St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

Based on Wikipedia: St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

The College That Nearly Died Three Times

In 1936, a small liberal arts college in Maryland lost its accreditation. It was broke, adrift, and facing extinction. The obvious move would have been to modernize, to chase trends, to water down the curriculum until something—anything—stuck. Instead, the Board of Visitors and Governors did something remarkable. They invited two educational radicals to burn the whole thing down and start over.

What emerged from those ashes is one of the strangest and most intellectually demanding undergraduate programs in America. St. John's College doesn't have majors. It doesn't have lectures. It doesn't really have professors in the conventional sense. What it has is a mandatory four-year reading list of the most influential books in Western civilization, small groups of students sitting around tables, and a simple question: What do you think this means?

The college has two campuses—one in Annapolis, Maryland, where it has existed since 1784, and one in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which opened in 1964. Between them, they enroll only about 800 students. But those students read Newton's Principia in the original. They translate ancient Greek. They study Euclid not from a textbook but from Euclid himself. And they do all of this because a nearly bankrupt institution decided that the path to survival lay in demanding more from students, not less.

Three Centuries of Reinvention

The story of St. John's begins in 1696, with a preparatory school called King William's School. This makes its successor institution one of the oldest in the United States—older than the country itself. The school was affiliated with the Church of England, training boys in the colony of Maryland for what passed as higher learning in those days.

In 1784, as the newly independent nation was sorting itself out, Maryland granted a charter to St. John's College, which absorbed King William's School the following year. The college moved into a building that locals called Bladen's Folly—a structure originally intended to be the governor's mansion but never completed. There's something fitting about starting a college in an unfinished building meant for politicians. The institution would spend the next two and a half centuries in a state of perpetual incompleteness, always becoming something new.

The college's name may derive from the Freemasons, who were influential among its early supporters. Religious tolerance was baked into the founding documents—the charter explicitly stated that "youth of all religious denominations shall be freely and liberally admitted." This was radical language for 1784. Among the founders was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Roman Catholic who had signed the Declaration of Independence. Presbyterians and Episcopalians also had seats at the table. Whatever the source of the name—whether Saint John the Evangelist favored by Masons or St John's College at Cambridge in England—the institution began with an unusual commitment to pluralism.

The Long Drift Toward Disaster

For its first century and a half, St. John's bounced between identities. The founders had envisioned it as the Western Shore branch of a proposed University of Maryland, but that plan never gained traction with the state legislature. After years of inconsistent funding and lawsuits, the college settled for a modest annual grant and tried to make do.

The Civil War forced the college to close entirely. Its campus became a military hospital. When it reopened, the curriculum took a decidedly martial turn. For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, St. John's was essentially a military school. Students drilled. They wore uniforms. It was a far cry from reading Plato.

By the 1920s, the mandatory military training had ended, though the college briefly experimented with a Naval Reserve unit—actually pioneering the entire college Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps movement in the United States. But student interest faded quickly, and the program dissolved within a few years.

Then came the Great Depression. Enrollment cratered. Money dried up. In 1936, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education revoked St. John's accreditation. The college was dying.

The Great Books Revolution

This is where the story gets interesting.

Rather than scrambling to meet conventional standards, the Board decided to try something genuinely different. They brought in Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, two educators who had been developing a radical curriculum at the University of Chicago with Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. The idea was called the Great Books program, and it proposed a simple but audacious premise: instead of dividing knowledge into separate departments and having experts deliver lectures to passive students, why not have students read the most important works ever written and discuss them together?

Buchanan became dean. Barr became president. In 1937, they implemented what they called the New Program. It remains essentially unchanged today.

The curriculum requires every student to read the same books over four years. Not excerpts. Not textbooks about the books. The books themselves. Plato's Republic. Aristotle's Physics. The Bible. Machiavelli's Prince. Shakespeare's plays. Newton's Principia Mathematica. Darwin's Origin of Species. Einstein's papers on relativity. The list spans philosophy, theology, mathematics, science, music, poetry, and literature.

There are no lectures. Instead, students gather in small groups—seminars of about twenty students led by two tutors (what other colleges would call professors), and tutorials of twelve to sixteen students for mathematics, languages, and laboratory sciences. The tutors don't lecture. They're supposed to guide discussion without directing it, asking questions rather than providing answers.

The class format is formal, almost old-fashioned. Students address each other and their teachers by honorific and last name. The seminar is considered a formal exercise in thinking together. But the formality serves a purpose: it signals that what happens in these rooms matters, that ideas are serious business.

There are no traditional textbooks. When Barr and Buchanan couldn't find English translations of some of the works they wanted students to read, faculty members translated them. They typed the translations, ran them through mimeograph machines, and bound them by hand. By 1941, the St. John's College bookshop had become famous as the only source for English versions of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Augustine's De musica, and Ptolemy's Almagest. The college was filling gaps in world literature just to run its curriculum.

What You Actually Study

The four-year program breaks down like this:

• Four years of seminar covering literature, philosophy, and political science
• Four years of mathematics, working through original texts from Euclid through modern times
• Three years of laboratory science
• Four years of language study—ancient Greek for the first two years, then French, with some Middle and Early English mixed in
• A first-year chorus followed by music tutorial in the sophomore year

In mathematics tutorial, students don't solve problem sets from a textbook. They demonstrate propositions that mathematicians laid out centuries ago, working through the proofs themselves. In language tutorial, students prepare translations and present them for discussion. The laboratory doesn't follow a modern science curriculum; instead, students replicate historical experiments and read the original papers that changed how humans understand the physical world.

The college grants a single degree: a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. But that degree is equivalent to a double major in philosophy and the history of mathematics and science, plus a double minor in classical studies and comparative literature. It's one degree that covers what other schools would spread across four or five departments.

Traditional grades exist—A through F, recorded on transcripts—but the culture actively de-emphasizes them. Grades are released only at the student's request. Evaluation is based on class participation and papers rather than exams. The emphasis is on the conversation, not the credential.

Survival Against the Navy

The New Program attracted attention almost immediately. In 1938, the columnist Walter Lippmann praised St. John's as a bulwark against fascism, writing that "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, Life magazine ran a feature story with the headline "The Classics: At St. John's They Come into Their Own Once More."

But World War II nearly destroyed the experiment. As an all-male institution, St. John's emptied out as students enlisted or were drafted. Fifteen seniors graduated in 1943. Eight in 1945. Three in 1946.

Worse, the college faced repeated threats of having its land seized by the United States Navy for expansion of the neighboring Naval Academy. This wasn't idle bureaucratic maneuvering. In 1945, James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy, formally announced plans to take over St. John's property.

The New York Times expected a legal battle comparable to the famous Dartmouth College case of 1819—the Supreme Court decision that established that private corporations (including colleges) have constitutional protections against state interference. The newspaper noted 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."

Public opposition and congressional disapproval ultimately saved the college. In late 1946, Forrestal withdrew the Navy's plan. But by then, Barr and Buchanan were exhausted. They left St. John's to launch a new institution called Liberal Arts, Inc. in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. That project failed. But the experience of nearly losing Annapolis planted a seed: maybe St. John's should have more than one location.

Breaking Barriers

The college's social history is complicated. St. John's was founded as an all-white institution, and Stringfellow Barr himself actively discouraged Black students from applying in the early years of the New Program. The segregation was typical for institutions south of the Mason-Dixon line, but it sat awkwardly alongside a curriculum centered on universal human questions.

By 1948, the tension became untenable. Faculty and students pushed the reluctant Board of Visitors and Governors to integrate. St. John's became one of the first previously all-white colleges south of the Mason-Dixon line to admit Black students voluntarily—not under court order, but because the community decided it was right.

Three years later, in 1951, St. John's admitted women for the first time in its 254-year history. The decision came from the top, without student input—some students only learned about it from news reports. A few objected, arguing that the college couldn't remain a serious institution if it admitted women.

They were wrong. As one historian noted, the women who enrolled quickly proved they were the academic and intellectual equals of their male counterparts. Today, it's difficult to imagine the Great Books seminar working any other way.

Going West

Under Richard Weigle, who became president in 1949 and served for thirty-one years, St. John's finally stabilized. Enrollment grew through the 1950s. The New Program became less of an experiment and more of an institution.

As the baby boom generation approached college age, Weigle began thinking about expansion. This time, the idea wasn't to relocate (as Barr had considered during the Navy crisis) but to open a second campus while keeping Annapolis.

The search for a location was chaotic. In 1959, the father of a student from Monterey, California, suggested establishing a campus there. Time magazine ran a story about the possible expansion, and offers poured in from New Hampshire, Oregon, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Connecticut, and elsewhere.

Monterey remained a contender for years, along with Claremont, California (too much competition from other colleges) and the Riverside Mission Inn (too little land, too much renovation needed). Then Robert McKinney, publisher of The Santa Fe New Mexican and a former St. John's board member, called Weigle with news: a group in Santa Fe had been looking for a second college for their city.

In January 1961, Weigle had lunch at the home of John Gaw Meem, a prominent architect, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. Meem casually mentioned that he had 214 acres of land he would happily donate to the college. After lunch, Weigle visited the site.

He fell in love with it instantly.

A faculty committee visited all four finalist locations and, after extensive deliberation, recommended Santa Fe. The governing board approved the plan in 1961. Groundbreaking occurred on April 22, 1963. The first classes began in 1964.

The two campuses operate as one college with shared governance and an identical curriculum. Students can transfer between them or spend a year at the other campus. A student who begins in the high desert of New Mexico and finishes overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland earns the same degree, having read the same books, as someone who never leaves Annapolis.

Beyond the Western Canon

The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education opened in 1967 as a summer program in Santa Fe. It has since expanded to offer year-round study on both campuses. The graduate program follows the same discussion-based approach as the undergraduate curriculum, but organizes readings 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 by completing four of the five segments.

More recently, the Santa Fe campus has developed programs that extend the Great Books method beyond Western civilization. The Master of Arts in Eastern Classics applies the same discussion-based approach to classic works from India, China, and Japan. The program is three semesters long and recognizes what the undergraduate curriculum cannot fully accommodate: the great philosophical and literary traditions of Asia deserve the same careful attention that St. John's gives to Plato and Aristotle.

There's also a Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics, focusing on major works from Jewish and Muslim authors written between the fall of Rome and the European Renaissance. These programs represent an acknowledgment that the conversation about fundamental human questions didn't happen only in ancient Greece and modern Europe.

What It Means to Study This Way

St. John's is not for everyone. The absence of majors means you can't pursue specialized training in a particular field. The lack of lectures means you can't hide in the back row taking notes. The small class sizes mean you will be called upon to defend your interpretations in front of peers who have read the same texts just as carefully as you have.

The student-to-tutor ratio is 7:1. Seminars have about twenty students. Daytime tutorials range from twelve to sixteen. The smallest classes, called preceptorials, might have only three to nine students intensively studying a single work or author.

There are no electives in the traditional sense. Everyone reads the same books in roughly the same order. This creates an unusual intellectual community: any two St. John's students can discuss the same texts, because they've both read them. Sophomores know what freshmen are struggling with. Seniors remember what it was like to encounter Euclid for the first time.

The method assumes that the most important questions—What is justice? What is knowledge? How should we live?—don't have final answers. They have conversations. And those conversations are best conducted not by listening to an expert explain what Kant meant, but by reading Kant yourself and arguing about it with people who disagree with you.

This approach has critics. Some argue that the Western canon is too narrow, that it privileges certain voices while silencing others. Some argue that students need specialized training to succeed in the modern economy. Some argue that the Socratic method is inefficient, that a good lecture can transmit information faster than a rambling discussion.

St. John's doesn't really try to answer these criticisms. It simply continues doing what it has done since 1937: gathering small groups of students around tables, handing them difficult books, and asking them what they think.

The Survival Instinct

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about St. John's is its persistence. The college has nearly died multiple times—from financial ruin in the 1930s, from Navy seizure in the 1940s, from cultural shifts that have made its approach seem increasingly eccentric. Each time, it has survived by doubling down on its distinctiveness rather than conforming to trends.

In his guide Cool Colleges, Donald Asher notes that the New Program was implemented as a survival measure. "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."

There's something instructive in that. Facing extinction, St. John's didn't try to become more like everyone else. It became more like itself. It demanded more from students, not less. It rejected the specialization and credentialism that have come to dominate higher education. It bet that there would always be students who wanted to read Newton in the original, who wanted to learn ancient Greek, who wanted to spend four years in conversation about the deepest questions humans have asked.

That bet has paid off for nearly ninety years. The college remains small—about 800 students across both campuses—but it remains. In a higher education landscape littered with institutions that have merged, closed, or lost their identities, St. John's continues to do exactly what Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan designed it to do in 1937: gather young people around great books and ask them what they think.