Nelson teaches lessons for life; Christopher B. Nelson and St. John's College educate students in the fullness of the Western academic tradition with a dynamic Great Books curriculum

Insight on the News, Sept 9, 2002 by Stephen Goode

In 1937, St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., began one of America's great experiments in education. At St. John's all students read the Great Books [see "Higher Learning", p. 12], beginning in their freshman year with Homer and wrapping up their reading of the greats as seniors with works by William Faulkner, Albert Einstein and other 20th-century figures.

Class sizes are small (never more than 18 or 20) and during their four years students work very closely with their teachers, who are called tutors. There is much class discussion--good conversation is highly prized at the college, as is the ability to listen to what others are saying--and students write papers regularly. There are no written finals, but there are oral examinations at the end of each semester.

St. John's president is Christopher B. Nelson, who went to St. John's Annapolis campus for three years before transferring to the school's new campus in Santa Fe, N.M. (opened in 1964) and from which he was graduated in 1970. Nelson practiced law in Chicago for two decades, but his return to the school where he passed his undergraduate years isn't surprising. His father also was graduated from St. John and the St. John's experience has been shared by a brother, a sister and Nelson two eldest sons. An important reason for his return to the school was a passion for its Great Books program, a passion that grew as the decades away from the campus passed.

"I was happy to leave St. John's and enter the world. I started that life with St. John's in my pocket. It gave me a lift into the world of work and business," Nelson tells INSIGHT. "It took a while before I realized that my true love and calling was to be back in education."

Insight: St. John's College pioneered the Great Books curriculum. It is 65 years old now, but in many ways it's still one of the most radical innovations ever made in American higher education.

Christopher B. Nelson: There's a sense in which what we do is fairly revolutionary. We treat the books as very difficult tools with which to work in the shaping of our lives. We think these books are seminal in helping us understand the world in which we live.

We're looking to see what these authors are saying. Is what's being said in this book tree? We're asking, "What can I take away with me from reading this book? How will it help me the better to understand the world in which I live?"

Insight: Have you ever regretted that you didn't have a more conventional college education rather than the Great Books experience you undertook as an undergraduate at St. John's?

CBN: Oh no. My only regret is that I couldn't do them all over again a second time and do it right. The big problem you have is that you are racing through the books. We do 130 of them or so in four years--most in full, but some in part--and in that amount of time, if you are not careful, you get only a glimpse of what's really happening in these books.

You're young when you're here and you've got a lot of other things going on in your life. There aren't enough hours in the day to give yourself to the wonderful things that come out of this experience.

The chance of coming back [as president] and teaching some of these books, reading them over and over again as I can in the classroom, is really the greatest pleasure about being back at St. John's. Almost every student desires to do the freshman year again.

Insight: That is when the students read Ancient Greek authors, including the historians Herodotus and Thucydides; the philosophers Plato and Aristotle; and much else, including Euclid on geometry. It is an impressive reading list.

CBN: It is the best, most integrated portion of the program. It's a terrific experience! We try to replicate it across the centuries in the remaining three years but, inevitably, there's a sense at the end that the students understand the first year the best and tend to want to experience it again.

Insight: Since the 1980s the faculties at many colleges and universities have been involved in what's been called a culture war over the so-called canon, which includes such things as the body of readings that schools should require students to master and what kinds of courses they must take. How did St. John's avoid these often contentious fights?

CBN: In part we didn't have a canon fight because we treat the program here as a living, breathing curriculum that's always in process, always changing, always in formation. There's a faculty curriculum committee that meets every week refining the program.

The program does change. In the years from 1937 to 2002, maybe 70 percent of the authors were changed and a little more than half the books. Over 65 years, that seems like a pretty slow transformation, but it's nonetheless a major one.

Another reason we haven't had a canon fight is that all of the faculty here must teach all the books. We don't have departments, so we don't have anyone who's protecting turf or wanting to start a new course and has a personal wish list to change the curriculum.