Doctoral Student and Annapolis Tour Guide: Michael Bors (’15)

When not engaged in advanced graduate studies in philosophy, Michael Bors (’15) can be found conducting tours of his native Annapolis.

“My dad likes history and he went to the Naval Academy, so he would often take us to the Academy, or downtown, or to the city dock,” recalls Mr. Bors. “As I got older, I would give informal tours to my own friends who were coming to visit from out of town.” Life would intervene, taking him across the country to fall in love with wisdom at Thomas Aquinas College, California — and back again, to deepen that love as a graduate student at The Catholic University of America.

Throughout his years of doctoral coursework, Mr. Bors continued to take pride in his Annapolitan heritage, and especially in sharing it with friends. That was when inspiration struck. “I realized I could do this to help out during graduate school by expanding the audience,” he says. Tour Annapolis was born.

Mr. Bors currently offers three kinds of tour: a walk-through of Annapolis’s historic downtown; a boating excursion onto the Annapolis Harbor and surrounding waters; and a mixed-drink tour, giving an insider’s look at the city’s creative cocktail culture. Yet, he finds, the participants define the tour. “With some groups, I get to talk more about the religious history of the state of Maryland,” he explains. “From the beginning it was intended to be a place of religious toleration, so that English Catholics, but also other denominations, including Quakers, could actually worship freely.”

Of course, Tour Annapolis remains a side project for Mr. Bors, whose attention is primarily dedicated to finishing his dissertation on a principle which appears throughout St. Thomas Aquinas’s writings, notably in his fourth way of proving the existence of God. “The first principle of the argument, that whenever you have a more so and a less so there must also be a most so, is really interesting,” he says. “My dissertation is essentially an explanation and defense of that principle.”

Between exploring the more and less beautiful scenery of what the colonists called the “Athens of America” and assiduously studying the most beautiful things as a graduate student, Mr. Bors is anything but idle. “I have two jobs this summer,” he laughs. “Give tours and write!”