvesting and preservation, fermentation, yogurt and cheese making, and animal husbandry including slaughter and butchery.
Other manual arts of our program are the development of construction skills. We teach adobe, super-adobe, CEB construction, cob and straw bale construction, conventional stick build, and an assortment of off-grid energy system skills.
An intense application of both the liberal and manual arts is required to fulfill our mission “to build men and women of virtue, wisdom, diplomacy, and courage who inspire greatness in others and move the cause of liberty.”
Our graduates enter the post-college world with a skill set that gives them the option of not seeking a job, but rather empowers them to create a self-supporting business and living situation that is completely independent. Financial and living independence always comes before political independence.
Our students graduate with a set of skills wherein they can think for themselves, communicate with power and effectiveness, grow their own food, build their own home, generate their own electricity, and form a business of value to themselves and to the world. Their education makes them an asset and leader in any community; in a word an “American.”
Faculty
Mark Anderson, AA
Andrea Briggs, BA
Shanon Brooks, PhD
Julia Brooks, AA
Vern Cox, PhD
William DeMille
Board of Trustees
Board of Trustees
Shanon Brooks – Utah
Deena Ortiz – California
Joelle Mancuso – California
Symbria Patterson – Utah
Dan Brooks – Nevada
Travis Slade – Utah