St. John's College is a private liberal arts college with dual campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, which are ranked separately by U.S. News & World Report within the top 100 National Liberal Arts Colleges. It is known for its distinctive curriculum centered on reading and discussing the Great Books of Western Civilization. St. John's has no religious affiliation.
One of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States, St. John's traces its origins to King William's School, a preparatory school founded in 1696, and received a collegiate charter under its present name in 1784. In 1937, St. John's adopted a Great Books curriculum based on discussion of works from the Western canon of philosophical, religious, historical, mathematical, scientific, and literary works.
The school grants only one bachelor's degree, in liberal arts. Two master's degrees are available through the college's Graduate Institute--one in Liberal Arts, which is a modified version of the undergraduate curriculum (differing mostly in that the graduate students are not restricted to a set sequence of courses), and one in Eastern Classics, which applies most of the features of the undergraduate curriculum (seminars, preceptorials, language study and a set sequence of courses) to a list of classic works from India, China and Japan. The Master of Arts in Eastern Classics is only available at the Santa Fe campus. The average admittance rate for Fall 2018 undergraduate students was 60 percent: Santa Fe campus (67%) and the Annapolis campus (58%).
Video St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)
History
Old Program
St. John's College traces its origins to King William's School, founded in 1696. In 1784, Maryland chartered St. John's College, which absorbed King William's School when it opened 1785. The college took up residence in a building known as Bladen's Folly (the current McDowell Hall), which was originally built to be the Maryland governor's mansion, but was not completed. There was some association with the Freemasons early in the college's history, leading to speculation that it was named after Saint John the Evangelist. The college's original charter, reflecting the Masonic value of religious tolerance as well as the religious diversity of the founders (which included Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the Roman Catholic Charles Carroll of Carrollton) stated that "youth of all religious denominations shall be freely and liberally admitted". The college always maintained a small size, generally enrolling fewer than 500 men at a time.
In its early years, the college was at least nominally public--the college's founders had envisaged it as the Western Shore branch of a proposed "University of Maryland" but a lack of enthusiasm from the Maryland General Assembly and its Eastern Shore counterpart, Washington College, made this largely a paper institution. After years of inconsistent funding and litigation, the college accepted a smaller annual grant in lieu of being funded through the state's annual appropriations process. During the Civil War, the college closed and its campus was used as a military hospital. In 1907 it became the undergraduate college of a loosely organized "University of Maryland" that included the professional schools located in Baltimore. By 1920, when Maryland State College (founded in 1857 as Maryland Agricultural College) became the University of Maryland at College Park, St. John's was a free-standing private institution.
The college curriculum has taken various forms throughout its history. It began with a general program of study in the liberal arts, but St. John's was a military school for much of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It ended compulsory military training with Major Enoch Garey's accession as president in 1923. Garey and the Navy instituted a Naval Reserve unit in September 1924, creating the first-ever collegiate Department of Naval Science in the United States. But despite St. John's successfully pioneering the entire NROTC movement, student interest waned, the voluntary ROTC disappeared in 1926 with Garey's departure, and the Naval Reserve unit followed by 1929.
New Program
In 1936, the college lost its accreditation. The Board of Visitors and Governors, faced with dire financial straits caused by the Great Depression, invited educational innovators Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan to make a completely fresh start. They introduced a new program of study, which remains in effect today. Buchanan became dean of the college, while Barr assumed its presidency. In his guide Cool Colleges, Donald Asher writes that the New Program was implemented to save the college from closing: "Several benefactors convinced the college to reject a watered-down curriculum in favor of becoming a very distinctive academic community. Thus this great institution was reborn as a survival measure."
In 1938, Walter Lippman wrote a column praising liberal arts education as a bulwark against fascism, and said "in the future, men will point to St. John's College and say that there was the seed-bed of the American renaissance."
In 1940, national attention was attracted to St. John's by a story in Life entitled "The Classics: At St. John's They Come into Their Own Once More". Classic works unavailable in English translation were translated by faculty members, typed, mimeographed, and bound. They were sold to the general public as well as to students, and by 1941 the St. John's College bookshop was famous as the only source for English translations of works such as Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, St. Augustine's De Musica, and Ptolemy's Almagest.
The wartime years were difficult for the all-male St. John's. Enlistment and the draft all but emptied the college; 15 seniors graduated in 1943, eight in 1945, and three in 1946. From 1940-46, St. John's was repeatedly confronted with threats of its land being seized by the Navy for expansion of the neighboring U.S. Naval Academy, and James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, formally announced plans to do so in 1945. At the time, The New York Times, which had expected a legal battle royal comparable to the Dartmouth case, commented that "although a small college of fewer than 200 students, St. John's has, because of its experimental liberal arts program, received more publicity and been the center of a greater academic controversy than most other colleges in the land. Its best-books program has been attacked and praised by leading educators of the day."
The constant threat of eviction discouraged Stringfellow Barr. In late 1946 Forrestal withdrew the plan, in the face of public opposition and the disapproval of the House Naval Affairs Committee, but Barr and Scott Buchanan were already committed to leaving St. John's and launching Liberal Arts, Inc., a new, similar college in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; that project eventually failed--but thinking about other sites for the college eventually led to the opening of St. John's second campus, in Santa Fe, in 1964. In 1948, St. John's became the first previously all-white college south of the Mason-Dixon line to voluntarily admit African American students.
The movement to desegregate the college was wholly internal, beginning with students who, with the support of the faculty and administration, persuaded a reluctant Board of Visitors and Governors to go along. The first African American student was Martin A. Dyer, from Baltimore, who graduated in 1952. In 1949, Richard D. Weigle became president of St. John's. Following the chaotic and difficult period from 1940 to 1949, Weigle's presidency continued for 31 years, during which the New Program and the college itself became well established.
In 1951, St. John's became coeducational, admitting women for the first time in its then-254-year history. There was some objection from students because they had not been involved in--nor even aware of--the decision before it was announced to the media, and from some who believed that the college could not remain a serious institution were it to admit women. Martin Dyer reported that women who were admitted quickly proved they were the academic and intellectual equals of their male counterparts. As enrollment grew during the 1950s, and facing the coming larger baby-boom generation, thoughts turned again towards opening another campus--but this time in addition to, not instead of, the one in Annapolis. Serious talk of expansion began in 1959 when the father of a student from Monterey, California, suggested to President Weigle that he establish a new campus there. Time (magazine) ran an article on the college's possible expansion plans, and in addition to California, 32 offers came in to the college from New Hampshire, Oregon, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Connecticut, and other states. A group from the Monterey Peninsula told Weigle that they were definitely interested, though funding was a problem, and suitable land was a big question. There was also an offer of land in Claremont, California, but competition with the other colleges there for students and financial contributions was a negative. The Riverside Mission Inn (in Riverside, California) was another possibility, but with only 5 acres (20,000 m2) of land and lots of renovations needed to the inn, funding was again a major question.
Nevertheless, all three locations were major contenders, when Robert McKinney (publisher of The Santa Fe New Mexican and a former SJC board member) called and told Weigle that a group of city leaders had long been looking for another college for Santa Fe. At a lunch Weigle attended at John Gaw Meem's house on the outskirts of Santa Fe in late January 1961, Meem volunteered that he had a little piece of land (214 acres (0.87 km2)) that he would gladly donate to the college. Upon looking at it after lunch, Weigle instantly fell in love with it. A committee of four faculty members (Robert Bart, Barbara Leonard, Douglas Allanbrook, and William Darkey) went to visit all four sites (the three in California, and Santa Fe) and, after much deliberation, also recommended Santa Fe.
Western mystery writer Tony Hillerman tells a slightly different story: The site selection committee, having originally expected to locate in Claremont, California, reluctantly accepted an invitation to inspect the site in Santa Fe. Hillerman says of the committeemen:
made pale from the weak sun of the coastal climate and their scholarly profession, generally urban, generally Eastern, solidly W.A.S.P. They came from a world which was old Anglo-Saxon family, old books, Greek and Latin literacy, prep schools and Blue Point oysters and Ivy League; a world bounded on the north by Boston... and on the south by Virginia.
In 1961, the governing board of St. John's thus approved plans to establish a second college at Santa Fe, New Mexico. Groundbreaking occurred on April 22, 1963, and the first classes began in 1964. As it turned out, land was also donated to the college on the Monterey Peninsula in California shortly after this, on condition that a campus also be developed there by a certain date.
Maps St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)
Curriculum
Great Books program
The Great Books program (often called simply "the Program" or "the New Program" at St. John's) was developed at the University of Chicago by Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler in the mid-1930s as an alternative form of education to the then rapidly changing undergraduate curriculum. St. John's adopted the Great Books program in 1937, when the college was facing the possibility of financial and academic ruin. The Great Books program in use today was also influenced by Jacob Klein, who was dean of the college in the 1940s and 1950s.
The four-year program of study, nearly all of which is mandatory, demands that students read and discuss the works of many of Western civilization's most prominent contributors to philosophy, theology, mathematics, science, music, poetry, and literature. Tutorials (mathematics, language, and music), as well as seminar and laboratory, are discussion-based. In the mathematics tutorial students often demonstrate propositions that mathematicians throughout various ages have laid out. In the language tutorial student translations are presented (ancient Greek is studied in the first two years and French for the last two). The tutorials, with seminar and laboratory, constitute the classes. All classes, and in particular the seminar, are considered formal exercises; consequently, students address one another, as well as their teachers, by their honorific and last name during class.
St. John's avoids modern textbooks, lectures, and examinations, in favor of a series of manuals. While traditional (A to F) grades are given and provided on transcripts, the culture of the school de-emphasizes their importance and grades are released only at the request of the student. Grading is based largely on class participation and papers. Tutors, as faculty members are called at the college, play a non-directive role in the classroom, compared to mainstream colleges. However, at St. John's this varies by course and instructor. Class size is small on both campuses, with a student to tutor ratio of 7:1. Seminar is the largest class, with around 20 students, but led by two tutors. Daytime tutorials are smaller, typically ranging between 12 and 16 students and are led by one tutor. Preceptorials are the smallest class size, ranging between 3 and 9 students.
The Program involves:
- Four years of literature, philosophy, and political science in seminar
- Four years of mathematics
- Three years of laboratory science
- Four years of language (Ancient Greek, Middle/Early English, and French)
- Freshman year chorus followed by sophomore year music
The Great Books are not the only texts used at St. John's. Greek and French classes make use of supplemental materials that are more like traditional textbooks. Science laboratory courses and mathematics courses use manuals prepared by faculty members that combine source materials with workbook exercises. For example, the mathematics tutorial combines a 1905 paper by Albert Einstein with exercises that require the student to work through the mathematics used in the paper.
Reading list
Although it varies from year to year and differs slightly between campuses, the Great Books reading list is the basis of the school's curriculum.
Freshman year
Sophomore year
Junior year
Senior year
Graduate Institute Liberal Arts program
The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education was established at St. John's College in 1967 as a summer program on the Santa Fe campus. The size and scope of the Institute have expanded so that currently both the Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses offer year-round graduate-level study based on the principles of the St. John's undergraduate program. Students in the Liberal Arts program explore the persisting questions of human existence by studying classic works of the western tradition. This program is organized into five semester-long thematic segments: Philosophy and Theology, Politics and Society, Literature, Mathematics and Natural Science, and History. Students earn a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts (MALA) by completing four of these five segments. A common curriculum provides the basis for a shared intellectual community; discussion with fellow students and faculty is the mode of learning both inside and outside the classroom. Each semester, students attend a seminar, a tutorial and a preceptorial--all carried out as small-group discussions under the guidance of St. John's faculty members. These three types of classes are the framework of the distinctive St. John's educational experience.
Eastern Classics program
At the Santa Fe campus, there is a program offering a Master of Arts in Eastern Classics (MAEC). This program is three semesters long and is designed to be completed in one 12-month period. The impetus for the program came with the recognition that the undergraduate program simply could not do justice to the Great Books of the three main Asian traditions (India, China and Japan) by trying to squeeze in a few works among so many European masterworks. The EC program therefore provides a full set of readings in the philosophical, religious and literary traditions of the three cultures listed above. Thus, students learn Chinese culture by reading not only Confucius, Laozi and Zhuangzi, but also Mencius, Xun Zi, Han Feizi, and Mozi, as well as historical narratives by Sima Qian and the Zuo Zhuan, the later movement of Neo-Confucianism and Zhu Xi, narrative works such as Journey to the West or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the great Chinese poets, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu. This list represents only one-third of the required corpus, which also covers the major teachings and branches of Hinduism and the development of Theravada, Mahayana and Zen Buddhism, as well as such literary masterpieces as the Mahabharata, Shakuntala, The Tale of Genji, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and others. Students also take a language, either Sanskrit or Classical Chinese.
Campuses
Annapolis campus
St. John's is located in the Historic Annapolis district, one block away from the Maryland State Capitol building. Its proximity to the United States Naval Academy (across King George Street) has inspired many a comparison to Athens and Sparta. The schools carry on a spirited rivalry seen in the annual croquet match between the two schools on the front lawn of St. John's, which has been called by GQ "the purest intercollegiate athletic event in America." As of 2018 St. John's has won 29 of the 36 annual matches. About the Johnnies' commitment to the event, one midshipman commented, "They're out practicing croquet every afternoon! Alabama should take football this seriously."
Construction of McDowell Hall at the center of campus was begun in 1742 by Provincial Governor of Maryland Thomas Bladen, but was not completed until after the end of the Colonial period. The 23,000-square-foot historic building underwent some improvements in 2017-18. Its Great Hall has seen many college events, from balls feting Generals Lafayette and Washington to the unique St. John's institutions called waltz parties.
Mellon Hall, constructed in 1958, was designed by noted architect Richard Neutra.
St. John's College Observatory
The observatory facility, located at the top of the Foucault pendulum tower in Mellon Hall, contains two permanently mounted telescopes, a 12" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope model LX200 and a 16" Newtonian telescope, both made by Meade Instruments. The Foucault Pendulum is located at the top of the four-story tower. The pendulum drive magnet is housed within a cast iron cone in the Observatory facility. The magnet is keyed to turn on and off as the pendulum swings by using technology such as a photoresistor that determine the center of the pendulum's swing.
Santa Fe campus
St. John's Santa Fe campus is located at the foot of Monte Sol, on the eastern edge of Santa Fe. It was opened in 1964 in response to the increase in qualified applicants at the Annapolis campus. The college chose to open a second campus rather than increase the size of the Annapolis campus. The second campus was part of a larger project, championed by then-college president Richard Weigle, which called for six campuses to be built across the country. St. John's abandoned the concept when it later sold a tract of land it owned in Monterey, California. The Santa Fe campus offers students a more secluded atmosphere than the Annapolis campus, with the vast Pecos Wilderness and Sangre de Cristo Mountains on its doorstep. The campus also boasts an expansive view of Santa Fe that extends to Los Alamos to the west.
The college maintains gear to facilitate student use of the outdoors, such as kayaks, rafts, hiking equipment, and sports equipment. Additionally, the college partners with Atalaya Search and Rescue to offer students training in search and rescue.
Ptolemy Stone
Both campuses have a Ptolemy Stone, an astronomical instrument invented by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy to measure the altitude of celestial bodies, in this case, the sun. The St. John's Ptolemy Stones are outdoor objects with a movable metal dial affixed (a prismical concrete column in Annapolis and a granite boulder in Santa Fe); this device was the precursor to the sextant. Freshman and sophomore math classes learn to use this stone to calculate the movement of the sun along the ecliptic. The students' use of the Ptolemy Stones underscores the mathematics and laboratory programs' connection to the practical experimentation and hands-on experience of the natural world.
Student body
Within the Class of 2022, 36 U.S. states and 15 countries are represented. Approximately 99% of students receive financial aid. First-year undergraduate students range in age from 15 to 65. The student body is relatively small compared to other liberal arts colleges, with a population historically below 500 students on each campus during a year. The college offers many community seminars and lectures that are available to the public.
Reputation
In 1975, a St. John's graduate gave this description of how a St. John's degree was received by other institutions:
Bernard M. Davidoff, M.D., a graduate of St. John's in 1969 and of Columbia Medical School... said the medical schools to which he applied reacted to his unconventional preparation in two ways. "Those who had not heard of St. John's were not impressed. Those who knew of the college generally waived requirements." Like most St. John's alumni who enter medical school, he took an undergraduate course in organic chemistry at another college. Dr. Davidoff... cited only one difficulty in adapting to medical school. "I didn't have any interesting people to talk to," he recalled.
Medical school admissions requirements have become significantly more rigorous since 1975, however, and institutions are now unwilling to waive requirements.
Motivational business speaker Zig Ziglar included a chapter entitled "St. John's: A College That Works" in a 1997 book. He said St. John's holds fast to the "medieval" notion that all knowledge is one and states that "the books they use are terribly hard." He notes that the school "ranks fifth nationally in the number of graduates earning doctorates in the humanities" and is impressed by the 81% of graduates entering education, engineering, law, medicine, and other professions. He concludes "Sounds like St. John's is onto something. Maybe more schools should take that approach." St. John's College is also listed in Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives.
St. John's runs counter to the usual emphasis on rankings and selectivity. In the past, St. John's College chose not to participate in any collegiate rankings surveys and did not provide requested survey information. However, the school was still included in many ranking guides. In 2014, Annapolis President Christopher B. Nelson wrote a post to address the issue in his SignPosts for Liberal Education blog:
After many years of refusing to participate at all in the rankings generated by U.S. News & World Report--one of the most prominent providers of college rankings--St. John's this year submitted statistical information for its survey. This change in practice was prompted by engaged parents who increasingly were asking whether the underlying data about St. John's in U.S. News was reliable. Since we were not submitting information, we could not vouch for its reliability. Although St. John's would prefer not to be ranked, and has long asked not to be ranked, U.S. News continued to rank us. We concluded, therefore, that we had to supply statistical data in order to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information U.S. News was publishing about us.
St. John's experienced an unprecedented leap upward in the 2014 U.S. News rankings after submitting data (as opposed to not providing information and still being ranked), as reported in the Washington Post. An educational reporter wrote:
Unlike many top-flight liberal arts colleges, St. John's isn't all that hard to get into: The school accepts 75 to 80 percent of applicants, primarily based on three written essays and, to a certain extent, grades. There is no application fee, and standardized tests, like the Scholastic Assessment Test, are optional. About three-quarters of the enrolled students ranked in the top half of their high school class, but only one fifth graduated in the top tenth. School officials said that's because they're less concerned that the applicant show a body of accumulated knowledge than a true desire for attaining it.
In September 2018, the college announced that it would slash undergraduate tuition by $17,000, from $52,000 to $35,000 per year, starting in the 2019-20 school year. St. John's Santa Fe campus president Mark Roosevelt cited concern about the rising cost of education among U.S. Liberal Arts institutions, particularly the rise of "prestige pricing" among competitive private colleges and universities, as impetus for the substantial tuition reduction.
Notable people associated with St. John's
See also
- Colonial Colleges: Details on St. John's antiquity vis-a-vis other old U.S. colleges
- Educational perennialism
- Narrative evaluation
- Western canon
- Santa Fe Institute
- Saint Mary's College of California (Moraga), Integral Program
References
Further reading
- Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again ISBN 978-0-520-26587-5 A former college president attended St. John's College and wrote a memoir about his experience reading Homer, rowing Crew, and examining the importance of a liberal arts education in today's society.
- Where I learned to Read Salvatore Scibona, The New Yorker, 2011-06-13
External links
- Official website
Source of article : Wikipedia
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