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 (M.A.L.A) 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 (M.A.E.C.). 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.
At this time, the Eastern Classics program does not include any texts from Islamic literature nor does it offer courses in the Classical Arabic, Persian or Turkish languages.
History St. John's College (United States)
St. John's College was founded as King William's School in 1696. In 1784, Maryland granted a charter to St. John's College, into which the original preparatory school merged. 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 favoured saint of Freemasons. 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 curriculum has taken various forms throughout its history. Although it began with a general program of study in the liberal arts, St. John's was a military school for much of the 19th century. In contrast to Washington and Lee University, a contemporary institution, the College always maintained a small size, generally enrolling fewer than 500 men at a time.
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 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 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. But Martin Dyer reports that the women who were admitted were an extraordinary group, quickly proving that 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 more.
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. A negative factor for California in general was the cost of living for faculty.
Nevertheless all three of these 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) 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 spins a tale 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. According to Hillerman, the Eastern scholars became captivated by the Sangre de Cristo range and the presence of mule deer tracks.
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. It eventually became apparent that opening yet a third campus in close succession to the second would stretch the college's resources too far, however.
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, rectangular, prismical concrete columns with a movable metal dial affixed; this device was the precursor to the sextant. Freshman and sophomore math classes learn to use this stone to calculate the apparent 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.
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, rectangular, prismical concrete columns with a movable metal dial affixed; this device was the precursor to the sextant. Freshman and sophomore math classes learn to use this stone to calculate the apparent 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.