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David Saussy
Experience & Activities
President, Program Director, Leader/Instructor
Current seminars: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; Homeric Greek; Euclid’s Elements; J.S. Bach Listeners’ Studio
I hold a B.A. and M.A. from St. John’s College in Santa Fe and Annapolis.
After graduating from St. John’s College, I helped my wife and Roxana Zirakzadeh found Symposium Great Books Institute in 2006 in San Francisco, and I subsequently led its reorganization as a 501c3 nonprofit entity in 2013 in San Antonio, Texas, and then the development of its first online seminars in 2014, as well a series of ‘on-location’ collaborations with the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Coppini Academy of Fine Art.
For me, the single-most important question after graduating from St. John’s has been to discover what serious liberal learning can look like in a community outside terminal degree programs. It seemed to me there is a necessity for this kind of learning, and that, whatever else it can be, lifelong liberal learning must be distinct from a path of professional specialization in a particular academic field. Groups of serious adult readers at Symposium have helped me walk, or live, the path of liberal learning in a significant way.
As a Symposium program director, my commitment is to support my colleagues and members of the Symposium community – whether by assisting in the development their unique pathways and offerings, or by lending them personal support (e.g. by meeting one-on-one concerning problems the arise in seminar).
