Brann - Essay 24 PDF

T H E C A M P A I G N F O R S T .
J O H N ’ S C O L L E G E
A COLLEGE
UNIQUE AND
UNIVERSAL
EVA BRANN
{ T H E C A M PA I G N FO R ST. J O H N ’ S CO L L E G E }
A COLLEGE
UNIQUE AND
UNIVERSAL
E VA B R A N N
3 { T H E C A M PA I G N FO R ST. J O H N ’ S CO L L E G E }
Eva Brann has been a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis since Contents
1957, serving as dean from 1990-97. A Jewish immigrant from Berlin,
Miss Brann went to Brooklyn College and later earned her master’s
in classics and a doctoral degree in archaeology at Yale University.
1. Unique and universal? • page 6
At St. John’s, she is one of the college’s longest-serving and most 2. We have one Program; do we have one expertise? • page 13
respected tutors; she has been a mentor to students and tutors alike,
3. Is the “how” of our teaching connected to the “what”? • page 16
and a model for the “examined life” the St. John’s Program encour-
ages. Miss Brann has written many books, including Open Secrets / 4. How do we choose and evaluate our tutors? • page 26
Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul; Homeric Moments: 5. How do we select and monitor our students? What is their life like? • page 31
Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad; The Music
6. What are the relations between tutors and students? • page 37
of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s
Writings; The World of the Imagination; What Then, Is Time?; and 7. What’s wrong with us? • page 40
The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing. Miss
8. What kind of institution does our Program require? • page 43
Brann’s many honors include her selection as a 2005 recipient of the
National Endowment for the Humanities’ prestigious award, the
9. What are the essential features of our Program? • page 48
National Humanities Medal. 10. What is the St. John’s Seminar, the center of the Program? • page 52
11. What do we do in the tutorials? • page 58
a. the Language Tutorial
b. the Mathematics Tutorial
c. the Music Tutorial
12. How does the laboratory fit in? • page 65
13. What do we want from and for our students? • page 67
14. What do we wish for – and see in – our alumni? • page 70
Illustrations by David Johnson 15. Postscript: A small college and those that love it. • page 72
{ A COLLEGE UNIQUE AND UNIVERSAL } 4 5 { T H E C A M PA I G N FO R ST. J O H N ’ S CO L L E G E }
Introduction prospective students, inquiring teachers, and close friends, for example – and alumni.
These are the same issues sometimes seized upon by critics of St. John’s: the choices
In this essay, the college’s longest-serving tutor, Eva Brann, explains what on our reading list, our requirement that tutors teach across the curriculum, and a
St. John’s College is and why what we do is important. She describes the college as, practice of not including in our classroom discussions the historical, cultural, and
paradoxically, “unique and universal,” because St. John’s persists with its singular social background of the texts we read.
and distinctive academic program while holding to an ideal of education that is meant These questions grant us the opportunity to reflect upon the integrity and whole-
to apply to all humankind and has, in fact, resonated throughout the world. ness of the Program. We believe that the best way to learn is to confront the texts of
In no way is the college perfect, Miss Brann acknowledges. Many aspects of the the greatest minds of our civilization, with nothing between us and the work, not even
college, for instance, the breadth and depth of the reading list, represent both our tutors. Yet, we recognize how important it is to have tutors who bring both intellect
greatest strengths and our most daunting challenges. And yet St. John’s continues to and imagination to their discussions, and who understand how to frame a question
attract international attention, welcomes scores of visitors to its two campuses, and is that will open a world of ideas from a simple passage.
called upon to offer seminars to many different groups outside our college. What we Our books and our program demand more of us than, in truth, we are capable of
consider a very simple and natural way to teach – cultivating in an individual the achieving. It is this stretch in our search for truth, however, that allows us, as a
ability to formulate questions and begin the search for answers – intrigues many who community of learners, tutors helping students, students helping each other, to
come to know St. John’s because of the intellectual honesty of our endeavor. We don’t achieve some measure of greatness. That all of us at the college continue to have faith
pretend to be something we’re not. On the other hand, our ways are not easily in this endeavor is perhaps to be celebrated above all.
adapted for just any college or university, nor do we have a “method” that can be As we launch a campaign to strengthen and secure St. John’s College, we are
defined in pedagogical terms. thankful for this clear vision of what liberal education is.
In answering fourteen questions that get to the very heart of the college, Miss
Christopher B. Nelson (SF70)
Brann explores issues that are interesting to both curious observers of the Program –
President, Annapolis
1. Unique and univ ersal?
How can a college be one of a kind in reality and nonetheless a possible

When people first hear of what we do they can scarcely believe their ears. We
invite them to come and see. The campus is always swarming with prospective stu-
dents and curious visitors. If they are familiar with other institutions of education,
model for higher education in its conception? – because that is how we at St. John’s do here are the main differences they will observe:
indeed think of ourselves. We are a distinctive community very much shaped by par- 1. We go back behind the modern departmental division between humanities and
ticular people and places, yet we have faith that our way is broadly applicable to other sciences to an older ordering: authors and arts.
institutions of learning. 2. The Program is all-required and non-specialized; thus there are no departments
All small institutions – colleges particularly – rightly think of themselves as at all and practically no electives.
unique. All professors cherish their special qualifications along with their students’ 3. Every faculty member teaches all or almost all the parts of the Program. Conse-
budding individualities, and the far, dry winds of Kansas blow differently over a cam- quently, we are amateurs rather than professionals, and we mark this fact by calling
pus than the close, moist breezes of South Carolina. Uniqueness is, oddly enough, ourselves “tutors” rather than “professors.”
what they all have in common – from Chicago to Colorado Springs, from Poughkeepsie This country used to be a boiling pot of curricular reform and innovation. Most of
to Santa Cruz – all sixteen hundred or so, belonging to that distinctively American the “alternative” curricula of the last century have come and gone. They were con-
species, the small independent school. Each has its own variation on the standard ceived as experiments with the possibility of failing – and they did fail.
university plan of departmental offerings, arranged broadly under humanities and The St. John’s Program was never thought of as experimental. Young souls are not
sciences, from which students elect their courses. meant to be the subjects of try-outs. From its founding in 1937, its teachers had faith
St. John’s College is differently different. We too have our gallery of faculty char- in the Program as the best way known to them to educate young Americans in partic-
acters; an English friend says that visiting the college is like stepping into an English ular and all human beings in general; the Program was universal in conception. In fact
novel. We even have two uniquely beautiful campuses under different skies. But we it has resonated in the wide world. When I was dean I received inquiries and visitors
differ seriously from the conventional variations of other schools in having one single from Madrid to Tbilisi and beyond. So rather than watch the curriculum fail with
plan of education, our Program. Whereas other colleges’ uniqueness consists of their personal regret but intellectual equanimity, we would think that some central pivot of
internal variety, ours derives from a coherent curriculum. civilization had been lost, should the college disappear – and it won’t, now.
{ A COLLEGE UNIQUE AND UNIVERSAL } 8
I have often wondered what we had that other remarkable schools didn’t – Black
Mountain College in North Carolina for instance, or the Experimental Program in
Berkeley, California. I think what we had was the Program: Our community was from
the first built not on assertive personalities and unstable curricular notions but on a
strongly grounded plan of learning, pretty nearly the same that we still follow.
CHARLES
In an educational world in which commonality is regarded as oppressive, we are
DARWIN
sometimes chided for having the confidence, not to say nerve, to submit ourselves and
our students to a set study plan. But we think it is a faculty’s responsibility to devise an
integrated curriculum for its students’ learning rather than to engage in turf battles in
favor of departmental specialties. Moreover, anyone who has lived in a working com-
munity knows that it can’t survive without some healthy egocentricity, some sense of
being at the center of the world. Who would devote a life to anything less? Our more
sober colleagues do continually warn against the notion that we are the world – and
they are half-right, for there are many good things we are not, and many other places
in this country about which the world also revolves.
The brute reality is that we have in fact remained one of a kind. There is, to my
knowledge, only one other four-year college devoted to a Program in part modeled on
ours, but with a significant difference: Thomas Aquinas College in California has a
strongly Catholic integrated curriculum, while St. John’s College has been from its char-
tering in 1784 (a wonderful date, the first year after the Revolution) a school not enforc-
ing on its students “any religious or civil test, or urging their attendance upon any
particular religious worship”; we are now in fact completely secular. And as Madison
so rightly predicted for freedom of religion, religious interest of every sort flourishes the product of long hours of faculty deliberation, all designed to protect the free
at the college. How we read religious books will be worth a paragraph (see p. 70). engagement of our intellects and imaginations – and, of course, our hearts. The real
Why have we, who think of our Program as a model of liberal learning which is espe- motion, the real freshness, in this school comes not in doing new things but in doing
cially at home in America, remained all but unique in this country? The United States, the old things better. For our founding ways are inexhaustible in their possibilities.
as former dean Robert Goldwin has written, was the result of an almost miraculous con- Undoubtedly we are an establishment, an institution. An establishment of learn-
fluence of streams of luck. This college, too, needed a lucky concurrence of events to ing is something of a contradiction in terms, since real learning is a radically disestab-
come about: a pair of founders, one, Scott Buchanan, well versed in the whole liberal lishing activity. Strange as it may seem, it is that untrammeled inquiry we are trying to
arts tradition, the other, Stringfellow Barr, possessed of administrative talent; a cam- protect with our multitude of established practices. But in the course of maturing we
pus on offer; a general spirit of revival for liberal education as exemplified in Alexander have become more and more our unique self. So how can we serve as a model for other
Meiklejohn; and finally a European emigration which brought people like Jacob Klein, communities of learning, especially when in our hearts we believe that numbers are
who fell in love with the intelligent naiveté of America’s young and brought the learned nothing and what really counts is that here and now one young (or old) soul should see
depth with which to effect a second founding, placing under the inspiredly practical something that makes life worth living?
Program a philosophical grounding. There was, moreover, the opportune return of the Well, we have obligations to the country that allows us to function, and the public
World War II veterans, who were superbly serious students, and above all, a faculty will- that supports us, and to our own two cities, Annapolis and Santa Fe. And we feel an
ing to conform themselves to a plan, not the plan to themselves. And this Program they obligation, born of our sense that we know something worth knowing about learning,
committed themselves to had an aim and an apex: the ardent pursuit of knowledge and to American education. So we engage in lots of outreach: give free access and help to
truth, or as the Greeks say, philosophia, “the love of wisdom.” visitors who want to see us at work, advise prospective founders of schools all over the
By now the “New Program” of this old college is itself quite venerable. At seventy world, help committees with curricular reforms, aid teachers with planning courses,
years it and its faculty can be said to be mature. We fine-tune it continually, and some- send out reading lists and manuals, explain the Program to people writing disserta-
times even make what seem to us world-shaking changes, but viewed, as philosophers tions and books, and go anywhere to lead all sorts of seminars: for high school stu-
say, sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity,” they look minuscule. dents (though I once did one with four-year-olds, two of whom had crawled under the
Around the stable curriculum have developed zillions of traditions and practices, each table whence they gave enchanting exegeses of a poem on sunflowers), for business
and community leaders, and of course for our alumni, whose appetite for reading
books together is lifelong. In fact, our principle is to do everything we can do without
spreading our substance too thin.
A LBERT
E INSTEIN
2. We h av e o n e P r o g r a m ;
d o w e h av e o n e e x p e r t i s e ?
It is a question worth asking because, as I will explain, our way of teaching

requires that we be and remain, deliberately and purposefully, amateurs. (We keep in
mind that the word means “lovers.”) As I said, we call ourselves “tutors”; it is our
single academic rank and the title is meant to replace “professor,” which means a
professional who has special expertise and the authority that comes with it. All of us
arrive with graduate training, but we must let our particular interests go to learn the
Program. (I myself, for example, was trained as a Greek archaeologist, yet I haven’t
looked at an antiquity – pots were my specialty – in scholarly earnest for half a century.)
There is, however, something we all get to be good at, perhaps even specially
good: asking questions. The questions we learn to ask – it is one criterion for being a
tutor – are not so-called teacher’s questions, such as a pedagogue asks pupils to see if
they’ve studied up: “What was Achilles’ mother’s name and where did she live?” – to
which the meek answer is “Thetis, in the ocean,” but the spirited answer is: “Why ask
me, since you already know?” Nor are they information questions like “What time is believe that the impetus behind the question is the hope of an answer, as a possible
it?” to which Yogi Berra’s immortal reply was “You mean now?” Nor “yes or no” ques- answer draws and shapes the question. In fact St. John’s differs from very nearly all
tions, like “Tell me true, is there or is there not Truth and Beauty?,” which could be secular schools in having a faculty that either believes in the real possibility of truth or
the ultimate conversation-stopper. in the pedagogical value of not foreclosing that possibility. Another way to put this is
Our questions are the expression of a genuine desire to find something out by pro- that you will find no easy relativism among us; our relativists are hard-thinking and
posing it for a common inquiry, the kind of question tutors might ask themselves when fiercely honest.
they study by themselves. Such a question is a kind of empty envelope, a vacant grasp, It should go without saying that to believe in the possibility of truth-seeking is
the concave outside of the convex inside, an undeveloped negative, a receptive open- the very opposite of having the truth or propagating it. We never tell our students
ing. All these metaphors circumscribe a good question, a searching question. In a dia- what to think. In fact, then it wouldn’t be thinking. We don’t even drive them to
logue by Plato called the Meno, which many of us regard as the scripture on question- question their beliefs, for “questioning” in the aggressive sense isn’t question-asking.
asking, Meno poses the question of questions: However can we ask after truth? If we Our questions are intended to incite thought, which might result in putting stronger
have it we needn’t ask, and if we don’t have it we won’t recognize it when it turns up. grounds under the faith students come with or indeed, sometimes, in exposing a belief
Meno means to stymie Socrates’ inquiry; Socrates has two defenses at once. One is: as ill-grounded.
Never mind, just go ahead and search. The other is: Question-asking and answering is In the same spirit of non-coercive openness, there is frequent discussion among
the most characteristically human activity there is, and we must continually consider tutors about the kind of question that is best for a seminar discussion: Should it be
not only how to do it well but also what in us makes it possible. Here is in germ what mil- based on a tutor’s interpretation of the book carefully worked out in private (with the
lennia later will come to dominate philosophy and cognitive science as “epistemology.” perhaps not so unintended consequence of pushing students in that direction), or
This is the kind of problem tutors think about and the kind of questions – questions should it express a current perplexity on the tutor’s part (with the likely, perhaps even
in search of truth – they are, I think it is not boastful to say, unusually good at asking; desirable, result that students will be a bit at sea)?
it is something like our local expertise. The central venue for questions is the seminar, of which more later (see p. 52).
Some of our friendly critics claim that we are too good at it – that our students come
ignorant and leave confused. But it is not so. I don’t know any teacher who doesn’t
3. Is the “how” of our teaching

connected to the “what”?
St. John’s does seem to have two aspects: the way we teach and learn, and
want to talk together about what they’ve learned in private; by nature, the young, if
not spoiled, like to grapple with what is hard but great.
Our business is to get out of the way without giving up our responsibility. Of
course we teach; even Socrates is talking hyperbole, for his companions in fact
the matter we set out for ourselves and our students. Both of these are distinctive. think they’re being taught. But – I’m looking for the right word – we do it cannily and
Friendly explainers of the Program often refer to our use of the “Socratic method” tactfully. We try to keep students focused and spontaneous, both. It’s tricky and
and to our list of “Great Books.” Members of the community cringe a little on both absorbing. I think every tutor, even those who’ve taught here a half century, has stage
counts. Here is why. fright before every class, largely because we’re not in complete control, and yet we’re
completely responsible.
a. How we teach: One obvious concomitant of our way is that we are very reticent with our opinions
Whatever it is we do, it’s not according to any method. A method is, properly, a rule- – at least in class. Outside of class I, for one, will pontificate if a student wants it. I recall,
governed process, and we adhere to none such. And it isn’t Socratic, not only because when I was dean, three woman students making an urgent appointment with me about
Socrates claimed to have been no one’s teacher but because the Socrates we know an important matter. The matter turned out to be what I, personally, thought about
occasionally drives people into a corner with his questions – which we never do, at God. We had a candid conversation – for me a real workout. Thus reticence expresses
least not without feeling sorry. Yet he is in some respects our model: in rarely telling itself in being sparing with talk in class and conversationally open outside.
but often asking, in valuing acknowledged perplexity as the starting point of learning, A number of ways to approach a book require lecturing. One is for the teacher to
in having utter faith in the possibility of truth. produce a critical theory into which the book is fitted. It is not entirely unfair to say
The reason our teaching is not a method is that it’s just a bit of nature. We do what that this is sometimes the art of making the difficult unintelligible, because academic
comes naturally: encourage thinking by asking (everyone here knows that you can’t theoretical language is often willfully abstruse. We don’t do that.
“teach people to think”; such taught thinking is just that simulacrum of thought, The other, more common, method is “backgrounding” or “contextualizing.” In
rule-driven reason). By nature, people, if not corrupted, like to rouse themselves to this approach the teacher “introduces” the student to the book by telling how the
communicative expression; by nature, people want to hear each other; by nature, they book can be understood according to the author’s historical and social background.
We particularly don’t do that, for at least two reasons. It does require lengthy lectur-
ing, by the end of which the students’ minds are so remote from the text that little a
teacher says next can recall them, and to paint even a somewhat plausible historical
setting requires enormous knowledge on the part of the professor – always supposing JANE
that the discovery of historical truth is a finite endeavor at all. But even if an author’s AUSTEN
epoch were accurately definable, how would it help to understand the book? Many of
our writers are overtly or covertly embattled with current opinion and think with
rebellious originality about the human condition. So talk of “Greek” or “Medieval”
or “American” thought is grossly unilluminating: How can a people or an epoch
think? Persons think.
I spent a part of my youth studying the Attic pottery of the late eighth and seventh
century B.C., the richest evidence we have of Homer’s time – and I have no non-spec-
ulative idea what it was that any or all of these people thought about anything at this
generative time when the Western tradition was born. Abridged, not to say canned,
introductions are mostly compendia of current preoccupations and brave attempts to
bring a book closer to students by drawing it into their supposed circle of interest. But
this is counterproductive: What arouses interest in students is not currency but
authenticity – if it is allowed to reveal itself.
So we tutors at St. John’s believe – all of us most of the time – in directness and
immediacy; we put nothing between ourselves and the reading and behave as if every
one of our books was indeed an open book to our students. I call this the “a cat may
look at a king” principle – these royal books were written for us, the willing laity.
I think that this way of ours works in many settings and for many subjects. It is, as and ourselves to consciousness – by reading them not as historical documents but
the term goes, transferable – an approach we can tell about and demonstrate to as living presences that made us who we are and taught us to talk as we do. We are
teachers anywhere. convinced that these Great Books contain a live wisdom necessary for thinking out
our current lives, for living awarely. Those who read these books – or study texts of
b. What we teach: symbols or scores of notes or canvases of paint – in our way often experience the
But this way of dealing directly and immediately with texts works most naturally for disciplined magic of these revivals.
the so-called Great Books, well over a hundred of which we read with our students I think it is hard to get away from the Great Books designation for the simple
through their four years. reason that “greatness” has real significance for us. It is the criterion by which we
Some colleagues are embarrassed by that appellation; it sounds too pat. But in have chosen our hundred-plus works – based in part on these millennia-old lists.
truth, Great Books lists have been labored over for millennia. Ours represents a kind of Here are some of these criteria: Greatness shows up as inexhaustibility. Some of us
Western consensus of the ages. In Santa Fe’s Graduate Institute there is a Master’s have read and reread our books for ourselves or in preparation for class over scores of
degree program in which the Eastern Classics are studied, just as they ought to be – years; there is always more to discover. A bored tutor is rare; a bored student is, more
with serious language learning. With our undergraduates, however, we stay in our often than not, just prey to one of the endemic dis-eases of late adolescence, among
West: “One thing at a time” and “Know thyself” are the guiding principles, especially which is complex sloth.
the latter; for knowing ourselves, how we came by the terms we live with, seems to be Second, these works are pretty self-sufficient. Writers of stature strive to be as
the first condition for a knowledgeable appreciation of other traditions. context-independent as they can be. They tell you what you need to know to under-
This point of view, that to know ourselves we need to know our tradition, is, I stand them. Good editions with pertinent notes will do the rest.
hasten to say, different from “historicism,” the notion that we are the products of Third, and most telling, these books are original in two senses. They are often the
impersonal historical forces, the blindly determinist effects of a dead past. We want earliest version of something new that will sweep the world, when it was still close to its
nothing to do with what is dead and bygone. When we speak of our “tradition” we mean roots in common experience and accessible to lay people. And they are original in the
individual works by thinking authors that have, to be sure, shaped contemporary life in sense of being characteristic, of bearing the stamp of their author’s personality – not only
ways of which we are largely unconscious. But we can bring these works back to life – their personal crotchets and idiosyncrasies, but their peculiar ways of reaching depths.
Fourth, these works are infinitely artful, bold and subtle, beautiful by design or
ugly on purpose. These authors are masters of the liberal arts that are a large part of
our Program.
F YODOR Fifth and finally for present purposes, the works, though their message may some-
D OSTOEVSKY times be dismal and dark, are not themselves dreary or depressing but grand and
redemptive. We have a sense that this four-year gift of semi-adult freedom that parents
make to their children should not be spent on mediocre documents of societal prob-
lems and their academic solutions – the world will soon teach all that – but on the deep-
est, most exhilarating exemplars of human achievement. The principle here is: First
have acquaintance with the best, then face the worst.
In this adherence to Great Books we are somewhat out of sync with the universi-
ties – less so as the pendulum of opinion swings back. In the last part of the last centu-
ry there arose a movement sometimes called the Canon wars. “Canon” with one n,
nota bene; it is a Greek word meaning a rule or standard and now used most generally
to refer to Great Books lists. An attack on the Canon was mounted for these reasons:
that no work is to be privileged as great; all writings are essentially mere documents
composed to confirm an elite in its dominance, be it one gender, one class, one conti-
nent. Moreover these screeds really have no individual author, being the product of
their time, of history.
Those of us who followed this debate and had actually studied some of the canonical
works were amazed. First of all, they seem to be highly individual products; secondly,
they seem to be far more radical in their attacks on each other and their society than
these contemporary critics. But above all, our way of reading is naturally expressed in First, it takes real mastery of facts and theories to teach these disciplines, and the
the question: What does the author intend? And I, for one, would not know how to teacher has naturally to assume the part of an authority. We could not be the perpetu-
address an authorless book, for how could I penetrate its words except on the assump- al amateurs we need to be to teach in the whole Program nor could our classes be con-
tion that they were written for me by a being I was like, in kind if not in degree? sistently carried on by students if we taught academic disciplines. We could not fulfill
St. John’s was not much touched by these battles; we and our students were simply our ideal of being exemplary learners rather than authoritative teachers.
too much engaged in actual study, too much captivated by this miraculous inheri- Second, the academic disciplines are not elementary in the sense we require (most
tance. One might say that we conceded the elitism of the tradition and practiced the of these fields, about one hundred thirty of them, were, incidentally, inventoried
egalitarianism of its readers. But we did think harder about our commitments. by Francis Bacon as early as 1620, in his “Catalogue of Natural and Experimental
In particular, we needed to be clear about the feature, or non-feature, of the Histories”, for example: “History of Venus, as a species of Touch”, that is, the physi-
Program that both academic and lay visitors notice with surprise: the absence of any ology of sex). By “elementary” in this context I mean having the property of elements
disciplinary fields – no history, sociology, anthropology, literary theory, history of that are fairly natural beginnings, as language learning usually begins with the parts
philosophy, etc. Our students might incidentally gather some information on these of speech, their syntax and vocabulary, the study of music begins with the mathematical
fields (in the case of history of philosophy, of science, and of mathematics more than construction of the diatonic scale by compounding interval ratios, and mathematics
almost any other group of American undergraduates). begins with definitions and axioms. Introductions to the field disciplines are usually
But generally we ask them to read individual books as unassigned to any discipline brief outlines of a huge body of research results whose shape depends very much on
and to practice on them the basic skills of learning. Our reasons for circumventing the presenter’s theories. It is hard to undertake such studies together in a way natural
academic fields are less theoretical than practical and pedagogical. (Our students do, and accessible to all. Euclid’s Elements, on the other hand, begins with the sentence:
in any case, go on to disciplinary studies in graduate school. And though they go there “A point is that which has no parts.” It is our model. Here our students start their four
nearly completely unacquainted with the “isms,” concepts, methods, that their col- years of mathematics. You can’t begin more minimally or more discussably: What – in
leagues from other institutions have been trained in, they seem to find their footing the world or out – is an object that has no part?
pretty quickly – and sometimes to stand out for the freshness of their approach.)
Here are some of these reasons.

4. H o w d o w e c h o o s e a n d e va l u a t e
our tutors?
I have never visited an institution whose life depended so much on a faculty

trained as a cartographer specializing in Chinese maps, who captivated us by showing
on the blackboard how to draw large meaning from a little Chinese character, and who
told us that he was preoccupied with the question whether Confucius’ writing was
applicable to American life. And he seemed to have far more in store than on display.
well fitted to its curriculum as St. John’s. Nothing is more important to our internal Our hope is that once appointed a tutor will stay with us. We do what we can –
well-being than our choice and assimilation of tutors. never enough – to help new tutors. In particular, beginning tutors’ seminar partners
It has always seemed remarkable to me that we – a school that prides itself on are chosen from more experienced colleagues to serve as their helper, critiquer-in-
putting students’ learning first – should have as our first criterion for permanent chief and advocate. But there are many other kinds of help, as new tutors engage in the
appointment not teaching but distinction of mind defined as excellence of intellect arduous task of working their way into the Program: phone calls requesting help to
and imagination. Nor is teaching second, but rather competence in the Program and tutors who know the material, the regular weekly meetings, led by a more knowledge-
increasing understanding of the questions raised by its books. For us these are not able tutor, in which anything that pertains to a particular class is discussed,
simply formalisms but vivid conceptions against which tutors are appraised. Compe- meetings with the dean, and above all, if there is time, sitting in on experienced
tence is not so hard to gauge, nor is good teaching in our spirit, the third criterion that colleagues’ classes.
we look to. The first demand, however, though crucial and not vague, is harder to But just because we want tutors to stay, the review process, conducted by the dean
apply: It describes a tutor who is able to open up large vistas in a small piece of text, and the Instruction Committee, is severe. Letters are written for each appointment up
who can see the whole through its parts and illuminate a detail by the entirety, who to tenure which are more specifically critical the greater our hopes for the tutor are. I
can put two and two together and on occasion get, gloriously and rightly, five. We recall all too well, on the other hand, what contortions of ominous vacuousness I had
think of good teaching as the natural fallout of these and similar abilities. to engage in as dean to warn people – as tactfully as possible – that they fell short of the
Thus this order of desirables fits our notion of the tutor as learner-in-chief, and as first criterion (distinction of mind). For while all the other standards could be met by
teaching more by example than by a technique. I think that if you are full of focused willingness and trying, there isn’t much to be done about natural endowments.
enthusiasm (a lovely Greek word, meaning “having the god within”) you’ll be with us all Two criteria for tenure prevalent through the whole academic world that we don’t
your life. To give an example: I recall the appointment interview of a present colleague employ are publishing and classroom “performance.” Some of us write books, but
more because we can’t help it than because our careers require it. (In fact, no one at
St. John’s has a “career” since there are no academic ranks, and becoming dean is
more an act of penitential love than a career move; besides, when our term is up we
happily go back into the teaching community that has been our care.) Academic pub-
lishing depends largely on specialized disciplinary research, and tutors learning the
Program don’t have much time for it. You will not hear talk of “my own work” among
tutors. We do each have our special pursuit, but it is no more our own than a great W.E.B.
book is a private possession. DU B OIS
As for teaching as a performance, it doesn’t fit us: Neither brilliant lecturers nor
disciple-making guruship fit our way.
What’s a tutor’s life like? Jacob Klein, a former dean and one of our grand old
men, used to outline with a gesture of his hand a wave with many crests, a roller-coast-
er track. It’s an alternation of exhilaration and despair, as classes go well or ill, as we
ourselves feel a sense of having gotten something or being confounded. That teacher’s
wave train is amplified by our aforementioned sense of responsibility without the
power to compel by grades, by badgering, or by lectures.
A tutor’s life is without question arduous; by spring when formal obligations mount
up (all our classes last the whole year) some of my colleagues look like the walking dead.
Two nights a week are given to evening seminars, Friday night lecture imposes a sort of
obligation to be a model of attendance for students. Family life suffers some; spouses
bear the brunt. Besides paper conferences, advising, committee obligations, there is
the fact that, since we are usually teaching outside of our original training, we need a
lot of time for adequate preparation. Everything is always new or just begun – a boon
insofar as we don’t often get jaded, a trouble insofar as we often get worn out.
It’s not that we work harder than anyone else in the professions or in business. It’s
that to perform our mission well we are supposed to think things out, ruminate,
5. H ow d o w e s e l e c t a n d m o n i t o r
our students? What is their life lik e?
What kinds of students do we want? Since in recent years our increasing

meditate, talk at leisure. We and our students know that the very word “school” is applications actually allow us to be, as they say, “selective” – a badge of prestige – we
derived from the Greek word for leisure, scholé, and that’s just what this school have an important decision to work out, as we always do, by consultation and discus-
doesn’t have enough of, especially for newer and younger tutors. I recall that when sion. Our policy has been, within financial and timing constraints, to approve applica-
years ago we were invited by our neighbor, the Naval Academy, to show some of their tions as they roll in, applying certain minimal criteria: Does this student read with fair
faculty, military and civilian, how we lead seminars, a brief discussion arose: Which of facility, write with some literacy and possess a minimum of mathematical training – in
our two schools is more like permissive Athens, which more like martial Sparta? The sum, can the student be expected to cope with the Program? For the rest, we were as
wonderful conclusion was that in point of faculty discipline and student requirements close to having a self-selected student body as a college can be. We took wild chances
we were taut Sparta and the Academy was liberal Athens – except for one aspect: The on a wild or rebellious or eccentric kid and sometimes lucked out and often lost.
officers thought that the pressure of a tight pace was good for developing quick At this point I’ll speak for myself, well knowing that my colleagues on the other
decision-making in future officers, while we were sure that continual busyness was side have arguments both principled and practical. I think that “selectivity,” far from
bad for thoughtfulness in future citizens. The intellect continually in harness loses its being a school’s mark of excellence, is a sign of curricular and pedagogic failure. A
spontaneous leaps, and the imagination continually pressed for time contracts its good undergraduate educational plan should be inclusive in design and well enough
embracing visions. taught to bring together future fellow citizens of all sorts of abilities. Wanting to be a
I should add that there are now on both campuses numerous tutor study groups, member of that community of learning should be the main criterion of admission.
funded and unfunded, that broaden our learning while drawing us together, animat- Desire trumps brilliance any time when it comes to learning. At St. John’s, tutors must
ing both campuses all year long. Although they occupy time, they are nonetheless felt have some distinction of mind to be appointed; students should need none to be
as a recreation. admitted. They may come undistinguished but they don’t leave that way.
Do we look for a representative student population? I think most of us know from

years of teaching that the distinctiveness of individuals being themselves is the ulti- an hour take turns appraising their work; then the students take their turn to
mate diversity. Nonetheless, insofar as some of us have a sneaking conviction that this respond. Don rags should be candid and precise but not hurtful, though there is
is the curriculum for all human beings who want to understand the roots of their sometimes some weeping for the sins of the term or from sheer nervousness. Great
modernity and for Americans in particular, we want very much to be teaching students pleasure is taken in praising a student precisely, and great pains are taken to give
of every describable kind. clear, accurate, concise reports, and helpful advice. The don rag is not the place for
Our monitoring and evaluation of students has won public commendation, crypto-grading or psychologizing, though of course that happens. A written report of
although it uses few of the conventional tools, such as essay or short-answer exams, tutors’ comments and the don rag committee’s recommendation for the student’s
quizzes, graded papers, frequent hands-up in class, absence records. To be sure, we future goes to the dean.
too have an absence policy and a fairly fierce one, since there is no making up a lost The “enabling” procedure occurs at the end of the sophomore year. All the students’
conversation and since students’ non-presence is a dereliction of duty not only toward records are reviewed individually in a meeting of all the tutors who have taught them.
themselves but also toward their classmates. When there is memory work to be done, Comments are made in the hearing of the dean and the Instruction Committee, who
especially in language, tutors do give diagnostic quizzes. But we have no official exam decide whether each student is able to continue. The chief factor in the decision is our
period. “Hitting the books” just before examinations is futile here, papers are never judgment that the candidate is likely to continue to learn and to help others in their
graded but critiqued, and hardly any Johnny is even capable of the short answer to a learning. Less than five percent are asked to leave and several of those return on appeal.
good question; these machine-graded tests are notoriously designed to be unforgiving Also, sometime earlier every student must have passed a test in the simple algebraic
of reflection. operations necessary to the mathematics and physics of the last two and a half years.
Since we are with our classes all year long and since they are small and since class For the first three years students are orally examined by their seminar leaders on
participation is demanded, we get to know our students well. Twice a year we report their reading in fall and on their annual essay in spring; at their best these are lively
on their performance and their progress in the “don rag” (a whimsical term come down conversations. But the oral of orals is the culmination of each student’s account-
to us out of our hoary past from our founders’ experience at an English university; the giving; it is the public examination all seniors undergo on their senior essay. It takes
“dons,” that is, masters, “rag,” that is, torment, the students). All the students meet, place in full academic regalia and consists of a searching, hour-long conversation on
one at a time, with all their current tutors together, who in the course of a quarter of the essay between the student and three tutors. Friends and sometimes family are
present, and at the end they congregate around the now-candidate for the degree
of Bachelor of Arts for congratulations. Just before graduation all the seniors’ records
are reviewed by the faculty, and seniors found sufficient are recommended to the
Board for the degree.
We are a talking college, and these oral examinations fit us well, but there is also
plenty of paper-writing and these papers, though not letter-graded, are evaluated.
This is a well-monitored student body. Everyone knows who works hard and who goofs
off, who’s deeply serious and who’s a smart-aleck. Certainly the students know it;
what they don’t always know is that we know it too.
What are our students’ lives like? The Program is very demanding. Moreover we
hope that the curriculum will expand and meld into extracurricular activity, that
A RISTOTLE
common study and casual conversation will continue classroom discussion – and the
converse. The scores of activities that enliven the campuses, from Santa Fe’s Search
and Rescue team to Annapolis sailing and rowing crews, from fencing to photography,
from the art studio to the gymnasium, all these teams and clubs stand more or less
under the aegis of the Program. Our directors of athletics and student activities have
known how to make our varied sports and outdoor activities support and express our
learning; Mens sana in corpore sano, say the Romans, “A sound mind in a sound
body”, and in this school, at least, the body works out so that the mind may be better
exercised. Well, at least in part – also for friendship and fun and for something else: In
a community of learning that discourages competition in the classroom, athletics
offers an outlet for energetic but regulated rivalry.

All over the campuses, in the coffee shops and unused classrooms, you will see Seminars, when all the classes are mingled for seminars selected and led by students.
students preparing for class together, sometimes in twosomes (they have the taste, The same committee also mounts forums on issues of student life, recently a series –
lost in maturity, for dual-purpose togetherness, such as studying their electricity and remarkable for its searching seriousness, as it seemed to me – on the Student
magnetism manual while experiencing similar phenomena in a less formal mode), Handbook’s requirements for conduct conducive to a community of learning.
often in larger groups, or in lively conversation. This devotion sometimes, wonderfully,
6.
assumes the aspect of the higher kookiness: Last year two young gentleman in
Annapolis invited me to tea (bags in mugs) to show me their beautiful new dormitory.
They told me that they had continued a recent tradition of reading Homer’s whole What are the relations between
Iliad in one day; they decided that such a work must not be interrupted, so that when tutors and students?
answering calls of nature they went together – one reciting, one not.
Students are in seminar Monday and Thursday night; they are supposed to be at Our tutors’ way of teaching and our students’ way of learning naturally
lecture on Friday night. They have six tutorials and two or three laboratories a week make for a strong bond between them. One might say that it is too close to be intimate.
during the day. Each class demands long and often challenging preparation. It would Put another way: Our common work is too serious for too personal an involvement.
be doable, except that too many students work at jobs more hours than are officially The fierce intellectuality and the common commitment to truth – as a goal, not a
permitted, in order to make money. When I was dean, students complaining of loss of possession – help to ensure this closeness-with-proper-distance. (There are, it bears
zest for their studies and mild depression were often simply overworked – analogously repeating, very few teaching faculties in this country today who will own up to truth as
to new tutors. That being said, by and large our students can be counted on to share an aim of education. Our tutors do – at least as a pedagogical practice; of course some
our love for the work we do together. Only let, say, an unsympathetic visitor question of my colleagues are deep-dyed skeptics, but for them too their conviction is a
their occupation and the wagons circle. philosophy – a way of loving wisdom.)
Some students are, nonetheless, insatiable: Throughout the year they form study The faculty has resolved that intimacies between tutors and students are wrong.
groups, often with tutors, and mount “guerrilla seminars” on non-Program books. This is, to be sure, what the law and professionalism require. But for us it is a conse-
Twice a year the Student Committee on Instruction organizes the All-College quence of our “tutorial” – literally, our “guardian” mode. We see ourselves as acting
within an old tradition first set out in a Platonic dialogue, the Symposium, where a
M ICHEL DE
young worshiper of Socrates reports that his offer of sexual favors was quietly and
M ONTAIGNE
firmly rejected in favor of a finer possibility.
Although in seminar discussions we are expected to assume no seniority but to
support our claims just like the students, we do, after all, evaluate them, and they are
in that sense not our equals; our classroom equality involves a certain degree of benev-
olent hypocrisy. These are not the conditions of bona fide friendships. Those arise
when in that sweet moment on commencement day, we, who have addressed them as
Mr. or Ms. for four years, call our new-minted alumni by their first name for the first
time. Then often a lifelong friendship is started. Yet we often have the devil of a ridicu-
lous time trying to get graduates to break through their decorous distance and to be
casual toward us: This faculty gets a touching lot of respect. But of course as we grow
older together we get closer in age, and so we grow more intimate as well.
Mutual respect is the norm, and, in addition, though we don’t generally speak of
“my student,” we do often grow closer to certain people who seek us out or who
attract our fond interest. An example going way back to 1958 comes to mind. I was a
freshman tutor then living in a room in one of the few seventeenth-century houses in
Annapolis. Near midnight the phone rang and the agitated voice of one of my fresh-
men came through: “Oh, Miss Brann, I need help with Eros!” I was young enough
then to need it myself, but I understood his particular requirements and got him start-
ed on his annual essay about the dialogue mentioned above. He’s a lawyer now, deeply
concerned with the service aspect of his profession, and we talk pretty regularly.
There are a few students – sad exceptions – who don’t establish special relationships Then there are the inherent limitations of the Program, the obverses of its
with a tutor they particularly trust; opportunity is surely not lacking since each student strengths, which have to be acknowledged. The Program is a small island in the sea of
has about twenty year-long tutors over four years, and it is part of our regular day to be our ignorance; to list all the worthwhile knowables our students don’t learn would be
available to all students – not just the ones we happen to have in class – for help, tantamount to producing almost all the catalogues of all the libraries in the world.
advice, or just conversation, beyond paper conferences and other required “contacts” Most things to be known are not known by us, and our students leave us vastly ignorant.
(horrible word). You will see tutors and students deep in conversation in the dining Moreover, most tutors know less about any one subject than any particular professor
room – we have a “take-a-tutor-to-lunch” plan – or in restaurants off-campus. It’s how at a university (where the universe of learning is indeed supposed to be collected), whose
we learn of the interests, particularly the curious kinds of connoisseurship our stu- knowledge, in turn, covers only a tiny territory in the vast field of some specialty. The
dents pursue. How many fantasy books have I read because a student ingeniously Program is a highly restricted plan of study that provides us with elemental skills of
proved to me that they were works of liberal art? learning and exemplary cases of knowledge, no more.
Even so, it is largely beyond our capacities. Our books demand that we be linguis-
7.
tically acute, mathematically quick, and philosophically deep every day. Of course we
aren’t up to it, although we help each other as best we can – tutors students and often
students tutors. We give and take help with the solution of technical problems, with
What’s wrong with us? the construing of sentences, with the interpretation of a line of poetry.
Often we need to compromise, to read too quickly, to leave difficulties unresolved,
Well, almost everything that’s right. So distinctive a community will pay to let ourselves and our students get away with less than satisfactory work – especially the
the penalty for being itself. Visitors do sometimes speak of us as an educational utopia students, who are after all, never allowed to play only to their own particular strengths.
– but recall that “utopia” is Greek for “no-place.” We have to remain plausible to I recall vividly an example from the days of my deanship. A fine, well-respected student
ourselves and to others, and so an occasional inventory of flaws is in order. simply could not achieve the satisfactory grades we require – only in the senior year – for
I have already mentioned that we are perpetually time-starved with deleterious graduation. The failing class was our demanding senior laboratory, and her tutor came
consequences to tutors and students. to see me. “Can’t you do something for her?” I asked. He said, “Do you want me to
prostitute myself?” “Yes, please,” I said, and he did, and he was right to do it.
There are darker things. Life here is so intense that it sometimes just falls apart.
Students don’t prepare, classes go badly. There have been times in my life when I
coasted and withdrew, as happens to most tutors from time to time. Students have to
8. What kind of institution
does our Progr am r equir e?
The Program holds us together intellectually, but our Polity provides the
think about money too much; some carry a debt burden that constricts their future. practical condition for a stable communal life. The role it plays within the college is
They experience crises of faith and entanglements of love and other pressure-cooker similar to that of the Constitution in this country: We certainly don’t think of it all the
effects. Here the possibility of escape to the other campus, Santa Fe or Annapolis, is a time, but all our procedures follow from it.
saving grace. Our students come from the world and bring its corruptions along, and The Polity gives us an institutional form, developed over many years of revision, a
whatever troubles American society has, we have, though, I think in a mitigated degree. form that contains our educational purpose pretty adequately. Like the Program
Consequently our students aren’t exactly angels out of class – more the opposite, itself, the Polity is at once unusual and exemplary. I shall mention only the provisions
though there are times when the demons do turn into cherubs. A particular occasion that are particularly concerned with the Program, and these in broad strokes.
for such a transformation comes at the end of the year, when the freshmen, who are all We are a truly national college – a rare thing – one college with campuses in
required to sing in the freshman chorus, give a concert. In Annapolis it’s in our Great Maryland and New Mexico. We have, with small local variations, the same Program,
Hall. We stand in the gallery listening to them sing Palestrina or Mozart and are in and the Polity protects both the expressions of local life and the unity of the Program.
heaven with the angels – for the moment. It first defines the responsibilities of the Board of Visitors and Governors (whose
This section could be much longer, and actually it all needs to be said, at least members, besides governing, do actually visit the campuses to familiarize themselves
among ourselves. Few things are as harmful to a community as terminal idealism. with their life). It then goes on to detail the functions of the faculty. What is vital here
is that the two presidents of the campuses are listed as first among faculty members.
Our presidents are officially tutors who often teach and always learn within the
Program; their responsibilities reach deep into the community. There are two deans
chosen from the faculty who – and this is unique as far as I know – sit on the Board ex
officio, so the faculty in turn reaches into the Board. The deans chair their part of the
Instruction Committee, with which the presidents in turn sit ex officio. This commit-
tee of faculty members, six each, elected on each campus, has, together with the
deans, responsibility for the Program of Instruction, including the formulation of
changes and recommendations of tutorial appointments to the respective president.
One might say it was a powerful committee, but we avoid such language: It is a respect-
ed and responsible committee, and a hard-working one. To complete the picture of
integration, it should be said that the associates, the professionals who run our admin-
istration, are also faculty members and sometimes teach. The deans, on the other hand,
coming from the faculty, are just what they were as tutors: amateurs. In fact we avoid
the administrative ambiance as best we can, and each dean ministers to the communi-
ty in a new way. My own style was to try to be some version of a universal grandmother.
The Polity specifies scores of committees, charges, and procedures, but the aim is
to have a structure as receptive as possible to the mission of the college, a form totally
F LANNERY friendly to the function. The Polity represents a pretty successful attempt to overcome
O’C ONNOR the paradoxical fact, already noted, that an “institution of learning” is a contradiction
in terms. For nothing is less amenable to institutionalization than a young – or old –
soul in development. And yet what is an intellectual paradox is a worldly necessity.
In this attempt our governance structure reflects the Program: Both are full of
prescriptions designed to protect freedom.
Here is the place to add that the students too have a Polity and a student government
that disburses the quite considerable funds for student activities. One of this Polity’s
chief provisions is a sleep-study rule designed to keep the dorms safe for learning – a
rule not always effective because of a besetting student sin of tolerance for each lar reform when he said: “The birthing mountains heaved and a ridiculous mouse was
other’s disruptive habits. There is also the aforementioned Student Committee on born.” We’re better off always first trying to do better what we’re already doing.
Instruction which mounts discussions on the Program and whose recommendations The Polity includes our Graduate Institute, which I must not fail to mention
the college’s Instruction Committee take very seriously. although this account is mostly concerned with the undergraduate college. The Grad-
Most organizations have a double aspect: Some members are responsible for its uate Institute is meant to give people who have missed out on it a belated chance at the
existence, others for its essence. At St. John’s, the Board and the presidents labor to kind of liberal learning offered at St. John’s. Its content is derived from the undergrad-
keep us in being, while the deans, the Instruction Committee, and the whole faculty uate Program but the ordering is by subject segments lasting a semester: Literature,
work to keep us being who we were meant to be. And both parties are well intertwined. Politics and Society, Mathematics and Natural Science, Philosophy and Theology,
How does it work in practice, particularly with respect to the two campuses? Santa History. The completion of four of these leads to a Master’s degree in liberal arts. In
Fe (founded in 1964) has long since outgrown its beginnings as an Annapolitan colony. Santa Fe, the Graduate Institute also includes a program on the Eastern Classics; stu-
One of the delights of visiting either campus, coming from the other, is that in the dents tackle the Great Books of China, India, and Japan.
most different of settings – the spacious skies and mountains of the Southwest against What the Graduate Insitute students, who are generally older, might lack in the
the confined vistas and coastal waters of Annapolis – the conversations turn about the skills the undergraduates practice through four years and in the continuity of their
same universal questions; the coffee shop blackboard bears the same mangled Greek reading, they make up in maturity and appreciativeness. Many tutors love to teach the
and the same lovingly drawn geometric diagrams. Of course where there’s two of any- same books to students fully engaged in practical life. Our G.I.’s, as they are called, in
thing there will be inventively invidious comparisons: Annapolis is supposed to be turn thrive when they realize that tutors will help but won’t dominate their learning,
teutonically earnest, Santa Fe fecklessly laid-back. But our students transfer back and that they are encouraged to reflect on their studies in the light of their experience.
forth in droves and are the better for it.
It is true that having to gain consent on both campuses for major Program changes
(as required by the Polity) and preserving the possibility of student transfer acts as a
brake on curricular innovations, college-wide or local. But I’ve sat through enough of
those at other colleges to know that the Latin poet Horace might have meant curricu-
9. What are the essential features

of our Progr am?
It’s time to come to the Program itself. The first feature that surprises the
What matters even more is that under this all-required Program, which compris-
es about sixteen year-long classes over the four years, all the students in the same year
are doing the same thing. Hence they can – and do – talk to each other; a senior might
be seen helping a freshman with an astronomical diagram. Nothing contributes more

public is that it is almost entirely prescriptive and what is more, prescriptive not only to making us into a working community than our common curriculum.
for the students but also for the teachers: four years of non-elective, non-departmen- But the thought behind all others is that there are elemental skills and crucial
tal, non-specialized study for students and tutors alike. books with which every inhabitant of modernity should have experience, and that it is
We really mean it. The same Program our students commit themselves to is a faculty’s responsibility to establish these learning matters and to have faith in them.
learned and taught by us, though of course more slowly, over many years. After all, if Students tend to have faith in their teachers’ faith: Although our students are given to
they can learn all its parts so, presumably, can we. raising questions about everything, there is remarkably little resistance engendered
What we lose by this perhaps startlingly unconventional approach is, as so often at by the Program, hard taskmaster though it be. (To be sure, our students chose this cur-
the college, also what we gain. We are, as I said, perpetual amateurs and often ourselves riculum, but what student was ever prevented from complaining by that little fact?)
at sea. But these deficiencies also make us better teachers – more sympathetic, fresher We find that the conventional elective system has too many pedagogically dubious
(no yellowed lecture notes for us), more alive to students’ difficulties. Intellectual dar- aspects: How can a student make a knowledgeable educational choice before being
ing – the willingness to plunge into new material, unabashed candor – the willingness educated? Should students really follow their bent or shouldn’t they rather submit
to admit ignorance, and bald directness – the readiness to do without scholarly camou- themselves to expansive diversity? Is it good for them to fill up on gut courses or
flage – these are the virtues this approach requires, and we think that such non-author- unplanned alternatives when their preferred course is full? There is much to be said
itative teaching does our students good. Since advancing in the Program by teaching it for giving up passing preferences in favor of a liberating experience, and capricious
is the main project of the tutor’s life, especially in the first ten years, the dean, who is choice in favor of a coherent study plan. For we make every effort to keep the curricu-
responsible for the teaching slate, contravenes the rules of seniority observed at most lum not only excellent in its matter but also coherent in its ordering.
institutions. Newer tutors are more apt to get the classes they ask for as they plan their The first essential feature of the Program is, then, its prescriptiveness for students
own learning schedule; the more experienced faculty is not favored. and tutors alike. An all-required program must, of practical necessity, be elementary.
No high levels of sophistication can be reached by non-specialists. We welcome the F RIEDRICH

necessity because “elementary” need not mean “introductory” or “simple-minded.” N IETZSCHE
To us it rather signifies “deep and radical,” in the sense of delving into the founda-
tions of world and soul and asking questions that go to their roots. For us it is not a
shame to be always at the beginning (which the Greeks called arché, the governing
source of things) but rather the evidence of our ever-fresh wonder. Still, the Program
is, albeit basic, pretty demanding.
The second feature is that there are three kinds of classes: seminars, tutorials, and
laboratories. In a very old division of liberal learning into Authors and Arts, the
seminar corresponds to Authors; the largest part of our Great Books list is assigned
for the seminar and discussed there (see p. 52). The Liberal Arts, the arts of language,
mathematics, and music, are practiced in the three tutorials (see p. 58). The laboratory
updates the medieval liberal arts tradition; the idea that the inquiry into nature
requires working on stuff with instruments – “laboratory” literally means “workplace”
– is quintessentially modern; here students do bench work (see p. 65).
Our catalogue – its title is “Statement of the St. John’s Program” – gives an accurate
overview of the study plan. It is not a repository for hopeful projects or defunct courses
but a regularly revised, detailed description of the material studied and the approach
used in these classes in each year. It is our primary document.
The third feature is negative: the absence of textbooks and secondary reading. Of
course, tutors and students are free to seek help from whatever quarter they can; my
own shelves are full of algebra and calculus and physics textbooks. But textbooks are
conveniently canned wisdom, and we prefer to use, wherever possible, original works, young than for their elders) that intelligent loquacity is at its peak at night. Some run
because they are usually closer to the foundational questions. Where we want to way past the allotted two hours, but experience teaches, as has been said of a hanging,
achieve some usable competence quickly we try to employ manuals written by tutors that a predictable cut-off time wonderfully concentrates the mind.
for the Program. They range from our Greek manual, which manages to teach intro- Seminar begins with a question posed by one of the seminar leaders, who sit at
ductory Greek in a reflective way, to a number of mathematics and physics manuals opposite sides of the oblong table. There are normally two tutors leading the seminar.
often containing annotations to accompanying original papers. The point is to prevent students from talking to the teacher, to inhibit a tutor’s domi-
To my knowledge we never assign secondary literature (that is, scholarly treatments nating the conversation, and, now and then, to treat students to a collegial difference
of a primary work) to students though we may recommend some to them and to each of opinion. Newer tutors are, as I said, paired with more experienced ones, and this is
other. Annotations and commentaries explaining difficulties in texts are, I suppose, often their most effective initiation into our ways of teaching. We find that this appar-
gratefully resorted to by all tutors as they prepare for class or engage in private study ently profligate arrangement is of the essence; two-leader seminars really go better by
– which, of course, often comes to fruition in the community. our criteria: students talking and listening to each other.
There are, grossly speaking, two seminar styles. Some tutors, like spirits silently
10.
brooding upon the waters, utter hardly a word and make things go merely by their
attentive presence. I’ve heard students say: “He’s a wonderful leader, he’s almost
What is the St. John’s Seminar , silent.” In the same vein, when I was dean, I listened often to the complaint: “He
the center of the progr am? dominates” – evidently a major tutorial transgression for students who take our
promises seriously.
The seminar is the center in so far as all the liberal learning of the Program Other tutors regard themselves as full-fledged members of the conversation
is meant to come to fruition here. A seminar in our sense is just a conversation among who will have their say, though, of course, on the same terms as the students. Both
a score or fewer people focused by – and mostly on – a book (or musical score or paint- styles can work.
ing) that the members have read (or heard or looked at) beforehand. The regular sem- But the main duty of the leaders is to keep things moving, ask new questions,
inars of the Program happen in the evening, on the hypothesis (truer, alas, for the recall members from tangents – though some flights from the texts are too interesting
to rein in quickly. In any case, we are in seminar not only to attempt to understand writers frequently absorb or take issue with each other. Thus they form each other’s
what our author for the night is saying but also to decide for ourselves whether there context and relieve us from fabricating introductions.
is truth in the book and how it might affect our lives. Living engagement is the soul of One way to put our approach to the Great Books is that we see in them not history
the seminar, and often spurts of witty banter or gusts of delighted laughter are but tradition, history being what has passed and is no longer, while tradition – literally
testimonial to the spontaneity of the conversation. Playfulness is the style of live as “what has been handed over” to us – is what is ours, now. Many of us are history buffs
opposed to dead seriousness. But the bread-and-butter mood of the seminar is candor, privately, but no school was ever less interested in bygones than ours. Nonetheless,
straightforwardness, responsiveness, and the conciseness that comes from thinking over the 256 seminars of their four years our students do accumulate some knowledge
before speaking – though we don’t want members to inhibit their contributions with that might be called historical. But they remain blessedly ignorant of conventional
too much circumspection. classifications: epochs of history, schools of thought, academic subjects. You might,
Students who have been in seminar together become memorable to each other. An for example, ask a junior, who has just read it, what the subject of Newton’s
alumna of three decades will say: “Oh yes, Ms. X., she always used to...” (Our students Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica really was and receive a wondering
are strictly held to formal address to preserve civility even in the heat of topics that answer: Theology? Philosophy? Mathematics? Mechanics? Dynamics? Astronomy?
touch them nearly.) We do, however, try to keep ourselves and our students from Cosmology?
assuming hallmark positions, and we would like contributions to be at once impromp- Where does the seminar list come from? Such lists were made and kept being
tu and to the point. That’s the art of seminar participation in a nutshell. made from antiquity on. Our list came largely from the “best books” lists compiled for
Students are expected to do their readings, which may vary from thirty to a hundred workmen’s education classes in England and for honors courses in America, begin-
thirty pages, well ahead of time and twice if possible. When I see a student in the coffee ning in the late nineteenth century. It is revised for titles and fine-tuned for selections
shop late on Monday afternoon with the book open on page ten, I shudder. regularly, but it is essentially stable; the judgment of the reading community diverges
Our set seminar list looks chronological. But we are not exemplifying a historical at the edges but unifies about the core. We know very well that every central book has
development; each book stands on its own. We read our authors largely in the order in about it a penumbra of fine authors and that these come front and center as they are
which they wrote, because that is the null hypothesis which relieves us from imposing discovered by enthusiastic advocates. Nonetheless I never cease to marvel at the pal-
subject groupings or schools of thought on our assignments, and because these pable difference between great and good; the latter pass by, the former you live with
perpetually. Those are the ones we want our students to experience.
Associated with the seminar is the preceptorial, a two months’ break in the junior
and senior seminars during which the students study a chosen subject, book, or
author, along with a tutor. The subject might be a text from within or beyond the
Program, be it fiction or philosophy, poetry or music, or a theme, say thermodynam-

J ONATHAN ics or economics. These breaks are felt to be a kind of festival of the mind for students
S WIFT and tutors alike, for the classes are smaller, the pace of study is more leisurely and the
penetration deeper.
The annual essay, a much longer piece than is required of students in tutorials, is
written for and examined by the seminar leaders. For their writing of the senior essay,
which is to be the fruit of their four years and which must be acceptable if they are to
graduate, seniors are given a free month. This essay is not supposed to be a product of
research but of disciplined, well-expressed reflection on a book or topic. It must be
found acceptable by a committee of tutors formed for the purpose. Some essays are
mediocre, but many are purely wonderful. The bond between essay-writing senior and
essay-advising tutor often lasts a lifetime.

11. What do we do
in the tutorials?
In the tutorials we ply the liberal arts, the skills of the intellect. The
for the Great Books.
Thus we have a language, a mathematics and a music tutorial.
a. The language tutorial lasts through all four years. The language learned in the first
tutorials are recitation classes led by one tutor who directs the students’ translations two years is ancient Greek, in the last two French. Students sometimes refer to the
and demonstrations and helps them work out difficulties. The arts here practiced are “Greek” or “French” tutorial, but that is not our intention. In fact, except for a few
not learned as bare rules or as processes privileged over products; they are not mere students, the language competence isn’t, mildly speaking, very high; our students
techniques. They have always had powerful matters of their own in which they are set come to us, after all, largely from average American high schools. These are language
out and exemplified, as a Euclidean proposition is at once a lesson in formal thinking tutorials, and though we obviously can’t talk about language without linguistic exam-
and a piece of substantial geometry. ples, a very moderate (laboriously acquired) knowledge of the elements will suffice for
In fact our tutorials still follow the traditional list of the liberal arts. First come our purpose, which is to reflect on the ways of human speech: What are the “parts of
the arts of language, thinking and expression, the trivium or “three-way”: grammar, speech” and how are they connected to thinking, that is, how is grammar related to
logic, rhetoric. Then come the arts of formal structures in time and space, the logic? What does it take to say the same thing in two languages, that is, to translate?
quadrivium or “four-way”: mathematics starting with the unit and the counting What makes some speech “rhetorical,” that is, especially persuasive?
numbers of arithmetic and ascending dimensionally from the partless point to the Why ancient Greek, a dead language? Well, it isn’t dead to us and it’s beautiful; it’s
plane and to the geometric solid, proceeding with the application of mathematics to the language in which most of our freshman books are written; it’s philosophically
visible nature in physics, particularly in astronomy, and culminating in passion- fundamental and etymologically helpful to the semantics of English. And it’s just suf-
inducing sound in music, above all, the music of the spheres. (I am told that in the ficiently different in syntax from English to make comparisons possible and prof-
slightly overwrought early days of the Program, the books on natural science in our itable. In my experience Greek is the least complained-of subject in the Program.
library were accordingly cataloged under “Music.”) The rules, structures, and Why French? Many years ago there was a grand debate to decide between German
formalisms of these arts, together with their exemplary applications, form the and French. As I recall, French won primarily on the grounds of “sensibility”: We
matter of the tutorials. And of course, they are also the elements of and models didn’t have enough sheer elegance in the Program. Perhaps it was also that French was
a little easier? In any case, our students read and translate, line by line, fine examples Our four years are elegantly framed by two kinds of geometry, Euclidean and non-
of the verbal arts, among them Greek and French plays and a lot of poetry. These serve Euclidean, studied in freshman and senior year respectively. One is the geometry of
as exercises in rhetorical analysis, to be sure, but also as enrichments of the imagina- the natural imagination and the other is a geometry that, though logically consistent,
tion. There is, besides the study of the elementary grammars of both languages, also is imaginable only on a model within our basic Euclidean world.
a sequence in logic. And rhetoric is practiced in a number of short papers, some of One reason mathematics is eminently learnable is that it has few, well-ordered
which are critiqued at paper conferences. We are of two minds here: whether, time elements: definitions, axioms, postulates (whereas language begins everywhere at
being limited, to indulge our natural pleasure in carrying on a conversation about the once and has complex elements: morphology, syntax, vocabulary). These are the
student’s intended content or to do our bounden duty to correct misplaced commas elements that Euclid organized in his classical compendium of that name, the book
and skewed syntax while preaching the gospel of meaningful discourse. we study in the freshman year. It is a tiny change in one of his postulates that produces
the mind-bogglingly strange new geometry of the senior year, which, for example, has
b. The mathematics tutorial, which also runs through all four years, is generally agreed no similar figures (figures, that is, of the same shape but of different size) and which
to be the easiest to teach. That’s inherent in the Greek word “mathematics,” which we study from the work of its originator, Lobachevsky.
means “what pertains to learning.” Our mathematics, to many a student’s surprise, is In between we study one mathematical revolution after another: the diagrams
most satisfyingly learnable, and, to exaggerate only a little, practically teaches itself. used by Ptolemy to “save the phenomena,” that is, to give a rational foundation to the
Hence we don’t acknowledge mathematics blocks, and so we don’t have any. Partly, of appearances of an earth-centered cosmos and their conversion by Copernicus to a
course, that follows from the fact that our students have chosen to study in this sun-centered universe; the geometric conic sections of Apollonius and their transfor-
Program, but it is also because we regard mathematics not as a difficult impersonal mation into the loci generated by algebraic equations (by some accounts the one sin-
technique but as a liberal humane art. We wish our students to be easy with the gle conceptual innovation most explanatory of modernity); the advance from the
thought that mathematics might be close to the roots of human nature, for example, static mathematics of the ancients to a mathematics of motion as formalized in the cal-
our root capacity for recognizing units and counting them and our mysterious ability culus; the expansion of counting numbers to include zero, negatives, rationals, and
to picture the inherently invisible such as points without parts, lines without breadth, finally irrationals as conceived by Dedekind; the turn of mind that allows us to think
solids without matter. of infinity not as an indefinite progress but as an actual transfinite magnitude; and
Einstein’s theory, which overturns our ingrained assurance that this moment here is
the same “now” throughout space.
We ask our students to study these high moments in actual mathematical detail A DAM
not simply as evidence of human progress, for at every turning point we ask also what S MITH
was lost in dropping an earlier restraint. Nor do we study them as history of science,
for we value each discovery for its intrinsic beauty (a word now proscribed by estheti-
cians but fully active among mathematicians). We do, however, want students to carry
away not a secondhand but a direct knowledge of the intellectual effort that went into
the making of their world.
c. The music tutorial happens in the sophomore year, just when most of our theology
is read in the seminar – not by chance, for music is not only traditionally the apex of
the liberal arts but, in Luther’s words, “stands close to theology.”
As a liberal art music has learnable elements out of which it is composed, a kind of
qualitative mathematics: small number ratios which, when realized by plucking
strings of various lengths stretched over a sounding board, produce the consonances
and when compounded yield the diatonic scale, the circle of fifths which displays the
keys, and so on to the traditional rules of meter, melody and harmony and their
inspired breaching by composers. Perhaps in no other liberal art are the elements so
immediately also the building blocks of its works.
Our students study these and then analyze musical compositions, score in hand.
They pay attention, especially in sacred music, to the relation of words to notes; they
consider the relations of parts to wholes; they learn to hear subtleties and recognize
large designs. In sum, they reflect on the phenomenon of incarnate, impassioned
mathematics in general and on the new effects obtained by stylistic innovations in
particular. There is, of course, a repertory of superlative examples.

12. H ow d o e s t h e
labor atory fit in?
The laboratory is, finally, the newcomer to the liberal arts, though there is
Truth to tell, not all tutors trust themselves to teach the music tutorial, which for us no question that it belongs with them. For what Francis Bacon calls – surely the
seems to be the only class requiring some special talent and prior training. I haven’t allusion is intended – “the inquisition of nature,” meant to force her secrets from her,
myself, though I’ve attended it. And we do always seem to find people who have the is a human concern no less than any of the humanities as now understood: the human-
daring to do it. centered studies such as, say, literature.
As I’ve mentioned, as freshmen all our students sing together. When the alumni In the three-year laboratory, then, we subject the bodies and motions of nature to
return for Homecoming some of them again sing together, pieces from their freshmen controlled conditions, from Galileo’s inclined plane to Millikan’s oil drop chamber,
chorus manual. Altogether, this school is full of music. and apply instruments of observation and measurement to them. Although original
I might add here that a decade or so ago we had a great debate about the role that accounts of discoveries are read and discussed and tutor-written manuals are studied,
the visual arts, not traditionally included in the liberal arts, should play within the the main activity is hands-on benchwork, experimentation in the sense of subjecting
Program. On the Santa Fe campus a painting segment was tried out; it is gone now. My stuff to procedures. Our laboratory equipment is not generally sophisticated, and we
guess is that the visual arts – which are certainly vigorously plied extracurricularly in don’t expect our students to make new discoveries. Instead we replicate numerous
our studios and appreciated through exhibitions in our campus art galleries – don’t crucial experiments and get an elementary notion of the kind of ingenuity and
quite fit into our Program because the teachable elements are hard to marshal into a patience required to make a science of nature’s ways. I don’t remember in my years of
common curriculum, and there is in them nothing quite equivalent to making music learning to be a laboratory tutor ever hearing the “scientific method” even mentioned;
together; so music appears to be the art most in accord with a community of learning. it never seemed that anything so jigged as one scientific protocol could apply to all
these great moments. Probably our students could nevertheless give a pretty good
account of what it means to define a problem, to devise an experimental setup, to
subject phenomena to measurement, to record data and gauge their value.

The freshman year begins with observational biology, with the tricky problem of far the pervasive application to human affairs of these well-defined terms of physics –
classification: Is outside appearance or inside structure more revealing? The labora- including, of course, relativity – is legitimate.
tory then takes up the problem of measurement and the atomic constitution of matter. Once a week, on Friday night, there is a lecture, the only one in the Program for
The sophomore year is given over to music, but the laboratory resumes in the junior which attendance is obligatory – perhaps a rule more honored in the breach than the
year with kinematics, mechanics, dynamics, optics, electricity and magnetism up to observance. But the students who generally profit most from the Program are present.
Maxwell’s equations. Since by the middle of the year students know some calculus, the After the lecture there is an intense, searching and sometimes interminable question
class isn’t so different in content from that of a standard first-year physics course, period. Visiting lecturers, all spent though they may be, find these midnight revels
except for the use of seminal papers, and in the hours given to reflecting on the mean- exhilarating. Where have they ever been so well attended to?
ing of physical quantities like matter, force, energy, fields – how they show themselves
13.
and how they came to be formulated. The senior year returns to biology, now on the
sub-individual, that is, molecular level, but first takes up subatomic, that is, quantum,
physics. At this point the laboratory becomes fairly demanding, not only mathemati- W h a t d o w e wa n t f r o m
cally but also conceptually. Recall that none of the students are science majors. and for our students?
Nonetheless, they study some early papers on radiant energy and think about the way
nature becomes elusive on the subatomic level: the wave-particle duality (the theory What we expect from our students while they are with us, what it takes to do
that radiation and matter are in some respects wave-like and in others particle-like); well, is somewhat different from what in most schools is called “keeping your grades
probability (the theory that on a very small scale strict causality fails and the laws of up.” Steady preparation, faithful attendance, timely delivery of well-written papers –
nature are statistical); and uncertainty (the theory that the process of observation these virtues are only part of it. We want our students to extend themselves through
itself makes the simultaneous measurement of certain quantities in principle impos- the Program, even to the parts that don’t come easily to them, and to be serious
sible). With these investigations our students are ready for their world, not only about their whole vocation as students. We want them to think of themselves as
because they have some notion how science is developing far beyond our naïvely responsible members of the community of learning: The faults of “having stopped
natural understanding of nature, but also because they can judge for themselves how learning” and “not contributing to the class’s learning” as judged by their tutors are
causes for being “disenabled.”
What about morality, that swamp of uncertainty for America’s educational institu-
tions? We are bound to enforce local and federal law on drinking, drugs and sexual con-
duct. But we are an institution of learning, devoted to the cultivation of the intellect
and the imagination, and our first and peculiar care is for the intellectual virtues. There
are certain kinds of behavior that we judge to be incompatible with our community of
learning, and our Student Handbook states this clearly. In particular, the use of illegal
mind-altering substances and the practice of intellectual dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism)
are not tolerated when they come to our notice; these we investigate exceedingly care-
fully and punish quite uncompromisingly. This morality we confidently enforce for the
sake of the college’s mission. You can’t work in our spirit if you’re not in your right
mind, and you are doing less than nothing if your work is not your own. And though our
M ICHAEL students come to us from a dangerous world, I think, occasional paroxysms aside, that
FARADAY they lead remarkably good and sober lives. What we would really wish is that all their
intoxications and ecstasies were those of the thinking soul.
This is what else we want for them: four years of minimally clouded thoughtfulness.
For this we have managed to keep our classes remarkably free of a current scourge of
higher education: politicization. The Program, whose works are full of religious doc-
trine and political opinion, requires something higher than tolerance; it requires
appreciative openness to all the possibilities of the intellect and the passions. No tutor
is entitled to wreck our conversation by introducing a personal ideology, and our
students generally have the tact to veer off from politics in the narrow current sense
(the sure sign of which is getting hot under the collar; it marks the difference between pose, and that they will themselves be the catalysts of such communities of two or of
politics and political philosophy, which remains relatively serene under opposition). many members, for action or for contemplation: companions, families, firms, schools.
We want students to feel safe in bringing all their experience to bear on the discussion And indeed our alumni are by preference founders and maintainers of small worlds.
of the books, but we hope they will learn to lever them into a large, universal mode. 2. Courage: We expect them to be full of boldness in approaching intellectual and
This desideratum for our students is so close to the heart of our life that I will try practical problems, in complementing their liberal learning with expertise, in trans-
saying it again: We want to give our students a classroom in which inciting books are muting their four years’ study into life-long learning and reading. And indeed our
talked about not as mere literature nor as historical documents, but boldly as they alumni seem to learn and do practically anything, and they are, many of them, invet-
meant themselves to be taken: as the Word of God, or the insight of the intellect, or erate readers and seminar-goers.
the wisdom of the world. And yet we want these same students to read subtly, not as 3. Decency: The fallout of years of thoughtful reading about good and evil should be
believers, disciples, and partisans – that may happen privately – but receptively, with at least plain probity. Not to suppose so is to renounce faith in the moral effect of liber-
that most desirable of human dispositions, an open mind, one which hears apprecia- al learning. And in fact, the alumni I know well do seem to have very live consciences.
tively and responds judgingly, both at once. 4. Tradition: Our alumni are in a singularly good position to live in appreciative
tension with the Western tradition, to know how we came to be what we now are,
14.
namely moderns, to preserve our treasures and reform our faults, and to recover for
themselves what we always were, human beings. And in fact, many of our alumni live
What do we wish for – as it seems to me we ought to live: half in, half out of our times.
and see – in our alumni? 5. Self-knowledge: Our alumni are as busy as anyone, but we hope that they will
find time for that inner housekeeping, that coolly unclouded self-awareness they
“Alumni” is a word of affection – it means “nurslings.” What nourishment learned about in their freshman year under the Delphic injunction “Know thyself!”
do we hope St. John’s has given its alumni to strengthen them for what is so curiously And that is the reality: One of the delights of seeing alumni, perhaps after decades of
called “real life”? I can think of five headings: disappearance, is the ready candor with which they report on the state of their soul –
1. Community: We hope that they will carry away a picture of a community of pur- for what would concern their former tutors more?
15. Po s t s c r i p t : A s m a l l c o l l e g e
and those that lov e it
I want to end with the peroration of a speech that Daniel Webster made in
behalf of his own school before the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Marshall presiding,
a plea which won the case and resulted in making independent colleges like St. John’s
safe from at least one danger – public control (Dartmouth College Case, 1818). He
concluded, and had the Chief Justice in tears:
Sir, you may destroy this little institution... but if you do..., you must
extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science, which, for more than
a century have thrown their radiance over the land! It is, sir, as I said, a small col-
lege, and yet there are those that love it....
Well, St. John’s has been here even longer than that, weathering other storms that
have only made it stronger. And though it too is a small college, it is also a great
college, so that those that love it, love it with good reason.

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T H E C A M P A I G N F O R S T .

11. What do we do in the tutorials? • page 58

a. the Language Tutorial

b. the Mathematics Tutorial

c. the Music Tutorial

12. How does the laboratory fit in? • page 65

13. What do we want from and for our students? • page 67

14. What do we wish for – and see in – our alumni? • page 70

1. Unique and univ ersal?

How can a college be one of a kind in reality and nonetheless a possible

Mountain College in North Carolina for instance, or the Experimental Program in

in this country about which the world also revolves.

books together is lifelong. In fact, our principle is to do everything we can do without

spreading our substance too thin.

It is a question worth asking because, as I will explain, our way of teaching

3. Is the “how” of our teaching

not spoiled, like to grapple with what is hard but great.

rebellious originality about the human condition. So talk of “Greek” or “Medieval”

or “American” thought is grossly unilluminating: How can a people or an epoch

think? Persons think.

introductions are mostly compendia of current preoccupations and brave attempts to

this is counterproductive: What arouses interest in students is not currency but

authenticity – if it is allowed to reveal itself.

have acquaintance with the best, then face the worst.

their time, of history.

Here are some of these reasons.

I have never visited an institution whose life depended so much on a faculty

disciple-making guruship fit our way.

er track. It’s an alternation of exhilaration and despair, as classes go well or ill, as we

wave train is amplified by our aforementioned sense of responsibility without the

power to compel by grades, by badgering, or by lectures.

What kinds of students do we want? Since in recent years our increasing

Do we look for a representative student population? I think most of us know from

Board for the degree.

what they don’t always know is that we know it too.

a community of learning that discourages competition in the classroom, athletics

offers an outlet for energetic but regulated rivalry.

often in larger groups, or in lively conversation. This devotion sometimes, wonderfully,

Although in seminar discussions we are expected to assume no seniority but to

Often we need to compromise, to read too quickly, to leave difficulties unresolved,

deans, responsibility for the Program of Instruction, including the formulation of

changes and recommendations of tutorial appointments to the respective president.

ed and responsible committee, and a hard-working one. To complete the picture of

in terms. For nothing is less amenable to institutionalization than a young – or old –

soul in development. And yet what is an intellectual paradox is a worldly necessity.

prescriptions designed to protect freedom.

forth in droves and are the better for it.

9. What are the essential features

be seen helping a freshman with an astronomical diagram. Nothing contributes more

No high levels of sophistication can be reached by non-specialists. We welcome the F RIEDRICH

is, albeit basic, pretty demanding.

requires working on stuff with instruments – “laboratory” literally means “workplace”

– is quintessentially modern; here students do bench work (see p. 65).

used in these classes in each year. It is our primary document.

perpetually. Those are the ones we want our students to experience.

Program, be it fiction or philosophy, poetry or music, or a theme, say thermodynam-

research but of disciplined, well-expressed reflection on a book or topic. It must be

essay-advising tutor often lasts a lifetime.

Thus we have a language, a mathematics and a music tutorial.