May 21, 2025 | By Eve Tolpa

Global investment professional Paul Tierney has been dedicated to creating and supporting lifelong learning opportunities in partnership with St. John’s College for three decades. Now, to ensure those opportunities continue to flourish, he has spearheaded the John Agresto Leadership Fund, named after longtime Santa Fe president John Agresto, which will provide the college with discretionary capital of $150,000-$200,000. 

The fund’s purpose is twofold: to recognize the legacy of Agresto, a longtime friend, who served as St. John’s Santa Fe President from 1989 to 2000, and to honor and enable Walter Sterling and David Carl in their new respective roles as Santa Fe campus president and Graduate Institute dean. Sterling and Carl have played integral roles in designing the ongoing classics seminars Tierney has hosted for years at both at the Santa Fe campus and in cities abroad such as Dublin and Florence.

“Few members of the St. John’s leadership in Santa Fe have done more to promote the ideals of liberal education beyond our BA and MA degrees than John Agresto,” says Carl, who, along with Sterling, has long championed community-oriented initiatives including Summer Classics, Winter Classics, A Year of Classics, Graduate Institute offerings, and other private classics programming.

“Adult education has been central to the mission of St. John’s from the start, but we often lack resources to pilot or expand or promote these programs,” says Sterling. “This fund will fill key gaps and provide seed funds that will allow many more folks to find their way to, and benefit from, the heart of what we do at St. John’s.”

Tierney is one such person who found his way to St. John’s College later in life and reaped innumerable benefits. This relationship emerged from his connection to the City of Santa Fe, where he and his wife, Susan, had a second home for years that was not far from campus.  “Susan and I love Santa Fe, and we spent as much time in Santa Fe as we could, but my busy work schedule kept us from moving out there full-time,” says Tierney, who is based in New York City and Darien, Connecticut.

Tierney encountered Summer Classics not long after Agresto created the seasonal program for lifelong learners in 1991 with the idea that the college’s influence could—and should—extend beyond teachers, students, and parents to reach “a cadre of interested, happy adults in the outside world," he says. Tierney was exactly the kind of Classics participant he was looking for, and his experience with Summer Classics was nothing short of transformative. Entranced by the texts, tutors, and rigorous seminar method, Tierney recalls thinking to himself, “How wonderful it would be to read this literature with a group of peers, friends of mine that were approximately the same age, on the theory that these works mean different things to you at different stages in your life.”

In fall 1997, Tierney invited 12 friends to attend the first of many seminars. The first was tutored by Agresto and tutor James Carey, who was then serving as Santa Fe’s dean. Upon its completion, Agresto recalls, “Paul said, ‘We have to do something more. If you and the faculty could come and teach, I will have two seminars each year, one here in Santa Fe and the other abroad in unique hotels in countries where the classical work originated. The name of St. John’s will grow, and it will also be a great benefit for this country and higher education in the arts.’”

Thus began a collaboration of 25-plus years. Tierney and Agresto put together a lifelong learning initiative loosely affiliated with the college and encompassing a handful of formats. Organized with the assistance of former St. John’s development officer Susan Metts, they comprise Domestic Seminars, which meet each fall in Santa Fe, and European International Seminars, the first of which, in 2001, brought participants to Florence to read Dante. Tierney subsequently expanded the offerings to include Salon Seminars, which have been held in Latin America and New York City since 2015, and a series of wide-ranging virtual seminars that started in the COVID-19 years of 2021-22 and continue to this day. The latter seminars generally meet on a monthly basis.

Tierney has always understood the value of a liberal arts education. As the founder of several successful investment partnerships and the current board Chair Emeritus of TechnoServe, a nonprofit that uses business solutions to fight global poverty, he describes himself as someone who “never had an interest in a practical education until it became necessary to get a job,” he says. His professional path began with a BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, followed by a Harvard Business School MBA after spending time in the Peace Corps. Tierney has since served on the faculty at Columbia and Georgetown Universities and guest-lectured at Harvard.

“The greatest literature in the world is accessible to all of us, and it’s a crime not to take advantage of it,” Tierney says of the Program’s Great Books. “We learn so much about life, about art, about meaning. No tutor we’ve ever had is the world’s expert on the particular book we are reading. We all tease meaning out of the book, and we never come to an answer, but we help each other learn.”

Tierney’s group numbers keep increasing, and his mailing list boasts hundreds of names reflecting an array of expertise that spans all areas of civic and economic life. As Agresto puts it, Tierney “has contacts that no one at the college could have had—major players in the economic, cultural, and political scene; people who really know what they are doing in a specialized, technical, very important way.”

Over the decades, their collective dedication to St. John’s has been expressed through advocacy, philanthropy, and, in some cases, serving on the Board of Visitors and Governors (BVG), as Tierney did from 1996 to 2005. The group also conceived of—and provided primary funding for—the college’s Faculty Summer Study Group Endowed Fund, which met its $100,000 goal in late 2024. Carl characterizes them as “sort of secondary alumni group who care about our mission and are ideally positioned to support it.”

Unsurprisingly, they also join Tierney in supporting the John Agresto Leadership Fund. “We wanted to express our gratitude to Walter and David, who have done so much for us over such a long period of time, with a modest gift,” Tierney says. They equally recognize John Agresto, who is a dear friend of mine, and of many people in the group, and who was the father of the idea for these classics seminars.”

On that last point, Agresto respectfully disagrees. “I’m just the administrator,” he says. “Paul’s the mind and the engine behind all this.” He also credits Tierney with popularizing a phrase that has become synonymous with the college’s educational outreach: lifelong learning: “I heard Paul use it over and over again,” Agresto says. “He had lifelong learning, and he liked the Summer Classics because that was lifelong learning for all.”

Sterling, Carl, and many other tutors have facilitated Tierney’s seminars on and off since their inception, witnessing firsthand how immersion in the classics can complement any pursuit—professional or extracurricular—while bringing clarity to participants’ values. “These adults have learned through their time at St. John’s that reading, thinking, and discussing such books is not simply a means to an end—that end being ‘the good life’—but are themselves an important part of the good life,” Carl says.

Sterling agrees and situates their pursuit squarely within the suite of benefits St. John’s offers the world. “When they choose to dedicate time and care to reading and conversation, they actualize the mission and convictions of the college in an entirely different way than our degree programs.”

Sterling sees Tierney as instrumental in that mission. “Paul Tierney, like John Agresto, combines all the restless energy of a man of action with the deepest sensitivity to literature and art of all sorts,” Sterling continues. “That spirit has made him a leader in our Johnnie world, as in other areas of his life, and he is constantly casting seeds for new reading, new seminars: new Invisible Cities, to borrow a title from Italo Calvino, who we’ll be reading together in Naples this year. This fund is another chapter for all supporting it, welcoming new folks, and casting new seeds. The college will benefit enormously.”