St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and its sister campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) offers a four-year BA in which there are essentially no (for credit) electives. Everyone reads a cannon of Great Books, beginning with the pre-Socratics, Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, and ancient Greek dramatists (as well as the Tanakh and the New Testament), continuing through Augustine and Aquinas, Descartes and Jonathan Swift, and ending with Marx, de Tocqueville, writings from the American Founding, and a small number of 19th- or 20th-century novelists like Flannery O’Connor. As one of its tutors, Zena Hitz, said this year in a speech on liberal education at a DC think tank, it’s a college for weirdos who think the most important thing to do isn’t to prepare for a career, but to wrestle with the most perplexing questions, and the great minds who have written about them. Following the Platonic Socrates (and Aristotle) only doing this makes you fully human and brings you to the apex of human flourishing.
St. John’s isn’t alone in pushing this as a way of life. Hitz founded a free Great Books seminar program, The Catherine Project, which has expanded to have a larger “student body” (3600 people take at least one seminar course during the year) than the two St. John’s Colleges (just under 1000 undergraduates between the two, with 160 graduate students). And there have been other institutions—Ralston College (in Savannah, Georgia), Shalem College (Jerusalem, Israel), the University of Austin (Texas), and some programs at the University of Chicago and a variety of other liberal arts or religious colleges—that have a similar approach. (St. John’s also offers three master’s degree programs—Great Books of the West, Great Books of the East, and Great Books of the medieval Jewish and Arabic world—which since Covid are also offered online.)
Philosophers have never just been weirdos who led some Essenic existence, simply lives of wonder independent of the societies into which they were born. Socrates was tried and executed for asking people his unsettling questions, and his most famous student and chronicler, Plato, also came under threat by becoming involved in the politics of Greek colonies in Italy.
It’s interesting that among several planned expansions or innovations at St. John’s one is a proposal that Platonists go to Washington, offering a part-time Master’s degree program in Washington, D.C. for adults working fulltime. (This year St. John’s announced it will begin offering its graduate program in Europe though the Netherlands’ Pascal Institute, allowing graduate students on both continents the chance at studying a semester abroad.) Will the Johnnies suffer the same fates as Socrates and Plato before them?
In a way they already have. The U.S. Navy, whose 338-acre Naval Academy is across the street from St. John’s Annapolis campus, attempted to confiscate St. John’s 36 acres at the end of World War II, which may have led St. John’s trustees to begin looking for a location for a sister campus: Monterey and Claremont, California were considered before the Santa Fe campus opened in 1964. (Today the Johnnies and the Navy have an annual croquet match, a ticketed Kentucky Derby style event, which St. John’s usually wins.)
Michigan’s conservative Christian Hillsdale College (with a slightly larger student body than both St. John’s campuses together) has run a part-time M.A. degree program in DC for fulltime Hill and Executive staff, with about 50 graduate students, for over five years. One assumes the St. John’s M.A. will not have the partisan inflection. Given that Hillsdale’s program is “Great Books” adjacent, the St. John’s version might be de facto “liberal,” since Hillsdale’s offer of full scholarships for many students may mean it takes many of the conservative students (and faculty) in this market.
DC’s population is often criticized for being dull. “Hollywood for ugly people” is one cliche. Bad fashion sense, say New Yorkers. Careerist social climbers says anyone who has lived in DC long enough to meet a lower-level political appointee who tells you they want the appointment so they can get a higher paying PR job later (or a higher level appointee whose plans include opening a lobbying shop or being appointed to corporate boards.) From the standpoint of the DC polity, Mr. Socrates going to Washington promises some intellectual liveliness as the Johnnies recruit whatever wondering weirdos have been languishing without a place to find and argue with their own kind.