St. John's College (Annapolis)

St. John's College is a private liberal arts college with dual campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. St. John's is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States as the successor institution of King William's School, a preparatory school founded in 1696; the current institution received a collegiate charter 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 college grants a single bachelor's degree, in liberal arts. The awarded degree is equivalent to a double major in philosophy and the history of science, and a double minor in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature.

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.

Although King William's School was founded with an affiliation to Church of England, St. John's no longer has a religious affiliation.

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 in 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."Charles A. Nelson (2001),''Radical Visions: Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Their Efforts on behalf of Education and Politics in the Twentieth Century''. Bergin and Garvey, Westport, CT; .

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 to 1946, 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 royale comparable to the 1819 ''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 to take over St. John's 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.

St John's had been founded as an all-white institution and continued as such in the early years of the New Program, with Barr actively discouraging black students from applying. However, by 1948 faculty and student sentiment had shifted and students, with the support of the faculty and administration, persuaded a reluctant Board of Visitors and Governors to integrate the college and St. John's became the one of the first previously all-white colleges south of the Mason-Dixon line to admit black students voluntarily.

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 time 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'' ran an article on the college's possible expansion plans, and 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 of land and many renovations needed to the inn, funding was again a major issue.

The three California locations were all still 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. During 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 () that he would gladly donate to the college. After lunch, Weigle looked at the land and instantly fell in love with it. A committee of four faculty members (Robert Bart, Barbara Leonard, Douglas Allanbrook, and William Darkey) later visited the four sites in contention and, after much deliberation, recommended Santa Fe.

In 1961, the governing board of St. John's approved plans to establish a second college at Santa Fe. Groundbreaking occurred on April 22, 1963, and the first classes began in 1964. As it turned out, shortly afterwards land was also donated to the college on the Monterey Peninsula, on condition that a campus be developed there by a certain date.

Academics

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 heavily 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, requires 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

* Homer: ''Iliad'', ''Odyssey''
* Aeschylus: ''Agamemnon'', ''Libation Bearers'', ''The Eumenides'', ''Prometheus Bound''
* Sophocles: '' Oedipus Rex'', ''Oedipus at Colonus'', ''Antigone'', '' Philoctetes'', ''Ajax''
* Thucydides: '' Peloponnesian War''
* Euripides: '' Hippolytus'', ''The Bacchae''
* Herodotus: '' Histories''
* Aristophanes: '' Clouds'', ''Frogs''
* Plato: ''Meno'', '' Gorgias'', '' Republic'', '' Apology'', ''Crito'', ''Phaedo'', '' Symposium'', '' Parmenides'', '' Theaetetus'', ''Sophist'', ''Timaeus'', '' Phaedrus''
* Aristotle: '' Poetics'', ''Physics'', ''Metaphysics'', '' Nicomachean Ethics'', ''On Generation and Corruption'', ''Politics'', ''Parts of Animals'', ''Generation of Animals''
* Euclid: '' Elements''
* Lucretius: ''On the Nature of Things''
* Plutarch: "Lycurgus" and "Solon" from the '' Parallel Lives''
* Ptolemy: '' Almagest''
* Blaise Pascal: '' Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids''
* Nicomachus: '' Arithmetic''
* Antoine Lavoisier