A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  A classically proportioned Trojan Horse, placed by the Johnnies against the wall of the U.S. Naval Academy, “School that’s based on sin.”

  COURTESY ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE

  The boys and girls who end up on the banks of College Creek tend to be kids who just can’t get with the program. And who can possibly defend the program? Practically all high school courses are now taught to one test or another, whether it be a state-mandated “high-stakes” graduation test or one of the ever-expanding galaxy of Advanced Placement exams considered de rigueur for entry to a top-tier college. Even the calmest of parents succumb to anxiety during the college application nightmare, and children detect the disturbance in the spheres, whether they surrender to it or not. Learning takes a backseat to succeeding— succeeding on the standardized tests, succeeding at sports, and succeeding at extracurricular activities. What’s to like? The system breeds dissidents. Many of them drop out. Some apply to St. John’s.

  Traditionally, the college has been happy to have them. They call them “risks,” kids with checkered (read: bad) high school transcripts who write convincing essays about why they want to read the Great Books at St. John’s. (Until recently, the University of Chicago tried to drink from this same applicant pool, with its wildly nonstandard [e.g., “Tell us about mustard”] “Uncommon App,” or college application.) All incoming freshmen are a risk, because no boy or girl among them has ever sat at a seminar table in a school where they who teach best teach least, and whose motto is “a full notebook betokens an empty mind.” A by-product of increased college applications has been an attenuated sense of daring on the part of St. John’s, because it can be more choosy. “In the past, we took a fair number of risks,” says Dean Michael Dink. “We now ask, ‘Are we eager to take this risk?’ versus, ‘Are we willing to take this risk?’”

  Unlike almost every other college in America, St. John’s has a high freshman washout rate. Of an entering class of 140, only 100 used to graduate. Now probably 110 or 115 will. Also unlike most colleges, it has a 60-40 male-to-female ratio. The names on the syllabus are practically all male, which turns off some female applicants. St. John’s is pretty easy to get into—the college accepts about 60 percent of the self-selecting high school seniors who apply—but tough to stay in.

  Kids drop out because studying the Great Books is hard. I attended several classes during my visit, all of which surprised me. A senior laboratory devoted to Ernest Rutherford’s essay “The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom” was flat, flat, flat. No one seemed to have done the reading, and if anyone had, not much was taken in. A sophomore Greek class treated me to their morning pledge. Rising from their seats in ancient McDowell Hall (Lafayette ate here!), the boys and girls faced east and chanted, “For I am Oedipus, whom all men call great.” In Greek, of course. The liveliest class of all was a sophomore mathematics discussion of the Conics of Appollonius of Perga, a book so stultifying that Adler purged it from the 1990 Great Books. “This is actually really interesting,” one student blurted out as he monkeyed around at the blackboard. “It shows how the parabola is straightening out.” Speaking about Appollonius, student Molly Rothenberg told me, “Our tutor said that no one else in the world is studying this guy. And it is really, really hard.”

  “These kids do not remind me of myself,” I wrote in my notebook during my sojourn in the St. John’s classrooms. I meant it as a compliment.

  Brann allowed me to sit in on her sophomore seminar that evening, devoted to Questions 2-5 of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica . At St. John’s, the two-hour evening seminar is the Main Event. Twenty-five minutes before the 8 P.M. start, I felt the campus buzzing; every student was hurrying with apparent enthusiasm to his or her classroom. “Our Great Books seminars are in the evening when the young tend to be loquacious,” Brann explained, also advising me ahead of time that the assigned reading was “stupefying.” I would have to agree. The two hours devoted to Aquinas’s famous treatise on God did not go well at all. Like myself, everyone had done the reading, but few could make heads or tails of it. Brann herself floated the most interesting idea of the evening, that perhaps Aquinas was making God absolutely impossible to love—“an intense, white light” is how one student phrased it—to emphasize the role of Jesus Christ as our necessary mediator with the Divine. Anything is possible.15

  You live by the Books, and you die by the Books. This is the downside of the “Great Books will do the teaching” pedagogy. Suppose the books fail in their mission? I thought of a thousand interesting questions to ask about Aquinas: Why did he feel the necessity of proving God’s existence? Who in the Middle Ages disagreed with him? What was the purpose of the twenty-two volumes of the Summa Theologica? Why was he so fat that he had difficulty walking across a room? “We don’t talk that much about who the actual people are,” Rothenberg complained to me. Like St. Augustine, for instance. On her own, she found out that “he persecuted and tortured the heretics. Sometimes we’re missing the historical context.”

  If you teach the Great Books by the Erskine-Hutchins-Adler book, as they still do at St. John’s and in the few remaining Great Books seminars around the country, all those questions are out of order. Only the text on the table is allowed to speak. But that’s a mistake. There is plenty to learn from outside the book, and I daresay a professor with a PhD in theology could have brought much to our meager table that night. In education, as in all pursuits, extreme solutions always bear the seeds of their own failure. Even Aristotle knew that. You can look it up.

  To say that student life at St. John’s is distinctive would be a wild understatement. To be sure, the boys and girls at Annapolis look like normal college kids, dressing slovenly, spending their days shambling from one gorgeous eighteenth-century neo-Classical classroom building to another. I thought I saw more smokers on campus than usual, which would fit with my Johnnies-as-social-dissenters theory. But that is far from the only deviation from the college norm. At a typical college, for instance, friends on the ubiquitous Facebook.com might rally around a sports team, or a favorite watering hole. Here are the names of two typical St. John’s Facebook groups: “I didn’t get laid because I was too busy reading Thucydides” and “I had to look up ‘logos.’”

  Take sports. St. John’s offers only three sports: sailing, crew, and fencing, with a heavy emphasis on intramural competition. The men’s teams have names like the Guardians and the Spartans; the women are the Maenads, Amazons, Furies, Nymphs, and Kunai. Recent graduate John Okrent remembers rowing against a small school in Maryland when “suddenly our cox started screaming to us about the soul, doing this little Aristotle bit to inspire us. It was kind of annoying, actually.” It is true that the Johnnies are never shy about flashing their erudition. When some students were arrested during a civil rights demonstration in the early 1960s, the Saturday Review quoted a student who observed: “Annapolis has the only jail cell in the country with Greek inscriptions on the cell walls.”

  Athletic director Leo Pickens is a former student, a trim, thoughtful Californian who grew up in a home that owned Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World. “Their iconic presence was huge,” he recalled, balancing on a thick plastic yoga ball in St. John’s dowdy gym. “You’re right, though, they were impossible to read. Those two columns of dense type. It was very off-putting.” He had fond memories of Robert Hutchins’s introductory essay, “The Great Conversation.” Within moments, Pickens and I were discussing arête, the Greek concept of virtue that also includes attributes of knowledge and heroism. “Excellence is a daily habit of some virtue,” Pickens explained. “I’m trying to get the students to prize arête, the Greek quality of virtue and excellence.” Like eidetically, this is a word I am hearing for the first time. It is omnipresent in the work of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, and is of course familiar to every St. John’s freshman.

  How come, I asked Pickens, the Johnnies are so ferociously competitive? At a spring festival called “Reali
ty,” intended to usher the seniors out of the Platonic cave where they have dwelt for four years, the students play “Spartan Madball,” a semicontrolled riot staged on the flat plain of the lower campus with a huge, inflated bladder. The game ends “only when three goals have been made or three ambulances have been called.” Off the playing fields, it is said, the classically educated Johnnies party harder than anyone north of Florida State.

  “That is a good question,” Pickens said. “Look, the students want to be here. They want to learn. They want to read these books. That bleeds over into all these extracurriculars. They have that splendid intensity that you so rarely find in America anymore.”

  That intensity flares up every spring for The Game, a quarter-century-old rivalry between St. John’s and the Naval Academy in . . . croquet. Long dominated by the Johnnies, the resurgent midshipmen recently hired a coach and bought fancy new mallets. But the Washington Post, among others, has suggested that the middies may never match the Great Bookies in the splendid intensity department. St. John’s “brings a three-pronged attack passed down from one imperial wicket [team captain] to the next,” the newspaper reported in 2006. “Practice hard, play all out, drink heavily and find new and creative ways to put the minds off their game.” In what might be a nod to Aristophanes, the Post reported, “The Johnnies also field a Designated Temptress, held in reserve for desperate moments, whose job it is to saunter over to the midshipmen with a winning smile and a tray of drinks.”

  War by other means: the famous St. John’s-Naval Academy croquet match. COURTESY OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE

  In 1987, the St. John’s fans broke into this derisive chant:

  Naval Academy, School of War,

  School that’s based on sin.

  St. John’s College, School of Knowledge,

  We are going to win.

  Arête? Or hubris? The gods spoke; St. John’s lost.

  “The Johnnies take this sport very seriously,” Pickens confirmed. “They love nothing more than to chop up on the middies. They play a very aggressive form of croquet.”

  They also play an aggressive form of kicking back. “They seem to party with a vengeance,” Okrent told me. “It’s like they’re out to prove something. Maybe it’s from reading about all those heroic men.” Wednesday night—Wednesday night—is known as “New Year’s Eve” at hard-partying Annapolis, and the administration has occasionally imposed curfews on student revels.

  Okrent, who plans to attend medical school, is experiencing one of the downsides of St. John’s. He needs to be reeducated to even apply to become a doctor. And there is another downside. Taking postgraduate pre-med courses at Bennington College, he said, “is very jarring.” “At St. John’s, there was a productive sort of wonder in the wandering in the classroom. Your mind isn’t used to processing information just to get the answer. Now the dialectic is gone. The teachers are just teaching, the students just sit there listening. We’re just learning to get a good grade on the test.”

  The biggest problem St. John’s students described to me was withdrawal, and interactions with a world that doesn’t give a fig about the Great Books. Even during the blotto, midweek “New Year’s Eves,” Okrent said, the students kept talking about the pursuit of knowledge; “I haven’t had those conversations since I left St. John’s.” “It’s almost impossible to explain to friends what we’re doing here,” student Paul Wilford said. “It looks like we’re just taking a bunch of introductory courses.”

  Molly Rothenberg lives not too far from me in the Boston area, and I shared a hamburger with her during one of her Christmas breaks. She told me about sitting down with a fellow graduate of the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Rindge and Latin School during sophomore year. Her friend was attending Bates College in Maine. “She told me they were studying Rhetoric, and they would be watching episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and listening to Eminem. They were going to analyze it. I just laughed. What could I say?”

  ELEVEN

  AMONG THE BOOKIES

  THE GREAT BOOKS ARE NOT IN FASHION. Harold and Allan Bloom notwithstanding, the literary canon has broadened to encompass slave narratives and the utterances of Chief Joseph Seattle, among others. For its fiftieth anniversary collection of twentieth-century writings published in 1997, the Great Books Foundation included an excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which elicited predictable howls of protest. Today, in their Great Conversations collections of poems and short stories, they publish snippets of Dave Eggers, Sogyal Rimpoche, and Maya Angelou. “You want to operate in the spirit of Adler, but not in the letter,” Foundation staffer Dan Born explained to me. “Some people say we’re departing from the pure faith of Mortimer Adler, but great literature continues be written. You can’t talk about Aristotle forever. We don’t want to be stuck in a deep freeze.”

  Against all odds, the Great Books movement is not dead. It is true that there are no more Great Books salesmen knocking on doors, masquerading as university professors, and subjecting their marks to the “Mexican build-up” and other dubious sales practices. In fact, there are hardly any more Great Books sales. Britannica, which Benton’s heirs unloaded on Lebanese-Canadian investor Jacqui Safra, makes no attempt to sell off the inventory left over from the disastrous 1990 relaunch. If you happen to trip across them on the company’s website, you can buy the set for $1,200. “We don’t market them aggressively,” admits Britannica’s Tom Panelas. “There isn’t a groundswell of demand for the books.”

  The Great Books Foundation, created in 1947 to service the viral outbreak of postwar reading groups, still claims 850 active chapters, although hardly any of them actually read the Hutchins-Adler-Benton selections. The Foundation has been on the verge of bankruptcy more than once, most recently in 2002, when it laid off a quarter of its staff. President George Schueppert, a straight-talking businessman with a background in engineering and corporate finance, waxes unsentimental about the halcyon days of the Western canon. “The organization had an inspiring mission but no business plan,” he says. “It was clear that the founders’ idea that there was a vast craving for liberal arts education that would lead to tens of thousands of participants and hundreds of thousands of book sales—that never happened.”

  A lot of what could have gone wrong, has gone wrong. About ten years into its existence, Schueppert relates, the Foundation gave up on the idea of making money from the adult reading groups. “We’ve never been able to do what Hutchins and Adler thought was possible,” he explains, “to get adults to pay for the books and for training of the leaders. Sputnik was our saving grace”—for a while, at least. Panicked by the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the beachball-sized, chirping satellite, America poured money into “gifted and talented” courseware for the nation’s elementary schools, and the Great Books were more than welcome. But those programs have now largely vanished, decimated first by anti-elitist groupthink and then, more definitively, by the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind program, which emphasizes “teaching to the test.” Startlingly, the Foundation has failed to cash in on the lucrative book club phenomenon, because it holds itself above it. Schueppert speaks dismissively about Oprah’s Winfrey’s book club and the thousands of reading klatches that it has spawned. “We’ll read To Kill a Mockingbird, but we’re not going to ask, ‘How do you feel about the lead character? ’ The Great Books movement isn’t about feelings, it is about interpretation. We are hosting an intellectual event, not a social event.”

  And so an opportunity passes.

  While writing this book, I attended two Great Books Weekends, Friday-evening-through-Sunday-lunch events, with each day devoted to one of three books. The current M.O. seems to be this: one piece of classical literature, such as Gilgamesh and Oedipus Rex; some modern literature, such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Albert Urrea. Then something from in between. At a weekend in Chicago, it was Jonathan Swift’s “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms” from Gulliver’s Travels. A
t a late winter confab in Mystic, Connecticut, we read “The Future of an Illusion,” Sigmund Freud’s brief, corrosive, and semiconvincing essay about the eventual withering away of religion. In each case, these are books I would never have re-read, or read at all. Reading them en groupe turned out to be fun, and also hard.

  How does it work? You send the Foundation a check for a few hundred dollars, and they send you the three books that will be discussed, months ahead of time. There goes your excuse for not getting to the material. The latter-day Great Bookies gather on a Friday afternoon at a not-so-bad businessperson’s hotel and see which discussion group they have landed in. When I showed up at the Mystic Hilton for the New England Great Books Council’s weekend—organized around the theme “Would You Believe. . . ?”—I found myself one of fourteen members of “The Enkidoodle Dandies,” a reference to Gilgamesh’s boon companion and object of homoerotic affection, Enkidu. Other groups were “The Freudy Cats,” “The Ishtar Gazers,” and so on. Corny? Yes.

  How to put this? I myself am of a certain age, but it seemed as if practically everyone else attending the meeting was older. I felt younger than most of the people there, many of whom were retirees, and many of whom seemed to have been schoolteachers. Women outnumbered men by about two to one. Almost everyone had attended Great Books events before, and there seemed to be some artful politicking going on, as the veterans angled to be assigned to a “good” group, like college kids angling for the cool T.A. Peter Temes, Schueppert’s predecessor at the Great Books Foundation, also noticed the graying—nay, whitening—of his core audience. “I went out and saw some of these groups,” he says. “It was scary. I don’t think that’s reversible. It’s suitable for a generation that’s on its last legs.”