Gutenberg College - Charley Dewberry ~ Christian Liberal Arts & The Philosophy of Science

Gutenberg College, located in a former sorority house near the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, has been in operation as a microcollege for over 30 years. This gives it a unique place in the developing story of the micrcollege movement - either a late comer to the class era of new college creation in the mid-20th century era of higher education experimentation, or an early harbinger of the current flourishing of the 21st century. In either case, the story of Gutenberg College is a fascinating and highly personal one, intimately connected with the biography of my guest for this episode, Charley Dewberry, who has served as a tutor and academic dean since the college's founding in 1994. A native son of the upper Midwest, Charley got interested in science and ecology through an engagement with the complex field of stream restoration and a quixotic quest to restore a fish, the grayling, to its ancestral habitat in northern Michigan. This interest led him to work with salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and a chance encounter with a book dealing with epistemology and the philosophy of science called Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi, which challenged everything he thought he knew about science and the scientific method and shook his worldview to its core. In fact, Dewberry credits Polanyi's "post critical" attack on reductionist materialist with his personal conversion to Christianity and for setting him on the path to founding a Great Books microcollege dedicated to the "Christian Liberal Arts" with generous helpings of classic ecological thinkers like Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and E.F. Schumacher, all based in a conversation-rich lifesharing community housed under one roof. And they have a popular Irish ceilidh band to boot!One of the great things about microcolleges is they are impossible to pigeonhole! Enjoy this conversation with Charlie Dewberry.Gutenberg College - https://gutenberg.edu/Gutenberg College on "Oregon Grapevine" - KLCC Eugene Public Radio - https://www.klcc.org/podcast/oregon-grapevine/2026-04-07/oregon-grapevine-eugenes-gutenberg-collegeThoreau College - https://thoreaucollege.org/