Contrarian College

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Nice column from Frank Bruni about the little college you probably wish you went to.
St. John’s College, the third oldest in America. https://www.sjc.edu
Everyone takes Greek, no exceptions. No sports. No electives. There is just “The Program” centered on the Great Books.
Read read read the now unfashionable canon of old dead white guys. Question them. Who does that anymore?
Sounds like heaven.

https://nyti.ms/2MotEv4


SANTA FE, N.M. — Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you’ll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There’s no choice in the matter. There’s little choice, period.

Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it’s Kant. You have no major, only “the program,” an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed.

It’s intense. Learning astronomy and math, you don’t merely encounter Copernicus’s conclusions. You pore over his actual words. You’re not simply introduced to the theory of relativity. You read “Relativity,” the book that Albert Einstein wrote.

Diversions are limited. There’s no swimming team. No pool. The dorms are functional; same goes for the dining. You’re not here for banh mi. You’re here for Baudelaire.

I’m talking about St. John’s College, which was founded in 1696 in Annapolis, Md., is the third-oldest college in America and, between its campus there and the one here, has about 775 undergraduates. And I’m drawing attention to it because it’s an increasingly exotic and important holdout against so many developments in higher education — the stress on vocational training, the treatment of students as fickle consumers, the elevation of individualism over a shared heritage — that have gone too far. It’s a necessary tug back in the other direction.

I’m not saying that most students would take to it or that other schools should mimic it. The degree to which “the program” omits the intellectual contributions of women and people of color troubles me. But many schools would be wise to consider and better integrate its philosophy, which Walter Sterling, the dean of the Santa Fe campus, recently explained to me.

“Your work and career are a part of your life,” he said when I met with him and the Santa Fe president, Mark Roosevelt. “Education should prepare you for all of your life. It should make you a more thoughtful, reflective, self-possessed and authentic citizen, lover, partner, parent and member of the global economy.” I love that assessment — the precision, balance and sweep of it.

And what better idiom for the instruction that he’s describing than the classics? What better mooring? They're the foundation of so many of America’s ideals and institutions. They’re the through line from yesterday to tomorrow.

I visited St. John’s out of respect for its orneriness and because it’s making an announcement this week that’s consistent with its mission of pushing back against the fashionable norm. For the academic year that begins in the fall of 2019, it’s lowering its yearly tuition to $35,000 from $52,000, a change that recognizes how wildly the cost of college has risen and how few students pay the sticker price anyway.

Some colleges keep that figure high, even if it scares away a few prospects, partly because it validates their prestige. Then they dole out deals, often regardless of need. It’s a capricious, confusing and demoralizing process.

“We’ve resisted almost every trend in higher education that we consider naughty,” Roosevelt told me, but they surrendered to what he called "prestige pricing" — until now.

St. John’s wants more comers than it gets; this price cut may help. But the college also means to be a model of financial accessibility as well as of rigorous intellectualism. To stay flush, it’s conducting a major fund-raising campaign, begun without any announcement two years ago, to raise $300 million by 2023. An alumnus, Warren Winiarski, the founder of the Stag’s Leap winery, has agreed to match up to $50 million of contributions.

The St. John’s method isn’t cheap. No class is larger than 20 students; even so, some have two “tutors,” which is what professors are called. They steer winding, soulful discussions that demand engagement. I eavesdropped on several. Three dynamics stood out.

The first was how articulate the students were. Something wonderful happens when you read this ambitiously and wallow in this many words. You become agile with them.

The second was the students’ focus. A group discussing Homer’s “Iliad” spent more than 10 minutes on the phrase — the idea — of someone having his “fill of weeping.” If digital devices and social media yank people from one trumpet blast to the next, St. John’s trains them to hold a note — to caress it, pull at it, see what it can withstand and what it’s worth.

The third dynamic was their humility. They weren’t wedded to their initial opinions. They weren’t allowed to be. And they moved not toward the best answer but toward better questions. In the “Iliad” and in life, is there any catharsis in revenge? Any resolution in death? Does grief end or just pause? Do wars?

Jack Isenberg, a senior, told me that St. John’s had taught him how much is unknowable. “We have to be comfortable in ambiguity,” he said.

What a gift. What an education.
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Re: Contrarian College

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There is one thing and one thing only that I consider necessary that a student should learn in college. With it, any degree is valuable. Without it, every degrees is worthless. IMHO.

That is critical thinking. Being able to reason, to use facts, to determine what is valid and what is bullshit. To be able to abandon beliefs, no matter how long held, in the face of factual evidence, logic and close reasoning.

It's not easy, and the first thing most students develop is a critical facility far beyond their other skills. It's useful, but not enough, not by a long shot.

The most important thing that happened to my in my UG career was in my junior year, doing research and finding a fact that just didn't fit my preconceived notions. I was tempted to ignore it, but I just couldn't. It was real, it was single data point. It contradicted my conclusions from ALL the other evidence. And it was totally unimpeachable. After wrestling with this one fact for weeks, giving me nightmares, I finally did what you're supposed to do: Abandon my assumptions, my beliefs, my biases, and my notion and find an rational explanation for ALL the facts, including this highly inconvenient one.

The result was a much stronger, quite different and much more robust narrative, confirmed years later when reading the work of a renowned scholar, found he had come to the same conclusion that I had had. Nothing else I did or learned in all years in college or grad school was as important as that one incident.

If this school, with its atavistic program teaches that one thing, then it's well worth it. If it doesn't then it's not.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: Contrarian College

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It sounds interesting, but I doubt I could have used a degree in "the program" to get a job in engineering. I would have loved to have gone to MIT but I was almost too poor to go to state school.

What's too bad is they don't take some of this type of teaching and push it down to K-12. Now they simply teach to the test, rather then teaching to question and learn. Kids learn memorization skills, don't know how to think, and find out quickly how holding opinions outside of the norm will lower their grades. So I had to teach my kids to give the teacher what they wanted to hear to get the grade they needed. Then teach them how to forget what they did in school and to actually think, learn, and be successful.

Sort of homeschooling around the worst of public education while using the best of it. Luckily, we're a naturally inquisitive, skeptical, and intuitive bunch in my immediate family so we never stop learning.
Brian

Re: Contrarian College

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There used to be quite a few "Great Books" colleges, but the change has been to vocational preparation. The cost of academics have created more part-time students who want a degree for career advancement. Developing critical thinking skills and expository writing are the most important things to learn no matter what the major.

St John's, original campus is in Annapolis which is also home to the US Naval Academy. Very different students - the jocks at the Academy and the free spirited students at SJC. Every summer they have a croquet match, fun for all. Pictures of the 2016 "Annapolis Croquet Cup".
https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/croquet
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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