For years I've talked to prospective students interested in St. John's College, which I attended in Annapolis. This essay puts some thoughts on the value of a St. John's education in relation to my own experience.
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If a friend of mine knows anything about St. John’s
College, it’s that St. John’s
is where students read the classics.
True enough, and that’s half of why I went. The other half: conversations. I enrolled
wanting those conversations – profitable, serious, companionable conversations. I wanted to read socially, not alone. And at St. John’s, that
happened.
If a friend knows anything about me, it’s
that I love to read and talk. Always
have, still do.
I grew up in a tight-knit Baptist church in South Carolina, the
oldest in a family of nine children. My parents, as
teenagers, had the usual questions: Who
am I? How should I live? And they
found answers and guidance in the Bible and from the evangelists that,
especially in the 70s, were part of the American South. My mother rode circuit with tent revivalists
for a while. My father became a
cameraman for a local Christian television that started up. When my mother started working as a cashier
at the grocery that my father shopped at, they began to talk. They were seventeen, the same age I was when
I went to St. John’s
looking to answer similarly serious questions, but in a different way.
As my parents began to date, they started asking
each other questions, and never stopped: How
should a family be? Are plants alive the
same way we are? What makes males and
females different? My parents are
curious people, although not college educated.
They are thoughtful people, alive to ideas and observations.
My mother waited tables and my father repaired
copiers, and they each found interest and depth in these jobs. My dad would bring home broken parts from a
copier and explain to me his theory of what happened: See
what happened here – there was just enough heat coming off that fuser to make
this little plastic gear soften and wear down faster. A broken copier, believe it or not, is
interesting and fun to fix: you just have to come at the right way. My dad is interested in just about
everything: he’d pull the van over on the way back from church because he saw a
kind of tree he didn’t recognize. We’d
back up until he spotted it again and he would take a branch – then go home and
figure out what kind of tree it was, and what was different about it. My mother would bring home stories from the steakhouse
she worked at of the family dramas that would play out between couples eating there. And we would sit late at night and listen,
not just to the gossipy, petty dramas that families play out at restaurants,
but also the more serious questions: How does a basically decent couple come to
hate and hurt one another? Just what is
the pleasure that people take from malice?
Why do people posture?
So, my parents’ questions tended to be about family,
church, machines, nature. They were
deliberate parents and meant business about raising us well: their parenting
was thought through. They questioned and bucked cultural and
child-raising conventions. They taught
us that every choice you make is your
responsibility – that if you follow the crowd or act without reflection, you
are as responsible for those actions as for the things you strike
out alone to do. I’m the only one of
their children that attended St.
John’s, but it is no surprise that parents like mine
raised at least one kid who did. St. John’s is a place where the curriculum, the program of
education is similarly thought through
and questioned: fundamentally, St.
John’s takes full responsibility for the design of the
education offered. As in my family,
things are not done at St. John’s just because
that’s how others do it.
Like most independent-thinking people, my parents
held firmly to the convictions they did reach, because those convictions were
their own. At home, we read the Bible
each morning over breakfast. My father
had a special love for the Proverbs, and a knack for drawing out many lessons from
the same verse: one lesson for the small children, another for the older kids,
and a third for him and mother – all in the few minutes it took to eat a bowl
of oatmeal or grits. The fact that a
single, profound text contains many meanings for different people, a familiar
idea at St. John’s,
was something my father demonstrated to us at the breakfast table.
At church, we heard ambitious, long-form, expository
sermons. I loved the Bible, loved my
faith, and believed in Christ. I was the most intellectually minded of the kids,
and loved the focus our church had on reading to learn, and talking to
teach. But my parents’ convictions
and my church’s strictness were, at the same time, confining, even stifling. I wanted to read the Bible critically, not
just devotionally. I wanted to talk about
the Scriptures with people who understood them differently than a Baptist did,
or who did not believe at all. Church was not the place for that. Neither was home.
Public high school was worse. Like my brothers and sisters, I had been
homeschooled in the earlier years. The
shift to public school was unpleasant.
My interests did not fit in, my parents’ convictions (little television,
no popular music) did not fit in. I was
a proud kid without a knack for friendship who had far too little patience or
sympathy for others. Teachers didn’t
know what to do with me. Classes bored
me.
Instead, I liked the library and debate team and my
job at the local diner. At the school
library, I had worked my way through the philosophy shelf and found my teenage
favorites: Hobbes and Dewey. The school librarian mentioned St. John’s. Hmm. Working my job at Waffle House, a chain diner,
I saw that life was more of a struggle for people who did not go to college
somewhere. Hmm. On the debate team, I
asked my coach where an older student I’d admired had ended up going to
college. “University
of Chicago,” she said, “he was
thinking about St. John’s
but his parents didn’t let him go.” Hmm.
I went and found a St.
John’s College
catalog in the public library.
That catalog impressed me. I was sixteen. St.
John’s presented itself in full paragraphs about
lasting issues – paragraphs that had the sound of adulthood. The catalog was addressed
not to a customer, nor a child, nor the appetites, but to the developing adult. It aimed to be neither populist nor elitist. Instead, it spoke to that best part of an
individual: to that part most shared with others. It treated the good of the
individual and the good of society as having equal weight and being very
needful. It described liberal education
as something deliberate, deserving of
design and intention. The catalog argued
that, for the sake of the individual and the nation, education is something too
important to leave to cultural accident or a young person’s passing interests. And, near the last page, was this little
sentence: “Occasionally, St. John’s
accepts an applicant that is not a secondary school graduate.” Wow! I
can quote the sentence now, because I stole that catalogue from the library and
still have it.
Could it be? St. John’s College would let me come there as a
freshman and skip my senior year in high school? I wrote a letter to the admissions office to
ask about this and plenty else. I had
what seemed then to me to be serious questions.
Would St. John’s
welcome a fundamentalist Christian?
Could I really come after my junior year in High School? Would there be people to talk to who would
tell me, really honestly tell me, why they didn’t believe the Bible was
true? John Christensen,
then the director of admissions in Annapolis,
sent me a letter in reply that left me trembling. It was well put, hearty, and kind. His reply took me for an adult, and dealt
plainly with my questions. Young people rarely
get letters like that – I never had. I
wanted to write like that; wanted be at a place where people sounded like that.
So off I went.
I was barely seventeen and had applied nowhere else. And at St.
John’s I was happy: happy because I found friends and
belonged to a community that loved me; happy because I was lost in my work for
classes; happy reading and talking and thinking and coming up with projects to
take on. St. John’s is a great place to be young and
learn.
I had growing up to do, some of it hard. None of my family had been through college, and
even though my family’s ways were in some ways comparable to St. John’s, still, my childhood had been
sheltered and thoroughly religious. St. John’s was neither. I had to learn not to recoil from people who
lived different. I was no more awkward
than many of my classmates, but I arrived more proud, aloof and bound up in
rules of behavior than most.
Shared experience, the desire to fit in and
eventually friendships broke through my awkwardness to a great extent, but that
took time. From the start, though, the
variety of backgrounds, personalities and interests was exciting. From the start, most of us had a bottomless
appetite for talking through ideas, for plunging in and learning to make a
classroom conversation go. We had the desire to be at St. John’s in common on the first day. And, soon, we had more in common simply from living
together in a small community where we read, went to class, ate our meals, had
jobs, fell in love, played, tried to figure ourselves out. Above all, we talked and talked.
Learning to have a good conversation, though, took time, and was as important as what
we were talking about. It began,
frankly, with self-control and improving manners – learning not to hog the
table, not to ignore what had been brought up by others, not to force a new
topic of individual interest. All of us,
in one way or another, had to mature to improve in conversation. For me, it was about learning humility. For others, it was about becoming bolder, or
increasing attention-span, or controlling temper, or developing patience. It was in learning to have a conversation at St. John’s, more than
from anything else, that I developed respect for others and learned not merely
to yield the floor, but to lend my effort to following others’ interests – seeing where their insights and concerns would
take us. St. John’s taught me the worth and necessity
of making a common effort with others.
By reading together, we learned how people come at
books and make good use of them. How to
read well is an important subject. Reading is an
underdeveloped skill, generally, because reading is under-recognized as a skill. People understand that the skill of driving is as important as the quality
of the car being driven. People
understand that the quality of a friendship depends as much on the common
effort of building the friendship as on
the individual qualities each friend brings.
Reading well, similarly, is a skill or art. And, similarly, reading well is as important
to the worth gotten from books as are the books themselves.
Reading well is not about the act of eyeing printed
words. The skillfulness lies in the hard
work of tackling a book, considering it, making something of it. It requires fair-mindedness, focus and
attention span. It requires developing a
mental library of references to other books already read, which takes
time. Reading well requires a sense of when to step
back to draw connections or raise doubts, and when to press forward to see an
author’s point on its own terms. At St. John’s, as in few other
places, we were able to develop our skills of reading, over time, broadly. We could do so not alone in a library, but
together in a community. I remember
thinking of it as almost the formation of a mature, lasting, profitable
friendship with books. Few things are so
beautiful, or so useful, as that.
By reading the same books, together, with each other
in a community, we could learn the different ways of approaching very
dissimilar books, the range of approaches to an issue or description. As with other important skills, even the problems of carrying out the work of
reading are worth consideration. Bigger
errors and littler mistakes made in understanding a book or proposition or
experiment could, by conversation, be made useful.
Instead of simply jumping to someone who got it
right, we would usually try to repair something that had gone wrong and figure
out how it had. One of the best ways to understand a
proposition is not to abandon someone’s mishandling of it but to trace through
the steps and figure out: What went
wrong?
That lesson has stuck with me and been profitable to
me ever since: books and other subjects lend themselves to certain revealing mistakes. Incorrect readings of a book are not random, so long as they arise from
sincere effort. Meaningful mistakes loop
around great ideas in definite orbits whose paths, when traced, reveal some things
about the central idea itself, or about an author’s treatment of an idea, that cannot
be learned from staring at an idea dead on.
So, we learned to pay attention when one of us was honestly
troubled by an idea, or tangled up in it.
We learned to be selective – to accept that books worth reading are too
rich to discuss in full, all at once. We
learned that direct and simple observations are more useful, more beautiful,
and usually more subtle. The truth is
rarely fancy, but often delicate. We
found that just working out what a book was saying, step by step, took serious
effort, even without stacking on critical or historical layers.
In interpreting what we read, we learned that the
easiest explanation was the fastest to fall.
For some books, comparisons and metaphors helped understanding. But with other books, the difficult idea,
standing for itself, directly engaged, was better than any metaphor or
explanation we could substitute for it.
And a few books had hidden meanings, found behind trap doors that led
past a surface meaning erected to satisfy the censors, or to obscure a precious
truth from the casual reader, or to hide a potentially dangerous truth from the
foolish and clumsy.
We therefore had to prepare with care, reading and
studying. The most valuable habits to my
current practice as an attorney that I learned at St. John’s were the habits of close reading,
re-reading, long study, text annotation, and other preparation to discuss and
defend a fair reading of a text.
But St.
John’s is bigger than the reading, the conversations
and the books. I was lucky in the
work-study job I was assigned: I worked in the mailroom and made the rounds. So I got to know the staff at St. John’s. The staff was the one important part of the
college community not mentioned in the college catalog. My mail rounds often took too long, because
some conversation with somebody on the staff was just too good to let go. There were great conversations in the offices
with the secretaries, in the print shop, in the college’s excellent bookshop,
or, early in the morning with the housekeepers and security officers.
I loved the people at St. John’s.
Some of the best conversations were about the operation and business of
the college. I relished this
practicality – and still think about the necessary connection between a great
idea or community, and the functions and structures that support it. My law firm’s clients would tell you that a
favorite theme of mine is finding the right marriage of means and ends: finding
how best to get where my clients want to go.
The staff and administration at St. John’s
gave me an education in this: they knew and I learned that a St. John’s education takes more than books,
tables, and chairs. Even as simple an
education as that at St. John’s
requires a serious, committed organization and staff to support it. Even liberal arts require business sense,
administration and a good deal of money.
I missed out on athletics at St. John’s – a beautiful thing that I
neglected, and in retrospect I regret it.
But I did plenty else. King William’s Players is
the theater group in Annapolis,
and I was in the chorus of Antigone,
played the Archbishop in Henry V
(typecasting, but a great costume), and produced The Book of Job, a staged version of the one book in the Bible that
is, essentially, a dialogue in poetry. I
was part of student government, called the Polity, arranged a traditional group
trip to the Santa Fe campus, called Westward Wagons Ho!, and led the Political
Forum, which arranged for political speakers and thinkers, domestic and
international, to visit and talk to us.
And I helped out with other organizations that other students led.
I had a special love for the wisdom literature in
the Bible, including Job, and several of the informal study groups I
participated in were about them. This
turned out, at St. John’s, to be a way for me to
make some acquaintance with Jewish culture and people, something I hadn’t had
growing up in my part of South
Carolina. Talking
to Jewish tutors about Job and Ecclesiastes, and learning about these books’
place in Jewish faith and culture was as rich as any element of my education at
St. John’s. I frankly felt envious of the obvious depth
and complexity of Jewish cultural roots. I felt that I had nothing comparable,
although I did learn to value more highly the Baptist, southern and American roots
that I do have. I even learned a few
Yiddish jokes. (Here’s one that is,
indirectly, about Job himself: So a guy
on a train is trying to sleep in the lower berth of a compartment. But the guy in the upper berth keeps moaning
“Oy, am I thirsty! … Oy, am I thirsty.”
So the guy in the lower berth sighs and goes and gets a drink of water
and hands it up, to get some quiet. The
guy up there drinks the water and the fellow in the lower berth settles back in
to get some sleep, in peace. But just as
he does, the guy in the upper berth starts back “Oy, was I thirsty! … Oy, was I thirsty.” I love that joke.)
The faculty members (the “tutors”) at St. John’s are superb,
and they have an unusually difficult job.
Their class load is fairly heavy, and tutors do not specialize. They are called on to guide conversations and
lead without lecturing. That is frankly
a hard way to teach. It requires
finesse, intense focus in listening, and, above all, a sort of personal charm
that draws students to enter into the work and matter of the classroom
conversation. The charm, brilliance and
fundamental seriousness of Socrates is called for –
and the wonder is that the tutors at St.
John’s mostly do manage to be Socratic to some degree.
Young people are easily awed by impressive adults
who care for them, and on the whole we were awed by the tutors. The tutors maintain a certain formality in
their interactions with students – a detachment that helps keep classroom
conversations from devolving into free-for-alls or social conversations. Students pick up on that, and one of the main
things that strikes me in retrospect about the classroom conversations at St. John’s was their propriety. This was a purposeful formality that St. John’s prizes because
it enables greater intimacy with the ideas and allows a fuller freedom to discuss
hard things and delicate topics plainly and honestly. I remember asking, as we read W.E.B. DuBois,
“How do we know that the races are
equal?” Not because I doubted the
equality, but because the subject is vital, and needs to be thought
through. Simply to assume the thing is
to be unable to defend the proposition from attack. The conversations at St. John’s were of a character that permitted
worthwhile but touchy questions to be asked safely. The guardians and cultivators of that
conversational liberty at St. John’s
are the tutors. Setting the conditions by
which serious questions can be asked, and serious answers defended, is
something I think about every time I write a lawyer’s brief for court. Some of the means for creating those
conditions in court I learned in the classrooms at St. John’s, watching how the best tutors went
about their job.
The tutors’ other great role at St. John’s is to serve as a patient and
responsive audience of student writing, and to try to develop us as
writers. Reading and responding to student papers is tedious
work. But because the tutors do it, students
who apply themselves can learn to write well.
Little is more practical, useful and liberating than the ability to
write well. The opportunity at St. John’s to learn to write is my first answer to someone
who worries that St. John’s
is impractical. The professional who
writes well succeeds best, and not only in law.
The greatest strides in my own writing ability were made at St. John’s, and that was
thanks to the tutors. When a person
combines an ability to write with other abilities that can be developed at St.
John’s – of clear thought, of fearlessness in the face of unfamiliar and
difficult material, and of persistent study – the result is someone powerfully
and unusually ready to do just about anything.
I don’t know what could be more practical than that.
To be sure, the transition from St. John’s to an adult, working life is
difficult. It was for me and my St. John’s friends, and
it is for graduates of other colleges, too.
I went back to South Carolina,
found an apartment and a job, assisting at a consulting firm that provided
automation and information technology advice to manufacturers. The firm was floundering, and as
better-qualified people left, I found I could take up the slack. St.
John’s is a fine preparation for technical careers
because it allows students the realization that no textbook is required. A person who studies the fundamentals can
figure out almost anything with effort and time. By the time the consulting firm went bankrupt,
I was able to get a job at one of our clients – Dunlop,
the golf and tennis ball manufacturer.
People respond well to St. John’s students in the workplace. Partly this is because of the practical
habits I mentioned before. But it is
also because people like to be around interesting people that are fair-minded,
diligent and fun to work with. St. John’s encourages
those traits.
Outside work, I dove back into religious life at my
church with fervor. I had missed that
life and my old church community while at St.
John’s. But after
returning, it was not the same. Nobody
at St. John’s encouraged me to lose my faith – I
knew more people that gained religious faith than lost their faith at St. John’s. But my own faith had been eroded in the
course of my reading, including at St.
John’s. My
faith had particularly eroded as I continued to read the Bible itself. It presented itself to me differently than it
had when I was a child. Particularly when
I read the wisdom literature I loved so much, things had changed. As I’ve seen in others, my own slipping
belief led to a period of increased, almost frantic religious intensity – there
is an attempt, by activity, to counteract what is gone spiritually. But by the fourth year after St. John’s, my faith was quite gone.
There was another factor: I had always been
attracted to other guys, not girls. I
had grown up believing this was a spiritual disease or affliction, and that I
could control it, even see it as a trial to overcome and prove myself
against. It is possible with strength to
repress something you sincerely believe to be evil and destructive, at least
for a time. But at St. John’s, I came to know gay and lesbian
people, old and young, who lived good, happy, full lives. Thinking of them, I was unable to maintain my
belief that homosexuality was an awful disease.
By the time I returned home, the only reason I had for keeping that part
of me shut down was that it was simply a requirement of religious practice and
an act of Christian submission.
That held for a while, but it could not survive the
erosion of my faith. Finally, I prepared
my parents and friends, then stood in front of the congregation that I grew up
with and told them that I no longer believed that the Scriptures were
inerrantly true and that I would, from that time forward, feel free to live as
a gay man.
It was painful – these people loved me and I had
grown up in that church. Until then I
had felt more at home in those pews than anywhere else. I was excommunicated. Friends and relatives did not know what to do
with me. And it was especially hard for
my parents – although the pain of it gradually passed for them and we have a
stronger relationship now than ever. But
that took years and called on their full measure of decency and love, and on
mine.
But right after that excommunication, I needed to get out.
It was a dramatic period, a departure crisis of the sort I remembered
from great novels. Within weeks and with
scrambling and luck, I had moved to New York City
and found good work in the information technology office of a large Manhattan law firm. I began to get my bearings on the job, and my
bearings as a gay young man who’d moved to the city. It was the sort of transition a lot of people
make, for one reason or another. Essentially,
the culture of young arrivals into big cities is a culture of departure and
ambition. Figuring out what of this new
culture to adopt, and what to accommodate, and what to resist – that was the
challenge. The city and the new life and
the ease and excitement of society were wonderful. I began to drink (I never had); I began to
swear (I never had). Conversations were
different, the settings were different.
I reconnected with a lesbian acquaintance from St. John’s.
She had been someone I knew and respected back in Annapolis;
here in New York,
we formed a friendship that helped me get my bearings in the first months in
the city. I began to date and, after a
while, found my partner, now my husband.
He and I have been together since, going on nine years.
A few months after moving to New York, it was clear that I needed to move
into something that would interest and occupy me better than my IT work could. I needed something I could do over decades. A profession I could grow old in. Law appealed best – the work with words,
texts, speaking and writing. It was
practical and intellectual. It suited
me. And it seemed likely to pay well.
So I applied to law schools. I doubt my applications would have been a
success without the advice and help of Roberta Gable, then at the St. John’s Career Services Office. The applications were accepted and I moved to
Cambridge, Massachusetts
to attend Harvard
Law School. I found that in academia, particularly in
legal academia, St. John’s has a big reputation,
quite out of proportion to St. John’s
small size. Professors love St. John’s, occasionally
without having any good reason for it, they just hear it’s great. Reputation
works that way. I probably benefited as
much from St. John’s reputation as from St.
John’s actual
preparation of me for graduate work.
Law school went well. I was on the Harvard Law Review at the time Barack Obama
was coming to prominence. News
organizations would come by to look at our (rather worn) editorial offices. Friends and I stayed up late editing articles
and learning to improve others’ writing (editing others’ work is something not
much practiced while at St. John’s). I made friends, especially on the Review, and graduated in what felt like
a few months, not three years. The last
period that had sped by that quickly were my four years at St. John’s.
And now I practice law, mostly corporate bankruptcy,
a field of law that had interested me starting half way through law school. I love the work. All good work is hard, and has its share of
drudgery – just ask a St. John’s
tutor reading a stack of papers! But the
counseling of clients, the giving of advice, is satisfying. Researching the law and writing a clean,
direct, winning brief is a hard thing I love doing well. And I relish going to court and feel great
respect for the institution of the courts.
That our society has an arena for disputes, before an empowered judge,
equipped and limited by law, able to decide with finality but not violence –
that both awes and satisfies me. It is a
privilege to be a part of that and to begin to belong to the community of
lawyers who practice the same specialty in the same courts. Like any specialization, it is a small world
where your reputation is quickly formed and known. I feel I have a place in a great human
endeavor, the law, and that my corner of the law, bankruptcy, offers something
practical and necessary both to the safety and to the encouragement of a
risk-taking society.
My education at St. John’s
does contribute to my efforts to do my work well: the practice of speaking, of
convincing, of listening and of reading closely I had at St. John’s is valuable. But St.
John’s plays an even greater role, I think, in my
enjoyment and appreciation for my work. St. John’s forms the
habits of enjoying ideas: of appreciating
a good idea well implemented. I think
bankruptcy law implements a good idea. I
like to think about how it works, what it depends on, and the purposes it
serves, intentionally and unintentionally.
There is a joy to living in a reflective, thoughtful
way – and St. John’s
encourages that way of living. Trying to
live that way, in my own case, both honors my parents and is true to what St. John’s stands
for. You keep on reading, you keep building
friendships through heartfelt, engaged conversations about ideas and life. You get older; you try to get wiser. You lend your effort to things that seem
worthwhile. You provide for family and
old age. You love; you work. And, with good luck, these make for a happy
and honorable life.
St.
John’s, fifteen years on, seems to me to
have broadened and deepened my appreciation for living quietly but intensely
and well. And, the four years I was
there were a happy, good time. That
memory is valuable in itself. The friendships
I have from St. John’s
that are still strong – and the practice I gained there in how to be a friend –
are even more valuable. And the program
of study itself at St. John’s was, for me and most graduates, a confirmation
into a life of reading, good conversations, and grappling with ideas. That’s a lot, and I’m grateful for it.
