Stan Ridgley is one of the Great Courses Professors The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have dubbed a “rock star professor.”

Stan is the author of Brutal Minds, the 2023 expose on higher education that reached #1 on Amazon’s Democracy Bestseller list. Ridgley is also the author/presenter of Strategic Thinking, the million-dollar best-seller video course published by The Great Courses.

Stan is Clinical Full Professor of Management at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. At Drexel, he serves on the faculty senate. He holds a Doctorate and Master’s in International Relations from Duke University and an International MBA from Temple University. He has also studied at Moscow State University and the Institut de Gestion Sociale in Paris.

He is a former Military Intelligence Officer and served five years in West Berlin and near the Czech-German border, where he received the George S. Patton Award for Leadership in Bad Toelz, West Germany. His intelligence activities versus the Soviet Union included signals and electronic intelligence as well as Russian translation and analysis. He served as a tactical intelligence officer on the German frontier with a combat arms unit and as a liaison officer during Soviet military inspections. 

Stan teaches courses on Strategy and Competitive Advantage, Technology Innovation, International Business, and Competitive Intelligence. He has lectured and presented widely in the United States, Russia, China, India, France, Singapore, Spain, and Colombia. He is a staunch defender of Individualism and Enlightenment values in the university as the best defense against the seduction of authoritarians, charlatans, political poseurs, and noxious ideologues of every sort.  All of this is abundantly evident in his 2025 titles for Armin Lear, DEI Exposed.