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�ON
EINSTEIN
t isn't always easy to get alumni out for a chapter event in the dead of
winter, particularly right after the holidays. So imagine tutor Sam Kuder's
delight when the Annapolis chapter drew about 25 participants to a
Saturday morning seminar he was leading on Einstein a week after
New Year's. Annapolis Johnnies aren't the only ones eager to talk about
Einstein and his special theory of relativity during the centennial of
Einstein's anna mirabilis. Several chapters have seminars planned.
In this issue of The College, tutors and alumni describe working through the
paper as one of the most remarkable experiences they've had at the college-one
that stays with them long after they've moved on to other pursuits.
Who isn't familiar with Einstein's struggles in his early education? Born in 1879
to middle-class German parents Hermann and Pauline Einstein, young Albert
frustrated his parents and teachers. His penchant for daydreaming and dislike of
rote memorization are well known, but popular lore mistakenly brands him as a
poor student. At the Institute ofTechnologyin Zurich, he preferred independent
research to the lecture hall.
When he couldn't find an academic job after graduation, he landed at the Swiss
Patent Office in Bern. His undemanding day job gave him the freedom to think. And
his 1905 paper gave him instant fame-something Einstein accepted graciously, but
would gladly have done without. He was more fond of his violin, his sailboat, and his
work.
His unhappy first marriage to fellow physics student Mil eva Marie ended in
divorce. Einstein later married his cousin Elsa, who proved the cheerful hostess and
efficient helpmate Einstein failed to find in his first marriage. He had two sons by
Marie and a daughter born before their marriage who may have been given up for
adoption. He was fond of Elsa's two daughters, who provided great companionship
in his later years.
A life long pacifist, Einstein nevertheless decried the Nazis' rise to power and the
world's failure to stop Hitler earlier. His famous letter to Roosevelt warning that
Germany was likely building a bomb urged that the U.S. move quickly to develop
atomic weapons. He later regretted this and became a proponent of nuclear
disarmament. He died in Princeton, N.J., in 1955, after insisting that his office
at the Institute for Advanced Studies not be preserved, but made available for
someone else.
In his essay "The World as I See It," published in 1931, Einstein described himself
as a "lone traveler." "The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have
given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and
Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation
with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific
endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me," he wrote.
- Rll
' WINTER
THE
e
0
S!JOHN'S
College
2005
VoLUME 3I, IssuE I
THE MAGAZINE FOR ALUMNI OF ST. JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS
• SANTA FE
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA P'B
(usPs oi8-75o)
is published quarterly by
St. John's College, Annapolis, MD,
and Santa Fe, NM
THE CoLLEGE
Known office of publication:
Communications Office
St. John's College
Box28oo
Annapolis, MD 2I404-28oo
Periodicals postage paid
at Annapolis, MD
POSTMASTER: Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John's College,
Box 28oo, Annapolis, MD
2I404-28oo.
Rosemary Harty, editor
John Hartnett (SF8g),
Santa Fe editor
Jennifer Behrens, art director
Annapolis
410-626-2539
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
Contributors
Sus san Borden (A87)
August Deimel (SFo4)
Barbara Goyette (A73)
Erin Hughey-Comers (Aos)
Carolyn Knapp (SFOI)
Andra Maguran
Jo Ann Mattson (A87)
Natalie Rinn (Aos)
Roxanna Seagraves (SF83)
Christopher Utter (Ao6)
Robin Weiss (SFGI82)
Roseanna White (Ao4)
··· ·· ·· ············· ·· ···· ·· ·· ······ ····
{CONTENTS}
PAGE
12
D E P A R T M E N T S
2
THE CHAIR
A visit to the Clore factory reveals just
what goes into the famous St. John's
chair.
PAGE
14
EINSTEIN AND THE
PROGRAM
8
PAGE
I2
Alumni and tutors say that studying the
I go 5 paper is an exceptional experience
at St. John's.
PAGE
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
A New President in Santa Fe
The Magnificent Seven
MacGyver Meets the Johnnies
Mellon Grant Supports Tutors
Ringing a Bell for the Annual Fund
Reunion Class Leaders
LETTERS
28 THE FACULTY
29 BIBLIOFILE
A co-editor of a new commentary on
Milton, William Moeck (A8o) once
thought Paradise Lost would be too
boring.
20
ATOMIC JoHNNIES
3I ALUMNI NOTES
Los Alamos National Laboratory has
provided some interesting professional
and educational opportunities for these
Johnnies.
PROFILES
30 Linnea Back Klee (A67) works for quality
child care in San Francisco.
33 Documentary filmmaker Alex Shear
HoMECOMING
(SFoo) encounters baseball fever in
Japan.
36 Ross Mackenzie (AGio3) demystifies the
. Naval Academy.
It was all for Homer in Annapolis.
46 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
PAGE
26
PAGE
I4
48 ST. JOHN ' S FOREVER
PAGE
26
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
ON THE COVER
Albert Einstein
Illustration by David]olznson
�{F
R 0 M
THE
BE L ,L
T
0 wE R
s}
A NEW PRESIDENT IN SANTA FE
St. fohns Finds a Leader at the Council on Foreign Relations
BY JOHN HARTNETT
At first glance, it wouldn't
Along with experience in
appear that St. John's College
administration and international
(goo students on two campuses)
affairs, Peters brings to his new
and the United States Military
position a deep appreciation for
Academy (4 ,000 cadets) have a
the ancient world, rooted in his
great deal in common. But
early life as the son of a military
Michael Peters, a West Point
officeT. His father was stationed
graduate and the new president
in Ankara, Turkey, giving the
of the Santa Fe campus, sees
cmious teen the perfect home
striking similarities ben-vccn
base to explore the great sites
the two institutions.
of the ancient world.
Both colleges are founded on
"My first two years in high
principles and missions, and both
school, I traveled all over
have a clear sense of their own
Turkey,Cyprus,andthe
unique identities. Most imporMediterranean," he says. "It
tant, says Peters, St. John's and
really solidified my interest in
West Point are among the few
history. So many of the classics
colleges still concerned with
we read at St. John's are set in
developing the moral character
places vivid in my memories.
of their students.
I've been to Ephesues, Izmir,
"St. John's and West Point
Iskenderun, Athens, and
both believe you can define what
Cyprus. I remember walking
a virtuous life is and what a
through the Cilician Gate where
person of honor is. Both colleges
Alexander marched his army to
believe that through exploration
meet the Persians. As a teen, it
and thought and interchange a
was an incredible experience."
student can come to understand
Retracing Alexander's route
what it means to be virtuous,
kindled a passion for history
honorable, and a person of
that led Peters to follow in his
integrity," he explains.
own father's footsteps. After
Both approach that goal the
high school, he entered the U.S.
same way: "The instructors at
Military Academy at West Point.
West Point give the cadets a
In 1968, he graduated and was
ALONG WITH MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE, MICHAEL PETERS BRINGS AN
model of what it means to be a
commissioned an officer in the
INTERNATIONAL VIEW TO ST. JoHN ' S COLLEGE.
good officer. Similarly, the
Army, taking command of a
tutors at St. John's give stutank platoon in Vietnam.
After his tour ended, Peters earned a master's in economics
dents a model for learning what it means to be a virtuous person
and a good citizen," Peters says.
from the University ofWashington, then returned to West Point
On November II, 2004, the college's Board ofVisitors and
to teach economics. "At that time every junior had to take the
Governors chose Peters to serve as the sixth president of the
economics course. I had IS instructors including the head of my
college's Santa Fe campus , bringing to a close a 16-month search
department working for me. I was a captain at the time and had a
to replace former president John Balkcom (SFGioo). Peters took
full colonel teaching for me," says Peters.
office January 17, just in time to preside over the January freshAfter teaching at \Vest Point, Peters studied Russian then
man convocation. Prior to joining the college, the retired Army
served as a Soviet military attache at the American embassy in
colonel had served as executive vice president of the Council on
Moscow. Living and working in that city at the height of the Cold
Foreign Relations in New York. A nonpartisan, foreign policyWar was "a true adventure in every sense oftheword," he
oriented membership organization, research center, and publishrecalls. Ronald Reagan had just begun his first term as president,
and U.S. -Soviet relations were rocky.
er, the Council provides programs (over 300 a year) and services
to ;},ooo members around the world and the general public.
It also publishes Foreign Affairs magazine and books on internacontinued on p. 3
tional affairs and foreign policy.
{ THE
CoL L EGE.
St. fohn 's College . Winter 2005
}
{FRoM THE BELL TowERS}
3
entailed managing the research arm of the
Council. His experience supervising
scholars and researchers at the council will
"You could never leave the apartment
make him feel "right at home with the
without coming back with a story," says
faculty and students of St. John's," he says.
Peters. "There was the time I coasted into
Peters had been aware of St. John's
the gas station running on fumes. Even
College for many years . After the executive
getting gas was always an adventure in
search firm contacted him to gauge his
Moscow. There were very few gas
interest in the position, he took a trip to
stations. The ones they did have were almost
Annapolis to visit classes. He was impressed
hidden-impossible to find. Once you found a
by what he saw and heard.
station, you couldn't pay cash-you had to buy
"I sat in on a seminar on Aristotle, then
coupons from the state, give yom coupons to
MICHAEL PE'I'ERS, SANTA FE PRESIDENT
Ptolemy in math tutorial, and a Greek class
the attendant, then wait for the person to set
translating the Meno. The experience really
the pump for the amount of gas you were
convinced me that St. John's was a place I
allowed to buy. In one instance I went to the
window, my car on empty, and one of the coupons I had was torn on would like to be part of. The interaction between students and
tutors, the commitment and enthusiasm of the students, and the
the corner. The woman refused to take it. I kept telling her how
respect that students have for one another, the tutors, and the
badly I needed the gas. I even had the torn corner and offeTed to
books were all incredibly powerful. It convinced me to look
tape it back on, but no matter how I pleaded, she still refused.
seriously at the college and to find a way I could be part of the
Finally I crossed my fingers and coasted off to another station
St. John's community," he says.
that did accept my coupon-even with the tear."
It didn't hurt that in all their travels, Peters and his wife,
PeteTs left Moscow for Berlin, wheTe he wmked as liaison
Eleanor, found Santa Fe and the Southwest to be among the most
officer to the Soviet Army in East Germany, to work as a
beautiful places they have visited. They are particularly keen to
conventional aTms negotiatm in Berlin. Later, during the
attend the acclaimed Santa Fe opera-one of their new homebuildup to the 1991 GulfWar, he led an elite Civil Mfairs
town's many cultural treasures-this summer. "Wherever Eleanor
Battalion in Saudi Arabia. He finished his militaTy career by
and I would go in the world, we tried to take advantage of the
returning to West Point- this time as an administrator.
local operas . In Moscow, for example, we quickly found out it
After retiring from the military with the rank of colonel,
was best to go only to Russian operas. Once you've seen Madame
Peters went to work for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Butteiflyin Russian, you'll never see h again," he says.~
During his nine years at the Council, Peters served as senior vice
pTesident, chief operating of:ficeT, and director of studies, which
(continued)
"The experience
really convinced me
that St. Johns was
a place I would lzke
to bepart if."
MICHAEL P. PETERS
At a Glance
Education: B.S., engineering, United States Military Academy
at West Point; M.A., economics, University ofWas~ington.
Recent Experience: As executive vice pTesident, Council on
Foreign Relations (2002-2004), seTved as the principal deputy
for the council's president in all areas of operations. Directed
the research arm of the council, supervising a staff of IOO,
including 70 research fellows. For seven years (1995-2002),
directed day-to-day operations of the council, including managing a budget of almost $30 million and a staff of over 200.
At West Point: As chief of staff from1992-1995, directed day-today operations of the academy and led a community of over
ro,ooo. Managed a $350 million operating budget. Directed a
strategic review of the academy defining the mission and
purpose of the institution for the 21st century.
{ THE
Co L LEGE .
Military Career: (Ig68-gs) Chief, Conventional Arms
Negotiations: Principal adviser to the Secretary of the
Army and the Chief of Staff, Army, on negotiation and
implementation of treaties to reduce conventional arms
in Europe.
Commander, g6th Civil Mfairs Battalion (Airborne): led
an elite, 200-person, special unit responsible fm working
with local officials and populace in support of U.S. military .
operations. Deployed to Saudi Arabia in the first month of
Operation Desert Shield; coordinated Saudi support for
the lo!-,ristical infrastructure required for the U.S. forces.
Coordinated the initial restoration of government services in
Panama following the removal of Manuel Noriega.
Executive assistant, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. Soviet Foreign Area Officer.
Assistant professor, United States Military Academy.
Platoon leader, executive officer and Armored Cavalry Troop
commander.
Recent reading: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, a novel set in Turkey.
St. fohn's College . W in t er 20 0 5
}
�4
GILLIAM HALL
DEDICATION
{FRoM THE BELL TowERS}
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
G 1 l
The newest dormitory on the
Annapolis campus, Gilliam
Hall was formally dedicated in
a ceremony November rr.
Family members ofJames H.
Gilliam Jr., for whom the
building is named, and trustees
of The Hodson Trust, which
provided most of the funding
for the dormitory, attended the
ceremony and toured Gilliam
Hall afterward.
Gilliam was a trustee of
The Hodson Trust and vice
president ofthe Beneficial
Corporation in Wilmington,
Del., until his unexpected
death in the summer of 2003.
An Mrican-American lawyer
and business executive, he was also a respected civic leader and
philanthropist who believed in advancing opportunities for
others, particularly in higher education. To honor Gilliam's
memory, the first seven Mrican-American graduates of the
college attended the ceremony.
Long before he became a Hodson trustee, Gilliam came to
know St. John's through his service as a director of the Beneficial
Corporation. He was chairman of the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute when the foundation gave St. John's its first grant, for
$r million. "He was proud that we received it, and it showed,"
said Christopher Nelson, president of the Annapolis campus .
The college is honored that the new dormitory will bear
Gilliam's name, he added. "I came to admire Jim as someone
who reflected the ideals of our community: he had a talent for
{FRoM THE BELL TowERs}
thinking through problems and LINDA GILLIAM (RIGHT) WITH
CHRISTOPHER NELSON, AND HER
presenting solutions. He was
DAUGHTERS ALEXIS AND LESLIE
humble and generous; he was
someone who had achieved
success in life and felt compelled to share his blessings
with others," Nelson said.
Finn M. W. Caspersen, chairman of The Hodson Trust,
described Gilliam as an individual with attributes that Johnnies
would particularly value. "He embodied good judgment. Even in
difficult situations, he always had the right answers."
Daniel Russell (Aos) had two reasons to thank the Hodson
Trust for its generous support of the college: He lives in Gilliam
Hall and has benefited from a Hodson-funded internship that
allowed him to experience life in a public defender's office last
summer. Russell praised the dorm's spacious common rooms,
the full-size kitchen, and the views of College Creek and the lower
playing field. But he also noted that the addition of the new
dormitory has enhanced the character of the campus.
"What used to be a dark and foreboding back campus has
now become a much more lively area," he said. "Gilliam Hall
has truly been a wonderful addition to the already wonderful
St. John's College."
Gilliam' s widow, Linda Gilliam, also thanked The Hodson
Trust and the St. John's College community for "this marvelous
tribute to Jim."
"With Gilliam Hall, his legacy lives on," she said.
Work is already well under way on the second dormitory, to be
built next to Gilliam Hall and available to students in January
2006. With eight dormitories, the college will be able to house
about 8o percent of its students on campus . ....
FINN CASPERSEN, CHAIRMAN OF
THE HoDsoN TRusT, PAID
Gathered together for the
happy occasion of dedicating
Gilliam Hall, the first seven
Mrican-American graduates
of St. John's College had a lot
of catching up to do. Many
are retired now; some complained of slovving down just a
little. Some are single, some
married with children and
grandchildren.
Perhaps, since they were
already vvilling to attend a college in a segregated city and
suffer the indignities associated
with such injustice, they were
remarkable people when they
arrived here. Whether the
college made a difference or
not, one thing is clear: they are
certainly remarkable people
now. All went on to earn
advanced degrees. In long and
productive careers, they
worked to improve the lives of
others through education,
advocacy, and education.
Groundbrcaker Martin Dyer
(class ohg52) capped a 30-year
career in public service with
another decade as a fairhousipg advocate. He's still
active as a consultant to the
Greater Baltimore Community
Housing Resource Board, and
serves on the college's Board of
Visitors and Governors.
Mtcr earning his master's in
clinical social work, Everett
Wilson (class ofrgs6) also went
into public service: 33 years
helping youth in the state of
Maryland's Alcohol and Drug
Abuse Administration. Now, he
counsels kids struggling with
Attention Deficit Disorder.
Leo L. Simms (class of
rgs6)has retired from the
business career he launched
after earning his MBA from
Boston College, but he
stays active in his church in
Chelmsford, Mass. Mter
graduation , he served in the
Air Force, studied to become a
Russian translator, and worked
for the National Security
Administration during the
height of the Cold War.
It's the retired life, too, for
Joan Cole (class ofr957), the
first African-American woman
community services and
mediation for many years;
she's currently a trainer for the
city's Children's Services
Administration and involved
in community service in
Queens, N.Y.
Jerry Hynson (class ofrgsg)
has more time for genealogy
and research now that he's
retired from a long career in
Baltimore schools, where he
THE PIONEERS : FROM LEFT TO RIGHT (BOTTOM): JOAN COLE, MARTIN
DYER, CAROLYN BAKER BRoWN. TOP: EvERETT WILsoN, LEo
L.
':After the
jirJt semeste~;
I knew this was
theplacefor me. "
}ERRY HYNSON (CLASS OF
I959)
to attend the college. She takes
the trips she has dreamed of
during a long and successful
career in the New York Public
Library system, where as a
regional manager, she supervised 20 branch libraries.
''I'm so glad I can read during
the daytime," she says.
Carolyn Baker Brown (class
ofrgs8) , another New Yorker,
earned her master's in social
work and has worked in
was a teacher, then assistant
principal. His published works
on Mrican-American history in
Maryland have covered topics
including runaway slaves
and freed African-Americans
before the Civil War. Charlotte
King (class ofrgsg) was
another graduate to spend
her life in public service as
a clinical therapist, social
worker, and social services
administrator.
It wasn't easy to be pioneers
in Annapolis before Brown V.
Board ofEducation made
segregated schools illegal.
Martin Dyer came to Annapolis
in rg48 and found the college
much more welcoming than
the greater Annapolis community. The Little Campus Inn on
Maryland Avenue may have
been an off-campus haven for a
TRIBUTE TO JAMES H. GILLIAM JR.
{ THE
CoLL E G F..
St. John 's College . W inter 2005
}
SIMMs,
CHARLOTTE KING, JERRY HYNSON.
{ TH E
CoLL E GE.
St. John 's College. Winter 2005
}
5
generations ofJohnnies, but
Dyer was never able to venture
inside. Wilson remembers he
couldn't try on a suit in a downtown clothing store. And King
was turned away from a church
in downtown Annapolis , told
that she would find a more
welcoming congregation in
another part of town.
"At St. John's, I was just
another student," Dyer says.
"Mter the first semester,"
says Hynson, "I knew this was
the place for me."
Joan Cole, the librarian,
never regretted her decision
to attend the college-even
though she remembers her
name was left out of the
program of a King Williams
Players production for which
she had made costumes. Her
life-long love affair ·with books
was nurtured here, and she
enjoyed the poetry group in
which she participated. "I
found the education I was
expecting here," Cole says.
Each of the graduates has
remained keenly interested in
St. John's after some five
decades away from Annapolis.
Their attachment was demonstrated by their eagerness to
attend the ceremony and
their ongoing support of the
college's efforts to recruit
Mrican-American students,
helping the college find new
ways to tell minority students
about St. John' s. As Wilson
says, many Johnnies find out
about the college through
word-of-mouth, often from a
relative or friend who attended
the college.
"Our job as alumni is to
get the word out-through
churches, sororities, communities, anywaywe can-that
St. John's provides an education for a lifetime," he says.
There may be no better
evidence of that than these
seven alumni .....
-
RosEMARY HARTY
�6
{FROM
THE
BELL
{FRoM
TowERS}
THE
MAcGYVER MEETS
''I'M READY FOR MY
THE JOHNNIES
BELL
CLOSE-UP' MR. ZLOTOFF''
The St.
John~ Story,
Quick CUTS of 4-5 students &
2 tutors as they open books
and begin reading in various
locations: dorm rooms, library,
etc. Possible FLASH CUTS of
author's names, Hegel, Plato,
etc. CUT to villainous East
German spies racing up
McDowell Hall stairs. CUT to
MacGyver hastily assembling
rocket out ofseminar chair,
shoestrings, and Coffee Shop
French fry grease. He shoots up
stairs to Bell Tower, rappels to
safety FADE OUT
It's fun to imagine what the
St. fohn's Story- the campy
student recruitment film made
more than 50 years ago-could
become in the hands of Lee
David Zlotoff (A74), the
creator of the popular TV hero
Angus MacGyver. Zlotoff,
who has enjoyed a career
as a screenwriter and
director since graduation,
volunteered his time and
expertise to write and direct
a promotional video for the
college- the first since a
second movie was produced in
the early Ig6os . After serving
Redux
Natalie Rinn (A05) was enlistedfor a starring role in Lee Zloto.ff's
movie. Here's her account oflife behind the camera.
for many years on the college's
Board ofVisitors and Governors, Zlotoffknewwell how
the college struggles to
explain itself to its various
audiences . Last year, he
proposed a new movie proj ect
to the board. Shooting took
place in Santa Fe and
Annapolis last fall. Now,
Zlotoff is supervising the
editing of more than 70 hours
of videotape into a series of
short videos that the college
can show at college fairs,
use as presentations to
potential donors, and post to
the college's Web site.
Unlike past films that have
tried to re-create seminar
discussions, Zlotoff's project
starts with tutors and students
"Now throw down your book like you just can't make sense of it,"
directed Lee Zlotoff from behind the camera.
So I did. And such was myweek, the week that the St. John's
promotional film crew became extended-stay guests on campus and
I became a movie star.
It all happened by chance. I sat in the Mellon courtyard on a warm
Sunday early in September. I was puzzling over a paper in the senior
lab manual. A young man approached me as I was crinkling my brow
looking over the reading.
"Would you like to do a screen test?" he
asked in a tone that lacked expectation.
Happy to set aside my confusion for a
moment and intrigued by the words ''screen
test," I accepted his offer. I was sat down in
front of a camera and answered questions
posed by Lee. After spurting answers in
response to his questions about "what is it like
to be a Johnnie?" I was told I would be contacted within a week and was sent on my way.
A week later, the call came. It was the young
man, Jared Krause, the producer of the
St. John's promotional film. He wanted to
know ifl would be willing to be the subject of
some scripted material for the film .
Apparently the look of confusion I wore
when Krause first spotted me was the type of
authentic St. John's experience they wanted to
be sure to include in the film . He told me that
they needed images that would create a visual
"I thought this
was something
that needed
doing."
LEE DAVID ZLOTOFF (A?4)
LEE ZLOTOFF CHECKS OUT THE VIEW FROM BEHIND THE CAMERA.
preparing for seminar. The
bells ring, and students walk
into the classroom. It ends ·
when the opening question is
posed. Interspersed in the
basic narrative structure are
interviews with students,
tutors, and alumni; scenes
of campus life and student
activities; and environmental
shots showing off the beauty of
Santa Fe and Annapolis.
All told, Zlotoffhas
already spent months on
the project, which he
describes as a labor oflove.
He ate in the dining halls
and coffee shops on both
campuses, hung out with students in downtown Santa Fe or
Annapolis, and talked with
tutors. He enjoyed reliving his
own student days through the
eyes of a younger generation.
"It was great fun to do
and a remarkably insightful
process," he says. "At
St. John's, everybody does
the same thing and in certain
ways gets the same sort of
thing; in another way it's
TUTOR NICK MAISTRELLIS LED A
MOCK TUTORIAL FOR THE NEW
totally individual. If I had to
title the experience it would
have been 'Chasing the
Paradox.' We tell students
what to study but we don't tell
them what to think. It's a small
school, but in many ways,
there is this amazing diversity
of opinions and suppositions
and life experiences that
people bring to them."
The college has remained
basically the same since his
student days, but Zlotoff
has noticed some changesparticularly in the students.
"When I was at the college,
there were students who were
at St. John's because they didn't
fit in anywhere else . On both
campuses today, I see a great
deal of awareness on the part of
the students about what the
college is about and what
they're looking for," he says.
What took Zlotoff away from
Hollywood to document life at
St. John's? "The college could
go out and hire someone to
produce a video, but they
wouldn't have had a clue how
to do a film about St. John's,"
he explains. "I thought this
was something that needed
doing."-$-
ST. JoHN's VIDEO.
- RosEMARY HARTY
{ THE
CoLLEGE .
St. John's College. Winter 2 005
}
ST. JoHN's IN
THE NEWS
For those involved in the three
days of shooting on the
Annapolis campus, the Today
Show segment on St. John's
that aired December 30 might
have seemed disappointingafter all there was no mention
of great books, tutors, or seminars. A quick glimpse of tutor
Peter Kalkavage leading a
chorus, a seminar, a Waltz
Party in the Great Hall, shots of
crew on College Creek, and the
story of a "tiny college next to
the Nav~Academy"was over.
But brief as it was, the
story couldn't help but be good
press for the college, and about
6 million viewers watch this
most popular of morning news
programs. Roger Martin,
president of Randolph-Macon
College,hadspentasabbatic~
from his college in Ashland,
Va., to find out what life is like
for freshmen at St. John's. For
the f~l semester, he attended
seminars, rowed with the
crew team, and got to know
Johnnies. A Washington Post
story on Martin's experiences
caught the eye of an NBC
producer, and a crew came to
campus in mid-December.
{ THE
CoLLEGE.
TowERS}
7
story of a student's preparation for seminar: sitting in various places
on campus reading, conversing with fellow students, looking
generally confused while paging through a reading. They thought I
was a good candidate. Because they would capture these images without sound bites, the pressure to perform would be minimal. I agreed
to his request and we arranged a date to do our first filming.
The day arrived. I sat in a bath of synthetic light and rested on the
quad while the production assistant applied makeup to my face. I felt
I was experiencing the clashing of two worlds: The world of St. John's
and the outside world that was straining to look in. Providing a
vvindow of exposure into the Johnnie world felt unnatural at first.
Could we, as props arranged to tell the Johnnie story, really communicate the essence of the Johnny experience? I was told to assume
my look of confusion as I sat in the quad and affectedly discussed a
seminar reading with classmates.
The lights glared, the camera rolled, and then, a funny thing
happened. Under a tent of surveillance and heat, I embodied all too
easily the confusion with which I was so well acquainted. Though the
scenario was staged, my two classmates and I
had so often been genuinely confused throughout our time at St. John's that to reproduce the
appearance of confusion, even in a feigned
discussion, was second nature. I then realized
very little acting would be required in order for
the film to communicate even a taste of true
Johnnie life.
Throughout the next week I spent several
hours with Lee and his crew performing
several takes of"seminar preparation." While
the repetition of takes at times grew tedious,
I was confident the finished product would
convey to the world outside something true
about our microcosmic haven. And I, for one,
was more than happy to reproduce that truth
under the lights. -$-
NATALIE RINN:
Two observations on the
experience: Students can summon a mid-week Waltz Party on
about a hour's notice. And students and tutors assembled for
a mock seminar will have a serious discussion on Thucydides
that will go on long after the
crew packs up ru1d leaves.
NPR's WeekendEdition
~so carried a short story on
Martin's experiences at the
college, as did more than 6o
newspapers. (An. essay by
Martin will run in a later
edition of The College.)
The college continues to
attract attention from a
perplexing assortment of
media. In September,
St. John 's College. Winter 2005
}
A
STAR IS BORN.
Cosmo GIRL! magazine
included St. John's on its
"first-ever guide to the so Best
Colleges for CosmoGirls."
Sometimes national press
attention is just a passing mention, but in the right context,
it's enough to make Johnnies
swell with pride. An Atlantic
Monthly article entitled "Who
Needs Harvard?" an~yzed the
competition to get into top
schools and mentioned St.
John's-in the company of colleges such as Bryn Mawr, Notre
Dame, and Oberlin- as "schools
[that ru:e] not in the top twentyfive, yet may be only slightly
less good than the elites."
Now that's good press.-$-
�8
{FRoM
THE
BELL
}OHNNIES-R-Us
A New Online Community for S]C
Alumni Awaits Members
The college is pleased to unveil a new online community created to
enable alumni to stay better connected to each other and to the
college. The address is: http://alunmi.stjohnscollege.edu. The page
can also be reached by clicking Alumni on the college's home page:
www.stjohnscollege.edu and following the link published there.
Shortly after launching a new Web site last year, the college also
rolled out an online alumni register, but after a rough start never
improved, the application was scrapped. The college chose
YourAlumni. com to provide a broader range of services to alumni.
The site does require registration to take full advantage of its
features, but alumni can still choose to hide all or some of their
personal information from public view. Register as a member, and you
can view the personal listings of all alumni who have also registered.
Alumni can add much more information than has been provided in
the paper directory, last published in 200I. There is space to add
occupation, employer, graduate school, birthday, and other information such as career changes, moves , books read or written, and births of
children. Johnnies can post their own photos and create a gallery of
their children, new home, pets, or vacation to Greece.
{FRoM
TowERs}
Other options:
• Take part in online forums.
• Submit alumni notes online.
• Find out about college news, chapter events, and college-wide
events.
• Search for members by multiple criteria: e.g., campus, class year,
location, occupation. (Please note that results will be limited until
more alumni become members.)
• View class homepages and photo galleries.
Another improvement of the new sile is ease of registration: in most
cases, alumni will not need to wait for approval from the Alumni offices
in Santa Fe or Annapolis- it's automatic. Even when staff intervention
is needed, action can usually be tal(en in one business day. Users can
also select their own passwords.
The college chose a membership-based application in order to
restrict personal information to the alumni community and protect
privacy. However, alumni can still access a slatic directmy-which the
college will update periodically-that lists alumni, class year, city,
and slate. While this information is oflimited use, it's the member
directory that should be genuinely useful in creating a community.
All it needs is members.
Contact the Alumni offices with any concerns or questions about
the site: in Santa Fe, Roxanne Seagraves at 505-984-6Io3 or alumni@sjcsf.edu; in Annappolis, JoAnn Mattson at 4m-626-253I, or
alumni@sjca.edu. -t-
THE
BELL
TowERs}
9
TRAINING DAY
EARLY LAST FALL, 2I NEW RECRUITS-MOST OF THEM FRESHMENCOMPLETED THEIR FIELD CERTIFICATION FOR THE ST. JoHN'S COLLEGE
SEARCH AND RESCUE TEAM WITH A SIMULATED SEARCH MISSION ON
DECEPTION PEAK IN THE SANTA FE SKI BASIN. THE NEWBIES MADE THE
CLIMB TO I2,000 FEET AND COMPLETED FIELD NAVIGATION , BACKCOUNTRY
SKILLS, AND SEARCH TECHNIQUE TRAINING TO BECOME FIELD CERTIFIED
AND EARN THE NICKNAME "GROUND-POUNDER." WITH MORE R E CRUITS
THIS YEAR THAN EVER, THE COLLEGE TEAM CAN NOW FIELD MULTIPLE
TEAMS OF VOLUNTEERS. LEFT, ANABELLAASPIRAS (SF08) OF
WASHINGTON D.C., CAN NOW USE A TRIANGULATION MAP AND COMPASS
TO FIND HER WAY IN THE MOUNTAINS. ABOVE, NATE OESCH AND
RYAN GREENDYK (BOTH SF08) DO PUSH-UPS AT THE TRAILHEAD.
{LETTERS}
MISTAKEN NoTIONS
The story of Martin A. Dyer's being recruited
as the first Mrican-American student to
attend St. John's College, ofhis graduating in
I952, and of his now joining the Board ofVisitors and Governors, is inspiring. Mter all,
Brown v. Board ofEducation was not decided
until I954· When I arrived in Annapolis as a
freshman in I956, African-An1ericans were
still second-class citizens in Maryland.
The story of Martin A. Dyer reflects well
on St. John's College, on the students who
persuaded the college to agmit [him], and on
Mr. Dyer himself.
The college's "diversity initiative," by contrast, is consistent neither with the mission of
St. John's College nm·with the achievements
ofMr. Dyer. Defending the "diversity initiative," nonetheless , Mr. Dyer asserts in his
recent letter (Fall2004) that the college
should make a determined effort to recruit
more minority students, "because seminars
and classes achieve greater profundity and
richness when students of different races, ethnicities, and backgrounds bring their life
experiences and individual perspectives into
the conversation."
I must disagTee. To remain politely silent
would show respect neither for the college
nor for Mr. Dyer. To remain silent would trivi-
thing profound that any Asian or Irish-American or Je,vish or African-American student
has said in a St. John' s College seminar that
flowed from his or her "race, ethnicity, or
background." My own fellow-students
advanced our conversations by giving evidence of close reading and good logic. My
fellow-students' racial and ethnic characteristics made no discernible contribution to
their being able to read and think well ...
Mr. Dyer is a remaTkable man, and I am
like other Johnnies in respecting his
achievements and in tiling pride in him
and in his story ... .All men and women are
educable "l.vithout regard to the peculiarities
of their ethnic and racial backgrounds. It is
not our fellow-students' peculiarities that
are the teachers at St. John's College . It is
the great books that are our teachers.
alize the great books program, and it would
patronize Mr. Dyer. St. John's College exists
because, as its motto suggests, boys of all
sorts are equally capable ofbecoming men by
a single device, namely, by means of books
and balances. The Program Telles on books,
not on the alleged broadening effects of a
multi-cultural mi'< of students. Nor was Mr.
Dyer himself recruited to St. John's College in
order to provide his fellow-students with his
race-peculiar contributions. Such a suggestion is repellant. Mr. Dyer was recruited
because the students at St. John's at that time
found the then-prevalent rules of racial discrimination offensive. This was precisely
because they believed that all men are fundamentally the same, not that they are different ...
Mr. Dyer cannot and does not appeal now
to what all men have in common, however. In
departing from that premise, he departs from
the foundation on which St. John's College
stands. Mr. DyeT relies, instead, on the premise that different "life experiences" will somehow enrich the college's seminaTs. Is this an
empirical claim or is it a tautology? I assume
that Mr. Dyer means it to be an empirical
claim. If so, he must present proof. Unfortunately, no proof is possible. Neither Mr. Dyer
nor anyone else can present evidence of any-
{ THE
CoLLEGE .
St. John's College. Winte r 2005
MARY CAMPBELL GALLAGHER,
CLASS OF Ig6o
The College welcomes letters. Letters may
be edited for clarity and/ or length. Please
address letters to: The College Magazine,
St. John's College, Box 28oo, Annapolis
MD 2I4o4. Letters can also be sent via
e-mail to: rosemary.harty@sjca.edu.
}
MELLON GR.ANT
SuPPORTS FACULTY
A $soo,ooo grant from The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow St. John's College to raise faculty salaTies
and provide funds for faculty
study groups on both the
Annapolis and Santa Fe
campuses.
One of the college's most
important strategic goals is
to bring its faculty salaries
closer to the mid-range of
comparable liberal arts colleges. Attracting and retaining exceptional faculty, and
compensating them fairly in
cities with a high cost ofliving, are key to preserving the
college's discussion-based
education program and small
classes.
Almost important as
improved compensation is
the need to provide faculty
{ T HE
C o L L E G E .
with continuing opportunities to deepen their own
knowledge ofthe subjects
they are teaching. Funds for
study groups mll support
faculty members who plan
and organize the material for
the sessions, and compensate
faculty for the additional
time they spend in such
groups . In the past, study
groups at St. John's have
included topics such
as Apollonius' classical
geometry, advanced reading
in ancient Greek, and the
poems ofWallace Stevens.
St. f ohn 's College. Winter 2005
}
"This generous funding
from the Mellon Foundation
for faculty salaries and
faculty development mll
allow the college to demonstrate to our tutors and our
students, as well as to the
college community as a
whole, the value we place
on our faculty and the
commitment we have made
to them for the future,"
said Christopher Nelson,
president of the Annapolis
campus. -t-
�.
'
,--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
IO
{PHILANTHROPIA}
RINGING A BELL FOR
II
{PHILANTHROPIA}
ST. JOHN~ s
REUNION
CLASs LEADERS
Increasing Alumni Involvement
ell-ringers were all over town in Santa Fe last
317 phone calls, and there was a lot of ringing: they raised $2,245
December, but bell ringers of a different kindin gifts and pledges .
without the Santa Claus suits and red kettles-were
Tiffany Simons (SFo6), a phonathon veteran, gave an
also making appeals from Weigle Hall at St. John's
enthusiastic kickoff speech to first-timers . "Make sure alumni
College. Telephones rung in homes across the
understand that gifts of any amount are greatly appreciated," she
country as students participated in a phonathon
said. "If everyone on this list gave only five dollars, we'd be way
for the college's Annual Fund.
above where we were last year in terms of alumni participation."
The Annual Fund helps pay for tutors' salaries, health and
Students say they get a great sense of pride in volunteering for
counseling services, admissions, athletics, and campus
phonathons. Some start out reluctantly, afraid to make a phone
maintenance and, perhaps most vital to the group making the
call to a stranger and reluctant to disturb a quiet evening to ask
phone calls, student financial aid. Thition meets just 70 percent
for money. But when they secure their first gift, they beam .
of the cost of educating students, and about 6o percent of the
Melinda Miller-Klopfer (SFo7) has worked several phonathons,
college's students receive financial aid. A gift of $roo to the
and each time she riffles through the list of potential donors to
Annual Fund has the same effect as $2ooo in the endowment,
find alumni in California. She, too, is from California and taps
since the college draws a s% from the endowthe \Vest Coast connection to establish a personal
ment every year for operating expenses. Gifts to
association with the alumni she calls. Some she
'~
the Annual Fund can be put to immediate use .
has talked to several times, and even though they
Phonathons take place on both campuses
have never met, they catch up like old friends
toward the end ofthe calendar year, and again in
over the phone. Helping the college raise money,
the spring, as the college' s fiscal year comes to a
Miller-Klopfer says, strengthens her appreciation
close June 30. Alumni, students, and staff take
for St. John's.
parents~
tutor~
part in the calling. To heighten the fun and
"After all," Miller-Klopfer says, "my St. John's
foster a little gentle competition at the Santa Fe
education is a gift-from my parents, my tutors,
phonation, held on a blustery December
the financial aid office. An education of any
evening, students had bells next to their phones
variety is a gift, but a St. John's education is a
• -11:
"
0J~ce
that they could ring each time a call yielded a
blessing as well." "'$gift. The group of eight students together made
MELINDA MILLER-KLOPFER ( SF07)
-ANDRA MAGURAN
.. my St. ]ohn:S
education is a
g!ft-from my
my
thefinancial azd
...
RINGING THE BELL:
ZAcK BoRING ( sFo8)
AND MELINDA MILLERKLOPFER ( SF07) HIT THEIR
BELLS TO SIGNAL A "'YES"
IN RESPONSE TO THEIR
ANNUAL FUND CALLS .
{ THE
C o L LEGE .
St. John 's College . Winter 2005
}
ohnnies like talking
with other Johnnies.
They get a chance
to exchange ideas particular to the college,
and they understand
what a genuine conversation is. That's one reason many
alumni accept an invitation
from the Advancement offices
in Annapolis and Santa Fe to
serve as "reunion class leaders," joining Philanthropia
volunteers in making alumni
aware of their role in supporting the college. When your job
is to reconnect with members
of your class to strengthen
their ties to the college, it's
more fun than work .
Tapping everything from
{
nostalgia to technology,
J
reunion class leaders work at
bringing the St. John's experience back
to alumni who have gone on to other
pursuits five to fifty years after leaving
their campuses. "It's so easy to keep in
touch with old Johnnie friends - which is
why it's weird that a lot of them don't
realize how important it is to give back to
the school," says a new reunion class
leader, Anna Christenbury (SFoo).
One of the major goals of the volunteer
effort is to increase awareness of the
importance of the Annual Fund to the
college and increase the number of
alumni who make contributions.
Gifts to the Annual Fund are vital to
supporting the college's day-to-day
operations .
Often, serving as a class leader is the
first time some alumni have had an
opportunity to volunteer for the college.
"We're fortunate to have reunion class
leaders who are exceptionally enthusiastic
and energetic," says Suzanne Thornton,
advancement officer in Santa Fe. "Many
of them find it extremely rewarding to be
able to do something for the college."
A FAMILY AFFAIR:
CAROL PLAUT
RICK
(A79)
(A77)
AND
HAVE BOTH
VOLUNTEERED AS REUNION CLASS
LEADERS.
Is
EMMA PLAUT
(Ao7)
NEXT?
and aware of what's happening
at the college today. "I owe
St. John's a debt of gratitude,"
says Preston, an architect in
Washington, D.C. "It opened
me up to appreciating the
eloquence of an idea, of a
well-reasoned argument. I may
have felt oppressed by it all
while I was there, but now it's
a kind of heaven in my mind-a
golden, shimmering memory."
Christenbury, who has been
composing music since graduating, has more than a few
ideas on how to get members
of her class back to the
college. Assisted by other class members,
she's assembling digital photo albums
and organizing regional get-togethers.
The most important part of her job, she
says, is taking the time to explain to
alumni why it's important for them to
help support the college. Preston says
that the most successful outreach in the
past has been making and selling home
videos from college days.
Other reunion class leaders have sent
handwritten thank-you notes to alumni
who have made a gift, contributed
material for class Web pages, sent out
postcards with senior class photos,
and arranged class gatherings for
Homecoming.
Putting one Johnnie in touch with
another invokes the sense of community
shared at the college, and that's what
reunion class leaders strive to do:
encourage their friends and classmates
to keep giving to ensure that more
students can learn what it is to be a
Johnnie . --$-
"I owe St. ]ohn:S a debt
qfgratitude. It opened
me up to appreciating
the eloquence qf
an zdea~ qfa wellr~asoned argument. "
BRUCE PRESTON, CLASS OF
Ig6s
From Annapolis, volunteers are
recruited for ro reunion classes;
eight classes in Santa Fe have reunion
leaders this year. The college offers
training at Homecoming each year to
inform volunteers about the needs of the
college and to provide an opportunity for
new recruits to talk with past RCLs about
the program.
Bruce Preston, class of rg6s, said he
took on the job because he wanted not
only to reconnect with the college, but
also to become more directly involved
{ THE
CoLLEGE.
St. John 's College. Winter 2005
- RosEANNA WHITE
}
(Ao4)
�{T
I2
H E
C H .A I
{THE CHAIR}
R }
ABOUT A CHAIR
"The chair looksfine everywhere. "
A Visit to the Home ofa St. Johns Icon
BILLY COPPAGE
It's a family business, and has been since
Moses Clore started the company in I83o.
Mter a fire in I930 nearly put the Clorcs
out of business, Mrs. Herbert Hoover-a
summer resident-came through with a
loan. Since then, the operation's been a
strong one, aided by a small college that's
been one of its best customers.
This is the home of the St. John's chairor, to be precise, the three chairs that
have populated the Annapolis campus
since the Igsos and the Santa Fe campus
since its opening in I964. The seminar
chair is actually the Plain Master Chair.
Dorm rooms are furnished with the armless Plain Side Chair, and the dining halls
in Santa Fe and Annapolis are filled with
the Ladder Back Dining Side Chair. While
the factory makes tables and desks and
other furniture, chairs outsell everything
else, says Troy Coppage, a great-grandson
of E.A. Clore and the vice president for
personnel. "You just won't find a more
durable chair," he says, hefting one up
and showing off the construction.
Production is labor-intensive. It starts
in the lumber room, where wood is boiled
for about three hours, then placed in
form s that forc e the wood for the back
frame, arms, and slats into graceful
curves. The slats are fitted into the
grooved holes of the frame, as are the six
rungs for the bottom of the chair, which
connect to the front legs. No nails are
needed, except for one on each arm of the
Master Chair.
Mter the chairs are stained, they're
sent out to local residents who weave the
fiber-rush seats with which Johnnies
become so intimately familiar. Newcomers to this work sometimes surrender in a
few days. "It's hard on the hands," says
Coppage. ''I'd starve ifl had to do it."
The graceful arms of the Master Chair
go on last. Then the chairs are shipped,
most often to individual customers, but
also to big users like boarding schools,
seminaries, and inns.
BY RosEMARY HARTY
fit weren't for the signs leading the way, it would
be easy to miss the E.A. Clore Sons Furniture
Factory in Madison, Va. The view to the west is
of Old Rag Mountain, the most spectacular peak
in the Blue Ridge'- Mountains. Turn off the main
business thoroughfare of this town, follow a
driveway to the bottom of a little hollow, and you'll find
a very small factory where furniture is made the old-fashioned way.
{ T H E
C
o L L E G E .
St. fohn 's College . Winter 2005
}
OPPOSITE: "You CAN USE IT EVERY DAY,
AND IT'LL LAST IOO YEARS," SAYS
TRoY CoPPAGE OF THE ST. JoHN's CHAIR.
AT RIGHT AND BELOW: CHAIRS ARE MADE
THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY IN THIS FAMILYOWNED BUSINESS IN RURAL VIRGINIA, JUST
EAST oF THE BLuE RIDGE MouNTAINS.
ABOUT THREE HOURS OF HAND WORK GO
INTO EACH CLORE CHAIR.
Coppage doesn't know a lot about the
St. John's Program ("It's not a normal
college'?") but he likes seeing the Master
Chair featured on the college's Web site.
That was partly the doing of Mark
Neustadt, a marketing expert who's been
handling the college's recruitment publications. "It's a perfect symbol of how the
school differs from others," he says. "You
learn by sitting and discussing the books.
You learn for yourself."
But is the chair really comfortable?
"Wonderfully comfortable," says tutor
Eva Brann, who should know as well as
anyone. "You sit in them for hours at a
time, so it's good that they have a comfortable'bottom. And of course, they are
very elegant to look at."
And is it really sturdy? Yes, says Bryan
Valentine, the treasurer in Santa Fe,
who is in charge of buying new ones
when the stock of more than I,Ioo out
West needs replenishing. "The rungs
sometimes break out because students
always rest their feet on them, and the
backs have been broken out when they've
tipped over."
Billy Coppage, vice president of the
company, has made several trips to
Annapolis to deliver new or repaired
chairs. On a visit to Colorado a few years
back, he made a detour to Santa Fe just to
see the campus-and his chairs.
{ THE
CoLLEGE.
St. fohn 's College . Winter 2005
So where does the Clore chair look
better, he's asked? In Santa Fe's
sun-drenched seminar rooms? In
historic McDowell Hall? He smiles
broadly and says in a voice dripping
with Virginia honey, "That chair looks
fine everywhere."-*
For more on Clore, visit the company's
Web site: www. eaclore. com
}
�{THE
{THE
PROGRAM}
PROGRAM}
EINSTEIN
COMES TO ST. JOHN'S
BY RosEMARY HARTY
URTIS WILSON (HA83) BROUGHT
Einstein to St. John's College.
That is, during Wilson's
tenure as dean of the college in
the late Igsos, he decided that
Einstein's theory on special
relativity deserved a place in the Program. "The
idea of tackling difficult things was not foreign
to the Program," Wilson recalls. "All sorts of
things could be attempted, but what was important was learning to do them in a way that students feel some accomplishmen\ in them. We
didn't want to bamboozle them by talking over
their heads."
Working with tutor L. Harvey Poe (A52), Wilson wrote a manual designed to lead students
through the math and the major concepts of the
I90S paper. The manual was introduced in I959
and used at least until I964, when Wilson joined
the faculty in Santa Fe and later, the University of
{ T H E
C o L L E G E .
California. When he returned to Annapolis in
I973, seniors in math tutorial were reading the
paper. "That was an important shift, and I was
really glad to see it. It motivates students- 'this is
really the paper that Einstein wrote? And I'm
reading it?' "
Beautiful, simple, mind-boggling-the words
St. John' s tutors and students use t o describe Einstein's paper-help explain why so many Johnnies
find reading the paper a capstone of their years at
the college. But it was once thought ''too modern, too difficult, too complex" for students,
recalls Santa Fe tutor Peter Pesic, who has taught
the paper about half a dozen times. As a physicist,
of course he was familiar with Einstein's theory,
but he had never read the I90S paper before
coming to the college.
''It was one of the discoveries I made at St.
John's, to encounter Einstein in his own
thoughts, his own words," he says.
S t. fohn's College . ·w inter 2005
}
{ T H E
CoL LE G E.
St. Jo hn 's College . Winter 20 05 }
IS
�I6
{THE
PROGRAM}
{THE
"Special theory is a
little gem. "
patience, even more so than intelligence (though that does
not hurt, of course) . Patience is needed for both running
experiments and figuring out what to make of the end results.
SEEING A PROBLEM
Erin Hanlon (SFo3)
Studying Einstein's paper did not influence my decision to
become a scientist but it has had an impact on how I think
about research questions.
I had been accustomed to reading scientific papers a couple
of times over and thereby getting a general sense of the theory
and any equations. But with the Einstein paper I had to carefully go over each word to make sure I understood what he was
saying-so much of it was counterintuitive to my mind. I
remember staring hard at the board and frequently interrupting
whoever was presenting in order to ask questions so that I could
better shape the mental illustration I was trying to form.
The properties of electrodynamics addressed in the special
theory of relativity do not have a direct effect on my research as
a plant eco-physiologist. But it is the process, the process of
seeing a problem, coming up with possible solutions and
working through them all until one that holds up is found, that
turned out to be my most important gleaning from this paper.
The most important thing that you need to bring to science is
CHALLENGING AssuMPTIONS
Richard Green (SF87)
Probably the most radical thought that comes from the rgos
paper on special relativity is that it forces one to rethink the
concept of simultaneity. Assumptions about simultaneity seem
so basic that it is difficult to be aware that one is making
assumptions. How interesting that one can be unaware of basic
assumptions that are fundamentallyWI·ong.
Richard Green is a chemist workingfor the US. government on
issues related to difenses against chemical warfare agents.
"Ones learning
how to make
another small
step_, then maybe
another step
ifierthat."
C oLLEG E .
S AM KuTLER ( AS4 )
Erin Hanlon is a Ph.D. student in biology at the
University of Utah.
In Annapolis, Dean Harvey Flaumenhaft
"We didn't assume that our students knew
has led the senior math tutorial on Einstein
algebra back then," he explains, ''and the
many times. Although Flaumenhaft's speworst thing we did was waiting until senior
cialized field of study has been political phiyear to teach calculus-too late to use in
losophy, a framed copy of the Einstein-on-asenior laboratory."
bicycle photo hangs prominently in his
To Kutler, Einstein's theory is simply
office, and Flaumenhaft holds this particubeautiful. ''It has two postulates. One is that
lar Program author in high esteem- not just
if light is emitted it doesn't matter if the
for what he thought, but how he thought.
light is coming right at you, going away
Einstein characterized himself as a "slow
from you, or standing still with respect to
thinker" who pondered his theories long
you: it's still going to come at a single speed.
and hard for many years before something
The constancy of the velocity of light is one
emerged. Approaching Einstein in the classprinciple, and the other one is the relativity
HARVEY FLAUMEN HAFT, DEAN
room also requires patience and time.
principle, which is that the laws of physics
"One's learning how to make another small
have to be the same; there's no special frame
step, then maybe another step after that. If
of reference."
we can take just a couple of really good steps
Long b efore he worked out his theory on
toward beginning to understand those fundamentals, one
paper, "Einstein didn't think that Newtonian physics made
starts to think in a way that's much deeper."
any sense," says Kuder. Poincare, Lorentz, and Fitzgerald
"Special theory is a little gem," says Annapolis tutor Sam
were all thinking along the same lines, and Poincare might
Kuder (class of 1954) , because seniors can study it for a
well have beaten Einstein to the punch. But Einstein was
term- one truncated by the writing period and perhaps
the first one to determine that "since we can't find the
aether, there's no need for it."
tainted by the post-essay letdown -and emerge with a fairly
good understanding of the basics. Adding the paper to the
" This is a great blow to empiricists like Francis Bacon
Program was a change that was enabled by the college's
who believe you keep experimenting and experimenting,
earlier decision to stop extensive instruction in algebra.
and you're very slow to theorize. Einstein didn't obey those
{ THE
PROGRAM}
St. John 's College · Winter 2005
}
rules. He theorized first and the
experimentation came later. He
loved his theories, and he
believed in them."
Santa Fe tutor Ralph Swentzell
guided seniors in math tutorial
many times in his 38 years with
the college, and led one exceptional preceptorial for Graduate
Institute students taking the
math and science segment.
"Some of them were accountants, and some were English
teachers, and they would all get
up to the board and work through
the equations . It was very exciting-I still get letters from those
students," he says.
Over the years, Swentzell has
assembled a collection of notes
that he uses to supplement the
paper; they're enormously popular with Santa Fe students. One
of his favorite examples is helping students make sen se of Einstein by getting them to figure
how fast they would have to drive
a car to get it to shrink and fall
into one of the cracks on the
road. "They get a big kick out of
that," he says.
Even after all his years of working through the paper 'vith students, Swentzell finds there are
some concepts Einstein presents
that just "hit you in the stomach
sometimes."
"You can see how it's all
derived, but then to imagine
walking around this world of
ours and as you're walking down
Two THINGS
Laine Conway (SFot)
I was, while reading Einstein, fairly obsessed with the
work of Kurt Go del, and so my memories are doubtless somewhat tainted. Still, two things in particular
stand out for me from reading Einstein:
r. The equation "e=mc 2 " is far from being
mysterious and arcane. Instead, it falls neatly,
elegantly, and almost unobtrusively out of the
preceding equations.
2. Einstein later (re) did his calculations for
relativity using only algebra; the original equations
use calculus because Einstein was, at the time he
wrote the paper, studying calculus!
The other thing I recall is how much I liked Einstein.
I'm thinking, here, of a line from The Catcher in the
Rye: "What really kno cks me out is a book that, when
you're all done reading it, you wish the author that
wrote it was a terrific friend of yours, and you could
call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
Laine Conway; having completed an MFA in
Dramatic Writing, has returned to math (and Marx)
and is studyingfor a Ph.D. in economics.
PROVING THE ABSURD
David] Macdonald (SFg3)
Einstein's 1995 paper on special relativity was certainly one of the highlights of my time at St. John's,
and not just because it seemed to prove the absurdthat our notion of absolute space and time was an illusion. What I found most exciting was the simplicity of
the reasoning behind it. The step-by-step proof, from
the premise (Michaelson and Morley's observation
that the speed oflight is constant) to the conclusion
(that the length of an object varies according to its
speed relative to the observer) , was accessible even to
a college student like me with no more than a basic
knowledge of calculus. I felt like we were proving the
absurd with very simple , rational tools.
David Macdonald is a composer who also teaches
music theory at the Manhattan School ofMusic. .
{ T HE
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St. John 's College. Wi nter 2005
}
the hall, to suddenly think that
what you're calling 'now' means
a different set of events in the
universe than for somebody
who's sitting down in their
office. Everything changes.
That's the part," h e says, and
stops to chuckle, " that's just too
weird. That's when you have to
go home and sleep on it and get
the equations out to guide you."
The Nike adage "just do it" fits
with Peter Pesic's approach to
teaching the paper to Santa Fe
seniors. " Some tutors try to go
backwards, but it's hard to do
that without spending a long
time on review. So we plunge
into it and then take extended
digressions in electricity and
magnetism. We can drag out
magnets and coils and try to
bring to life where Einstein
was starting from with his
questions."
The paper may have seemed a
risky proposition to introduce
four decades ago , but it's well
within the grasp of today's students, says Pesic. "The heart of
his deduction can be done with
nothing except algebra, " he
says, adding that each time he's
taught it, even those students
without great skills in math have
risen to the occasion.
A leisurely pace is needed for
Einstein; up to 30 class sessions
in Santa Fe are invested in the
rgos paper. "That's quite a long
time, and a lot of time is needed
�{THE
PROGRAM}
{THE
"JYe can understand a lot
about geniuses and we can
participate in their thinking.
It;wt talces some zvork. "
GREAT IDEAS
Alciba Covitz (Ag1)
My senior year math tutorial was led by Winfree
Smith. Although I very much liked and respected
Mr. Smith, it was not a very good tutorial. One
student in particular refused to accept any aspect of
non-Euclidean geometry. Mr. Smith was patient at
first, but he was clearly not in the best spirits and, as
the semester progressed, the clash between the two
of them became quite pointed. We came to Einstein
with that as our rather contested and cantankerous
foundation.
At that stage in my college career, I was still on
the fence about what I would do, in terms of what
field to pursue i.n graduate school, try law school, do
a post-bac and try med school, pursue my interest in
journalism, etc. I remember that Einstein's language
seemed to be as much tied to metaphysics as to
physics. His ideas about the actual workings of
the universe and his semi-hidden, semi-mystical
cosmology seemed all jumbled together. I tried to
dis aggregate them, but with little luck. This, as I
recall (together with the mind-breaking steps he
assumed between the lines of his proof), helped to
convince me t11at it was best to pursue what I took
to be the foundations of all pursuits: the manifold
origins of the theoretical underpinnings of great
ideas. I chose to pursue this with the idea of a
constitution in the fully-contested world of politics.
for students to express their perconclusions on electromagnetic
plexity," continues Pesic. "The
radiation led Einstein to wonder
problem that emerges requires
what would happen if a source
having to reconsider the evidence
of electromagnetic radiation-a
of your senses in a very deep way.
light bulb, for example-wereWith Einstein, you don't so much
moving and he stood still. "And
understand it as you get used to it.
of course, you discover it doesn't
It flatly contradicts everything
matter," says Flaumenhaft.
that seems to make common
Einstein wasn't such a good
sense."
mathematician says FlaumenWatching students struggle
haft. "He was imaginative, he
with Einstein, Pesic sees the
took simple notions and mulled
best characteristics of Johnnies
over them, and he revolutionized
revealed in their discussions with
what we know about the world,"
each other. "They are not v-.rilling
he says.
to take some expert's word for it,
There's a strong correlation
instead, they want to see whether
between studying Einstein and
it's really true," he says. "They're
approaching nearly everything
An assistantprofessor ofpolitical science at the
intelligent and open-minded, and
else in the Program, from basic
University ofRichmond, Alciba Covitz teaches courses
they want to understand deeply."
assumptions about human freein constitutional law, civil rights, and ci'villiberties.
The types of questions tutors
dom to the laws of the physical
and students ponder in class can
world. "And that is that you just
be both wondrous and perplexing, agrees
can't'take it for granted-you have to think
Harvey Flaumenhaft. "What does it really
about; you have to examine whether it's
mean to say it's 5 o'clock in two different
really true," Flaumenhaft says.
Einstein~
places? \XThat does a law of nature have to
Curtis Wilson, who as tutor emeritus
look like to be reasonable?"
continues his life-long study of the history of
science, says Einstein's revelations were as
Students have the time to be patient and
shocking to the world as those of Coperniplod through the interesting questions
cus, Newton and Galileo. "There is a
Einstein's paper raises. " One ofthe delights c
relativity, usually called Galilean relativity,
of senior math is that Einstein's paper is
that says that whether the solar system is
short, and we spend a lot of time reading
moving or sitting in one place in absolute
through it line by line. It's so concentrated
space you can't tell, because everything
that what you're doing is unpacking the
goes on exactly the same way whether it's
significance of very simply stated assumpmoving or not. Here was a large branch of
tions that turn everything you've been
science that said you can't locate anything
thinking about the framework of the world
in absolute space, you can only say that
upside down," he says.
PETER PESIC, TUTOR
bodies move relative to one another and if
Senior math tutorial should start with
one body is accelerating instead of moving
a so-minute "quick-and-dirty review" of
uniformly, you can say that it's accelerating
Maxwell's Equations because Nla,"'CWell's
"Wzth
you don't so much
understand zt as
you get used to it.
Itflatly contradicts
everything that
seemJ· to rnake
common sense. "
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St. John 's College. W inter 2005
}
PROGRAM}
CuRTIS WILSON (HA83)
with respect to absolute space- in Newtonian physics , acceleration is real, the forces are real.
"That was kind of astonishing to people because they
thought the earth was not moving: 'I walk on this ground, it's
perfectly stable, towers are not toppling, and so forth. That
seemed like firm common sense. That's why Luther spoke of
Copernicus as 'that fool.' The earth moves!-how ridiculous
can you get? But of course Galileo and then Newton show
that everything works exactly the same way, mechanically,
whether we're moving or not."
By the time Einstein started questioning things, most
physicists "were as firmly convinced that there was an aether
as back in Luther's day people were convinced that the earth
stood still."
Einstein was able to think about light moving through the
aether in a different, imaginative way, and that made all the
EINSTEIN IN PoETRY
Anna Perle berg (SFo2)
The most amazing thing about the rgos paper is that it's all
algebra. Einstein could have worked the whole thing in calculus,
but instead he makes it simple-once, that is,,you get the dozen
or so steps he leaves out between equations. And Mr. [Ralph]
Swentzell brought a wide-eyed fascination to the subject (as all
the best teachers do) that made it matter. He was wonderful at
coming up with "real" examples applying these obscure
theories-swimmers, twins in spaceships, trains in tunnels.
One of the things Mr. Swentzell said that stuck with me was
that Einstein needed to be poetized in order to be brought to a
larger audience . Here's my attempt:
II. Relativity
T = cp(w)~(T-w~hc2)-Lorentz transformation for time
"*'
Yet it's all predictable,
and so smooth a ride in the end;
time-dilated by a few tokes
I faced the following:
A train (of course a train) pushing c, trapped
or not trapped in a pre-Freudian tunnel,
depending on passenger or spectator.
And they're both right. They're both right,
goddammit. The sober mind boggles.
But as I spmwled on the floor after two hours of work
and saw the clock's fingers tap out fifteen minuteswell, it's synchronicity, that's what it is.
Everything's happening the same everywhere,
just not at the same time.
And not at the same where, either.
How-much-not-the-same-time,
how-far-from-the-same-where,
.
though, is only algebra. And for mankind
it all goes to zero. Fm electrons or stars, a different story,
haiku or epic; but here on Pascal's fulcrum,
balanced between infinite and infinitesimal,
one feels less wretched than weighting.
It's all about trains,
though their timetables must be thrown out
· thewindow. "Hurryhome,"
I say to an absent lover, "or at least
start traveling at three-quarters c away from me."
I stand on the platform and watch you go by
getting smaller and smaller, more and more part
of my past.
{ TH E
difference. "He tried to think about sitting on the hump of a
wave. Just sitting there at 30o,ooo kilometers-persecond, what would it be like?" Thought experiments like
those led Einstein to new questions. "He gets rid of the
aether and says space and time are what we're talking about."
Even with his many years of studying science as his foundation, Wilson says he can still be "befuddled" by the
subtleties of the paper when he stops to think about them.
But it's not a bad state to be in, he concedes, adding a rationale that seems in a broad sense to cover the whole point of
choosing a college '"rith a program like St. John's in the first
place.
"We can understand a lot about geniuses," Wilson says.
"And we can participate in their thinking. It just takes
some work."
Anna Perle berg is at work on an MFA in poetry at
Wichita State Universi~y.
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St. John 's College . Winter 2 0 05
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�20
{ATOMIC
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2I
THE NEGOTIATOR
From the Seminar Table to International Relations
BY RosEMARY HARTY
~--
HESE DAYS NICOLE NELSON-JEAN (AGIOO) LIVES
in Tokyo, where she directs the Department of Energy office and serves as Energy
Attache to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan.
In September, she received a Service to
America Medal honoring her for her success-at the age of 28-in negotiating bilateral agreements with Russia that led to
stronger security measures for that
country's nuclear material and weapons stockpile. She's the
mother of an n-year-old daughter, newly wed to a Marine, and
ambitious enough to follow her career in public service as far as it
will take her.
But it all started very modestly with an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As a college student, she was assigned
to a project tracking and cleaning up so-called "legacy waste"
from the lab where the atomic bomb was developed in the I940S.
In the lab's early days, materials like cobalt or cesium were
dumped into nearby canyons and carried by rainwater into
surrounding areas, she explains.
"My primary job was to get people to sign access agreements for
the government to come on their property, do a site survey, and if
necessary, clean it up and restore it," she explains. With her clipboard and her I.D. badge, Nelson-Jean was like a young Erin
Brockovich, traveling through the Los Alamos area, visiting
homes, mnches, and Indian reservations. One man, in his gos,
lived in a mobile home on a large tract ofland. "He was extremely
paranoid and wouldn't let anyone on his property," she recalls.
Nelson-Jean visited with him, listened to his stories, and, after
about a month of visits, left with a signed access agreement. "He
used to be the locksmith at Los Alamos during the time of Oppenheimer-he knew it all," she says.
Nelson-Jean had a family connection to Los Alamos. Raised by
her father, who had a military career, she was born in Morocco
and had lived in Spain and Italy. Mter retiring from the military,
her father went to work in nuclear engineering and was at Los
Alamos when Nelson-Jean was in college. Nelson-Jean landed
summer internships, founded the lab 's first student organization,
and was soon recruited by the lab's nuclear nonproliferation area.
Here, her language skills were a plus: She had learned Arabic as a
child and continued studying the language in college. She began
{ THE
CoLLEGE .
translating documents from Arabic to English-and, since some of
the information was determined as classified, earned a security.
clearance before she had a bachelor's degree. Mter graduating
from Grambling State University with her degree in political science, she went to work full time at the laboratory for one of the
defense contractors installed at LANL.
While she was working at the lab, Nelson-Jean applied to the
St. John's Graduate Institute in Santa Fe. "I really wanted to hone
my critical thinking and writing skills," she says. She had just
applied to the GI in Santa Fe when she was asked to take a temporary job working at the Department of Energy headquarters in
Washington, D.C. As a short-term contractor on loan from the
lab , she helped coordinate a nonproliferation exposition on
Capitol Hill. She met then-Secretary of Energy Federico Pefia.
"He asked me if there was anything I ever needed to come and talk
to him about it." Nelson-Jean said she'd love to work for the DOE,
and shortly after returning to New Mexico, she was called for a job
interview in Washington. Mter she joined the EneTgy Department
(still as a contractual employee), she put her graduate degree
plans back on the front burner. "Once I found out there was a
St. John's in Annapolis, it made it a lot easier to move to Washington. I was really sold on the GI," she says.
Status as a full-fledged federal employee came the month before
she graduated from the GI. Nelson-Jean was hired as a project
manager in the DOE's Materials Protection, Control and
Accounting Program. She was assigned to projects geared to helping Russia protect its nuclear facilities-and an estimated 6oo
metric tons of weapons-attractive materials in the country. Later,
her work came under the jurisdiction of the National Nuclear
Security Administration.
The two nations continue to work cooperatively to secure
Russian materials, but certain agreements had not been signed
when Nelson-Jean joined the effort. She believed that only face-toface meetings would facilitate negotiations, and she soon found
herself leading a delegation of U.S. security specialists and
scientists to the Arctic Circle. "I flew on Russian airlines, on
planes with bald tires. It's worse when you have 30-degree-belowzero temperatures, and the runway is a sheet of ice. The guest
houses were livable, but when you turned the water on, lots
of brown gunk came out," she recalls.
St. John's College. Winter 2005
}
In the negotiations, Nelprograms, technical center
son-Jean was at a disadvandesigns, and construction
tage-not because she lacked
schedules for the facility.
a science degree and not
Her award was a nice plus,
because she is an Mricanbut Nelson-Jean modestly
American woman. Instead,
says the real reward lies in
her youth worked against
the work itself. In her new
her. "In Russia," she says,
role in Japan , nuclear ener"they respect expeTience
gy is just one of the issues
moTe than anything, and
she handles. Her n-year-old
when you're young, how
daughter, Rachelle, attends
much experience can you
an American school in
have?"
Tokyo and may have inherIt was in overcoming that
ited her mother's skills.
barrier that heT Graduate
"When it comes to negotiatInstitute experiences proved
ing, she has it down pat,"
most helpful. She was able to
says Nelson-Jean. Her husCrOSS the boundaries of age and ethnicity How DO YOU BREAK THE ICE IN A ROOM
band, Patrick, is stationed about IO hours
because she knew that genuine conversation FULL OF RussiAN SciENTISTS? NICOLE
away at a U.S. military base in Iwakuni.
cultivates trust and respect. "The ability to NELSON-JEANWOULDTALKBOOKS.
Nelson-Jean has been adapting to a new
learn about different cultures, to really hear
culture again, by watching, listening, and
different perspectives without judging, to
respecting differences. "When dealing
communicate and talk with other people-all
with Russians, you can slam your books
were developed sitting around the seminar
and throw your papers-in Japan it's very
table at St. John's," she says.
civilized and very quiet. The Russians,
She had also read Tolstoy at the college
they're tough, and they're very good at negoand was able to convey true interest and
tiating. With the Japanese, they deal with
appreciation for Russian history and culture.
things by not dealing with them so directly."
NICOLE NELSON-JEAN (AGIOO)
Her knowledge of other classics in the WestWhen pressed, Nelson-Jean acknowledges
ern canon gave her the chance to talk with
that the world is perhaps a little bit safer for
the Russians about something other than weapons-grade plutothe work she has done. When she made her first trip to Russia,
nium. "Many of the people you deal with who have reached high
"September I I hadn't happened yet." What the NNSA seeks to
levels with scientific backgrounds are also very well read in the
prevent-unsecured nuclear material falling into the hands of a
classics," she explains.
terrorist group-seemed a more distant threat than it does today.
One of the best outcomes of the negotiations was a new cooperThe terrorist attacks sharpened her focus and have helped shape
ative agreement with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Another
her career. "I feel better that our cooperation is stronger with
was the establishment of the Kola Technical Center, the first
Russia today," she says. "It's made my work even more satisfying.
multimillion-dollar service and training center for securing
I feel like I'm making a difference. I hope I am."-$nuclear material and weapons in Russia. Nelson-Jean worked with
the Russian navy and Russian contractors to develop training
"In Russia they
respect experience
more than anything. "
{ THE
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St. John's College. Winter 2005
}
�22
{ATOMIC
JoHNNIES}
{ATOMIC
JoHNNIES}
BEYOND
THE BOMB
Johnnies Pursue Research Questions at Los Alamos
DY ANDRA MAGURAN
INCE
J.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER LED A TEAM
of scientists in developing the atomic
bomb at a laboratory created on the site
of a former boarding school in I943, it's
been difficult for the sprawling Los
Alamos National Laboratory to promote
an image of being anything other than a
secretive place where nuclear weapons
are developed. Santa Fe senior Chris
Horne witnessed this view firsthand last summer when he
went to work at Los Alamos as an intern and encountered a
gathering of anti-war protesters. It was a bit ironic, he
thought, considering he was assigned to the lab's project
focused on efforts to find a cure for HN.
About 40 miles northwest of Santa Fe, Los Alamos
National Laboratory is the nation's leading science
research facility, currently operated by the University of
California for the Energy Department's National Nuclear
Security Administration. Together with Sandia National
Laboratories, the laboratory is the state's largest employer,
and many Johnnies work there as scientists, researchers,
project managers, and in various support roles. Many more
Johnnies have taken advantage ofthe laboratory's student
internship program, which employs about 2,ooo students
every year.
{ TH E
CoLLEGE .
The development of nuclear weapons is, of course, still a
major part of the laboratory's work, and some Johnnies are
part of that. But Horne says that the public is generally
unaware of the scope of research conducted at Los Alamos.
Horne worked as a bioinformatician on a project devoted to
using LANL's worldwide database ofHN virus information
to better understand the strain responsible for the AIDS
pandemic. In the summer internship, Horne used mathematical models and computer programs to annotate a
viral genome. He organized raw genetic data-namely, the
basic nucleotide series constituting the DNA of his
assigned virus-into charts, graphics, and text to create a
resource for medical and pharmaceutical researchers.
Since he recognized certain repeated portions of the series
in the viral genome he was annotating, he was given liberty
to name them as he wished. Inspired by the Iliad, he
gave the sequences names such as Agamemnon, Leitos,
and Euryalos.
Along with gaining experience in a scientific setting,
Horne enjoyed adapting his seminar skills to the professional environment of the lab. He gave two presentations,
one for the Annual Summer Student Symposium, a showcase for work done by summer interns. Since he'd been
annotating a viral genome, Horne created a poster displaying the sample gene record for one of the 77 genes he'd
St. John's College . Winter 20 0 5
}
examined. His other presentation-on SciENTIST EDWARD TELLER (CENTER) AT
ers can speak, to understand the
FuLLER LoDGE IN Los ALAMOS IN I946.
open reading frames, a type of gene
mechanics of this speech, and to alter
found in DNA-was part of a series of T ELLER WOULD LATER BECOME KNOWN AS
these mechanics to develop more
THE "FATHER OF THE HYDROGEN BOMB."
meetings that were held to update
efficient [computer] languages," says
members of his immediate group on
Hurwitz.
contemporary issues in genetics and
In his two years interning at the lab ,
virology. Mter his 45-minute talk, he
Hurwitz published six papers and was
ably defended his work in the question
the primary author for four of them. (A
period-even though he felt a bit intimsample title: "End-to-End Performance
idated facing a room full of scientists.
of Io-Gigabit Ethernet on Commodity
An internship in computational
Systems" published last year in IEEE
science was an equally rewarding expeMicro.) He was also part of a team that
Gus HuRWITZ (sFog)
rience for Justin "Gus" Hurwitz
set a new record in the Guinness Book of
(SFo3), who completed two internships before going on to
World Records for the fastest transmission of data over the
work full time at the lab. During his junior and senior years,
Internet (2.38 billion bits per second). "The lab is a serious
and for a year after graduation, Hurwitz worked at the lab
place to work," Hurwitz says, and a place where even Johnconducting experimental and theoretical research in areas
nies without a graduate-level scientific background can
of high-performance computer networking and protocol
contribute a great deal. "If you show your mentor that you
design in the Advanced Computing Laboratory, or ACL,
are capable of contributing to the work, the only limits will
part of the Computer and Computational Science Division.
be those you place on yourself."
Hurwitz's work in high-performance computer networking
In the working environment of Los Alamos, Hurwitz
was designed to improve the performance of the supercomfound similarities to the intellectual environment
puters used in nuclear science simulation.
fostered at St. John's. "The laboratory is a place where
"In more Johnnie-centric terms, I was a computational
people embrace inquiry and challenging questions," he
philologist, working to increase the rate at which computsays. He never encountered anyone who thought that the
"The laboratory is a
place wherepeople
embrace inquiry and
challenging questions. "
{ TH E
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St. John's College. Winter 2 005
}
�,-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-- -----
{ATOMIC
{ATOMIC
}OHNNIES}
DEBRA RuTHERFORD
HAS SPENT MOST OF
HER PROFESSIONAL
LIFE AT Los ALAMos.
liberal arts were useless; to the conweapons play in the lab-like me in my
trary, many of his co-workers with scifirst few months; you \vill meet moral
entific and technical backgrounds 'vish
delusionists , and those who work \vith
they had had the opportunity to read
the deadliest materials mankind has ever
the classics. "One of my co-workers
known and don't care, for whatever
always had a book \vith him. We had a
reason, to ask these questions. You \vill
number of good talks about Austen's
DEBRA RuTHERFORD ( sF8o)
meet idealists, who believe that they are
Emma, Descartes, and Locke."
helping to prevent more weapons from
c
Now that he's left the laboratory,
being built by maintaining the ones that
Hur\vitzhas turned his thoughts more
we already have," he says.
frequently to the difficult ethical questions he has previ"In short, the lab is a place on the edge of the greatest
ously avoided. A Johnnie who works at ~os Alamos \vill
moral dilemmas that I have ever encountered. Those
meet people whose views run a \vide gamut. "You \vill meet
questions are rarely asked or discussed, but they are always
people who have been at the lab since the Cold War for
there under the surface. And, if you scrape down below the
whom nuclear weapons were a necessary reality that could
surface, you \vill find as many understandings, acceptances, justifications, avoidances, and explanations of these
not be questioned. You \vill meet skeptics who question the
role that nuclear weapons played during the Cold War and
questions as there are employees at the lab. But, the most
the logic behind the arms races; you will meet
common response that you \vill find, nowadays, is, "I don't
people who do not understand the role that nuclear
know.'
"The intellectual
rigor. .. is astounding. "
{ THE
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St. fohn's College. Winter 2005
}
JoHNNIES}
'Yyworkis
tangential to kzlling
people and deJ'troying
the world"
''My work is tangential to killing peoin the area of nonproliferation. The reasoning and diplomatic skills she learned
ple and destroying the world. It is not
Gus HuRWITZ
at St. John's have proven as useful to her
the clean morality of a book, the ponas her scientific and technical training.
derous morality of Augustine, or the
technical morality of Kant; and it is far
"I participate and lead international
and domestic advisory panels and working groups, which
scarier than even the worst of that which Nietzsche could
require the skills one learns in seminar," she says.
conceive .... Students of philosophy in general \villlikely be
Rutherford feels the lab's most famous work, the Mansurprised by just how introspective most scientists are
about their work."
hattan Project, was a significant contribution to the end of
In addition to continuing as a consultant for the computWWII. But she is also impressed that the spirit of inquiry
er science company he founded while still in high school,
and the level of scientific excellence fostered in the
Hur\vitz is now making plans to attend law school with an
lab's early days have continued into the fields of physics,
eye to one day working at the intersection of science and
chemistry, biology, engineering, and mathematics. The
people she works \vith and leads at Los Alamos are proud of
law.
Unlike Hur\vitz and Horne, Debra Rutherford (SF8o)
their work and believe they are contributing to America's
freedom, she adds.
can provide few details about her work at Los Alamos,
where she took a short-term job after graduation
"The intellectual rigor \vith which national and internabefore going on to earn a master's degree in chemical and
tional scientific endeavors are pursued is astounding,"
nuclear engineering from the University of New Mexico.
Rutherford says.-$-She has worked full time at the laboratory since rg8g in
areas of nuclear technology
and nuclear material management-in short, helping to
safeguard the nation's nuclear
stockpile.
A clue to why she can't
say much about her work
may be found in the title she
holds now: Project Leader and
Nonproliferation and International Security Analyst in
the International Research,
Analysis, and Development
Group at the lab. What
Rutherford can say about
her job is that she leads a I2nation working group on the
need for critical experiments
AT
Los ALAMos, Gus HuRWITZ
CONDUCTED 'RESEARCH, WROTE
PAPERS, AND HELPED SET A NEW
WORLD RECORD FOR INTERNET
SPEED.
{ THE
CoLLEGE.
St. fohn's College. Winter 2005}
I
I
�{HOMECOMING}
{HOMECOMING}
HoMECOMING NOTEs:
ODYSSEY
Merit Award winners: William A.
Carter, class of 1940; Charlotte King,
class of 1959
Honorary alumnus: Glenn Housley,
class of 2004 (For more on awards,
see the Alumni Association section,
p. 47·)
IN OCTOBER
Homer Attracts a Crowdfor Annapolis Homecoming
ou couldn't say that Homecoming 2004 in Annapolis
lacked drama. Not with a
dozen or so costumed
students acting out the
homecoming scene of the
Odyssey in Iglehart Hall. Alumni happily
played the role of hungry suitors, noshing
on Greek appetizers offeta cheese,
hummus, and olives while they awaited
the banquet.
You couldn't say it lacked pizzazz-not
with a flock of plastic pink flamingos
leading the way to the picnic tent
("Kalypso's Isle"), where ceramic pigs
graced the table and calypso music played
on a steel drum had revelers dancing in
the buffet line .
·
And you certainly couldn't say it lacked
a good story, not with a dozen members
Y
of the class ofi954 , the last all-male class
to graduate at St. John' s, back on campus.
Rallied to attend by reunion class leader
and Annapolis tutor Sam Kutler, the
boisterous group matched much younger
Johnnies in their enthusiasm for the
weekend's festivities. On Saturday afternoon, they lingered in the private dining
room of Randall Hall telling stories and
drinking wine until they could be coaxed
outside for a group photo.
Arnold Markowitz stopped to comment
on changes in the main dining hall, where
bow-tied waiters did the serving in his
day. "Chairs," he observed. "We didn't
have chairs. We sat on benches." The
group disagreed on a few things. One
remembered milk cartons being lobbed at
the students by the servers; another was
Homecoming lecture: "Human Rights
from Antigone to Rosa Parks," Peter
Weiss, class ofr949
certain pitchers of milk were set on the
table.
Other members of the class were
pleased to see that the Chinese paintings
of a royal couple installed during President Dick Weigle's era were still hanging
in the dining room. The portraits were
among the few things that haven't
changed a great deal since these class
members attended the college . When
they were on campus, Campbell Hall was
brand new, Mellon Hall wasn't even a
blueprint, and students directed their
energy toward thwarting attempted
restrictions on their social lives that
today's students wouldn't believe.
With 450 students-compared to about
125 in 1954-the student body today seems
very large. "We were a small class," says
Bernie Jacobs, of New York City. "Only I7
of us graduated. It was a brief ceremony."
Several of the alumni remembered the
turmoil when women joined the student
body in their sophomore year. Eric
Crooke was one of several members of
the class to marry one ofthe first female
Johnnies. He and his wife, Sarah (class of
1955), live in Silver Spring, Md., and he's
been back to campus frequently since
graduation.
A nephew of tutor John Kieffer
(HA7o), Crooke learned of the college
through his uncle, but he came to
St. John's ofhis own choosing. "I've
never regretted it," he said, though he
heard many, many times, "you look like
John Kieffer" when he got to Annapolis.
Biggest turnout: Class of rg84, with
39 members registered. Annastasia
Kezar, assisted by Lenore Parens,
mustered the good showing, in part
by compiling for class members a CD
of '8os hits including "Rock the Casbah" and "Rock Lobster." A close
second was the class of rgg4, with
25 registrants.
Gerald Geddiman came all the
way from California for the
reunion. He hadn't visited the
campus since the day he received
his diploma under the Liberty
Tree. " I like what's happened," he
said, looking around. "I do like
the Greenfield Library. Next, I
want to go over and see Woodward
Hall-what's it called now?"
Santa Fe tutor emeritus Robert
Sacks-with Kutler one of two
members of the class to become
a tutor-was swept up in the nostalgia of the afternoon. "Fifty
years-it doesn't seem that long,"
he said.
The 1954 class members were
among the most honored guests at
what turned out to be the biggest
Homecoming yet in Annapolis .
More than 400 Johnnies attended
all or part of the weekend. At
Saturday evening's banquet, the
gymnasium was transformed (via
cardboard columns) into a palace,
where an energetic group of
students led by Julie Janicki (Ao6)
reunited Odysseus and Penelope
once more.
Inspired by the performance,
one alumnus giving his class toast
raised his glass to a true honorary
Johnnie. "Let's hear it for
Homer!" he said, starting the
alumni chanting: "Homer!
Homer! Homer!"._
Theme tchotchke: handy St. John's
backpack-good for any odyssey
TOP TO BOTTOM: STUDENTS GREET GUESTS TO
THE PICNIC TENT; MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF
I954;
-ROSEMARY HARTY
PENELOPE AND ODYSSEUS, TOGETHER
AGAIN; AND MINGLING AT THE SATURDAY
COCKTAIL PARTY.
I945, AND
I949o PONDER A
CHARLES NELSON, CLASS OF
JIM CONRAD, CLASS OF
PHOTOS BY G ARY PIERPOINT
SEMINAR QUESTION.
{ THE
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St. John's College. Winter 2005
}
{ THE
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St. John's College. W inter 2005
}
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{THE
FACULTY}
{BIBLIOFILE}
IN ARisTOTLE~s FooTSTEPS
pARADISE LOST: REGAINED
A Healthy Marsh Enhances Freshman Laboratory
PARADISE LosT, r668-rg68 :
THREE CENTURIES oF CoMMENTARY
BY RoBINWErss (sFGI87)
On an autumn day in
Annapolis, at the foot of the
Boathouse, marsh grasses
wave along College Creek, a
testament to the health of
this six-year-old wetlands
restoration site. Cattails,
pinecones, and fist-size
mushrooms grow vigorously along the banks.
On their own initiative,
students often use the
marsh for projects such as
reseeding oysters, Environmental Club activities,
marsh cleanup , and independent research. Since
efforts to restore the grasslands have taken hold,
"we have more fish, crabs,
heron ...everything," says
tutor Kathy Blits.
Trekking through a
muddy marsh into a murky creek
isn't for everyone. But a few
weeks before the season turned,
some students in freshman lab
and a couple of tutors-enriching
the practica side of their biology
curriculum- took the plunge.
"Some ofmystudentswentin up
to their necks," says freshman
lab tutor Margaret Kirby. Using a
huge net supplied by tutor Jason
Tipton, they emerged from the
creek with four- to eight-inchlong fish . "We were just lucky
that we got really cool ones,"
Kirby says.
Thtor Christian Holland (A84)
recalls a handful of students
"leaping into the water to catch
a bunch of fish for the laboratory
tanks" after Holland showed
them Tipton's techniques. His
students continue to observe
these 40-some fish, well past the
fish sequence oflab.
This method of shallow
fishing with nets, called seining,
isn't new to the college, nor is
the aquarium in Mellon Hall,
which has been augmented over
the years by lab director Mark
"Small ugly;
insign!ficantfoh
consumed
[Aristotle :S}
thinking. "
TUTOR JASON TIPTON
Daly. In 1999, the college undertook a pilot project to restore a
portion of the College Creek
shoreline, with funding from
several sources including the
city of Annapolis and Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The
project proved successful in
increasing the number and
variety of wildlife habitats along
the creek and filtering stormwater runoff. When Tipton started
teaching three years ago, he was
thrilled with the pocket marsh
on campus, specifically its
possibilities for, what he calls,
"the pursuit of slippery prey."
The ubiquitous minnows aside,
Tipton names sunfish, silversides, croaker, yellow perch and
"FISH ARE A WORLD
I
KNOW," SAYS
ANNAPOLIS TUTOR JASON TIPTON
pipefish as some of the fresh
water and marine life plentiful in
this estuary.
"Fish are a world I know,"
Tipton says. An ichthyologist,
with a master's in evolutionary
biology and a Ph.D. in philosophy, Tipton wrote his dissertation on Aristotle's On the Parts
ofAnimals. Before coming to
St. John's, he spent a year in
Greece as a Fulbright fellow
tracking down, and finding,
Aristotle's fish. " One doesn't
have to be an ichthyologist,"
Tipton says, to stumble around
in the marsh.
''I'm paraphrasing, but
Aristotle says: 'Don't be afraid
to root around in the organic
world; there are gods here too.'
I love that idea. There 's something about getting your hands
dirty; Aristotle suggests something rhetorically powerful
about that."
More than 2,300 years ago,
Aristotle paid careful attention
{ THE CoLLEGE. St. John 's College . Winter 2005 }
to the eating, mating, and
breeding habits of fish in
their habitats. "Small,
ugly, insignificant fish
consumed his thinking,"
he says. Jars of alcoholpreserved goby and
blenny-Aristotle's one
fish, found to be two
through Mr. Tipton's
research- line a windowsill in Mellon. On one
jar, crowded with sturdy
grayish-brown fish , each
about two fingers long,
the label reads: " Bay of
Kallori, Lesvos, 4 km. N.
ofPyrrah, 75 m below s
altmarsh."
Nearby, tanks of marsh
fish from College Creek,
some wiggly, some mellow, inspire ongoing
student examination.
Atop one tank, a note
warns observers not to
touch or "you might get a case of
nasty microbes."
Freshman lab assistant Allison
Hennigan (Ao6) explains the
truth behind the joke: "Little
white crustaceans, about the
size of a dime," had attached
themselves to the gills and eyes
of certain fish. Eventually, the
arthropod parasites would have
worked their way into the blood
vessels on the gills or, after
sucking eye fluid, entered the
bloodstream through the eyes.
Biocalm, an anesthetic, seemed
to get the fish drunk, recalls
Hennigan: "The fish were doing
backllips. The parasites seemed
drunk, too ." The drug worked,
and the fish are healthy.
Students don't dissect these
specimens. Instead, Daly goes
to a local seafood store to get
" kitchen fish " such as rockfish,
flounder, and bluefish, for
students to dissect in lab. -t-
Edited by Earl Miner, co-edited by
William Moeck (A80), corresponding
editor Steven Jablonski
Bucknell University Press, 2004
BY G. A u GusT DErMEL, SF2004
---·--hen William Moeck
graduated from
St. John's in 1980,
he could not have
envisioned one
day co-editing a
massive volume of commentary on
Paradise Lost. First, like many Johnnies,
Moeck had developed "a healthy contempt
for secondary sources." Second, he had
skipped the Milton reading and seminars.
"I r em ember fearing that Milton would
be a boring or difficult author," Moeck
says. "Samuel Johnson once said that while
everyone could recognize the greatness of
Paradise Lost, no man ever wished it
longer."
When Moeck moved to New York after
graduation, he kept his Shawcross edition
of the poem along with his other Program
books. Fe eling guilty that he had never
gotten around to it, Moeck toted the book
along on vacation many years later and
discovered that he had missed a truly great
book. "I recall with vividness that on
vacation in 1988 I found clever and
Paradise Lost 1668-1968
,.HREE CENTURIES OF COMMENTARY
"
tdttor Enrl M1ner
Co·Edttor Wtlham Moec.k
Corresponding £d1tor Steven Jablonski
admirable the speeches of Satan.
I r ecall how moving the domestic
tragedy of Adam and Eve to be,
when Adam practically insults her
for wanting to go off to the garden
alone. If we are able to read
Genesis as literature nowadays ,
Milton must be given partial credit
for that change, fm he has told a
better story than the Bible itself,"
he says.
Reading Milton inspired Moeck
to look into graduate school, and
he later entered a doctoral progTam in English literature at City
University of New York. As he
wrote his dissertation, he began to
examine how passages from other
works influenced Milton. His dissertation adviser connected him
with Princeton University professor Earl Miner on the project that
would eventually become Paradise Lost
1668-tg68: Three Centuries of Commentary.
When he first conceived of the book
more than a decade ago, Miner (who died
last April) envisioned a reference book of
allusions on the Milton epic. Miner and
an early collaborator on the project,
Steven Jablonski, had begun collating representative work from scholars of Milton.
When Moeck joined the pToject in 1997,
"a different sort of problem emerged in
terms of defining what an allusion is."
"Imitation, echo, copy, allusion-even
parody and farce-all form a network of
words with related meanings . They imply
some sort of relationship between one text
and another that can be studied and
qualified. But how rigorously can one
establish how they differ from each other?
Is an unconscious borrowing also to be
considered as related to allusion?"
Moeck provided an example in the
oft-quoted passage where Satan says,
"The mind ... Can make a Heaven of Hell,
a Hell of Heaven."
"Has Milton here borrowed unwittingly
from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's.
Dream, where one character says 'I'll
follow thee , and make a heaven of h ell'
(2.1.243)? The character in question ,
Helena, is merely the frustrated lover of
Demetrius, and not the diabolic perverter
of humankind. Would Milton in his lines
thus more likely be responding to the
{ T HE C oL L EGE. S t. John 's College . Win ter 2 005 }
IT TOOK HIM IO YEARS TO GET TO THE READING,
BUT PARADISE L OST EVENTUALLY CAPTIVATED
WILLIAM MOECK.
metaphysically-oriented Hamlet instead,
who also says ' There is nothing either good
or bad, but thinking makes it so' (2.2.24849)? Or do we have to look elsewhere for
Milton's sources, in Thomas Browne, for
example, or in the writing of the stoics?"
Together Miner and Moeck combed
through the available work on Milton
and chose commentary on each of the
12 books ofMilton's poem. A research
library unto itself, the book includes the
best commentary from Patrick Hume
(r6gs) to Alastair Fowler in rg68.
Now a pTofessor at Nassau Community
College in Garden City, N.Y., Moeckis
reading Augustine , Freud, Darwin, and
Marx with students in an interdisciplinary
program. The contempt he once held
for secondary sources has diminished
considerably, but he still believes in the
value oheading original texts before the
commentary of others.
"I think the very idea of such a reading
of the classics is embattled nowadays , and
probably the strongest line of defense
against the pre-professional training
vaunted by most undergraduate schools
would be to invoke the shibboleth ' critical
thinking,' " h e says. ~
�,-----------~-------·~- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
{ALUMNI
{ALUMNI
PROFILE}
I've just completed r6 weeks of
training in getting certified as a
volunteer hospital chaplain."
CoMMITTED TO HELPING FAMILIES AND CHILDREN
Linnea Back Klee, A67, Balances I deals and Details
BY CAROLINE KNAPP, SFoi
rom her fourth-floor
office in San Francisco's Mission District,
Linnea Back Klee
(A67) has sweeping
views of the city, from
Nob Hill across the bay to the
shipyards of Oakland. Seagulls and
ragged palm trees flap in the foggy
air; down below, high school
students straggle down the sidewalk,
swinging their backpacks. Construction cranes sway up over the traffic
lights of Van Ness.
Inside, order reigns . Klee's deskfrom which she directs one of the
city's largest nonprofits, administers
an annual budget of$ so million, and
manages a staff ofr3o-has perhaps
three stacks of paper on it, each
corralled in its own tray. There are
no aging Post-its, no toppling files,
no stray paperclips. Even her
awards, bronze plaques from the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors
and various nonprofit groups, are
neatly aligned on the bookcase.
The Children's Council of San
Francisco, Klee's professional home
since 1993, strives to make sure that San
Francisco's working families can meet one
of the most basic needs of daily life : affordable , high-quality child care. The council's
referral programs put parents in touch
with child-care providers, its education
programs train caregivers, and, perhaps
most crucially, its subsidy programs
administer the monthly payments that
put child care within the financial reach of
low-income mothers and fathers.
But, not to lose sight of the social
environment in which all these individual
choices are made, the Children's Council
is also a major advocacy force in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Washington.
Through public policy lobbying and
grassroots organizing, Children's Council
employees and volunteers do their best
to bring the needs of working parents,
child-care providers, and children before
lawmakers and voters.
A "QUIET"
JoHNNIE, LINNEA BAcK
KLEE FOUND HER VOICE IN ADVOCACY.
her sophomore year, Klee wrote a
letter to tutor Barbara Leonard
(HAss) about the difficulties of
being a quiet Johnnie, packed her
bags, and went on to earn a degree
at George Washington University.
Klee's journey from the ether to
the grassroots can be traced in part
through her higher degrees: after
GWU, she earned a master's in cultural anthropology from Catholic
University, then a Ph.D. in medical
anthropology from the University of
California, San Francisco. Klee had
considered following her husband,
Earl Klee, into teaching. But her
thesis project, on cultural perceptions of illness in history, refused to
be contained in the classroom:
by1983, the AIDS epidemicwas
exploding like a shell over San
Francisco, and suddenly the most
interesting sources weren't in the
library. They were in the hospitals and in
the streets. Thus began Klee's decade of
~eldwork in medical anthropology.
An introvert no more, she interviewed
women about their attitudes toward childbirth, former GM workers about their
alcohol abuse, children of alcoholics
about their parents. In 1985 she joined a
colleague at the newly founded Center for
the Vulnerable Child at Oakland's Children's Hospital, where she continued her
work as a researcher with the center's target population: children in foster care. "I
loved going and meeting all those people
and talking to them," she says.
But her work at the Center for the
Vulnerable Child was leading her toward
another emerging talent: As program
coordinator of an innovative and perpetually underfunded nonprofit, Klee began
writing grants. By the time she left in 1993
to become the executive director of the
Children's Council, she had become very
"People arefinally
starting to get it. "
LINNEA BACK KLEE
(A67)
At the helm of all this, Klee, a gracious,
attentive woman with a generous smile, is
the first to admit that her work is not for
everyone. "It goes from the sublime to the
ridiculous," she says. "I've got employee
parking problems .in front of me one
minute, then major public funding
questions."
But Klee's background has made her
comfortable in balancing ideals and
details . Although she attended St. John's
40 years ago, she still remembers loving
Euclid and the freshman-year program.
"I really loved the curriculum," she says a
little wistfully. "But I just couldn't talk. I
was an introvert in an extrovert's college."
Klee followed her brother, Eric Back (A6s),
to Annapolis in I963. But midway through
{ THE
CoLLEGE .
St. John 's College. Winter 2005
continued
}
HEl\'RY SHRYOCK JR. was recently
awarded "The President's Call
to Service Award" by the
President's Council on Service
and Civic Participation.
1 935
"I'm still working- practicing law
for the past 66 years and I hope
to get it right soon!" writes
RICHARD WOODMAN.
Milestones: GIL CRANDALL writes
that he celebrated his 8gth
birthday on July r, 2004, and
classmate MARTIN RAuscH
celebrated his goth birthday
on July 8, 2004.
ERNEST HEINMULLER writes to
say that the " 'keep reading, keep
learning' credo ofWinkie
[Stringfellow Barr] is still alive:
1943
At 85, MILTON PERLMAN is still
reading many hours a day: "The
most important benefit of the
Program is a love of reading. I am
still hoping that at least the first
part of Proust's novel will be
restored to the fourth-year list."
GEORGE R. TRIMBEL JR. hecame
a great-grandfather with two
great-grandsons born one week
apart in October 2004.
NoTES}
eager for the homecoming: "We
have not seen him for three years ,
given our own driving limitations-twenty minutes to and
from church each Sunday is the
longest, with Rita on 24-hour
oxygen, etc."
GEORGE WEND continues to
participate in the Baltimore
Alumni Association chapter's
book discussion group. The
summer before last, he took a
trip to Peru to visit Machu
Picchu, the Andes, and the
Amazon. This past summer,
he took a two-week river cruise
from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
THE REV. FREDERICK P. DAVIS
writes from California that his
son, David, is expected back
home from a convalescent center
early this spring after suffering
several health problems, including a broken leg and infections
that settled in both legs. The
Rev. Davis and his wife, Rita, are
continuedJr:om page 30
good indeed at nonprofit management and
her grant writing was paying the salaries of
the entire staff.
In her I I years with the Children's
Council, Klee has supervised its expansion
from a neighborhood organization with
35 employees to its current status as a
statewide player with 130 employees and its
own building. She's been gratified to see
public opinion shift on child care ("people
are finally starting to get it").
Today Klee's work continues to walk the
line between the big picture and the individual story. These days, she's the one who
Enjoying the retired life,
JOAN CoLE just returned from an
Alaskan cruise. "The glaciers,
mountains, lakes, and wild life
are too impressive for words .
Residents spoke about their
state with the enthusiasm and
pride of staunch St. Johnnies,"
she writes.
gets int~rviewed for articles, and at work
she goes weeks without seeing a child. She
writes the position papers for the council's
public policy committee and sits on the
policy boards of sister nonprofits. But she
is acutely aware that the 30o,ooo children
on the waiting lists for public assistance
in California represent not only budget
dollars but also individual families with
complex, often pressing needs.
What more, she's aware that the work
she strives so hard to keep organized, there
in her office with the city laid out all
around her, is work that truly can- in the
most simple ways- help many of those people. Nonprofit management is a good field,
{ TH E
CoL L EGE .
St. John's College. Winter 2005
HILDRErH BECKER (HILDY
SMITH) writes: ''I'm a happy
grandmother again: grandson
Alexander Paige, son of rg88
[Annapolis] alumnus CHRISTINA
MYER PAIGE. He joins his sister
Adela, who is now nine. Christina is working full time as a high
school math teacher. What have I
been doing since attending the
college? I pursue my studies in
philosophy and other esoteric
pursuits."
1962
JOHN FRANKLIN MILLER is president of the board of the Library
of American Landscape History.
1957
1 949
rg6o
rg68
PETER CoEN (A) is currently
employed as an assistant public
defender in Bradenton, Manatee
County, Florida.
ANTIGONE PHALARES (SF) spent a
week in Santa Fe in July staying
with ALLISON KARSLAKE LEMONS
(SF68), DoN (SFGigr), and two
she says, "if you're interested in pursuing
the Good. That's what we do."
As for less practical pursuits of the
Good, Klee still hasn't given up on the
idea of St. John's. She and her husband, a
professor at UC Berkeley, visited Santa Fe
last summer and are already thinking that
perhaps, when they retire, getting a few
more degrees might not be amiss . "I
wouldn't have any problem talking in
seminar now," Klee says, laughing. --$-
Caroline Knapp lives in Berkeley,
California, and is an editorial assistant at
the University of California Press.
}
�{ALUMNI
sons Micha 1md Than, and a
St. Johnnie , JAKE, a junior at the
Santa Fe campus. "We gathered
around the television listening to
the speeches of the Democratic
convention . It was delightful to
be amongst politically like-minded friends. Allison and I enjoyed
a three-night, do-it-yourself
retreat at the Holy Archangels
skete near Canones in northern
New Mexico. We had lunch with
Claudia and Sam Lancombe and
reminisced and sputtered over
the political mess-o-potamia our
government has gotten us
embroiled in. Both Allison and I
fac e the empty nest; this fall her
sons leave for Italy and Hungary.
My daughter, Heather, is already
in Paris."
1969
LINDA M. BERNSTEIN (A) writes:
"Our first grandchild was born in
August. We are fortunate our son
and his wife and their new son
live in Philadelphia so we can
enjoy their company and watch
him grow. Meanwhile, our third
son has left home to become a
freshman at Guilford College in
Greensboro, N.C . We would
be 'empty-nesters' but our
middle son has moved back
home until he gets established
after graduating from Boston
University last May."
JoHN GOODWIN (SF) is now
marketing director at the Plaza
Hotel in Las Vegas, N.M. "I am
also the president of Habitat for
Humanity in Las Vegas llJ.ld with
any luck will be single soon! "
RACHEL HALLFORD 'I'REIMAN (A)
decided it was time to bring The
College up to date: "I divorced in
2001, and after my son entered
college, sold the house in New
York and returned to Lewistown,
Montana, where my brother
lives, last December. I am now
coordinator for the Retired and
Senior Volunteer Program covering Fergus County and Judith
Basin County. Since that is only
30 hours a week with no benefits,
I also work online 20 hours for
benefits . My oldest, Grace , is now
21 and a senior at the University
of Pennsylvania, majoring in history. My son Andrew is 19, a
sophomore at the University of
North Dakota, majoring in Air
Traffic Control and on an Air
Force ROTC scholarship, planning to go career Air Force. I love
being back in Montana. I was
born in Lewistown (left when I
was six) and therefore , for many
of the older folks I identify myself
by my grandfather, mother, and
her siblings. That slots me in the
scheme of things. I'm fortun ate
my family was liked back thenpeople have long memories out
here!"
If you've lost track of BRAD ARMs
(A), it's because he and his family
have been on the move: "2004
was the year of moving for
us ... three times! After living in
various parts of the country
based mainly on the job ... we
finally had a chance to pick where
we wanted to live . We had always
liked Oregon for its beauty and
friendliness .. .so in early 2004,
we sold our house in Simsbury.
Since the house sold quicker than
we expected, we moved into a
1930 Colonial, which we had
fixed up as an investment
property. We were there for two
months while we made arrangements to move West. And then it
was on to Lake Oswego, Ore.,
where we rented a house while we
decided exactly where we wanted
to live and what to buy. Finally,
on November 30 , we closed on
our new house in West Linn,
which is about ro miles south
of Portland. The house is comparable in size to the one in
{ TH E
CoLLE GE .
{ALUMNI
NoTES}
Simsbury. It is built on the hill,
which gives it a view of Mt. Hood
in back. Jen & Chris have started
classes here locally. Their interests are in computer animation
and web site design. Meanwhile,
we are settling into the new
house and learning about all that
Oregon has to offer."
ROBIN KOWALCHUK BURK (A) is
at West Point: "I have been
teaching at the U.S . Military
Academy for the last 3 years,
first in the computer science and
information technology
programs and now in the systems
engineering department, where
I currently advise groups of
seniors applying Multiple
Objective Decision Analysis and
simulation techniques to projects
for real-world clients. I've also
begun doctoral studies at SUNY
Albany in the Information
Science program, with a focus on
intelligent software agents and
their application to group
decision making. Best regards to
the staff at St. John's and to all
the alumni that ROGER (A74) and
I missed seeing this past weekend
at Homecoming."
· .. .... · · · · · · · · · · · · · · .. .. · · · · · · · · · · · .. ·
1973
DONNEL (A) andJANET O' FLYNN
(A74) moved to Hamilton, N.Y.,
home of Colgate University, on
Oct. r6 , 2004. Donnel will be
rector of St. Thomas' Episcopal
Church . Janet will work as a
therapist, probably in the public
schools. AIDAN O'FLYNN (Aos)
graduates in May. Kathleen
O'Flynn is now an EMT and
looking forward to joining a
New York ambulance crew.
1 974
MARIE CLARK AVERY (SF) has
four sons : Justin, 20; David, 18;
Josh, 14; and Tyrel, rr. She
taught for the Jicarilla Department of Education, Apache
Government. A founding
member of the National Campaign for Tolerance, she also
received the National Nomination to the Wall of Tolerance in
February 2oor. The wall, she
notes, was designed by Maya Lin
and is similar to the Vietnam
Wall. She started her master's
degree program in rggg and
most recently has been a special
education teacher in Espanola.
1 977
CLIFF ADAMS (A) is divorced
and has three children: " I live in
Germany, I'm traveling a lot,
and loving life."
JUDY KISTLER-ROBINSON (SF)
recently visited classmate ELIZABETH (COCHRAN) BOWDEN (SF)
at her home in Marblehead,
Mass. The two celebrated their
birthdays and being friends for
more than half their lifetimes at
the Kripalu Yoga Center in the
Berkshires. Judy also watched the
continued
AGGIE JACOBS (SF71) has been engaged in the
type of work that reaps real rewards: "Mter
three years of composing music for Hebrew
prayers , I am about to release a CD of my work.
I don't expect to make any money from it, but
I'm hoping that my music will find an audience." -*'"
S t. John 's College . Winter 2005
}
33
FRoM HINDU FESTIVAL To HIGH ScHooL BASEBALL
Alex Shear, SFoo, Explores Lffe Through Documentaries
BY R o s E MARY HARTY
LABoR oF l~ovE
M
NoTES}
lex Shear (SFoo) has
had front-row seats
to two very different
phenomena united
by the fanatic zeal of
their participants.
The first is the Maha Kumbh Mela,
a Hindu festival believed to be the
largest gathering of individuals in
the wOTld; 27 million people made
the pilgrimage to wash away their
sins at the Sangam at Allahabad in
January 2oor. The second is the
National High School Baseball
tournament in Japan, a two-week
contest which draws the rapt
attention of the whole baseballcrazed country every August.
In India, where he recorded
digital sound for the film Take Me to the
River in 2001, Shear worried about being
crushed in the crowds, never quite managed
to get enough to eat, and met a famous yogi
who had been holding his right arm up in
the air for 30 years. "His fingernails were six
inches long," says Shear.
Working on the baseball film, Kokoyakyu, in Japan last summer, Shear ate
sushi, worked long hours, and met
Takashima Kantoku, the most successful
high school baseball coach of all time.
"Many Japanese consider him a living
samurai," says Shear. This time Shear was
producer of the project, with responsibilities in fund-raising, accounting, research,
interviewing, and when it was his turn,
getting everyone lunch.
AB different as the two proj ects and
cultures are, Shear found a common thread
in the power of devotion to bring people
together: "There were some similarities in
that both were types of national fe stivals.
In India we had millions of people from
every possible state, and all these different
cultures were represented. The high school
tournament in Japan is the only national
event like this. It's on TV all day, 24 hours a
day and 20 million people tuned in to watch
opening ceremonies.
Only recently has Shear been able to
devote himself full time to documentary
filmmaking. After graduating from St. John's
in 2000, h e landed a job at a dot. com
company in his hometown of Boston. But
company Projectile Arts . He
helped secure $roo,ooo in grants
from foundations and sponsorship
from United Air Lines. " I like the
creative aspect, working out the
content of the film ," he says.
"And I like the
entrepreneurial aspect, starting
something from scratch, and
against all odds, making
it happen."
Shear has always been a big
baseball fan . "I felt there was ver y
little known in the U.S. about
Japanese baseball and it could be
a great way to learn about a very
mysterious culture. It's a filmmaker' s dream: passion, history,
culture, youth, sports- it really
has it all," he says
The crew interviewed players, coaches,
cheerleaders , and fans, and filmed some of
the most intensely played baseball Shear has
ever seen. The work could be grueling; the
t emperature in the stands reached rr7
degrees one day. One of the highlights for
Shear was meeting Hidcki Matsui,
who earned the nickname " Godzilla" in
Japan before going on to become a N.Y. Yankees star.
Immersion in such fanatical national
fervor gave Shear a lot to think about. "As
an American, I don't think I would want my
son to play ro hours ofbaseball a day. It's
kind of like milit ru:y sch ool."
Shear isn't sure he's found his career.
Low-budget documentary filmmaking, he
says, has its pros and cons. "Pros: it's
creatively and intellectually stimulating, you
are your ovm boss, and you get to travel and
meet fascinating people. Cons: no money,
job security, or vacation time; it takes
forever, and it's a nerve-wracking rollercoaster ride .
"To me the satisfaction comes from
having an idea, which a whole bunch of people tell you can't be done , and going out and
proving them ·wrong."
Take Me to the River is showing at film
festivals; Shear hopes it will soon be
distributed nationally. AB for the baseball
film , he and director Ken Eng hope
PBS will pick it up for broadcast after
production is completed this spring. _..
ALEX SHEAR, SECOND FROM RIGHT, SUITED UP
FOR A PRACTIC E GAME.
': .. it:S a nerve-wracking
roller-coaster rzde. "
ALEX SHEAR ( SFOO)
when two of his good friends told him they
were headed to India to make a film , Shear
was desperate to go along. " I took a month
off, paid half my airfare and volunteered to
work for free doing sound," Shear says.
" It was ll1l incredible experience."
A few days after Shear got back to his
promising job in Boston, the company
folded and laid everyone off. He moved to
New York to be involved in post-production
on Take Me to the River, and took a few
temp jobs. After September rr, Shear went
back to Boston to sell ads for a tabloid. "The
stories are short, you can read it on the
train , and the ads get a lot of results, which
h elp ed us all make money."
But the next time his filmaker friend
Kenneth Eng called, Shear was ready to
commit to the project on Japanese baseball.
This time he quit his job and devoted his
sales skills to raising grant money for the
proj ect through the nonprofit production
{ T HE
C o L LEGE .
St. John 's College . W inter 2005
}
�34
{ALUMNI
KARL STUKENBERG (SF) is director of Psychological Services at
Xavier University's Psychology
Department in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He is also a tenured faculty
member in analytic psychology.
As CRAZY AS IT SoUNDS
W
ILLIAM (BRAD) HODGE (SFg2) is working for
the Department of State, managing security
issues for U.S. embassies in almost a dozen
countries. "It's fun, challenging, gets me
traveling all over the world, and reminds me
of one thing I remember from the St. John's program, 'That
which doesn't kill us makes us stronger,'" he writes. ""When
that is not challenging enough, I volunteer as a police officer
with the Washington, D.C., police department. Yeah, it's as
crazy as it sounds."+
cows changing pastures while
visiting LYNNE GATELY (A) in
Randolph Center, Vt., where
Lynne is a librarian. Lynne and
her husband, David, run a dairy
farm and a maple sugar business.
Judy also visited KEITH HARRISON (SF) at his home in New
Hampshire. Keith teaches law at
Franklin Peirce Law School. Judy
has been enduring Minnesota
weather for more than six years
now and is longing for a temperate climate '-vith mountains.
Anyone with job leads in New
Mexico, please contact Judy!
ELIZABETH KOCSIS (A) has retired
to a "hobby farm in north central
West Virginia (my husband,
Mike Kingston's, idea) where we
home-school our two boys
Steven (13) and Frank (g). I'm
active in the inclusive state,..vide
home-schooling organization
(wvhea.org), which recently
(2003) celebrated a political
victory in the state legislatureelimination of a rule requiring
home-schooling parents to have a
college degree to home-school
high-school-age children.
}ULIA PERKINS (A) writes: "My
daughter, MARGARET HENNESSEY,
joined the class of ' o8 in
Annapolis this year, adding to a
bunch of alumni children in
Annapolis now: Emma Plaut,
Ao7, daughter of Richard Plaut
(A77) and Carol Katrina (A7g);
and Bekah Ross, daughter of
Steve (A78); and Jessie Perry,
1982
PATTI NOGALES (A) recently
started her second year as an
assistant professor of philosophy
at California State University in
Sacramento. "The kids and I are
finding that Northern California
has some advantages. I would
love to hear from classmates."
Ao8, daughter of Steve Perry
(A78). Maybe there are others?"
1979
GERALDINE M. KLINE (SF) was
recently elected to a six-year term
of provincial leadership for the
Sinsinawa Dominicans in San
Antonio, Texas.
DANTE BERETTA (A) is teaching
biblical Greek at St. Mary's
Seminary and has been teaching
Latin at Garrison Forest School
since 1985.
ELIZABETH JENNY (SF) says:
"Greetings to fellow alumni! I am
getting a lot of enjoyment from
my alumni chapter. My family
and I are doing well in Colorado.
I invite you to see my work at
http:/ /artist.bldr.net."
1981
ROBBYN JACKSON (A) has a
"great new job as chief of
Cultural Resources and Museum
Management at San Francisco
Maritime National Historical
Park (check out the park at
www.nps.govI safr)."
CoLLEGE.
STANLEY SCHIFf (SF) has retired
after 14 years teaching at Sierra
Vista Junior High.
DAVID WEITZEL (A) married
Allison Hornvag in the fall of
~woo, after Dave had finished his
law degree at Catholic University
that spring. They welcomed
William Kenneth's arrival in
October 2002.
1980
{ TH E
{ALUMNI
NoTEs}
DAMON ELLINGSTON (A) is getting
a Ph.D . in physics at the University of Maryland College Park.
MARY (PUTNICK) GARNER (A) is
in her second year at Episcopal
Divinity School and a postulant
for the priesthood. Spouse
GEOFF (A86) is the academic
dean at the Naval Justice School
in Newport, R.I.
CHRISTINE GOWDY-}AEHNIG (A)
and her husband, Mark, recently
moved to Decorah, Iowa, and are
looking forward to living in a
St. fohn 's College. Winter 2005
}
college town of over 8,ooo
(six times larger than Preston!).
Their eldest child, Alexandra,
recently left for Hamline University in St. Paul. "It's been a year
of changes for us," she writes.
TRISHAA. HoWELL (SF) is
pleased to announce the
publication of her newest book,
a personal growth/self-help title,
The Journeying Workbook:
Unleash Your Inner Power.
Trisha would love to hear from
former classmates and can be
reached at Trisha@HowellCanyonPress.com.
1989
}ACK EGGLESTON (A) and EMMA
MORTON EGGLESTON (SFgo)
write: "We have moved back to
our home state ofVirginia after
many years of studying and
working elsewhere. I am working
as a hydrologist for the U.S.
Geological Survey in Richmond,
Va. Emma is doing a fellowship in
endocrinology at the University
ofVirginia Medical Center. We
have three children ages 3-9 and
are living in an old farmhouse
near the mountains.
"Hello friends!" writes KYRA
LYNN ESBORG (SF). "I live in
San Francisco and share intuitive
healing practices and stress
management as my business.
My St. John's experience
enhances every day. I am a wave
diver in the ocean waters near my
home, and enjoying life."
LINDA HAMM GREZ (A) is thrilled
to announce the birth of her first
baby, Anna Helene Grez, born
on Sept. 30, 2004-the week
Mt. St. Helens erupted (hence
Anna's middle name).
NINDA LETAW (A) reports that she
is the proud owner of Charlotte's
Home Cooking, a personal chef
service in Raleigh, N.C.
She would love to hear from
classmates.
1990
REV. GERARD THOMAS SPARACO
(A) is living in Little Valley, N.Y.
"It would be nice to hear from
people," he says.
}ONATHANYING (A) is a Ph.D. student in the School oflndustrial
and Labor Relations at Cornell
University in Ithaca, N.Y.
1991
FATHERKEvlNLIXEYL.C. (SF), a
priest of the Congregation of
Legionaries of Christ, is involved
in establishing the new Church
and Sports department within
the Pontifical Council of Lay
people as announced by the
Vatican in August 2004.
From CATHERINE BARRIER (A)
and}IMDUGAN (Ag3): "We'd like
to announce the birth of Lucy
Eleanor Dugan on December 10,
2004, in Los Angeles. We are, of
course, convinced she is the most
beautiful and smartest baby in
the world. We just hope we can
keep up. If anyone is rash enough
to ask for pictures, they can
contact us at ccb@
mnemonides.net! "
BONNIE FORBIS (AGI) recently
graduated as a certified nurse
midwife from the Yale School of
Nursing. She lives in Chicago
with her daughter, Meaghan,
age g.
1995
1993
CHRIS GRAM (A) has just started
in practice as a vascular surgeon
in Decatur, Ill. "We bought a
great house on a lake and our
daughter is two-and-a-half and
doing very well."
"I'm keeping very busy," writes
JANE McMANUs (A). "Not only
will I b e an adjunct professor at
the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism this semester, but
Steve and I had our second little
girl, Charlotte Mason, on August
28. Big sister Jean just calls her
'New Baby.' I can be reached at
janesports@hotmail.com. Any
Johnnies wanting to know more
about J-school should drop me
a note."
1994
LEAH MuLHOLLAND AucKENTHALER (A) writes, "My husband,
Ben, and I welcomed a son on
June 10. Jonathan Titus Auckenthaler completes our family, '"lith
Nicholas Alan, 2, and Reggie
Pit-Shephard, 8. I always wanted
three boys. We moved from
Brooklyn to Minneapolis three
weeks after I delivered Nicholas.
Ben got a job in financ e here
working for American Express.
Not bad for a jazz drummer.
"Anyone interested in catching
up (Eddie, Matthew, Chad,
Johnnie, Janice , et. al.), please
e-mail me at leaha@
earthlink.net. And any of you
Minn./St. Paul peeps (Paul,
Amie, Muneet), let's have
a thing!"
{ THE
CoLLEGE.
35
NoTES}
" I am living the good life in
sunny Phoenix, Ariz .," writes
ALEX GOLDSTEIN (SF). "I own a
real estate business, and way
more wine and cigars than any
human should possess. Any
Johnnies in the area who want to
drink, smoke, or talk smack, call
me (602-405-9961). Best wishes
to all my friends with whom I've
lost touch ages ago ... "
Greetings from VERONICA
GVENTSADZE (AGI): "After some
four years of teaching the humanities at a university, I am back to
being a student, this time in veterinary medicine. I have no
regrets and am enjoying this new
experience immensely, and while
I have no doubt that I have made
the right choice , my liberal arts
background will always be there
to help me along. So four years
down the road I will be the
'philosopher-vet,' for what that's
worth . I would love to hear from
my classmates and from any of
those who remember me or who,
like me, are in the midst of
switching careers. But most of all
I want to thank Mr. John Verdi for
starting me on this great American adventure some I I years ago,
and I have a question for him
about Nietzsche. It's a long one,
so I won't take up any more space
here. "
}ULIA}. KELLY (A) sends in her
first update since leaving
Annapolis: "After graduation, I
attended the Maine Photo Workshops for six months , contributing to my decision to attend the
Savannah College of Art and
Design in order to get an MFA in
photography. After completing
that program, I worked for three
years with a commercial photographer in Savannah. Convinced I
could make a better living selling
real es tate for my mother's large
firm, I did that for several years
St. fohn 's College. Winter 2 005
}
before meeting my fiance, and
now am planning a wedding in
early 2005, along with a move to
Pensacola, Fla. I hope to get back
into photography when I settle
in, though I may end up shooting
more images on the road than of
weddings, as he is a musician and
travels across the country. I'll
keep you posted! If a band called
the CodeTalkers ever plays in
yow· town, please come out! My
fiance is the banjo player!"
MIKE LAYNE (SF) and family are
still in Barrow, Alaska. "Our
daughter, Audrey Rae, will turn
three in February. And we are
expecting a second child, a boy,
in March. Feel free to e-mail me
at michael.layne@northslope.org."
1996
HEATHER POOL (SF) is a firstyear graduate student at the
University ofWashington in the
political science department.
She's currently a teaching
assistant for Intra to Political
Theory. " I will likely be doing
political theory as my first field,''
she writes.
1997
Major news from }EHANNE
DUBROW(A): "}EREMYSCHAUB
(A) and I are engaged to be
married. The big day is set for the
end ofJuly 2005, in Washington.
Jeremy is currently stationed out
of Norfolk, Va. I'm in my second
year of a Ph.D. program in
creative WJ.'iting at the University
ofNebraska-Lincoln, where
I'm also teaching and working
on the editorial staff of Prairie
Schooner. This past summer, I
spent two months in Oswiecim
(Auschwitz), Poland, where I codesigned and created an exhibit
�.
-,
, -- - - -- ---------------------------- -- - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - - - - - - -- - - - - -- -- --- - -- -- -- -- -- -- - - -- -- -- - - -- -- - - -
g6
{ALUMNI
THE OTHER. SIDE OF THE WALL
Navy PilotandAuthor Ross Mackenzie, AGio2
BY RosEMARY HARTY
ssigned to teach English at
the Naval Academy five
years ago, Ross Mackenzie
(AGio2) crossed the street
to see what the little college
on the other side of the wall
had to offer. AN avy pilot and 1994 graduate
of the academy, he had been invited back to
teach at his alma mater. "I went to visit a
seminar at St. John's and literally ran into a
good friend of mine from the academy
[Mason New, AGIOI] who I hadn't seen in
years," he says. "He told me, 'man, you're
going to love it.' "
An English major at the academy,
Mackenzie's passion for language and
literature has always had a
rival in his passion for
flying. Mter seeing Top
Gun as a teen-ager, he
went on to earn a private
pilot's license and set his
sights on one day flying
the Navy's fastest jets.
"Take a dark and stormy
night and land a jet on the
back of a ship that's pitching and rolling- that really
appealed to me."
Mackenzie followed his
older brother, Alec, into
the Naval Academy. He
did well enough to secure
a coveted aviation billet,
but had to wait to begin
flight school and spent a
semester as an English
instructor at the academy. When he was
called to flight school, Mackenzie still
expected to fly jets-until a helicopter ride
changed his mind. "I was sold on just that
one flight."
Flying helicopters has its own challenges,
he adds . "You know where it is and what
you have to do to get the aircraft on the
ground before a catastrophic failure,"
he explains.
Mter earning his wings, Mackenzie was
stationed in San Diego and deployed twice
to the Persian Gulf. When he was asked to
come back to teach English at the Naval
Academy, he needed to begin a graduate
degree program, and St. John's was the logical choice. He was a] so eager to fill in gaps
in his education. ''I'm proud of myNaval
Academy degree, but as an English major,
I was frustrated that I didn't end up
reading some of the things I thought
were important."
The texts Mackenzie read at St. John's
quickly found their way onto his syllabus at
the academy; midshipmen in his first-year
English class were assigned the Odyssey
and the Canterbury Tales. "I probably had
only a handful of English majors in my
classes, but I was determined to get those
guys excited about the literature," he says.
At St. John's, Mackenzie was invigorated
by the lively discussions in his classes. "The
thing about the Graduate Insthute that J
Ross MACKENZIE'S LOVE FOR BOOKS COMPETES
WITH A LOVE FOR F LYING.
find so remarkable is that it brings people
from such vastly different backgrounds to
share the same great works. Everyone
brings their own life experiences with them
to the table."
Mackenzie was enrolled in the literature
segment and discussing the Iliad when the
terrorist attacks took place on September
n; he was one of two students with military
experience in his seminar. "You can read in
these great books when and why it's appropriate to put people in harm's way. I've
been there and I was able to say 'this is what
I believe in.' "
{ THE
CoLL E GE.
{ALUMNI
PROFILE}
St. John's College . Winter 200.5}
Now stationed in Jacksonville, Fla.,
where he is a full-time pilot in a reserve
squadron, Mackenzie flies Seahawk
helicopters, often on counter-drug missions off the Florida coast. He's married to
his high-school sweetheart, Elizabeth, and
they have two boys: Stuart, 3, and
Cameron, I.
Last year, he put his liberal arts and
Navy backgrounds together to take over a
project his father, Ross Mackenzie,
launched shortly after Mackenzie's brother ·
graduated from the academy. "My father's
a newspaper writer who was frustrated by
having two sons in the Naval Academy and
listening to them talk-he always wanted
to know what was going
on-and he decided he
could tell other parents
about it."
BriefPoints (Naval
Institute Press, 2004) was
originally published in
1993 and revised n Igg6.
Much information in the
book was dated, and g/n
had brought changes to
the academy. A major
revision was needed, and
the publisher gave
Mackenzie the job. "I did
interviews with everyone
from midshipmen to academic deans to athletic
department personnel to
find out what really makes
the Naval Academy tick."
Mackenzie observes that family
members of middies are proud and excited
about their children entering the Naval
Academy, but they can be perplexed by the
military culture. A glossm·y of terms that
quickly become part of every plebe's
vocabulary-Mackenzie calls it "Midspeak"-is an important part of the book.
Parents aren't always aware of what their
midshipmen endure in terms of academic
and physical challenges. In his introduction, Mackenzie tells parents that the
academy-like St. John's-isn't for every
student. "As important as their advice is,
their support and understanding are even
more important," he says.~
of art and poetry, 'The Lost
Shabbos: the Jews ofOswiecim.'
Two ofmypoemswere recently
published in The Hudson
Review. And, staying true to
my St. John's roots, I'm still
translating poetry, at the
moment, sections from the
19th-century Polish epic, Pan
Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz,
which is nothing if not obscure."
1998
CINDY LUTZ (A) and VINCENT
BAKER (Ags) were married on
October 10, 2004, in Frederick,
Md., nearly IO years after they
first met by the mailboxes in the
Coffee Shop. Johnnies in attendance included PAMELA BERGSON
(Agg), JosH EMMONS (Agg)and
the also newly-married MARISA
Jo and BILL ERSKINE (A97).
"We'd love to hear from any
friends in the D.C. Metro Area:
cinderlou@peoplepc.com."
1999
MELISSA "MISSY" PHIFER (SF)
writes: "After completing my
service in the Peace Corps in
Haiti in 2002, I worked in
various odd jobs until I began
graduate school at Temple
University in Philadelphia.
Currently I am working at John
Bartram High School teaching
biology and working on my
Master's ofEducation to be
completed soon! I would love to
hear from any of my former
classmates- send me an e-mail at
mphifeno@aol.com and let me
know what you're up to. I hope
all ofyou are well!"
2000
KARINA I-lEAN (A) will receive
her master of fine arts in drawing
from New Mexico State University
in Las Cruces, N.M. , this May. For
the time being, she's keeping busy
with exhibitions and teaching.
"Will be relocating to southern
Colorado soon-I'll be hiding in
the mountains, making artwork,
and protesting the Bush dynasty if
anyone would like to join meyou're always welcome: karinahean@hotmail.com."
"It was a long road similar to the
one described at the beginning of
the Inferno, but after nine years I
have reached the end of a long
road," writes CHRISTOPHER
VAUGHAN (A). "A journcy that
took me from the University of
Alaska and the wilds of the great
Northwest to the warmth of
Florida at Flagler College is now
history. I have graduated from
college at last!"
NoTEs}
37
certification training. She was
recently in London and Hawaii,
and is heading to France and
Mexico shortly! She would love
to hear from recent graduates
and alumni in the New York area.
Mter traveling to the far reaches
of Thailand and New Zealand
together, ANDREW RANSON and
MARTHA ROGERS (both AGI)
were married June 26, 2004, in
Annapolis . Martha is continuing
her studies in holistic healing
while Andrew is teaching high
school social studies and English
in Baltimore County. They have
found marriage to be greater
than they ever expected and are
looking forward to their next trip
abroad as husband and wife.
2002
JAMES GILMORE (A) is studying
phifosophy at Johns Hopkins
University. "My e-mail is jamesfgilmore@gmail.com, and it
would be great to hear from any
Johnnies, especially members of
the class of 2.002.."
CHARLES GREEN (AGI) writes:
"After completing my coursework as an English literature
Ph.D. candidate at Drew
University, fhave moved back to
Annapolis to prepare for my
comprehensive exams. I look
forward to getting to know the
city and the college again, as well
as seeing alumni old and new."
"As of August 2004, I am living
in San Jose, Calif. , passing on the
love ofliberal arts by teaching
general curriculum to eager
fifth-graders," writes MEGAN
MAxwELL-SMiTH (A). "My experience is, so far, quite rewarding.
I am at a very well-run school
peopled by bright students and
dedicated staff. I would love to
hear from anyone inclined to get
in touch: megan.maxwellsmith@sbc.global.net."
}USTINNAYLOR (A) and DILLON
WRIGHT-FITZGERALD (Aos) were
married on June :12, 2004, in
2001
}OSHUA VAN DONGE (SF) is still
"slogging away" at the University ofWashington's graduate
program in architecture.
"I've spent this year in
St. Michael's, Md., serving an
apprenticeship in wooden boat
building," ANNE NEEDHAM (A)
wrote last summer. "I'm now off
to Naguabo, Puerto Rico, for a
few months to do some house
repair and child care for my
brother and his family. After
that, if you know anyone who has
a wooden boat that needs work
(i.e., anyone who has a wooden
boat), please let me know."
SYLVAINE RAMECKERS (A) is still
working for Dateline NBC and
currently completing diver
{T
H E
Co
L L E GE .
A STRONG FouNDATION
orne things just seem meant to be, as AURORA
CASSELLS (Ao4) writes: "My sister, boyfriend, and
I, all of the most recently graduated class from
Annapolis, are moving into a cute little house in the
beautiful town of Shepherdstown, W.V., which my
sister, PROSE, is buying. This itself is exciting news,
since buying a house is considered a big step in establishing
oneself, but the real reason for writing in about it is of course
much more personal and familiar and Johnnie-based.
"Mter our offer on the house had already been accepted and
Prose was touring the outside of the house another time, she
found a remarkable, unbelievable sign that this was the right
house: It seems that someone had taken a finger to the concrete
foundation for the newer part of the house at the back while it
was still wet and written in 4-inch-high letters, underlined:
The Program. So, three recent graduates are all moving into a
house built on the foundation of the Program!
"We also discovered that it was obviously meant for Johnnies
from the Annapolis campus, since on the newly built back deck
there was an old lawn croquet stake! Already in love with the
little house and its great location, it was truly welcoming to find
such friendly reminders of St. John's. " ~
St. John 's College . W in ter 2005
}
�{ALUMNI
JoHNNIE
VOICES}
B. ATHENS
Athletic~ Aeschyl~
ABOUT THE CATS
and Spzderman
BY STEPHEN CoNN (SFg8)
first came to Athens I I years ago,
a post-high school gift from and
with my parents. Mom wanted
to give me an introduction to
classical culture before I headed to
St.John's. Several years and jobs
later, armed with only my Spiderman 2
backpack and a whole lot of can-d?, I
returned to Athens for the Olymp1cs.
I checked in at my hostel, the Hotel
Zorba on Victoria Square. Yannis the bellboy was pleasant enough, the bunk area
only had one unidentifiable odor, and the
toilets flushed as long as you didn't put
toilet paper in them. I learned .to j?urney
on the Piraeus-Kifissia metro hne m order
to get to the different stadiums. Fierybrowed Greek men pondered my Spidey
backpack, while old ladies crossed themselves every time we passed a church.
Many events took place at the aptly
named Olympic Stadium to the north,
where people walked under va~t white
archways while Greeks sat on lifeguard
chairs and announced on bullhorns,
"Parakalo [please] we are welcoming you
to the Olympic Games. Water polo is on
the right."
gymnasts happened to take an extra step
when I shoot-coincidence!
The Acropolis! Don't think I passed up
the ancient stuff, folks. The next day I
began the hike to that fount of democracy,
The Temple ofNike . To the east of~he
main structure, slightly down the ndge,
are the remains of the Theater of
Dionysus, where Sophocles and Aeschylus
received their first performances.
In honor of the occasion, I pulled out
my copy of Lattimore's Aeschylus, and
recited a bit of The Persians. A few cats
living among the pillars gathere.d in .
audience, and I felt the Apolloman veil
had been suitably rent.
And the women! Many a time I would
approach a sellers' booth and say, "excuse
me, would you have a ticketfor. .. good
God!, I considered asking one of these
Hellenic beauties for a night on the town,
but reflecting on the Medea-like anger of
most of my past dates, I opted for another
evening of Amstel Lights at t~e Zorba.
After sessions of table tenms and boxing between various breakaway republics,
it was time to head home. I brought an
American flag with me on the flight. Not a
huge hit in Athens, but the bu~z - ct~t
customs officer in Atlanta notlced lt as
he stamped my passport.
"You bring that to the Games?' he
smiled.
"Yessir."
"You must have waved that quite a bit,"
he said with a grin .
"Well, if we can put a chimp in the
White House then we should certainly be
able to wave CHd Glory once and a while."
Okay, I didn't exactly say this. ~ut ifye
Johnnies old and new want to get m t~uch
with the Mediterranean source, then JUSt
put those terrorist fears away ~nd tell
the ticket agent, "I want two t1ckets to
paradise."-'$-
But it was gymnastics I was after, my
old sport, many beers ago. I sat down
among sad-eyed Eastern-block:r~ to
watch one of the women's prehmmary
sessions. "GO KA-TY!" cried an
anguished Englishman into my left
eardrum. The Chinese girls tended to fall
off the beam and stumble a lot. "No flash
photos, sir," the usher chided me. So the
(SF or) writes, "For the most
part, my life is quiet and full of cats. If they keep
multiplying I might make crazy cat woman status
at the early age of 35· I live with ANDRE\V SMITH
and ISLA PINELO (both SFo3) . CAROLINE KN~P
(SF or) recently moved from our house to a qu~et
neighborhood and lives in a beautiful garden. I'm su~·e she m.lsses
h . g her bedroom windows rattle when the cars dnve bywlth
t : : ;bass all the way up . If anyone is in or passing through the
Berkeley area, give me a holler." -$-EBEKKA SHUGARS
Millvi1le, Penn. The Naylors now
live in Wilmington, Del., where
Justin teaches at Nativity
Preparatory School.
2003
Thorn Barry and MEG EISENHAUER (A) were married at
St. John's College in Annapolis
on July 31 , 20o4. " Many thanks
to everyone at the Annapolis
campus who helped us to make
this possible ," Meg writes.
(A) is moving to
Italy to study gastronomy at the
new Universita di Scienze Gastronomiche (www.unisg.it/eng).
He received a full scholarship.
"Drop me a line at aaron .foster
@gmail.com. I will be in
Pollenzo, a small town outside of
Bra, in Cuneo, Piedmont."
AARON FOSTER
biology.utah.edu or
bugle song@ juno. com."
RACHEL (ROCCIA) SULLIVAN (A)
Wl·ites with an update on what she
and husband MICHAEL SULLIVAi~
(Ao2) have been up to since
graduation. "As many already
know, we were married a week
after graduating from St. John's.
We then moved to Washington,
D.C., so that I could take pre-med
classes at the University of Maryland, and so that Michael could
pursue his Ph.D. in Philosophy
(particularly in medieval scholastics, which should come as no
surprise!) at Catholic University.
He is now in his third year. In May
of this year I gave birth to a
daughter, Clare Veritas Sullivan,
who is now a fat and happy little
five-month-old. We bought a
house in Silver Spring, Md., and
I've begun studying medicine
at the Uniformed Services University, which is located right
.
'
across the street from NIH in
Bethesda. I'm a commissioned
ofii.cer in the U.S. Army and learning to be an "Army Doc." I go to
school with several ex-midshipmen from the Naval Academy who
think it's bizarre that a Johnnie
would choose to join the military,
but the idea of practicing "Good
Medicine In Bad Places," as our
motto goes, is really exciting and
led me to choose this school over a
few more prestigious ones that
offered me slots. I found that
medical schools were surprisingly
receptive to me as a St. John's
student, and would love to talk to
and encourage anyone interested
in applying: I can be reached at
rmrsullivan@hotmail.com. I'm
also happy to report that
Michael's brother RANDALL (Ao4)
has joined the Dominican order
of priests, and has started his
novitiate . He's enjoying himself
immensely and has taken the new
name of Ezra. In closing I'd like to
say hello to all my old pals, to offer
my spare room to anyone who has
a reason to be in D.C., and to take
this opportunity to encourage
BEN FREY (A02,) and GABRIELA
HURWITZ (Ao2) to call me back!"
CoLLE G E .
St. fohn's College . Winter 2005
}
2004
LAURAA:NNEMANGUM (A)
married Michael Moore on
June 5, 2004·.
PAUL McLAIN (SFGI) was
awarded a scholarship to attend
Yale University Divinity School in
New Haven, Conn. He completed
an intensive Koine Greek class
this summer and is settling into
his first of three years' work
toward a Master of Divinity
degree. Ruthie, his wife , is office
manager ofHistoRX, a medical
research firm affiliated with Yale.
She now serves her patented
Thursday Night GI Gathering
Homemade Goodies to "Divvies"
instead ofJohnnies. They have
been blessed with a rent-free
four-bedroom parsonage provided
by St. Andrew's United Methodist
Church, where they work part
time. Johnnies are welcome to
stay when making New England
pilgrimages. Contact
pkmclain@comcast.net if
you are headed their way or if
you would just like to keep
in touch. -$-
NATASHA VERl\iAAK (A)
writes: "I just survived my first
quarter of graduate school in
the materials science and
engineering department at
the University of California,
Santa Barbara ...woah!
Visitors welcome."
ERIN HANLON (SF) Wl·ites: "I
entered the University of Utah
this fall as a Ph.D. student in the
biology department. I am
studying plant ecology with an
emphasis on the impacts of the
drought and climate change. I
would be interested in hearing
from any Johnnies in the Salt Lake
area, whether they live here or are
just passing through. I can be
reached al either hanlon@
WHAT's UP?
The College wants to hear from
you. Call ns, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you're doing. The next issue
will be published in May;
deadline for the alumni notes
section is March IS.
IN ANNAPOLIS:
Tlz e College Magazine
St. John's College, P.O. Box 28oo
Annapolis, MD 2I404;
rosemary.harty@sjca. edu
IN SANTA FE:
The College Magazine
St. John's College
Communications Office
n6o Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
STEPHEN CONN WAVED THE FLAG AND
RECITED THE PERSIA NS IN GREECE.
{ TH E
39
{OBITUARIES}
CLARE SULLIVAN IS GOING PLACES.
{ THE
CoLLEG E .
St. John 's College. Winter 20 0 5}
�4I
{OBITUARIES}
{OBITUARIES}
REMEMBERING
MISS LEONARD
At a memorial service in October, former
St. John's tutor and Assistant Dean
Barbara Leonard (HAss) was remembered
as a star athlete with a zeal for competition, a scientist with an inquisitive mind,
and an able administrator with a skill for
strongly-worded memos. Mostly, she was
remembered as a good friend.
Miss Leonard died last August in
Oberlin, Ohio. Her health had been
failing for several years. She
had retired from the college
in rg87 after serving as
assistant dean and tutor for
36 years, but continued to
serve the college as a
member of its Board of
Visitors and Governors for
several more years.
In the midst of Homecoming festivities, alumni,
tutors, and former colleagues of Miss Leonard's
gathered in Francis Scott
Key Auditorium to share
their memories of a strongwilled woman with a great
sense ofhumor. And
although she was dean of
women for just one year
before her title became
assistant dean, Miss
Leonard remained a role
model, confidante, and
friend to generations of
women at the college.
Among them was Anita
Kronsberg (A7g), who read
from an account of Miss
Leonard's life.
Born and reared in Oberlin in what
she described as something of an "idyllic
childhood," Miss Leonard earned a
bachelor's degree at Oberlin College
and master's and doctoral degrees in
zoology at the University of Rochester.
She conducted research in histology at
Yale Medical School before becoming a
visiting lecturer at Oberlin. Before
coming to St.John's, she taught zoology
at Smith College. Her willingness to work
with men and to compete in a maledominated field had roots in her love for
"She came with us_,
J'he read the bookJ' with
us_, and J'he learned
at our rate. "
from my colleagues, male students
resented my presence when I arrived on
campus," she later recalled. "In fact,
prior to my appointment, it was a mass
protest of the then all-male student body
against the admission of women students
that convinced the college leadership they
needed to hire a female tutor and assistant
dean. These students would constantly
try to catch me off guard,
so I pretended nothing
fazed me."
The following year, when
the assistant dean for men
took a sabbatical, Miss
Leonard worked with both
male and female students.
From that point on, she
said, "I never weaned those
boys from me."
In the early rg6os, Miss
Leonard was a Fulbright
lecturer in India. She was
named an honorary faculty
member of Lady Doak
College and The American
College, both in Madurai,
India. When she retired in
rg87, the students dedicated
the yearbook to her:
"Though gruff in manner,
she has an eye for the
humorous and is quick
with a quip, delighting in
repartee," theywrote.
"She is also judicious in her
advice and careful to keep a
confidence . In her position
she has heard many."
Tutor emeritus Ben Milner (HAg7) recalled that after their first
meeting,
he thought Miss Leonard to be a "retiring
motherly sort. That was a Jirst impression
-and one I would discover in need of
correction," he said.
When Mr. Miln er began his new post,
Edward Sparrow (HAg3), dean at the
time, advised Mr. Milner about the
"importance of cooperating with Barbara
Leonard." "And to reinforce the point
smilingly, he asked if I was familiar with
her habit of firing off sharply critical
BARBARA BRUNNER KiEBLER (ASS)
Mrss LEONARD PREFERRED THE CoFFEE SHOP
To HER McDowELL HALL OFFICE.
sports: As a third-grader she was the
catcher on a boys' softball team.
Through colleagues in Oberlin,
President Richard Weigle (HJ4g) found
Miss Leonard and brought her to
St. John's to shepherd the first 25 women
to attend the college. Miss Leonard had to
win over the male students.
"Although I encountered no resistance
{ 'I'
HE
CoLLEGE .
St. fohn's College. Winter 2005
}
memoranda and letters to
various colleagues including
the dean and president of the
college," Mr. Milner added.
In her time at the college,
Miss Leonard became "the
first among equals," and "her
voice was always respected
and often decisive," he said.
"I think that it was universally acknowledged that she
had a love affair with the
students," Mr. Milner said.
"It was mutual and it was fun.
Barbara enjoyed nothing
more than a good joke, a
hardy laugh, and she had a
lot of company in this with
students and staff as well. "
Tutor emeritus Malcolm
Wyatt (HAo3) shared
McDowell 13 with Miss
Leonard in the mid-rg8os.
"She was very fond of the
students," Mr. Wyatt said.
"She maintained close
friendships with successive
generations characterized by sympathy,
warmth, acrostic humor. And the source
of that acrostic humor had a certain skepticism about it that sharpened her judgment but didn't keep her from being
attached to the student body and hence,
[she had] a very accurate perception of
what life was like at the college from day
to day."
A member of the first class of women
to graduate, Barbara Brunner Kiebler
(class of 1955), said Miss Leonard was a
genuine member of that class even before
the Alumni Association made her an
honorary alumna. "She came with us,
she read the books with us, and she
learned at our rate," Mrs. Kiebler said.
With all the new rules the college
adopted to keep men and women
separate-and with the inevitable bending
and breaking of those rules-Miss Leonard
was "good-natured and flexible" even as
the president and dean fretted over such
matters. "She was sanguine about the
relationship of the sexes-after all she was
BARBARA LEONARD BECAME AN HONORARY
MEMBER OF THE CLASS OF
I955
UPON HER
RETIREMENT, BUT LONG BEFORE, THE FIRST
CLASS OF WOMEN CONSIDERED HER ONE OF
THEIR OWN.
a biologist by training, she knew the
inevitability of the relationship," she said.
Miss Leonard could usually be found in
the Coffee Shop , but she spent a great
deal of time on the playing fields as well,
Mrs. Kiebler noted. "Barbara broke the
sports barrier for women at the college.
There were no sports here for women
except badminton and Ping-Pong.
Barbara h erself integrated the softball
team ... she was a whale of a softball
pitcher and she won her St. John's blazer
for softball. Whenever I came back to the
college at Homecoming, I would see her
in the blue blazer and a pleated skirt, her
school uniform. She wore it proudly."
When Mrs. Kiebler brought her
daughter, Amy Oosterhout (A82) to the
{ T HE
CoLLEGE.
college, she was pleased to leave
her in the capable hands of
Barbara Leonard. "Barbara told
me how pleased she was to
have at St. John's the children
of her girls. I never heard her
call us that before, but I guess
that's what we were. She
promised us she'd look after
Amy, and she did."
Two members of the Annapolis
class ofrg8o, Didrik Schanche
and Ann Schanche Ferro came to
the college as Febbies, leaving
their parents in Cairo, Egypt, for
a college halfway around the
world. In Miss Leonard, the
sisters found " landfall and a very
solid one in a sea of words and
great books." Like many
students, they forged a life long
friendship with Miss Leonard.
"Ann and I, being homeless,
were often around campus or at
least Annapolis during the
holiday because Egypt was a little
too far for a three-day weekend,"
Miss Schanche said. '"Miss Leonard would
periodically invite us up to her apartment
over the infirmary for a glass of wine and
some conversation and just to help us feel
that we did have a bit of home away from
home." Ms. Leonard also was a stickler
for certain thing, Ms. Schanche noted.
One in particular was the correct pronunciation of the word' dissect.'
"Most people, me included, pronounced
it 'dye-sect,'" she said. "The correct
pronunciation according to Ms. Leonard is
' dis-sect' and she drilled that one in. I am
now an editor and every time I try to
correct someone's pronunciation of that,
I think of Ms. Leonard."
"She was there for us," Mrs. Ferro
added. "And so in death she stays with us,
too. She is locked in our psyches, in her
flat-soled sneakers, her blue skirtconsistent, calm, humorous, solid, and
generous to a fault with her support and
guidance for us students. These are lifelong gifts that Barb am gave us and that
she expects us to share with others."*'
St. fohn's College. Winter 2005}
�{OBITUARIES}
BEATE
RuHM voN
{OBITUARIES}
0PPEN
Beate Ruhm von Oppen (HAor), St. John's
tutor emerita, died in August at her
home in Annapolis.
Miss von Oppen left Germany as a teenager to complete her secondary education
in Holland, moved to England and earned
a bachelor's degree at the University of
Birmingham. She worked in political
intelligence for the British Foreign Office.
Mter the war, she took a job with the
American Historical Association in
Alexandria, Va., when she learned from a
co-worker about an opening at St. John's.
She taught at the college for nearly
43 years, with an occasional break to write
books, conduct research, and serve as a
visiting professor at other colleges.
Her interest in the role of religion in
the German resistance led her to work
before starting college in England:
Letters to Freya, a collection ofletters
written by Helmuth James von Moltke,
a legal adviser to the Third Reich, to his
wife, Freya. Von Moltke worked within
the regime to undermine the Nazis
before he was captured and executed.
In 1989, the German edition of the book
won the Scholl Prize, a prestigious literary
award in Germany.
At a memorial service last
September, Miss von Oppen
was remembered as a careful
and diligent scholar, a lover of
music (particularly Bach) and
books, and a beloved sister,
sister-in-law, and aunt.
Several who spoke at the
service referred to an essay
called "The Tuning Fork,"
Miss von Oppen's account of
the bewildering change in the
Germany of her youth.
The following is excerpted
from the essay, originally
publishedinHumanitas, the
journal of the George Bell
Institute. Miss von Oppen
wrote of her attempt to go to
Holland, where she hoped to
work before starting college
in England.
crisis at the very tim e when the Hitler
regime created large numbers of refugees
or would-be refugees- trying to keep such
aliens out.
To admit my status as a worker, albeit
unpaid, would have meant being sent back
to the fatherland, with the additional
black mark of having tried to flee it. So I
denied it. The denial was an automatic
reflex. Unfortunately, my response to the
question about my religion was equally
automatic. I said 'Protestant,' having been
baptized at birth according to the
Zwinglian rite and having attended Prates- ·
tant religious instruction at my German
schools, with even a spell of Lutheran
Sunday school thrown in for good measure. It was a mistake. I did have the presence of mind and necessary minutes and
pennies to send a cheery postcard about
my 'good trip' to my Jewish grandmother
in Frankfurt from the Dutch side. I wanted
to reassure her; she had a heart ailment, of
which she died before the year was out.
Now I was put on the next train to
Emmerich, where I was received-not
to say taken into custody- by the Evangelische Balznlzoftmission ... .It felt like a
halfway house on the way to more
serious, more purely political
confinement. Theywere stern
and forbidding and there was
nothing evangelical about them.
There was even a touch of
Nazism. As I was sitting, somewhat disconsolately, in a dark
reception room, a boy of about
eight came in and sang one of
those Nazi songs-1 don't know
why; perhaps it was just youthful
exuberance. It grated enough to
make me decide to accept no
food from this establishment or
run the risk of having to sit at the
table with these professional
Protestants. My grandmother
had given me enough provender
for the day.
What I did not have was
money, beyond the ten Marks
one was allowed to take out of the
country. When the woman in
"THE TUNING FORK"
It was spring 1936. They took me off the
train after it had crossed the border from
Germany. They asked me for my religionfor while they wanted to protect the Dutch
unemployed from the competition offoreigners, they also wanted to protect the
virtue of young women. I was 17. They
accused me of coming to work in Holland.
I denied it, though they were right. They
had no proof, but I had the burden of
proof. The fact was that I had in the prcvious December passed the examination
given by Oxford for entrance to British
universities. Being penniless and not
wanting to be a burden on the American
uncle who had paid my school fees for the
year that it had taken me to prepare for
that exam, I had gladly accepted the
school's invitation to stay on as unpaid
general dog's body until it was time to go
to England to study, the following October. So I was earning my keep as matron's
assistant, occasional coach or tutor, babysitter, and so on. But these services .. .were
work prohibited by the law or regulations
of the land that was , like most European
countries-struggling with an economic
ALTHOUGH SHE WORKED IN
BRITISH INTELLIGENCE DURING
WoRLD WAR
II, Miss voN 0PPEN
RESISTED BEING CALLED A SPY.
{ THE
CoLLEGE .
St. John 's College. Winter 2005
}
charge of this Internal Mission house
allowed me to go for a short walk in town,
I could not resist a tuning fork in the
window of a small music shop. I went in
and bought it. My instrument at the time
was the violin, which I played as badly as I
had played the piano and would later play
the oboe. I may have justified the rash
purchase to myself as useful: a violin has
to be tuned and there isn't always a piano
or other instrument present to give the
pitch. It was a modest tuning fork and
cheap, but it depleted my minimal
resources. I probably realized this, yet
probably felt, too, that there was not only
practical but also symbolic value in a
gadget that gave you the true pitch.
Before I went for the walk in the strange
town I had telephoned my school and told
my friends there what had befallen me .
They said they would certify me as a bona
fide pupil- I was taking lessons with the
music master-and get the local police
to put an official endorsement on the
43
'-/1s I was sittin~ somewhat disconsolately;
in a dark reception room~
a boy ofabout eight
came in and sang one
ofthose Nazi songs... "
This meant crossing the Rhine. I boarded
the ferry, paid my last Pfennige to the nice
conductor, and asked him how far from
the landing place on the other side the
railway was. It was a fal.r step, especially
with luggage. He found me a free ride to
the station. This turned out to be a local
butcher, who gave me the seat beside him
in the van, with the carcasses behind us.
He wasn't an anti-Nazi. He sounded like a
Nazi or at least a loyal citizen to the Third
Reich. In the absence of money I gave him
my last German postage stamps and
signed a document acknowledging my
debt to him for the additional small
amount it cost to connect my old rail
ticket with the new stretch from Cleve to
Nijmegen.
So offl went, crossed the frontier without further incident, and reached the
school safely. The tuning fork came in
handy when we played Haydn quartets.
I still have it. Tuning forks don't take up
much space._.
BEATE RuHM VON 0PPEN, THE T UNING FORK
document that would suitably impress the
Dutch border officials. The document duly
arrived by Express mail the next day, but
also a message that the police station had
closed by the time that my friends had got
there and that they had made their statement sound as persuasive as possible without the police back-up. They advised me
not to try the same border crossing again,
from Emmerich to Zevenaar, where I was
now known, but to take another, from
Cleve to Nijmegen, where I wasn't.
JOliN AINSWORTH
economy called Socialism in the Soviet
Union. He is survived by a daughter, Jenny.
JONATHAN AURTHUR
John Edgar Ainsworth, class of1942,
died Sept. 30 following complications
from a stroke. He was a resident of Silver
Spring, Md. Until his retirement in 1984,
Mr. Ainsworth was an atmospheric
physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center, where he was primary designer of
the Pioneer Venus probe.
Mr. Ainsworth pursued many hobbies
including ice skating, sailing, skiing,
camping, windsurfing, hang-gliding, flying
small aircraft, ballroom dancing, and jazz.
He became one of the first students in the
college's New Program when he enrolled at
St. John's in 1938, but he left the college
shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor to
enlist in the Army-Air Force. As the Washington Post reported, Mr. Ainsworth was
sent to the Pacific, and "took with him two
books, both on calculus, and taught himself the discipline while in the military."
Mter returning from the service in 1946,
he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Harvard University.
He is survived by his wife, Anne, and
three children.
Jonathan Aurthur (A68), who wrote a book
about his son Charley's struggles with
mental illness in The Angel and the
Dragon, took his own life in November.
He was 56 and had lived in Santa Monica,
Calif. An account published in the Los
Angeles Times said Mr. Aurthur leaped to
his death from a soo-foot cliff in the Angeles National Forest in Arcadia, Calif. His
body was found Nov. 29. According to the
article, friends said that he was despondent
over several issues.
Mr. Aurthur was profiled in the Winter
2003 issue of The College. The article
described his attempts to understand his
son's illness and to determine if someone
could have found a better way to help
Charley, who committed suicide by
jumping from a freeway overpass.
Mter leaving St. John's, Mr. Aurthur
attended the University of California,
Los Angeles, where he majored in motion
pictures. In the late 1g6os through the
early 198os, he worked as a community
organizer and documentary filmmaker.
He was also the editor of a journal of
political theory called Appeal to Reason
and the author of a book on political
{ THE
CoLLEGE .
St. .John's College . Winter 2005
ALSO NOTED:
STEPHEN BRAUN (SF84), July 2004
}OliN-DAVID HINDLE HAIIDT (AGI96), Sept. 9,
2004
CHARLES HYSON (class ofr937), March 8,
2004
PERCY KEITH Ill (class ofi949), Jan. 17,
2004
JoHN LOGUE (class of1950), June r, 2004
}oHNMAGIDRE (class ofr946), March 13,
2003
ALAN PIKE (class of1937), Oct. 22, 2004
MR. WILLIAMT. ROBERTS III (class of1951)
ANDREW CAMERON SHERRARD }R. (class of
1941), Nov. 7, 2003
A. ROBERT SMITH (class of1937), June 2,
2004
ROBEitl' SNIBBE (class ofr937), June 8, 2004
}OliN STERRETT (class ofr950), Aug. 14,
2004
RICHARD B. TAYLOR, class of1936
THOMASUSILTON (class of1943), Oct. 15,
2004
VALYS ZILIUS (class of1958), Nov. 14, 2004
}
�~------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------,
44
ALFRED MOLLIN
Alfred M ollin, who died last August in
Philadelphia, was a tutor for seven years in
Annapolis. He later lift the college and
embarked on a career at the Department
ofJustice, where he rose to the position of
senior appellate counsel. Some alumni may
remember him.from his days at the college,
but many more know ofhim.from the Greek
manual used at St. John :S. Tutor emeritus
Robert Williamson (HAo2), who
co-authored the manual, offered this
remembrance at Mr. M ollin 's memorial
service at the college last September:
I first met Alfred Mollin when he visited this
campus in order to sit in on classes and he
interviewed for a position on the faculty.
Fellow graduate students of his at Penn
State whom I had known as students at
St. John's suggested that he stay over at
Marilyn's and my home .. .On the night
before he returned to Penn State, he and I
talked long into the night about St. John's
College, about our common friends, about
philosophy and the writings of philosophers, about politics and military history.
By the time we arrived at the subject of our
favorite movies, it was clear-I think to both
of us-that our conversation, if allowed to
continue into the coming academic year,
would develop into a friendship.
Since I first read his Ethics, Aristotle's
account of friendship has seemed to me the
truest and most helpful guide to understanding what can generally be understood
of an afiection so intimately bound up with
the particularities of those who share in it.
It is an abiding disposition or readiness to
take pleasure in another's company and to
wish for and work for that other's good. And
it is reciprocal. But, as always with Aristotle,
that readiness comes fully into being when
it is set to work. The highest manifestation
of friendship is shared activity which, in
itself or in its goals, is good. Activity, unlike
readiness, depends upon opportunity, has
its starts and stops. There are high moments
in friendship. And aside from the activity of
raising children which husband and wife
share, I have never enjoyed a more intense
and sustained experience of friendship than
in the two years Alfred and I collaborated in
the production ofAnlntroduction to
Ancient Greek.
The idea was first his. We had both come
to agree that the textbooks available at the
time did little to encourage serious
reflection on the forms and artful use of
language. I had been content to supple-
{OBITUARIES}
{ArJUMNI AssociATION NEws}
ment and occasionally correct the
treatment given by Chase and Phillips'
textbook, then in use. It was Alfred who,
after giving two informal lectures on
Greek and English grammar, proposed
that together we produce a textbook with
the aim of serving the principal aims of
the St. John's language tutorial. At first I
was skeptical. I'm glad he overcame my
doubts .
We decided that each of the major
themes which would be recurrently
addressed and developed in the course of
the textbook should be passed back and
forth between us. We knew that in what we
speaking. The striking triangular diagram
which he placed at the end of the introductory chapter on the verb is the visible
image of his unifying insight. In the years
since, I have marveled at this unifying
power in his thinking on the most various
of subjects, a unification which respects
and illuminates the differences of its units
by revealing their togetherness.
There was a third sharer in that activity:
Chris Dill, later Chris Mullin, who was at
that time secretary to the dean and then
registrar at the college. In addition to
those responsibilities, she undertook the
final stages of preparation of the text for
distribution to the freshman classes. This
required the exercise of taste and judgment .
as well as the transcription of Greek. Our
goal was to distribute each lesson at least a
week before it would be used by the freshman classes. She saw to it that we did,
not only by doing her part but often by
making up for time lost in our last-minute
submissions ofrough drafts to her ...
If I tried to describe Alfred throughout
the time I knew him, the word with which
I would begin and end is one with which
Homer often describes his heroes: megathymos. In English: "great-hearted," though
in Homer's use the meaning can range
from "generous" (or "big-hearted" ) to
"high-spirited."
I have already mentioned one instance of
Alfred's gcneTOsity. I wish to mention
another, lest it be forgotten sooner than it
should. Early in the fall semester which was
to prove his last, John Kieffer (HA7o) fell
ill and Alfred was asked temporarily to
substitute for him in his feshman language
tutorial. At that time a substitute was asked
to serve on a pro bono b asis for a couple of
weeks and then would begin receiving a
stipend in addition to his regular compensation. After a longer period ... the class
would cease to be assigned to the incapacitated tutor and be reassigned to some other
tutor, with proportional compensation.
Alfred knew how strongly John Kieffer
hoped to be able to return to his class, a
hope which, as Alfred knew, would probably never be realized. When the treasurer,
Chuck Elzey, objected that under the
Polity the college could no longer pay for a
substitute, Alfred responded, "I insist on
continuing as a substitute, and I refuse to
be paid." Alfred continued as a substitute
during John Kieffer's remaining months
and never told John what he had done for
him ...
"What we learned in the
e:x:ecution was that
same-mindedness can
be generative: as we
passed a theme back
andforth~ each ones
anticipated contribution
was deepened and
enlarged by the others
prevzous one. "
RoBERT WILLIAMsoN (HAo2)
were setting out to do there was what
Aristotle calls homonoia, same-mindedness, on all that really mattered. What we
learned in the execution was that samemindedness can be generative: as we
passed a theme back and forth, each one's
anticipated contribution was deepened and
enlarged by the other's previous one. It was
truly a combined effort.
But sequential combined efforts must
have beginnings. Early on we had agreed
that we would unfailingly present the textbook as an equal effort. He held me to the
agreement on several occasions. That was
an act of generosity on his part. Now that
he is gone, I feel free to speak the truth.
'I'he two most important and original
insights .which gave rise to our project
and which most pervasively shaped it
were his. I mean the distinction between
formal and material verb-complements
and, especially, the unification of the six
aspects of the Greek verb under the three
elements of subject, predicate, and act of
{ THE CoLLEG E . St. fohn 's College. Winte r 2005
+
}
FRoM THE ALuMNI
AssOCIATION
PRESIDENT
Dear Johnnies,
As alumni, we are always happy towelcome new members into our community.
This fall we've had the occasion to open
our doors to new students and a new
leader.
Welcome to incoming students-alumni
of the future!
Do you remember your first encounter
with the idea of St. John's? Your first visit
to a campus? First seminar? I certainly
do, and those memories rushed back
when; in late September, we hosted a
prospective student reception in my
home. "We" is the Twin Cities Chapter of
-the Alumni Association and my husband,
John. Together we welcomed a group of
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed below.for information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Bob & Vicki Morgan
SOS-275-90I2
BALTIMORE
Deborah Cohen
4I0-47 2-9IS8
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon
4I0-28o-0958
BOSTON
Ginger Kenney
6r7-964-4794
AUSTIN
John Strange
2I0-392-SSo6
Bev Angel
5I2-926-7808
CHICAGO
Rick Lightburn
lightburn@
earthlink.net
': .. thefoture ifthe
college seemJ' stronger
and brighter this year
than ever_ ifore."
b
young and enthusiastic would-be Johnnies
and their parents . It was a remarkable
gathering in many ways in addition to the
personal time travel it afforded.
One of the prospectives appeared with
her mother in tow-an alumna herself,
Annapolis class of 70-something.
Another brought a sibling who began
the afternoon clearly bored beyond belief
and ended it rather curious about this
strange place and the education it ofiered.
Another parent had read the great
books in her youth without benefit of
conversation. She was thrilled to find out
(via the "The Following Teachers Will
Return ... " mailing) that such a place as
St. John's existed. Her son was excited,
too. Next fall he'll be off to Annapolis
while she joins us for chapter seminars
and contemplates the possibilities of the
Graduate Institute.
The story is that prospectives who
attend such receptions are much more
likely to come to the college than those
who have no personal contact. It was a
delightful party, and the Santa Fe Admissions office made it quite easy! If you are
interested in hosting such an event, contact the Admissions office nearest you.
Not onlyvvill you be doing the College and
the prospectives a favor, but you'll also
find an occasion to revisit memorable
moments from your youth.
Welcome to President Peters!
As alumni from the East and West, we
are pleased to welcome Mr. PeteTs as the
new president of the Santa Fe campus.
Mr. PeteTs' experiences have prepared him
well for a role of productive leadership in
the college community. He has dedicated
DALLAS/,FORT
WORTH
Suzanne Lexy
Bartlette
8I7-72I-9II2
DENVER/BOULDER
Lee Katherine
Goldstein
720-746-I496
GLENDA H. EoYANG, PRESIDENT
ST.JOHN's CoLLEGE ALuMNI AssociATION
himself to learning and supporting the
environments of learning; he has managed
administTative functions that are similar in
size and structure to the College; and he
engages with a kind of seriousness and
attention that we like to think is characteristic of our community.
We are pleased that MT. Peters and his
lovely wife, Eleanor, will be joining us in
January. The Alumni Association Board
of Directors will be looking for ways to
support him and the College under his
leadership, and we encourage our fellow
alumni to do the same.
With a constant supply of eager students
and a promising new leader in Santa Fe,
the future of the college seems stronger
and brighter this year than ever before.
Thanks to all who continue to make the
idea of the college a reality: members of
the Board ofVisitors and GovernOTs,
administration, faculty, current students,
alumni, and friends.
For yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
Glenda H. Eoyang
President
St. John's College Alumni Association
NORTHERN CALIF.
Deborah Farrell
4I5-'{3I-8804
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles
505-986-I8I4
PHILADELPHIA
Bart Kaplan
2I.5-465-0244
SEATTLE
Amina Brandt
206-465-778I
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray
724-325-4I5I
SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Elizabeth Eastman
S62-426-I934
MINNEAPOLIS/
ST. PAUL
Carol Freen1an
6I2-822-32I6
PORTLAND
Lake Perriguey
lake@law-works. com
NEW YORK
Daniel Van Doren
9I4-949-68II
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico
6rg-423-4972
{ THE CoLLEGE . St. fohn 's College . Winte r 2005
45
TRIANGLE CIRCLE
(NC)
Susan Eversole
9 I 9 -9 68-4856
. WASHINGTON, D.C .
Jean Dickason
gor-6gg-6207
}
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Julia Ward
4I3-648-oo64
ISRAEL
Emi Geiger Leslau
IS Aminadav Street
Jerusalem 93549
Israel
9-722-67I-7608
boazl@cc.huji.ac.il
�~-------------------------------------------~----~--------------------------------------------~
{ALUMNI AssociATION NEws}
HoMECOMING
CHARLOTTE KiNG (CLASS OF I959) FOUND AN
OASIS FROM RACISM AT ST. JoHN'S.
ARouND THE CHAPTERs:
TwiN CITIES
DISCOVERING
HoNoRs
The Alumni Association extended its
highest honor, the Award of Merit, to two
Annapolis alumni at Homecoming in
October. William Carter, class ofig1~o,
was recognized for his contributions in the
field of technical education; Charlotte
King, class of rgsg, was honored for her
contributions to the field of social service.
The association named Glenn HousleyAnnapolitan, sailmaker, and Johnnie
supporter-an honorary member of the
Class of 2004 in recognition of his
contributions to the life of the college,
specially its students and alumni.
Dr. Carter was nominated for his award
by Bill Reynolds, also of the class ofig4o,
with whom he also attended Charlotte Hall
Military Academy. Dr. Carter enlisted and
served in the Navy after graduating from
St. John's. He went on to a career as an
executive with the Northwestern Mutual
Life Insurance Company, but it was in the
field of education that he made his real
mark. He was a founding father of Delaware
Technical and Community College in
Georgetown, Del., and served on its board
of trustees for more than I3 years. The
\Villiam A. Carter Partnership Center on
the Delaware Tech campus is named in his
honor.
After earning his doctoral degree from
Berne University in rgg8, Dr. Carter turned
his attention to the use of computers in
public school classrooms. The Teacher
Assistance Program he founded is now
being used in schools with great success.
Dr. Carter has served on numerous
state, regional and national boards and
{ALUMNI AssociATION NEws}
Maryland's Social Services Administration,
where she was responsible for a $300
million budget and the operation of all
family services and child welfare prograrn:s
in the state.
Miss King has served on the Anne
Arundel Commission for Women, the
Anne Arundel County Ethics Commission,
and the YMCA Board of Directors. In addition, she has volunteered time to more
than a dozen coalitions and commissions
devoted to helping women, chHdren, and
families.
In accepting her award, Miss King said
that although it was difficult to endure the
racism she encountered in the city of
Annapolis in the rgsos, she found in
St. John's an "oasis."
"St. John's is one of my longest and most
profound relationships," she said. "It has
all the characteristics of a good friend; it
has taught me, guided me, challenged me,
and supported me .. .St. John's enabled me
to be a better person by giving me an
expanded vision oflife and its infinite
opportunities for learning, discovery,
and actualization. "
When Miss King returned to work and
live at St. John's more than a decade later,
with her 7-year-old daughter Rachel in tow,
Annapolis had become a "hotbed of civil
rights activity." Here, Miss King found her
new challenges in the area of public service.
"I am so thankful to the college and the
Alumni Association for reminding me that
my life had meaning and that I should take
pride in some of my achievements,"
Miss King said.
At the All-Alumni meeting, Glenn
Housley joined the class of 2004, receiving
a college cap and gown along with his
honor. For IS years, Mr. Housley has hosted
St. John's students on the college's Annual
Sail Picnic and has introduced other
students to the art of sail making.
In his tribute to Mr. Housley, Chris
Denny (Ag3) said: "Glenn and his wife,
Sus3an Borden (A87) , the college's director
offoundation relations}, have opened the
doors of their home to students and faculty
with gracious hospitality through the years.
Students who know Glenn in his many
roles-sailor, craftsman intramural
competitor, and friend-are grateful for his
participation in the life of the college."_.
commissions, including the Delaware
Higher Education Commission and the
National Commission for the Support of
Public Schools. In 2000, he received the
Order of the First State from the governor
of Delaware, an award the recognized his
contributions to improving the quality of
life for residents of the state.
"It is gratifying to have one's efforts
recognized, but it is especially so that this
award comes from all of you," Dr. Carter
said at the Homecoming banquet. "I have a
special place for it right here," he added,
tapping his chest, "and I'll keep it there
for always."
Dr. Carter acknowledged the support
and assistance of his "capable and longsuffering wife, Ann," and introduced his
grandson, Matt Carter, (Ao8). "I have been
lucky enough to be in the right places, at
the right times, to be able to help make
good things happen," he said.
A native of New York, Charlotte King
became one of the first African-American
students to graduate from St. John's. After
graduation, she went on to a career in
social services and today is a senior human
services executive and clinical therapist.
In rg7o, she returned to St. John's to help
establish the college's first counseling
program. She entered public service,
becoming assistant director of the Anne
Arundel County Department of Social
Services, and later directed social services
in Charles County. She served as the
executive director of Associated Catholic
Charities in Washington, D.C. In rggo,
she was appointed executive director of
WILLIAM CARTER (CLASS OF I940) WAS
HONORED FOR HIS COWfRIBUTIONS TO
EDUCATION.
{ THE
CoLLEGE.
St. fohn 's College. Winter 2005
}
AMERICA
BY }UDY KISTLER-ROBINSON (SF77, SFG179)
For several years the Twin Cities alumni
chapter has engaged in reading books according to a theme. Mter a year-long theme on
tragedy, we read what was for some of us an
arduous list of Goethe's literature and scientific writings for a ydr. With that ambitious
undertaking completed, we had no theme in
mind when one member suggested reading
The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.
None of the group had yet read it, but the
keywords "travel" and "Mississippi" spurred
us to read TWain's Adventures ofHuckleberry
Finn first, followed by The Confidence Man.
At that time, we weren't sure whether our
theme should be travelogues or river tales.
Our theme evolved into "Who are we as
Americans?" when we chose to read
Tocqueville 's Democracy in America next
(over three months).
Since the time period of our readings started in the early rgth century, we attempted to
move gradually into the 2oth century and get
a range of different perspectives. Our readings encompassed W.E.B. DuBois' Souls of
Black Folk, Willa Cather's Death Comes for
the Archbishop, Henry James's Washington
Square, Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle, Jack
Kerouac's On the Road, and Anne Fadiman's
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down:
A Hmong Girl, Her American Doctor, and the
Clash oJTwo Cultures. Although our members all agreed we could have stayed on this
theme for years without even scratching the
surface, we ended our investigation into the
American psyche with an American Western
film. Which one to watch caused more
debate than any reading selection, but we
selected The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valence, directed by John Ford, because
we'd heard that Eva Brann once led a
seminar on it.
Many exciting and relevant questions came
up in the course of our readings and discussions. Some of the recurring ones:
What would Tocqueville say about
2-oth-century America? This surfaced in
discussions on immigrant experience and
cultural/ class clashes .
Questions of culture, as seen through the
immigrant experience. How does a group (or
individuals within a group) both keep a former culture and found a new one? Is assimilation inevitable, or does this very process end
up changing the dominant culture too?
How do time and experience change Western archetypal ideas, such as democracy?
What do we value?
How do we deal with the precarious and
important balance of individualism versus
the common good?
What are the different ways to approach
building a society?
What is the American myth? What are the
stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and
is there a basis for these?
Participants seemed to enjoy this theme
greatly, both due to the variety of readings
available within it as well as the timeliness of
the topic in this election year. Next up for our
chapter: epic adventures and journeys, starting with the Odyssey.-$-
47
ST. JOHN~S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in the
St. John' s College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors elected
by and from the alumni body. The Board meets
four times a year, twice on each campus, to
plan programs and coordinate the affairs of the
Association. This n ewsletter within The College magazine is sponsored by the Alumni
Association and communicates Alumni
Association news and events of interest.
President- Glenda Eoyang, SF76
Vice President-Jason Walsh, A85
Secretary- Barbara Lauer, SF76
Treasurer - Bill Fant, A79
Getting-the-Word-Out Action Team ChairLinda Stabler-Talty, SFGI76
Mailing address- Alumni Association,
St. John's College, P.O Box 28oo, Annapolis,
MD 2r404, or u6o Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
Awards of Merit go to alumni who have
made outstanding contributions to the
college, their professions, or the nation.
Honorary Alumni awards go to individuals who have made significant differences
in the lives of students or the college
without having been enrolled as students.
At-Large Directors of the Alumni Association Board are elected by members of the
Association to represent them in the
decision-making processes.
Alumni-elected members of the Board
ofVisitors and Governors provide unique
alumni perspectives to inform the
decisions that set policy for the college.
Officers of the Alumni Association are
elected to provide support and leadership
to the Alumni Association Board of
Directors.
Do you know anyone-alumnus or
not-who should be recognized as an outstanding member of our community?
If so, please contact our Nominations
Committee chair Steve Thomas at
sthomas@fsa.com. Please provide your
name, class year, contact information
for you and the nominee, and a brief
explanation of your nomination._.
CALL FOR
NoMINATIONS
The St. John's College Alumni Association
recognizes members ofthe community in a
variety of ways.
. MEMBERS OF THE TWIN CITIES CHAPTER TOOK A
LITERARY JOURNEY THROUGH I9TH- AND 20THCENTURY AMERICA.
{ TH E
CoLLEGE .
St. f ohn's College. Winter 2005
}
�- -- - - - -- - --·--- ·
{ST.
}oHN~s
FoREVER}
Experience the beauty of early summer
along the San Juan, Colorado, or Green
rivers in an outdoor adventure led by
Mark St. John, director of student activities
in Santa Fe. This adults-only trip is open
to all alumni and their spouses/partners,
but is limited to r6 participants. Participants are invited to camp on the launch
site on Thursday, June r6.The cost
is $300. Contact the Alumni Office at
sos-984-6103, or e-mail Roxanne
Seagraves at rseagraves@sjcsf.edu for
more details. By April I, the office will
know which river has been chosen for
the trip.
THEigo8FOOTBALLTEAM,
AT A TIME INTERCOLLEGIATE
ATHLETICS THRIVED AT
ST.
JoHN's.
GLORY DAYS
n October ro, 1936,
The Black and Orange of
St. John's College entered
the field before s,ooo fans
in Ashland, Va., to face the
Randolph-Macon Yellow
Jackets. The Johnnies were clearly outmatched by the Jackets, who were expecting
to add an 18th game to their winning streak.
But the Johnnies, well prepared by new head
coach Valentine "Dutch" Lentz, held back
Randolph-Macon's star quarterback. Neither team scored until Johnnie Lambros
(class ofrg38) passed the ball to Bill
Stallings (class of 1939), who crossed the
goal line. The game ended in a 7-0 victory
for the Johnnies, the second in a six-game
winning streak.
But the glory days for the college's
athletic teams were waning. In earlier years,
even as the college's academic program
struggled, the athletic program thrived.
Championship lacrosse and football teams
regularly humbled rivals including Johns
Hopkins and the new state college,
Maryland Agricultural, now the University
participate in intercollegiate sports.
In the account given in J. Winfree Smith's
A Search for a Liberal Education, Barr
cited difficulties in scheduling games,
adding that intercollegiate athletics
"involves substituting a spectator
psychosis for student participation."
Lentz left St. John's and later became
head basketball coach at West Point.
Seniors from the class ofr939 voiced
their disappointment with Barr's decision
in thatyear'sRat-Tat, the college yearbook. "With the graduation of our class,
intercollegiate sports pass out of the
picture. And while it is no more our
purpose to bring up that question than
to re-fight the Civil War .. .looking at the
list of our activities, we find that half of
the class played [a sport] at one time or
another during our stay here."
The yearbook writers couldn't have
anticipated how many Johnnies still play
sports. More than roo of the students in
Annapolis and about J20 in Santa Fe take
part in intramurals.
of Maryland. The Johnnies' 62-0 victory
against MaJ:yland in r8gg recently made
the front page of the Washington Post as
one of Maryland's 13 worst losses in
football, a sidebar to a story on a Virginia
Tech-Maryland game.
The brilliant rg36 season was attributed
to some outstanding players and the coaching prowess of Lentz, a rgr8 alumnus who
became athletic director later that season.
A professional sports star in football and
baseball, Lentz had played with the Orioles
basketball team in the Eastern League and
was a high school coach until he returned
to his alma mater in 1926. The 1937 season,
with only two wins and one tie in a ro-game
season, was attributed to a tough schedule
and several injuries. The great triumph of
the final season, rg38, was a o-o tie with
Johns Hopkins, with whom the Johnnies
had the third-oldest sports rivalry in
intercollegiate sports. Failing to win a
single point that year, the team earned the
nickname "the galloping goose-eggs."
In 1939, President Stringfellow Barr
announced the college would no longer
{ THE
Co LL EGE.
St. fohn 's College. Winter 2005
-CHRISTOPHER UTTER
}
(Ao6)
Reunion classes are '70, '75, 'So, '85, 'go,
'95, 'oo. This year, a special roth anniversary reunion is planned for Eastern
Classics participants. Events include
reunion class parties and seminars, the
annual Alumni Art Show, Homecoming
Dinner Dance, Friday Night Lecture
(relating to Eastern Classics), and a
Saturday night Midsummer's Night Ball.
Meet the new president of the campus,
Michael Peters, over Sunday Brunch.
Join Annapolis president Christopher B.
Nelson and Santa Fe president Michael P.
Peters for an "Evening of Conversation"
about the state of the college and plans for
securing its future.
The venue is the Fogg Museum of Art
at Harvard University, and guests will have
the opportunity to tour the museum's
galleries before and after the program.
Beer, wine, and light fare will be served,
and there's plenty of time set aside to allow
Johnnies to catch up with each other and to
hear about what's happening in Annapolis
and Santa Fe.
This year's summer program is a week full
of intellectual stimulation, fun events on
and off campus, and a special participatory
theater event. Alumni can choose from
three seminars:
Chushingura, or The Treasury ofLoyal
Retainers, led by Claudia Honeywell
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, led by
Kenneth Wolfe and Jay Smith
Milton, Paradise Lost, led by Eva Brann
and David Carl
Participants can also explore A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest by
joining a Shakespeare Reader's Theatre
production of the comedy. Reader's
Theatre is minimalist theatre in which
the script is used openly, staging is simple,
and no full sets or costumes are involved.
Special outings include a picnic and winery
tour along the Rio Grande and Puccini's
Turandot at the Santa Fe Opera. For information on fees, housing information, and
hotel discounts, visit the college's Web site
(click on "Alumni" and choose activities in
Santa Fe) or call the Alumni Office at
sos-984-6!03.
A QUIET MOMENT BY THE POND DURING
SANTA FE's HoMECOMING LAST suMMER.
September 30-0ctober 2
Reunion class years are ' 45, 'so, 'ss. '6o,
'6s.,
,
,
Alla11
Ce
"An Evening of Conversation"
6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday, March rs.
Fogg Museum of Art ·
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge
RSVP by March r: 410-295-sssr, or
alexandra.fotos@sjca.edu
This event is the first of four planned
for 2005; similar gatherings for alumni,
parents and friends will take place in
San Francisco, Albuquerque/Santa Fe,
and Philadelphia later in the year.
:~~ DATE DUE
I
Back cover: Photo by David Trozzo
{T
H E
CoLL
E G E .
St. fohn 's College . Winter 2005
}
�•
STJOHN'S
COLLE~GE
PERIODICALS ·
POSTAGE PAID
ANNAPOLIS · SANTA FE
PUBLISHED BY THE
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
P.O.
Box 28oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
2I404
ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED
~I
�
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<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
Description
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The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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thecollege2001
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48 pages
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The College, Winter 2005
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Volume 31, Issue 1 of The College Magazine. Published in Winter 2005.
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St. John's College
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
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2005
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pdf
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The College Winter 2005
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Hartnett, John (Santa Fe editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Borden, Sus3an
Deimel, August
Goyette, Barbara
Hughey-Comers, Erin
Knapp, Carolyn
Maguran, Andra
Mattson, Jo Ann
Rinn, Natalie
Seagraves, Roxanna
Utter, Christopher
Weiss, Robin
White, Roseanna
Johnson, David
Eoyang, Glenda H.
The College
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6b8d06ce38e6a21ddf56bf9ce5c6de77.pdf
10f3c0274f819bdc99f5ccb9601c60c5
PDF Text
Text
SPRING
.
2- 0
ANNAPOLIS
-..
0
5
�SPRING
THE
VOLUME
31,
0
THE MAGAZINE FOR ALUMNI OF ST. JOHN 'S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA
2,005
I SSUE
FE
{CONTE NTS }
PACE
IO
DEPARTMENTS
2
BOATHOUSE REPUBLIC
Spending a sabbatical at St. John's gives
the president of Randolph-Macon College
a glimpse of sports and the Program.
PACE
14
BROTHER ROBERT
He came as a visitor to learn more about
the great books program; he ended up
becoming a treasured member of the
St. John's community.
PACE
8
PAGE
14
18
PROFILES
30 On "Marketplace" David Brown (AGI95)
talks business.
34 Newspaper editor Julia Goldberg (SFgr)
Annapolis tutor John Verdi points to the
writers who most influenced Nietzsche,
including Emerson, Plato, and Pascal.
likes to make waves.
38 Nathan Wilson (AGio1) unveils shroud
mysteries.
PAGE
18
44 STUDENT VOICES
A Johnnic ponders what it means to be a
member of a community oflcarners.
NIETZSCHE HAUS
In Sils-Maria, a Johnnie revisits the ideas
of her senior essay.
PACE
28 BIBLIOFILE
21 ALUMNI NOTES
WRITERS
23
LETTERS
Annapolis tutor Eva Brann shares
aphorisms in Open Secrets/Inward
Prospects.
NIETZSCHE'S FAVORITE
PACE
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
Michael Peters settles in.
A new dean in Annapolis.
A conversation across generations.
Grappling ideas-and more-in Santa Fe.
Warren Spector (A81) funds
Annapolis dorm.
46 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
' FOREVER
48 ST. JOHNS
26
CROQUET
There's always next year.
PAGE
26
ON THE COVER
Nietzsche
Illustration by David Johnson
2
�{FROM
THE
{FROM THE BEL L
BELL TOWERS}
A NEW DEAN IN ANNAPOLIS
MICHAEL P ETERS
On the Job in Santa Fe
It's been a busy six months for
Michael Peters, president of the
Santa Fe campus. On January 17,
he arrived in his office in Weigle
Hall, and a few hours later,
donned academic robes to
deliver his first Convocation
address to January freshmen.
Then the college's Board of
Visitors and Governors arrived
on campus for four days of
meetings, and the pace has
hardly slacked ofT since.
In spite of a busy schedule,
Mr. Peters has made it a priority
to set aside time to get to know
students and the Program by
sitting in on seminar with the
January freshmen. Although he
is juggling a great deal of out-oftown travel, he's been able to
make at least one seminar a
week and hopes to continue
with the JFs through most of the
summer. He does the reading,
sits in the side chairs-as
prospectives and other guests
do-and takes in the conversation. As a West Point graduate,
former career Army officer, and
most recently, former executive
vice president of the Council
on Foreign Relations, he particularly enjoyed the discussions
on Thucydides.
"There is so much in Thucydides that directly paraUels the
world today," he says. " Right
now on the global stage we are
dealing with many of the same
issues and facing many of the
same challenges."
He also was a member of a
senior essay committee on
LIBERAL ARTS
AND CITIZENSHIP
From Mr. Peters' Convocation speech, January 17,
2005
" ....You and I will be participating actively in this intellectual
community-a community which believes chat a liberal education is good for its own sake, but is also crucial for citizens of
our country and our world if, as former Dean Scott Buchanan
wrote in the college catalog from the late '30s, we are to:
'Distinguish fact from fiction, between principle and case,
between opinion and insight, between propaganda and
instruction, and between truth and falsity.'
"These attributes of citizenship are as important now as
they were in the dark days prior to World War II. Today, our
nation honors the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, who
demonstrated that the ideas and character of one man can have
a profoundly positive effect on many.
"It has become almost a cliche to say we are part of an
interconnected and complex world-a world that faces profound
issues of war and peace, poverty and plenty, disasters, plagues
and pestilence both natural and man-made, to name a few.
These issues require thoughtful and informed public debate if
we are to come up with imaginative and workable solutions.
Dealing with these problems makes a liberal education not a
luxury, but a necessity. In the individual and collective choices
we must all make, bumper stickers won't do and you won't find
bumper stickers at St. John's." ♦
{T
THE
Co
LL
B .
The Brothers Karamazov-one
of the highlights of his St. John's
experience to this point.
Observing January freshmen
take their first tentative steps in
the Program and participating
in a senior's culminating experience gave him appreciation for
the growth a student experiences in four years at St. John's.
There's also a great deal
of work to be clone in cultivating relationships with the
community and the state of
New Mexico. A step in that
direction was hosting the
state's Summit on 21st Century
Competitiveness on campus.
The event attracted state
leaders including Gov. Bill
Richardson and U.S. Sen.
Jeff Bingaman to the
St. John's campus.
The schedule for Mr. Peters
and his wife, Eleanor, won't
slow down much this summer.
He'll be busy greeting visitors
to the campus who come for
Summer Classics, hosting his
first Homecoming in July, and
getting ready for his October z8
inauguration. At his request,
the inauguration ceremony
will be simple and without
much fanfare.
St. John's College . Spring 2005 )
ELEANOR AND MIKE PETERS HAVE
BEEN ON THE ROAD, MEETING
ALUMNI AND FRIENDS.
"There isso
much in
Thucydides
that directly
parallels the
world today. "
MICHAEL PETERS,
SANTA FE PRESIDENT
St. John's students continue
to surprise him with their
diverse talents and extraordinary thirst for learning. " I often
reflect on these young men
and women and what their
contributions will be to our
world. They're learning,
through the Program and the
method, to address the most
important questions life asks of
us-helping them learn not what
to think, but how to think." ♦
-ANDRA MAGURAN
Shortly after President
Christopher Nelson announced
that tutor Michael Oink (A75)
was selected dean of the
Annapolis campus, Dink
received both "congratulations
and condolences" from his
colleagues.
The congratulations referred
to the great honor it is to be
selected by one's peers for
such an important position.
The condolences-most meant
in jest-spoke to the burdens of
the job: long hours spent in
committee meetings, hiring
and tenure decisions, meting
out justice in disciplinary
issues, and making other
difficult decisions that affect
the lives of students. It's also
not easy to take a long breakfive ye ars-from the classroom.
"It's true that tutors regard
ourselves as model learners,"
says Dink. "And there's always
the sacrifice of giving up our
primary activity for a while.
It's probably love for the
community as a whole that
motivates any tutor to want to
be dean. You have the chance
to see that St. John's is the best
that it can be."
Dink looks forward to
moving into the dean's position
July 1, succeeding Harvey
Flaumcnhaft, who served for
eight years. " It's an opportunity for a more thorough and
deeper involvement with the
college," he says. "It's a
challenge."
He feels fortunate that
his predecessor made great
strides in his years as dean: in
faculty development, support
for students, and forging bonds
with Santa Fe. "I'm very grateful to Harvey- he's left things
in great shape," he says.
After spending a year-ancl-ahalf at Harvard, Dink entered
St. John's as a Febbie. A high
school English teacher had
suggested the great books
program at St. John's, but at
the time Dink believed, "I
could get the same thing at any
good school." However, in his
philosophy classes, Oink found
his professors lecturing from
notes or teaching their own
books. He wasn't reading the
books he wanted to read and
wasn't encountering many
students who were serious
about their studies.
He returned to Harvard after
an unsatisfying first year, but
by the middle of sophomore
year, his thoughts returned to
St. John's. "J spent the reading
period for my exams at Harvard
filling out the Febbie application," he says.
After St. John's, Oink went
on to graduate study in philosophy at Catholic University.
Five short years after graduating from the St. John's, he had
{ T THECo
.
TOWERS}
completed the coursework for
his doctorate and was back at
St. John's as a tutor in Santa Fe.
"I knew I would like to be a
teacher, and the idea of coming
back as a tutor had been in the
back of my mind through grad
school," says Dink. In the
summer of 1980,Dink received
a call from Robert Bart, then
dean in Santa Fe, who needed
to fill a last-minute appointment. Dink flew o ut for an
interview and joined the
faculty.
WHILE MICHAEL DINK (A75) WILL
MISS THE CLASSROOM, HE IS LOOK·
ING FORWARD TO THE CHALLENGES
OF BEING DEAN.
In 1984,he transferred to
Annapolis where he also served
as co-director of athletics, first
with tutor Bryce Jacobsen
(class of 1942), and later with
Roberta Gable (A78). He was
then and remains a big fan of
St. John's College . Spring 2005 }
3
the college's intramural
program. " Intramm·als allowed
me to play sports, and I became
a pretty active athlete," he says.
Dink received a grant from
the National Endowment for
Humanities that allowed him to
spend a year pursuing questions in the works of Plato and
a second year leading a faculty
study group and delivering a
lecture.
Dink's three-year term as
director of the Graduate Institute in Annapolis from 1998 to
2001 was good preparation for
the dean's office, he believes.
"I t's on a much smaller scale,
but the responsibilities are
similar-you're involved with
other segments of the college
community, publications,
financial aid, transcripts, being
responsible for students. It
does give you some sense of
what's required in the dean's
office."
Dink looks forward to
working with "all segments of
the community, including
Santa Fe, supporting younger
faculty, and just hoping to find
ways to keep things running
smoothly." Among the changes
scheduled to occur in his
deanship is the discontinuation
of the Febbie program in
Annapolis, with the last class
entering in January 2006.
(The program will continue in
Santa Fe.) Does he have mixed
feelings, since the Febbie
program allowed him to enter
St. John's when he was ready?
While it's hard to see traditions
go, Dink says, the decision
was in the best interest of the
students.
"Febbies get a truncated
version of the Program, and it
puts a lot of stress on the students," he says. "In recent years
most Febbies have been students who would have come in
the fall ifwe had let them." ♦
-ROSEMARY HARTY
�4
THE
{FROM
THE
so-YEAR CONVERSATION
When women from the first coed graduating class at St. John's
returned to the college for a day with women of the current
graduating class, we did what we always do at St. John's: have
conversations. From a leisurely lunch to a seminar on John KeaLs'
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Virginia Woolf's "On Not Knowing
Greek" to a dinner at the Boathouse, a steady flow of conversation
continued, tying 1955 to 2005 as solidly as the conversation in a
freshman seminar ties new Johnnies to Socrates and Agamemnon.
Toward the end of the evening, Missy Skoog (Ao5), who
helped organize the day's events, spoke of the inspiration the
women of 1955provide for women of the current class. It was an
inspiration of which I was not much aware before meeting the
women from 1955. In my own experience at the college, I have
only recently thought of my presence as a woman in addition to my
presence as a student. The struggles I have experienced and the
ways I have questioned the Program and myself have felt very
personal. It is only recently that I have seen the ways I share those
struggles with others.
Over meals with Barbara Brunner Kiebler (A55), Cornelia
Hoffman Reese (A57) and Emily Martin Kutler (A55) , J saw that
the uncertainty I'm going through as I'm about to graduate is
perhaps a natural result of having a Johnnie's philosophical bent
and widespread interests. At lunch, Kiebler told Samantha Buker
(Ao5) and me a life story that included four children, graduate
courses in mathematics, and a law degree she earned in her 40s.
It put my own varied plans in perspective. I'm someone interested
in questioning and experiencing, like Johnnies have always been.
This interest is clearly what brought the first women to the
BELL TOWER S }
{FROM
college. Everyone I asked said t hey were not aware of making
history when they decided to come to St. John's. Though Kiebler
said she felt "on display" once she arrived at the college, the
decision co attend was based on a love oflearning rather than a
conscious effort to change the status quo.
Reese said she fell in love with St. John's as soon as she saw that
questions and answers were "part of the learning process ... for
both the students and the faculty." She said she had often been
told in high school, "That's a very good question, Miss Hoffman,
and I'm sure you realize why we don't have time to answer it." At
St. John's, she encountered a very different attitude toward asking
questions. "I felt like I blossomed," she said. "I felt like all my
eagerness to learn had a place to go, and a way to get there."
Talking to the first women at St. John's was fun and comfortable. We shared the common ground of the St. John's Program,
and therefore had a base from which Lo compare and consider
our life experiences. Carolyn Banks-Leeuwcnburgh (A55), who
couldn't make the event, but shared her memories in a phone
conversation, said she believes the Program produces this ease of
connection by being "so different and unique, it's timeless."
Though much of what I realized that day had to do with the
similarity of all women and of all Johnnies, I was also deeply
impressed by the courage the first women showed in coming to
such a deeply intellectual school at a time when there were doubts
on all sides as to a woman's ability to handle such a thing. Women
were alJowed to apply to St. John's in 1951 because of several
issues, according to Barbara Goyette (A73, vice president for
advancement in Annapolis). These included then-president
Richard Weigle's commitment to co-education, low enrollment at
the college, and a strong interest among women in attending
St. John's. When the women did enroJJ in 1951, they came in spile
of resistance from some
tutors and students.
Goyette said, " The men
were unsure socially
about how it would
change the campus, and
they were unsure that the
women could do the
work.AJ1ofthatchanged
very quickly once the
women came."
The women did
encounter some prejudice. Leeuwenburgh
remembers being Lold in a
don rag, in response to
the character of her
opinions, that she should
"go make babies." Reese
continued on p. 5
LONGTIME ST. JOHN'S
LIBRARIAN CHARLOTTE
FLETCHER (HA69, CENTER
TH E
B E L L
hornbcams, loblolly pines,
sycamores, dogwoods, red oaks,
and maple trees.
N EWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
In late March, the Santa Fe
can1pus hosted the New Mexico
State Summit on 21st Century
Competitiveness. The summit
brought together senior
New Mexico business and
community leaders with national
economists, industry and policy
experts, and federal policymakers to discuss the state's
higher education and workforce
challenges in the new economy.
President Mike Peters gave the
welcoming remarks and introduced Gov. Bill Richardson and
U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman.
The summit addressed one of
the state's thorniest problemsthe continuing drain of the
state's educated young people to
other states. After graduation,
the majority of college students
in New Mexico tend to leave
the state for better-paying jobs
elsewhere.
In his opening remarks,
Peters pointed out that St. John's
College actually helps reverse
this trend by attracting and
keeping college-educated people
in the stale. The college recruits
students from nearly every state
and several foreign countries,
yet approximately 25 percent of
St. John's graduates remain in
New Mexico after finishing their
studies. Currently almost 1,000
alumni live in New Mexico.
Approximately 31 percent serve
as teachers in public and private
high schools, as professors at the
state's colleges and universities,
and in the state's Department of
Education.
5
TO WE R S }
AP POI NTMENT S
In Annapolis: RUTHANDERSON
COGGESHALL
has been appoint-
development field. Arasteh
replaces RoBERTA G ABLE (A78),
who has moved from the Career
Services office co Admissions,
where she is associate director.
In Santa Fe: P ENELOPE
B ENEKOS (SF99) has been
named advancement officer.
Prior to her return to the Southwest, she taught English in
France, traveled throughout the
Mediterranean, and worked in
development at the Museum of
Fine Arts in Boston.
St. John's in Annapolis received
a Plant Award (People Loving
and Nurturing Trees) from the
Maryland Department of Natural Resources for undertaking an
urban forestry program several
years ago. The inventory counted 118trees on the campus at the
time. Since then, another 90 or
so have been added, says Blythe
ed director of major gifts. Previously she was chief development
officer for the National Gallery
of Art, where she completed the
museum's New Century Fund
campaign and redirected the
gallery's development efforts to
solicit major gifts nationally and
locally. She also held leadership
positions at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine.
SrEFANlE TAKACS (A89) joins
the college as director of annual
giving from Abraham House in
the South Bronx, where she was
assistant director of operations
and development director.
Takacs had been a volunteer
fundraiser in Philanthropia
since 1998 and served as the
events committee chair for
Woods, the college's horticultur-
several years.
cation, "Girl Scout/STUDIO
ist. The college carefully tracks
the health of its trees, she adds.
Although the college and
community still miss the
magnificent Liberty Tree, the
campus is rich in American
is the
new Career Services director in
Annapolis. She brings to the
college more than six years of
experience in a variety of private
and p ublic settings in the career
2B Advisor Self-Study Guide."
The program was created for
older girls age II-r7, a group
that often loses interest in
ANNAPOLIS ENVIRONMENTAL
AWARD
SlWtRZAD ARAsTE:11
STUDENTS
ELIZABETI-1 V EGA (SFo6)
received an Excellence Award
from the Girl Scouts for a guide
she wrote to help orient leaders
of a new national program aimed
at keeping teenage girls in valved
in scouting. The award is given
annually co individuals whose
innovative contributions
significantly advance the work
of the council.
Vega wrote a 68-page publi-
scouting ♦
continuedfrom p. 4
remembers that some of her male classmates would make a point
of challenging women when they demonstrated propositions in
math class. Both women chalked this up to a lack of maturity on
the part of some of their classmaLes. Reese said that she felt "just a
little" hostility that seemed to come mostly from younger men
who didn't know how to handle the presence of women.
The women, regardless of these difficulties, acquitted themselves admirably. Goyette said, "They surprised everyone. I think
they surprised themselves." They returned to St. John's 50 years
laLer, confident in the abilities St. John's had given them, ready to
encounter another seminar. I hope to carry myself with that sort of
grace and ease someday. I hope I am as available to share questions and conversation as all these women did that day. I hope I am
ready to aim for the heart of any conversation, as Emily Kutler did
when she pursued the true intent of Woolf'sessay. I hope I will
walk, as Barbara Kiebler did when she accompanied me to a class
on Einstein and Minkowski, unhesitatingly toward any chance to
keep learning. ♦
TOP) JOINED 2005 AND 1955
CLASS MEMBERS FOR A
SAMANTHA BUKER (AOS) ANO SARAH CROOKE (A55) HAVE MUCH TO TALK
CELEBRATION OVER CROQUET
ABOUT DESPITE A SO-YEAR DIFFERENCE.
WEEKEND.
{ THE
C o COLLEGE
. St. John's College . Spring 2005
)
{ THE
Co LL E c
E.
St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
�6
{FROM THE
JOHNNIES GRAPPLE WITH
MORE THAN IDEAS
Jiu-Jitsu Takes H old in Santa Fe
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a new
addition to the martial arts
offerings on the Santa Fe
campus, but it's become
enormously popular in just a
few short months. C.J. McCue,
who joined the Santa Fe staff as
student activities coordinator
eight months ago, is an accomplished martial artist whose
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes
have attracted more than
30 students and inspired
several Johnnies to
enterand win-national
competitions.
During spring break,
McCue and seven ofher
students o·aveled to Las
Vegas. Nevada. to compete in a submission
wrestling tournament
for no-gi grappling and
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. 1\vo
ofMcCue's students,
Alex Kongsgaard (SF05)
and Quinn Mulhern
(SF07), both blue belts,
took first place in their
divisions. McCue took
second place in the
women's advanced
~
division and third place ;
in the open-weight
!
women's division.
z~
]\1:,::Cue teaches
•
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in
the Gracie style, which was
created for self- defense. This
martial art relies upon body
mechanics and leverage rather
than strength, so a small person
can win against a bigger or
heavier competitor. That's one
reason the sport is popular with
women, says McCue.
There are two types of
Jiu-Jitsu: Brazilian, or modern,
was developed after 1900,
while Japanese Jiu-Jitsu is
considered traditional and dates
to pre-1900. Like many martial
arts, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu requires
a technical knowledge of
specific positions, development
of physical and mental strength,
and the use of strategy. However, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is
unique in that most of the
techniques involve grappling
on the ground. "Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu practitioners learn how
to defend themselves on the
ground," says McCuc. " Of
course this has enormous
real-world benefit as a selfdefense method for both me n
and women."
The clothing (gt) looks like a
traditional martial arts uniform
ofloose white pants and jacketstyle wrap shirt secured with
a belt.
"The gi is a very instrumental part ofBrazilian Jiu-Jitsu,"
says McCue. "Thegi can be
used as a way to control one's
opponent."
Most of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
techniques involve specific
positions. There are takedowns,
{ THE COLLEGE,
{FROM
BEL L TOW ERS}
self-defense techniques, and
striking, but the core of the art
involves mental so·ategy. That's
part of the appeal to Johnnies.
Competitors strive to improve,
maintain, or defend their
ground positions, along with
mastering submissions such as
chokes and armlocks.
Both Kongsgaard and
Mulhern apply themselves with
vigor to the martial art, as they
have with other endeavors.
After Kongsgaard graduated
from high school, he walked
500 miles from the CaliforniaOregon border to San Francisco, averaging 2,2, miles a day.
In addition to continuing his
wrestling training, Kongsgaard
ALEX KoNcscAARD (SF05) 1s
WRESTLED TO THE GROUND BY
QUINN MULHERN (SF07).
is an avid cyclist, a rock climber,
and a member of the St. John's
Search & Rescue team.
Mulhern aJso brings intensity
and dedication to his training,
says McCue. Mulhern's older
brother practices Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu and persuaded him to
take up serious study. "We
would wrestle, and I saw that
my brother's submission
St. John's Collese. Sprins 2005
}
movements were not angry, but
graceful and re laxed," he says.
He credits McCue, "a great
teacher," with helping him win
in Las Vegas. "She is able to
demonstrate something
physical in a way people really
respond to," he explains.
The psychological aspect of
competing is the most difficult,
says Mulhern, who practiced
breathing and visualization
techniques to enhance his
performance. "Adrenaline can
be one of your biggest enemies
because it can cause you to use
your energy right away," he
says. He credits his winning to
feeling calmer. "It's one thing
wrestling in class or wrestling
with your friends, but
another competing in a
tournament where you
have only four minutes
and you can easily
forget everything
you know. It's a lot
of pressure."
McCue looks forward to getting more
students involved in
sports at St. John's.
"While some Sc. John's
students are not very
physically active when
they first arrive at the
college, they find themselves in a community
of like-minded individuals and feel more
confident when they
discover the benefits of
physical activity," she
says. "You see students
make a connection to
something physical-whether
it is a martial art, climbing,
Search & Rescue, hiking,
skiing, winter camping, or
intramural activities. They run
with it because they've become
inspired by all this at a later
time in their life. For some it's
just the beginning." ♦
-ANDRA MAGURAN
TH E
B ELL
TO WERS}
7
NEw DORMITORY Is A GIFT FROM ST. JoHN's ALUMNUS
Spector Hall to Open in January
Warren Spector (A81) has
given the coJJege a generous
gift to fund, in his father's
memory, the building of a new
dormitory on the Annapolis
campus. Spector Hall, as the
dorm now under construction
will be named, together with
Gilliam Hall, which opened
last fall, will allow the college
to house 80 percent of its
students on campus.
Mr. Spector, President
and Co-Chief Operating
Officer of Bear, Stearns &
Co. Inc., a leading Wall
Street investment banking
and securities trading and
brokerage firm, says his gift
was motivated by his appreciation for the education he
received at St. John's.
"St. John's provides a
unique educational experience," said Mr. Spector,
a member of the college's
Board of Visitors and
Governors. " Building
this dorm will help
preserve the intimate
learning environment that
sets St. John's apart from
other liberal arts schools."
The college needs new
dormitories for two reasons.
Overcrowding in existing
dorms required the college
to convert some double
rooms into triples and
appropriate a few common
rooms for housing. The
college also wants to better
nurture a community of
learners by ensuring that
students who want to live on
campus can do so. I mpressed
by the recent renovation of
Mellon Hall's classrooms and
laboratories, Mr. Spector was
pleased to provide a gift to
further improve student life.
"The St. John's educational
experience is not limited to the
classroom. The ability for
students to learn from each
other is greatly enhanced by
living together on campus."
Mr. Spector continued, " For
me the dialogue with my
fellow students was a crucial
part of my education. I could
not be more pleased to further
the education offuture
generations by funding the
creation of a place for that
dialogue to take place."
Spector Hall wilJ house
40 students when it opens in
January 2.006. The dormitory
includes spacious common
areas, suite-style rooms, and
a tutor's apartment.
The building will be named
Spector Hall in memory of
Warren Spcctor's father, who
died in 1990. Philip Spector
had forged over his lifetime a
AN APPRECIATION FOR HIS ST. J OHN'S EDUCATION PROMPTED WARREN
SPECTOR TO FUND A NEW DORMITORY ON THE ST. JOHN'S CAMPUS.
"One cfthe most valuable tools I
gainedfrom my St. John s education
was the abtfity lo think critically. "
WARREN SPECTOR, A8I
{ THE
COLLEGE·
St. John's Collese · Sprins 2005
}
successful career as a contractor who was responsible for
numerous residential,
commercial, and industrial
projects in the Washington,
D.C., metropolitan area. "I
very much wanted to find a way
to honor my father. It seems
fitting considering his long and
successful career as a builder
that a structure is named for
him. It is my hope that he
would have been extremely
pleased with the results,"
Mr. Spector said.
Ironically, both of Mr.
Spector's parents were
initially concerned when he
announced his plans to
transfer from Princeton and
start again as a freshman at
Sc. John's. " It did not take
long for my parents to see
that I thrived in the environment of St. John's College,"
commented Mr. Spector.
"By the time I graduated,
they were big fans of the
St. John's education and
were pleased that I did not
go to college anywhere else."
One of several St. John's
alumni working at the top
of the investment field,
Mr. Spector credits the
college with providing him
with skills that have helped
him succeed in the fastpaced and ever-changing
world ofWall Street.
" One of the most valuable
tools I gained from my
St. John's education was the
ability to think cri tically," said
Mr. Spector. "In the highly
analytical and technologically
sophisticated world in which
we live, the ability to think on
one's own and make sense of
the seemingly endless data
that exists should not be
underestimated." ♦
�8
{LETTERS}
{LETTER S }
VARIED VIEWPOINTS
I must respond to Mary Campbell
Gallagher's rejection of Martin A. Dyer' s
diversity initiative. Ms. Campbell's principal objection is that Mr. Dyer relies on the
premise that different "life experiences"
will somehow enrich the college's seminars. She insists that he "present proof."
Well, I can-and so, I believe, can any
St. John's alum.
....Anyone who has gone through four
years of the Program knows that people
bring their "life experiences" into the
seminar room. Male, female, veteran, gay,
married, black, Mormon, elderly, handicapped, Orthodox Jewish-can anyone be so
naive as to believe that such factors don't
influence how we approach a text? This
doesn't mean surrendering to subjectivity.
But it does mean expanding the Annapolis
campus beyond affluent suburbs of Washington-Baltimore and New York City, the base
for the student body when I was a student.
No one is advocating affirmative actionthat is, preferential treatment to someone
because of his or her background. But the
college effectively makes decisions all the
time about the makeup of the student body
by the way it recruits and where. If the
college makes a concentrated effort to
increase diversity, it can only result in
livelier class discussion by including
more and varied viewpoints.
STEVE WEINSTEIN, A95
ON DIVERSITY
I agree with three statements in the letter
from Mary Campbell Gallagher (A6o)
published in the winter 2005 issue of The
College: (1) "all men are fundamentally the
same ...."; (2) "All men are educable without regard to the peculiarities of their ethnic
and racial backgrounds;" and (3) " ... students' racial and ethnic characteristics
[make] no discernible contribution to
their being able to read and think well."
I disagree, however, \.vith other assertions.
I do not believe that the Opportunity
Initiative is inconsistent with the college's
mission of providing a liberal education.
Although the college makes its unique
program equally available to, and welcomes
everyone, its recruitment efforts have not
been equally successful in attracting all segments of the population. A major purpose of
the initiative is to determine the reasons for
this failure and to work with the Admissions
office in devising corrective measures. Our
goal is to broaden the college's appeal to
people who do not now seem to understand
learn to function well in both, to speak and
act according to the expectations of each.
They can competently participate in and
contribute to ongoing St. John's dialogue
seen through the lens of upper middle-class
people of European heritage. But to feel safe
enough to share the particular lessons life
has taught them and to relate their own
unique backgrounds to the topics and readings being considered in seminar would
require the safety of numbers and the college
community's appreciation of the richness to
be gleaned from different heritages.
I know college recruiters, with the
support of alumni of color, are making
good-faith attempts at increasing the
diversity of students and faculty. I hope they
arc successful for the sake of all students.
that its program is also intended for them,
not change either the program or admission
policies.
The great books are indeed teachers, and
close reading of them and good logic arc the
principal means by which conversation is
advanced. Other factors also play an important role. "[P]eculiarities [borne] of...race
and ethnic backgrounds" are among them,
as are differences in economic status,
religion, nationality and personal life
experiences...My views of freedom and
justice, for example, are affected by the fact
that I am black, am two generations removed
from slavery, and grew up in Baltimore in
the 1930s and 40s and attended college in
Annapolis when racial discrimination and
segregation were still the way of life.
Blacks were denied basic opportunities....
I suggest that interactions among students
both in class and in their day-to-day social
lives are a vital part of teaching and learning.
In other words, the encounter of individuals,
separately and in concert, \vith the great
books is indispensable to St. John's unique
education.
MARTIN
PATIENCE GARRETSON SCHENCK,
POETIC PLANCK
I enjoyed Anna Perleberg's poem "Relativity"
in the Winter 2005 issue of The College. As
" Relativity" did mention haiku in the last
stanza, Joffer one ofmy own in response:
Late autumn
Reading Planck
In the cold room ...
A. OYER, AS2
SHARING LIFE LESSONS
LUCIA STAIANO-DANIELS, SF04
A recent letter suggested that diversity has
nothing to do with learning at St. John's;
that, on the contrary, it is the books that are
our teachers. I disagree. If we learned only
from the books, students could sit in their
rooms and read them by themselves. Rather,
it is the exchange of ideas that leads us to
enlarge our understanding of what the books
can teach us.
An African-An1erican student who has
been stopped by the police for "driving
while black" understands the relationship
between justice and power differently than
the daughter of a judge who sits beside him
in seminar. Someone who grew up in a working-class church with a ministry to the poor
understands the parables ofJesus differently
than someone from a place of worship
attended by the privileged. A Muslim reads
Genesis differently than either a Christian or
a Jew. These differing backgrounds and perspectives can greatly enrich the exchange
that takes place around the seminar table.
The challenge for the college is to attract
sufficiently large numbers of students and
faculty from diverse backgrounds to affect
the culture of the college. Members of
minority groups have learned to live in two
cultures, that of their ethnicity and that of
the dominant group they have encountered
in school and other public venues. They
{ 1' n ll Co
LL E c E .
St. John's College . Spring 2005
Cuss OF l'.959
WEIRD SCIENCE
... .Infatuation, it seems, is frequently
the outcome of a close encounter with
Dr. Einstein's work, but I think we would aJJ
agree that St. John's College strives not only
to expose its students to the works of great
thinkers, and to impress upon its students
the importance of giving those thinkers
their due, but also it strives to equip its
students to be critical of what those thinkers
have to say. Education, Plato reminds us,
involves entrusting the cultivation of your
soul to another, so it is only prudent to exercise some caution (Protagoras 312c-313b).
As a theory ofrelativity, Dr. Einstein's
work should be properly understood as one
of reciprocity.
...A strict interpretation of relativity,
however, is no longer tenable. Relatively
well-known experiments with muons and
atomic clocks have demonstrated tha t
"clocks" moving at high speed do slow
down. Here is where things get peculiar.
A strict interpretation of relativity would
require that people riding on high-speed
airplanes see the clocks down on Earth slow
down. When the travelers return to their
earthbound comrades, there should be a
grand argument as each group asserts that
)
the other group's clocks were rwming slow.
Instead, there is agreement: the travelers
are younger than they would be if they had
stayed at home, and the difference is more
or less what Dr. Einstein's equations predict.
It is, then, a matter of fact, that relativity
effects are not reciprocal.
Oddly, then, experiments of this kind
demonstrate that there actually is such a
thing as absolute space, for we obviously
can decide who was moving and who was
standing still by seeing whose clocks were
slowed and whose were not. Further, until
someone can find a place where clocks run
faster than they do here on Earth, relativity
actually supports the claim that the earth is
absolutely at rest. But wait! It gets stranger:
if the Earth is at rest, then, since we see the
sun , moon, stars, and planets moving across
the sky, the evidence suggests that everything revolves around the Earth. And jL1st
to top it off, if everything revolves around
the Earth, then, since the universe is now
regarded as infinite, there is no reason not
to regard the Earth as the center of the
universe. Oh! The progress we've made!
At this point, the door stands "vide open
to supplement Dr. Einstein's theorywhich indeed, provides nothing beyond
what Aris to Ile would label a formal causeby reintroducing the aether as the material
cause, and so take a step towards developing
an account on the level of the efficient cause
(which is what any of the natural sciences, as
studies of how the material world works,
should strive to achieve). It would be most
mysterious , however, to use the very theory
that killed the aether to resurrect it.
Weird science? You'd better believe it.
But, at some point somebody will feel
emboldened to declare it to be nonsense,
and, at that time, there will be some need for
clear heads who can distinguish the baby
from the bath water. We all, I think, not only
hope, but expect that St. John's will be the
institution o f higher learning where those
heads get clarified ...
}OHN NEWELL, A86
__________
-'-'-.;;.;.;.
EINSTEIN OMISSION
Your capsule biography of Albert Einstein
on the inside cover of the [Winter 2005)
issue omitted two critical facts. The first
is that Einstein was a Jew. Although this
omission can be excused because it is a
matter of general knowledge, it is widely
assumed that because Einstein was never a
"religious" Jew his Jewish heritage was of
merely accidental significance until the
Nazis decreed otherwise.
9
l CAN IDENTIFY ONE OF THE STUDENTS IN THE OCTOBER CALENDAR PICTURE.. .JANE D'AGNESE
(A74) IS STRIDING UP TO THE QUAD AFTER LAB. LOOKING AT THE PICTURE, AND JUDGING FROM HER
ENTHUSIASM, l CAN STILL HEAR HER SAYING, "CHESTAH, CHESTAH, ARE YOU GOING TO THE PAHTY?"
(YouR CAPTION ABOUT SEMINAR AWAITING IS WELL-INTENTIONED, BUT I LIKE MY STORY BETTER.)
BEHIND HER IS POSSIBLY ME, THOUGH THE DRESS DOESN'T RING A BELL SO l WILL GLADLY CEDE TO
SOMEONE ELSE'S BETTER MEMORY AND IDENTIFICATION. SrrTING IN THE FOREGROUND IS, I'M
PRETTY SURE, PATRICK D'ADDARIO (A7x), OTHERWISE KNOWN ASP-DAD. -DEB Ross, A74
I do not think so. The Bavaria of
Einstein's youth was hardly a hotbed of
tolerance. Not only was the young Einstein
exposed to anti-Semitism; even ifhe and his
family were not "believing" Jews, he grew
up surrounded by believing Christians
receiving mandatory religious education
. .. .It is fair to suppose that this experience
as an intellectual as well as ethnic outsider
contributed to Einstein's ability to "think
outside the box," his ,villingness to explore
counter-intuitive models of the universe.
Second, the biographical sketch totally
omits the fact that Einstein was a committed
Zionist. Despite his principled disapproval
of ethnic nationalism, Einstein recognized
that Jews could not be fully accepted citizens
of European ethnic states, and needed their
own hom eland where they would not be
merely tolerated guests in an alien culture.
Well before Hitler came to power, Einstein
helped raise funds to buy land for Jewish
settlement and to support the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. After the war he
pleaded for the creation of a Jewish state,
and in his old age was offered (and declined)
the largely-ceremonial presidency of the
State oflsrael.
It is important to remember that even
such a universalist and hlLmanist as Albert
{ 1' H
E
Co
L LE
c
E .
St. John's College . Spring 2005
Einstein insisted on the importance of a
Jewish state for the preservation of the
Jewish people and their unique contribution
to human culture.
KEVIN SNAPP, SF72
CALENDAR MYSTERIES REVEALED
The May photo in the 2005 Philanthropia
calendar was taken in '72 or '73. That's me,
third from the left with the scraggly hair and
beard, with my leg up on the bench. Kit
(Kathleen) Callender (SF73) is to my left,
and Bill Blount (SF73) is seated to her left.
Beyond that, I'm guessing-it's embarrassing
not to remember everyone's names.
My sons will get a real kick out of seeing
their papa "back in the day."
PtTER MEADOW, SF73
The College welcomes letters on issues of
interest to readers. Letters may be edited for
clarity and/ or length. Those under
500 words have a better chance of being
printed in their entirety.
Please address letters to: The College
magazine, St. John's College, Box z8oo,
Annapolis, MD 21404, or by e-mail to
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu.
)
�IO
{ATHLETIC S }
{ATHLETICS}
''Bein.g out on the Severn River at dawn . ..
is about as close to heaven as you wtll ever get. "
BOATHOUSE
REPUBLIC
BY ROGER H. MARTIN
Roger Martin, president of Randolph-Macon College in the team. Everyone." Leo seems to be looking directly at me,
Ashland, Va., spent a semester at St. John :S lastfall. His goal perhaps because I stick out in this crowd of youngsters. I am not an
was to experiencefreshman year at the college, in part to gain ordinary freshman, but a college president on sabbatical.
I decide to go out for crew. Since I cannot live in a freshman
some insight that might be helpful in shaping the
residence haJJ, crew will provide the chance for me to have contact
freshman-year experience at his college. Martin sat in on
with students outside of the classroom and give me an opportunity
freshman seminar andjoined the crew team. In November, he
to explore the unique connection here between academics and
joined competitors 40 years younger at the annual Head of athletics.
the Occoquan Regatta. His experience broadened his views
On September 7, about 60 students turn up at six in the morning
about college sports.
for the first crew practice. I recognize some of chem: Julie, Justin,
reshman orientation ends at Iglehart Hall,
the college's ancient gymnasium. One hundred of us are greeted on this withering
August afternoon by athletic director
Leo Pickens (A78). We sit on the floor in a
wide semicircle as this man of modest build
and piercing eyes looks over us in silence. I
sense that we arc in the presence of a sage.
We are not seated in a gymnasium, but
rather in a sacred building- a temple, Leo explains. He talks about
how athletics was as much a part of Greek culture and society as
political discourse and debate and tells us chat athletics must therefore be taken seriously and with reverence.
After describing the intramural sports and activities at the
college, Leo says something you would not expect to hear from an
athletic director: "Skill and previous experience are not required
here at St. John's, just tlzumos. Passion." As he says "tlzumos," he
pounds his chest. He concludes: "Everyone who shows up will be on
{ T u E Co
LL Ec E .
Victoria-all members of my freshman seminar. No one is saying
anythi ng, and the eyes of many are glazed over, probably from latenight reading.
Leo, also the crew coach, wears blue thermal overalls, a red
sweatshirt that says "Johnnies" in white letters across the front, and
a well-worn baseball cap. I suspect he knows what is going through
our minds at this very moment. We are all wondering why any sane
person would get up at five in the morning to spend two hours
engaged in punishing physical exercise, often in foul weather. "I
can promise you," he says, "that being out on the Severn River at
dawn on a crisp fall morning, watching the sun rising from the east
and the geese flying to the south as eight oars move together in perfect unison over the glistening water is about as close to heaven as
you will ever get in this life."
We don't have Jong to wait. Next morning we all march down to
the dock. The sunrise over the Severn is spectacular. The novices,
including me, climb into an 18-person training barge. As we row up
and down College Creek the poetry of Homer's Odyssey, the book
we are now reading in seminar, provides a balm for the pain I begin
to feel in my lower back.
St. John's College . Spring 2005
)
THU/IfOS- PASSION- IS WHAT L EO P ICKENS DEMANDS FROM HIS ATHLETES.
{ THE
Co
LL E c E .
St. John's College. Spring 2005
)
�I2
{ATHLETICS}
{ATHLETICS}
The images and voices cfthe great books
are everywhere~ in the Boathouse as
we!f as on the Severn River.
ROCER MARTIN
When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more
we hauled the vessels down to the sunlit breakers first ....
The crews swung aboard, they sat to the oars in ranks
And in rhythm churned the water with stroke on stroke.
And churn the water we do in a boat vaguely similar to the
Pentekontor that brought Odysseus and his crew to the ends of the
world. I am in first position in the barge and directly in front of me
sits a limber 17-year-old freshman. Mike, the assistant coach, who
is standing in the stern at the tiller, yells out, "Everyone in the
catch position, oars square and buried." Not knowing what the
catch position is, I lean back as far as I can-which is not very
far-and my oar immediately fouls the oar of my rowing
companion who is leaning very far forward. The result is a loud
noise and a huge splash as we start rowing.
The novices practice in this way on College Creek until we
become proficient enough to row in a proper eight. Over the next
several weeks, my rowing improves and as it does, I blend in with
the young men in my boat. I am no longer a college president, I an1
just another novice learning how to row. I keep my mouth shut, I
observe, and I listen.
Most student-athletes leave their studies behind when they go
to practice. Not at St. John's. The images and voices of the great
books are everywhere, in the Boathouse as well as on the Severn
River. It is now 6:30 in the morning and it's pitch dark. We are
rowing up the river to
the start of our race, past
the Naval Academy
bridge, past the Route 50
bridge. A month from
now, we will race against
other colleges on the
Occoquan Reservoir in
Northern Virginia, and
our practice races have
taken on a new intensity.
The sky is studded with
stars, still bright enough
to be seen above the dark
purple hew of the Chesapeake's eastern sky, and
there isn't a cloud to be
seen. Bobbing sailboat
masts look like black
sticks in the distance,
{ TH E
and I can imagine the port of Argos, and Agamemnon and
Menelaus leaving for Troy with the Greek armada to win back
Helen. Our own armada of two eights, two fours, and a single quad
docs a river turn just beyond the Route 50 bridge and at Leo's
command we race back to the end of the Naval Academy seawall, a
distance of some 5,000 meters. A gray-blue storm cloud suddenly
appears and empties its moisture into our low-lying shells, requiring the coxes to bail madly as they call out their commands. At the
finish, in complete exhaustion, I notice the geese Leo Pickens
promised several weeks ago, eight of them (like the number rowing in our boat), flying directly overhead toward Virginia, honking
loudly as they wing their way south. The vision suggests to me that
we will do well at Occoquan.
October is upon us. My seminar is reading Plutarch's Lives of
lite Noble Grecians and Romans, and my boat continues to
improve. Today, us our four racing shells approach the Naval
Academy bridge, rowing at a rather hectic pace over the usual
5,000-meter course, we see an armada of yellow Naval Academy
shells, approaching us from downriver. Laughter comes from one
of them as it passes to our starboard. The midshipmen are getting
a kick out of seeing this rather motley collection of}ohnnics. And
who can blame them? There they are, in their clean white t-shirts
with "NAVY" emblazoned on the chest, and dark blue shorts, all
looking extremely fit and athletic. Here we are, some of us in
multi-colored t-shirts, some obviously overweight, others rather
skinny, some men wearing earrings, others
sporting tattoos, and
one very tired 61-ycarold guy with a red beard
rowing in the numbertwo position.
This scene causes me
to ponder Plutarch's
biographies of Lycurgus
and Solon. As the leader
of Sparta, Lycurgus is
architect of laws which
are austere and unyielding. In Athens, where
Co LL E c E . St. John's College. Spring 2005
EVEN IN THE SHELLS ,
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT
THE BOOKS PERSIST.
}
Solon is the lawmaker,
individualism is honored.
Sitting in my shell and
watching our two very
different crews passing
each other on the Severn
River, I see how two
philosophies of society
exist side-by-side in Annapolis: St. John's, devoted to diversity and
pluralism, as Athens; the Naval Academy, with its focus on loyalty
to the corps, uniformity, and order, as Sparta.
Our training continues as November and the Head of the
Occoquan approach. I am amazed not only at how hard my teammates practice, but also how the great books arc ever part of
their chatter. Before launching our shells, I often hear students
talking about seminars, tutorials, or the Friday lecture. Even in
the boats, where crew is not supposed to talk, the great books
cannot be denied.
Our extremely capable cox is out of commission for a few weeks,
so a loquacious sophomore replaces her. While our regular cox is
all business and hardly ever talks except to give commands, her
substitute offers a running commentary on everything from
his favorite movies to college gossip to the current topics in
sophomore seminar. "Do you know what my tutor told us last
night at seminar?" he asks crew as we row out of College Creek
towards the Severn. His seminar is reading the Gospel of John.
"He said that because he first read the Bible in Greek he thought
that the first words of John were, 'The origin was the principle'
rather than, 'In the beginning was the Word.' "
As we round the seawall and head toward the Route 50 bridge,
now rov,ing at a fairly fast pace, his commentary regresses. He is
now talking about the Phoenicians. "Do you know why the
Phoenicians were the fastest rowers?" We are stumped. "Because
they had nubile Phoenician women to row home to." I find this
piece of information intriguing until, off to my port, I hear Leo
Pickens yelling at me from the skiff, "You're not focused Roger.
Snap those legs back. Square the oar. Drop the blade."
On November 6, the morning of the regatta. Leo assembles the
team in the back of the Boathouse. "Are you all ready for the
Festival of St. Occoquan?" he asks the assembled group. "OK,
now listen up. I have something important to say. First, I want to
commend all of you for the time and devotion you have given to
this sport. No matter how well you perform this afternoon, you
should all feel a great sense of accomplishment."
He continues by providing some interesting statistics. "Those
{ TH E
ON THE SEVERN AND IN
~ -........... SEMINAR, RocER MARTIN
( CENTER) SAW DEDICATION.
of you who are the grizzled veterans have put in
90 hours of practice, the
novices 80. And you've done this while being students in an
incredibly demanding academic program. Few athletes competing at Occoquan this afternoon have had to contend with the
incredible academic load all of you carry. You should feel extremely proud. You have achieved perfection. I pronounce this boathouse a republic."
In just six words, Leo says that we have come together as a team,
each doing his or her part, but each contributing to the good of
our community. Unity, one of the ideals of Plato's Republic, has
earned Leo's highest praise.We are not only rowing much better,
but we also care about each other. And there is a spirit-a team
spirit-that is very special. Clearly, we are far from perfect in our
rowing ability. But we really are, figuratively if not in reality, a
republic, and everyone understands exactly what our coach has
just said.
The race itself is a blur. My boat does reasonably well,
losing to the University of Maryland by only six seconds but
beating three other universities. However, before the day is out,
J witness C\vo contrasting scenes that speak to intercollegiate
athletics both in America and at my adopted college. As my wife
and I walk down the hill toward the launching docks just before
my race, I overhear a coach lecturing the women on a
large university team who are preparing to race. "You didn't get a
medal last year, girls. It was a real embarrassment to me personally and to the university. So are you going to screw up again this
year or win something?" I don't hear the rest of this speech as I
continue walking down the path, but I see discouragement in the
faces of the crew.
As I return to the parking area, I witness a more pleasing scene.
Seated on the ground and leaning on a boat trailer, one of our
team captains is reading an essay by Thomas Mann for preceptorial. Nothing, not even Occoquan, is more important than
Thomas Mann.
This is the way intercollegiate athletics ought to be. ♦
Co LL E c E. St. John's College . Spring 2005
}
�{THE
{TH E
TUTORS}
T U TOR S }
FAITH, FRIENDSHIP,
AND TEACHING
Brother Robert Smith u sail devoted to SL John:SBY ROBIN WEISS (SFG186)
rother Robert Smith (HA90) traces
his personal history-spanning
90 years-from his childhood near
the Golden Gate Bridge, through
adolescence in wine country, to
adulthood when, as a Christian
Brother, be stoked the fires of his
passion for educational reform: first
at St. Mary's College in Moraga,
Calif., then at St. John's in Annapolis.
"I just learned from a woman we both knew that Jacob
Klein told her that once I came here I would never leave.
This has turned out to be true," he says, reflecting on his
appointment to St. John's in 1972.
For Brother Robert, the Program is perpetually new.
"Each person is asking their own questions; that is the
heart of education," he contends. "There's a new conversation every time. You see the repeated miracle, each year, of
how students develop, with a renewal of life each time."
To generations of Johnnies, Brother Robert has served
"as practical advisor, career counselor, spiritual guide,
almost Any mentor-like role," says tutor emeritus Elliott
Zuckerman (HA95) . No one has been so unswervingly
devoted to the college, to the seminar in particular, and,
personally, to [former Annapolis dean] Jacob Klein."
During his graduate school years in D.C., tutor Michael
Dink (A75) enjoyed Brother Robert's standing offer of a
guest room in his Market Street apartment. "At breakfast,"
Dink recalls, " I did my best to keep up my end of the conversation, regardless of what kind of night I had.. ..These
talks helped me to keep a sane perspective on the sometimes trying world of graduate school."
{ THE
Devotion to faith, friendship, and the practice of teaching underlie Brother Rober t's story, which began in a "very
interesting part of Oakland," home to a flood of German
refugees fleeing the persecution of Catholics under Otto
von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Empire.
"At the beginning of the Prussian takeover, Bismarck
made life very difficult in Germany. A lot of these people,
specifically Franciscans, were aware of California because
that order had missions there." Brother Robert explains
how these "highly educated people started a parish in what
was then the edge of Oakland. Now it's deep in Oakland but
the parish is still there."
He remembers orchards near his grammar school, where
German nuns taught using methods "in advance of
Catholic schools anywhere."
"I benefited from that. I grew up in that parish and that
sch ool, and I'm very grateful. It was far-seeing, a wider outlook," he says. At a Christian Brothers high school in
Berkeley, he met the brothers and liked them. "I wanted to
do what they were doing-so I joined them."
In the fall of 1930, while a novice, he picked grapes
and was p art of the group who moved the Christian
Brothers Winery to their 400 acres in Napa Valley. During
Prohibition, because it was legal to sell alcohol for religious
pur poses, the ,v:inerywas allowed to stay open.
"As recently as 15 years ago, over half the brandy in this
country was our brandy," he recalls. Today, with their winery closed, the Brothers keep a small hospital on this land
high in the hills above Napa, but rent the remaining acres to
Stone Winery.
Founded in France in 1680, the Christian Brothers (an
order of teachers who are not priests) spoke to the needs
Co LL EGE. St. John's College. Spring 2005
)
FOR 33 YEARS, BROTHER ROBERT HAS REMAINED
"UNSWERVINGLY DEVOTED" TO ST. J OH N'S.
{ TH E
Co LL E GI!. St. John's College . Spring 2005
)
�I6
I7
{THE TUTORS}
{THE T UTORS}
"THE BROTHER"
BROTHER ROBERT SMITH, SAY
of the working poor as these
HIS FORMER STUDENTS, "MADE
people made the transition
HIMSELF THE BEST OF FRIENDS."
from rural to city life.
According to Brother
we were at war and various
Robert, the founder saw "a
people said: 'You'll eventucrying need to provide free
ally get into this war, and it
education," which allowed
won't be a good thing for
for "the very beginning of
you.' " Instead, in 1943 he
the possibility oflower-class
went to Laval University, in
people rising." In this time
Quebec, where he studied
of Louis the XIV, with finanphilosophy.
cial support from nobility,
He doesn't regret that choice. " It
the Brothers initiated radically new
turns out they were right." He
schools, which were French rather
remembers studying with people
than Latin-based. These schools
who had started at Louvain and
were for shoemakers, shipbuilders,
had to leave. " Laval was extremely
and other working people who deslively. There were refugees from
perately needed the basics of math,
BROTHER ROBERT SMITH , TUTOR
other European countries," creatreading, and writing to survive in
ing an exciting mix of teachers and
the cities. The movement started in
students.
Rheims and quickly spread to Paris,
After returning to St. Mary's as a teacher, Brother Robert
Avignon, and Rome.
continued work on his dissertation: liberal arts from the
Almost two centuries later, when Pope Pius IX asked
point of view of St. Thomas Aquinas, completed and pubBrothers from France to serve in California, they were
lished in 1947. A grant allowed him to spend the following
reluctant to go. " In effect, the Pope gave a polite order to
summer at Edinburgh University. "I studied, amongst
get us there, and we've been there ever since," Brother
other things, Hume," he admits, laughing. " He's not my
Robert says. "We had to do things we didn't do in France,"
favorite philosopher, but he came from that university. So I
such as teaching Latin and Greek to a more affluent populahad a good taste of him there."
tion, that oflawyers, doctors, and priests. "We had to scrape
In 1953, after a year in Rome, he was back at St. Mary's
around and find teachers who were competent," he says.
teaching large lecture classes. "We already had seminars,
Thus arose St. Mary's College in 1863, which the
but these lecture classes were the usual ones. At St. Mary's,
Brothers took over in 1869 and run to this day. After attendwe always had our eye on new needs and new ways of doing
ing St. Mary's as an undergraduate, Brother Robert taught
things, and that connects ,vith St. John's."
in a Sacramento high school for a number of years, a
Innovation at St. Mary's had much to do with a layman
requirement of his order.
teaching there, James L. Haggerty, who was acquainted
He recounts that, when he joined the order, there
with the original committee who went to the University
were ten thousand French Brothers as opposed to three
of Chicago in pursuit of "the ideal form of education."
thousand non-French. He'd grown to love French and, for
Brother Robert tells how the partial successes at Chicago,
graduate work, wanted to attend Louvain, in Belgium, "but
"You see the repeated miracle.,
each yea0 cfhow
students develop. . "
{ THE
Co LL E c
E .
St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
Annapolis tutor Howard Zeiderman worked with Brother
Robert in many environments. "The most memorable
ti me I spent with Robert was when he accompanied me to
participate in a Touchstones program we had in prison.
He and I and six others joined 12 inmates for a go-minute
seminar. That day the men had selected a text in Touchstones, a selection by St. Theresa of Avila, on prayer."
Brother Robert didn't wear his collar and was quicl for
the beginning part of the conversation. But after about
five minuLes, Zciderman recalls, Brother Robert began
to talk about forgiveness. "The men were transfixed.
None moved when the warning bells sounded, and Lhe
guards finally came LO move them along to their lunch,"
Zeiderman says. "As we left, they referred to him as
brother-a title of friendship. However as the months
passed, each time I came into prison, they asked about
Robert and referred to him as Brother Smith. Finally they
simply began to ask after 'the Brother,' a phrase no one
had ever heard them use before. Ile simply, even when
looking like the resl of us, became BroLher Robert." ♦
such as changing the undergraduate
structure
but
preserving departments, didn't satisfy Scott Buchanan and
others working with him. So,
at St. John's in Annapolis,
"We started anew here, eradicating traditional departments
and transforming the lecture
system to education through
conversation.
At St. Mary's, Haggerty
introduced changes, as far as
he could, such as reading original sources and implementing the seminar. " He talked to all of us about the wonderful
thing that was going on at St. John's. We sent people to
St. John's to look at it," Brother Robert remembers. "We
became closer to St. John's."
In the fall ofx956, St. Mary's received a grant to explore
possibilities for educational reform. Haggerty, initially
responsible, became ill. "Somebody had to run it, so I was
put in charge all the sudden," says Brother Robert. "All I
knew was St. John's. By that time, I had visited a number
of times."
Visits were sweeter due to Raymond Wilburn, a former
St. John's dean, who befriended Brother Robert while
Wilburn was stationed at a naval pre-flight school, located
on the campus at St. Mary's during the war. Wilburn wrote
letters for Brother Robert "to be nicely treated" during
his visits.
He recalls one trip in particular, when he attended a
seminar taught by Jacob Klein. " I was overwhelmed by it,
so I made a point of getting to know him. We became
friends and we remained friends until he died."
While in charge of the new project at St. Mary's, Brother
Robert called on Klein, Richard Scofield, and others for
help. He describes "bold projects," such as bringing in people from outside St. Mary's to examine each senior on his
essay. " I would not do that again. I was matching important
{T
H E
Co L
L E
people, sometimes, with very
ordinary students. I thought
every student should have the
same chance."
He spent his sabbatical
year of 1964 in Venice studying Rabelais. "Rabelais
despised the system under
which he was educated and
decided to get free of it. I've
read him, cover to cover,
many times." After Brother
Robert returned to the states,
Klein invited him to give a lecture.
" I enjoyed it," he says. "I think the students did, too. I
was more rambunctious than I would be now." He admits to
quoting Rabelais "in all kinds of unseemly ways that I
wouldn't do now... "
But after lecture, " Klein told me I would probably be
invited to teach here."
And he was. Students of his first class, a junior seminar in
1966-67, made him an honorary member. He corresponds
with some of them to this day.
" By committing himself as a teacher to thinking together
with his students about what matters to them, Brother
Robert has made himself the best of friends," says Steve
Werlin (A85). " It has also led him to surprising places. He
can speak well of Aristotle, Montaigne, and Baudelaire, but
also about the Talking Heads." Now a teacher himself,
Werlin relies on Brother Robert's advice: "Start where the
students are."
For the remainder of the 1960s, Brother Robert returned
to his duties at St. Mary's. " I had to put the new project in
good enough shape" before getting permission to transfer.
But when the time was ripe for Klein's prediction to come
true, Brother Robert telephoned Klein, asking, " Does
it make any difference to St. John's if I come this year
or next?"
" It makes a difference to me," Klein replied. ♦
c E . St. John's College . Spring 2005
}
�I8
{ON
{ON NIETZSCHE}
Ig
N I ETZSCHE}
"Ourfavorite author.s are .simply
those we cannot escape. "
JOHN VERDI, TUTOR
NIETZSCHE 'S
FAVORITE WRIT ERS
BY JOHN VERDI
t is probably true that all of us
ought to read more books by
those authors with whom we
deeply disagree , because only
they have the power to force us
to rethink our comfortable
ideas. Most of us, however, do not do so,
but instead gravitate to those authors in
whose books we recognize our own
thoughts expressed more fully and convincingly, or so we would like to think. In
any event Nietzsche cautions us against
reading any author "of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book,"
but urges us to read " only those whose
thoughts unintentionally became a
book." (The Wanderer and His Shadow ,
I2I) Perhaps we should trust no idea at all
{T n
E
that comes to us while we are reading; as
Nietzsche says, "only ideas won by walking have anyvalue." (Twilight ofthe Idols,
I, 34)
Still, Nietzsche himself read widely,
and while we may not always find his interpretations of his predecessors accurate or
fair, he certainly did h ave his favorite
writers, those in whom he heard echoes of
his own insights and struggles, or who
represented to him types of their age, distillations of the thought around them, or
who entered the great conversation with a
destructive impulse, in an attempt to
refashion thought after their own image.
Our favorite authors are simply those we
cannot escape, because they are too close
to us, for better or worse. Our favorites
Co LL E c E. St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
READING NIETZSCHE'S FAVORITES GIVES US MORE INSIGHT INTO A
PUZZLING AUTHOR, SAYS TUTOR JOHN VERDI.
{T
tt
s Co LL s c £.St.John's College. Spring 2005
}
�{O N NIE T ZSC H E }
{ON N I ETZSCHE}
2.0
reveal aspects of ourselves that might otherwise remain
undetected, and so it can be valuable to reflect on them. For
a similar reason we might better understand what Nietzsche
means to us-what Nietzsche ought to mean to us-by asking
who the writers were that he could not leave behind. Nietzsche's pantheon of favorites is large, and I have chosen only
a few and not necessarily those who exerted the most
influence on him. In making this selection I am, to be sure,
revealing a favoritism of my own.
HERACLITUS
In the fragments of Heraclitus Nietzsche found a man who
was willing to live without the metaphysical comfort given
by belief in things that persistently endure. 0wqmjJuLorraorcavra peL, ouoev µevu: Everything changes, nothing
remains steadfast. Nietzsche says that around Heraclitus he
culture that after Socrates, Plato, and Jesus, becomes "pale
and ungraspable," even "immoral." (Daybreak, 103)
Nietzsche's praise ofThucydidcs makes me wonder if, in the
famous dialogue between the Melians and the Athenians
over the fate ofMclos, the historian even means for us to ask
whether it is the one or the other who are right. Might the
moral question be exactly the one Thucydides wants not to
raise? As if to suggest this, Nietzsche asks a rhetorical
question: " Does one reproach Thucydides for the words
he put into the mouths of the Athenian ambassadors when
they negotiated with the Melians on the question of destruction or submission?" (Will to Power, 42.9) The Athenians
argue from power, yet don't we find their words compelling,
if not decisive?
P LATO
felt "altogether warm and better than anywhere else. The
Nietzsche could never escape Plato. His relationship with
affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the
decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying "Yes" to
opposition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being-all this is clearly more
closely related to me than anything else to date." (Ecce
Homo, IV, 3) Throughout his life Nietzsche considered himself a disciple of Heraclitus. While St. John's does not try to
inculcate this reverence in its freshmen, we do ask them to
translate many of his fragments in the language tutorial.
Their depth and power, contained in such brief, aphoristic compass, invariably proves a remarkable springboard for
reflection on the depth and power of all language.
him and with Socrates often reads like a rocky love affair. On
the one hand he praises, saying: " One can conceive philosophers as those who make the most extreme efforts to test
how far man could elevate himself-Plato especially" ( Will to
Power, 973) and "What is needed above all is an absolute
skepticism toward all inherited concepts (of the kind that
one philosopher perhaps possessed-Plato, of course-for
he taught the reverse)." ( Will to Power, 409) On the other
hand he considers what has derived from Plato to be a sickness. "My cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli,
are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to
deceive themselves and not to see reason in reality."
(Twilight of the Idols, V, 2.) Nietzsche praises Plato as "the
most beautiful growth of antiquity," but one who invented
"the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors
so far... the pure spirit and the good as such." (Beyond Good
and Evil, 2) Nietzsche also complains that "since Plato
philosophy has been dominated by morality." {Will to
Power, 412.) Philosophy has lost the ability to blur the
boundary between good and evil, in the way that Nietzsche
believes Thucydides could do naturally, to the extent even
of denying that morality has any role to play in our understanding of human actions. Plato and Socrates represent for
Nietzsche the triumph ofreason and dialectic over intuition
and instinct. Nietzsche, however, struggles to make clear
that "one does not make men better when one represents to
them that virtue is demonstrable and asks for reasons."
T HUCYD IDES
T hucydides is another program author Nietzsche considered a favorite, because Thucydides "takes the most
comprehensive and impartial delight in all that is typical in
men and events and believes that to each type there pertains
a quantum of good sense: this he seeks to discover." (Daybreak, 168) While this reason for his love of Thucydides
might seem at odds with his praise for individuality and
transcendence, and his beckoning to the " Overman,"
themes that pervade his later work, still Nietzsche often
wonders "what might yet be made of man" as a species
(Beyond Good and Evil, n8), andhow"the type 'man'" can
be enhanced. (Beyond Good and Evil, 2.57) He believes that
in Thucydides we see the "last glorious flower" of " that
culture of the most impartial knowledge of the world," a
{ TH E
Co LL e c; E . St. John 's College . Spring 2005
)
(Will to Power, 441), which
is what he thinks Plato and
Socrates do. If our favorite
writers ought to be the ones
that do us the most good,
then perhaps we ought
to include Plato in our list
of Nietzsche's favorites,
though Plato did not give
him the sort of comfort we
often seek in our favorite
authors. But Nietzsche
rarely sought comfort.
2.I
NIETZSCHE RARELY SOUGHT
COMFORT IN THE WORKS HE READ.
Nietzsche thought that
honesty was the one virtue
left to "free spirits," among
whom he counted himself.
"So few writers are honest
that one ought really to
mistrust
anyone
who
writes." (Schopenhauer as
Educator, 2,) In Montaigne,
however, he found the most ~
honest of writers. Mon- 8
taigne's willingness to
explore his own character and the prejudices with which he
himself reads and writes is what impresses and stimulates
Nietzsche most. "Since getting to know this freest and
mightiest of souls, I at least have come to feel what he felt
about Plutarch: 'as soon as I glance at him I grow a leg or a
wing.' " (Ibid.) Montaigne's honesty also infuses what Nietzsche considers his other admirable quality: "a cheerfulness
that really cheers ...with certainty and simplicity, courage
and strength ... as a victor...for there is cheerfulness only
when there is victory." (Ibid.) Montaigne hides nothing and
because he is deeply interested in the world as it is and as it
has been reflected in great books, he serves for Nietzsche as
a kind of Thucydides of the soul.
them both, and for this Nietzsche loves him. " He has
taught me such an infinite
amount-the only logical
Christian." (Letter to Georg
Brandes) At the age of 16
Pascal wrnte a treatise on
conic sections, a text that
marks the beginning of his
very fruitful work in science
and mathematics, and which
students at St. John's read as
sophomores. T hen at the
age of 31 he experienced a
conversion and devoted the
rest of his short life to
religious matters and to
introspection . Nietzsche
consider s him "the most
instructive victim of Christianity." (Ecce Homo, II, 3)
According to Nietzsche,
Pascal carries Christianity to its logical conclusion, "selfcontempt and self-abuse" ( Will to Power, #2,52,), a condition
in which "everything is sin, even our virtues." ( Will to
Power, #786) In such a condition reason, too, is corrupt and
faith is needed for every kind of kno,ving. Furthermore, in
his writing Pascal seems to share some of the honesty that
for Nietzsche characterizes Montaigne. "One should not
conceal ...how our thoughts have come to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will probably always
have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character
of Pascal's Pensees." (Will to Power, #42.4) Both writers tell
us not only what they think, but how they came to think so,
which can be enormously supportive for those of us who
struggle simply to try to think a few good thoughts.
PASCAL
H EIN RI CH H EINE
Nietzsche sees personified in Pascal the conflict between
science and faith. While Nietzsche attacks both, Pascal.felt
Heinrich H eine was a German poet, cnuc, and writer
of Jewish heritage who converted to Protestanti sm for
MONTAIGNE
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BEYOND THE BOOKS
practical reasons. Nietzsche admired his work immensely
throughout his life, and wrote of him: " T he highest conception of the lyric poet was given me by Heinrich Heine . ... He
possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine
perfection ....And how he employs German! It will one day
be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of
the German language." (Ecce Homo, III, 4) In Heine can
perhaps be found the seeds of two of Nietzsche's most
famous pronouncements, the death of God and the eternal
return of the same. In The History ofReligion and Philosophy in Germany, H eine writes: "Do you hear the little bell
ring? Kneel down. They are bringing the sacraments to a
dying god." (Book II) And in his Last Poems and Thoughts,
we find this: " However long a time may pass, according to
the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal
play of repetition, all meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and
corrupt each other again." (We also find the eternal return
suggested by another poet Nietzsche admired, Friedrich
Holderlin, in his unfinished play, The Death ofEmpedocles.
Empedocles speaks: "Go, and fear nothing. Everything
recurs./ And what's to come already is complete.")
R ALPH WALD O E MERSON
Perhaps the writer Nietzsche held dearest from early in life
to late, and the one he returned to again and again, is an
American, Ralph Waldo Emerson . Nietzsche read Emerson
(in German translation) while a student at Schulpforta, and
after he lost his much-annotated copy of Emerson's Essays
some years later, he soon replaced it. While in the end the
differences between the two men may be greater than their
similarities, there is no question that Nietzsche found much
to admire in Emerson's views of nature and history, of
the role of genius in human culture, and of the paradoxical
character of good and evil. The first edition of The Gay
Science quotes Emerson's essay " History" in an epigraph.
"To the poet and sage, all things are friendly and hallowed,
all experiences profitable, all days holy, all men divine."
What Nietzsche finds in Emerson is a thinker who, like
Heraclitus, sees the natural world as shot through with
impermanence. "There are no fixtures in nature. The
universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of
degrees." (Circles) He finds a man who recognizes that
"man .. .is that middle point, whereof every thing may be
affirmed and denied with equal reason." (Spiritual Laws)
H e finds a writer who acknowledges that "we do not see
{ TH E
directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of
correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are,
or of computing the amount of their errors." (Experience)
Nietzsche also discovered in Emerson someone who was
willing to say: " I would gladly be moral ... but I have set
my heart on honesty." (Experience) In general Emerson's
skeptical attitude toward custom and conventionality is
thoroughly Nietzschean. Of both thinkers one might say (as
Nietzsche does say of Schopenhauer by citing Emerson):
" Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this
planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is
safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but
its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary
reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that
may not be revised and condemned." (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator; Emerson, Circles)
A N EC L ECTI C LI ST
While I promised only to give my favorites of Nietzsche's
favorites, I ought also to mention some of the other writers
Nietzsche admired, though his attitude toward most was
ambivalent. The list is eclectic. There are the great aphorists: La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Chamfort, Leopardi.
There are the German giants: Kant, Goethe, Hegel,
Schopenhauer. There is Spinoza, the "purest sage," who
because he denied free will, teleology, and the moral world
order, also stands "beyond good and evil." There are the
Eastern influences, especially Buddhism, which Nietzsche
came to know largely through his reading of Schopenhauer,
and Zoroastrianism, founded by the Persian, Zoroaster, or
Zarathustra. (Could Emerson's description of Zarathustra in
Character have influenced Nietzsche's development of his
version of the character?) And then there is Dostoevsky.
Nietzsche considered his discovery of Dostoevsky in 1887 to
have been "one of the most beautiful strokes of fortune
in [his] life." (Twilight of the Idols, IX, 45) I wonder what
twentieth-century writers Nietzsche would have esteemed,
but then I realize that hardly one has not been affected by
him to some degree. Would not the literature of the last
century be to Nietzsche a mirror in which the reflected
image, while perhaps distorted, would nonetheless be a
familiar one? ♦
John Verdi is a tutor in Annapolis.
Co LL E c E . St. John's College . Spring 2005
)
Revisiting Nietzsche in Sils-Maria
BY JENNIFER A. DONNELLY,
A96
- - - • he rituals of opening questions,
seminar and don
rags vanish after
graduation from
St. John's. But the
night the bells of
McDowell Hall
tolled my class's
submission of our senior essays, an
aphorism by Nietzsche, on whom I had
written my essay, seemed co ring out like
an opening question to the rest of our
lives. " What good is a book," he asks in
The Gay Science, "that does not even
carry us beyond all books?"
As is often the case with Nietzsche,
the formulation is enigmatic: we know
that the man who articulated it was an
avid reader, a prolific writer and a professional philologist, and we notice that the
format used to question the value of
books is, well, a book. But for us,
students of the "great books" program,
the teasing becomes almost a taunt.
What good are these books to which we devote ourselves for four
years? And what does it mean to be carried beyond them?
After seven years of being nagged by these questions, I made
a journey to what could be considered their source: the Nietzsche
Haus in Sils-Maria, the remote village in southeastern Switzerland's Engadine valley where the philosopher spent several
summers and produced some of his most notorious works.
Despite having poured my heart into my senior essay on Beyond
Good and Evil, I had not pursued further studies on Nietzsche or
in philosophy. On that first visit, however, I lovingly toted my
careworn copy of that book, its marginalia ranging from smiley
faces to question marks to "Yes!"
The house in which Nietzsche used to board now shelters a
small museum, library, and archive that present elements of his
life and ideas, as well as some aspects of the remarkably rich
literary and artistic history of the region (which drew authors
{T
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THE VIEW FROM JENNIFER DONNELLY'S ROOM IN THE NIETZSCHE HAUS,
WHERE THE PHILOSOPHER STAYED REGULARLY IN THE I88os.
from Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse to Anne Frank
and Pablo Neruda). When co-curator Mirella Carbone mentioned
that a few rooms are allocated to artists, scholars, and writers, I
wondered whether the Engacline's reputed "champagne air" had
gone to my head. The prospect of unbroken space and time for
reflection stretched out wide and inviting like the glacier-topped
pea.ks, temperamental skies, and glassy lakes that inspired
Nietzsche's idea of"eternal return."
So return I did. One year later, the toy-like RhiitischeBahn train
was carrying me up an unending succession of misty switchbacks,
steep terrain that Nietzsche somehow covered in a horse-drawn
carriage. This stay in Sils-Maria was to last a month. Although I
St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
�{ALUMNI VOICE S }
{A LUMNI VOICES}
was eager to reread Nietzsche
in the environment that had
so powerfully inspired him, it
wasn't my intention to make
a pilgrimage to his ghost.
Rather, having recently completed a master's thesis on art
museums in Paris, which for
five years had been home, I
was mainly seeking distance
from everyday life in order to
WTite and think about something else, such as where my
next steps might lead.
My room in the Nietzsche
Haus turned out to share one
wall with that of its more
famous resident. It also bore
the type of Spartan furnishings upon which he had
insisted-little more tha n a
single bed and a WTiting
desk-although I had the
benefit of electric lamps and
a sink instead of gas lanterns
and a washstand. I soon
determined that my ends
were best achieved not by sitting at that desk, but by setting out into
the mountains framed by the window
above it. As I climbed the trails, one
panorama wouJd unfold into the next
and high-altitude valleys would come
into view; peaks previously hidden
would rise up, compelling me to continue moving, often over snow fields
and glacier streams, in hopes of glimpsing whatever Jay beyond.
Just so, fresh perspectives on my life
down in the "flatlands" (to borrow
Thomas Mann's phrase from The Magic
Mountain , set in nearby Davos) suggested themselves. The insights sometimes evaporated, but other times they
REVISTING N I ETZSCHE SENT
DONNELLY BACK TO P ARIS WITH
NEW APPRECIATION FOR THE
PROGRAM IN GENERAL.
l
evolved into realizations about
how I had wound up where I
was and resolutions about how
to proceed forward. The sound
of the German verb for "to
hike," wandern, aptly captured this dual motion of
rambling across slopes and
" .. the texu on the Program
create a sort ofmental
landscape through which
we Johnnies-and all those
who reai debat~ and write
aboutthegreatbookshave earned thepassport
to wander. "
J ENNIFER A. DONNELLY, A96
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meandering through thoughts.
Furthermore, so resounding
is the echo between Nietzsche's writings and the Engadine landscape that the hiking
paths-wanderwege-turned
out to give as direct an access
to his ideas as did the wellstocked shelves of the Nietzsche Haus library and the
Biblioteca Engiadinaisa. Trail
guidebooks quote the philosopher on the scenery (he
described a lake as " milkgreen ") and designate his favorite trails
(rarely too steep, because of his fragile
health). At the tip of the Chaste peninsula jutting into the serene lake of Sils,
where he dreamed of living in "a sort of
ideal dog-kennel," a boulder is engraved
with a passage from Zaratlwstra: "AJl joy
longs for eternity...."
On one hike, the words fit the scenery
with an exactitude that was downright
eerie. Takjng a break, listening to cowbells ringing through the valley, I
opened On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life. "Consider
the herd before you," the book begins,
t
I
launching a discourse on the dangers of historical memory by
describing a herd of grazing cattle.
Off the trails, the magnetic gcist of the Nietzsche Haus and
its centrality in the Engadinc's cultural and intellectual life
encouraged the conversations that, as all Johnnies know, round
out reading and reflection. I met a Scottish professor from
the University of
Hawaii writing the
preface to his translation of Zarathustra, a
Ziirich screenwriter,
and a Swiss-German
novelist. Even the
library seemed to hum
with the whispers of
the absent authors of
weighty dissertations
sent from all corners
of the globe like travelogues from the territory of Nietzsche's
thought.
The image of those
heavily footnoted theses loomed in my
mind when co-curator
Joachim Jung asked me to explain my link to the house's
namesake. As I rendered into clumsy German a 20-year-old's
interpretation of Nietzsche's "philosophy of the future," I wondered whether my unmediated reading of that book was merely a
straying into a thick forest, and my senior essay for St. John's a
valiant but inexpert attempt to plot my haphazard steps back
through it.
I reread that essay, after descending to the flatlands of Paris, for
the first time since handing it in that cold January night in
Annapolis. Since my focus had been morality, religion, and dogmatism, the ending surprised me: "Art," I had concluded, "is
beyond good and evil. ..." Though I would no longer dare to
defend this proclamation as earnestly as I might have at my senior
oral, I like to consider it a portend to my later experiences of
studying and working in the field of the visual arts.
This perspective on my study of Nietzsche at St John's leads me
back to my opening question: what is the value of studying the
program books? Writing a senior essay on Nietzsche certainly did
{ THE
not make me an authority on his philosophy. But reading his work
in the Engadine years later reminded me that the texts on
the program create a sort of mental landscape through
which we Johnnies-and all those who read, debate, and write
about the great books- have earned the passport to wander. The
books (as well as the musical scores, the scientific papers,
and the mathematical
texts) can inform our
decisions, spark new
ideas, and color our
experiences long after
our formal studies
end. And we need not
become experts on
a book or its author
in order to be instructcd, entertained or
even annoyed, any
more than we need be
Alpinists to hike up a
mountain.
As for defining my
next steps, walking
through Nietzsche's
mountains convinced
THE MOUNTAINS T HAT I NSPIR ED NI ETZSCH E
me that reorienting
GAVE DONNELLY N EW INSIGHTS INTO THE
oneself
is a process
PHILOSOPHER'S IDEAS.
that never ends. "Der
Weg ist das Ziel, " ran
an ad in a paper I read over morning coffee at the Nietzsche Haus:
the path is the goal. The real challenge is not to stick to a narrow
trail but to keep climbing with all the strength in our limbs and
hearts in search of the most breathtakjng views. ♦
Notes: Nietzsche's description ofthe lake as "milk-green" isfound
in Eugen E. Hiisler's Engadin, Bruckmann Verlag, Munich 2001.
His favorite trails are described in Paul Raabe 's Spaziergange
<lurch Nietzsches Sils-Maria, Arche Verlag AC, Zurich-Hamburg,
1994. Nietzsche's description of his retreat as a "sort ofideal dogkennel" is mentioned in a letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 28 June
1883, cited in The Nietzsche Haus in Sils-Maria, by Peter Andre
Bloch, Calanda Verlag, Eng. trans. Albi &Julia Rosenthal.
Co LL E c E. John's College. Spring 2005 l
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{C R OQ UE T}
{CROQUET}
NAVY PREVAILS!
Cold and Rain Fatl to Dampen Spirits
at the 23rdAnnual Croquet Match
BY ROSEMARY HARTY
eforc the match started, the
only thing to grumble about
was the weather: unseasonably
cold, windy, patches of rainthe kind of weather that calls
for abandoning the picture hat
and sun dress in favor of a down coat and
jeans. Nevertheless, the crowd of alumni,
students, and townies approached 500. They
enjoyed the party under umbrellas, tents,
and blankets.
But then, the unthinkable! With the score
tied 2-z, a Navy team edged past Chris Mules
(Ao6) and Tristan Evans-Wilcnt (Ao7) after
the Johnnies tried a risk)' move and ended
up "staked out" by their opponents.
In hockey, it was the equivalent of sitting
in a penalty box while the winning team
scores on a power play. Jn basketball, it was
like watching a three-pointer swish through
the net with your best player on the bench
after fouling out.
It was a well-played, competitive, exciting
croquet match-just what the two teams who
took the field were hoping for. The Mids
emerged from Woodward Hall to Queen's
"Under Pressure." The theme from
The A-Team played as the Johnnies came
out dressed like characters from the movie
Napoleon Dynamite, in badly stenciled
white t-shirts that said "Vote for Pedro,"
short-shorts, and geeky headbands.
The two teams were tied for most of the
afternoon, with St. John's clinching one of
the final games when senior Cara Lammey
hit a winning stroke.
"I knew it was now or never ifl was going
to play a match-I also know they needed a
token girl," she explained.
Imperial Wicket Nick Whittier (Ao5)
had nothing but praise for the Navy team.
Having beaten Navy in an intercollegiate
competition a few short weeks before,
Whittier wasn't expecting
an upset.
" Some of their best players had an ei,.traordinary
game, and some of ours had
one or two off shots-and
that's all it takes," he says.
"I think the Navy team is
excellent."
Overall, St John's has won
r8 matches co Navy's five
wins. The last time Navy
upset the Johnnies was in
zoor. Navy's captain, Adam
Todd, declared himself
"stoked" over the win.
{ T H E
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St. John's College . Spring 2005
MIDSHIPMEN ADAM TODD (LEFT) AND
ALEX PLUMER GREET NICK WHITTIER (Ao5,
RIGHT) AND JOHN GERARD (Aos) FOR A
FIERCE BATTLE.
"It was a great match," he said. "The
Johnnies came out and played an excelJent
game."
The Navy team of Dustin Wood (next
year's captain) and Eric Watt succeeded in
"staking out" the Johnnies by hitting a rover
ball, a move the Johnnies had just tried
unsuccessfully. That forced the Johnnies to
sit out two rounds, allowing Navy the win.
Navy fans rushed the field in triumph.
Did the Navy team put in extra practice
this year? "We practiced less because of the
bad weather," he said.
A few days after the match, Todd was
unable to say where the Mids planned to
display the Annapolis Cup, the thrift-store
trophy awarded the winners of the match.
" I didn't even know there was a 'cup,'"
he said. "I had always thought it was just
a myth." ♦
}
SANTA FE CHILI
SAVES THE DAY
Alumni traveled from as far away as
California to attend the an nual Croquet
match against the Naval Academy, and
their spirits were only slightly wilted by
gloomy weather and ignominious defeat.
The weather didn't stop a group of Santa
Fe alumni from pulling off a pre-Homecoming reunion, or deter a grou p of young
Annapolis alumni from pitching a te nt
and enjoying a banquet of potato-leek
soup, vichyssoise, and salmon.
Tanya Hadlock-Piltz (Ao5) flew in from
Los Angeles to see her friends- all of
whom were dressed to the nines. "This is
homecoming for us," said Hadlock-Piltz.
The Santa Fe reunion class of zooo
used the annual party to stage a preHomecoming gathering in Annapolis.
Many alumni live on the Ease Coast, so
croquet gave them an impetus to get
together in case they can't make it back
to Santa Fe this summer. T he group
consisted ofr4 alumni from the class. and
even though their plans were somewhat
compromised by uncooperative weather,
they had a great time catching up, said
Alex.is Brown (SFoo, EC03).
The group rented lodgings in the
historic district and had Horseman's
Haven green chili, "a much-loved and
missed commodity from Santa Fe,"
shipped to the Annapolis alumni office
before the event. Their plan was to invite
any Santa Fe alumni and current students
(a group of about 20 made the trip) whom
they met during the croquet match to a
Saturday-evening barbeque. When the
match was postponed to Sunday because
of threatening weather, they partied
amongst themselves, ate more salsa, and
joined the Waltz party later that night.
All alumni got to sample the hoc stuff on
Sunday at the alumni tent.
"Evcr)one was very happy to have had
this opportunity to get back together,"
says Brown. "Some ofus hadn't seen each
other in six years.''
Amina Khattak (SFGI95) flew in from
Norther 1 California, bringing Annika, 3,
and CyT,1s, r4 months, to introduce them
to John me croquet. "I try to come out
every year, but this is their first match,"
she said. ♦
CLOCICWISE: ANNAPOLIS '04 GRADS IN THEIR
FINERY; MEGHAN HUGHES
(SFoo)
AND HER
BEAU, PATRICK; LAURENT MERCERON
(Ao8);
(Ao7).
AND JUDITH TORGERSON, MOM OF ERIC
PHOTOS BY MATTHEW BARRICK
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�28
OPEN SECRETS/I NWARD P ROSPECTS:
REFLECTIONS ON WORLD AND SOUL
By Eva Brann
Paul Dry Books, 2.004
n her latest book, Annapolis tutor
Eva Brann has collected
observations and aphorisms
written over more than
30 years. Open Secrets/
Inward Prospects divides
into two sorts: observations about
our external world well known to
all but not always openly told, and
sightings of internal vistas and
omens, wherein Miss Brann looks
at herself as a sample soul.
In the preface to this beautiful
volume that fits perfectly in one
hand, Miss Brann describes her
manner of composition: "I wrote
these thoughts down on about two
thousand sheets, two to three
thoughts per paper, and I kept
them in some used manila
envelopes, the earliest of which
bore a postmark ofI972."
Most of the sheets lacked a
notation of when and where they
were written, she added. "Whether
about 5,000 articulated notion per
person per lifetime is about average
or over or below I cannot tell; they
certainly stacked up high."
Miss Braun's instructions for
approaching the book are these:
"Open anywhere and if it irks you,
try another page. This book can be
long or short-As You Like It."
Any Johnnie who has been lucky enough
to enjoy a conversation ,vith Miss Brannin seminar or outside of it-will understand
why this little book is a gem. For those
who haven't had the pleasure, these interesting thoughts-a sample of which are
provided below-wiJJ offer a glimpse of the
experience.
Some people's chatter, God bless them, is
actually self-expression, but for others it's
self-sacrifice on the altar of sociability to
join in, and betokens not so much interest
in what is being said as interest in the mere
expression of interest, that is, the desire to
show civility-and to look each other over.
Sometimes it gets screamingly boring, and
then you catch a glimpse of one of these
others feeling likewise-and start a real
conversation.
{BIBLIOF I LE}
{BIBLI OF ILE }
maunder on for a long, long time. When
the last judgment is ready to be made we'll
be Jong gone.
To love your country is to love it openeyedly, sometimes for its flaws, sometimes
with its flaws, and most often in spite
of its flaws. It's not so different from
personal love.
The heroism of maintenance is severely
underrated. It is the resistance to human
and natural eno·opy- that cosmic
downward trend (which Lucretius
symbolized in the fundamental fall
of his atoms), that tendency toward
deterioration and featureless
homogeneity that will obtain if the
world is left alone. (In Washington
State I Ltscd to see a dentists' billboard saying "Ifyou ignore your
teeth they' ll go away.") But it isn't
only nattue and humanity in its
natural course that needs to be kept
going against time's grain; we also
need a counterinsurgency against
mindless novelty. Between entropy
and innovation-that's where my
heroes a.re at work.
"Vacation" is a sad word, the
vacancy of time after the press of
business. "Leisure" is a lovely
word, the freedom of time for longbreathed projects.
No one has sufficiently said what a
feeling is. I tis pathos, something
passably suffered, affect. Yet it is
also motion, being moved out of
oneself, emotion. No more do we
know what pleasure is, especially
psychic pleasure: It seems to be the
aboriginal accompaniment, not so
much reaction as concurrent commentbut every analytic description covertly
involves the word "pleasant." All the
definitions I've read of feeling or pleasure
are either diversionary or circular: Even
my trusty Heritage Dictionary can do no
better than to lead me from feeling to
affect and from affect to feeling. And the
definitions given in books circumvent
saying what passions are by telling how
they arise and what they're good for-as if
origin and effect were what is wanted.
Miss BRANN's OPEN SECRETS COVERS TOPICS
INCLUDING MUSIC , INTIMACY, MEMORY, AND
IMAGINATION.
Many of us feel ourselves to be living on
the cusp of time: Great questions are about
to be settled: Is nature infinitely transformable, or does she collapse if her own
Jaws are used too intrusively against her?
Is human nature indefinitely malleable or
does it ttrrn monso·ous when pushed too
far? How much virtuality can the human
imagination absorb before it loses its own
actuality?, etc. I don't think anything wi II
be concluded in the short run: Both nature
and humans will accommodate to more
impositions than anyone imagined and
rebel at less provocation than one would
have thought, and that way things will
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"Questioning" this or that is an act of
covert aggression. Question-asking is an
act of persistent love.
)
P ROFILES IN TERROR: T HE GUIDE
TO M IDDLE EAST TERRORIST
O RGANIZATIONS
By Aaron Mannes (AGI97)
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
incc global terrorism emerged
in the 2.ISt century, it has
spawned dozens of shadowy
groups with elusive leaders.
Aaron Mannes (AGI97) sheds
light on 20 terrorist organizations in the Middle East and the regional
groups that are affiliated ·with them in his
book Pro.files in Terror: The Guide to
Middle East Terrorist Organizations.
Mannes, who wrote his handbook for
journalists, researchers, and those who
work in counterterrorism, describes
aspects of each terrorist group, including
leadership, ideology, financial support,
targets and tactics, and areas of operation.
"The modern terrorist phenomenon
really started when the age of media began.
It is political theater," says Mannes, who is
careful to distinguish modern terrorism
from other insurgencies throughout
history. "Terrorists play off the nature of
our modern, wired society and use mass
media to spread fear and their agendas.
Terrorists legitimize violence. They say the
society is so awful that violence as a whole
is appropriate."
When beginning his research,
Mannes was fascinated by what he
calls "asymmetrical warfare," and
says, "First-world countries such as
the United States are unbeatable,
but terrorism has emerged as part
of a vast equalizing process." Looking to the future , Mannes predicts
more terrorism. "There are different evolutions - the terrorism that
achieves a goal, such as the Madrid
train bombings that effectively got
Spain to pull out of Iraq. And there
arc the catastrophes that wreak
major havoc, violence as a goal in
and of itself."
Mannes was inspired by his tutors
at St. John's to pursue his interest
in public policy and writing. "All
my tutors were terrific," says
Mannes, "but Leo Raditsa (now
deceased) helped me even after my
graduation from St. John's. He
taught me about the importance of
freedom, liberty, and governments
that protect and preserve that.
Governments that undermine
this are viscious."
Mannes served as director ofresearch
at the Middle East Media Institute in
Washington, D.C., from r998 until 200I.
He currently works at the University of
Maryland's "Mind Lab," where he models
terrorist networks. ♦
During times of public stress, like war,
certain mental illnesses and suicides are
said to decrease. That's surely not an
argument for the redemptive power of war
but an illumination of the human condition
in peace: Normalcy is the most stringent
tester of sou.ls.
A PUBLICATION
OF JINSA PRESS
AARON MANNES' HANDBOOK DETAILS
20 TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS IN THE
MIDDLE EAST.
"Open anywhere and
ifit irks you~
try another page. "
Contrary motions: The young at their best
are intensely introspective but all their
dreams are for the world. The old a.re in
fact rooted in that world but their meditations turn inward. -Like passing ships,
they send tenders across and board briefly,
bringing news and victuals. Less fancifully,
coming and going, we've got things to tell
each other.
EvA BRANN, TUTOR
Childlike and childish: the ever-young at
heart and the willfully infantile. The first
are quirky but lovable, the second just
irritating.
Some looking into themselves come to the
limit and say, "I am the ground." Others
see no end and say, "It hath no bottom."
But perhaps you shouldn't search in the
soul but through the soul.
"A friend is another self." If so, why
bother? One ofmc is enough. No, it's just
because souls are never transparent to each
other v-.rithout remainder that they see each
other at all. Mutual opacity keeps us two,
together but unmerged.
We humans a.re temporally rooted in the
world, atemporally in the soul. Good
communities mediate these two realms
of the secular and the transcendent: Their
members live their daily life mindful of
something beyond.
{ THE
Co LL E c
E.
St. John 's College. Spring 2005
Do my colleagues see themselves, mutatis
mutandis, as I see my sclf?-a being of
dubious gravity, urgently perfectionist
about small things and dilatory about great
ones, an everlasting amateur frivolously
suspicious of expertise, kept callow by the
luck of life that has preserved me from
chronic tragedy, extensively introspective
in leisure rested from responsibility-an
old woman with an unconscionably
young soul? ♦
)
�{ALUMNI
{ALUMNI
PROFILE}
PROFILE}
THE HosT OF "MARKETPLACE" TUNES IN
David Brown (AGJ95) takes a liberal arts approach to business news
BY PATRICIA DEMPSEY
mid Brown (AGl95)
says the long oral
tradition in radio is
still vibrant and vital.
"There's more time on
radio to engage in the
art of this tradition, and there's more
room for nuance."
Brown is speaking from the Frank
Stanton Studios in Los Angeles, Calif.,
just a few hours before he goes on the
air to engage millions oflistcncrs with
his agile conversation as host of
"Marketplace," public radio's national
series about business and life. There's a
rustle of paper as an assistant slips an
urgent message under Brown's nose,
but right now his focus is elsewhere.
His meandering Southern speech downshifts, and Brown, who once customized
and sold Harley-Davidson motorcycles,
relaxes into a conversation about
road trips.
"When I think of favorite road trips,
one that stands out was the road trip of
the summer of '95, from Boston to
Annapolis to attend the Graduate
Institute," says Brown. "I was working
in Boston for Monitor Radio at the time;
Monitor is the public radio broadcast
produced by the Christian Science
Monitor newspaper. They offered me this
gig to host and I said, 'Hey, I'm happy to
do this hosting gig but this program at
St. John's is important to me.' "Brown
asked for the summer off to finish his
Graduate Institute studies. " I t is so vivid
in my mind, when I was finally crossing
the border into Maryland and feeling so
happy to be heading south of the MasonDixon again. And Annapolis as a place
has such resonance for me."
A native of Georgia, Brown lived in
Annapolis in the early 1990s when he
worked as Washington, D.C., bureau
chief and chief national correspondent
for Monitor Radio and Monitor
Television. In one of those happy
I
expand your perspective, you can see that
each point of view in fact is true."
"I also think quite often of
Tocqueville's Democracy in America,"
says Brown, who owns three copies of
Tocqueville's book and keeps one on
his bedside table. "When I look at the
domestic scene, so many of his
observations hold true today, such
as the religiosity of Americans, the
role race plays in the American
consciousness, the tension between
rugged individualism and civic duty, so
many of the things that made Americans
peculiar creatures in Tocqueville's time
continue to define us on the world stage
today." Of his three editions of the book,
Brown says "one is a precious, dog-eared
volume with my class notes, another is an
inexpensive paperback I can pack up and
take along as a casual read, and the third
is a library edition.' "
Brown offers another insight that he
culled from reading the great books.
"I think about art and science, how
radio brings these together and how at
St. John's, the concept of art versus
science, and the melding of the two, was
part of the curriculum discussion ," says
Brown. "Here in radio, you have storytelling-the art of telling-a-story-part of
radio-and then you also engage in the
science, the journalism, getting the
facts right. This is what we do here at
'Marketplace.' I t's a liberal arts approach
to looking at business," says Brown.
"At 'Marketplace' we have what we call
'front-yard stories' that touch a deep
chord, such as an issue of democracy and
justice. What's at stake when there's a
courthouse shooting in Atlanta? We look
at the social phenomena, the context
shaping the backdrop for the events that
are shaping the business news. Then
there are 'backyard stories' on topics like
bond prices that are not big on curb
appeal, but need to be included. Then we
mix it up-this is what makes us unique."
''.[fyoufree your.se!f
expandyourper.spective~
you can .see that each
pointefview in/act is
true. "
DAVID BROWN (AC195)
accidents that make a journey memorable,
when Brown was living in Annapolis he
stumbled upon St. John's, a perfect match
for his appetite for intellectual discovery.
" I was searching for something to keep
me mentally charged and stimulated,"
says Brown.
At a political function in Annapolis,
Brown met a recent GI grad. "He was
enthusiastic, incandescent even, about
his experience at St. John's. So I met
with [graduate admissions coordinator]
Miriam Callahan-Hean. At that time
the Graduate Institute was housed in
Mellon Hall and we walked around and
I remember thinking, 'This is extraordinary-there are conversations about
conversations going on here.' "
The ideas Brown encountered in his
conversations at St. John's find a forum
in his distinctive radio show today. "I ate
it up. I loved it. The reading, the being
exposed to ideas I wouldn't have exposed
myself to if left to my own devices," says
Brown. "I'm not a math person, but not a
week goes by that I don't think about
Lobachevsk.--y and Euclid and parallels.
You can see it, visualize it-the parallel
lines into infinity. I remember thinking,
'This is not possible. How can these
mutually exclusive ideas-Euclid's classic
definition of parallels and Lobachevsky's
vision oflines infinitely approaching
each other-both be true?' "says Brown.
"This opened a way of seeing things for
me in journalism. If you free yourself,
{ THE
Co LL EC & •Sc.John's College, Spring 2005
}
Brown recalls the skepticism
surrounding "Marketplace," when it was
a new show. "In 1989 there was this
cheeky upstart business program that
everyone said would fail," says Brown.
By 2000 Brov-m, who had just graduated
from Washington and Lee Law School,
was recruited to be senior producer of
American Public Media's "Marketplace,"
and du ring his tenure the show garnered
several awards, including the prestigious
Peabody Award for excellence in journalism. By 2003, Brown was host, a
challenge he relishes. "There is something that happens every day between
10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. when we go on the
air. I'm no CPA, so I have to synthesize
this, present it in an interesting,
engaging way co tell it to our listeners.
There's a pressure, but it's a good
pressure, and you spin out the story.
It's exciting, challenging, thrilling," says
Brown. "When I go home, I get calls from
friends and they say, 'That made so much
sense. I'm so glad you put it that way.'
That makes it meaningful for me-that I
got through, communicated. St. John's
prepared me; all the underlying conversations prepared me."
Brown is another hour closer to going
on the air, but he has one more story
about the GI. " Of the four GI segments,
I put off math until the last semester.
Lobachevsky, the logic, I wrestled with it.
One day I was having coffee with [tutor
': ..he [Mr. Kutler) knew
I was .straining. He told
m~ 'You 'fl.see this. You 'fl
get it. Give it time. ' "
DAVID BROWN (Ac195)
{ THE
Co LL E c
E.
St. John's College. Spring 2005)
DAVID BROWN WORKED BRIEFLY IN TELEVISION,
BUT PREFERS RADIO. "IT'S BEEN SAID 'THE
PICTURES ARE BETTER IN RADIO' ANO IT'S
TRUE."
emeritus] Mr. Kutler. I think he knew I
was straining. He told me, 'You'll see
this. You'll get it. Give it time.' He was
right. It was a loving, reassuring gesture.
He could see I was looking for an intellectually challenging experience. 'You
might really love law school,' he said to
me.'' He knew I was interested in talking
about ideas. He knew I was wondering,
'Where do I go from here?'"
Fortunately Brown ended up at
"Marketplace," adding intellectual spice
and artful conversation to evening
commutes. ♦
�{ALUMNI
1935
"1 'm very proud to have been a
II
graduate ofSJC," writes
MELVILLE L. B1SGY£R. "I'm a
very old man now (91+) and as I
look back, those four years are
among the highlights. The
memories of my fellow
students, the wonderful profs,
the staff, the old buildings, my
dorm-Pinkney Hall-the bell
rope running through a classroom atop McDowelJ, the
library, the gym, the proms.
Is the Sugar Bowl still in town?
The connict with Hopkins in
'35, the front campus, the old
Liberty Tree, which I know is
now gone. The All-American
lacrosse teams-all part of a
wonderful memory. A biologyzoology class of four students
and two profs-wow-other
memories we won't discuss, but
think about with many a
chuck.le. All the best."
s. WOODMAN is "still
practicing law here in upstate
New York and traveling quite a
bit to Jtaly and Australia in my
spare time. Would like to hear
from any classmates who are
still around."
R ICJWlD
Ii
I
{ A LU M N I
NOTES}
Q UITE IMMERSED
(class of1955) received the
"Conductor of the Year, 2004" award from the
Illinois Council ofOrchcstras. He is now
conductor laureate of the New Philharmonic
and Du Page Opera. He has accepted the
_ ~ _ ~ artistic directorship of the opera program at
North Park University in Chicago and is quite immersed in
composilion and painting. ♦
-
-
-
-
AROLD B AUER
-
1950
1943
has been
thinking about the college,
particularly about the reading
list, and especially about
Proust. " It seems to me," he
writes, "that since my time, the
Program has improved with the
two years of Greek and French,
the greater emphasis on writing
and laboratories without
Humphreys' sha1..-y floors. The
one disimprovcmcnt has been
the dropping of Proust from the
fourth year. Swann's Way,
although a part of a larger
whole, is a complete work in
itself. The author of a recent
article in The Atlantic Monthly
found it incredible that one can
graduate from Harvard without
reading Shakespeare or Proust.
How can a 'great books' program not include Proust? It is
time to include him again."
M ILTON P ERLMAN
"My wifeof 56 years, Phyllis,
(we were married two weeks
after graduation under the Liberty Tree) and I will be moving
to a Quaker-sponsored continuing-care retirement community,
Kendal on Hudson, on July
first," wTites P ETER D AVIES. "It
is close to New York and
Riverdale, so we will continue
to enjoy theater, concerts, dining, and city life, and friends in
Riverdale. We stayed with that
Republican, GERRY H OXBY
(class of1947); argued into the
night last August while in Ohio
campaigning for John Kerry!
I'm still representing the
United Nations at Safer World
(a British think tank) and working on a conference in July on
preventing armed conllict."
:
The eldest son of O SCAR L OUIS
L ORD, Lance W. Lord, an Air
Force four-star general, has
been made Commander of Air
Force Space Command.
1944
LINDSAY CLENDANIEL writes,
"I am happy to represent other
alumni who, like myself, didn't
graduate from St. John's but
from other institutions, yet
consider St. John's my alma
mater!"
{ TH E
Co
LL£
c
E.
A tribute from Eo LYNCH: "My
belief is that St. John's is one of
the finest educational houses in
the country. I did not graduate-I completed two full years
and did not return. I came to
St. John's from high school.
My classmates were men who
had attended other colleges,
gone to the war and returned to
St. John's to be enlightened and
truly free. I was intimidated by
their vast knowledge of the
world and the things in it.
Anyway, I guess I wasn't the
brightest bulb in the lamp,
nor the most energetic. I love
St. John's, and I always will.
I will never regret my time
there."
R OBERT G. HAZO
FREDERICK P. D AVIS: "We 3-Ds
in the low desert of Southern
California (son David, wife
Rita, and self) still plug along
respectively at a Riverside Nursing Home (broken, infected
legs), Rita on full-time oi,..-ygen,
and I without a driver's
license-revoked! But church
volunteers have supplied us
with food and rides to church,
etc., since this cruel blow of the
OMV on November 2.4, 2.004.
St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
is the most reliable and
strongest expression of real
love."
JAMES and AMY (class of1959)
JOBES are both retired. An1y
serves as an occasional supply
priest in Massachusetts. They
have three grandchildren now,
in Massachusetts: Amanda, 4; in
Georgia: Elijah, 2., and Sophia,
1 month.
is still writing
political books entitled Minorily
Rufe. "It goes slowly but well.
Publishing articles in the metropolitan newspaper here and in
the Washington Report on the
Middle East on doings in the
Middle East, especially Iraq and
Lebanon. Gave my annual
lecture on "Love" on Valentine's
Day to undergraduates. Attendance was good. Women outnumbered men by 2, or 3 to 1,
surpTising since maternal love
our regular lives and welcoming
friends in these more spacious
quarters."
M ARYFRANCES McCtrrCHAN is
retired from the National Park
Service. She lives in Annapolis,
is learning to play the flute, and
has three grandchildren. She's
also looking forward to her class
reunion in 2.008.
"I have finally found the Great
Hall ofSJC here in Santa Fe and
attended a wonderful concert by
Joan Zucker last week. Now that
I know where it is, my wife and I
will attend more concerts,"
writes MICHAEL TRUSTY.
1 959
H ARVEY and MARY (class of
1958) GOLDSTEIN are
planning ahead. "Members of
the class ofr959 are already
starting to plan for our 50th
reunion-log on to the class of
'59 Web page on the alumni site
for the continuing story."
1960
USAF, is
enjoying retirement. "Marie
and I are thoroughly enjoying
life in the slow lane. After many
years of high-stress/high-travel
jobs, having time to read, soak
in the spa, shoot pool, frequent
auction and estate sales, and
generally do whatever I want,
whenever I want, is wonderful!
The only downside is the great
blue heron that eat our fish, and
the deer that eat our shrubbery.
COL. JOHN J. LANE,
1953
1949
I
Lately "Seniors Helping
Seniors" (for a price) have
taken Rita and me to see doctors, get haircuts, etc., throughout this valley. But at 60 miles,
Riverside is out of their range.
It's over three years since we've
seen David. Rita and I shall
never forget SJC, where we met
at St. Anne's Church. I obtained
a classic liberal education."
CECILY SHARP-WHITEHILL
writes: "Along with the
seminars my colleagues and I
conduct several times a year for
senior executives of professional service firms on the topic
of management of PSFS (this is
a five-day course and qualifies
as education, not just training),
I continue to consult for firms
on the topic of business
communications, both spoken
and written. Having wearied of
relatively long, gray winters
and snow shoveling, I moved
permanently to Osprey, Fla.,
immediately south of Sarasota.
It's delightful here."
1966
"On December 10, we moved
into our new house designed
by us and our architect,"
reports J ULIA B USSER OU PREY.
"It has been an exciting, but
all-consuming project, and we
now look forward to resuming
{ THE
33
N O TES }
1968
ELIZABETH A. D OBBS (A) writes:
"I have an article coming out in
the Chaucer Review on an allusion to Ovid's Narcissus and
Echo story in The Franklin's
Tale. It's called 'Re-sounding
Echo.'"
G. K EENS (SF) is a professor of Pediatrics, Physiology,
and Biophysics at the Keck
School of Medicine of the University of Southern California
and a member of the Division of
Pediatric Pulmonology at Children's Hospital, Los Ange les. "I
was recently appointed Director
of Pediatric Subspccialty Fellowship Education at Children's
Hospital," he writes. "I have
crested a year-long course in
scholarship skills (research
methodology and proficiency in
teaching), which emphasizes
small-group interaction rather
than reliance on lectures. I conduct research in pediatric respiratory disorders and am investigating an innovative hypothesis
that the cerebellum has a majoT
role in control of breathing."
THOMAS
CllARL£S B . WATSON (A) writes:
"Anya Watson graduates from
Connecticut College this year
and has been awarded the Rolex
North American Our World
Undergraduate Scholarship
for 2.005, presented at the
Explorers Club in New York
City in April 2.005. It provides a
year's funding for undersea
research (and a Rolcx watch).
Her undergraduate major was
marine biology with a minor in
Russian and European studies
(age 2.1). Ivan most recently
reports from Kyrgyzstan for
NPR after recent travel to Iraq,
Beirut, Turkey, Iran, and other
newsworthy locations (age 28).
Michael, an avid scuba and
windsurfing enthusiast, is
working on Martha's Vineyard.
Other alumni are encouraged to
look us up in Connecticut and
Martha's Vineyard."
"Hello to H ENRY CONSTANflNE
(A) and his beautiful wife,
Christine," writes STEVE H ANFr
(A). "Thanks for the iospirational message-see you at the
reunion."
LIVING HISTORY
-
(SF74) continues to direct the Public H istoTy
program at New Mexico State University. His book
,_ ON H UNNER
Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth ofan Alomic
Communily came out last fall from the University of
Oklahoma Press. His program at NMSU has published
:_ •
books on Santa Fe and Las Cruces and conducts living
._. history events from the Spanish Colonial and Great
Depression era. Mary Ellen, his wife, is finishing a graduate
degree in nursing, and t heir son Harley is a first-year student at
Seattle University. ♦
Co LL E c £.St.John's College. Spring ~005 }
i
�34
{ALUMNI
NOTES}
{ALUMNI
SUSHEILA H ORWITZ (SF)
writes: "I'm still alive and still a
member of Madonna House.
I spent the last seven years in a
small city in eastern Russia.
I loved the people there and
would love to retllrn."
LIFE AT THE ALTERNATIVE
Julia Goldberg (SF91) and the Santa Fe Reporter keep an eye on the city
BY ROSEMARY
HARTY
here's a great deal of hard
work, long hours, and modest compensation attached to
the work Julia Goldberg
(SF91) docs as editor of
The Reporter, Santa Fe's
alternative weekly newspaper. So on a
recent winter's night, she was at peace
with relaxing her journalistic ethics just a
little to accept a free ticket to a sold-out
lecture by linguist Noam Chomsky.
Goldberg has always loved language,
and there's no better outlet for someone
in Jove with words than the satisfying
grind of putting out a weekly newspaper,
especially one as feisty and in-your-face as
The Reporter.
A life-size stand-up ofBuffy the Vampire
Slayer, adorned with Goldberg's press
pusses, overlooks the piles of newspapers,
files, and other materials stacked all
around Goldberg's office. After five years
as editor, she's had time to get comfortable in her job. Her path to The Reporter
was a simple choice.
" I wanted to WTite, and I didn't want to
leave Santa Fe," she explains.
Like many Johnnies, the Philadelphiaarea native was guided to St. John's by a
high school teacher who recognized
Goldberg's love of books. She loved the
language in the Program, especially
ancient Greek; however, " junior math
almost killed me," she says, shuddering at
the memory. She became a music assistant
and delved into journalism by editing
The Moon, the student newspaper, during
her junior and senior years.
Established in 1974, The Reporter is one
of the oldest independent weeklies in the
country. Given away free in boxes all over
town, it has a circulation of 21,000 and a
core of dedicated readers. "We have a
great relationship with Santa Fe, and we're
really considered a part of the city," she
says. On the other hand, Goldberg adds,
"we're always struggling to break even."
As editor Goldberg oversees two
reporters, a full-time art director, a
part-time assistant director, and a dozen
or so freelancers. 'Iwo other Johnnies
currently work for the paper: Andy Dudzik
(SFGI92) is the publisher; Jonanna
Widner (SFGloo) is assistant editor.
Many Johnnies have been on staff or
freelanced for the paper. Even when Goldberg's reporters are young and green, they
share a passion for breaking news stories
and digging imo complicated issues.
"I'm working with really smart people,"
she says. "We've broken a lot of stories in
the last year and a half."
"The Short Life of Jimmy Villanueva"
revealed that the county jail violated the
---
constitutional rights of prisoners by
failing to treat their health problems.
"Soldier's Heart" probed the psychological problems soldiers faced on their return
from Iraq. And a shocking lack of services
for autistic children in New Mexico was
exposed in "The Lost Ones." Goldberg
has won numerous awards from the New
Mexico Press Association and the National
Federation of Press Women. She created
and directed the Hip-Hop Voter Project,
designed co inspire young Hispanic
residents in New Mexico to vote.
The R eporter provides an importanL
alternative to the local daily, the Santa Fe
continued on p. 3 5
organic garlic farming. Visitors
are welcome at s Dodge Corner,
New Vineyard, Maine."
(SF)
has a short story in the online
journal VerbSap: http://verbsap.com/2oo5mar/sarai.html.
"Just got home from a threeweek wine and nature trip to
New Zealand," says LELIA
STRAW (A). "Love the Kiwis and
their homeland. We were there
over the U.S. election though,
and they're all mystified by the
outcome."
35
WORK AND PLAY
ARCO ACOSTA (A82) sends a hello to all his
1 973
(SF) reports:
"My daughter INDIA C L ARK
(SF01) and Challem Clark are
now living in Budapest,
Hungary, in a beautiful
apartment right over Vaci
Utaca, the main pedestrian
street. They are having a
blast and perhaps will stay
longer than the original
six-month plan."
INDIA WILL IAMS
SARAH (GANCIIER) SARAI
NOTE S }
1 974
and R ANDY P ENDLETON
(both SF) have news: "We are
delighted to announce the
marriage of our son, W ALKER
(A99), to R.Ac n EL V EDAA (SF99)
in April."
M AllTHA
"unique and talented" classmates: "I have
many great memories of our college years and
hope the best for you all and your families.
I continue to examine my life daily. Work is:
legal, filmmaking, public school teaching
K-12; Play/other: WTiting, guitar, music, recording, chess,
basketball. Personal: divorced. Peace and Prosperity to you allplease call when you're on the West Coast."♦
(A) directs, supervises, and interprets MRI
examinations of the brain and
body at 30 sites in 12 states.
"I teach and lecture on brain
development, brain imaging,
and brain pathology at
Georgetown University and
elsewhere. My four wonderful
children never cease to amaze,
amuse, confound, and inspire
me as they display the intricacies of brain development to
me, up close and personal."
JOIIN REES
1 975
C YNTIIIA Swiss (A) has been
elected to president of the
Maryland/DC Chapter of the
American String Teachers
Association. "I have organized
statewide certification exams
for young string players," she
writes. "I also schedule
workshops on Suzuki String
Teaching Technique. Our
chapter published a newsletter
called Stringendo, and I have
contributed several articles."
I RVINC WILLIAMS (A) is
"moving to the country estateroom for a pony-in July to start
continuedfromp. 34
New Mexican, says Goldberg. "They
cover what's happening; we try to be
progressive," she explains. Part of the
paper's job is to provide a guide to
enjoying Santa Fe, with special sections
on restaurants, art galleries, recreation,
and just living in the city.
The process of putting out a weekly
paper starts each Wednesday morning,
with a critique of the current paper.
Goldberg and her staff brainstorm new
story ideas, identify a cover story, and
plan what they need to report on in the
coming weeks. On Thursday, they start
working on a preliminary layout, Sunday
Goldberg spends editing the cover story,
and Monday and Tuesday are "slam days,"
as the final stories come in for editing,
headlines, and fact-checking. Tuesday
THE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN
HER COMMUNITY KEEPS J ULIA GOLDBERG AT
THE REPORTER.
{THE
Co LL E c E. St. John 's College. Spring2005}
night is the press run, and on Wednesday
it starts all over again.
The Johnnies and other reporters who
work for Goldberg tend to get good training at The Reporter. But they soon head
off to New York or other cities where their
editorial skills can earn them a better
salary. After interning at the Phi/,adelphia
City Paper, the New Mexican and The
Reporter, Goldberg earned her master's
degree at the University of New Mexico.
"J:re 've broken a lot of
.stories in the last year
andaha!f"
JULIA GoLOBERC (SF9:r)
{ THE
Co LL E c
E.
St. John 's College. Spring 2005 }
She acquired valuable experience at one
of her first jobs, the Rio Grande Sun,
where she covered county government,
politics, and schools. It gave her a sense
that an aggressive local paper is an
important tool of democracy.
"You need to ask questions, and you
need to listen carefully-a lot like what we
do at St. John's."
In between deadlines, Goldberg manages to get time off to enjoy the beautiful
city she's living i n. She enjoyed a recent
Community Seminar at St. John's and
vows to get up the hill more often to enjoy
campus events.
But even with the long hours, it's hard
for her to imagine giving up the work she
does at The Reporter. There's always
another story to tell. " I can't say the
perfect opportunity isn't out there, but
right now, I can't imagine a better job." ♦
�{AL U M NI
NOTE S }
{ALUMN I
37
NOT ES }
I
Beginning April I, MICHAEL
will be serving as the
regional minister for Northwest
Connecticut, responsible
for oversight of about 50
United Cht1rch of Christ
congregations.
C IBA (A)
MAUYELLEN LAWRENCE (SF)
has finished her subspecialty
training in infectious diseases
at the University of New Mexico
and is practicing medicine in
Santa Fe. She writes, "It may be
that, at last, 1 have completed
my formal medical training!"
" I've been eagerly scanning the
class notes for 21 years now, so
thought it was about time I
made a contribution," writes
} ACK A RMSTRONG (SF). I live in
West Chester, Penn., of all
places, with my wife, Ca1·men,
and kids Michael (16) and Emily
(8). I am happier than I ever
expected or deserved. I'm
printing ballots for a living,
and writing stories for my soul.
I also have a theatre with
Carmen, the Philadelphia
Shakespeare Festival, which
is the 800-pound gorilla of
hobbies. l miss you all."
ANNE M CCLARD (SF) reports
1980
" I am delighted to let everyone
know that I am now the proud
mother of Emily Sierra," writes
Gmu GLOVEU (SF). "She came
to live with me from Memphis,
Tenn., and I will be ever grateful to her birth mom for helping
me create a family. Can't wait
for you all to meet her at our
next reunion."
that NOAH MCC LARD
LEDBETTER (SF02) and DAGNY
CHICOINE-STANGL (SF01) were
married in July 2004.
STEVEN T. R EYNOLDS (A) writes:
"Landry Tait Anders Reynolds
joined the gaggle August II,
2004. The family and the
garden continue to thrive."
medical staff on January r,
2005. He will serve as president
for two years. He was previously
the medica 1staff vice president
for two years and has been the
laboratory medical director for
four years. Thia is currently
working with President William
Harvey to build a proton
therapy radiation oncology
center at Hampton University.
She has also recently been
invited to serve on the Board
of Directors for the Thomas
Jefferson National Accelerator
Facility, the American Physical
Society Division of Nuclear
Physics Program Committee,
and the Combined Theory and
Experimental Collaboration for
Quantum Thermodynamics.
Nothing but good news from
KATII EIUNE RowE (SF): "I am
still a preacher in the Episcopal
Church and still in a Denver
suburb. I'm still a speech and
language pathologist, and still
in love with my husband, Phil,
and my two ch ildren. I'm also
still glad that I went to
St. John's."
1985
writes,
"I continue to practice law in
Baltimore and am pleased to
announce that I have recently
set out on my own. Having my
own practice has allowed me to
do the cases I want to do, spend
ANNA L. D AVIS (A)
ERIN MCVADON ALBRlGHT (A)
welcomed his first grandson,
Patrick Alexander, into the
world one year ago.
News from BARRY H ELLMAN and
CYNT111A " TwA" KEPPEL (both
A): Barry became president of
Mary Immaculate Hospital
GoozILLA PHASE
STEVEN CRAMER (A) is an
attorney in private practice in
New York City. He lives in
Maplewood, N.J., with his
wife and two daughters, the
youngest adopted from China
in December 2004.
-
-
ife is "good and busy" for A LEX (AGI93) and
ELLERMANN. Alex works in the
national security field, flies C-13os in the Navy
Reserve, and is working toward his second
master's with the Naval War College's Distance
- - - - • Education Program. Vanessa practices Jaw with a
Georgetown firm that specializes in class actions. Son Alex, 5, is
going through a Godzilla phase at the moment, "which is pretty
fun," they write. ♦
V ANESSA (A93)
.J
{ THE
1:
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S1. John's College. Spring 2005
)
more time on volunteering and
pro bono cases, and most
importantly, better balance the
demands of work and family.
My husband, Richard Gordon,
and children, Aaron (IO) and
Rachel (6), and l are all well and
would love to hear from any and
all Johnnies passing through
Baltimore."
TE1uu K. LUCKE'IT (SF) worked
for GE for a long time but left
for Honeywell in 2002. "I lived
in L.A. for one year, but moved
to N.J. a year ago to become
vice president of Business
Planning for HON. I'm hoping
to move out ofN.J. back to
points west as soon as possible,
but time will tell. Beautiful
Carolyn is 12, now and a true joy,
was diagnosed with diabetes in
2001, but we manage. We grew
weary of corporate nomadic life
and bought a piece of Santa Fe
to call our 'home away from
home.' Ping us if you are either
here or there: terri.luckett@
honeywell.com."
is vice
president of operations at a
mid-size software company in
Maine. " It's quite exciting and
very busy," he writes. " I am
happily married to a woman
from Maine who makes me
laugh a great deal. For those of
you who remember my interest
in music, I wrote an orchestral
piece around 1995-96 and went
to the Czech Republic and had
it performed at a workshop for
orchestral composers. It was
really fun. Haven't written a
note since!"
K ENNETH MARTIN (A)
1986
MELISSANETfLESHI P Br-.J',EDICT
(SF) writes: "Since July of 2000
I have been director of finance
at Santa Fe Preparatory School,
released her thu-d album, Live
at Blues Alley. Her Web site is:
www.mclaniemason.com
JOHNNIE FRENCH TESTED
-
ATRICE MCSHANE (SF02) was on her way to Africa
earlier this spring: " I spent the two-and-a-ha lf years
after graduation in Portland, Ore., working at a
Montessori preschool. I got ants in my pants, shifted
direction, and applied to volunteer for the United
....
States Peace Corps. I was accepted and leave for
Burkina Faso, Africa , on March 17' An unusual way to spend
St. Patty's Day, don't you think? I'll be there for over two years,
teaching secondary math to Bw·kinahe high school students.
Let's hope my SJC French rises to the occasion! I am mighty
excited and would be more than willing to discuss the Peace
Corps application process/experience with any prospective
vo lunteers. Or just write to say "hey, you!" patsymcshane@
hotmail.com." ♦
just down the hill on Camino
Cruz Blanca from the Santa Fe
campus."
1989
"After many years in San Francisco, I've been in Denver for a
year, spending much of my time
practicing Tibetan Buddhism,"
writes LARRY SEIDL (A). "I've
been remiss in my alumni
activities, though I saw many
shining faces at reunion
number ro in '96. Twenty is
just around the bend. A warm
general hello to the community
in general, and the class ofr986
and my tutors in particular."
BURKE GURNEY (SFGI ) is
married with two children:
Kyra and Elise, ages 15 and 13.
"I am an assistant professor at
the University ofNcw Mexico in
the Department of Orthopedics,
Rehabilitation, and Physical
Therapy. I teach physiology,
orthopaedic evaluation and
treatment, professional ethics,
and gerontology. I am an avid
traveler, reader, skier, and
parent."
JAN UNDERWOOD (SF) is working
as a Spanish instructor.
AL1ZA S HAPIRO
(SF) was
recently engaged to David
Mandel.
1990
JOHN SELLERS (A) is "married to
Becky Woods and teaching
grades 8-12 math and science,
including chemistry and
physics-challenging."
THE RFV. M'N SLAKEY (SF) is
now priest-in-charge at
St. Matthew's Episcopal Parish
in Ontario, Ore.
is a fuUtime blues artist, writing and
performing original blues-rock
material as lead electric
guitarist and vocalist for the
Melanie Mason Band. She
also performs and records
traditional acoustic blues as a
solo artist. She recently
KEN TuRNBULL (A) writes:
"My wife, Leslie, and Tare both
lawyers in Washington and are
enjoying our seven-month-old
daughter, Fiona."
Co LLB c
E.
'
(SF) and her
husband arc pleased to
announce the birth of their first
child, Emma Lee Ward, born on
January 4, 2005.
J ENNIFER R YCIILI K
1991
is a 2004
winner of the National Poetry
Series award, and her second
book, Starred Wire, will be
published by Coffee House Press.
ANGIE MLINKO (A)
N ICOLE l<ALMANOR LEVY (SF)
writes, " l n August 2004, I gave
birth to our first daughter, Eve
Simone Levy. She's the apple of
our eye! My husband, Rob, and
I moved to the North Shore of
Boston last year, to Swampscott,
which is a small town next to
Salem-the Witch Capital, and
Marblehead-a sailing capital.
A fon destination with some
cultural treats! 1 am working
on a master's in Jewish studies.
Got through Jewish mysticism,
now working on a translation of
portions of the Book of Exodus.
I wish I could go to more
alumni events, it's been great
connecting!"
MELANIE M ASON (A)
{ TH E
Alrnapolis to sec his wife, SARA
ScnROEOlNGER (A92), he is logging lots of frequent-flyer miles
on bt1siness trips to China,
Thailand, and Malaysia.
1993
The commute to work for K u1n
HECKEL (A) got a lot longer in
early September 2004, when he
took a position ,vith Border
Concepts in Charlotte, N.C.
When he is not traveling back to
St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
1994
JANIE BOSWORTH (SFGI) and
GEORGE F. BING HAM (SF66)
were married July 3, 2004, at
the Audubon Center in Santa
Fe. Between them, they proudly
share six children and seven
grandchildren-with another
one on the way.
finished
writing his dissertation in May
2004 and spent the summer
backpacking in Montana. " T
hiked across the Bob Marshall
Wilderness once, enjoyed the
experience, and went back for a
second passage," wTites Kroll.
"Walking through the long
eveni ng light of summer in the
northern Rockies is not to be
missed. The bears keep things
interesting, too. Talso spent
numerous days floating the
Bitterroot and Clark Fork
Rivers, drinking beer and
formulating a master plan.
I completed my Ph.D. in
Wildlifo Biology from the
University of Montana in
December 2004 and accepted a
position as a research scientist
with Wcycrhaettser Corporation
in Federal Way, Wash.
I am responsible for habitat
plann ing for the company's
Wester n timberlands, as well as
general wildlife research and
operational support. I would
enjoy hearing from anyone, and
I am anxious to jump-start
ANDREW }. K ROLL (A)
I
I
I
I
�{ALUMNI
NATHAN WILSON
{ALUMNI
PROFILE}
(AGl01) UNVEILS SHROUD MYSTERIES
BY PATRICL\ DEMPSEY
ike many Johnnies,
Nathan Wilson (AGlor)
is unwilling to walk
away from an ino·iguing
question. Five years
ago, Wilson became
fascinated with the origins of the
mysterious Shroud of Turin and began
to wonder how the images ofJesus on
the cloth-believed by some to be
authentic-could have been faked.
Ultimately, with a few simple tools
Wilson demonstrated how a medieval
might have forged the images on the
shroud. His simple experiment showing that glass, paint, and sunlight
could have been used to create a
"reversed" photonegative image
sparked a media frenzy, with Wilson
appearing on shows including ABC's
World News Tonight.
Wilson (profiled in the Summer
2.002 edition of The College for his parodies
of apocalyptic novels) ruminated over two
questions: how do we know the dark image
was imposed on light linen at all? Further,
how could a forger in the Middle Ages
lighten linen without chemicals, paints,
or dyes?
"A negative image can be easily produced using only large pieces of painted
NATHAN WILSON THEORIZES THAT
C H RIS D AVI S and CARMEN
(both SF) write:
"CHARLIE B REW and P AT
BOHAN, it's high time you
stopped reading so much
Kafka!"
H ERIJIIG
SUNLIGHT TRAVELING IN AN ARC OVER
PAINTED CLASS CREATED THE
3-D IMAGE
ON THE SHROUD OF TURIN.
glass," explains Wilson. "In the Middle
Ages, glass was commonly made in large
sizes: six-by-eight feet or even nine-by-five.
It was made in a long cylinder and unrolled
into a sheet as early as the noos, a technique perfected in the 12.oos and r3oos. As
the Shroud is roughly 14 feet in length, two
pieces of glass would be necessary, both at
least six feet long. The image of the front of
alumni activities in the Puget
Sound area. I can be reached at
ajkroll64@hotmail.com."
English, Italian, and Latin, and
where Greek and Sanskrit are
offered as electives.
PATRICK SCANLON (SFGI) will
be resident clirector of School
Year Abroad's Italy campus in
Viterbo, Italy. SYA Viterbo
offers a one-year classics
curriculum for American
juniors and seniors in homestays. He and his wife, Linda,
and their four children return
to the central Italian town
(population 60,000) where
Pat had taught English for two
years previously. Now he'll
oversee a program that requires
GREG WATSON (SF) writes, "l
live in Washington State on a
beautiful island with my dog,
Rusty, and wife, Karen. During
the week I am employed as
assistant harbormaster at a
local marina, and on weekends
I teach sailing in Seattle. So I
am still using my captain's
license. Also, I am getting ready
to embark on a trip to Costa
Rica with Solar Energy International, where we will work with
locals installing renewable
energy power systems."
{ TH E
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the man would be produced beneath
one and the back of the man beneath
the other."
How would the forger create the
three-dimensional shading? "By painting an image on the top side of the
glass," says Wilson. "This leaves a gap
where the sunlight traveling in a 180degrec arc could penetrate at angles
that produce the 3-D shading."
Wilson used white oil paint to create
images on eight different window
panes and placed them over coarse
linen in the sun. The paint blocked the
sunlight from bleaching the darker
cloth, but everything around it was
bleached white. The results, Wilson
believes, point to one possibility for
how the shroud was faked. He detailed his
experiments in an article published in the
journal Books and Culture: "What I have
done is crudely demonstrate that such
an image could easily be produced in a
matter of weeks by wicked men with no
scruples, a little imagination, and a little
more skill." ♦
1 995
JEROME DuFFY (SFGI) is
working as an elementary
school teacher at the Chinese
American International School
in San Francisco.
ALICE BROWN and GREG
HODGES (A) are happy to
announce the birth of their
second child, Silas Wister
Hodges. "We are also pleased
to announce the completion of
Greg's doctoral thesis, "An
Ethnography Study of Lucan's
Bellum Civife," which has
St. John's College. Spring 2005}
arrived after a gestation of
many years and has earned him
a Ph.D. in classics from Ohio
State University. We arc
teaching and in the thralls of
Babydom in the Great White
North, and loving it. Fond
thoughts of all!"
CAMERON GRAHAM (SF) has
moved from South Carolina tO
the Defense Languages School
in Monterey, Calif. "I am a
specialist, and I will most Iikely
be there for a couple of years;•
he writes. "In the army, I
received an award for top
physical program at Fort
Jackson in South Carolina,
and now I am studying Arabic."
D AVID MALLEY
(A) writes:
"T didn't graduate from
St. John's, but my short time
there is a treasured memory.
For that, I am always grateful."
H EATHER (AGI)
my new company and will serve
as my launching pad for my
next year of helicopter flying,"
reports KI RA K. ZIELINSKI (SF).
"Happily, no more tourists. I'll
be flying as a utility pilot, which
means construction and
firefighting all over the western
U.S., just as Pericles would have
done had he not been occupied
with a higher calling. Same
e-mail: Hcrme5@juno.com."
and C HRIS
NOR.DLOII (AGI96) welcomed
Nicholas Nordloh into the
world on Dec. 24, 2004.
(A) and AolUENNE
(JAK0WSKI) RUIJENSTElN (A96)
have lived in the Washington,
D.C., area for five years, the last
three in Frederick, Md.
Adrienne teaches at the
Maryland School for the Deaf,
and Peter commutes to an
In tern et networking job in
Northern Virginia. Their big
news is the appearance on
the scene of Jonah Chester,
by far the littlest Rubenstein
currently extant. Born just
shy of Halloween 2004, Jonah
has made a splash among his
admirers. Blue-eyed and dark of
hair, he is considered by his
father to be "quite handsome."
Two-year-old beagle "Elway" is
said to be " adjusting well" to
the newcomer despite occasional lapses in respect for the
property rights of others.
P ETER
"Did I mention I'm engaged?"
writes APRIL I0AWALTERS (A).
"Getting married October r,
2005, to Travis Hopkins and
J'm keeping my name. Also,
I've been working at MICA as
the writing studio coordinator
almost as long as I attended
SJC!"'
1996
}ILL C111U!,'flNE NIENIIISER
(AGI ) writes: " T was recci:itly
promoted to director of strategy
at Mind and Media, Inc. in
Alexandria, Va. Last Friday I
had my first piano lesson since
1984. Upon leaving the music
store, I slammed my finger in
the car door. So far there is no
appreciable difference in my
playing ability, despite the
swelling! Hah ! "
1997
DAVID CANNELL (EC) dropped a
note from Japan: "Hidcko, the
three boys, and I are in Tokyo
for the next year or two on a
Japan Foundation fellowship,
praying it's enough to see us
thr9ugh the remainder of my
doctoral program (UC Irvine).
My thesis is on Matsuo Basho
and haikai poetry in late seventeenth-century Japan. Meantime, we're just enjoying being
here. The cherry blossoms have
come and gone-in a matter of
days! Can't wait for the next
sumo tournament. Would love
to hear from fellow EC grads
and know what's going on in
their worlds."
"I'm proud to say that I've used
up Las Vegas and am now off co
Tucson, which is the home of
{ THE
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NOTES }
39
"My company, North Star
Games, is starting to pick up
momentum," writes DOMINI C
C1tAPUCHETrF.S (A): "Cluzzle
has won several prestigious
awards as a great family game
and our next game, Trivia
Casino, was picked up by a
larger game company. It looks
likely that both games will be
available at national outlets for
the 2.005 holiday season! If so, I
will finally get a paycheck after
12 months of working for nothing except a dream. WES DONEHOWER bought an apartment in
DuPont Circle so we have been
hanging out a bit recently. Give
us a call if you're in the area
and we'll get together: 202-2536070."
1998
News from ALEXANDRA D .E.
BOOZER (A): "Jam happy to
announce that I was ma rried to
Daniel Giguere ofWindham,
Maine, on September I9, 2.004.
Last year I received my doctorate in clinical psychology from
George Washington Univers ity,
with a specialization in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We are
currently living in Holmes
Beach, Fla., where I am
working towards obtaining
Florida psychology licensure.
I would love to hear from any
old friends or to link with other
students/alumni with an
interest in practicing
psychology. I can be reached
by e-mail at: alexandra_FL@
hotmail.com."
(SF) is teaching
fifth-grade math. He and his
wife, Sara, are pleased to be
homeschooling their four
ch ildren. "This summer we
will be flying to England, where
we will be learning to build
wooden boats."
D AVID BRADEN
St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
MA'ITH£\V C. JOHNSTON
(SF)
sends greetings to his long-lost
classmates. "After stints as a
teacher, a college admissions
counselor (at SJC of course),
and a theology student, I'm
pleased to report that I'm back
at St. John's in Santa Fe, working alongside the assistant dean
to improve student activities
and services. My wife, A.NNE"ITE
P RA.PASI RI (SF04), and I are
expecting a baby in mid-April
and, ifwe can negotiate home
prices here, plan to stay in SF
forever. Drop me a line if you're
in town or needing the inside
scoop on SJC developments. I
can be reached at 505-424-3292
or mjohnston@sjcsf.edu."
1999
RACHEL VE0AA (SF) and
WALKER P ENOLEOON (A)
were married April 16, 2005,
at St. Mary's College in
Moraga, Calif.
2000
ANNE MCSHANE (A) is finishing
her first year at law school at
NYU. 'Tm spending the
summer at Nebraska's ACLU.
If anybody wants to chat about
going to law school, feel free to
write me at annecarolmcshane@
yahoo.com."
BENJAMIN SHOOK (SF) writes:
" I'm making beautiful furniture with a hint of Danish and
Asian influence. Visit
www.bcnshook.com to see
my work."
DE8EllNJERE } A.NET T 01Ul£Y
(AGI) is in Seoul on a Fulbright
fellowship, studying premodern Korean literature in
�40
{OBITUARIES}
{ALUMNI NOTES}
"A GIFT FOR FRIENDSHIP": REMEMBERING STUART BOYD
preparation for her dissertation
research in the Department of
Comparative literature at Penn
State University.
BY LYNDA MYERS
TuTOR, SANTA Fe
DAVE P ROSPER (SF) moved LO
Oakland and bas a new job. "I
also have a stack ofblack-andwhite Eexlebots comic books; if
anyone wants one. let me know.
Life is pretty sweet."
2002
ALANA and JOEY CHERNTLA
(both SF) had their second little
girl, Rose Isabella, on Feb. 25.
"Our first, Sadie Pearl, will be 2
in a few weeks. Besides enjoying
our intense domesticity, Joey
runs a daycare, and I work in
publishing and tutor homeschoolers in Euclid."
2003
NATE and REBEKA H (NEE
Go·rrtOB) EAGLE (both A) are
serving as Peace Corps
volunteers in Cameroon, West
Africa. They arrived at the end
of September for training in
agroforestry and moved to their
pose, the town of Poli, in
December. Their service will
end in December 2006. You can
view photos and a blog and find
out how to get in touch at
monadology.net.
KYLIE LIEBERMAN and ZEPJ-!Yll
(both SF) planned to be
married April 30, 2005, in Las
Vegas, Nev. See their Web site,
zheartk.com for pictures and
contact information.
R ENNER
2004
ENJOLI COOKE (A) is beginning
her second year as a postbaccalaureate fellow at the
National Institutes of Health.
"I'm beginning the graduate
school application process and
am planning to attend a Ph.D.
program in molecular biology."
RHO DA FRANKLIN (A) and
}All.ED 0 1mz (AGI05) were
married December 18, 2004,
in Annapolis.
LAURA MANION (A) was featured
as a "profile of the month" on
the Web site of the Mississippi
Teacher Corps. The corps is a
two-year program that recruits
recent college graduates to
teach in critical-shortage areas
in the Mississippi Delta, in
exchange for a full scholarship
for a master's in curriculum and
instruction from the University
of Mississippi. Manion teaches
ANNAPOLIS SENIORS COMBINED ENTREPRENEURIAL SP! RIT WITH
ALTRUISM BY CREATING A"WOMEN OF !l.005" CALENDAR TO HELP RAISE
MONEY FOR THEIR CLASS GIFT. THE STUDENTS PLEDGED MONEY TOWARD
PURCHASING LOBACHEVSKY MANUALS POI\ ALL SENIORS NEXT YEAR.
THEY HOPE THEIR GESTURE WILL INSPIRE OTHER CLASSES TO DO SOME·
THING SIMILAR, WITH THE COAL THAT ALL LAB MANUALS CAN BE GIVEN TO
STUDENTS. THESE TASTEFUL CALENDARS (MAY zoo5-MAY 2006) CAN BE
PURCHASED FOR $10 THROUGH THE ADVANCEMENT OFFICE IN ANNAPOLIS:
SEND ACHECK TO ALEXANDRA FOTOS, ADVANCEMENT, P.O. Box 2800,
ANNAPOLIS, MD 21404.
seventh- and eighth-grade
English at a middle school in
Arcola, Miss.
TATIANA HAIUUSON (A) was
married to Rob Harrison on
June 28, 2004.
RYAN R.lSING (A.GI) is attending
the University of Kansas School
of Law, where he hopes to
graduate on their fast track in
two years, rather than three.
He is at work on a novel that he
hopes to be the first in a ninevolume series. ♦
{ TH E C o LL E c E . St. John's College. Spring 2005
}
WHAT'S UP?
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you're doing. The next issue
will be published in October;
deadline for the alumni notes
sect.ion is August 15.
Cla;;snotes posted to the college's online community will
also be included in The College.
IN ANNAPOLIS:
The College Magazine
St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 2r404;
roscmary.harty@sjca.edu
IN SANTA FE:
The College .Magazine
St. John's College
u6o Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
When Stuart Boyd retired from the college in
1988, he was presented with a scroll that read:
To Stuart Boyd, Artist, writer, healer ofsouls,
lover ofknowledge, and teacher ofthe Books:
A testimony to lzis contribution ofover 22
years to the intellectual and convivial delights
ofthe College. "He was a man... we shall not
look upon his like again. "
His humanity, wit, common sense, and love
of life were celebrated again at a memorial
held on the Santa Fe campus at the end of
January, a week after he died of a heart attack
at his home near Can1busavie, Scotland.
Mr. Boyd joined the faculty of St. John's in
1966, when the Santa Fe campus was still in
its infancy. In the words of his wife, Nan, "At
St. John's Stuart found his spiritual home."
Before coming to the college Mr. Boyd had
already led a rich and varied life. He was born
on January 3, 1922, in Aberdeen, Scotland.
In his memoir, The Wind.swept Child, he
describes his childhood in Scotland between
the two world wars as a precious, fragile, and
fleeting time.
When World War II interrupted his
graduate work at Aberdeen University,
he volunteered for the Parachute
Regiment and saw active service in
Sicily and North Africa before being
wounded and captured at Arnhem
in the Netherlands in September
1944. (The story of that disastrous
mission is recounted in the book
The Bridge Too Far.) He spent the
remainder of the war in prison
camps near the Polish-German
border.
After the war, Mr. Boyd completed
his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in
clinical psychology, taught at
several universities in the UK and
the United States, and eventually
joined the faculty of New Mexico
Highlands University, where he
became chairman of the Psychology
Department. At Highlands he met
Robert Bunker (then chairman of
the Highlands' English and
philosophy deparonents and now
tutor emeritus of St. John's).
Ralph Swentzell (now also tutor
emeritus) was a student of both and
what the Confucianists would callJen or
benevolence for his fellow man."
Mr. Boyd's intellectual interests spread
quickly as he taught through the Program
and he became a loved and respected tutor.
Mara Robinson (SFGI83), a former member
of the college's Board ofVisitors and
Governors, first met him in a Community
Seminar, later studied with him in the
Graduate Institute, and became a close
friend. "Stuart was a brilliant, inspiring
teacher and a charismatic man whose classes
always overfilled with students cager to
'sit at his feet' and learn," she recalls.
" His knowledgeable and entertaining
leadership won over, not only many students
through the years, but an enormous number
of townspeople as well."
Faculty colleagues remember Mr. Boyd as
something of an iconoclast, as the faculty
meeting min Lites he wrote as faculty secretary
in :r974 show. According to Mr. Swentzell,
" Stuart, although loving the formal, was
always strongly sensitive about tendencies
toward pompous elitism or hypocrisy. He
valued straight, honest talk-preferably
accompanied by wit and eloquence,
both of which he had in abundance." Tutor Jorge Aigla remembers the way Mr. Boyd welcomed
him to the faculty: "Twenty years
ago it was my good fortune to be
paired with Stuart Boyd for my first
freshman seminar-a wonderful way
to be initiated into our educational
venture. I soo n learned with Stuart
to read honestly, carefully, sensitively; to respect the authors, to
laugh with them (I never managed
to laugh at them, as Stuart occasionally did), and to appreciate the
insights and awakening of our
students. His common sense,
wisdom, advice, courage, and sense
of honor were a great h elp to me."
In the early days of the Santa Fe
campus Mr. Boyd's gift for friendship and his capacity for fun were
cohesive forces among the faculty.
recalls a seminar co-led by "these Lwo most
philosophically exciting professors. I think it
had to do with science and religion, or maybe
it was
existentialism. Students talked about Stuart's
frequent exclamations in class whenever
Bunker would hint at the possibility of God's
existence, something to the effect that he
'didn't see any need for Easter Bunnies
running across his systematic reasoning.' "
In 1966, Mr. Boyd and Mr. Swentzell,
encouraged by Bob Bwlker (who had come
to St. John's the year before), joined the
fledgling Santa Fe faculty. Mr. Boyd served
both as a tutor and as campus psychologist.
As Nan Boyd observes, "Stuart always
managed to find time, and the right words,
when someone was in distress or in need of
wisdom. I know there are students without
number who have cause to be grateful to him,
not only for his role as a tutor, but also for
getting them through emotional problems to
graduation in one piece." Ralph Swentzell
adds, "What I most admired in Stuart was his
blunt honesty and genuine humani ty. He had
a great capacity for sympathetic compassion,
continued on nextpage
STUART BOYD WITH FANG IN
DoRNACH, SCOTLAND.
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continuedfromp. 41
According to Torn Harris, tutor emeritus,
"Stuart helped us form such strong bonds..
.we all resonated with his warmth and care for
us. Did we not dance beautifully and wildJy
then! With uncontained energy we danced on
into the night! He always had a wonderful
laugh. I hear it now." Nan Boyd adds, 'Tm
perfectly sure everyone of you remembers
occasions when the room was almost lit-up by
his laugh and general merriment-there was
nothing, absolutely nothing, he enjoyed more
than a gathering of good friends exchanging
stories and making each other laugh."
Mr. Boyd had a distinctive, very Scottish
presence on campus. Many remember his
military bearing-not quite a swagger-when
he arrived at waltz parties in full regimentals.
Even after 2.0 years, he found the bright sun
of New Mexico oppressive and lamented the
chill and clamp of home. Rumor has it that his
favorite philosopher remained fellow Scot
FACULTY M EETING MINUTES,
SANTA FE:
AN EXCERPT
Nov. 21, 1974
Stuart Boyd, Faculty Secretary
Dean Ncidorf, presiding, judging a
quorum to be present, asking for and
receiving, approval of the minutes of the
previous faculty meeting (noting the
objection by Mr. Jones, whose presence
and words had been reported but whose
absence and silence were the facts, ru1d the
correction by Mr. Venable who suggested
that something had been "evoked" from
Mr. Sacks, not "invoked" as reported nor
"provoked" as intended) invited Mr. Steadman to justify his request that a special
faculty meeting be called for Saturday,
November 2.3, a request to which
Mr. Steadman responded with zest.
Mr. Ncidorf then linked this specific
event with a request for Faculty discussion
of the suggestion that Facul ty Meetings not
be held at the time which had been agreed
on and which had become the tradition,
i.e. Thursday Afternoon, but that we tinker
with this arrangement, to find extra time
so that discussions could last even longer.
Drew wondered out loud if time could not
be saved by streamlining our procedures.
Robinson reminded the Faculty that the
AT 72, MR. B OYD DONNED HIS PARATROOPER'S SUIT FOR A JUMP IN THE NETHERLANDS.
David Hume. When Mr. Boyd retired from
the college, he and his wife returned to
raison d'etre for establishing the Thursday
Afternoon Faculty Meeting was to protect
Saturdays, and that to meet on Saturday
morning would see the remorseless,
insidious, and irrevocable engulfment of
all the hours of daylight and sunshine, in
accordance with Parkinson's Law. Dean
Neidorf finally pronounced that the
thought of rescheduling anything seemed
to involve great difficulty and pain, that
tradition must be respected, that he would
call Thursday afternoon Faculty Meetings
at l p.m. instead of1:30 p.m., and that he
would do what he could to streamline the
meeting procedures.
The Dean then asked for comments on
the recent All-College Seminar. There were
enthusiastic responses from some who felt
that it brought together those who would
otherwise not be so brought, with consequent excitements....Robinson, noting
the excitements that some had experienced, wondered if all seminars could not
be of this nature. The Dean paused, then
remaiked that of course such a suggestion
could be countenanced, but that he was
sure in his experience of the Faculty that
even in the event that a majority approved
such an idea, that that same majority
would reject taking any action. There was
some further conversation about seminars
and books, in which was heard the
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43
{OBITU AR I ES }
Scotland and settled in a small village near
the northern coast, cold and rainy enough to
satisfy even him. There he read, gardened,
worked on his memoirs, and painted in
acrylics, something he had begun doing while
at St. John's. In addition to enjoying quiet
activities near their home, the Boyds traveled
extensively and returned several times to
Santa Fe, where he gave lectures on topics
ranging from Shakespeare to T.E. Lawrence.
In 1994, at the age of 72., Mr. Boyd together
with several other survivors of the Arnhem
mission repeated their parachute jump over
the Netherlands to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the Battle of Arnhem and to
raise money for the Airborne Forces Charities
of his regiment.
Mr. Boyd voice lingers on for many friends
like Jorge Aigla: "When Stuart retired in
1989, he asked me to take over his office. In
that space, I still sometimes hear him laughing, telling me (and us): 'ALL is well, my boy,
andallSHALLbewcll! '" ♦
predictable, conditioned suggestion that
Pavlov be expunged from the senior
reading list.
Dean Neidorf reported that the
Annapolis Faculty, in response to student
sentiment, was considering whether or not
to abaJ1don the practice of awarding
honors. After a lengthy silence, Harris and
Jones asked qu estions of Dean Neidorf,
wondering ifhe meant the Annapolis
campus of St. John's, and ifhe meant there
was consideration of whether or not to
award honors at graduation, and received
solemn assurances that all was as he had
said. The Dean went on to say that the
graduating class on the other campus had
registered the complaint that the system of
awaiding honors was oppressive and
offensive. Mr. Sacks remarked, somewhat
cryptically, that the oppressed should not
feel oppressed.... The discussion about
honors continued, with considerable time
spent on Descartes aJ1d "warm, effusive
feelings" and other comments which flew
too fast for this reporter to catch either
their significance or their relevance,
terminating in a masterly synthesis of
Greek ru1d Christian worlds by Mr. Long,
who urged us to think of honors as like
some Olympic Garnes to which many were
called but few chosen ... ♦
MICH AEL C. S LAKEY, C LASS OF 1985
Michael C. Slakey, Annapolis class ofI985,
died of cancer on January 30, 2.005, in
Lannion, Brittany, a region of western
France. He was 42..
Michael met his wife, Victoire Devaud
Slakcy, a French citizen, in Washington,
D.C., and they spent most of their married
life in France. Michael had a full life as a
painter and musician, and as an organic
farmer especially devoted to the care of his
land. He leaves behind his wife and three
children, Theo, Fay, and Yarrow.
H e is the son of Marion and Thomas
Slakey, a tutor emeritus and former dean of
St. John's, and the brother of Tom, Jr.
(SF81); Bill (SF88); and the Rev. Anne
Slakcy (SF88).
"Michael had an exceptional capacity to
take pleasure in what he was doing at the
moment, whether it was in the hard work of
cutting his own trees with an axe and
smoothing planks with an adze, weeding
and planting his garden, sitting and playing
his guitar or his Irish flute, or painting,"
his father wrote.
M UNTt;F. 8U UIIJAJLY, JK., CLA:>i> ot· 1947
Monte Ferris Bourjaily, Jr., who had been
the publisher and editor of Globe Syndicate
since 1977, died Jan. 4 at his home in Front
Royal, Va., after a heart attack.
Mr. Bourjaily was born in ClevelaJ1d, Ohio,
and raised across the country as he accompanied his journalist parents on their
assignments. He served in the Army Signal
Corps in Europe during World War II.
Early in his career, he was a reporter for a
newspaper in Floyd County, Va., and worked
in the U.S. House of Representatives radio
gallery. From 1952 to 1966, he worked for
Army Times as an associate editor and
author of the " Kibitzer's Corner" column.
He then was an executive assistant in
Washington for the Oklai1orna-based architectural, engineering, and planning furn of
Hudgins, Thompson, Ball and Associates.
Survivors include his wife of 61 years,
Marietta Dake Bourjaily of Front Royal, Va.,
and six children.
MARGARET NEUSTADT RANooL
Maigaret Neustadt RaJ1dol of Baltimore,
who was married to former St. John's Dean
John 0. Neustadt, died at her home in
Baltimore in December 2.004. She was 83,
and had been a longtime civil-rights activist
in the city. She was well known for her work
with Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc., the
Maryland Commission on Human Relations,
and American Civil Liberties Union.
MI CHAEL TOBCN, FORMER BVGMEMBER
Michael E. Tobin died April 2.1, at the age of
79, at his home in Tesuque, New Mexico.
He served as a member of the college's
Board ofVisitors and Governors from
1994-2000.
Mr. Tobin was born in Philadelphia. He
lettered in fencing and soccer at Central
High School. He attended the University of
Pennsylvania until he was drafted into the
U.S. Army, where he served in Europe.
After the war, he remained in France to
study classical piano. Although mus ic
remained one of his passions throughout his
life, Mr. Tobin returned to complete his
studies at Penn's "Wharton School of
Business. He inoved to New York to launch
a career in finance, later joining the firm
of Arthur Young and Company. There he
worked in bank and securities consulting
and became partner in charge of the
Chicago and Western offices.
As president of the Midwest Stock
Exchange, he pioneered automation for the
exchange, making it the second-largest
market in the U.S. by dollar volume. He later
became chairman and CEO of the American
Bank and Trust Company of Chicago. That
bank became the sponsor of a program that
sent teachers in Chicago's Paideia program
(which introduced Socratic seminars to
public-school classrooms) to the Graduate
Institute in Santa Fe.
Throughout his life, Mr. Tobin was actively
committed to the arts, and when he moved
to Santa Fe, he became an ardent supporter
of the Santa Fe Symphony. He also continued to cultivate a lifelong interest in world
history and Western literature at St. John's,
where he took part in comm unity seminars.
Mr. Tobin is survived by his wife, Judith
Brown Tobin; his children Michael, Jr.,
Allegra Love, and Corey; a stepson, Brett
Sylvestri and wife Virginia; and four
grandchildren.
EMIL MAsSA, FlUEND OF T HE MEEM LIBRARY
Dr. Emil J. Massa, who died in October
2.004, took an interest in St. John's College
as early as the mid-197os. Perhaps he fust
visited on one of his regular trips to Santa Fe
to attend the city's world-famous opera. By
1992., Dr. Massa had included the Meern
Library in his estate plan. Now, his bequest
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St. John's College . Spring 2005
will fund an endovm1ent for maintenance of
the library's collections.
Dr. Massa settled in Denver, Colo., as an
orthopedic surgeon in 1960. Born into a
first-generation immigrant family in the
Cleveland, Ohio, area, he attended
Dennison College in connection with his
military service, followed by medical school
at Northwestern University. Dr. Massa was
keenly aware of the value of a good education-not only professionally, but spiritually
as well. Following his formal schooling, he
became an avid reader and bibliophile of
broad and formidable intellect, drawn
especially to the humanities ru1d liberal arts
and sciences.
Dr. Massa was always questioning,
confronting his ideas with those of others
and trying to discern the best way to live.
He found it in his appreciation of fine workmanship of all kinds-books and the craft of
bookbinding, art, music, fine automobiles,
and wine-but most of all in his ongoing
personal search for truth. No great idea, he
believed, can flourish without serious
conversation, one of the highest activities in
which humans can engage. To enter the
conversation in earnest, we must know what
has been said already. For this, as Dr. Massa
knew, the best education is a study of the
greatest books ever written.
A LSO NOTED:
FRED ALEXANDER (class ofi937) , December
2.2., 2.004
LurH ER BLACKJSTON (A68), January 18, 2.005
MICHAEL B LUME (A78) , February 7, 2.005
} A.MPS H. C 1moERS (SFGI70), October 9,
2.004
WJLLL\M C. H ALL (class of1946), December
18, 2.004
ROWLAND ALFRED JONES (class ofx949),
February 2.1, 2.005
GEORGE L YON, JR. (class ofx940), January
14, 2.005
D UNCAN M CDONALD, former An napolis
tutor, January 2.4, 2.005
ERICH NUSSBAUM ( class of 1945), March 18,
2.005
HAROL D OAV1 0 Runm (Ao4), December
2.004
DEBORAH MICAEL TIIIELKER (A79), April 17,
2.005
J AMES TINDALL (class ofi949), March 2.4,
2.005
)
�44
COMMUNITY
F OR T H E
S AKE
O F
Miss HucHEY-COMMERS LEAVES ST. JOHN'S
WITH A PASSION FOR COMMUNITY EDUCATION.
LEARNI N G ,
LEARNING
FOR T H E
SAKE
OF
COMM UNI TY
sv Ea,,. Hucttsv-COMMEas, A05
hroughout.high school my
image of college was a place
where people came together
to explore the knowable
world with gusto; I envisioned lively discussions and
a feeling of fulfilJment when I turned in
each assignment. I was interested in a kind
oflearning that would involve my whole
being- that would inform not only which
answer I put dovm on the test but also teach
me how to live in a more thoughuul way
once I stepped outside the classroom. And
I was interested in sharing this kind of
learning with other people who were
engaged in the same activity. I was fortunate
to find St. John's.
As an underclassman what I loved most
about the Program was the discussion.
How well I remember staying up until one
in the morning after my first seminar talking with my hallrnates about the character
of Odysseus in Homer's Iliad, or, much
later, my euphoria after reading Plotinus,
who, in his way of speaking about God
without personification, gave me just the
insight I needed to begin to talk about the
word of God in the Book ofJohn for my oral
examination. I learned what an amazing
thing it is to have a really good seminar, in
which the conversation takes its own
course, free of any student attempting to
determine its direction, and in which something completely new and unexpected is
clarified out of the chaos of my own reading.
Long after the newness of St. John's wore
off, I continued to find myself in unexpectedly thoughtful conversations, often in the
lunchroom with someone I didn' t know, or
with the girls on my hall while brushing
teeth after seminar.
Many of the books we read deal with the
question of what it means to live a good and
virtuous life. Reading and discussing these
T
books changed, among other things, the
way I thought about my future. When I
came to St. John's, J knew that I wanted to
be a teacher. In my previous teaching
experiences, I had enjoyed helping students
discover the fun of learning, and showing
them that they were capable of more than
they had believed. After coming to
St. John's and reading so many books that
applied directly to my life, I became interested in finding a way of teaching that would
provide students with the opportunity to
make the clear connection between what
they were learning in class and their lives
outside of school. Before, it had seemed
enough for me to help students bring themselves as whole people to their learning, and
what I had hoped to accomplish as a teacher
had rested in empowering individuals by
helping them enter the world oflearning;
now I saw it was equally important that they
turn back to their daily lives as snidentsthat they thus learn how to live thoughtfully
as well as learn vibrantly. Teaching enlarged
its scope then; I came to see it as the work of
strengthening a society.
As a resuJt, I became interested in the
Waldorf School, which is based on the
writings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf
Steiner. The summer following my sophomore year, I was fortunate to get a Hodson
internship to work in a Waldorf School for
the remainder of their school year. In the
process of giving its students a balanced
education, including art, music, and
handwork, the Waldorf School also seeks
to awaken in students an awareness of
themselves as a part of a social and natural
whole-and to prepare them to make
thoughuul decisions about the way that they
act as citizens of this whole. In addition the
Waldorf School is an example of the way
that philosophical ideas can be implemented in the world. It turned out that it
{ THE
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St. John 's College. Spring aoo5 )
provides an education much like the one
that Socrates describes in the Republic,
the education of the future philosopherk.ings: certain kinds of music arc played and
stories told based on the students' level of
development.
The summer after my junior year, I
received another Hodson grant to intern
with the Nelson County Museum of Rural
History in central Virgina, where I learned
about the work of educating an entire
community. Dttring the internship, J helped
lead an oral-history workshop for fourthand fifth-graders, in which we invited senior
citizens to be interviewed on tape. Everyone
benefited from this experience: the older
people were happy to share their stories and
spend time with the students, and the
snidents showed surprise and pleasure at
what the seniors told them about life during
the Depression. History became real for
these students through conversations with
their elders, once again demonstrating the
importance of dialogue to meaningful
learning. I believe that such dialogue is not
only important for education but also
essential for seeing oneself as part of a
larger whole- as a citizen of a locality where
one's actions have a direct and tangible
effect on the community.
Since becoming a student at St. John's,
I have been impressed by how much
learning depends upon interaction with
other people. One night in seminar, toward
the end of the semester, I felt weighed down
and found myself participating little in the
discussion. I was stopped after class by
another student who asked me my thoughts
on the conversation. I expressed my frustration, and we shared anecdotes about the
tension we felt while sitting in seminar,
often caught between interrupting the flow
of conversation and wanting to clarify a
particular point for ourselves. It was so
45
{ ST U D ENT V OI CES}
{STUDENT VOIC E S}
refreshing to talk to a classmate like this
that I began to speak more vigorously and to
feel more impassioned about our seminar.
When I returned to my room that night I
had gotten my energy back for the Program.
There is something amazing about the
power of conversation. Not only do we
uncover ideas and get co ask ourselves
questions we would never have thought
about on our ovm, but we are also able to
discuss the learning process itself, to realize
what is standing in the way, and above all to
become connected once again with our
passion for learning. When we learn
through dialogue, our relationship to
learning is not distinguishable from our
relationship to ocher people. Through that
human relationship, we are able to pursue
truth and knowledge as whole beings.
In the Republic Socrates divides the soul
into three parts: the highest is the intellect,
the lowest, the desiring part, and that which
connects these is the spirited part, or
thumos. When I said at the beginning of my
talk that I wanted to bring my whole self to
learning, I meant that I wanted the spirited
part of me to be just as involved in the
conversation in its own way as the intellectual part. Spiritedness not only asks but
embodies the question, "Why is this
important to me?" Even in the most
abstract discussion, something must be
at stake for the conversation to live and
breathe, for us to find ourselves in it.
That's the thing about St. John's- through
our interaction with the people around us
and, by means of the texts, with the great
thinkers of our culture, we enter into
learning with all parts of the soul and we
discover that there is little chat does not
interest us.
At St. John's we call ourselves a community of learning. My time here, as well as my
summer internships, has driven home for
{ THE
CoLLBCE,St.John'sCollege,Spring2005}
me the truth that in order for either to be
ftilly what it is, community and education
must not be separate. Thinking along these
lines, during my fall and winter breaks this
year I have worked with teachers, students,
and community leaders in Nelson County
to design a program for high school
students in which they will learn about
the workings oflocal government by
conducting research, attending meetings,
discussing issues, and writing articles
for the newspaper about what they are
learning. Starling this fall, I will coorclinate
the program for a year; beyond that, I am
excited about making community education the focus in my career. Indeed, I am
indebted co St. John's for helping me
find such a strong focus for my career as
a teacher.
When my parents told me they would be
unable to help me pay tuition at St. John's,
I began to fill out application forms for as
many local and national scholarships as I
had time to apply for. I knew that St. John's
was the right school for me, and I believed
that somehow it would be possible for me to
go. I was extremely fortunate in chat a
Ruritan club, a local church, and a private
foundation assisted me at different times.
At first it seemed awkward co be receiving
money from others; however, after the first
time that I went to the Episcopal church
service to thank the parish for its help, the
experience of being a scholarship recipient
changed. When I stood up to telJ the
congregation about my work at St. John's
and saw so many smiling faces looking back
at me, I realized I was not alone in my
endeavor, financial or academic.
It is easy for us to consider our education
as something we obtain ourselves, for
ourselves. What I've realized in the course
of talking with my sponsors is that this is
not true. An education is brought about
through the efforts of many people and if
all goes weJJ, many people will be the
beneficiaries of that education. To put it
more strongly, an education is a gift from a
community to a community. I've come to
the place of being able to accept help with
deep gratitude, joyfuIJy looking forward to
the time when I can give back, and aJJowing
the boundary between myself and my
community to become less distinct. ♦
�{ALUMNI AssocrATION NEws}
FROM THE ALUMNI
AssoCIATION
PRESIDENT
•
•
•
Dear Alumni,
•
Even at St. John's
College, technology
changes quickly.
Last year, the
college and the
Alumni Association
instituted an online
register, which provided little more
than contact information for alumni from
both campuses and all programs. Thanks
to all of you who registered for your commitment and patience during a bumpy
implementation process.
This year, the online register is being
replaced with an Online Alumni Community, a user-friendly, flexible, and powerful
tool to help you connect with fellow alumni
in many different ways. This new virtual
community offers:
• Powerful search features to help you
find and connect with other alumni.
The site is designed to allow alumni
to conduct a search for special networking-for example, look for alumni
working in the Jcgal field in New York
City. As more alumni become
•
•
•
•
•
• Phoco galleries from special alumni
events, such as chapter picnics,
outings, and Homecoming, can be
posted here.
It is a wonderful and flexible tool for
staying connected with others and with the
college, and we' ve only begun to use just a
fraction of the features available. One area
ripe for development is a Career Services
section that allows Johnnies to learn of job
openings, post resumes, and advertise
positions that are just right for Johnnies.
If you're concerned that the list could be
used for "spamming," don't worry: the
system has safeguards built in to avoid
alumni or unauthorized users from
creating lists from the system.
Your friends can only reach you through
the Online Community if you have registered as a member. As of May, close to r,600
alumni have joined the community, with
our younger alumni really taking the lead.
It only talccs a few minutes, and approval is
most often automatic-so do it today. You
should also encourage your friends to
register, so you can reach them through this
virtual "Johnnie homecoming."
members, this search feature will be
more helpful.
Announcements for alumni and other
college events around the country.
Member forums where you can start a
conversation or enter one in progress.
Information about Alumni Association
chapters' contact information and
activity schedules.
Faculty listings from both campuses
with e-mai l addresses.
" Meeting space" for special groups of
alumni. One current group is Military
Family Alumni, for alumni who are
either serving in or associated with
the military. Mary Ruffin (Ao4)
started the group after marrying a
Naval officer.
"Personal space" where you can share
information about yourself with ocher
alumni, including your personal page,
buddy list, web log, photo album, and
resume.
Class home pages, class notes, and
e-mail lists to help you stay in touch
with members of your class. Alumni
notes from The College magazine will
be posted here, and classnotes you
submit through the online community
will also be printed in the next edition
of the magazine.
Instant messaging.
A process that allows you to easily
upload your photos of special events
(a wedding) or special people (the new
baby) to share with your classmates.
It was a busy year for Alumni Association
chapters across the country, with the usual
mix ofhmchcons and receptions, potlucks,
picnics, and seminars. (With or without
a potluck, Johnnies still turn out for a
seminar.)
Here's a look at what's happening:
• Albuquerque had six seminar/
potlucks; Austin had IO seminars,
Baltimore enjoyed five seminars and
hosted a networking seminar for
juniors and seniors with the Annapolis
and Washington, D.C., chapters.
• The revival continues for the Boston
chapter, which reported an "excel{T
tt &
Co LL E c e . St. John's College. Spring 2005
GRANT PRESERVES
GYM PLAQUES
le talces 2.0 laps around the suspended
wooden track in Iglehart Hall to complete a
mile. That gives determined joggers and
walkers ample opportunity co read the
plaques lining the wall of the gymnasium in
Annapolis, reminders from past generations
of}ohnnie athletes that every sport requires
the best effort every time.
Thanks to a grant from the Alumni
Association, the plaques look better than
they have in years: 23 of 38 plaques in the
collection, commemorating the alumni of
the years 1871-192.8, have been cleaned and
restored. The association provided a grant
for the work, which cost $3,800. These
plaques are of both nostalgic and historic
value to alumni, being among the very few
publicly displayed relics of the college's postCivil War through post-World War I period.
A ss O C I A TI ON
N EWS }
The class of 1889 left behind the motto
Respice Finem- "look to the encl." The class
ofr916 was a bit more Spartan in its athletic
philosophy: Aul Vince,-e Aut Mori- "co conquer or die, death or victory." The Latin
phrases embodied by those athletic teams of
years past represent a time when St. John's
competed with the likes of Navy and Johns
Hopkins in football and lacrosse, and usually
won. Lofty values that transcended athletics
were also emblazoned on the plaques:
Omnia Vinci, Veritas, "truth conquers all
things," declared the class ofr927.
The plaques were cleaned and oxidized to
a dark statuary finish, with an architectural
coating applied. "Now you can really sec
chem- even read the names-and from the
court floor no less," says Athletic Director
Leo Pickens. "Until the cleaning they were
just like dark holes on the wall. The details
on many of them are almost architectural
and quite lovely." ♦
47
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in
the St. John's College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors elected by and from the alumni body. The board
meets four times a year, twice on each campus,
to plan programs and coordinate the affairs of
the association. This newsletter within
The College magazine is sponsored by the
Alumni Association and communicates
association news and eve ms of interest.
President - Glenda Eoyang, SF76
Vice President - Jason Walsh, A85
Secretary-Barbara Lauer, SF76
'freasurer- Bill Fant, A79
Cetting•tlze-Word•OutAction Team ChairLinda Stabler-Talty, SFGI76
Mai/i,,gaddress-Alumni Association,
St. John's College, P.O Box 2800, Annapolis,
MD 21404, or n6o Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
To register, go to:
www.stjohnscollege.cdu; click on "alumni"
and follow the directions from there.
For the past, present, and future,
Glenda H. Eoyang
President
St. John's College Alumni Association
lent" year with 13 well-attended
seminars, many of which attracted
new faces. Boulder enjoyed a poetry/
reading potluck along with 10 seminars; Chicago had seven seminars,
and there were six seminars-one with
dinner-for the Greater Puget Sound
chapter.
• As one of the largest chapters, New
York is very busy: five seminars, seven
movie nights, a reception picnic, and a
holiday party. The chapter expanded
its Web site significantly this year.
• In Northern California, eight seminars
and a seminar/picnic at Stag's Leap;
one seminar and one outing to the
Philadelphia Sha.Jcespeare Festival for
Philly, and 12 seminars for Pittsburgh.
• In Portland, alumni have been meeting
regularly since October and have had
AROUND THE
CHAPTERS
{AL U M N I
four seminars since July. A tea party
and six seminars took place in Santa
Fe, six in Southern California, r2 in
the Twin Cities, where the chapter
completed a yearlong plunge into the
theme of ""Who are we as Americans?·'
• A highlight for the Washington, D.C.,
chapter was "A Day in the Country,"
hosted by Sharon Bishop (A65), with
Eva Brann leading a seminar. The
chapter will return this spring to
Bishop's country place for another day
in the country with a great book.
• In seven other areas, reading groups
are considering organizing chapters,
or the association is reaching out to
alumni to gauge the interest in getting
a group of Johnnies together. ♦
- COMPILED BY CAROL FREEMAN, AGl94
}
PLAQUES LINING THE WALLS OF IGLEHART H ALL
ARE GLEAMING ONCE AGAIN, THANKS TO AN
ALUMNI AsSOCIATION GRANT.
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed below for information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
actfrities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
BALTIMORE
Bob & Vicki Morgan
Deborah Cohen
505-275-9012
410-472'-9158
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon
410-280-0958
BOSTON
Ginger Kenney
617-964-4794
AUSTIN
John Strange
210-39 2-5506
Bev Angel
512,-926-7808
CHICAGO
Rick Ligh tburn
lightburn@
earthlink.net
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
Suzanne Lexy
Bartlette
817-i21-9rx2
DENVER/BOULDER
Lee Katherine
Goldstein
72~46-1496
MINNEAPOLIS/
ST.PAUL
Carol Freeman
612,-822-3216
{ THE
Co
LL E c E.
NEWYORK
Daniel Van Doren
914-g49-68rr
PORTLAND
Lake Perriguey
lake@law-works.com
NORTHERN CALIF.
Deborah Farrell
415-i31-8804
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico
619•423-4972
PHILADELPHIA
Bart Kaplan
215-465-0244
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles
505-986-1814
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray
724-325-4151
St. John 's College. Spring ,ioo5 }
SEATTLE
Amina Brandt
206-465"'7781
SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Elizabeth Eastman
562,-426-1934
TRIANGLE CIRCLE
(NC)
Susan Eversole
919-968-4856
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Jean Dickason
301-699•6207
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Julia Ward
413-648-0064
�{ST.
JOHN'S
FOREVER}
"COEDS INVADE
ST. JottN's"
n the fall of 1950, the faculty
of St. John's College voted to
admit women the following year.
As Richal'd Weigle later recounted
in his book Recollections ofa
St. Johns President, the vote was
to be kept secret until the college's Board
ofVisitors and Governors t0ok up the
matter. One eal'ly plan suggested the
possibility of establishing a women's
college with the St. John's PI"ogram.
The enrollment of women was in pal't
a response tO the college's difficulty in
building enrollment and achieving
financial stability. But the overriding
reason, Weigle said, was that women
wanted to be here.
When the news leaked out shortly after
the boal'd's approval of the matter, he
wrote, "students were in an uproar.
A protest meeting was held in the Great
Hall of McDowell ...just before students
left for Christmas vacation .... Students
believed that discussions in serninal's and
tutorials would suffer and that women
were not up to the rigors of the St. John's
Program," Weigle wrote.
The banner headline in the Evening
Capital was set in type just a bit smaJ ler
than the news of a big development in
the Korean Wal'. It read: "Local College
to Offer Program to Limited Number
of Girls."
A yeal' later, the Washington Post
greeted the arrival of women with a photo
spread and the headline, "Girl Students
First to Enter Old College." The article
quoted some male students as saying, "we
were afraid... that they were going to be a
bunch of giggly girls, only interested in the
Naval Academy." The men, the article
concluded, were pleasantly surprised to
note that the women took the rigors of the
Program as seriously as they did.
This fall mal'ks the 50th anniversary of
the 1955 graduation of those pioneering
women. Several members of the class are
expected back for Homecoming in
Annapolis this fall, where their role in
forever changing the face of St. John's will
be celebrated. ♦
{ TH E
Co LL E c
&•
St. John's College . Spring 2005
FEMALE STUDENTS LEAVE CLASS IN MCDOWELL
HALL WITH TUTORS AND CLASSMATES,
DATE DUE
I
}
I
�S!JOHN'S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS• SANTA. f'&
PUBLISHED BY THE
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
P. 0. Box z8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND z1404
ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED
PERIODICALS
POSTACE PAID
�
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Santa Fe, NM
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The College, Spring 2005
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Volume 31, Issue 2 of The College Magazine. Published in Spring 2005.
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Santa Fe, NM
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Dempsey, Patricia (managing editor)
Hartnet, John (Santa Fe editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Borden, Sus3an
Goyette, Barbara
Hughey-Commers, Erin
Maguran, Andra
Mattson, Jo Ann
Naone, Erica
Weiss, Robin
Martin, Roger H.
Verdi, John
Donnelly, Jennifer A.
Myers, Linda
Hughey-Commers, Erin
The College
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�STJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
On Mozart
magine what Mozart would have thought of the sweeping claims made of his music
today, and of the various commercial enterprises that sprouted up as a result.
Listening to Mozart, according to some studies, can help produce smarter babies,
stimulate creativity in adults, and even motivate cows to produce more milk.
This report on the “Moozart” effect can be found on ABCNews.com: “On Hans
Pieter Sieber’s Priegola dairy farm in Villanueva del Pardillo, Spain, the secret to
success is not some newfangled technology or machine. . . Rather it is the dulcet, layered
tones of classical music.” In this case, the report claimed, Sieber’s 700 heifers went more
happily to their milking stalls when exposed to Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp in
D Major.
As the recipient of a “Mozart effect” CD, I can find no evidence as to whether Mozart’s
music has rendered anyone in my family smarter, more creative, or a better test taker.
However, personal experience has shown that “5oare sia il sento” from Cosifan tutte,
played on a continuous loop, has been proven to soothe both colicky babies and desperate
adults in the middle of the night.
While Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus gave Mozart a new prominence in the aoth century, it
also reinforced in modern popular culture all the myths that begin as rumors soon after
Mozart’s death in lygr. Here was a genius hounded, undermined, and ultimately driven to
death by that sulking mediocrity, Salieri. The fact that Mozart died while trying in vain to
finish his Requiem, along with reports that his body swelled up dramatically in his final
hours, helped to contribute to the conspiracy theories.
William Stafford debunks a dozen or so misconceptions about the composer in his book
The Mozart Myths. In short, Stafford concludes: Mozart was not poisoned, but died from
an infection; rheumatic fever may have factored in his rapid decline. Mozart didn’t suffer
from mental illness, wasn’t the playboy or drunkard he is sometimes made out to be, and
by most accounts was devoted to his wife, Constanze. Salieri, while no genius, really wasn’t
such a bad composer. Mozart’s professional and financial failures had more to do with his
inability to play along with the patronage system and to cater to the popular tastes of
his time.
At St. John’s, juniors discuss Don Giovanni in seminar and listen to several other Mozart
works in tutorial. Annapolis tutor Bill Pastille says the opera is sometimes a challenge to
discuss in seminar. For him, the archetypal Don Juan story of the libretto doesn’t quite
measure up to the superb music of this opera, though he points out that Kierkegaard found
the opera fascinating.
Pastille prefers The Marriage ofFigaro, often discussed in music tutorial. “The last two
minutes, the scene in which the countess forgives her husband, is a beautiful moment. It’s
like grace shining into the world.”
This issue of The College^ celebrates music at St. John’s by focusing on some of our
tutors-and there are many more at the college than can be profiled in these pages-who
share their musical talents with all of us.
-KU
I
The College
is published three times a year by
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD,
and Santa Fe, NM
Known office of publication:
Communications Office
St. John’s College
Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800
Periodicals postage paid
at Annapolis, MD
Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John’s College,
Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404-2800.
postmaster:
Rosemary Harty, editor
443-716-4011
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
Patricia Dempsey,
managing editor
Jenny Hannifin,
Santa Fe editor
Jennifer Behrens, art director
The College welcomes letters on
issues of interest to readers.
Letters can be sent via e-mail to
the editor or mailed to the
address above.
Annapolis
410-626-2539
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
Contributors
Ann Deger (SFii)
Sara Luell (A09)
Brooke McLane-Higginson
(AGI09)
Anna Perleberg (SF02)
Deborah Spiegelman
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
J
“
170/^
J?
Mixed Sources
Product group from well-managed
forests and other controlled sources
www.fstorg Cert no. SW-COC-0024<M
O 1996 Forest Stewardship Council
�I -|
College
The
ZINE FOR Alumni of St. John’s College
Annapolis
{Contents}
PAGE
ZO
DEPARTMENTS
From Freshman to
Johnnie
Was it speaking up in seminar, finishing
up the freshman essay, falling in love
with Ptolemy? Members of the class of
2011 share experiences that helped make
them feel like a Johnnie.
PAGE
Zz^
The Book that Changed
My Liee
Sometimes a book is so powerful it can
change your life in subtle or dramatic
ways, suddenly or over time.
PAGE
2
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Celebrating campaign success
Developing young leaders in Annapolis
What the tutors did last summer
Keeping the great books alive in Chicago
It’s all about community in Santa Fe
High praise for St. John’s
The reading list
A Graduate Institute family
Levan Hall update
News and announcements
9
LETTERS
30 BIBLIOFILE
Toby Barlow (SF88) explores lycanthropes
in love in Sharp Teeth-, also, new alumni
books in brief, and what the tutors
are reading.
2(0
Music in the Key oe Liee
34 ALUMNI
Exploring another side of our
multi-talented tutors.
PAGE
PROFILES
32 Deputy Police Chief Clark Kimerer (SF78)
keeps law and order in Seattle.
36 Judge Jean K. FitzSimon (A73) aims for
fairness in bankruptcy court.
38 Austin architect Francois Levy (SF87)
designs sustainable buildings.
40 Abby Weinberg (SFoo) is saving forests.
28
Alumni Voices
On Saturday nights, the fishnets
are on and the gloves are off for
Jane McManus (A93) and her roller derby
alter ego, Lesley E. Visserate.
48 SANTA FE ALUMNI RETURN
50 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
PAGE 32
ON THE COVER
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Illustration by David Johnson
52 ST. John’s forever
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Celebrating Unprecedented Success
Exceeding the most ambitious
fundraising goal in the college’s
history called for saying thank
you in a big way, and of course,
saying it twice: first in Santa Fe
on July 25, when the college
announced it had raised $134
million, and again in September
in Annapolis. Alumni, parents,
board members, community
supporters, and friends from
across the nation joined
together to celebrate a land
mark achievement. In both
cities, the college marked how
much has already been achieved
through gifts to the campaign
and thanked those whose
contributions made the
campaign a success.
In Santa Fe, President
Michael Peters hosted a distinc
tively Southwestern-themed
celebration that began with a
reception in the tented parking
Spirits were high at Santa Fe’s July 25 “Celebracion.”
lot of the Student Activities
Center. Monsoon rains that
visited the campus earlier in the
parents, and foundations, as well as its faculty and staff and the
week yielded to sunny skies, and mariachis in studded charro suits
communities it serves, is what has been most heartening to me.”
greeted arriving guests. The main event took place in the SAC
Among the speakers were Reed Dasenbrock, secretary of the
basketball court, transformed by draping, banners, black carpet
New Mexico Department of Higher Education, and Santa Fe
and strikingly decorated tables. A jazz ensemble entertained as
Mayor David Coss. Both expressed their appreciation for the
guests enjoyed dinner and dessert.
college. “I grew up with St. John’s as a neighbor, and I am proud
“Without every gift, no matter how large or small, we would
that St. John’s is here,” said Coss. “You fit in right from the very
not be here tonight celebrating the campaign-a campaign that
beginning.”
achieved virtually every one of its goals-increased college
Ray Cave (class of 1948), a member of the college’s Board of
endowment, student internship programs, new dormitories in both Visitors and Governors and chairman of the college’s previous
Santa Fe and Annapolis,” Peters said. “This enthusiastic participa
campaign, was called upon to lead a champagne toast. He referred
tion, the knowledge that St. John’s is valued by its alumni, friends.
to a draft of a proposed new strategic plan for the college, which
The Campaign for St. John’s College raised $134 million for
the college, much of which is already at work in supporting
the Program;
• $43.6 for the support of financial aid
• $14.4 for improvements to student life, the libraries,
internships, and grants for teachers to attend the
Graduate Institute
• $29.3 million for increased faculty salaries and faculty
development
• $12 million for the construction of Gilliam and Spector
halls in Annapolis
• $13.5 million for the renovation of Mellon Hall
• $5 million for the construction of Norman and Betty Levan
Hall, to house Santa Fe’s Graduate Institute
• $5 million for a new dormitory in Santa Fe
{The College-
states: “mere survival is no longer an issue for St. John’s.”
“So I propose a toast. First: to a St. John’s where ‘survival is no
longer an issue.’ Second: To the glorious prospect that-once again
and for the foreseeable future-with due thanks to a successful
capital campaign-the following teachers will return to St. John’s
each fall: Homer and Plato, Kant and Descartes, Tolstoy and
Twain-along with too of their friends,” Cave said.
Although the news was already out, the celebration in
Annapolis, held in the FSK Lobby, was no less ebullient. A group
of grateful Johnnies sang “Ode to Joy” and Annapolis President
Christopher Nelson (SF70) thanked supporters for helping the
college surpass the $125 million goal for the campaign.
“We knew from the very start that to reach such an ambitious
goal we would need the support of everyone who knew and cared
about the college: our alumni, our friends in Annapolis and Santa
Fe and across the nation, and the parents of our alumni and
students-everyone had to play a part,” Nelson said. “And you
St. John’s College ■ Fall 200S }
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
3
Honoring Two Exceptional Supporters
Ron Fielding (A70) is named a Fellow of the college, to the
APPLAUSE OF (l. TO R.) AnNAPOLIS DeAN MiCHAEL DiNK (A75),
BVG Chair Sharon Bishop (class of 1965), and Santa Fe Dean
Victoria Mora.
The July campaign celebration included a special presentation
to two alumni whose contributions were essential to the success
of “With a Clear and Single Purpose”: The Campaign for
St. John’s College. Santa Fe Dean Victoria Mora and Annapohs
Dean Michael Dink (A75) named two new Honorary Fellows of
the College, a distinction that has been bestowed by the faculty
of the college to just a handful of people over the years.
Ronald Fielding (A70) was honored “in appreciation of his
outstanding leadership as chair of the Campaign for St. John’s
College, his extraordinary generosity to the college, and in
recognition of his accomphshments in the field of finance.”
Sharon Bishop (class of 1965) was recognized “in appreciation
of her distinguished service as chair of the Board of Visitors and
Governors, her generosity and leadership during the period of
the Campaign for St. John’s College, and her contribution to the
field of human resources and social services.”
Both were moved by the honor, with Bishop noting, “none of
my tutors ever would have expected this from me! ”
Philanthropist Paul Mellon (class of 1944) and Columbia
University’s Mark Van Doren (HA46) were made honorary
fellows of the college in 1958-59. In 1996, Ray Cave (class of
1948) and Stephen Feinberg (HA96), co-chairs of the Campaign
for our Fourth Century were made honorary fellows.
came through! Boy, did you come through! My heart is so filled
with gratitude toward all of you for what you have done to secure
the future of this small but important college. We can’t say
thank you often enough for the good things you’ve helped us
accomplish.”
Before the speeches gave way to swing dancing, Elsabe Dixon
(Aio) took a moment to thank donors for what their gifts make
possible for St. John’s students now and in the future: “You have
given us the ability to be a great college through your contribu
tions to financial aid, student housing and student internships,”
she said. “You are the ones who have put in the time as a commu
nity to continue to support this community. And for everything
that you all have done for me and my fellow students, I am grateful
beyond what these words can say.”
{The College.
Above,
clockwise:
Santa Fe students
offered a hearty thanks to
CAMPAIGN donors; TUTOR ToM MaY AND HIS WIFE, PAMELA, AT THE
Annapolis; Luke Russell, Sam Porter, and Robert
Shaver (all Aog) perform; Dr. Norman Levan (SFGI74), Santa Fe
GI Director Krishnan Venkatesh, and BVG Member Michael
Uremovich (SFGI05).
reception in
St. John’s College ■ Fall aooS }
�{From the Bell Towers}
Learning Leadership a
Long Way from Home
This past August, three
St. John’s students and alumni
traveled with five Annapolis
teenagers to the Dominican
Repuhhc, where they spent a
week living and working in the
remote mountain village of
El Ramon. The service trip,
designed to foster leadership
skills to prepare the teens to
make a difference in their
hometown communities.
was organized by Epigenesis, an
outreach project created and led
by Annapolis students.
Last spring, the group’s
founders (Jamaal Barnes, Aio;
Raphaela Cassandra, Ato;
Joshua Becker, Ao8; and Rachel
Davison, Ao8) received a
$10,000 peace grant from the
Kathryn Wasserman Davis
Foundation for their program.
They contacted local community
groups to develop ideas and
support for the program, then
recruited their participants.
Beginning last June, they met
together in Mellon HaU for
seminar-style discussions on
topics including leadership,
race, and social activism. The
international trip offered the
students an opportunity to put
their training into action.
Cassandra, Becker, and Adam
Meyers (A07) made the trip,
serving as chaperones for the
teens. The Dominican
Republic’s Ambassador to the
U.N. met their plane in Santo
Domingo. They stayed at a local
Cathohc school near El Ramon
for two nights, then packed up
their gear and two heavy suit
cases filled with books donated
by The Annapolis Bookstore for
the village’s library. Next came
the steep ride up the mountain
to El Ramon. “It was so steep we
had to get out and push at
Johnnies
and their
Epigenesis
PARTICIPANTS IN THE DOMINICAN
Republic. Back row (l. to r.):
Yosy Valasquez, Bryanna
Greene, Tobi Yusuf, Adam
Meyers (A07), Joshua Becker
(A08), Raphaela Cassandra
(Ato); Front row: Timothy
Greene and Tony Connor.
What the Tutors Did Last Summer
Ah, the lucky tutors. Each
summer they get to delve into
something new, seek a deeper
grasp of a familiar work, or
study unfamifiar subject matter
to prepare for a class they have
yet to lead. AU we get to do is go
to the beach.
In Annapohs, six tutors read
Virgina WoolFs The Waves.
Tutor Tom May, who led the
group, said, “Our study of the
novel ranged from close and
lengthy consideration of the
imagery of the interludes and
their relation to the foUowing
sections, to the development
and aging of each of the six
characters, to the larger effort
that Woolf makes to refashion
the novel as a literary form.”
The group also read and
discussed two poems that
resonated with particular
sections of the novel:
Wordsworth’s “Lines Written
on Westminster Bridge,”
related to Bernard’s arrival in
London, and W. H. Auden’s
“Stop aU the clocks” in connec
tion with NevUle’s account of
Percival’s death.
A group of Santa Fe tutors
delved into comedic hterature
with a study group that arose
from tutor David McDonald’s
{The College -5f.
aooy lecture on Rabelais.
The lecture sparked a dialogue
between McDonald and tutor
Alan Zeithn, and the two began
discussing ways in which
comedic works might be better
apprehended in the Program.
“Comedy has a reputation of
being hard to talk about at the
coUege,” said McDonald.
The two had three principal
aims for their summer study
group: to help participants
become better readers of
comedic writings, to look at the
many deep and intrinsically
interesting questions raised by
the study of these works, and to
John’s College • Fall 2008 }
times,” Cassandra says.
In El Ramon, the group
settled in on sleeping mats at La
Esperanza Community Center, a
concrete building with stone
floors, but no running water or
electricity. They shared long
days of hard work and learned to
dance the merengue at
communal dinners with local
village leaders. They also discov
ered “the parallels to service
work in the United States, and
the ways we could have an
impact back here in Annapolis,”
says Becker.
Working with Peace Corps
volunteers and local leaders, the
group conducted a census of the
350 families in El Ramon. They
also ventured into the lush rain
forest outside the village to dig
up plants for a prayer garden
they created near the village’s
community center. “The garden
was a way to cross the language
barrier,” says Cassandra. “We
learned how to work together,
planting side by side.”
For more on the project, visit
the group’s Web site:
www.epigenesisprogram.org.
—Patricia Dempsey
consider carefully the place of
comedic works at the college.
They set out to look beyond
surface-level comedy to
discover deeper meaning.
“Being amused [by a work] too
often means dismissal of its
intellectual seriousness,”
said Zeitlin.
The group was startled by
how different from each other
various comedic traditions
were-Aristophanes from
Terence, Chaucer from Lucianyet all managed to show how
our expectations of the world
are at odds with our experience
of it. “Comedy teaches us the
hmits of being able to control
our world,” said McDonald.
�{From the Bell Towers}
5
Summer in Santa Fe
In Santa Fe, the bustle of
campus life doesn’t slow during
the summer months-in fact, it
just gets busier. January
Freshmen and Graduate Insti
tute students are joined by
conference attendees from
around the world. The campus
hosted i6 groups this summer,
including Middlebury College’s
Bread Loaf School of English,
the Santa Fe Institute, the Glen
Workshop, and a bevy of biolo
gists, cosmologists and physi
cists from Los Alamos National
Labs. During the month of July
the college also hosted partici
pants in the Summer Classics
Johnnies and
Santa Feans of
all ages spread
blankets on the
athleticfield.
program, a diverse group
of alumni, Santa Feans,
and friends from across
the nation who gathered
for week-long seminars on
works including the
Mahabharata and the
Iliad and on topics such
as World War I in prose
and poetry.
This summer marked
the third year of the
college’s enormously
successful Music on the
Hill series, envisioned as
a way to bring St. John’s
and the Santa Fe commu
nity together through family
centered concerts. This year.
Music on the Hill kicked off
June II, beginning six weeks of
performances that drew crowds
of up to 1,500 people (up from
450 in the first year). National
and local acts representing a
range of styles from jazz to folk
to reggae to blues graced the
stage each Wednesday. John
nies and Santa Feans of all ages
spread blankets on the athletic
field to mingle, picnic, dance,
and enjoy music on beautiful
summer evenings.
This summer also saw the
college’s participation in the
5th Annual International Folk
Art Market, a global celebra
tion of international craft tradi
tions and the artists who partic
ipate in them. More than 100
artists from 40 different coun
tries attend the market, which
provides an opportunity for
artists and craftspeople to
share their work, exchange
ideas, and create sustainable
economic opportunities for
their home cultures. St. John’s
housed artists in the dorms the
first year of the market, and
many of the original attendees
recall their stays on campus
fondly. Some, particularly
those hailing from troubled or
strife-torn regions, remarked
that the market was “one place
we could always feel safe.”
As the event has grown.
artists no longer stay on
campus, but the college
continues to sponsor the event,
and President Michael Peters
sits on the market’s board of
directors. St. John’s also hosts
and organizes the One World
Dinner, a festive meal for more
than 350 people that allows
artists, organizers, sponsors,
and international dignitaries to
join together in cross-cultural
conversation. The success of
the International Folk Art
Market played a role in Santa
Fe’s recent designation as a
UNESCO Creative City.
—AnneDeger (SFii)
Above: Participants in the
International Folk Art
Market. At left: Summer aoo8
MARKED THE THIRD SEASON OF
Music
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Fall 200S }
on the
Hill.
�6
{From the Bell Towers}
Supporting Chicago’s
Great Books College
Against all odds, a small,
independent liberal arts college
with a great books curriculum
overcomes serious financial
difficulties to survive. Sound
familiar? Shimer College,
“the great books school of
Chicago,” shares many aspects
of its history and educational
mission with St. John’s. In addi
tion, Shimer shares Christopher
Nelson (SF70), president of the
Annapohs campus and current
chairman of the Shimer Board
of Trustees.
Since he joined Shimer’s
board in 2005, Nelson has
helped advise the college in
critical matters such as
fundraising and student recruit
ment, a move from Waukegan to
Chicago, and choosing an
interim president. He also
assisted in the search that led
Shimer to its new president,
Thomas K. Lindsay, deputy
chair of the National Endow
ment for the Humanities.
Nelson has known of
Shimer since the early 1970s,
when as president of the
Chicago alumni chapter, he met
several St. John’s alumni who
were teaching at the college.
“I was very interested because
Shimer has a core curriculum
that looks a lot hke St. John’s
and a faculty that was clearly
dedicated to the college’s
mission,” he says.
Shimer was founded in 1853
in Mount Carroll, Illinois.
Under Robert Hutchins’ guid
ance, it became the great books
college of the University of
Chicago from 1950-1958. When
Chicago pulled out, the great
books remained. Falhng enroll
ment and crushing debt led the
college’s trustees to desperate
measures in the 1970s. They
voted to close the college and
sell the buildings and campus in
Mount Carroll; however, a
group of faculty and students
refused to give up. They
borrowed money to keep the
doors open, and the college
moved to Waukegan in 1979. “A
dedicated group of people kept
it going,” Nelson says. “The
faculty did all the administrative
jobs, as well as teaching, and
even the maintenance. Students
continued their studies, and the
college rebuilt itself.”
In part because St. John’s also
struggled to survive at times.
Nelson finds Shimer’s story
inspiring. Although students
can choose major fields of study
at the college, a required core
curriculum includes seminars
on the great works of Western
civihzation.
Nelson’s involvement with
the college began when he
became a friend of Shimer’s
former president, Donald
Moon, who remains on the
faculty. Throughout the years,
Nelson offered Moon advice and
support, and he joined Shimer’s
board at the invitation of Presi
dent William Rice. Nelson even
tually became vice chair and
began his term as chair in 2007.
Nelson is pleased that things
are looking up for Shimer. Two
years ago the college sold its
Waukegan buildings and moved
to the campus of the lUinois
Institute of Technology in
Chicago. Last year, the college
was profiled in the New York
Times and earlier this fall, the
college welcomed 45 freshmen,
its largest entering class in 30
years. “It’s important that this
school survive,” Nelson says.
Cassie Sherman {A04) is one
of four St. John’s alumni among
Shimer’s faculty and staff; like
Nelson, she’s determined to see
Shimer succeed. As assistant
admissions director, she does
everything from visiting high
schools to producing student
recruitment material. “I feel
hke I’m doing a good thing,”
she says.
{The College-
As CHAIRMAN OF ShIMER ColLEGe’s BoARD OF TRUSTEES, AnNAPOLIS
President Christopher Nelson (SF70) advises the college
LEADERSHIP.
“The Most Important
Ideas of our Civilization”
St. John’s is often mentioned favorably in books about educa
tion, but it’s always nice when a highly respected figure issues
high praise. In this case, it’s Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who for
30 years was the president of George Washington University.
In his newly pubhshed memoir, Trachtenberg mentions
St. John’s in a chapter titled “The Ideal University”:
“St. John’s College ... is a smaU, intimate, teaching-oriented,
classics-focused institution that is sometimes mentioned as one
ideal. I remember when in 1954 a St. John’s representative came
to speak to a parent/student meeting at my high school in
Brooklyn. As interested as the parents were in what the man had
to say about the college, it was clear that they were needlessly
concerned that if their kids chose St. John’s, they wouldn’t be
able to get into medical school. To them, it was, perhaps, too
unconventional a place that was following a curriculum they
perceived as too far from the norm to be recognized by
professional schools as providing a legitimate education.
But for many other people, St. John’s was and stiU is the very
best form of undergraduate education, a chance to immerse
oneself in the most important ideas of our civihzation.”
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Levan Hall
Plans
Approved
Building in environmentally
sensitive Santa Fe is never an
easy feat, but the college’s longawaited center for the Graduate
Institute, Levan Hall, has made
its way through the city’s
extensive review and permitting
process, and building should
begin in the spring. A gift from
Dr. Norman Levan (SFGI74)
made the project possible.
The first step, approval from
the City of Santa Fe Planning
Commission, was achieved in
June. The next hurdle was
cleared July aa, when the board
approved a height exception
(the building is 39 feet at its
tallest, compared to the
regulation 16 feet), but required
college officials to return for
approval of additional design
features, including some varia
tion in design from surrounding
buildings, and the architect’s
use of COR-TEN, a resilient
steel designed to weather to a
pleasing copper color. The
review board approved the
college’s plans on Sept. a3.
Levan Hall is being designed
With
plans approved, the college should begin
Levan Hall
CONSTRUCTION NEXT SPRING.
to achieve a silver rating in the
United States Green Building
Council LEED rating system.
Reading List
CHANGES
In with Medea, out
with the Rat Man
The Instruction Committees on
each campus have made some
changes to the work in progress
that is the seminar reading list.
In Santa Fe, where the
committee focused on
All in the GI Family
Two GENERATIONS OF THE ThOMAS/GrOENENDYKE FAMILY, SHOWN WITH
President Michael Peters (l.), graduated from the GI last May.
Abbie Thomas (not in regalia) received her degree in May in
Annapolis. Her mother, Cheryl Groenendyke, and Cheryl’s
HUSBAND, Richard (a BVG member), received their degrees a week
later in Santa Fe. Ms. Thomas was awarded a prize for her
preceptorial essay, “Rereading Proust,” an honor announced
AT the Santa Fe ceremony.
freshman and junior years,
some of the more significant
changes involve replacing
Plato’s Sophist with the
Protagoras, swapping “The
Two-Part Prelude of 1799” for
“Tintern Abbey,” and
replacing Euripides’
Hippolytas with the Medea.
All three replacement texts
have been on various reading
lists before, and it is likely that
all will appear again in the
future. One plan, adopted a few
years ago, was to alternate the
Sophist and the Protagoras on a
regular basis. Similarly, Medea
might likely find itself replaced
with another Euripides play,
and “Tintern Abbey” could
give way to a different
Wordsworth poem.
To take the Sophist off the
reading list is “to lose a great
good,” says tutor Matt Davis,
but the Protagoras has its own
virtues. Considered one of
Plato’s most dramatic
dialogues, the Protagoras is a
literary masterwork offering
students an opportunity to
learn about Protagoras-the
representative of relativism-in
more than one dialogue
(Theaetetus being the other).
By studying the dialogues
together students learn
more about one of the most
important problems of our
(The College. St. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
7
time. The dialogue also allows
greater insight into Socrates:
readers see him in a slightly less
saintly role and learn about his
relationship to the Sophists.
It has been about eight years
since Medea was on the
freshman reading list, Davis
estimates. Medea elicits
questions about the status of
the Greek heroes and about
mortals’ relations to the gods.
“Tintern Abbey” can present a
challenge in seminar due to its
brevity, but one virtue in
reading shorter texts is the
opportunity for a deeper, more
leisurely conversation.
In Annapolis, freshmen will
have two seminars on De
Anima, with their Lucretius
seminars moving to sophomore
seminar. This exchange undoes
a long-standing, but anom
alous, departure from the
rough chronological order that
prevails through most of the
reading list. Annapolis Dean
Michael Dink (A75) says, “it is
hoped that freshmen will
benefit from bringing the three
major Aristotle readings
together: Physics, Metaphysics,
and De Anima. The other
changes all followed the
principle that any author
worthy of being on the
Program is worthy of at least
two seminars.”
That means in sophomore
year, a second seminar will be
read on Calvin. Seniors will
have two seminars on Faulkner,
with additional selections from
Go Down, Moses, and two
seminars on Heidegger’s Intro
duction to Metaphysics, instead
of one on “What is Philos
ophy?” Removed from the
reading list are Rabelais’
Gargantua and Pantagruel in
sophomore year. Sacrificed in
senior year: Flannery
O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back”
and Freud’s “Notes on a Case
of Obsessional Neurosis” (Rat
man).
�{From the Bell Towers}
8
News & Announcements
New Tutors
The following tutors have
joined the Santa Fe faculty:
Arcelia Rodrigue/,
received her BA, MA, and PhD
in Government and Politics
from the University of Mary
land, College Park.
Her areas of special interest
include political philosophy
and international relations.
Seth Braver received his
MA in Mathematics from the
University of California at
Santa Cruz and his PhD in
Mathematics from University of
Montana. Before coming to
St. John’s Braver was adjunct
associate professor at the
University of Montana.
Topi Heikkero received his
MA (Theoretical Philosophy)
and MTh (Theological Ethics
and Philosophy of Religion)
from the University of
Helsinki, Finland. He special
izes in the ethics of technology
and the philosophy of tech
nology.
Llyd Wells received his BA
in Natural Science and Ancient
Near Eastern Studies from The
Johns Hopkins University, and
his MS and PhD in Oceanog
raphy from the University of
Washington, Seattle. Before
coming to St. John’s, Wells
held a Mellon postdoctoral
fellowship at the University of
Pennsylvania, and was scholar
in-residence at Sterhng
College, Vermont.
Annapolis welcomed the
following tutors:
Michael J. Brogan earned a
PhD in Philosophy from
Villanova University, where he
also earned his master’s
degree. He was a visiting
researcher at the Catholic
University of Louvain in
Belgium and earned his bach
elor’s degree at Swarthmore
College.
Matthew S. Linck joins
St. John’s from The New School
of Social Research, where he
was an adjunct professor in the
New School for General
Studies. He has also taught in
the honors program of Long
Island University, SUNY’s
Purchase College, and New
York University. He is author of
The Ideas ofSocrates (London:
Continuum, 2007). He earned
a BEA in Painting at Syracuse
University.
Marcel Andrew Widzisz
earned a PhD in Classics from
the University of Texas at
Austin, where he also earned
his master’s in Greek Litera
ture. He earned three bach
elor’s degrees from Southern
Illinois University: in Classics,
French, and Philosophy.
A visiting tutor in the
Graduate Institute this fall,
Sarah Benson earned a BA in
Philosophy at Pennsylvania
State University, an MA in
Comparative Literature from
the University of Texas, and a
PhD in the History of Art from
Cornell University.
Members
New BVG Members
The college’s Board ofVisitors
and Governors welcomed these
members:
John M. Belcher is the
Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer of ARINC Incorpo
rated. He has more than
30 years of experience in the
aviation, information tech
nology, and defense industries,
and is a leading authority in
aviation and air traffic services.
Stephen Jon Bohlin (SF81)
retired recently after a long
investment career with
Thornburg Investment
Management in Santa Fe.
He also serves on the New
Mexico State Treasurer’s
Investment Committee as a
public member.
Michele C. Farquhar is a
partner at Hogan and Hartson
law firm in Washington, D.C.
She is a member of the Cali
fornia and Washington, D.C.,
bar associations and is on the
board of trustees at her alma
mater, Duke University.
Jana Howard Carey retired
as a Partner at Venable, LLP, in
December 2003 after 26 years
of law practice. She is an active
of the aikido club go through their moves as part of a
STUDENT activities FAIR EARLIER THIS SEMESTER.
{The College -St. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
community leader in Maryland.
Richard A. Groenendyke,
Jr. (SFGI08) recently retired
after a 35-year career in the law.
Most recently, he was a share
holder and senior litigator with
Hall, Estill, Hardwick, Gable,
Golden & Nelson,
Attorneys at Law, in Tulsa,
Oklahoma.
John C. Jeeferies, Jr.
recently stepped down as dean
of the University of Virginia
School of Law. He is a member
of the bar in both Virginia and
the District of Columbia.
Awards
In October, Annapolis
Treasurer Bronte Jones was
one of six recipients of the
Fannie Lou Hamer Award,
named for the groundbreaking
civil rights leader. Presented by
the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Committee, the award recog
nizes women who continue
Hamer’s efforts. Jones was also
accepted to the HERS Institute
at Wellesley College.
The Arts Council of Anne
Arundel County earlier this fall
presented Annie Awards to
Lucinda Edinberg, art
educator for the St. John’s
Mitchell Gallery, and Anna
Greenberg (HA96), honorary
member of the college’s Board
ofVisitors and Governors.
Edinberg was named Arts
Educator of the Year, and
Greenberg was recognized as
Arts Patron of the year.
The Epoch Journal,
a magazine on current affairs
published by Annapolis
students, was named a finalist
in the American Collegiate
Press’ 2008 Magazine
Pacemaker Award, which
recognizes excellence in
student journalism. For more
about the Epoch, visit the
publication’s website:
http://news.
epochjournal, org/.-^
�{Letters}
A Loss FOR THE COLLEGE
On a hot summer day in 1997,
Chris Colhy (HA08) showed
me how to use the most
intimidating machine in the
Print Shop: an industrial-grade
paper cutter, armed with a hlade
powerful enough to sever a
hand. 1 stiU recall Chris’ patient,
soft-spoken manner when he
explained how to operate the
menacing machine. Thankfully,
for my sake, the machine had a
fail-safe method of operation,
requiring the use of hoth
hands to trigger the cutting
mechanism.
1 had the privilege to know
and work with Chris, not while I
was a student, hut after I gradu
ated. For a year, before 1 went to
law school, 1 was a hookmaker,
among other things, at the
Touchstones Discussion Project,
which required my almost daily
presence at the Print Shop.
Chris trained me in the art of
paper cutting, binding, and
copying. Soon, not only did 1
lose fear of operating copying
machines, I also became part of
Chris’ Print Shop family, and my
tedious work became much
more enjoyable.
During my time at the Print
Shop, Chris and 1 had many
conversations about pretty much
every subject. 1 recall one partic
ular anecdote he related about
his grocery shopping habits,
which 1 try to practice to this
day. He recommended going to
the store with specific meals in
mind so as not to overspend or
buy on impulse, thus defeating
the expectations of the grocers.
Chris had a rebellious streak in
him. He said, in his matter-offact way, that one saved much
money that way. After threeand-a-half years of St. John’s
(1 was a Febbie), 1 appreciated
Chris’ real-world savoir-faire.
While Chris.. .was unable to
finish college, he was well-read,
knowledgeable and informed. In
his time at the college, he had
caught the “Great Books bug,”
having read many of the books
Christopher Colby (HA08)
students read, which always
made for pleasant conversation,
as we discharged our respective
duties and tried to drown out
the repetitive noise of the
printing presses and the
copiers. Chris also enjoyed an
unexpected perk from the tutors
who came every day with mate
rial to copy for their classes.
Chris would keep an extra copy
of any material that interested
him (short stories and poetry in
particular) and would read them
at his leisure.
I last saw Chris during my 10year reunion in aooy. He
showed me the many improve
ments in equipment and tech
nology that he had accom
plished since I had left. As we
toured the Print Shop, I could
not help but think how proud
Chris was of the changes that
had occurred. He had brought
the Print Shop from the Guten
berg years to the aist century.
Chris was a humble, loyal and
dedicated member of the college
community. I am not only
saddened about his death,
but also about the loss for
the college.
Juan Villasenor (A97)
Applauding TheLogic of
Desire
I recently read and was
entranced by.. .Annapolis tutor
Peter Kalkavage’s The Logic of
Desire: An Introduction to
Hegel’s Phenomenology....
The book is a remarkable
embodiment of the teaching art.
Kalkavage creates a living
joining of inwardnesses, which
he is able to awaken and hnk in
a remarkable way; the inward
ness of Hegel’s written words,
his own inwardness as medi
ating presence, and the inward
ness of the reader. The paradox
to me was that when I’m able to
teach like this, it’s because I can
stand in the thing to be under
stood and in the particular
embodied learning soul of the
student before me and adapt
what I say to the way that
student learns, while watching
aU the time not only what the
student says but the modulation
in the student’s eyes, opaque or
melting to insight, resistant or
ardent. Kalkavage does the
same thing, but without the
individual student before him.
Yet he addresses the reader in
such a way as to reach a wide
array of individual readers. His
book is a model of this art.
Kalkavage writes, “Commen
taries on the Phenomenology
tend to give the reader a
summary of its conclusions and
teachings, often brilhantly,
without necessarily helping him
become a better reader of
Hegel’s book.” Becoming a
better reader of Hegel’s book
means to be able “to make sense
of things from the inside as they
unfold.” [This] points to a
deeper effect of Kalkavage’s way
of shaping our experience of
reading his book.
Let me try to say succinctly
why this is so by starting with a
comparison. Ifyou read John
Bunyan’s great narrative. The
Pilgrim’s Progressfrom This
World to That Which is to
Come, you will be able to share
in the immediate experience of
Christian as he moves from one
crisis of Christian growth to
maturity after another. This is
aimed to support more of an
inner transformation of the
reader than a doctrinal
summary of Christian teaching
might do.
Similarly, Hegel wrote The
Phenomenology ofSpirit to
enable the reader to share in the
{The College ■ St. John’s
College ■ Fall aoo8 }
9
immediate experience of spirit
through its intrinsic and neces
sary sequence of stages and
transitions as it moves through
one crisis of growth after
another toward its complete
realization. In helping us
become better readers of Hegel,
Kalkavage stays within the
perspective of spirit at each
point of its unfolding as Hegel
represents it. In this way we are
helped to pace and share an
unfolding that is also happening
in each of us. Thus Kalkavage’s
commentary, as Hegel intends,
supports a self-reflection that
helps us discover who we are.
Such more than personal yet
also personal self-reflection as
this enables is a great gift.
Where do I find myself in
Hegel’s great gallery of arche
types of stages of spirit’s self
consciousness? Master? Slave?
Stoic? the Unhappy Conscious
ness? Rameau’s Nephew?
Beautiful Soul? Or any of the
many other archetypal states of
consciousness? I will confess
only that I recognize myself only
part of the way along the course
of spirit to maturity and no
doubt as I read I reduce Hegel’s
description of what is ahead to
fit the lens of my present
consciousness of self and the
world. Nevertheless, I’m
grateful that I found myself,
almost by accident, among “the
courageous non-specialists” for
whom Kalkavage writes.
Richard Freis (class of ig6i)
The College welcomes letters
on issues of interest to readers.
Letters may be edited for clarity
and/or length. Those under
500 words have a better chance
of being printed in their
entirety. Please address letters
to: The College Magazine,
St. John’s College, Box 2800,
Annapolis MD 21404. Letters
can be sent via e-mail to
Rosemary.Harty(@sjca.edu.
�{The Program}
IO
FROM FRESHMAN
TO JOHNNIE
Interviews by Sara Luell (Aog)
AND Jenny Hannifin
he College posed this ques
tion to members of the
Class of 2011: Was there a
moment during your first
year when you felt like you
really became a Johnnie?
Their answers were as individual as their
own personal experiences have been at
St. John’s, but also reflective of the
college as a community of learners.
Hein Myatt, Santa Fe. “It was definitely the moment I first
spoke in seminar. It took me a long time to speak up; it was
very challenging for me. I’m from Burma, and we didn’t have
these kinds of discussions in school. I wondered: ‘what if I say
something really stupid in front of the class?’ My tutor,
Ms. [Janet] Dougherty, was very encouraging. She said,
‘everyone says stupid things at times; you say them, and then
you can learn from them.’ So, when we were talking about the
Odyssey, I was moved by it, and I finally spoke. From there, it
got a lot easier.”
{The College*
Jake Simon, Annapolis. “I really became a Johnnie when I
realized how deep the Program was, during freshman essay
writing. When I was writing on The Sophist^ I turned in a
rough draft to my language tutor. She told me just to reread it
with a question in mind. WTien I was rereading it, I realized
that there is so much more going on than I thought was
possible. And then I was like, ‘Oh wow, aUofthe Plato that I’ve
read, I haven’t read it at all.’ Then feeling that I could spend
years going over just this book. The Sophist, just with one
question in mind. It makes you feel incredibly impotent, going
up against these great minds.”
Natasha Barnes, Santa Fe. “There are so many little times
when an experience allows you to step outside of yourself for a
second and say, ‘Oh wow! I’m really a part of this.’ It usually
hits you right after a class. You’re so engaged when you’re in
the class, so if you’re going to have a great experience it’s
because you aren’t thinking about other things in the middle
of it. You get out of seminar and start talking to people about
it, and all of a sudden you think‘Oh my gosh! This is crazy! I’m
in the middle of this, which is exactly why I wanted to be here.
So that I could have this kind of experience.’ I feel like [as a
freshman] you feel something starting, because it’s really a
longer process. Because you’re never aware that it’s actually
happening until later in the year: you realize that something
has changed from when you first got here. That now you’re not
looking at this community of thinking, you’re in the middle
St. John’s College * Fall 2008 }
�{The Program}
of it as much as anybody else is.
And that happens throughout
the whole year.”
Freshmen still have to contend
WITH their first DON RAG, BUT AT
LEAST “running THE GAUNTLET” IS
ONE FRESHMAN EXPERIENCE TODAY’S
STUDENTS don’t HAVE TO ENDURE,
AS THESE Johnnies did in 194a.
Lucy Ferrier, Annapolis. “I
think the first time that I sort of
became aware that I belonged
was coming home from Thanks
giving break. Coming back to
the campus, I felt like I was
coming home. You have to be
away to appreciate it. Everyone
was running up to me saying,
‘Hi, how are you?’ I was back
with people I knew, everyone
knew who I was, I knew where
my stuff was and where my life
was based.”
After years of self-identifying as
a liberal arts major. I’ve discov
ered a deep love for lab tutorial.
The study of grammar now
beguiles me, instead of boring
me. I even like Ptolemy. I did not
expect to love the Program itself
as much as I do, even as I find I
do not love the culture of the
school, the culture that brought
me here.”
Anne Deger, Santa Fe.
“Although my feelings about
being a Johnnie changed over
the course of the first year, at
the end of the first seminar,
sitting around the table, I
definitely experienced an ‘I’ve
come home’ feeling. But I think
the most compelling momentof-Johnnieness I’ve had has
come this year, after talking to
freshmen. I feel more a part of it
now that I’m introducing other
people to St. John’s, so perhaps
it just took a while to find my
place. I am an older student, and this may be part of the
problem. I’ve been disappointed in the lack of rigor I see in
some of my fellow students, though I hope that much of this
may be attributed to the process of growing up. And that
learning to live in a community takes time.
Still, that’s a poor excuse for skipping readings or coming to
class stoned. My ovm expectations of the school varied as
wildly from the college’s nature as my classmates’ natures. I’m
happy to have had some of those expectations proven false.
{The College-
Nathaniel Torrey, Annapolis.
“I would say the moment when I
really felt like I was ‘in the club’
was the night I turned my
freshman essay in. As soon as
that seminar was over, I was in it
to win it. From then on I was
like, ‘I made it.’ Because every
thing else was a weird freshman
trial at the college, it was so
unknown. I felt like I had done
the big thing that everyone else
does every year. I wasn’t just a
freshman who had just shown
up. I had actually proven my
mettle, I fought, and I deserved
to be here.”
Nareg Seferian, Santa Fe. “‘Does it bother anyone else that
these figures can be conceptualized, but not visualized?’ Thus
spoke a classmate, as we were starting Euclid. No, the circle or
triangle, as he describes it, simply cannot exist in ‘the real
world’ (whatever that is). We can think of it, though, think in
terms of it, work with it, prove things with it. I think all the
time, about all sorts of things, but there come these moments-
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�la
{The Program}
Tutor William Darkey
leads a math
ematics TUTORIAL FOR THE FIRST
FRESHMEN IN SaNTA Fe, IN I964. HoW
MANY FRESHMEN LEARNED TO LOVE MATH
BECAUSE OF EuCLID?
and I’ve had a fair few at St. John’s already over the past six
months-where one is compelled to be extra pensive. It’s invig
orating and refreshing. ‘Good for the soul’ is a classic way of
expressing it. This ‘antiquarian’ sense that comes with
St. John’s is reinforced in Santa Fe by an idyllic setting: nestled
amidst hills, with arcades of pillars supporting a small commu
nity of learning. Some may criticize the philosophy behind the
college, and in response to that, all I can say is this: St. John’s
is indeed not for everyone, but it fulfills the function of filling
the very unique gap it fills, for those who yearn for just such a
place. That’s what it does for me, anyway.”
Dave Maher, Annapolis. “The first time I realized I was a
Johnnie was the first time in seminar when I realized that
someone hadn’t done the reading, and it made me very, very
angry. The college is essentially a communal effort to come to
learning and these people were not doing their part.”
{The College.
Anna Goold, Annapolis. “Before
I got here I had a different view on
what I thought a Johnnie was. I just
assumed that all my classes and all
my seminars would be perfect, that
we would get somewhere with all of
them, and we would come to great
conclusions. I think that changes
when you start having classes that
aren’t that way, and you realize that
everyone is struggling through
everything. That was the big differ
ence for me, when I felt like I
belonged here. It probably was by
the end of the first semester
freshman year, when I was able to
differentiate between it being just
seminar and it being awesome.
Being able to look at each problem
we were discussing, whether it was
good or bad, whether I thought it
was going somewhere or not,
whether I thought it was perfect or
not. I think a lot of people [come to
the same conclusion]. For a lot of
us, this was the only school we
applied to and we worship it as this
ideal institution. It is kind of when
we realize it is not ideal that we realize we are just people
grasping at ideas.”
Kyouhee Choi, Santa Fe, “Was there a moment when I felt
like I really became a Johnnie? Sure. When I balanced a
seminar chair. When we do Archimedes, we learn about
balance. There’s a saying that seniors have: if you can balance
the seminar chair, you’ll graduate, and if you can’t, you won’t.
I knew that it was stupid and not true, but it irked me anyway.
So I was really relieved when I balanced the chair. I even took
a picture.”
Martin Greenwald, Annapolis. “I think it was in the period
of the couple of seminars before winter break, when we were
reading Thucydides and the Republic, when the workload had
picked up, and our seminars picked up. Everyone settled into
their routine, everyone got what was going on. One big thing
St. John’s College . Fall 2008 }
�{TheProgram}
[about being a Johnnie] is being able to take the attitude we
have in seminar and try to cultivate that in everyday conversa
tion, try to bring the respect and open-mindedness of seminar
to conversation anywhere. Always looking at a text for what it
is worth, without prejudging it beforehand. Trying to get a
coherent view of the Western canon and our civilization, and
where it’s been and where it is taking us.”
Han Qi, Santa Fe. “One who has gone to a normal college
probably would never think of college as personal and humane
as St. John’s. I certainly never did. From my experience, when
a student registers for four courses at a generic school, four
professors each demand a considerable portion of his time
according to some regimented syllabus, expecting him to
produce projects almost every other day-a five-page interpre
tation of a Shakespeare sonnet on Monday; a Microeconomics
presentation, Tuesday; a quiz on Spanish verb forms,
Wednesday; and on Thursday, he is supposed to know the
difference between Paul’s messages to the Corinthians and the
Romans.
Students at work in a freshman laboratory
STUDENTS STILL READ GaLEN AND HaRVEY.
class, circa 1945.
The
{The College.
13
It is sheer madness. At St. John’s there are fewer readings in
mathematics, language and laboratory classes, but more focus
and more time to reflect and remember. Tutors let students
digest rather than devour. A school does not become personal
just by having a small pool of students. It has to give students
space and time to connect their learning with their life. The
moment I felt I became a Johnnie was in my first don rag. A
tutor criticized me for being overly prepared. Something as
singular as this has only happened to me at St. John’s, and I am
convinced that for a place so special, you cannot prepare to be
ready. You must be here in person to experience it.”
Matt Hendershot, Annapolis. “It sort of came gradually,
after winter break, maybe, when you’re coming back onto
campus, and you’re no longer a novelty. You’re no longer some
little freshman, wide-eyed and rubbernecking, talking about
how excited you are about the Program. You’re still excited
about the Program, but you are excited to be a part of it, now.
You’ve faced down your first don rag, sat in real open-faced
criticism ofyourself andthe wayyou conduct yourself. There’s
a lot of overblown talk
about how it is all about
finding a personal philos
ophy, or coming to rest at
home in the classics, but
plenty of people do that
without ever being John
nies.
What really makes you a
Johnnie is the fact that you
are here with all sorts of
other people that really
want the same thing out of
life and out of their educa
tion. You and the people
around you really come to
accept that when you’ve
made it through that first
semester. It can be tough. I
know my class lost a few,
even in the first couple
weeks. So I feel like you are
really here to stay, and
people sort of know that
when you step off the plane,
and you come back, and it is
like coming back home.”
labs may be more modern, but
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{books}
14
THE BOOK THAT
CHANGED
MY LIFE
he College asked alumni to to me about the anti-historical approach that the Program
describe a book that was represented.
I did not return to the college that fall. I did manage to
important in their lives. What resolve my dilemma, as it were, and returned to St. John’s
we received in return were the following fall, to graduate three years later with my
stories of career paths found, “new” class of 1954. But Spengler has remained the single
greatest influence in my life. He gave me a context in which
dilemmas resolved, passion I could comprehend various stages, or the ‘development’ of
and purpose discovered, faith strengthened,
a particular people (for example, the Greeks, or time, or
how
to imagine what Beethoven’s late quartets meant in our
and questions answered.
T
“A
Fruitful Tension”
Edward Bauer (Class of 1954)
I spent the summer after my freshman year at St. John’s
(1949-50) at home, trying to come to terms with the
Program’s total absence of “historical background,” which
of course is an issue of critical importance for the Program.
I don’t remember how I came upon Oswald Spengler’s huge
work. The Decline ofthe West. But I soon became convinced
that a broad knowledge of the history of an era (or of a work
of literature, or a particular architecture or art form, etc.)
was absolutely necessary for understanding it. Since I felt
that so strongly, I did not see how I could return to St. John’s
in the fall. I wrote to Mr. [Jacob] Klein, the dean, and tried
to explain my decision, and I will always be grateful to
him for his understanding and for taking the time to write
{The College-
earlier Western culture). I also understood howwhat we are
experiencing now in the late stages of Western civilization
is one more historical example of the birth, growth,
achievement, and decline-the biological analogy, in a
word-of a particular cultural entity.
In a very real way, my whole life has exemplified this
tension between historical and anti- (or un-) historical. I
would like to believe it has been a fruitful tension.
“A Meaningful
Life”
Isaac Smith (A03)
I tend to date the point when I stopped being a teenager and
started to become an adult to the time I was reading Middle
march in junior seminar. Middlemarch being, of course, the
great novel of dashed hopes and bruised idealism. It had
been a few months after the September ii attacks, and I was
coming to grips not only with my own mortality (the passage
when Casaubon stares death in the face is one of the novel’s
St. John’s College - Fall 2008 }
�{books}
high points) but with my own anonymity, the knowledge
that all my deeds, thoughts, and high ideals would be
swallowed up by time and forgotten. As a result, I strongly
identified with Dorothea, Ladislaw, and Lydgate, and their
attempts to carve out a meaningful life for themselves even
if the results weren’t what they intended. For similar
reasons, I also fell in love with Milan Kundera’s The
Unbearable Lightness of Being-'which in its own way
grapples with the same themes.
BOOKS HAVE THE POWER TO INFLUENCE OUR LIVES, EVEN WHEN We’rE
NOT AWARE OF IT AT THE TIME.
school, which turned me into quite a little snot until
St. John’s classes and discussion thankfully beat that out of
me. My first big-people book was War ofthe Worlds by H.G.
Wells when I was 8, so that set the stage for everything.
“The Question
“Watching Stars and Planets”
of
Opportunity”
Jennifer Hoheisel (AGI89)
by Dave Prosper (SF02)
I suppose an actual Program book that changed my life
would be Ptolemy’s Almagest. As wrong as he turns out to
be, I found his descriptions of how to watch the sky
extremely useful, and thus I tend to stay up watching stars
and planets and debating if I should just ditch the
computer-job thing and become an astronomer. Then I
remember that my math skills are lacking and decide
against it.
There was also Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World.,
which was a nice skeptical smack in the brain. I realized
that my weird dreams when younger were just memories
of weird dreams and not weird memories of actual aliens
poking around in my room. I can blame a Johnnie by the
name of Whitley Strieber (A67) for that earlier confusion,
thanks to Communion and his vivid descriptions of
naughty, nosy aliens. I also read The Prince and Johnny
Rotten’s autobiography simultaneously during high
{The College-
15
Before reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I
hadn’t really thought about the fact that for centuries many
women were in a cycle of constant pregnancy and childbirth
that left little energy or brain power to do much that was
academic. Personally I was in no frame of mind to do philos
ophy for at least a few months after each of our two sons was
born-although I know women who feel otherwise. The cycle
of frequent childbirth also was bound to interrupt the studies
of those few women who did have access to higher education.
All of this helps to explain why we don’t have many works
from women prior to the advent of birth control and the
opening of many institutions of higher education in the 20th
century. (I know there are exceptions; I was writing a disser
tation about a 14th-century female mystic when I was in grad
school at Georgetown.) Woolf’s book speaks about the
need for women to have both the time and the financial
independence to be able to write.
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{books}
l6
Y discovered thepower ofsheltering myselfinside a story
Erin Martell (A98)
Not only did the book cause me to think
about texts from women, it also made me
realize how few women had been part of
my higher education to that point. As an
undergraduate majoring in Classical
Civihzation at the College ofWilliam and
Mary, I never had a female professor, and
at St. John’s, all my tutors were male. I am
not saying that there is anything inher
ently different about male and female
scholars; rather, it made me think again
about the question of opportunity. In my
own family, my extremely bright grand
mother was sent to work in order to send
her brother-a man who took seven years
and didn’t finish the degree-to college.
In the next generation, my mother was
given the opportunity to go to college and
was expected to excel, but her parents then assumed that she
would marry, raise a family, and not work outside the home.
When my sister and I arrived, we were expected to go to
college and establish ourselves doing what we loved before we
even thought about marriage. It was quite a difference
among the three generations.
Woolf’s book caused me to think about all these issues
related to scholarship and opportunity for the first time. It
made me appreciate anew my room in Humphrey s Hall and
the luxury of time to read and read deeply.
“A Profound
Experience”
Erin Martell (A98)
One of the first “big kid” books my mother read me was The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Order triumphed over
chaos and I discovered the power of sheltering myself inside
a story. I tore through the remaining books as fast as my
newly-learned-to-read brain could process. I read This
PresentDarkness\3y Frank E. Peretti at a time in my life when
I was seeking the answer to a question I didn’t even know I
had. As I finished the book, I realized with sudden clarity
that I couldn’t accept the religious precepts I’d been taught,
their fundamental contradictions caused my constant
struggle against the church, and that it was time to give up,
be free and figure out what I believed on my terms. Last, as it
{The College-
A Room OF One’sOwklw Jennifer Hoheisel
(AGI89) TO THINK ABOUT women’s
OPPORTUNITIES.
was for many others. War and Peace
was a profound experience for me. I
don’t think I captured the thoughts quite
right in my senior paper, hut the idea
that difficult things are worth doing
and worth surviving even if the surviving
is all you have in the end has stayed
with me.
“Challenged and
Transformed”
Laura Anne Stuart (A93)
When I was a sophomore in Santa Fe, I
came upon the book Angry Women while browsing at a
record store in town. This book contains interviews with
women artists, activists, and writers, most notably sexuality
educators Annie Sprinkle and Susie Bright. My view of femi
nism and female sexuality was challenged and transformed,
and I began to think that the field of sexual health might he
where my passions lay. It hadn’t even occurred to me before
then that it could he a job!
While at St. John’s, I followed my passion by co-coordinating the Women’s Literature Study Group and organizing
trips to Washington, D.C., to attend the 1992 March for
Women’s Lives and the 1993 March for Lesbian, Gay, and
Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. After graduating from
St. John’s, I earned my master’s degree in public health and
worked as a sexuality educator for more than a decade. This
year, I published a sex education curriculum for young adults
and became the proud owner of a sex toy store in Milwaukee,
the Tool Shed. When I finally met Susie Bright, she was
amused to know that one interview that she had given years
ago had started me on my career path. I spend a lot of time
teaching and mentoring young people and hope that I can
inspire someone in a similar way.
St. John's College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{books}
17
Ybelieve only authors are capable ofchanging our lives.
Christopher Benson
“A Lifetime’s
(SFGI07)
Christopher Benson says authors,
NOT books, have THE POWER TO
Pursuit”
Harrison Sheppard (Class of 1961)
CHANGE LIVES.
Plato’s Apology did not merely
change my life; it virtually formed
it. When I was 16, an uncle of
mine-who had introduced me to
“literature” when I was eight years
old with an eight-volume set of the
works of Edgar Rice Burroughsgave me a small volume containing
five of Plato’s dialogues: the
Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Sympo
sium, and Republic. I vividly recall
the moment, more than 50 years
ago, riding on a Philadelphia
subway train, when I finished my
first reading of the Apology. That
Socrates was willing to give up his life, defiantly, rather
than abandon the search for knowledge as he had been
pursuing it, had a stunning effect upon me, an effect that
was simultaneously thrilling and exalting. I left that train
transformed. It was a year later that I learned about
St. John’s College. But it was the Apology that awakened
me to a lifetime’s pursuit of self-knowledge in its deepest
sense, the difference between what appears to be and what
is, and living with integrity based upon one’s self-recogni
tion. Along with my experience at St. John’s, it also
accounts for my chosen professions as a lawyer and writer
and my enduring devotion to what one might yet learn from
reading Plato and his companions in “The Great Conversa
tion” (as Robert Hutchins termed it).
“In Search
of
Resonant Voices”
Christopher Benson (SFGI07)
To the shock of every Johnnie, no book has changed my fife! I
believe only authors are capable of changing our lives.
St. John’s was a transformative experience for me because the
institution facihtated an intimate encounter between reader
and author, an encounter that crosses time and culture. I read
in search of resonant voices. To borrow an insight from Ralph
Waldo Emerson, a resonant voice is “spoken over the round
world” but comes “home through open or winding passages.”
{The College-
It is a voice that I ought to hear,
that belongs to me, that vibrates on
my ear, consoling me when I am
downtrodden and guiding me when
I am lost. It is a voice of inex
haustible pleasure and needful
wisdom, never flattened by the
tyranny of time or the vicissitudes
of fife. It is a voice that treats my
dark inertia, risks my securities,
heals my hidden wounds, deepens
my faith, awakens my somnolent
imagination, expands my imper
fect sympathies, and shapes my
“final vocabulary.”
I am tempted to mention other favorite authors-Dante,
Shakespeare, Pascal, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Dick
inson, and Frost-hut I will discipline my list to include only
the resonant voices:
Jesus: His subversive wisdom and edifying teaching
inaugurate an upside-down kingdom-both in my soul and in
the world-where the low is brought high and the high is
brought low.
Saint Augustine: When the Bishop of Hippo authored his
autobiography. Confessions, he authored the biography of
every Ghristian. His prayers and tears are my prayers and
tears. His conversion is my conversion. He reminds me of a
terrible truth, “Without God, what am I to myself but a guide
to my own self-destruction?” Gonsequently, “nothing is
nearer to God’s ears than a confessing heart and a life
grounded in faith.”
Soren Kierkegaard: In Fear & Trembling, Philosophical
Fragments, and Works of Love, Kierkegaard goads me,
against my own sheepish obstinacy, in two directions: to
enter the prodigious paradoxes of the Ghristian faith and to
five the scandal of the Gospel.
G.S. Lewis: I read the apologetic works of Lewis-Mere
Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, The Great
Divorce, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, and The
Abolition of Man-tsot as an “outsider” who surveys the
St. John ’5 College • Fall 2008 }
�{books}
i8
''Thatfateful, rainy Saturday morning, I wanted something to read...
Valerie Pawlewicz (A89)
landscape before undertaking a difficult journey, but as an
“insider” who leaves the famiharity of the boat for a thrilling
deep-sea dive. The analogical imagination of Lewis turns the
Christian faith intelligible, challenging, and winsome. No
one has done a finer job of holding the Fact and Myth of Chris
tianity together. His translation of theology into the vernac
ular is magical, leaving me with goosebumps of wonder, just
as Lucy experienced when she first beheld Narnia.
“More than Thought”
Steven T. Brenner (SFGI83)
When at age 15, I read Albert Schweitzer—An Anthology
(edited by Charles R. Joy) I knew I’d been spared a lifetime
of susceptibility to the dogmas and pretenses of the world,
for which in return I would owe a lifetime debt of higher
endeavor. Schweitzer’s thought is more than thought; it is
heroically won conviction born of total engagement with
the mysterious condition in which we find ourselves. It
never ceases to challenge me to revolutionary change in my
own thought and way of life.
Until I discovered Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil
37 years later, I had no idea that such knowledge was avail
able to human beings in their mortal state. Overwhelming
as it is on first impression, a single reading of this human
and cosmic creation poem-the most profound, most
difficult, most beautiful work I know-barely contains a
glimpse of its true riches. I still don’t understand a tenth of
it, but I know there’s nothing to fear.
“A
Second Chance”
Charles Green (AGoa)
Pride and Prejudice, in addition to being the funniest novel
I’ve ever read, also showed me the importance of giving
books a second chance. I first read the novel in loth grade,
and failed to see its point. Re-reading it during my junior
year in college, I was amazed at how accurately Jane Austen
captured aspects of myself in the main characters. I could
see that some days I’m Elizabeth Bennet, witty and
charming, while at other times I’m like Mr. Darcy, haughty
and isolating, and every once in a while. I’m a silly, shame
less flirt like Lydia Bennet.
{The College.
“The Wonder of Life”
Valerie Pawlewicz (A89)
A book that affected my life-although I didn’t know it at the
time-was a garden book called Making Things Grow by
Thalassa Cruso. She was a British gardener who hved in the
Boston area and in the 1960s and 70s had a gardening TV
show called-ta da!-“Making Things Grow.” In a bunch of
books my mother sent me when cleaning her house out about
IO years ago, in the middle of my busy life, I found this book
about keeping houseplants ahve. At the time I was working at
the Smithsonian, commuting, putting in intense hours, and
not quite content with the frenetic way of hfe in the Big City.
That fateful, rainy Saturday morning, I wanted something
to read, and on a whim, I opened this book. Inside I discov
ered a world of calm, of green living things, and good, plain
common sense. What surprised me was her delightful prose
style. It was like having breakfast with a good, enjoyable
friend. She would tell a story, give plant characteristics as if
they were people, throw in details about growing up in a
great house in England before World War II, explain what
she looks for in buying plants from a local nursery, and share
personal failures (growing gardenias) as well as successes
(growing almost anything else).
The reason that this book “changed my hfe,” as I see it
now, was that it inspired me to learn more about gardening.
I don’t grow many houseplants, and I don’t really work that
hard to maintain the ones that I do. But I have learned to
acknowledge my love of being outdoors and being with green
things as a worthwhile way to spend my time and earn my
money. I had always thought that working outdoors and
gardening was for other people, a waste of my education
beneath a “true” career. During the next 10 years, I took
courses on the side, experimented in my garden on sunny
weekends, and read more gardening books on rainy week
ends. Along the way I found other good garden writers like
Geoffrey Hamilton, Penelope Hobhouse, and Michael Dirr,
who add as much personality as information when they write.
Eventually, four years ago, I turned to gardening full-time
and now run my own personal gardening business, working
only with private residential clients to help them to infuse
something of themselves in their private gardens. I came to
gardening late in life, being too busy to realize it was okay to
be happy while I was busy. Now I have a business that is hard
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�{books}
19
''From all sides, friends offered su^esfions ofbooks to read...
Christopher Sullivan {A89)
work but a delight. It involves my
brain and body equally. It requires
patience, research, labor, focus, art,
and lots of techne. I also work closely
with my clients to introduce them to
the wonder of life growing right
outside their door. For some clients, I
am the most regular person in their
lives-someone who knows about
their worries, their careers, their
doctor’s visits, their dogs, their chil
dren, their security codes, their birth
days, their art, and their opinions
about the upcoming election. I am
the only person in the lives of my
clients who knows their outdoor
spaces as well as their personalities.
I don’t think I’ve actually read the hook in years-I just
remember the feeling I got the first time I opened it up and
became involved in her story. Now I feel I am living the book.
Thalassa would like that.
“Attending the Particular”
Alan D. Hornstein (AGI86)
Reading Vico’s Nuova Scienza in a preceptorial with [tutor]
Howard Fisher transformed my way of thinking. As the
product of American legal education and with a career as a
law professor, I had generally approached matters through
the manipulation of ahstractions-a thoroughly conceptual
approach not only to the life of the mind, hut to life itself.
Vico’s (and Fisher’s) insistence on attending the particular,
in all its singularity, was a revelation-one that I continue to
struggle with, hut which has also enriched my life and
understanding enormously.
“A Very
Metaphysical Place”
Christopher Sullivan (A89)
Following several sudden and unexpected deaths of people
close to me, I fell into a miserable depression revolving
around the fear of my own mortality and the mortality of
those dearest to me. From all sides, friends offered sugges
tions of hooks to read, people to talk to, workshops to take.
Law professor Alan Hornstein (AGI86)
FOUND A REVELATION IN ViCo’s NVOVA
Scienza.
mind-hody work to do, and medica
tions to take to try to lessen the hitter
sting of the depression. I read Viktor
Frankl, the Dalai Lama, Epictetus,
Lin Yutang, and so many more, hut
for months, no matter what I tried,
no matter how much wisdom from
throughout the ages I exposed myself
to, that grim, immohilizing fear held
its horrible grip.
Then in a slow process of distrac
tion that led me from gym workouts
to reading mystery novels and almost
everything in between, someone
recommended yet another book, one I’d never thought I
would read, though I’d heard of it-even thought of as a
joke!-foryears.
Surprisingly, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
offered the first chink in the depression’s armor that finally
let me begin to climb out and get back to my life. After
several chapters of vague and business-oriented ideas, in
chapter 15, he shifts into a very metaphysical place.
Addressing the fear of death, he reminds the reader that as
we learned in elementary physics, the entire world is made
up of only matter and energy. According to the concept of
conservation of energy, one can transform into the other, but
neither can be created or destroyed.
Suddenly my years of worrying and wondering about soul
and afterlife and reincarnation and death came to a peaceful
resolution. At death, I realized, whatever energy makes each
of us the person that we are loses its connection to our body,
but it is not lost or destroyed. From there, all those ideas
about “we are all one with the Universe” or “God is within”
or that life and death are an unending cycle came, finally,
into a clearer focus. Exactly what becomes of that energy,
that “soul,” remains a mystery, but I found it hugely
comforting to recognize that simple, physical, scientific
truth. And I’m immeasurably grateful.
{The College. St. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{Musical Tutors}
MUSIC
in the
KEY OF LIFE
BY Deborah Spiegelman
AND Rosemary Harty
ach Friday afternoon,
after the last elass ends,
Annapolis tutors Carl
Page and Eric Stoltzfus
join with seven students
to sing sacred music.
From the Pendulum Pit,
the voices of Primum
Mobile send the beautiful
sounds of Palestrina’s “Missa Papae Marcelli”
resonating through Mellon Hall, a gift to
everyone else within earshot.
Around lunchtime on the Fishpond Placita,
Santa Fe tutor Cary Stickney (A75) may be
found opening his guitar or banjo case, ready to
play and sing with any music lover who has the
time and inclination. Spontaneous dancing is
always welcome, too.
Just as conversation spills out of the classroom
at St. John’s College, music enlivens and unites
our college communities beyond the bounds of
freshman chorus and sophomore music tuto
{The College-
rial. Many talented tutors help make it possible:
through formal groups and polished perform
ances, community sing-a-Iongs and Collegium,
jam sessions, and musical mentorship to
students. The college is fortunate to have gifted
pianists in Elliott Zuckerman in Annapolis and
Peter Pesic in Santa Fe. On Wednesday evenings
in Annapolis, Peter Kalkavage leads a commu
nity chorus of students, staff, and tutors emeriti
that practices all year for a spring performance.
In Santa Fe, Phil LeCuyer and John Cornell
collaborated on “To Strike the World,” a
performance of orchestral music and spoken
word that brought together musical tutors and
students last December.
Among the tutors profiled in these pages are
individuals who found their passion for music
later in life and those who had early and exten
sive training. Several perform regularly as part
of professional music groups. Some compose,
one won’t sing, but all consider music one of the
great passions of their lives.
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{MuSICAlTuTORS}
2,1
"There s this tension between the intellectual and this wacko rock bass-playing
side ofme thatsjust been something Tve decided to negotiate all my lije. ”
Henry Higuera
It’s only rock ’n
{The College
roll but
St John’s College • Fall 2008 }
Henry Higuera likes
it.
�{MusicalTutors}
Long Live Rock______________________________
Henry Higuera
play lead guitar on some of his favorite rock songs. When he came
to St. John’s, he sometimes joined up with students who put on loud
concerts in the Coffee Shop. Marriage (to tutor Marilyn Higuera,
current director of the Annapolis Graduate Institute) and children
(Adam and Helen), along with the busy life of a tutor, meant his
instruments were often at rest in the basement.
Having a steady group of musicians and singers at the college
(with various membership over the years) has given him more
opportunities to play, and he’s always eager to strap on the Gibson
or the Fender for a concert.
“There’s this tension between the intellectual and this wacko
rock bass-playing side of me that’s just been something I’ve decided
to negotiate all my life,” says Higuera. “It’s so intense, it’s so loud.
The only thing more exciting than being at a concert is being
on stage five feet in front of your own large amphfier. You can see
how it can get in the way of other more refined pursuits you have in
your life.”
In tutor Henry Higuera, a rock star lurks beneath the surface.
Just watch him strum his Fender Telecaster, even when it’s not
plugged in, and you’U get a hint that here is a man on the verge of
rocking out.
In 1966, Higuera bought a bass guitar. (His first instrument was a
ukulele.) With his neighborhood friends in Evanston, Illinois, he
formed a garage band called the Knight Lords. They played songs
hke “Louie, Louie” and “Gloria” on second-hand instruments and
with amplifiers heldtogetherby duct tape. After listening to Beatles
songs on his transistor radio, Higuera learned that rock music
opened up to him in a whole new way when he first heard songs from
the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane on a good stereo.
“The songs to me sounded a million times better, and what made
the difference was the bass,” Higuera explains. “The bass sings
—Rosemary Harty
underneath the melody. It’s not obvious, but it gives the song its
structure.”
Fantasy for Violin____________________________
In junior high, Higuera invested $300 in his first quality bass, a
Christine Chen
Gibson EB-3. The Knight Lords never made the big time, but they
played teen clubs, parties and junior high dances. They were an
Santa Fe tutor Christine Chen’s proclivity for music became
enthusiastic group, Higuera remembers. “But we would have made
evident when she was quite young. Her instrument of choice was
a lot more money if any of us had been able to sing,” he says.
a Quaker Oats cereal box and her bow a ruler. “It was in the key of
Music followed Higuera to Cornell, where he earned his under
granola,
” she says ofher makeshift violin.
graduate degree. He joined a band of hippies that played in Ithaca’s
most popular bars, and Higuera was good enough to
consider pursuing music as a career. But watching
musician friends eke out a meager existence and
traveling from gig to gig made it all seem less
romantic. “It was really part of my identity, and I had
to rework that,” he says. “After junior year, I wasn’t
playing, but I always had the bass with me.”
At the University of Toronto, as a doctoral student
in political philosophy, he played music for fun with
housemates and friends. One of his professors was
Allan Bloom, author of The Closing ofthe American
Mind. “That book was based on an article he wrote
for the National Review, and I was his ‘big expert’ on
rock,” says Higuera.
Higuera tried to make a case that rock ’n roll was
about more than just sex and drugs; it could play a
powerful role in political reform. But by the time
Bloom began working on the book, Higuera was
“dethroned” as Bloom’s rock expert.
Santa Fe tutors David Bolotin and Christine Chen have performed together
Higuera was teaching at Dickinson College when SEVERAL times AT THE COLLEGE, BOTH AS A DUO AND AS PART OF A TRIO, IN WORKS FROM
he bought the Telecaster, a six-string that lets him Bach to Shostakovich.
{The College-
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�{MusicalTutors}
Equipped with a more responsive instrument, she soon
embarked on a 13-year journey through the competitive world of
adolescent classical musicians. Under the tutelage of Eudice
Shapiro at the University of Southern California School of Music,
Chen seriously considered a career in music. “I thought long and
hard about conservatory, but I decided I’d rather have a liberal
arts degree,” she says.
While Chen earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at
Wellesley, Harvard, and Yale, her music remained a central part of
her life. She played in the first violin sections of the Yale
Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
Her teachers included Nancy Cirillo of the New England Conser
vatory and Sidney Harth, former concertmaster of the Chicago
Symphony and professor at the Yale School of Music. As a doctoral
student at Cambridge University, Chen helped found the Rusalka
String Quartet.
When she spotted an ad for St. John’s tutor positions, Chen
thought, “this is really perfect for me.” That was more than three
years ago, and Chen has successfully fit music into the challenging
work of being a tutor at St. John’s. Weaving in the musical context
during seminar discussions is “a way of connecting disparate
parts of learning,” Chen suggests, adding with a laugh, “I prob
ably [do it] to an annoying extent.”
Chen has discovered that a surprising number of tutors play an
instrument, including a group that regularly plays bluegrass
music. Ensemble playing involves the “necessity of being better
attuned to the other musicians,” she observes. Along with
colleagues including David Bolotin, Chen played the viohn in the
2007 performance “To Strike the World.” Bolotin introduced her
to a 70-year-old cellist in town, which led to the formation of an all
female string quartet with seemingly unbounded energy for
music. In addition, Chen will soon appear with The Serenata of
Santa Fe, a professional chamber music group.
In a setting where the emphasis is on the mind, Chen finds it
refreshing to be able to step into the realm of music.The college,
she adds, has given her the encouragement and support to
perform in addition to teaching. “Music reminds me that there’s
something else besides what I’m doing,” she says. “It is deeply
important that a college has a sustained musical life.”
a3
“I always told myself that I’d return to the piano,” Bolotin says.
He began piano lessons at age 6. Music followed him to college,
but slowly receded to the background as lessons became increas
ingly sporadic. Engaging with academia more fully, Bolotin
thought his piano-playing days were over.
Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Bolotin earned a
doctorate at New York University and lectured in classics at Yale
before joining the Annapolis faculty in 1974. In 1981, he trans
ferred to the Western campus.
Four years ago, music reentered his life. “I saw an ad for a
digital piano, and then suddenly I had one,” Bolotin says. He
played casually for about eight months until a student showed
him a book of 17th-century songs. While Alexis Segal (SF05) set
about mastering the vocals, Bolotin accompanied her. Thor
oughly hooked, he resumed his long-discarded practice of regular
lessons and loved it.
Musical performance also found its way into a seminar on
Chekhov. When the discussion focused on a passage the class
found depressing, a student suggested that “in a musical, this
would be the cue for an upbeat song.” Bolotin challenged the
young man to write the piece. The student not only wrote it, but
also found a fellow student to present the song.
Bolotin has been taking lessons for more than three years from
Jacquelyn Helin, an internationally known classical pianist and
teacher who lives in Santa Fe. Since the auspicious digital-piano
purchase, Bolotin has acquired an upright piano as well as a
grand. “Two years ago, we remodeled our house to make a sound
proof piano studio out of our former one-car garage,” he adds.
What Bolotin really enjoys about music is the intimacy of
performing with others. Ensemble playing-collaborating with
both students and fellow tutors-is a source of deep satisfaction.
He was Segal’s accompanist in a recital this spring. “ She wouldn’t
take ‘no’ for an answer,” Bolotin recalls. Most recently, he joined
tutor Christine Chen and recent graduate Susanne Ristow (SF06)
in July in a performance of Brahms and Haydn piano trios in the
college’s Great Hall. “I’m so lucky to have a community to make
music with and a hall to do it in,” Bolotin says.
— Deborah Spiegelman
Deacon Blues
— Deborah Spiegelman
T. Andrew Kingston
Piano Man
David Bolotin
When Santa Fe tutor David Bolotin talks about music, his voice is
unmistakably reverential, which might have something to do
with his recent reunion with music after a hiatus of nearly 40
years.
{The College-
Four years ago, while awaiting the arrival of his moving van and
family from the East Coast, T. Andrew Kingston occupied himself
much as any new musician on the scene would: he found a blues
club in Santa Fe and became a fixture there-at least until it was
time to unload the truck.
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�2'4
{MusicalTutors}
Raised in Chicago and Washington,
D.C., Kingston came to music through
classical training on the piano and his
parents’ influence. Both amateurs, his
father favored the church organ and his
mother lyric opera. In high school,
Kingston played various instruments in
school bands.
He credits two people with bringing
him to jazz; Miles Davis, whom he heard
in concert in 1981, and a teacher at
Kenyon College who was a jazz pianist.
Resuming regular piano lessons,
Kingston began exploring what many jazz
musicians insist is true American clas
sical music. During his junior year abroad
in Padua, Italy, he traveled with a local
blues group. At Boston University, his
graduate studies in an interdisciphnary
program combining the philosophy of
aesthetics and music were largely
financed by his blues and jazz gigs around
town.
While at BU, Kingston learned of a pianist and teacher proficient
on a wide range of instruments. Three years after putting his name
on Charlie Banacos’s waiting fist, Kingston began lessons. “He is a
great jazz educator,” Kingston says, and in a month of lessons, “he
changed my fife.”
Ultimately, the hard fife of a full-time musician wasn’t for him.
Instead Kingston returned to Kenyon to teach before becoming a
tutor at St. John’s in Santa Fe, where his musical and teaching fives
are well integrated. “Tfie seminar is like jazz interpretation,”
Kingston notes, sharing an observation made by a fellow tutor. The
greatest jazz musicians are those who can listen and work with
others, similar to seminar in that individual contributions create a
whole piece. Like jazz, the seminar moves along on interpretation
and improvisation.
Musical expression is a regular feature of campus fife, including
botfi scfieduled performances and spontaneous jam sessions.
Kingston offers piano lessons informally and has helped form a
number of jazz groups, alternately composed of students, tutors,
and local musicians. “There is a chance to work with the students
who are here,” he says, noting that an instrument that might not
fit, strictly speaking, into an ensemble presents an opportunity for
some innovative arranging.
Kingston has kept his hand in the music scene in Santa Fe (his
latest endeavor: salsa gigs), and is grateful for the freedom to play
{The College-
Like jazz, the seminar moves along on
INTERPRETATION AND IMPROVISATION, SAYS
Santa Fe
tutor T.
Andrew Kingston.
music at his own pace. “Music is a way of
talking about being human.”
— Deborah Spiegelman
Songbird
Judy Seeger
Judy Seeger is always singing.
The Annapolis tutor sings at home,
she sings in the car, she sings with
colleagues and students in formal
groups and impromptu gatherings.
When she gave the Commencement
speech in 2006, it was natural for her
to urge everyone to join her in a chorus
of “The Water is Wide,” even though
she was struggling with laryngitis.
There is no occasion, Seeger believes, that can’t be made more
joyful by adding a song.
“My mother tells me that I sang before I talked,” says
Seeger. Her earliest memories are of singing in her family’s
Pittsburgh home with her father, a Gulf Oil executive who
loved to play the piano. Seeger sang while her father played
music from Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, and others from
a collection of songs stashed in the piano bench. “Not Bach,”
she says. “My father was not a fan of Baroque music.”
As a child, she studied the piano, but like her father, she
always preferred to play in accompaniment to a song. A love of
music brought Seeger together with her husband, Tony, a
member of a musical family (folk singing legend Pete Seeger is
his uncle). The two met as youngsters in New York City, and in
their teens, they both attended the Seeger family’s Camp
Killooleet, where campers sing folk music and traditional
songs all summer long. Seeger also learned to play the acoustic
guitar at the camp.
“Music was one of the things that brought us together, and
it’s one of the things we keep on doing together,” she says.
Seeger earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and master’s
and doctoral degrees in Romance Languages and Literature
from the University of Chicago. Her husband became an
ethnomusicologist. Together they spent nine years in Brazil
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�a4
{Musical Tutors}
Raised in Chicago and Washington,
D.C., Kingston came to music through
classical training on the piano and his
parents’ influence. Both amateurs, his
father favored the church organ and his
mother lyric opera. In high school,
Kingston played various instruments in
school bands.
He credits two people with bringing
him to jazz: Miles Davis, whom he heard
in concert in 1981, and a teacher at
Kenyon College who was a jazz pianist.
Resuming regular piano lessons,
Kingston began exploring what many jazz
musicians insist is true American clas
sical music. During his junior year abroad
in Padua, Italy, he traveled with a local
blues group. At Boston University, his
graduate studies in an interdisciphnary
program combining the philosophy of
aesthetics and music were largely
financed by his blues and jazz gigs around
town.
While at BU, Kingston learned of a pianist and teacher proficient
on a wide range of instruments. Three years after putting his name
on Charlie Banacos’s waiting list, Kingston began lessons. “He is a
great jazz educator,” Kingston says, and in a month of lessons, “he
changed my fife.”
Ultimately, the hard life of a full-time musician wasn’t for him.
Instead Kingston returned to Kenyon to teach before becoming a
tutor at St. John’s in Santa Fe, where his musical and teaching fives
are weU integrated. “The seminar is like jazz interpretation,”
Ki ngston notes, sharing an observation made by a fellow tutor. The
greatest jazz musicians are those who can listen and work with
others, similar to seminar in that individual contributions create a
whole piece. Like jazz, the seminar moves along on interpretation
and improvisation.
Musical expression is a regular feature of campus fife, including
both scheduled performances and spontaneous jam sessions.
Kingston offers piano lessons informally and has helped form a
number of jazz groups, alternately composed of students, tutors,
and local musicians. “There is a chance to work with the students
who are here,” he says, noting that an instrument that might not
fit, strictly speaking, into an ensemble presents an opportunity for
some innovative arranging.
Kingston has kept his hand in the music scene in Santa Fe (his
latest endeavor: salsa gigs), and is grateful for the freedom to play
{The College.
Like jazz, the seminar moves
along on
INTERPRETATION AND IMPROVISATION, SAYS
Santa Fe tutor T. Andrew Kingston.
music at his own pace. “Music is a way of
talking about being human.”
— Deborah Spiegelman
Songbird
Judy Seeger
Judy Seeger is always singing.
The Annapolis tutor sings at home,
she sings in the car, she sings with
colleagues and students in formal
groups and impromptu gatherings.
When she gave the Commencement
speech in aoo6, it was natural for her
to urge everyone to join her in a chorus
of “The Water is Wide,” even though
she was struggling with laryngitis.
There is no occasion, Seeger believes, that can’t be made more
joyful by adding a song.
“My mother tells me that I sang before I talked,” says
Seeger. Her earliest memories are of singing in her family’s
Pittsburgh home with her father, a Gulf Oil executive who
loved to play the piano. Seeger sang while her father played
music from Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, and others from
a collection of songs stashed in the piano bench. “Not Bach,”
she says. “My father was not a fan of Baroque music.”
As a child, she studied the piano, but like her father, she
always preferred to play in accompaniment to a song. A love of
music brought Seeger together with her husband, Tony, a
member of a musical family (folk singing legend Pete Seeger is
his uncle). The two met as youngsters in New York City, and in
their teens, they both attended the Seeger family’s Camp
Killooleet, where campers sing folk music and traditional
songs all summer long. Seeger also learned to play the acoustic
guitar at the camp.
“Music was one of the things that brought us together, and
it’s one of the things we keep on doing together,” she says.
Seeger earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and master’s
and doctoral degrees in Romance Languages and Literature
from the University of Chicago. Her husband became an
ethnomusicologist. Together they spent nine years in Brazil
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
J
�{MuSICALTuTORS}
living with the Suya Indians and studying the role of music and
song in their culture. In 1989, Tony joined the Smithsonian
Institution as Curator of the Folkways Collection and Director
of the Smithsonian’s Folkways Recordings, and Seeger joined
the St. John’s faculty.
The place of music at the college, both in and outside the
classroom, was one of the factors that drew Seeger to St.
John’s. “The whole college is a musical community,” says
Seeger. “Where else do all the freshmen sing?”
With Annapolis tutors Jon Tuck, Henry Higuera, and
Chester Burke, and Santa Fe tutor Cary Stickney, Seeger is a
part of a continuing tradition called “Begone, Dull Care,” a
musical gathering meant to brighten the winter doldrums.
The event started at the behest of Eva Brann, who was looking
for an event to brighten the dark days between winter and
spring breaks. After a few experimental years-including a
performance in the Pendulum Pit with Seeger, tutor George
Doskow and then-music librarian Tina Davidson, the gath
ering found its home in the Great Hall. A folksy, high-spirited
community sing-along that takes place every winter in
Annapolis, “it lifts people’s spirits,” Seeger says.
A song has the unfailing power to get people to put aside
their individual pursuits and come together. “We do music at
St. John’s the way we read books,” she says. “You read the
book by yourself, butthat’s not the end ofit-it’s when we come
together and talk about it that the magic happens. It’s the
same way with music.”
— Rosemary Harty
as
Galloping on the Guitar
Chester Burke (A74)
Playing the pedal steel guitar takes more than just musical
ability, says Annapolis tutor Chester Burke (A74). It’s a feat of
coordination and concentration. Burke was first drawn to the
challenge by the sounds he heard in country music: a happy
twang, a mournful wail, a nameless longing, all produced by
masters of the steel guitar. But there’s great risk involved: when
played poorly, the steel guitar can produce some of the most
wretched sounds known to the human ear.
The pedal steel guitar has two necks, each with 10 strings. It
has seven pedals and five knee levers, which control the volume
and pitch of the string. With his right hand, Burke plucks the
strings with two finger picks and a thumb pick; the left hand
(instead of pressing against the fret on a guitar) moves the steel
“bullet” up and down the frets to raise and lower the pitch of
the notes he’s plucking out on the strings. “It’s many instru
ments in one instrument, and it takes longer than most instru
ments to master,” he says.
Burke has been a serious musician since childhood, starting
with the violin, cello, and piano before setthng on the flute as
an object of serious devotion. After graduating from St. John’s
he studied music and performed in Paris. He returned to the
states to earn a master’s degree in performance at the Univer
sity of Michigan. Since 1982 when he returned to the college,
initially as lab director, he has played the flute professionally as
a member of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra.
The steel guitar began to intrigue him, especially when he
became the temporary custodian to colleague Walter Ster
ling’s treasured collection of classic country music. “In the
country venue, the steel guitar is the instrument that best
accompanies the singer,” Burke says. “It best imitates the
emotions.”
Determined to play the difficult instrument, Burke took
lessons from one of the best in the business. Buddy Charlton,
who played with Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours. He
invested la years in lessons and practice before he was
comfortable performing before an audience, but he began
carting the instrument along with his flutes for concerts and
special events.
Burke is now turning his efforts to the acoustic guitar. So
far, he’s not producing the sounds he so admires in Andres
Even
if she wanted to,
SINGING.
{The CoLLEGE-5f. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
Judy Seeger couldn’t keep from
�2.6
{MusicalTutors}
Segovia, but he’ll keep trying. “The sound of the guitar
intrigues me,” he says. “But it’s much harder to play than the
flute, and 1 feel I’ll never get very good at it.”
At St. John’s, every musician is fortunate to have receptive
audiences, whether it’s Purcell in the Great Hall or Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young on the quad. “As audiences go, the
St. John’s community listens very well-we make a practice of
hstening to one another with respect and appreciation, and it’s
a pleasure to perform here,” Burke says.
And while he’s game to try almost any instrument, Chester
Burke will never sing. “I’m terrified of singing,” he says.
— Rosemary Harty
Practice Makes Perfect
Stephen Houser
Santa Fe tutor Stephen Houser routinely powered his habit of
practicing the guitar into the early morning hours with peanut
butter-and-jeUy sandwiches-but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Growing up in Lakewood, Colorado, Houser started taking
piano lessons at the age of five, received a guitar for Christmas at
ten but “didn’t do much with it,” and played oboe in the juniorhigh band. A high-school friend with an electric guitar was his
first musical influence. Together, they bowdlerized several
guitars to create their Frankenstein, dubbed “the Astrocaster.”
Houser later upgraded to a better
electric guitar, with which he dutifully
annoyed his family. During his first
semester at St. John’s in Santa Fe, he
met a fellow student who played clas
sical guitar. “I was mesmerized,” he
recalls. “He helped me choose a clas
sical guitar to buy, and I practiced my
brains out.”
Houser saved up money from a job
with the U.S. Postal Service and
invested in a steel-string guitar, a 1943
Martin. He dedicated his summer
after freshman year to music, prac
ticing IO hours every day, and made a
habit of daily practice through college
and after graduation. Returning home
in the evenings from his day job as a
paralegal, he would eat his sandwiches
and practice until he couldn’t keep his
eyes open.
But Houser “had an itch” to pursue music more seriously. So
he enrolled in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where
he studied, took master classes, and played in a bluegrass band
until the money ran out. Returning to Santa Fe, he taught guitar
and “on a lark,” applied to the college as a tutor. He joined the
faculty in August 1983.
Houser has been at St. John’s ever since, except for sabbaticals
and the 1987-1990 academic years, when he pursued his
doctorate in philosophy at the University of Virginia. He tried to
keep up practice, but it became too difficult as he became more
involved in extracurricular obligations at the college.
Music, however, continued to play a role in class discussions.
“I rely on the common experience that students-sophomores,
juniors, and seniors-have with music,” he says. “Music was a
very important part of my St. John’s experience [as a student]. It
was natural and easy for musical things to happen.”
Houser has collaborated musically with students and tutors,
including playing the lute with young singers and accompanying
a tutor who played the recorder. More recently, he has been
concentrating on the violin-guitar repertoire and currently is
partnering with a viohnist from Santa Fe Pro Musica on “enough
pieces for a concert.” He is hoping to reach beyond the St. John’s
audience to make a contribution to the community.
Houser also understands the soothing quality of music, having
in the past played guitar for the residents of nursing homes and,
most importantly, for his mother as
she battled a form of bone-marrow
cancer. When his mother moved to
Alaska to be cared for by Houser’s
sister, he sold his 1943 Martin and
bought recording equipment to make
CDs of his guitar music for his
mother’s solace.
After 25 years at St. John’s, Houser
consciously integrates music into
his fife as a tutor. “I want to make
some space for my music,” he
explains. On sabbatical for the 20082009 academic year, he will be doing
just that.
—Deborah Spiegelman
Annapolis tutor Chester Burke (A74)
PLAYS flute for the BALTIMORE
Chamber Orchestra, but says the
guitar is the hardest instrument he
has tried to learn.
{The College
s?.
John’s College • Fall 2008 }
�{MuSICAlTuTORS}
Johnnie Song Book
”" hen a group of St. John’s tutors performs
for special events, these two Johnnie clas
sics are showstoppers.
Tutor Henry Higuera wrote the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic of Letters”
in the early 1990s, after someone
announced a contest for a new St. John’s anthem. Although the
contest never materialized, Higuera’s muse took over. “I was
idly amusing myself with various joke anthem ideas when all
these great lines from specific books started occurring to me,
all set to the tune of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’”
Higuera explains. “After about a year of this I showed it to some
seniors, and the rest is history.”
Tutor Jon TRick’s “The Western Canonball” was inspired by
both Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, published in 1995,
and a lively song about a train. “There was a certain pomposity
about the book that I found amusing,” says Tuck, who has
always liked Roy Acuff’s “The Wabash Cannonball.” “I put the
two of them together, and just started fiddling around with it.
My words are funnier when you know the original lyrics of
the song.”
Audiences love his booming, Opry-inspired delivery of the
song, but Tuck remains modest. He loves performing for college
events, big or small. “It’s a wonderful fringe benefit of being at
St. John’s,” he says. “You don’t have to be any good. I’m always
invoking what I call the Pyramus and Thisbe principle: the
worse you are the better you are.”
W
The Western Canonball
From the great Atlantic Ocean, from that European shore.
From Athens and Jerusalem come the authors we adore.
They’re dead and white and masculine, they’re known and loved
by all.
They’re the regular combination of the Western Canonball.
[Chorus: ] Oh, listen to the Logos, and listen to your heart.
As you glide through all the authors, through every lib’ral art.
Hear the mighty rush of the Freshmen, hear the lonesome
Seniors call,
“I’m traveling through the jungle on the Western Canonball.”
Now the Eastern books are dandy, say the folks in Santa Fe,
From the Vedas to Confucius, and Lao-Tse by the way.
But we won’t give up Plotinus, till the darkness round us fall.
No changes can be taken on the Western Canonball. [Chorus]
Here’s to our daddy classics, may their name forever stand,
And always be remembered, and taught throughout the land.
Though their earthly race may falter, in the West’s decline and
fall.
Still we never study history on the Western Canonball. [Chorus]
The Battle Hymn of the Republic of Letters
My mind has seen the glory of th’ Idea of the Good,
That it’s not the same as pleasure I have firmly understood.
And I wouldn’t take a tyrant’s power even if I could.
I’m marching from The Cave!
Marching, marching towards the sunlight.
Marching, marching towards the sunlight.
Marching, marching towards the sunlight.
I’m marching from The Cave!
The Fool conceives of God but thinks the faithful are deceived,
BUT a “Greatest Being” whose reality is not believed
Is a being than which something greater still can be conceived,
Which contradicts itself!
Ontological rebuttal.
Ontological rebuttal.
Faithlessness will ever scuttle,
For it contradicts itself!
The State of Nature’s character we know from good report
To be very solitary, nasty, brutish, poor and short.
So let’s give the Sovereign all our rights and every gun and fort.
And then we’ll all survive!
Ratify the Social Contract...
Deterministic limits on my freedom are erased
By the transcendental ideality of time and space.
So my atoms are determined but my will’s a different case.
It’s pure autonomy!
Hail the Transcendental Ego...
They came from old Chicago U. some sixty years ago;
As they rolled into the Program, you could hear the whispers
go:
“There’s Homer, Hobbes and Hegel, there’s Plato and St. Paul,
They came with Scott Buchanan on the Western Canonball.”
[Chorus]
I’ve been through all the steps in my phenomenology.
So it’s Master, Slave or in between it’s all the same to me.
I’m Unhappy and I’m Conscious so I’m absolutely free.
I’m fully synthesized!
I’ve undergone the Dialectic...
{The College -
27
John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�2,8
{Alumni Voices}
The Secret Life of a Roller Derby Queen
Dressing Up and Acting Out on a Saturday Night
BY Jane McManus (A93)
it was my first night scrim
maging. I was part of a
visiting roller derby team in
an ancient skating rink
called Roller Magic. The
women there had names like
Bleeding Rainbow and Pinky Swears, and I
knew once we got started they were going
to try their hardest to knock me off my
skates and onto the polished wood floor.
And as much as I had butterflies, I
wanted to get at them first.
My 5-year-old daughter was at the snack
bar, playing with some of the other kids
tagging along with moms, and a few
fathers, tattooed or nose-ringed, casually
watched over them.
First two-minute jam, I was a capable
blocker. I can do this, I thought, and I
rammed into Pinky. Once I got comfort
able, one of the veterans threw me the
jammer helmet cover, meaning I was the
only one who could score points for the
team. The whistle blew, and I cut through
the pack of skaters quickly and cleanly,
beating the other woman at the spot.
I skated out fast and glanced at the tables to
see Jean jumping up and down.
“Go, Mommy, go!”
I knew I was going to like roller derby
before I pitched the story to the newspaper
I write for. The Journal News in the New
York City suburbs. I’ve worked as a sports
writer for the last to years, covering most
sports from amateur to professional. Some
I try, some I like better than others. I loved
roller derby from the start: the physicality
of it, the speed and, let’s face it, the
fishnets, I joined the local league. Suburbia
Roller Derby, and adopted a name a sports
writer can live with-Lesley E. Visserate.
I got an e-mail from longtime sports broad
caster Lesley Visser after I told her. Subject
In ordinary life, Jane McManus (A93), on the right in this promotional poster, is a jour
line: “How are we doing?”
nalist AND the mother OF TWO LITTLE GIRLS. On SATURDAY NIGHTS, SHE BECOMES LeSLEY E.
Visserate, roller derby queen.
Some background on me. I am in my,
ahem, 30s and I live in the New York
suburbs. I have two little girls, ages 5 and 3.
Stockings, stripes and Jolly Rogers
But I love derby for the same reasons you
Although I got my first tattoo at age 19, you
colliding in a tangle of wheels and limbs. I
can find features on the sport in any news
wouldn’t know about it unless you work out
like the theater of it, and the fact thatpaper lucky enough to have a hometown
at my gym or know me really, really well. So
before
the crowd and the DJs at a public
league:
it
’
s
sex
and
violence
in
one
sporty
I’m not the usual derby demographic on
bout-it’s just a group of women practicing
package.
the surface.
T
SATURDAY. JUNE 28 - 7pm
{The College-
St. John’s College - Fall 2008 }
�{Alumni Voices}
for months on a dusty sport court at the
police gym in Yonkers, drenched with sweat
hy the end of the night.
For me and for a lot of women who I play
with, roller derhy means getting out of the
nest, out of the life that has been made
comfortable. Out of the world of white
collar workers and academia, out of
affluence and covering other people’s
achievements. For a night, it’s my chance to
be cheered, to dress up and act out.
In the last five years, roller derby has
attracted thousands of women. And, in an
age when the WNBA has to beg for the
insignificant coverage it gets, women in
ponytails and skates get the front page of
the sports section. It reminds me of the
mid-1980s, when a women’s basketball
team had players dress in unitards to titil
late the fans.
I am a basketball player first, even now,
so that double standard irks me. But I don’t
blame derby for being sexy. Wlien she bats
her pretty eyes at me, it’s hard to stay mad.
American audiences still have a hard
time with women and sports. Tennis has
short skirts, so it gets a pass. Softball might
have lesbians, so that’s scary. Volleyball
players are in bikinis, which is awesome.
Just like in life, pretty athletes get the
coverage-why, hello, Danica Patrick! Who
are you wearing?
Given what I do for a living. I’ve given
this some thought. I also noticed that it was
really hard to find a women’s basketball
league nearby. After the passage of Title IX
in 1973 and the millions of women who
started playing sports, I assumed there
would be legions of women playing basket
ball once I got out of St. John’s in 1993.
I’m still waiting.
''Although Igot myfirst
tattoo at age ig, you
wouldn i know about it
unless you work out at
my gym or know me
really, really well So Im
not the usual derby
demographic on the
surface.
‘7 sat on the chicken sandwichfor the go-minute
drive home, shifting uncomfortably in my seat the
whole way I thought about what I was doing—
wedgingfrozen meat under my tailbone—and
whether it was really a sensible decisionfor me to
play a sport like this. ”
And so are a lot of soccer players,
lacrosse players-in fact, most anyone who
played a team sport. Adult women’s leagues
are few and far between in my area just
north of New York City. I did a story on this
a year ago, and I actually sat down and
counted, calling up leagues and recreation
departments and talking to women who
once played a sport in high school.
You want to know why so many women
run? It’s because there aren’t a lot of other
options, and it’s easy to schedule. I’ve
talked to women who hate running, but
hate being inactive just slightly more.
Some of those women come over to the
dark side. Kimberly O’Leary, a woman who
goes by Vixen Von Bruisen on Suburbia,
played seriously in high school. You can see
it from the way she leads practice, very hard
physically, but fun.
As much fun as it is put on a flirty
uniform on the Saturday nights we hold our
bouts at E.J. Murray’s Memorial Rink in
Yonkers, there is a ton of work leading up
to it. We are a young league, just a year old,
and we are still learning. Some of our
players come from other leagues and could
mop up the court with us rookies, but it
really is a cooperative environment where
we try to help each other get better at the
basic skills.
My learning curve is slow. I have a
competitive streak, and I want to be the
best player out there immediately, which I
definitely am not. I throw my elbows, which
is just one of the illegal habits I have. There
have been nights I’ve been so frustrated
with myself that I wanted to quit, and other
nights when I wondered if I was insane.
In early February, I was blocking Jeri
Fling’her (a mother of two and health tech
nician who lives in Connecticut). I was a
little off balance but thought I had her.
I missed her and fell backwards, slamming
my tailbone on the floor. It hurt, but I
told myself to get the $ *#% up and finish
the jam.
{The College -St. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
After practice, I drove to a gas station in
a crappy part of town and asked, through
the bulletproof glass, for a frozen sandwich.
The guy tried to sell me a refrigerated Hot
Pocket but I said, “No, it has to be solid
ice.” Just then my teammate Black Star
Heroine pulled up in a station wagon to ask
if I was OK-a woman in a sketchy neighbor
hood wearing fishnets-and I paid for a
chicken sandwich.
I told her what happened and that I was
in a lot of pain.
“Oh, that happened to me, too,” Black
Star said. “It’s probably going to wake you
up for the next few nights.”
I sat on the chicken sandwich for the 30minute drive home, shifting uncomfortably
in my seat the whole way. I thought about
what I was doing-wedging frozen meat
under my tailbone-and whether it was
really a sensible decision for me to play a
sport like this.
I did wake up in pain. I popped Advils. I
couldn’t drive my stick shift for weeks. It is
a solid six months later, and my tailbone
still aches. You know it’s the one bone they
can’t do anything for when it breaks?
Still, I was back at practice the next
week.
Call it my midlife crisis. I’m staving off
the creep of mediocrity. I had my lame old
tattoo redone in brilliant colors and
invested in fishnets of every variety. My
body has emerged from the years of preg
nancy and nursing, wonderful in their own
way, but over.
I have abs again.
This might not last forever. I’m covering
the New York Jets for the first time this
season, and I’m aware that I could get an
injury tomorrow that causes my little hobby
to intrude on my real life. But I will savor
my tenure as a roller girl while I can.
�30
{Bibliofile}
Ee, tutor Ben Kraus had a trunk fuU of
Marvel comics. I was always moving
between the trunk of comic books and the
great books.”
Sharp Teeth
Toby Barlow (SF88)
HarperCollins, aoo8
A lover’s revenge takes on satisfying and
creepy possibilities in Toby Barlow’s darkly
humorous thriller, Sharp Teeth. Early in the
story, set in the sprawl! ng neighborhoods of
Los Angeles, a certain “She” muses about a
failed romance with yet another lover. “She”
finds comfort on the shoulder of Lark, a
successful attorney, werewolf pack leader,
and long-time friend. As they have a latenight chat Lark promises her something that
will change her “completely...with it comes
a certain power.” Instead of offering another
glass of wine. Lark slices open his forearm
and invites her to mingle her blood with his.
By morning “She” wakes up as “her own
brand of beast,” a werewolf in Lark’s pack.
Sharp Teeth is a romantic thriller that
threads multiple plot lines teeming with
rival gangs of lycanthropes, high-stakes card
games, dog traffickers and catchers, and
organized crime in the seething underbelly
of Los Angeles. In blank verse that jumps
like rap music, Barlow dances between
human consciousness and the musings of
lycanthropes. With almost scientific
authority Barlow sifts through the centuries,
describing how small packs survived, biding
their time, roaming the wilderness and
surviving by killing “men that no one would
miss.” Rest assured, Barlow chants, despite
technology and surveillance, “the blood
sugar fever still survives.” Barlow dispels the
myths about how humans transform into
lycanthropes: “It’s not the full moon. That’s
as ancient and ignorant as any myth. The
blood just quickens with a thought... So that
one can self-ignite...becoming something
rather more canine.”
Unlike popular science fiction stories in
which aliens inhabit human bodies (revealed
when one is face-to-face with their green
reptilian eyes) there are no clues-only
surprises-as to who is and isn’t a werewolf
in Sharp Teeth. “Even the werewolves do not
recognize another werewolf,” says Barlow.
Yet what makes the novel so gripping is not
so much the strangeness of the mysterious
crossover into a fycanthrope that characters
like Lark deftly navigate. Rather it is the
human struggles-the beast that resides
within each of us-the desires, rages, loves,
competitions, that makes the book a
page turner.
“A classic werewolf fears the transforma
tion and the deeds he might do as a beast.
—Patricia Dempsey
Racing Odysseus:
A College President
Freshman Again
Becomes a
Roger H. Martin
University of California Press, 2008
deeds he will not remember; but my were
wolves, like humans, are wholly conscious,”
says Barlow. They remember their blood
thirsty deeds, and like us, they have long
ings, regrets, dreams, and heartbreaks.
Sharp’s Teeth is populated with hip char
acters such as a persistent LAPD detective, a
blonde surfer-chick (who is also a werewolf),
a Hispanic meth manufacturer, and Cutter
and Blue, bridge tournament finalists who
just happen to be werewolves in Lark’s pack.
These lycanthropes are clever. So is Mr.
Venable, a mysterious sage that Barlow says
“pays homage to an old tutor at St. John’s,
Bruce Venable. He was a man out of time,
a dichotomy, and a tremendous amount of
fun. Like my tutor, Mr. Venable in the book
embraces fife in all its highs and lows.”
Barlow, an executive creative director at
an advertising agency in Detroit, didn’t plan
on writing a book. But
several years ago when
he was living in a
Chicago hotel room, an
article on a dogcatcher
caught his eye. “I
needed something to
pass the time and at a
certain point the char
acters came alive.”
Barlow did intend for
Sharp Teeth to be visu
ally rich, just like the
comic books he discov
ered at St. John’s.
“When I got to Santa
{The Colleges?.
John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
When he was 61 years old, and then still
the president of Randolph-Macon College,
Roger Martin decided to become a
freshman again-at St. John’s College.
Having survived melanoma against
tremendous odds, Martin was looking to
find new perspective and new challenges
when he joined the freshman class in the
fall of 2004. He sat in on freshman
seminar, became a member of the crew
team, and even attended waltz parties in
the Great Hall.
In this honest and deeply personal
memoir, he chronicles his journey from a
life in which he was an over-controlling,
efficient time manager to a life in which he
became a student immersed in the liberal
arts. At St. John’s, Martin writes, he redis
covered the art of questioning, conversa
tion, and contemplation. He shares his
great admiration for St. John’s students
and tutors, and has special words of praise
for Athletic Director Leo Pickens (A78),
whom Martin got to know well as the harddriving coach of the St. John’s crew team.
Toward the end of his stay at St. John’s,
Martin wrote: “I have arrived at seminar
15 minutes early...I am finally enjoying
myself. I’m enjoying being a member of the
crew. I’m enjoying reading the Great
Books. I’m enjoying hanging
out in the Coffee Shop and
meeting students. I’ve attained
nirvana.”
Gumbo Tales: Finding
My Place at the
New Orleans Table
Sara Roahen (SF94)
W.W. Norton, 2008
There are as many gumbos in
Louisiana as there are accents
writes Sara Roahen in her book.
Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place
�{Bibliofile}
at the New Orleans Table. But in New
Orleans her favorite gumbo is “as thick as
a cypress swamp in flavor.” In post-Katrina
New Orleans, Roahen finds another reason
to savor gumbo-as a symbol for the city’s
resilience.
Roahen lived in the Crescent City for
several years, while her husband attended
medical school. In August 2005, Hurri
cane Katrina disrupted their lives and
forced a move to Philadelphia, but Roahen
frequently returned to New Orleans to
taste gumbo and other favorites.
The result is not a compendium of
recipes, but essays about food and place.
She cobbles together aromas and flavors,
conversations with patrons at local
eateries, oral histories, and food history in
this personal celebration of the city’s
culture. Roahan explores the wonders of
familiar dishes such as po boys, red beans
and rice, crayfish bisque, coffee and
chicory, beignets-“naked or sugared”-as
well as dishes introduced by the city’s
varied cultures, including Vietnamese pho
and Sicilian braciolone.
Roahen and her husband, Mathieu
DeSchutter (SF94) are now back in
New Orleans.
Violent Video Game Effects on
Children and Adolescents:
Theory, Research and Public
Policy___________________________
Craig Anderson, Douglas Gentile (A86),
Katherine Buckley
Oxford University Press, aoo8
Do violent video games contribute to aggres
sive and violent behavior? Douglas Gentile
(A86) has coauthored an insightful explo
ration of this question that incorporates
both scientific research and pubhc policy in
an exploration of a possible link between
violent video games and aggression.
Gentile is a developmental psychologist,
assistant professor of psychology at Iowa
State University and director for the National
Institute on Media and the Family. Violent
Video Game Effects presents the results of
three studies that use various measures of
aggression and research on elementary, high
school, and college-age students. The
authors note that critics confuse the scien
tific question (Are there harmful effects?)
with the legal question related to First
Amendment rights. In the meantime, as the
debate rages on, the book offers tips for
choosing video games and a wealth of
What the Tutors Are Reading
Frank Pagano, Santa Fe: “I am revisiting
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. The novel
is not about the (late) ‘60s generation so
much as what they reacted against: the
perfect American, Roth’s Seymour Levov,
the Swede. Roth brings to life the all-Amer
ican boy, and shows why the baby boomers
chose to make him the enemy.”
David Levine (class of vjhy), Santa Fe: “I’m
just finishing Henry James’ The Princess
Casamassima, which is the first James
novel I’ve read. Published in 1886, it’s
about the fate of culture amidst the rise of
popular democratic movements.”
David Carl, Santa Fe: “Steven Pressfield’s
The Virtue of Warts a work of historical
adventure fiction based on the fife of
Alexander the Great, which gives a very
engaging fictionalized vision of the fife of
the great Macedonian general. Pressfield is
perhaps most famous for his novel Gates of
Fire, a fictional account of the Battle of
Thermopylae (before the comic book and
movie goo brought it to pop culture atten
tion). Pressfield’s portrayal of Alexander is
an inspiring vision of conflicted leadership,
perhaps even of the tension between
philosophy and politics.”
Nick Maistrellis, Annapolis: “I’m on
sabbatical leave so I have much more time
to read. I have read a novel named/ZZZ, by
Phillip Larkin who is a well-known English
poet. The novel is about a lower middle
class scholarship student at Oxford in 1940
and his attempts to fit into an upper-class
world. The novel is beautifully written and
quite moving. I’m also reading Out ofthe
Labyrinth, by Robert and Ellen Kaplan. It
{The College-
St. John's College ■ Fall 2008 }
31
resources on how to be an involved
consumer and citizen. Says Gentile, “The
media are far more powerful than we want to
admit, but we are far from powerless to
control the effects.”
The Theater of Insects___________
Jo Whaley, contributions by Linda Weiner
Chronicle Books, 2008
Santa Fe tutor Linda Weiner wrote the
primary essay for The Theater ofInsects, a
new book by Jo Whaley. Weiner’s identifi
cation of the insects accompanies Whaley’s
dazzling, theatrically-staged photographs
of butterflies, beetles, dragonflies and
other colorful bugs. The collaboration
resulted in a work that echoes the style of
natural history dioramas, and-thro ugh
Wiener’s contribution-offers a thoughtful
reflection on the intersection of art and
science. The Theater ofInsects, titled after
a 1658 work of the same name, is published
to coincide with a series of exhibitions
across the country, including the Photo
Eye Gallery (Santa Fe, N.M.), the National
Academies Keck Center Gallery and
National Academy of Sciences (both in
Washington, D.C.).-^
is the best book on teaching and learning
mathematics I have seen.”
SamKutler, class ofig54, Annapolis: '''The
Warriors, by J. Glenn Gray. He describes
many of the horrors of war and reflects on
them. My father was in the first World War,
and my childhood is steeped in memories
of the second World War. The day he
received his doctorate in philosophy. Gray
received a letter from President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt which began ‘Greet
ings.’ He found that all the philosophy he
had been studying no longer meant
anything to him because the war became
his whole world.”
Pamela Kraus, Annapolis: "Posthumous
Keats by Stanley Plumly. I have a long
standing interest in Keats, so I read a lot of
things by and about him. Plumly, who is a
poet and occasional essayist, has written a
reflective account of Keats as living on
through his fife, poems, and reputation. It’s
a lovely book.” dlk
�32
{Alumni Profile}
Seattle’s Philosopher Cop
Clark Kimerer (SC78)
BY Patricia Dempsey
the distant horizon but completely
here have been
misses the immediate threat.”
moments in his 25When making split-second
year career when
decisions, Kimerer can’t afford to
Seattle’s Deputy Chief
be contemplative. “It’s a time to
of Police Clark
stand watch. If you think too much,
Kimerer (SF78) has
you won’t survive.”
questioned his line of work. In
Kimerer honed his ability to
aoo6 when a Seattle gunman shot
make split-second decisions
several young adults at a rave dance
during stints as a patrol officer,
after-party and then pulled the
SWAT Team training officer, chief
trigger on himself, Kimerer and his
hostage negotiator, captain
boss. Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske,
charged with vice and narcotics,
were called to the scene. Kimerer
and today as head of emergency
had to share the grim news with the
preparedness for the city of
victim’s families, brief the media,
Seattle. After he joined the force as
and console the teenagers who were
a patrol officer 25 years ago, his
grieving for their friends. “It was
survival depended on being
one scene of human despair after
constantly alert and mindful
another over a six-hour period,”
because “the situation could
says Kimerer. “When it came time
degenerate instantly.” Kimerer
to walk through the scene, I turned
excelled at making critical deci
to Gil and said, ‘I’m not sure if I
sions under pressure and in 1985
want to walk through another
became a SWAT Training Officer
slaughter. I see my own kids every
and Team Member, handling lifetime I do.’”
and-death situations every day. He
“You have to do it,” Kerb kowske
trained “the guys [who] crash
told his deputy chief. “One, you
through the front doors, the
have in your life been devoted to
deadly force cadre [whose] goal
understanding this. Everything you
always is to save lives. I had to
have read and thought about the
create a curriculum dealing with
human endeavor to find out what is
these issues as well as post-trau
good in the world, you have devoted
matic stress syndrome. We were
yourself to. Two, you have to do it to
often faced with making a good
show the world that you care. And
choice among many bad options.”
three, you have to do it to show
Kimerer’s education at St. John’s
yourself that you care.”
“is a real conversation starter when
As Kimerer walked through the
In his 25-YEAR CAREER, Clark Kimerer (SF78) rose from
sitting in a roomful of pohce
grisly scene, trying to make sense
PATROL officer TO SECOND-IN-COMMAND OF ONE OF THE NATION’S
LARGEST POLICE FORCES. He’S GAINED A NATIONAL REPUTATION
chiefs.” He is a gifted leader who
of what his eyes were taking in, he
FOR HIS EXPERTISE IN EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS AND HOMELAND
studied at the FBI, Northwestern
thought of readings from Plato,
SECURITY.
University, and the Program on
Montaigne, Homer, and Hegel.
Negotiation at Harvard Law
“Snippets went sweeping through
School. He is a philosopher cop
my mind: What is good? How can
who reads voraciously and is as
you find sense in this kind of
Yet Kimerer is quick to note that deep
compassionate as he is rational about his
slaughter? How do you make peace with
reflection does not always have a place in
fellow human beings. Kimerer volunteers to
what is bad? If you don’t make peace, the
the line of duty. “Where do the readings not
help disabled adults, particularly the home
alternative is despair. Kierkegaard was
belong? They do not belong when there is a
particularly poetic in how he explored this.”
danger in thinking too much. In Moby-Dick, less, and embraces Oscar Romero’s libera
tion theology, which maintains that values
Each day Kimerer asks himself, “How do
Melville describes how the last person you
and ethics should be part of public policy.
these great works have a place in my small
want in the crow’s nest is someone ‘given to
Kimerer never loses sight of the irony that
life as a police officer? To make sense of the
unseasonable meditation’ up there with a
he has “one of the most unusual job
good is one way of dealing with the bad.”
copy of the Phaedo, because he’s looking at
T
{The College. 5t. John’s
College • Fall aooS }
�{Alumni Profile}
descriptions in civilization” and as deputy
chief, he uses “coercive force to keep law
and order.” As second in command of the
igth-largest municipal police department,
with a $aa6 million dollar annual budget
and 1,870 employees, he also investigates
cases, prevents human misery, and
“protects every citizen, day in, day out.”
Ultimately Kimerer is a public servant,
“bound by duty and responsibility, rather
than authority and prerogatives.”
Kimerer also oversees emergency
preparedness and homeland security for the
city of Seattle. Most city police departments
do not oversee large-scale emergency and
disaster response; however Seattle is a port
city and headquarters of the Microsoft
Corporation, a symbolic target for terrorist
threats. Seattle is also vulnerable to natural
disasters such as windstorms, landslides,
and earthquakes. In 2001 the Nisqually
Earthquake (magnitude 6.8) under the
Puget Sound caused over $200 million in
damage, and in 1999 the city’s New Year
celebration was cancelled when a man was
caught smuggling bomb-making materials
into the U.S. at Port Angeles, with plans to
stay in a hotel near the city’s famed Space
Needle. To keep abreast of emergency
response and terrorist-prevention methods,
Kimerer travels globally to meet with his
counterparts in various governments and
also advises the Major Cities Chiefs, an
organization for the chiefs of the nation’s 56
largest police and sheriff departments, on
such strategies. “Here in Seattle we have a
leading edge with data and communications
systems that are interdependent. All these
things help us to manage disaster.”
Just five years into his career, Kimerer
faced disasters of a different kind. He was
tapped from SWAT Team training to
become Chief Hostage Negotiator (a posi
tion he held from 1985 to 1992). In the midst
of a tense situation, Kimerer learned to
calmly persuade another human being by
hstening and asking questions. “It’s a real
devotion to understanding through
listening,” he explains. “Basicallyyou’re
trying to get a desperate person, someone
who’s taken over a hostage, on a wavelength
where you can reason with him or her.”
Kimerer has seen 300 to 400 such
scenarios in the past 25 years. “There are so
many causes-behavioral disorders, chem
ical disorders-but the one thing each
hostage taker has in common is singlemindedness, an inabihty to look beyond a
self-formulated view of a course of action to
be taken.” As a crisis negotiator, Kimerer
built a rapport. “I had to convey a profound
level of attention to the person. I had to try
to let the subject construct a larger
universe, one that had options and other
choices than suicide or murder.”
Just as the horrific shooting scene from
the rave after-party lingers in Kimerer’s
mind, so too does one hostage episode in
which a suicidal-homicidal man, obsessed
with his caregiver, barricaded himself and
the woman in a clinic. “In this incident,
you’re looking at a lot of things. Sometimes
that person wants to do what’s called
‘suicide by cop.’ He wants the cops to
kill him in front of someone that he’s
angry with; he wants to act out in a
murder/suicide in front of those who have
wronged him,” says Kimerer. “I’ve seen
hundreds of those cases.”
''How do these great
works have aplace in
my small l^e as apolice
officer? To make sense of
the good is one way of
dealing with the bad.
Clark Kimerer (SF78)
In this case, Kimerer took it step-by-step.
“The first thing I had to decide was who not
to involve, such as the ex-spouses and
psychiatrists. A lot of hostage takers have
issues with authority and even clergymen
can create problems. There are a lot of
sensitive spots and each situation is
different. The second thing I did was try to
draw the hostage taker out to assess his
personality by constantly asking question
after question: ‘Why would you want to put
her at risk?’ ‘Let’s not do anything until we
can keep exploring this. Let’s keep talking.’
‘Where’s the weapon?’ I get him to put the
weapon down, if possible. It’s a dialectical
exercise. It’s Socratic. We know what we
want the answer to be. It’s not an openended, unconditional exploration. But you
only see hostage takers change when
they learn for themselves and discover for
themselves.”
{The College -John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
33
Finally there was a breakthrough. Says
Kimerer, “The subject admitted that the
woman was I ike his mother and he was
abused as a kid. Here was a chance to make
contrasts, to point out that the woman he
was keeping as hostage and planning to
murder was not his mother. I could progress
the dialectic along, tell him, ‘This is not
your mother. Let’s talk about the differ
ences and start creating some separation
and some options.’”
Kimerer’s ability to walk such delicate
situations with skill and patience makes him
a natural for law enforcement. Yet even
though he grew up in a police family,
Kimerer had no intention of joining the
force. “My stepfather and my mother were
both assistant police chiefs. My mother was
the highest-ranking policewoman [in the
country]. When she retired, she became a
U.S. Marshall. My great uncle was a fire
chief, my brother was chief of police, so the
whole family was involved in the police
force. I grew up socializing with the chiefs,
so I was never intimidated by them or the
paramilitary culture.”
After he graduated from St. John’s,
Kimerer worked as assistant director of
admissions in Santa Fe and studied at the
Graduate Institute while his (now) wife Julie
Berg (SF79) finished as an undergraduate.
Today they live in Seattle and are raising
three teenage sons. When they first moved
to the city in 1979, Kimerer worked in a
small business for several years, but he
wasn’t fulfilled. As a Big Brother volunteer,
he got involved in a case where he worked
closely with police detectives who were on
the trail of a child molester. The criminal
was sent to prison for several years, and
Kimerer gained appreciation for the detec
tives’ dedication. “I discovered that I was
really excited about justice, even if it’s not
perfect justice,” he says.
From his 8th-floor office with views of the
Puget Sound, Kimerer recollects the
dangerous days of his career; “I lookback
on my life, my St. John’s education, the cop
who spent four years looking at great books
and argues vehemently for the rights of the
downtrodden. Is this unusual? I don’t know,
but this is where my life has gone.”
Today Kimerer is more likely to be
dashing to a meeting than to a crime scene.
“When I’m called out, that’s when it’s
really bad, like the mass killing at the rave
after-party. Otherwise, the biggest threat I
might encounter these days,” he says, “is a
paper cut.
�{Alumni Notes}
34
1935
Richard S. Woodman writes
that he is still enjoying life and
the practice of law in lovely
upstate New York.
1937
Jack Owens sent a poem to
The College:
Let the music and adventures
play on
Until we must give up the gift of
life
Then comes a place of mercy to
give us relief and liberation
from
The tangled web we have woven
in our busy life in wonderland
Full of good works, and vanities,
plus all the ills and pains
We leave all of these our history.
Our love will live forever
So sail away to this new place of
supreme rest and peace
Now when friends and family,
smell a new blown flower.
Or hear a joyful tune, or see a
graceful wild bird-they will
think of you
1943
“Peg and I have been married for
65 years,” writes BURTON
Armstrong. “And it all started
at St. John’s.”
1953
“In a spirit of reason and good
will,” Jennie Alexander has
put away her former name, John
D. Alexander, Jr., and gender.
She continues to perform with
the Baltimore Jazz Trio. Indeed
the trio once again performed at
McDowell Hall during
Homecoming. Alexander also
continues her study of American
vernacular post-and-rung chair
making and 17th century joinery.
She has recently co-authored an
article on chair making to be
published in American Furniture
2009.
1954
Bernard Jacoh completed
29 years as a law teacher at
Hofstra University Law School
and was granted emeritus status
as of the 2008-09 academic year.
1962
My profile in View, the journal of
the Library of American
Landscape History, describes me
as a “preservation hero” because
of my efforts at Hampton in
Maryland; Stan Hywet Hall and
Gardens in Akron, Ohio; and
Ford House in Grosse Point
Shores, Mich. I retired June 30,
2007,” writes JOHN FrankLIN
Miller.
Steve Almy writes: “My wife
and I are happily retired in
California, on the western slope
of the Sierras, a really beautiful
spot. I am the president of our
local chapter of the National
Active/Retired Federal
Employees Association,
Hangtown Chapter 1503, in
Placerville, Calif. Our goal is to
protect the earned benefits of
retirees from the federal
government. Congress has tried
to cut our pensions but we have
(so far) successfully resisted. We
were visited recently by another
class member, George Jones,
and his beautiful wife. I wonder
how many classmates realize we
have a genuine war hero among
us. I spend my time Ashing,
reading and gardening, very
relaxing after a lifetime spying
against our country’s enemies.
My wife is the world’s greatest
cook of food from the Middle
East and Southeast Asia, where
we lived for so many years, so I
am constantly fighting the battle
of the bulge. I’d like to hear from
anyone in our class, particularly
if you’re going to be in the area
and can drop by, Yia sasC
Cecil Wade reports that his
daughter Cynthia won the Oscar
for Short Documentary at this
year’s Academy Awards
ceremonies.
1966
Barbara Hockman just retired
1964
i960
teaching English in China.
“My kids are a lot more daring
than I am! ” she writes.
Arlene Andrew is still working
full time as a senior planner for
the city of La Verne, 3.3 miles
from her home in Claremont,
Calif. She has no immediate
plans to retire. Her daughter,
Abby Banks, has had a book
published: Punk House, a photo
documentation of the homes of
groups of “punk” young people
she visited as she traveled across
America. Her son. Josh, is
after 30 “delightful and intense
years” teaching English as a
Second Language at the City
College of San Francisco: “I
taught all levels and types of ESL
from vocational and crosscultural studies to many years of
advanced academic classes. I was
helped in my work by my St.
John’s foundation followed by
five years abroad, teaching in
Japan, and traveling overland
around the world. Now I’ll have
time to paint and focus on my
Tibetan Buddhist studies and
practice (ongoing for more than
Decorating Idea
Leo Pickens (A78) wants to give alumni the first shot at a
bargain: two classic wooden AyLING sweep oars, made in 1971, WITH
THE DISTINCTIVE St. JoHn’s ORANGE-AND-BLACK DESIGN ON THE BLADE.
They’re 12' long, ideal for either dedicated rowers or those
WITH AVERY BIG HOUSE TO DECORATE. PiCKENS IS ASKING $250 OR BEST
OFFER, AND SAYS ALL PROCEEDS GO BACK TO SUPPORT THE ROWING
PROGRAM. Call 410-268-2558 or e-mail leo.pickens@sjca.edu.
(The College -Sr. John’s College . Fall zoo8 }
�{AlumniNotes}
25 years), simplicity dictated by a
teacher’s pension. Feel free to
send me an e-mail.”
1967
Division of Pediatric
Pulmonology at Childrens
Hospital Los Angeles. He is
married to Susan Keens, PhD, a
clinical psychologist. Daughter
Jenny is a fifth-grade teacher, and
will be married this summer. Son
Peter is a computer programmer.
Ezra Harris (A) and
Eve Cohen Olman (A6g)
got married about three years
ago at the Keren Or center for
special education in Jerusalem.
“It was a gas. We have recently
been blessed with the birth of
our fourth grandchild. Praise
the Lord!”
1968
More retirement news, from
M. Joy Avery (SF): “After
completing three careers, I
finally retire at 62 years: 5 years
as a technical writer, 26 years as
an interpreter to the deaf,
10 years as an occupational
,
therapy assistant.”
Tom Keens (SF) is the chair of
the Pediatric Pulmonology
Sub-board of the American Board
of Pediatrics: “This is a seven
member board who writes the
board examination for pediatric
pulmonology, which aU
physicians wishing to be certified
in this subspecialty must take and
pass. Members serve a seven-year
term. In my last two-years, I was
elected chair of the subboard. I
was initially reluctant to agree to
serve, but I realized that this
group has important obligations
not only to write the board
examinations, but also to
determine the knowledge area
which defines pediatric
pulmonology as a subspecialty. It
has been a very interesting seven
years.” Tom is also a Professor of
Pediatrics, Physiology and
Biophysics at the Keck School of
Medicine of the University of
Southern California, and he
holds a faculty position in the
1969
Joseph P. Baratta (A) writes:
“My big book. The Politics of
World Federation (2004),
continues to make slow, scholarly
progress. It has been reviewed
eight times. It has been cited in
the first note of Paul Kennedy’s
The Parliament ofMan. It is also
cited in a note in Joshua
Goldstein’s International
Relations and in a Wikipedia
article on “world government.”
My website on the book contains
the introduction and pictures of
me, worn out with labors to
realize the dream of world peace
and justice: http://web.mac.com
/Josephs aratta. ”
L. Luis Lopez (SFGI) has
published three books of poetry.
Musings ofa Barrio Sack Boy, A
Painting ofSand, and Each
Month I Sing (October 2008). He
teaches Latin, Ancient Greek,
Greek and Roman Literature, and
Mythology at Mesa State College
in Grand Junction, Colo. His
daughter, Reina Lopez, is
preparing to enter the Graduate
Institute in Santa Fe in January.
“To all who wished me well,”
writes BARBARA MORDES BOSS
(A), “it has been six years since I
was hit by a truck and I am finally
feeling good. The hardest part of
healing was going to the doctors.
Most doctors merely prescribed
drugs, and then more drugs. Two
months ago, a new doctor.
Dr. Brilliant and Beautiful, ran
her fingers over my body, from
my ears to my wrists, and then
from the back of my head to my
{The College. 5f.
35
Dancing All Night
DELL Kesselman (SFGI76) has been working in Phoenix
for four-and-a-half years as a psychotherapist at a
nonprofit agency, “using my liberal education daily. In
March, my only child became a Jewish wife, and I danced
and smiled all night. Living with my two cats, I continue
to sing and purr with abandon, laughing more as I near
60 than ever before.”
I
wrist. She then forcefully
declared that I must decaffeinate
and she immediately ordered an
echocardiogram. I stopped all
drugs as so ordered and after one
week, felt better than normal.
Still do. Last week I went to the
heart ultrasound doctor. I was not
able to see the screen as he
probed and muttered, but what I
heard was rather creepy; retarded
valves not quite clapping,
coughing and wheezing, as they
applauded the heart. (The doctor
had muttered ‘What a beautiful
heart!’ upon finding a good
viewing spot. At 60, any
compliment to a body part is nice
to hear.) Through the splashing
and whistling he made comment
on my ‘heart murmur’ describing
my weak mitral valve. If any
friends have advice please pass it
on. Truth, Beauty, and the Good
have not languished in my heart
but is there not an aspect of each,
particular for the aged? Any
thoughts, let me know. I do not
dream of my Rock ’n Roll time;
not Dylan, The Stones, The
Doors, Jimi, nor even Hiatt...
every night I dream of
St. John’s!”
“Retired, built a new house
(Curmudgeon Castle West), got a
new dog (Simon) and kept the
important stuff: wife (Sarah),
health (like bull) and business
(for the dogs),” writes JAMES
Scanlon (SF). The view to
Monte Sol is a bit dim; it seems to
be just over the curvature of the
earth from here (about 4000
miles). Reflection on the
St. John’s experience progresses
from pricey at the time to
priceless over time.”
1971
George Elias (A) writes: “After
more than 20 years seUing
businesses, I have embarked on a
new career as a financial advisor
with Morgan Stanley. I am part of
a new program that began late
last year in New York and is now
piloting in San Francisco. My job
is to help people preserve and
grow their financial assets- so
that they can enjoy a long,
comfortable retirement. A
curious fact: two members of my
office are longtime clients and
admirers of Dan Sullivan (A71),
President/Owner of the Strategic
Coach. Go Dan!”
Susan Volkmar (SF) moved
from Raleigh, N.C., to the Boston
area. She continues to be active
with the National Association of
Science Writers and the New
England Science Writers.
1972
Melissa Kaplan Drolet (SF)
was happy and proud to attend
the graduation of her daughter,
Megan Josephine Drolet
(SF08) in May: “Also in
attendance were my sister,
Sharon Kaplan Wallis (Class
of 1964) with her husband
Leonard Weeks and my brother,
cont. onpages'^
John’s College . Fall ^008 }
�36
{AlumniProfile}
The View from the Bench
Jean FitzSimon (A^g)
BY Rosemary Harty
he Philadelphia couple was
drowning in deht. They hoth
held low-wage jobs: she as a
waitress, and he as a retail
clerk. A compulsive gambler,
the man hid $120,000 in
credit card bills from his wife. When he
finally hit the jackpot, he spent some of the
money and gave her the rest to pay off their
mortgage. But other creditors were
waiting, and that’s what brought the man
before Judge Jean K. FitzSimon (A73) in
the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania last year.
In a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, a debtor can
seek a discharge of certain debts,
preventing creditors from taking further
legal action to collect. It’s unusual for
FitzSimon to deny a discharge, but in this
case she ruled that the man intended to
“hinder, delay, and defraud” his unsecured
creditors. “This is not the action of an
Presiding over the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Judge
‘honest but unfortunate debtor’ seeking a
Jean FitzSimon (A73) seeks the gray areas in the cases that come before her.
fresh start,” she wrote in her ruling.
Reflecting on the case later, FitzSimon
said it was a difficult one for her. “It’s not
ever forced to use a credit card, but teaser
She later moved to Chicago, where she was
my fault that this man gambled. But you
interest
rates, credit checks, confusing
appointed Acting U.S. Trustee for the
have this poor woman and her two children
language, and other marketing devices are
Northern District of Illinois, gaining
who will effectively be out on the street
at best ethically questionable, FitzSimon
expertise in bankruptcy law.
unless they can refinance their home,” she
says. And no one in Washington paid atten
After IO years with the government, she
says. “It was very clear that these were
tion
when
the
economy
was
booming.
needed
a new challenge and launched a
poor people who were in a bad situation,
FitzSimon speaks from personal experi
private practice in Phoenix, working on
but the code was clear. The only thing
ence. Right out of law school (the Univer
behalf of debtors. Apart from the long
that’s harder in what I do is when someone
sity of Notre Dame), she acquired two
hours, she enjoyed working on her own.
actually has to lose their house.”
credit
cards,
each
with
an
$1,800
limit.
She
But a headhunter led her to a job as in
At a time when many Americans are
used them to equip her first apartment,
house counsel for Sears, which was dealing
struggling financially, FitzSimon sees the
buy work clothes, and acquire the neces
with legal troubles stemming from its debt
human costs of ready credit. In the case of
sary elements for “building a life” as a staff collection practices. In less than two years,
the lottery winner, she wonders: how did a
attorney with the Department of Justice.
she became the company’s chief compli
man earning $19,000 a year acquire 9
Concerned about mounting debt on top of
ance officer and vice president. Her skill in
credit cards and a $200,000 line of credit?
school loans, she kept her spending down.
digging Sears out of legal quagmires led
“There are people out there digging
“I was smart enough to know I had to pay
her to Whitehall Jewelers, which was strug
themselves into a hole who are not plan
more than just the minimum, but it still
gling with financial difficulties and fending
ning to pay off their debt,” FitzSimon
took me three full years to pay those cards
off a proxy fight. As part of a small execu
acknowledges. “But there are also people
back down to zero,” she recalls. She has
tive team, she sometimes put in 100 hours
who lost their jobs, or they have illnesses
never carried a balance since.
in a workweek, but she enjoyed great
and medical bills they can’t pay. So they
FitzSimon was attracted to the law for the discounts on jewelry.
put it on the credit card this month,
same reason she was drawn to St. John’s:
Climbing the corporate ladder and
thinking that maybe next month they can
the freedom to pursue a wide range of inter keeping abreast of developments in the law
get a second job, that somehow they can
ests. She began her legal career at the
left little time for a social life. But
catch up. But they never do.”
Justice Department, where she started out
FitzSimon’s life changed when she made
There’s plenty of fault to spread around
in the Office of Information and Privacy.
time for a summer alumni program in
for the credit crisis, she adds. No one is
T
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{Alumni Notes}
Bart Kaplan (Class of 1965),
with his wife, Betty Kaplan.
Greatly missed at the graduation
was Megan’s father, Raymond
Drolet (SF69), who passed
away September 27, 2007.”
Geraldine Kline (SFGI) is
returning to Cochabamba,
Bolivia, this September, for the
20th anniversary of INFANTE,
an organization she founded in
1988. INFANTE has as its mission
the protection and education of
women. Among other activities,
the organization began and
fosters transitional homes for
abandoned babies and national
adoptions for Bolivian families.
1973
Mary L. Batteen (A) has been
chair of the Oceanography
Department at the Naval
’
Postgraduate School for seven
37
Deep in the Mountains
ews from Susan Read (SFGI85): “My son,
Harry, is now 13 and able to do some of the
repairs around our old Victorian house-1837,
colorful history. I still teach English at Wooster
School, but I also now do the yearbook, which
provides a kind of tedious creativity. I built an
Adirondack lean-to last week, deep in the mountains with
15 friends. All is well.” -*■
years: “I am a professor of
oceanography and am about to
write a book on ocean dynamics
that I hope will inspire a new
generation to study climate
change.” In August, Batteen gave
a seminar at the Ocean and
Climate Sustainability
Conference on “Science and the
Public” and on reaching an
understanding on global climate
change. “I hope to visit the
original St. John’s College, our
college while in Oxford! ”
Jan Lisa Huttner (A) writes:
“Approximately five years ago, I
created a movement that is now
known as WITASWAN (wit-uhswan = Women in the Audience
Supporting Women Artists Now).
After three increasingly
successful annual programs in
Chicago, WITASWAN
transformed this year into
International SWAN Day when
the Fund for Women Artists
joined the cause. Over 160
groups in ii countries on 4
continents celebrated the first
International SWAN Day on
March 29, 2008, and we have just
received a $25,000 grant from
the National Endowment for the
Arts to spread the word about the
next International SWAN Day on
March 28, 2009. (International
SWAN Day will always be on the
last Saturday of every March as
the wrap-up event of Women’s
History Month.) For more info,
see my blog
www.TheHotPinkPen.com
and/or www.SwanDay.org.”
1974
News from MARTHA (Mackey)
Pendleton and Randal O.
Pendleton (both SF): Randy has
retired and the Pendletons
expected to start renovating their
home this year. Son WALKER
(A99) is married to Rachel
Vedaa (SF99). The Pendletons’
cont. on page gg
Santa Fe in 1986, where she was intro
duced to therapist Lee Fischler (SF68).
They married in 1987.
Philadelphia is Fischler’s hometown,
and his love for the city is one of the
reasons FitzSimon put her name in the hat
when the bankruptcy court vacancy came
up. As a merit appointment, not a political
one, the post was within her reach, but she
was still surprised to be offered the job.
“Did you mean to call Jean FitzSimon?”
she asked the Circuit Court judge who
called her with the news. With the court
room filled with friends and family, she
was sworn in on Aug. 16, 2006. She and
Fischler found a place close to the
Philadelphia Art Museum, and she settled
into her chambers in the city’s massive
Robert C. Nix United States Courthouse.
A year later, FitzSimon is still pinching
herself. “In spite of the long hours, I have
enjoyed all my jobs,” says FitzSimon.
“But never in my life have I been as
satisfied as this.”
To an outsider, it may seem that her
court is where the American dream comes
to die. But FitzSimon tries to make the
system work for everyone. Few individuals
get the opportunity to interact with the
legislative or executive branches of Amer
ican government; FitzSimon wants citizens
to see the judiciary at its best. “I have the
opportunity to give people a magnificent
experience of the court system,” she
explains. “They may not agree with what I
do, but they feel that they are heard and
that I mean to be fair. If you’re ever going
to have the sense that government can be
trusted, it’s going to be with the judiciary.
It’s incredibly important that we treat
people with respect and listen to them.”
After she’s reviewed a case, FitzSimon
may point out the weaknesses and
strengths she sees and give the parties a
chance to come to an agreement before she
makes her official ruling. “Sometimes if
the borrower can come up with any kind of
plan, any source of funds, the creditor may
be better off. Then they can both walk
away with half a loaf,” she says.
It takes more time in court to do things
this way, FitzSimon says, but it’s closer to
her idea of justice. She explains her
approach by employing the men-de
construction from Ancient Greek: on the
one hand this, on the other hand that.
{The C
o l l e g e
. St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
“I’ve never been good at seeing things in
black and white,” says FitzSimon. “I think
the world is largely gray.”
In a bankruptcy court, helping each
party see the other’s side often leads to a
better solution. The creditor recoups some
money; the debtor regains a measure of
control in his or her life. There are days,
though, “when I can’t make magic
happen,” FitzSimon says. “There are the
days when someone has to lose their
house.”
After 30 years of impossible hours
FitzSimon is enjoying more free time: to
spend with her husband, enjoy Philadel
phia’s cultural offerings, and sample the
city’s fine restaurants. A former member of
the college’s Board of Visitors and Gover
nors, she hopes to become more involved
with the college again. But as enjoyable as
her job is, it can be unpredictable: “There
are days when I read the pleadings and it
looks like an easy, straightforward case.
Then the lawyers start talking, and it’s
‘whoa, Nelly, bar the door-we’re going to
be here a while,”’ she says, “It’s not always
pretty. But it’s justice. And it works.”
�38
{AlumniProfile}
A Sense of Place
Francois Levy (SF87)
BY Anna Perleberg (SFoa)
orn in Paris and raised in the
U.S., Francois Levy gradnated
from the Santa Fe campus in
r987. He’d come to St. John’s
“1 thought architecture
sounded
at the tender
age of inter
i6, and
esting, so didleft
diplomacy
foreign
withoutand
a clear
direction.
service. So I applied to a lot of different
grad schools, and the architecture schools
accepted me.” This Aristotelian accident
led him to a career he loves.
Levy moved to Austin (where he still
lives with his wife and three children) to
attend the University of Texas’ first profes
sional degree program for students who,
like him, had not studied architecture as an
undergraduate. It was during a srx-month
internship in Australia that he “finally fell
in love with architecture-before that we
were just dating.” After graduating with
his master’s in 1993, he plied his new trade
with several noted Austin firms, while also
teaching at UT and, in 1995, working
briefly in Paris on a new bne of the Metro.
Architecture, says Levy, is as much
science as art-perhaps more. “While you
make use of your artistic faculties, in the
end, you have to end up with a building
that people can inhabit.” The most
B
gorgeously conceived structure is
useless if it doesn’t stay up. But
there’s certainly a creative dimension-“pure functionality leads to
things like strip malls. There’s a
really fine line you have to walk
between self-indulgence and prac
ticality, between ego and humility.
You have to invest yourself in the
building or it won’t be any good.”
On the other hand, when an archi
tect becomes too self-centered,
“you get buildings neighbors love
to complain about.”
In May 2008, Levy received
another UT graduate degree, this
time in architectural engineering.
He’d returned to school for a
variety of reasons-for one, he says, “I’ve
always been a frustrated scientist,” and the
refinement of techne offered by the disci
pline was “a way to scratch that itch.” But
he also, in the progress of his career in
mostly residential architecture, found his
concerns shifting from buildings them
selves to their interaction with, and impact
on, the environment. “I was working on an
8,ooo-square-foot house for empty nestersit wasn’t even their primary residence. I
kinda felt like a fiddlemaker for Nero.”
Levy’s attraction to the trend of sustain
ability comes from his concept of architec
ture as beholden to place, “the intersection
of climate, technology, and society.”
Houses were formerly built of necessity,
using materials at hand-earthen struc
tures in desert New Mexico, wooden cabins
in forested Wisconsin, half-underground
sod houses in treeless, humid Kansas.
Without climate control or artificial
lighting, buildings were oriented to take
advantage of sun and wind; the size of a
residence depended not just on the
comfort of the inhabitants, but the practi
cality of heating, cooling, and maintaining
the structure.
Technological advances in building tech
niques and materials have meant that,
provided with the means, homeovraers can
impose any look or style they want on their
dwellings, ignoring landscape and climate.
At its most innocuous, this attitude leads
only to incongruous eyesores, but as Amer
ican houses get bigger and families get
smaller, resource and energy consumption
per capita explode, negatively impacting
the disregarded environment. In a worst
case scenario, the sudden re-introduction
of the outside world can make ill-suited
Built around two relocated rooms of a
German homesteader’s cabin, Francois
Levy’s MoonRise Ranch was designed to
EXIST IN COMPLETE HARMONY WITH ITS SITE IN
THE Texas Hill Country.
{The College. Sf. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{Alumni Notes}
daughter. Laurel, is fundraising
for La Clinica de la Raza in the
San Francisco Bay area and
attending graduate school at
California State East Bay.
“After 30 years of grueling trial
practice, I needed a change,”
writes MiKE PANTER (A). “I had
taught one class in litigation at
my law school, DePaul, and I
asked them about a full-time job.
Law professors are usually
credentialed academicians, which
definitely rules me out, but I
proposed a new idea. A small
class of law students sitting
around a table would meet to
debate and discuss a different
issue each week. Each week, a
different lawyer would pay the
law school $350 to bring in an
open issue on an active case for
the students and lawyer to
workshop together. I call it
‘Litigation Lab.’ The school
agreed to give it a try. Last night
we finished our 32nd session and
it’s a smashing success. Some of
the students call it the best class
they had in law school. Lawyers
come back for two and three
sessions. They credit us for giving
them thoughts and ideas that
directly lead to better results for
their clients. Everyone learns,
even the seasoned lawyers;
everyone teaches, even the
inexperienced law students.
People don’t leave-they hang
around talking long after class.
Whatever I do in this class, I
39
think always of what I did in my
year at St. John’s with my great
tutor, Eva Brann and classmates
like Chester Burke and Mike
Blaustein. If this program is a
success, it is certainly due to the
principles of learning that I
learned in even one year at
St. John’s, 38 years ago.”
and I engage in a collaborative
process of inquiry to generate
and test hypotheses regarding
the causes and effects of their
abrasive behavior. Late this year
I plan to open the Boss
Whispering Institute to share
this method with other executive
coaches.”
“I’m almost done with the
treehouse,” writes JEFF
ViCTOROFF (A). “Maia and Ivan
are jumping up and down! Next
week: our first sleepover.”
1977
1975
Laura Craws haw (SF) writes:
“Following the publication of my
book Taming the Abrasive
Manager: How to End
Unnecessary Roughness in the
Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 2007), I
relocated my coaching firm (The
Executive Insight Development
Group) to Portland, Ore. I
research and coach abrasive
bosses as part of my mission to
reduce suffering in the
workplace. Also known as The
Boss Whisperer, I will be
speaking at the Sixth Interna
tional Conference on Workplace
Bullying in Montreal this June.
I’ve put my St. John’s education
to good use, having incorporated
a technique I’ve termed Socratic
whispering into my coaching
method, through which my client
continued
houses the cause of needless human
suffering. Levy sees this as one of the
lessons of Hurricane Katrina: “I saw a
connection between how we choose to
develop on a large scale and the inevitable
effect of natural disasters. When you build
responsibly to the climate, when you don’t
have conveniences, it’s less of a hardship.”
His master’s project was entitled
“Indoor Air Quality Engineering Chal
lenges in Lunar Habitats,” based in part on
1979
Kevin W. Parker (A) writes:
Judy Kistler-Robinson (SF,
SFGI79) is baking for the fourth
summer in plain oT Texas. She is
a user-experience architect
(designing web applications),
which is the “best career for a
right-thinking person who
learned to be left-aligned at SJC.”
She volunteers as a literacy tutor.
1978
Lucy Tamlyn (A) just finished
up a three-year tour as Deputy
Chief of Mission at the U.S.
Embassy in N’Djamena, Chad. “I
am currently posted as Regional
Coordinator for the Kurdistan
Region in Erbil, Iraq. The
Regional Office is an outpost of
the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. We
represent the United States in the
region and coordinate U.S.
assistance in support of
reconstruction efforts. Children
Ben (16) and Filipa (13) are in
a paper he delivered (with J. Fardal) at the
2007 Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settle
ments, exploring the impact of radon-emitting lunar soil in the hermetically sealed
environments future settlers might five in.
Concerns like these, though currently
theoretical, are a logical extension of the
idea of responsible architecture as
subservient to a location’s available
resources.
Though Levy has been practicing in his
field since 1993, with his own firm since
1997, he feels his career is just beginning.
{The College . S:. John’s
College ■ Fall 2008 }
boarding school in the U.S.; my
husband is planning some
motorcycle trips across Europe
and possibly all the way to
Central Asia. We are all hoping
the next overseas posting will be
easier for visiting friends and
family! ”
“I just received my diploma for a
master’s degree in astronomy
from James Cook University in
Townsville, Australia. The degree
program was quite an interesting
experience, all done through the
Internet and in some ways just
the opposite of the St. John’s
experience, as there was no
direct human contact at all unless
you count e-mail (which I don’t!).
I’m still working as a software
engineer at the Goddard Space
Flight Center and my wife, Tina
Rhea (also A79), and I
celebrated our a5th wedding
anniversary last year.”
1980
Gina Ironside (SF) and
Ben Goldstein (SF79) report
that their son, Ben, is 13 and that
the family is still enjoying home
schooling. He and his dad are
both playing soccer intensely.
“One of the really beautiful things about
architecture is that you don’t really hit your
stride until you’re 50. You peak when
you’re 70. Hot young designers maybe the
darlings of the magazines, but their work
isn’t necessarily profound-the profession’s
not like football, more like baseball. Or
curling.”
More about Levy's design philosophy
andphotos ofhis work can befound at
francoislevy. com.
�{AlumniNotes}
40
Making a Case for Endangered Forestland
Abby Weinberg (SFoo)
BY Brooke McLane-Higginson (AGI09)
n her work as manager of the
Conservation Research Program at
the Open Space Institute in New
York City, Abby Weinberg (SFoo)
finds the ideas of John Locke and
Adam Smith helpful in under
standing the challenges to conserving the
nation’s endangered forest and farmland.
It isn’t easy balancing private property
rights and free markets with the less
tangible benefit of a forest as a good in
itself, but Weinberg uses research to
make the case for conservation-with
good results.
Weinberg brought her enthusiasm for
the outdoors to St. John’s, where her
studies of Smith and Locke helped her
better understand the formative philoso
phies driving human’s interaction with the
natural environment. After graduating
from St. John’s, she worked as an economic
analyst for the Federal Trade Commission.
Four years later, Weinberg earned a
master’s degree in Forestry at the Yale
Progress needs to be considered not just from the standpoint of what we produce from
School of Forestry and Environmental
FORESTS, BUT ALSO BY WHAT WE GAIN BY LEAVING THEM AS THEY ARE, SAYS AbBY WeINBERG (SFoo).
Studies. She worked as a forest technician
at the City of Seattle’s 90,000-acre water
shed before joining the OSI in 2004.
agriculture than the market would other
destroying it. However, these days, land
The Institute protects scenic, natural,
wise dictate. On the other hand, “Adam
prices are driven more by development
and historic landscapes to ensure public
Smith argues that agriculture is inherently
than the potential for forest products.
enjoyment, conserve habitats, and sustain
contrary to economic development,
Development speculation has driven prices
community character. Weinberg’s work
because division of labor doesn’t apply to
three or five times what can be justified for
focuses on evaluating and developing tools
forestry conservation, she says.
agriculture,” Weinberg explains. “The
for the conservation of actively managed
same person plows, sows, and reaps,
It’s part of Weinberg’s job to make a case
forest and farm landscapes in the
making it hard to increase production
for the value of preserving forests. One of
United States.
without increasing labor costs.”
her first research projects at OSI was to
Although one-third of the country is
In her work at the Institute, Weinberg
complete an assessment of conservation in
forestland, “people don’t necessarily see
relies on economic research and land
Massachusetts for the Kohlberg Founda
the value of standing forestland,” Wein
use analysis to recommend changes to
tion. Her work led to the creation of an
berg says. “Some of this goes back to Locke conservation and public policy. Up until
entirely new grant program for conserving
and his idea about labor and ownership.
2000, the amount of forestland in the U.S.
forest and farm landscapes in the area and
The labor of clearing trees and planting
was actually increasing as marginal farm
the dedication of another $6 million
agricultural products is evidence of owner
land was allowed to return to forests,
towards land protection.
ship, whereas people assume the forest is a
explains Weinberg.
With lessons from Locke and Smith,
public resource that takes care of itself and
The picture changed dramatically as
Weinberg has found a way to address both
isn’t necessarily worth paying for even
suburban sprawl, fed by rampant real
natural and economic issues by researching
though it is the source of our clean air
estate speculation, began encroaching
how to conserve forests while using their
and water.”
more urgently on forests. “In the tradi
resources sustainably. The traditional idea
Such ideas have made agriculture more
tional analysis of forestland prices you
of progress, that is, the conversion of our
prominent in our society, Weinberg
don’t assume someone is going to cut the
natural resources for economic goods, she
explains. Agriculture receives more
entire forest at once,” she says. Instead,
says, “is in many ways no longer valid when
government subsidies and funding than
“you need to know what you can earn from
we recognize the values lost when a forest
forests, to the point that more land is in
sustainably harvesting the land” without
is cut down.
I
{The College. Si.
John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{AlumniNotes}
Ben is coaching, too. Ben’s web
engineering company. End Point
Corporation, is doing beautifully
(visit endpoint.com). Several
Johnnies have turned up among
their recruiting respondents!
Gina attends the alumni seminars
in New York City from time to
time, and enjoys Scottish country
dancing: “The balls remind me of
St. John’s waltz parties, only
better, with the men in full
highland dress (kilts). Best wishes
to all.’’
“We have enjoyed looking at
colleges with our 17-year-old
daughter, Michelle,” says
Debra Ann Rutherford (SF).
“St. John’s College is still
the best!”
1982
Stanley Schiff (SF) has been
practicing tai-chi and chi-gong
for 35 years. “I became a certified
Lifetime Practitioner who uses
both modern healing techniques
and the ancient energetic and
spiritual techniques of China and
India.”
1985
Jeffrey Wilson (A) serves as
associate dean of the College of
Communication and Fine Arts at
Loyola Marymount University in
Los Angeles, where he has taught
philosophy since 1995. “As a
hobby, I participate in recitals
and other events for amateur
classical pianists. One of my best
St. John’s memories involved
Douglas Allanbrook giving me
the combination to the Steinway
in the Great Hall for early
morning practice, where
housekeeping staff would listen
from the balcony. Today, I
practice on a restored 1897
Steinway and take special
pleasure in sharing live classical
music with those who may
otherwise have no access to it.”
1986
privilege of working with an Iraqi
intelligence officer who was by far
the best officer in the division, if
not the Iraqi Army, and we put
many insurgents behind bars, or
in the ground, and won the
hearts of the people in our area
well worth the trip.”
Todd W. Masilon (A) has just
returned home from a year in
Baghdad working as an
Intelligence Operations Advisor
to an Iraqi Army battalion,
“ready to hang up my captain’s
bars after 10 years in the Army.
I’ve been away from wife, Renee,
daughter Molly, and son Ian for 3
1/a of the last 3 years (training/
Afghanistan/Iraq), audit’s their
turn now. I have a new job already
as a contractor working with the
Army Test and Evaluation
Command. I’m glad to be back as
the first seven months of the
deployment were consumed by
daily fighting in the main AlQaeda stronghold in Baghdad at
the time (we fought alongside our
Iraqi battalion in the one square
mile of B’dad with the highest
density of insurgent activity in all
Iraq). It was sad, horrifying,
frustrating, and terrifying on a
daily basis. Fortunately, I had the
Barbara A. Roberts (SFGI)
made her eighth visit to the
Pilgrim Center of Avatar Meher
Baba in Meherabad,
Ahmednagar, Maharashtra State,
India.
1987
“My husband and I welcomed our
second child, Samantha Danielle
Lewin last July,” writes Sallie
M. Fine (A). “Samantha and her
now 5-year-old brother,
Benjamin, made their first visit to
St. John’s for Homecoming this
past September, and while I’m
not sure if there is a second
generation of Johnnies in our
future, everyone had a great
time. I am head of the English
department at Charles F. Brush
High School in Lyndhurst, Ohio,
“Absolutely Proud”
lizabeth Natterman (Ara) has made Jeff
Natterman (AGI93) a happy father: “I want to
E
41
and I am grateful every day to
have a job in which I can always
find meaning.”
After years of teaching,
Elisabeth DuRard Keller
(SF) is currently Director of
Education Programs at the Santa
Fe Children’s Museum. “It was
great fun working with fellow
alum Jason Scott until he left
for graduate school at Stanford in
June and much fun working with
current Johnnie interns. Past
development director at the
college. Ginger Roherty, is also at
the museum and we enjoy talking
about our shared connections. I
recently attended a wonderful
afternoon of tea and poetry at
Will (SF86) and Janette
(Hradecky, SF85) Fischer’s.
Love raising my family and
enjoying the sky in beautiful
Santa Fe.”
1989
Jennifer Lee (SF) writes:
“Dimitri, I, and our daughters,
Fani (14) and Maro (ri), are
happy in Baltimore. I am
teaching fifth grade at the Park
School and loving it. I will finish
the Johns Hopkins Creative
Writing program this fall and
plan to start guitar lessons again.
I have also taken up running in
my middle years (who would have
thought!) and have completed a
few triathlons.”
share how absolutely proud I am that 15 years
after I graduated from the Graduate Institute,
my daughter is now a freshman on the same
Earlier this year George
campus. When I first was accepted into the
T
urner (A) acquired an electric
program in the early 1990s, Elizabeth was only about ayearbike
to make his nine-mile
and-half old. We toured the campus, and my wife, Donna, took
commute to and from work, to
a picture of us in front of the Liberty Tree. For years, I boasted
save on gas, and to save the
of my life-altering experiences at St. John’s. And foryears Eliz
planet: “So far I’ve only used it
abeth listened to my stories, intrigued by the tales of my
three times. So much for
having taken classes in the cupola, pausing the conversation
grandiose plans.”
each time the bell rang. Or, my silly refutation of the asymp
totic triangle as a mere intellectual play on words. Last week,
we watched Elizabeth shake Chris Nelson’s hand after her
name was called at the Convocation ceremony, and receive her
Greek lexicon. I nearly burst with pride. I only wish the
Liberty Tree was still around so I could take a new picture with
her when she graduates. Now that’s priceless!”
{The College. Sf.
John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�4a
{Alumni Notes}
it up in the slam pit that formed
late in the night, amongst a
group of rabbis, Talmud scholars
and Israeli settlers that
responded to the Hassidic band’s
rendition of a popular Nirvana
ode. In June, Michael and Yael
returned to Hollywood, Cahf.,
where Michael runs a law
practice concentrating on trial
work in the areas of criminal
defense, personal injury and
employment litigation.
Jessica Trupin (A) is returning
Blake Sitney (SF91) has been making a difference for orphans in Thailand. The Ban Mae Maeh
ORPHANAGE IN THE ChIANG MaI PROVINCE HAD BECOME UNREACHABLE DURING THE MONSOON SEASON AND WAS IN
DESPERATE NEED OF BOTH FOOD AND SCHOOL SUPPLIES. WiTH THE HELP OF A LOCAL RESIDENT NAMED JONG,
Sitney was able to deliver rice,
fruit, noodles, and other food, as well as school supplies to the
ORPHANAGE. SiTNEY ALSO PROVIDED THE CHILDREN WITH ART SUPPLIES SUCH AS CRAYONS, COLORED PENCILS, AND
WATERCOLORS SO THAT THEY COULD EXPRESS THEIR CREATIVITY. SiTNEY HAS CREATED A PHOTO ESSAY WEBSITE TO
SHARE THEIR ARTWORK WITH THE WORLD. HTTP://cOMMUNITY.LrVEJOURNAL.COM/aRTFORORPHANS/.
to the New York City area to
launch a startup nonprofit called
Bees Without Borders
(www.beeswithoutborders.org).
She expected to be in the city all
summer, just bringing husband
Dave and eight-year-old daughter
Bridget for the first couple
weeks, working on the nonprofit
and at the farmer’s markets.
Michael Zampella (A) and
1990
Kilian Garvey (A) was recently
named to the editorial boards of
The Journal ofSocial,
Evolutionary, and Cultural
Psychology and The Journal of
Evolutionary Studies. He is an
assistant professor of psychology
at the University of New England
in Biddeford, Maine.
thought to who might want to
place a baby for adoption. We are
so very glad to be parents.”
Geneva M. Fulgham (SFGI)
published a book about
secondary school teaching. Wit
and Wisdom Needed in the
Classroom (Rowman & Littlefield
2006). “I’m entering in national,
state, and local poetry contests
and sell the occasional opinion
essay,” she writes.
Lila Kerns (SF) and Kevin
Depew (Ago) are delighted to
Kevin (SF) and Khin Khin
Guyot Brock (SF88) are
delighted to announce the
adoption of their son,
Christopher Arden Brock, born
February 18, aoo8. “Christopher
is more wonderful than we
imagined,” writes Khin Khin.
“Christopher’s birth parents,
teenage sweethearts, are kept
informed of his development via
e-mail, photos and, in time,
visits. Thank you to all who saw
our earlier appeal and gave some
School (a prep school in Pebble
Beach): “I am married to a
woman named Andrea Price, and
we have an infant daughter
named Siri who was born on Nov.
7, 2007, and two spotted dogs. It
is quite a full house. I am
enjoying life here, balancing work
and time in the ocean with the
new responsibilities of
fatherhood. If you are in the
Monterey area, look us up.”
1991
“Retirement is enriching,” writes
Ronalie a. Moss (SFGI). “I am
rereading The Ramayana-a new
translation.”
1992
Charlie Henrikson (SF) is
living in Pacific Grove, Calif.,
teaching science at the Stevenson
{The College -5t.
announce the birth of their
daughter, Lucinda Lee Kerns
Depew (Class of 2029, expected),
born April i, 2008, in New York,
N.Y.
Michael Kopple (SF) was
married in Jerusalem in May
2008. His wife, Yael, is Israeliborn and hails from a family of 12
children who grew up in the West
Bank settlements. Luke Warren
(SF92) and his partner, Patricia,
attended the wedding. Witnesses
report that Luke was seen mixing
John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
his wife, Caitlin, are happy to
announce his commissioning as a
Naval Intelligence Officer in the
United States Navy Reserve.
“I want to reassure my fellow
alumni that this will in no way
affect my support of my alma
mater during the USNA/
St. John’s Croquet Match.”
1993
J. Walter Sterling (A) and
Meghan Haid were married at
sunset, on Father’s Day, June 15,
at the Hyatt Tamaya on the Santa
Ana Pueblo. In attendance were
alumni Noah Kay (SF92),
Elliott (A92) and Amy (Johns,
A91) Callahan, Melissa
Duke, (SFGI07), and Susanne
Ristow (SF06), playing her
cello, and tutors David Carl and
(of course) WALTER Sterling
(class of 1963), pere. The
weekend of vigorous celebration
included a long Friday night at
�{AlumniNotes}
the Cowgirl. Walter is a tutor in
Santa Fe. Meghan is a DPT
(doctor of physical therapy).
would love to hear from any of my
old friends via email:
deslong@yahoo.com.”
Stella Schindler (AGl)
1994
Colin (A) and Emiko (Ima)
Ray (SF) still live in Tokyo. Their
daughter, Marina, is 3. Son
Thomas Michael (Tom) was born
on January 8, 3007. They enjoy
meeting up with any Johnnies
who happen to be in town.
“John and 1 are very happy to
announce the birth of our second
son, Gilpin Edward Turkington
Ruhl,” writes IVY Turkington
(A). “His big brother Henry is
certain this guarantees him a
sailing crew member for the rest
of their lives, but I guess we’U see
whether Gilpin is captain or crew
material in about 8 years. Gilpin
was born September 34 (8 lbs, ii
oz, 30 inches) and we are aU
rejoicing much though sleeping
little.”
announces the release of her new
CD, Distant Hum.
1997
Patience Melnik (SF) writes:
“John Kochendorfer (SF95),
our three-year-old, Abe, and I just
moved from California to
Knoxville, Tenn. John has a post
doc at the National Oceano
graphic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) in Oak
Ridge, and 1 will attend the
graduate program for
architecture at the University of
Tennessee. We just tried chowchow for the first time and think
we’ll be all right here. If anyone
rolls this way, e-mail us at
patiencemelnik@gmail.com.”
1998
1996
Jennifer (Wamser)
Deslongchamps (AGl) has
indefinitely postponed work on
her doctoral thesis (she started a
PhD program in Medieval
Philosophy at Yale in 1997 and is
now ABD) in order to care for her
growing family: “Our son
Thomas Robert was born in
3000; Elena Margaret, 3003;
Camille Therese, 3003; Charles
Joseph, 3005; Zachary Louis,
3006 and our 3008 edition,
Stephen Benedict, was born three
months ago. Needless to say I
have been keeping very busy,
although I am woefully behind on
my reading! I remember with
great fondness my days in the GI,
discussing life’s deepest
questions with such wonderful
tutors and fellow students. 1
“I have made some big changes
(professionaUy) this summer,”
writes Dawn Star Borchelt
(A). “I left my position at the
Unitarian Universalist church
where I was Director of Religious
Education for 10 years. I will
continue to do some consulting
and contract work with UU
organizations and congregations.
but I also have enrolled in the
Birthing From Within Mentor
and Doula Certification program.
I am starting a private practice as
a childbirth educator and doula
in the Washington, D.C., area, so
if you are having a baby,
especially near the nation’s
capital, get in touch! I am doing
exactly what I want to do, and I
am working on remembering it
aU of the time. My spouse and two
young children, the dog, and the
birds are all fine, too.”
GlenScott Thomas Copper
(AGl) retired from teaching last
year and is finishing the novel he
began writing his first summer at
St. John’s in 1994.
Tobin Shulman (SF99) and
Julie Gronneberg (SF) report
that Tobin finished his master’s
in Architecture last May, and
Julie is the senior designer at the
MFA, Boston. “Our best design
project so far has been our sonLincoln Olav-who loves guitars,
the ocean, and dinosaurs,” and
turned 3 in July.
1999
George Finney (SF) graduated
from Southern Methodist
University’s Dedman School of
Law in May 3008 with a Juris
Doctorate.
From A to /J. Bottom
43
Kara Luna (Fenske, A) and
Richard Luna (Schmidt, A96)
are excited to announce the birth
of their daughter, Evie Teresa
Luna, on April 13, 3008. Mom,
dad, and baby are all healthy and
happy.
Sheridan Phillips (EC) is ABD
at the European Graduate
School.
From across the pond, Patrick
Reed (AGI) reports that he and
his wife, Jana, celebrated their
daughters’ 3rd and ist birthdays
this summer (Lucille and Anja,
respectively). They are loving life
in Europe and recently competed
in an ultra marathon
competition, in Davos,
Switzerland. Check out the
website at www.swissalpine.ch.
Mike and Abby Soejoto (both
A) are proud to announce the
first birthday of their third child,
Cecilia Anne (born June 3007).
Mike, Abby, Lucy (41/3), John
(almost 3), and Cecilia live in Los
Angeles, where Mike is a tax
attorney and Abby stays home
with the kids. They’d love to see
any Johnnies in the area (or hear
from any not in Southern
California) at
msoejoto@pircher.com or
asoejoto@sbcglobal.net.
2000
D. Read Lockhart (SF) was
awarded the Shapiro Grant from
the Art Students League in New
York City to paint in Europe.
Last spring, he was in Oslo after
having been to London, Paris,
and Amsterdam. He expected to
conclude his studies in Italy and
Vienna and return to New York in
September.
ow many heavy metal bands went by the name
“Absurdity”? We have Dan Nelson (A95) to
thank for the answer: seven. Nelson’s tome.
All Known Metal Bands, is simply that: an
alphabetical listing of every heavy metal band
(as of 3007). Opening with a quote from
For the past two years, Andre
Blaise Pascal, Mr. Nelson lists about 51,000 bands, including
30 different known “Genocides.” Learn more about Rodriguez (SFGI) has been
working as the staff attorney at
Nelson’s book, on his MySpace page: myspace.com/
the YMCA International Services
allknownmetalbands.
H
{The College-
St. John's College • Fall 2008 }
�{Alumni Notes}
in Houston, Texas, representing
immigrants, especially refugees
and victims of human
trafficking-modern day slavery.
In addition, he teaches an
undergraduate course at the
University of Houston.
Deberniere Torrey (AGI)
plans to marry fellow Penn State
comparative hterature graduate
student, Nathan Devir, on June
27, followed by a move to
Vermont in July. Nathan will
teach Hebrew at Middlebury
College and Deberniere will
continue working on her
dissertation and related projects.
2001
Colin King (SF) writes: “Anna
Canning (SFoa) and I were
married July 19 under an old
sugar maple on my family’s farm
in Clotho, Minn. An unusually
heavy rainstorm dropped more
than two inches before blue sky
appeared and sunlight filtered
through maple leaves. We were
blessed by the presence of family
and friends, including several
Johnnies.”
SUZANNAH LATANE SIMMONS
(SF) has been living in
Washington, D.C., for two years.
“A group of us SJC alums have
been working on fostering a
stronger chapter. There is now a
Facebook page for all interested
D.C. (and surrounding area)
alumni to join. Please check it
out. It is called St. John’s College
Alumni, Washington, D.C.
‘Social’ Chapter. As of June, we
have 66 members. I am working
at Whole Foods Market at
Tenleytown in the District. I am
an Assistant Team Leader for
their Specialty Department
(wine, beer, cheese and coffee).
Stop by and see me if you are in
the area. I make decent pairing
suggestions.”
2002
Jim Crotty (SFGI), of Monk
Media made his mark as the
“dashboard publishing” pioneer
of Monk: The Mobile Magazine
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M
onk_Magazine), author
(www.jamescrotty.com/),
multimedia auteur {Playboy,
Voyager), blogger
(WWW. crottyfarmreport. com),
media rep
(www.rumpleville.com,
www.HoleintheHeadmovie.com,
www.johnfrummovie.com
www.boristhedog.tv), and
filmmaker (www.resolved.tv).
With fellow ‘Monk’ Michael
Lane, Jim is the co-founder of
Monk Media (www.monk.com), a
global branding concern. Jim will
work with anyone who takes the
time to complete the Monk
survey at this link:
www.monkmedia.net/client/.
Patrick W. Harris (EC) begins
doctoral studies this fall at
Western Michigan University,
where he will focus on the history
of medieval Iberia.
The Sullivans have been busyas usual. Rachel (A) just
graduated from medical school in
May, and will begin her residency
training for psychiatry at Walter
Reed Army Medical Center in
Washington, D.C., in July. At the
same time she was promoted to
captain in the Army, and
continues to be among the ranks
of active duty soldiers. Michael
(SF) is nearing the end of his PhD
in Philosophy at Catholic
University, and hopes to finish
next fall. Clare celebrated her
4th birthday in May, and Grace is
looking forward to her 2nd
birthday in the end of July. The
girls are healthy, happy and
begging for more siblings!
“This May I completed my
Master in Arts in Art History
from the University of St. Thomas
in St. Paul, Minn.,” writes Laura
Thayer (A). “My master’s
qualifying paper was titled
‘Rebuilding Identity: The
Nineteenth-Century Faqade of
the Duomo of Amalfi.’ Now that I
am done with school, I look
forward to spending as much
time as possible in Amalfi, Italy,
continuing to study Italian,
figuring out what happens next in
my life, and maybe even getting
around to finally reading
Proust!”
2003
“I just finished my first year of
teaching philosophy at the
University of Nevada. Kathy is
working on her PhD in English
literature,” writes John Anders
(SF).
Meg Eisenhauer Barry and
Thomas Barry (both SF)
welcomed their second daughter
on April 27. “She shares her
mama’s birthday! Liesl Jane was
born at home on a beautiful
spring morning. She joins her
elder sister, Aviva, age 3, in
keeping our home a very lively
place indeed. Best wishes to all!”
Aaron Foster (A) is leaving
behind his “beloved” New York
City to move to Inman Square in
Cambridge, Mass., with his
girlfriend Eva: “Boston Johnnies
should feel free to look me up
(aaron.foster@gmaiLcom).
Recently, I’ve been consulting for
a major specialty food distributor,
mostly about cheese. In Boston,
I’ll be looking into opening a bar
focused on craft beer.”
Abram Trosky (AGI) is the
recipient of Boston University’s
highest academic scholarship,
the Presidential University
Graduate Fellowship. Trosky has
been Presidential University
Teaching Fellow for the
department’s introductory
courses in Political Science,
aty (Christopher) Davis (SFoi) writes: “Billy
American Politics and Interna
(Davis, SF02) and I are living on a beautiful
tional Relations, has solo taught
homestead in northwestern Oregon with my
Introduction to Political Theory
mother and our i-year-old son, Sam. We’re busy
and has guest lectured for
building our own cabin and raising chickens,
Modern Political Theory. A
goats, sheep, and alpacas-it’s wonderful to be
University
Scholar in Philosophy
exactly where we want to be. Though we haven’t yet reached
our
goal of self-sufficiency, we’re getting closer and are thoroughly
at Washington and Lee
enjoying ourselves. For now Billy is still commuting part time
University, Abram has been
into Portland, but expects to become self-employed by the end
steeped in classical pohtical
of the year; I am fortunate enough to be able to stay home with
theory and Socratic-style
our wonderful, adorable child and run the farm while helping
pedagogy, but has an abiding
my mother with her craft business. If anyone’s interested, we
interest in international relations
occasionally post on this blog: www.arcadiafarm.blogspot.com;
and postmodern political
and post pictures at: http;//si75.photobucket.com/albums
thought. He has studied abroad at
/wi37/samsilverlock/.” -tjk
Raising Chickens
K
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
�{AlumniNotes}
the University of Melbourne
under the auspices of The
Ashworth Centre for Social
Theory and in the U.K. as a
junior fellow of the EnglishSpeaking Union. Abram passed
his qualifying examinations in
February 3008 and is currently
in Vienna as a visiting junior
fellow of the Institute for Human
Sciences where he will be
researching the matrices between
cosmopolitanism, cognitive
development and moral
philosophy for his dissertation
proposal. At the termination of
his fellowship he plans to attend
the Institute’s intensive summer
program in International
Relations in Cortona, Italy,
before traveling from the Balkans
to Scandinavia with his
girlfriend. He will return to co
teach the History of American
Foreign Policy, 1865-present, at
BU this fall.
Namir Yedid (A) was appointed
“I’m serving my first tour as a
diplomat in the U.S. Foreign
Service in Rangoon, Burma,”
writes ChELSIA WHEELER (SF).
“Between political protests and a
major cyclone, it has been an
interesting experience so far.”
graduated summa cum laude
from the Dickinson School of
Law; he was also valedictorian.
2004
Suzanne Vlcek (SF, EC05) is
two-thirds of the way through
chiropractic school and looking
forward to starting her own
practice in the spring of 2010 in
the San Francisco Bay area: “I
will begin seeing patients at the
Palmer West Clinic, San Jose,
Calif., in January 2009, so if
anyone is in the area please stop
in and let me practice my skills.
This summer, I completed a 200houryoga teacher training
program and have begun
teaching classes on a regular
basis. Life is good!”
yth-grade dean at Pacific Ridge
School in Carlsbad, Calif., where
he teaches English and social
studies. “I’ve led the design of an
integrated curriculum and have
gathered administrative and
community support to make our
school carbon-neutral.”
Kelly Zeibak and Alexander
Kantner (both SF) were
married in the redwoods on June
21,2008, and enjoyed a
wonderful honeymoon in
Vietnam and Cambodia. They
recently earned their teaching
credentiasl, in mathematics and
English respectively, and are
currently teaching on the north
coast of California.
2005
Gregory W. Bair II (A)
Christopher DeManss (AGI)
is celebrating the worldwide
release of his first solo album.
The act is entitled Vib and the
album. The Letter K. It’s
available in stores and through
the Internet. A fair collection of
the songs was crafted while
attending St. John’s College. “In
other news,” he writes, “with
every day comes reflection upon
the beauty of my St. John’s
experience.”
Paul and Anita Fairbanks (SF)
are delighted to announce the
birth of their daughter, Charlotte
Eden, on May 20, 2008. “She has
brought us so much happiness.
We are living in Columbus, Ohio,
where Paul is studying business
in preparation for dental school.
I am simply enjoying
motherhood; my current
ambitions are to sing lullabies
and read great books aloud.”
45
Very Busy
ndy and Katie
(Lehner) Patton
A
(AGI05 and
AGI04, respec
tively) have
welcomed William
Kelly Patton (Liam) into their
little family. He joins hig brother
James (a), who is working on his
PhD in Dump Trucks; both keep Katie very busy. Andy is
interning at an investment bank in Nashville and starts the MBA
program at Vanderbilt this fall. “Send money,” they write.
Amy Taylor (A) writes: “I am
completing my PhD coursework
in clinical psychology at
Duquesne University in
Pittsburgh. In the past year, I
completed my MA in psychology
and a graduate portfolio in
women’s and gender studies. I’ve
recently made several conference
presentations and earned two
awards for my writing on identity
development and how individuals
represent themselves to others
(currently beginning research
into how we ‘write ourselves into
being’ on Internet communities).
Next year I will continue to teach
undergraduate courses and
practice psychoanalyticallyoriented psychotherapy with
clients from the Pittsburgh
community and from a local
liberal arts college. Missed you at
Croquet, hope to see you at
Homecoming.”
Jonathan Morgan and
Allison Kilgore (both SF) are
enjoying their third summer in
Seattle, and are slowly growing
accustomed to the intervening
winters. Allison is working as an
investment analyst at a
retirement finance company, and
Jonathan currently works as a
web editor at a dot-com well past
its glory days. He will begin a
PhD program at the University of
Washington in User-Centered
Design this fall. These two can
often be found palling around in
bars and coffee shops with Maia
{The College. St. John’s
College ■ Fall 3008 }
Swanson (SF03) and overheard
lamenting the dearth of Johnnies
and good green chili in the
Northwest.
2008
Shant Shahrigian (A) is off in
search of la dolce vita in Milan,
Italy, paying the bills by editing
for a new website. He tells his
fellow Johnnies: “Holla!”
What’s Up?
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you’re doing. The next issue
will be published in February;
deadline for the alumni notes
section is January 5.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404;
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
In Santa Fe:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
�{Obituaries}
James W. Stone, Class of
1955
Jim Stone of Arlington, Va.,
a retired linguist and active
St. John’s alumnus, died in a
boating accident on the Chesa
peake Bay on July 27 when his
i6-foot catamaran sailboat
capsized in a brisk wind,
Jim earned a doctorate in
linguistics from the University
of California at Berkeley in 1971.
His career as a linguist spanned
more than 40 years, nearly 25 of
which he spent as a supervising
linguist and language training
specialist at the U.S. Depart
ment of State’s Foreign Service
Institute in Washington, D.C.
There, he oversaw training in
various languages including
Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali,
Amharic, and Persian. After
retiring from the State Depart
ment, Jim was Director of
Translation Services at the
Center for Applied Linguistics
for II years.
Sailing and music were life
long passions. Jim began sailing
at age 15 when he was a Sea
Scout, and he later sailed as a
member of the St. John’s Boat
Club. He loved choral music and
other vocal music in the clas
sical tradition, and for 30 years
he sang as a member of the
Cathedral Choral Society in
Washington. Classmate Dorothy
Olim, who attended some of his
choral performances, recalls
“seeing the joy on his face as
he sang.”
Jim traveled extensively for
work and pleasure in the U.S.
and abroad. He and his wife of
39 years, Crawford “Corky”
Feagin Stone, had been plan
ning a trip to Yellowstone
National Park to celebrate his
75th birthday, which would have
been on August 10.
Jim maintained close ties with
classmates and other members
of the St. John’s community. He
enjoyed being part of a Wash
ington area St. John’s alumni
reading group and, in 2005,
James Stone
served as the class of 1955
reunion leader.
Classmate Jane Gerber
Denison remembers Jim as
someone who was gracious and
“the quintessential
gentleman,” Others, like Sam
Kutler, recall his quiet intel
lect. Jim is also remembered for
his unassuming ways. His
great-niece, Allison Dietz
(Aio), recalls the way he intro
duced her to St. John’s without
saying a word-when she was
still in elementary school, Jim
gave her a St. John’s sweatshirt.
Among the St. John’s friends
who attended Jim’s funeral
service July 31 were Dorothy
Olim (Class of 1955), Jane
Gerber Denison (Class of 1955),
Emily (Class of 1955) and Sam
(Class of 1954) Kutler, Diana
Cartier (Class of 1956), Sandy
and Joe (Class of 1956) Cohen,
Nancy Eagle Lindley (Class of
1958), Mark Lindley (Class of
1967), and Paula DelPlain
Binder (Class of 1959).
He was president of the
Hunt Family Foundation,
a charitable trust set up to
serve nonprofit organiza
tions in the El Paso region.
He had recently been named
chairman of REDCO, the
Regional Economic Devel
opment Corporation of El
Paso, Las Cruces, and
Ciudad Juarez.
Mr. Hunt was actively
involved in economic devel
opment in the El Paso area,
having served as a board
member of the El
Paso/Juarez World Trade
Center and the Camino Real
Angels, and as a member of the
Paso del Norte Group. He was
on the boards of the New Mexico
Nature Conservancy, the El Paso
County Historical Society,
Project Arriba, the Trans-Pecos
Regional Center for Innovation
and Commercialization, and the
Lydia Patterson Institute.
After graduating from
St. John’s, Mr. Hunt studied law
at Golden Gate University in
San Francisco. He is survived by
his wife, Stacey, and their two
daughters, and had been eagerly
anticipating the birth of a son in
August.
Memorial contributions can
be made to Texas Tech School of
Medicine-Department for
Mental Health Research, 4800
Alberta Avenue, El Paso, Texas
79905; or The Nature Conser
vancy of New Mexico, 212 E.
Marcy St. Suite 200,
Santa Fe, New Mexico
87501-2049.
Marcel Fremont
Marcus Hunt (SF95)
(SFoi)
Marcus Hunt, businessman and
philanthropist from in El Paso,
Texas, died on June 24, 2008,
in La Jolla, Calif. A fourth
generation in the Hunt family
businesses, he served as the
financial manager for invest
ments of Hunt Companies,
Inc., and affiliate companies, as
well as the Managing Partner
for Hunt Holdings, L.P.
by Kee Zublin (SFoi)
There’s a story by
Gabriel Garcia
Marquez entitled “The
Handsomest Drowned
Sailor in the World”
that I never understood
until the morning I
Marcel Fremont
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
read Veronica Fremont’s
account of her son Marcel’s
burial.
Marcel David Fremont (SFoi)
died on June 25, 2008, when his
motorcycle collided with a truck
in Montana. He was traveling
around the country to visit
family and friends before he was
to begin his doctoral studies in
neuroscience at Washington
University in St. Louis.
Veronica described how at
Marcel’s burial the mourners
gathered around the grave site
to toss in a few mementos:
a $2 bill, a sprouting potato.
Then, as the attendants began to
lower the pine box, one whis
pered, “It doesn’t fit.” Atten
dants and foreman cranked the
coffin back to the surface, and
friends and family began strip
ping off pieces. The bereaved
removed poles, bolts and blocks
as they tried three times to
consign Marcel’s mortal
remains to the earth.
One of those present
commented, “He wasn’t ready
to go.” Marcel’s father, Rick
Fremont, countered that Marcel
was a “connoisseur of awkward
situations” and that he knew his
friends and family “weren’t
ready to let him go.”
Although I was not in that
group, as I read Veronica’s
account I could picture why
Marcel’s coffin wouldn’t fit: He
was simply too big for any hole
in the ground. Everything about
�{Obituaries}
Marcel was too big to go easily
into the ground: his shoulders
were too broad, his legs too
long, his heart and brain too
oversized.
And suddenly, I understood
Marquez’s story: A drowned
man washes to the shore of a
tiny island village. The man is
large, so large that the children
who find him at first think he’s a
ship or a whale. When they lay
him in one of the village homes,
there is barely enough room on
the floor. Even when they
merely look at the man, there is
“no room for him in their imagi
nation.”
The villagers grow to love the
man, whom they name Esteban,
and so they hold “the most
splendid funeral they could
conceive of for an abandoned
drowned man.” And, as they
carry him to the sea, they
become “aware for the first time
of the desolation of their streets,
the dryness of their courtyards,
the narrowness of their dreams
as they face the splendor and
beauty of their drowned man.”
They did not need to look at
one another to realize that they
were no longer all present, that
they never would be. But they
also knew that everything would
be different from then on, that
their houses would have wider
doors, higher
ceilings, and stronger floors so
that Esteban’s memory could go
everywhere without bumping
into beams...and they were
going to break their backs
digging for springs among
stones and planting flowers on
the cliffs...
My friend Marcel’s life was too
brief. But in 29 years, he knew
and loved many people, and it is
indeed true that where he has
been we look around and realize
that we are no longer all present
and never will be. It is also true
that we can fill the big empty
space he left behind with some
thing beautiful.
To make room for Marcel’s
memory, we can build wider
doors and higher ceilings, live
less confined lives, think bigger
thoughts. And we can honor our
friend by emulating his insa
tiable curiosity and creativity,
searching in unlikely places for
water to bring forth flowers.
Marcel could always see the
hidden potential of little things.
He was big that way.
In Marcel’s memory, parents
Veronica and Rick, and brother
Nathan, have established “The
Marcel Fremont Fund,” admin
istered by the Oak Park, River
Forest Community Foundation
(www.oprf.org). The fund will
make small donations for
causes related to education,
arts, sciences, recreation, and
the environment. For more
information, e-mail Veronica at
marcelsmom@comcast.net, or
visit Marcel’s memorial website
at www.marcelfremont.
com/wp.
Anjali Pai (SFGI08)
Last spring, the Santa Fe college
community lost one of its Grad
uate Institute alumnae, Anjali
Pai, who died March 30 from
injuries suffered in a car acci
dent the previous day. Anjali
completed the Liberal Arts
program in December 2007,
and those who knew her
remember her bright person
ality and love for education.
Born in Ottawa, Canada, she
earned a bachelor’s degree at
Lake Forest College and a
master’s from the University of
Toronto, where she focused on
the study of music. While in
Santa Fe, Anjali worked as a
tutor for at-risk Santa Fe teens
as part of the Advancement Via
Individual Determination
program, tutored at Santa Fe
Community College, taught as a
substitute at Santa Fe Prep, and
worked as a freelance editor. She
described herself as “proudly
Canadian, 100% (East) Indian,
surrogate Scottish, and over
identified with the underdog.”
Anjali wrote a novel at age 13,
rode horses, was an accom
plished singer and musician
(violin and piano), and directed
musicals when she was in high
school. She had read the
complete works of Shakespeare
long before enrolling in St.
John’s, and published more than
150 short stories on her website.
She had more than 1,000
Anjali Pai’s sister Tanya
RECEIVES AnIALi’s DIPLOMA FROM
President Michael Peters at
COMMENCEMENT LAST MaY.
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
47
friends worldwide with whom
she kept in touch.
The Pai Memorial Fund has
been established to provide
annual funding to a graduate
student who plans to become an
educator and hopes to make a
difference in the lives of chil
dren from disadvantaged back
grounds. The fund’s first recip
ient will be a fall 2008 graduate
student. To contribute to the
Anjali Pai Memorial Fund,
please contact Penelope
Bielagus at 505-984-6113 or
pbielagus@sjcsf.edu.
ALSO NOTED
Frank Bannerman (class of
1938), July 12,2008
William Barrett (class of
1956), May 17,2008
Victor Barton ( class of 1947),
DATE UNKNOWN
George Gerlach (class of
1953 June 23,2008
Rosemary Ingham (AGI95),
July 13,2008
Ogden W. “Peter” KelloggSmith (CLASS OF 1943) May 28,
2008
Edward Lee (class of 1952),
July 17,2008
Renee Ronelle Letven (SF69),
July 12,2008
C. Ranlet Lincoln (class of
1950), Nov. 15,2007
Jane Mill (SFGI85),
July 19,2008
Pasquale “Pat” Polillo (class
OF 1956), Sept. 4,2008
Charles Powleske (class of
1953), Aug. 1,2007
Michael Slota (SFGI86),
July 31,2008
John Williams (class of 1946),
July 17,2008
Gerald Zentz (class of 1954),
June 2,2008
�48
{Alumni}
Return of the Pioneers
July Reunion Brings Together Santa Fe's First Classes
BY Harold Morgan (SF68)
Tth the aid of a
decision to move Santa Fe’s Homeborrowed MacBook,
coming to the fall. During the summer
Bruce Baldwin (SF68)
of 2007, the idea of a summer reunion
tuned a harpsichord for emerged, and a group of alumni settled
Roy Stegman (SF68),
on a full week-July 13-19-of activities.
who was leading a tuto Phil Chandler (SF68) conceived of the
rial on “Bach’s Temperament
” in the
format,
and Lindsay Ridgeway (SF68)
Peterson Student Center. The
computer
pitched
in as organizing committee
provided the note-perfectly, of course
chair and treasurer. Organizing and
allowing Baldwin to tune each string to the
planning took place via e-mail, the
computer’s purity.
college provided meeting rooms for
In the tutorial, Stegman described a
the gathering, and Santa Fe Alumni
recently rediscovered keyboard tuning
Director Michael Bales (SF06) helped
system Bach used, and he demonstrated on
coordinate activities at the college.
the instrument: a 1968 harpsichord, an
Santa Fe President Michael Peters and his
appropriate choice for Santa Fe’s pioneering wife, Eleanor, hosted a reception
class of 1968. The tutorial was one of a
welcoming alumni and their families back
number of offerings-inteUectual and social- to campus.
organized by a group of alumni for a July
The reunion attracted 29 alumni from
reunion of the pioneers, their families, and
classes through 1971, 8 tutors and 35 others
members of the classes who shared the
including alumni from later classes. From
campus with them: the classes of 1969,1970,
as far away as Gbteborg, Sweden, alumni
and 1971.
came to see the remarkable changes to the
The self-organized reunion grew from
campus, catch up with one another, and
objections by some alumni to the college’s
enjoy a host of options for spending their
W
time in Santa Fe, from seminars and
lectures to an evening at the Santa Fe
Opera and a morning rafting the Rio
Grande. “It was a wonderful experience,”
says Rick Wicks (SF68), who with 5,000
miles to travel from Sweden was a vocal
proponent for a summer reunion.
“Usually at a Homecoming one only
knows one’s own classmates, because most
of the others are younger (or older) in
multiples of five years,” he explained. “But
here we had members from the next three
classes, not all of whom I knew before, but
all of whom I very much enjoyed getting to
know better. Organizing the reunion also
brought me into contact with members of
the class of ’68 who had dropped out before
I arrived in Santa Fe for my junior year,
again a very rewarding experience. By the
time my family and I arrived, participants
had already been there for several days, so
there was an active community into which
we walked. It felt very good.”
The reunion week featured six seminars
(including two on the Odyssey), led by
tutors emeriti, alumni, or both together. In
addition there were several tutorials,
including a session by Beth Kuper on the
Above, Joy Avery (SF68)
catches up with
TUTOR EMERITUS CuRTIS WiLSON (HA83), ONE
OF THE FIRST FACULTY MEMBERS IN SaNTA Fe.
Left, Claudia Nordstrom Larcombe (SF69)
AND Antigone Phalares
{The College -Sf.
John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
(SF68).
�{Alumni}
I Ching and feng shui. Tutor emeritus
Curtis Wilson (HA83, one of the first
faculty members on the new campus) gave
an informal lecture, “Reflections on Lunar
Theory,” and tutor Peter Pesic performed a
concert. Outdoor activities included the
rafting trip and a hike up Monte Sol. In
between scheduled events, alumni enjoyed
several ad hoc get-togethers, restaurant
meals, and gatherings in the homes of
Santa Fe alumni.
The closing event was a Quaker-style
meeting, led by Kuper and Phil Chandler,
focusing on the theme: “What have you
learned since leaving St. John’s?”
Maurie Wills Scott (SF68) was very glad
she made time to attend: “I realized what
wonderful friendships I had,” she said. “It
49
was easy to talk with people, and our shared
background laid the groundwork for recon
necting.”
Harold Morgan attended St. John’s in Santa
Fefor three semesters. An Albuquerque
resident, he is a syndicated columnist and
blogger.
Left, Enjoying the view from Monte Sol are Antigone Phalares (SF68), Gus Goldstein (SF68), Ellinor Garbring, Linnea
Garbring-Wicks, and Rick Wicks (SF68). Right, Jeff Hockersmith (SF69), at Sunday brunch.
The Pioneers
On October a, 1964, the opening day
of classes for the Santa Fe campus,
8a freshmen signed the college Register
at Convocation. Everything was new and
unsettled. After all, “colonizing a
college,” in the words of then-president
Richard Weigle (HA49), wasn’t easy.
The campus had three buildings: a
student center, one classroom building,
one laboratory building, and a cluster of
dormitories on the upper campus. One
women’s dorm had ground-level windows
facing south to the pinon trees. A year
later, to discourage male visitors, a spot
light was pointed toward the trees. On its
second night in place, the spotlight
turned a flashing red.
The Rolling Stones and the Beatles
were featured artists in common room
parties. There was no television on
campus.
Ford K. Brown was a kind of genial god
of the II tutors, bringing wisdom, humor
and deep experience to the classroom.
and
Hendrik
In February 1966,
St. John’s drew a visit
from Beat poet and anti
war activist Allen Gins
berg, who traveled to
campus in a 1960s icon,
the battered Volk
swagen mini bus.
For the pioneers,
their years at St. John’s
coincided with a time of
great social upheaval.
The graduation year,
1968, was marked by
momentous events: the
assassinations of Martin
Luther King, Jr., and
Robert Kennedy, a riot
at the Democratic
Students play a spirited volleyball game on the Santa Fe
National Convention in
CAMPUS IN 1964.
Chicago, and Vietnam
War protests.
culture, but lacking older models,
Looking back years later, Weigle
students had to figure things out them
wondered whether importing a seminar
selves, with the help of their tutors.
size group of juniors could have helped
And in time, they did. ♦
younger students adapt to the college
{The College.
St. John's College ■ Fall 2008 }
�5°
{Alumni Association News}
From the Director
OE Alumni Relations
Dear Alumni,
It’s been a busy couple of montbs in Alumni
Land, and if we’re running around, it’s
because you’ve been especially activeand believe me, we’re not complaining!
St. John’s alumni came out in unprece
dented numbers to support the college’s
capital campaign. When Jeff Bishop
(HA96) told us in aoo6 that the goal was
$125 million-by far the most ambitious
goal the college had ever attempted-I don’t
think anyone believed we would reach it
without a miracle. It turned out that the
miracle was you. With the inspirational
challenge from Ron Fielding (A70), we
alumni helped the college to not only meet
that goal, but to exceed it by more than
$9 million! Thank you!
Alumni participation in the campaign
really caused the college to sit up and take
notice of you, the only permanent members
of our community, and it prompted us to ask
the question: how can we work with the
Alumni Association to make our programs
better for you? I’m very grateful that a small
team of alumni, led by Ray Cave (class of
1948), has begun working together with an
outside consultant to tackle this very
question. The group is called the Alumni
Task Force, convened by our presidents,
Christopher Nelson (SF70) in Annapolis
and Michael Peters in Santa Fe. Other
members of the Task Force are Dave
Heimann (A87, vice chair), Jason Walsh
(A85), Steve Thomas (SF74) Patricia Sollars,
(A81), PheloshaCollaros (SFoo), Brett
Heavner (A89) Matt Calise (Aoo), Pam
Carter, (SFGI08), Jo Ann Mattson (A87),
and the college’s vice presidents for
advancement, Barbara Goyette (A73) and
Jim Osterholt.
The Task Force met for the first time on
October 23. If there had been an opening
question it would have been, “How can the
college better serve its alumni and how can
our alumni better serve the college?” We
barely scratched the surface in attempting
to answer that question after four hours of
discussion. And we all have homework
due by the next meeting on November 13:
to research alumni programs at other
comparable colleges. We’re all really
excited about the impact the committee’s
work will have on the future of alumni
relations at St. John’s.
Another new development on the alumni
front is the amazing growth of activities in
alumni chapters and groups. To keep up
with the expanding endeavors of our chapter
leaders, the college has hired a new parttime employee in the Alumni Office. Torii
Campbell joined the Annapolis team,
although she will be working with alumni
groups across the country, as coordinator of
regional chapters and groups. You can look
forward to Torii helping your chapter plan
parties, seminars, and other activities, as
well as work to get the word out about these
events to the broader alumni community.
Feel free to send her an e-mail to introduce
yourself. She’d be happy to hear from you at
torii.campbell@sjca.edu. Thank you to all
the chapter presidents whose efforts with
alumni have made this position a necessity.
Finally, I need to say a word about the
current alumni directory project managed
by Harris Connect. First, a little history: up
until eightyears ago the Alumni Association
used a significant portion of the money they
received from your alumni dues to pay for an
alumni directory that was delivered free of
charge to all alumni. Contact and employ
ment information was gathered from alumni
every five years, and the college used this
information to update its database. About
seven years ago, the Alumni Association
decided to support the college’s onhne
alumni community. But unless we continue
to sohcityour most recent contact and
career information we will not have an
up-to-date database.
Harris Connect is the company we’ve
always used for this project; indeed, Harris
is pretty much the only game in town when it
comes to producing print directories. Their
arrangement is that they will gather the data
for us for free and offer you a directory for
sale. I understand it costs as little as $80 for
{The College -St.
John’s College . Fall 2008 }
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in
the St. John’s College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors
elected by and from the alumni body. The
board meets four times a year, twice on each
campus, to plan programs and coordinate the
affairs of the association. This newsletter
within The College magazine is sponsored by
the Alumni Association and communicates
association news and events of interest.
President - Jason Walsh (A85)
Vice President - Steve Thomas (SF74)
Secretary - Joanne Murray (A70)
Treasurer - Richard Cowles (A70)
Mailing address - Alumni Association,
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis,
MD 21404, or 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
the book and as much as $120 for the book
and CD. I appreciate all of you contacting
Harris and giving your time to update our
records, but I’m concerned about the
reports I’ve heard about some aggressive
sales representatives on the Harris end. I’m
sorry about this, and I’m working with
Harris to resolve it. Please don’t feel an
obligation to buy the book. It is expensive,
although a treasure for alumni, with photos
and personal stories-more fike a yearbook
than a phonebook. Again, it’s very impor
tant for the Admissions, Career Services,
and the Advancement offices to have your
most current information, so we are all very
grateful for your participation.
The Harris directory is not intended to
replace our online Alumni community
(which is still free). It’s an excellent resource
for staying in touch with your classmates,
sharing your news and photos, career
networking, and finding Johnnies wherever
you go. Find out more at:
http://alumni.stjohnscollege.edu/
Thanks to all of you who attended Homecoming in Annapolis and Santa Fe! We’U
talk more about that in the next issue of
The College.
Keep in touch,
Jo Ann Mattson (A87)
Director of Alumni Relations
jamattson@sjca.edu
�{Alumni Association News}
51
It’s Always Homecoming for the Annapolis Chapter
""There are Memories Here ”
“We had 15 participants for the first
ike most women, Annapolis
seminar in 2002,” Gammon says. “It was a
chapter president Beth
great start. We typically have about 12 to 20
Martin Gammon (A94)
participants, but there are certain readings,
juggles career and family
such as Shakespeare, that draw a specific
with one or more other
crowd.”
passions. In Gammon’s case,
Typically,
it’s St. John’s College, where she has
rein participants include both
and graduate alumni who
vigorated the Annapolis chapter undergraduate
of the
range in age from 20 to 80. “There is a
Alumni Association. Her husband, Alex
wide range of life perspectives in the mix,”
(A94), is one of her biggest supporters, but
says Gammon. “I find the different lenses
they can’t attend chapter meetings
together. “We take shifts to take care of our to be fascinating and welcome the chance to
revisit Program readings now that I have
two-year-old so one of us can attend the
had more life experience. But we’re all still
monthly chapter seminar gatherings,” she
Johnnies, still approaching the readings in
says.
the same way.”
When Gammon joined the Annapolis
Last spring, the group read and
chapter in 2001, the chapter had been inac
discussed Thucydides over three seminars.
tive. With assistance from the Alumni
In September they went more modern, with
office, she built a network and began
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford.
sending postcard announcements about
chapter seminars. Alumni are on the invita Madame Bovary was planned for October.
“We do a mix of literature from the
tion list; spouses and friends are usually
Program and some philosophy,” says
welcome. A core group of regulars attends
Gammon. Gammon acknowledges that her
the monthly seminars, held in the private
dining room in Randall Hall. This dedicated family’s busy lifestyle helps drive the
chapter’s reading list. “When I have more
group includes Paula Binder (class of 1959),
time we’ll do more philosophy,” she
Melvin Bender (AGI05), Jerome May
explains. “Right now, with a two-year-old, I
(AGI92), Joan Vinson (AGI81), Valerie
don’t have enough time to prepare those
Garvin (A96), Charles Green (AGI02), and
readings!”
retired tutor George Doskow and his wife,
In the future. Gammon hopes to work
Minna (AGI71).
L
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowfor information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Robert Morgan, SF76
505-^75-9012
rim2u@c0mcast.net
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon,
A94
410332-1816
emartin@crs.org
AUSTIN/SAN
ANTONIO
Toni Wilkinson, SGI87
512-278-1697
\vilkinson_toni
@hotmail.com
CHICAGO
Rick Lightburn, SF76
847-922-3862
ricklightburn@alumni.
stjonnscollege.edu
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
Paula Fulks, SF76
817-654-2986
puffjd@swbell.net
DENVER/BOULDER
Elizabeth Jenny, SF80
303-530-3373
epj727@comcast.net
HOUSTON
Norman Ewart, A85
BOSTON
Dianne Cowan, A91
713-303-3025
norman.ewart@rosetta
617-666-4381
resources.com
diannecowan@rcn.com
Beth Martin Gammon helped to rejuve
THE Annapolis chapter by organizing
monthly seminars.
nate
with her fellow volunteers to launch an
occasional social event, such as an evening
gathering at the Boathouse. For now,
socializing is informal, as attendees stroll
over to a nearby restaurant after seminar.
“We’re lucky to have the familiar turf of the
campus,” Gammon says. “We don’t have
the challenge of convincing people to come
to an unknown place. There are memories
here.”
—Patricia Dempsey
MADISON
Consuelo Sanudo,
SGIoo
608-251-6565
sanudoc@tds.net
PHILADELPHIA
Helen Zartarian, AGI86
2i5-482r5697
helenstevezartarian@
mac.com
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles,
SFGI95
505-986-1814
rcowles2@comcast.net
MINN./ST. PAUL
Carol Freeman, AGI94
612-822-3216
Freem013@umn.edu
PHOENIX
Donna Kurgan, AGI96
623-444-6642
dakurgie@yahoo.com
SEATTLE
James Doherty, SFGI76
2o6-542r344i
jdoherty@mrsc.org
NEWYORKCITY
Daniel Van Doren, A81
914-949-6811
dvandoren@
optonline.net
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray, A70
724-325-4151
Joanne.Murray@
basicisp.net
SOUTH FLORIDA
Peter Lamar, AGI95
305-666-9277
cplamar@yahoo.com
NORTH CAROLINA
Rick Ross, A82
919-319-1881
Rick@activated.com
Elizabeth Ross, A92
Elizabeth®
activated.com
PORTLAND
Jennifer Rychlik, SF93
503-547-0241
jlr43@coho.net
NORTHERN CALIF.
Reynaldo Miranda, A99
415-333-445^
reynaldo.miranda@
gmail.com
{The Coll
eg e
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico, A86
619-429-1565
srico@sandi.net
SALT LAKE CITY
Erin Hanlon, SF03
916-967-2194
e.i.mhanlon@
gmail.com
• St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
SOUTHERN CALIF.
Jan Conlin, SF85
310-490-2749
conlinjani@yahoo.com
Providing
OPPORTUNITIES
FOR MORE ALUMNI
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Ed Grand,! A77
301-351-8411
egrandi@aoLcom
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Peter Weis, SF84
413-367-2174
peter_weis@
nmhschool.org
TO CONNECT
MORE OFTEN AND
MORE RICHLY
�5a
{St. John’s Forever}
his picture from 1900 evokes
lacrosse, basketball, baseball, football, and
two bygone aspects of life at
tennis. The college’s biggest rival-espeSt. John’s College: the days
cially in lacrosse and football-was Johns
when the college fielded
Hopkins University. Compulsory military
teams in many different
training was discontinuedin 1923, the
intercollegiate competitions,
same year the college switched to an elec
and a time when military trainingtive
wassystem. President Stringfellow Barr
compulsory for every student. These
to intercollegiate competition
put John
an end
nies, posed with their trophies, were part
soon after the New Program began in 1937.
of a strong athletic program at the college.
In 1908, the college began construction
In addition to track, students also
on what was to become Iglehart Hall,
competed in boxing, fencing, crew.
named for Lieutenant Edmund Berkeley
T
{The College-
St. John’s College • Fall 2008 }
Iglehart, an 1894 graduate who was a base
ball and football star and later returned to
the college as a faculty member. Next year,
the college will mark the looth anniversary
of Iglehart Hall, where runners put in laps
on the suspended running track, and fierce
intramural competition takes place on the
basketball court.
�{Alumni Events Calendar}
:a
Alumni Calendar
■roquet; i
St. John’s College vs. the United States
Naval Academy, in the quest for the
Annapolis Cup
Piraeus 2009
Join us in Santa Fe or Annapolis--and this
year, in Washington, D.C.-for Piraeus, the
college’s continuing education program for
alumni.
I p.m. Sunday, April 19
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,
led by David Starr and Keri Ames
January r6-18, aoog, Santa Fe
Cost: $375 person, including all seminars,
receptions and Sunday brunch.
Registration and payment deadline is
January 5, aoo8.
Milton’s Paradise Lost, led by Eva
Brann and David Carl
June 4-7, aoog, Annapolis
Cost: $400 per person, including all
seminars, receptions and Sunday brunch.
On-campus room and board is $200 per
person for three nights. Registration and
payment deadline is May 15, aoog.
Stendhal’s The Red and the Black,
led by Michael Rawn and Ned Walpin
June 14-19, aoog, Santa Fe
Lee Branner (A07) brought her grandfa
ther, Frank Branner, to campus for a
Piraeus weekend on the Odyssey.
The week begins with a welcome dinner
Sunday evening. The program will consist
of seven seminars spread over the week.
There will be a morning and an evening
seminar on Monday, Tuesday, and
Thursday. The final seminar will take place
Friday morning followed by a closing
lunch. Wednesday is a free day to enjoy
Santa Fe and prepare for the final three
seminars.
Cost: $475 per person, including all
seminars, lunches, and dinner on Sunday.
On-campus room and board is $350 per
person for five nights.
Registration and payment deadline is
May 33, 3009.
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Fall 2008 }
Shakespeare In Performance
King Lear, led by Louis Petrich
and Jon Ihck
Acting Instruction by Shakespeare
Theatre Company’s Academy
for Classical Acting
June i8-ai, aoog
Harman Center for the Arts,
Washington, D.C.
In collaboration with Washington’s
Shakespeare Theatre Company, this
combination seminar/performance-based
workshop will feature stimulating scholarly
discussion integrated with an exploration
of the actor’s craft and approach to classic
text. This weekend is packed with activity,
beginning with a Thursday noon
registration, a tour of the new Harman
Center for the Arts, an afternoon seminar
and Shakespeare Theatre Company’s
performance of King Lear. Mr. Petrich
and Mr. Tuck will participate in the
performance workshops and lead two other
seminars before the closing session Sunday
afternoon.
Cost: $990 per person, including all
seminars, ticket to performance otKing
Lear, instruction, breakfasts, receptions
and tours.
Registration and payment deadline is
June 5, 3009.
�STJOHN’S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
Published
by the
Communications Office
P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
ADDRESS service REQUESTED
Non-Profit Org.
U.S. Postage
Paid
Annapolis, MD
Permit No. 120
�
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<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
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The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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thecollege2001
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52
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The College, Fall 2008
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Volume 34, Issue 3 of The College Magazine. Published in Fall 2008. Misnumbered as volume 3.
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St. John's College
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
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2008
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pdf
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The College Vol 3, Issue 3 Fall 2008
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Hannifin, Jenny (Santa Fe editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Dempsey, Patricia (managing editor)
Deger, Ann
Luell. Sara
McLane-Higginson, Brooke
Perleberg, Anna
Spiegelman, Deborah
Johnson, David
The College
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/44e76d23da077302e9cfee62b4cea998.pdf
a62f21ee86f7d52aa8698c1115c13583
PDF Text
Text
�On Galileo
SIJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
“7 don y know ’—what a beautiful expression that is—so candid in its honesty. ”
Galileo Galilei
bserving the natural world raised questions for Galileo, for example:
Why did the water on the surface of the earth slosh around once or
Born in 1564 in Pisa,
Galileo
at ainmonastery
considered
becoming
a monk,
twice
a day, studied
like water
a swingingand
container?
Galileo
rejected
the
but his father insisted
that
hethe
study
medicine.
Galileotowas
intrigued
mathe
idea
that
moon
had anything
do more
with it.
Instead,with
he concluded
matics, which he studied
with
a tutor
dropping
out
of the around
University
that itindependently
was because the
earth
was before
both rotating
and
moving
the
of Pisa altogether. He
later
returned
to
the
university
to
teach,
but
at
a
very
low
salary,
and
sun, constantly speeding up and slowing down, generating the
tides.
It
his appointment to the
of Padua
saved him
from
poverty.
Galileo alsoled
pursued
wasUniversity
a rare mistake
for Galileo,
whose
thought
experiments
him to
potentially prohtable
projects;
one
of these,Ofa course,
telescope,
proved
successful.
such
brilliant
insights.
he had
the quite
big picture
right.He
turned his instrument to the heavens with more questions, publishing his observations in
Starry Messenger.
Always a prudent scientist, Gahleo nevertheless made mistakes, for example, overesti
mating his political connections and friendship with Pope Urban VIII when he published
his Dialogue on Two Chief World Systems in 163a. He had finished the work on Christmas
Eve, iGag, but the bubonic plague delayed the news of his work, which challenged the
Catholic Church’s ban on teaching Copernican theories, getting to Rome.
Galileo never married, but he had three children with his housekeeper, Maria Gamba.
In her book Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel documented the especially close relationship
he had with his daughter, Virginia, whom he settled in a convent as a young girl. When she
joined her order, Virginia took the name Maria Celeste. Although she lived a cloistered
existence, she followed her father’s career and worried about him. After his trial in 1633,
in which the Roman Inquisition found Galileo guilty of heresy, Maria Celeste took on his
penance. Galileo had hoped to persuade the church to consider purely scientific matters
apart from faith. Instead, the Dialogue was banned for aoo years. Galileo was forced to
publicly confess his error and was sentenced to house imprisonment for the remainder of
his life. He died in 1642.
We read his works at St. John’s, follow his thinking, and replicate his experiments. But
the spirit of Galileo is reflected in laboratory in another way; Johnnies are asked to be
gadflies when they consider science. Like all other classes at St. John’s, “laboratory
proceeds in the mode of radical inquiry,” explains Michael Dink < A75), dean in Annapolis.
“We don’t want simply to assimilate the conclusions of science; we want to raise questions
about not only its conclusions, but also its methods, and indeed the whole enterprise.
Thanks to the interplay of seminar and laboratory readings, we are in a position to see the
project of modern science as novel and questionable.”
This issue of The College celebrates inquiry, both in laboratory and in the work of five
alumni engaged in fascinating pursuits in science.
-7?//
O
The College (usps 018-750)
is published quarterly by
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD,
and Santa Fe, NM
Known office of publication:
Communications Office
St. John’s College
Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800
Periodicals postage paid
at Annapolis, MD
postmaster: Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John’s College,
Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404-2800.
Rosemary Harty, editor
443-716-4011
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
Patricia Dempsey,
managing editor
Jenny Hannifin,
Santa Fe editor
Jennifer Behrens, art director
The College welcomes letters
on issues of interest to readers.
Letters can be sent via e-mail
to the editor or mailed to the
address above.
Annapolis
410-626-2539
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
Contributors
Christopher Allison (SF97)
Ethan Brooks (Aio)
Shane Gassaway (SF06)
Ruth Johnston (A85)
Cathi Dunn MacRae
Tom Nugent
Deborah Spiegelman
Erica Stratton (A08)
Kea Wilson (A09)
Jennifer Wright (A08)
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
® Mixed Sources
I
J
FSC
Product group from well-managed
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�"I "I
College
The
ZINE FOR Alumni
of
Vol
y
St. John’s College
Annapolis •
{Contents}
PAGE
(J
DEPARTMENTS
Commencement 2008
In Annapolis, the chairman of the
National Endowment for the Humanities
tells graduates to be grateful.
In Santa Fe, the president of the
Council on Foreign Relations asks
Johnnies to be citizens of the world.
PAGE
ZO
Talking About Science
PAGE 8
Johnnie researchers tackle big questions
dealing with the human brain, dangerous
diseases, and basic mysteries of the universe.
3a ALUMNI
PAGE 14
Progress
An aspiring writer ponders whether
artistic expression can co-exist with the
demands of the Program.
PAGE
•
•
•
Eastern Classics helped Lisa Levchuk
(SFGI05, EC06) finish her novel,
Everything Beautiful in the World.
Radical Inquiry
A Work in
Celebrating capital campaign success
New outreach effort in Annapolis
A dream walking
Cultivating outdoor skills in Santa Fe
Helping high school students get
to college
Deconstructing a greenhouse
Annapolis’ weekend warriors
A new GI director in Annapolis
Salvatore Scibona (SF97) found
inspiration for his first novel. The End,
in his heritage.
Z^
PAGE
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
•
•
•
•
•
30 BIBLIOFILE
No part of the Program has undergone as
much revision as the laboratory.
PAGE
a
PROFILES
3a Singer-songwriter Buddy Mondlock (A82)
finds success in the music business.
36 The Peace Corps introduced
Melanie Kirby (SF97) to a life with bees.
40 Adrian Bordone (AGI96) helps nonprofits
prove their worth.
Z^8
45 OBITUARIES
In Love with Croquet
Remembering two dedicated Annapolis
staff members.
For one day a year, Johnnies are
bloodthirsty Spartans.
PAGE 48
47 ALUMNI VOICES
Christopher Allison (SF97) finds purpose
in the foreign service.
ON THE COVER
Galileo Galilei
Illustration by DavidJohnson
50 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
5a ST. John’s FOREVER
�{From the Bell Towers}
The Campaign for St. John’s
Exceeds $125 Million Goal
When the college formally declares its
success at campaign celebrations this July
in Santa Fe, and September in Annapolis,
there will be quite a few people to thankLed Zeppelin among them.
The legendary rock band reunited in
December 2007 (with Jason Bonham
replacing his late father on the drums) in
London for a tribute to Ahmet Ertegun,
class of 1944 and founder of Atlantic
Records. Proceeds established the Ahmet
Ertegun Education Fund, which benefits
four educational institutions, St. John’s
among them.
Many individuals-from an anonymous
donor who made a $12 million gift to
strengthen the college endowment to a
recent alumnus who made a first-time gift
of $20 to the college’s Annual Fundcontributed to the success of “With a Clear
and Single Purpose”: The Campaign for
St. John’s College. As of June i, 2008,
more than $130 million has been raised in the campaign,
an extraordinary achievement for a small college. “We have been
able to address important priorities such as financial aid and
faculty salaries, as well as improving the physical facilities on the
campus,” said Annapolis President Christopher Nelson (SF70).
The Santa Fe campus, which is marking the 40th anniversary of
its first commencement this year, will see some of its most impor
tant long-term goals come to fruition as a result of campaign gifts.
Among them are the Norman and Betty Levan Hall, a new home
for the Graduate Institute; a new dormitory; and the Ariel Intern-
Great things have already been accom
plished
THROUGH THE CAPITAL CAMPAIGN.
Dr. Norman Levan (SFGI74) made a
$5 million gift for a new GI building in
Santa Fe. Below: Gilliam Hall in
Annapolis was made possible through a
GRANT FROM ThE HoDSON TrUST.
left:
ship program that provides work experi
ence for students. “The success of this
campaign will mean a stronger, more vital
campus community in Santa Fe,” said Presi
dent Michael Peters, “Innovation and vision
have always meant a lot to this campus.
Financial stability, increased support for
student financial aid, and improved facili
ties position us for a bright future.”
The campaign formally opened in 2006
with opening celebrations in Annapofis
and Santa Fe. On July 25, Santa Fe will
host the first closing celebration, a Fiesta
for New Mexico alumni and supporters.
On September 13, Annapolis-area alumni and college friends will
celebrate the successful completion of the campaign.
Strong leadership gifts, most notably from Ronald Fielding,
campaign chairman, started the campaign out on a high note.
Fielding directed his gift to the endowment, for financial aid.
To stimulate giving in the final year of the campaign, he issued a
$2.5 million challenge to alumni, matching first-time gifts,
increased gifts, and multi-year pledges to the campaign.
The challenge worked-alumni met and exceeded the challenge,
prompting Fielding to raise the challenge and match qualifying
gifts through June 30. One of the greatest achievements the
college can celebrate in this campaign. Fielding noted, is the
creation of a strong culture of giving among alumni.
Leadership gifts from donors such as Fielding, a strong
response to the annual fund from alumni, and the support of
foundations all contributed to the campaign’s success, says
Sharon Bishop (class of 1965), chair of the Board of Visitors and
Governors. “I think this campaign has reinforced our central
beliefs about St. John’s,” Bishop says. “First, St. John’s stands for
something important and valuable in higher education. Secondly,
our alumni believe in our Program and are willing to support it
with their dollars, more than they ever have in the history of our
college. Finally, we have gained the admiration and financial
support of foundations and friends which have been critical to our
success.”
When the celebrations end in the fall, the college will embark
on a new strategic plan, one that establishes priorities and iden
tifies challenges for the college in the coming years. Bishop says.
“Because this campaign has been such a resounding success, we
can move on to the next chapter, firmly grounded in our purpose
and confident about our future.”
- Rosemary Harty
{The College -St. John’s
College • Summer 2008 }
�{From the Bell Towers}
Reaching out in Annapolis
BY Ethan Bkooks (Aio)
In past years, Annapolis
students have engaged in
community service in a
variety of ways, from tutoring
local children to working on
Habitat for Humanity proj
ects. Early this summer, a
group of students who are
concerned about the social
issues of the wider Annapolis
community launched a new
project: Epigenesis, a lo-week
leadership program for
Annapolis youth “who have
experienced serious difficul
ties in life,” says Jamaal
Barnes (Aio). The idea, says
Barnes, is for Johnnies to
support teenagers as they
“work through the Annapolis
community to create the
change they want
to see.”
Four students created
Epigenesis: Barnes, Rachel
Davison (AoB), Raphaela
Cassandra (Aio), and Joshua
Becker (A08). The group
already has seed money: a
$10,000 grant from The
Davis Projects for Peace
program.
The effort arose from a
growing concern among
students over social problems
in Annapolis, including drugrelated violence, a high drop
out rate for students of color,
and a lack of opportunity for
area youth, says Barnes.
“Epigenesis was inspired by a
love for the Annapolis
community,” he says.
“Instead of being worried and
concerned and sitting in our
The
founders of
lofty positions on campus, our
education inspires us to act.
If something’s wrong, we
should try to fix it in whatever
way we can.”
Epigenesis founders began
their project by making
contacts with social service
and community organizations
in Annapolis, including
Annapolis High School, We
Care and Friends, Asbury
United Methodist Church,
and the Boys and Girls Club
in Annapolis. “We thought
it was important to partner
with other groups and get
the support of other
community programs,”
says Ms. Cassandra.
The program began in mid
June with a leadership work
shop for a dozen area
teenagers, selected with the
help of community partners,
at St. John’s. The group will
continue to meet throughout
“A Dream Walking”
St. John’s lost one of its biggest fans last February when
writer, newspaper columnist and conservative pundit
William F. Buckley, Jr. died. Buckley was the Commence
ment speaker in Annapolis in May 1996. Shortly afterward he
praised the college in his nationally syndicated column,
focusing on the titles of the senior essays he read about in the
Commencement program. Not easily impressed, Buckley
described his column as “a lullaby to the forlorn on the
theme of: Believe it or not, some American students learn.”
He described expressing his astonishment at the “academic
and intellectual sophistication” of the students to Ray Cave
(class of 1948), who sat next to him on the podium. He listed
many of the authors read on the Program, and concluded
with a line that the college has treasured since: “Did you ever
see a dream walking? Go to St. John’s.”
4"
the summer to plan and carry
out projects in their own
communities. Students will
develop programs to address
the social problems they see
as the most critical in the
Annapolis community today.
Barnes says these could
include open-mic nights and
community fairs. Johnnies
Epigenesis
HOPE TO EMPOWER AnnAPOLIS
YOUTH TO WORK FOR CHANGE IN
THEIR communities: (l. to R.)
Rachel Davison (A08), Jamaal
Barnes (Aio), Raphaela
Cassandra (Aio), and Josh
Becker (A08).
{The College-
3
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
will help facilitate the
program as advisers, office
assistants, or group leaders,
“to help the teens in whatever
way possible,” he says.
�{From the Bell Towers}
Ah, Wilderness!
Search and Rescue Fosters
Outdoor Skills
Thanks to wider cell phone
coverage, fancy GPS devices,
and better wilderness and
safety education, fewer hapless
hikers are getting lost in the
mountains near the Santa Fe
campus. That’s meant a shift in
focus for the college’s Search
and Rescue Team.
Brendan O’Neill, Athletics
and Outdoors Program coordi
nator in Santa Fe, has been
involved with the team since
1998. Since Search and Rescue
was founded in 1971, the team
would field 30 or so rescue
missions a year, he says. With
fewer rescues, the team has
focused more energy on
teaching Johnnies leadership
and outdoor skills. O’Neill says
extended training is focused in
four main areas: navigation,
including map reading,
compass skills, and GPS;
wilderness medi
cine; communica
tions, including
using radios; and
field certification,
which the state of
New Mexico
requires for search
and rescue partici
pants. The team has
about 30 members,
35 of whom are
St. John’s students.
Team members are
encouraged to
attend at least two
sessions a month.
In the pastyear
several courses
Nate Murray
have been held on the Santa Fe
campus, including a wilderness
first-response course taught by
Wilderness Medical Associates,
an amateur radio license class
taught by the Los Alamos
Radio Club, and an avalanche
course. Cultivating leadership
skills is still an important goal
of the team, O’Neill says, and
to that end students take on
important roles such as presi
dent, training officer, and
logistics officer.
All this training means a
safer and more effective
mission when Search and
Rescue heads off campus to the
mountains. In January, three
searches in four days involved
members of the St. John’s
team. In the first, the hiker
turned up while rescue teams
were mobilizing-“the best
result in a mission,” says
O’Neill. The second involved a
rescue that was completed just
before a snowstorm. The third
rescue, in which two people
were lost for three nights in the
Santa Fe Ski Basin area,
required 13 teams working in
blizzard-like conditions.
- Jenny Hannifin
(SF09) IMPROVES HIS
COMMUNICATION
SKILLS.
A Book That changed your life
Is there one book that changed your life? Opened your eyes to
something you never considered before? The College is
collecting stories about how one or two (three at the most!)
books affected alumni. Send your thoughts to the editor by email: Rosemary.Harty@sjca.edu or mail to; The College Maga
zine, PO Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404. The deadline is
September 15. We’ll print as many as we can fit.
Here’s a sampling to inspire you:
Erin Hanlon (SF03): ''War andPeace brought me to a belief
in God. That part where Pierre is searching and meets the old
Mason kind of paralleled my own searching, and when Pierre
goes through the initiation ceremony it somehow dawned on
me that God existed. That said, I did not become a Mason, but
instead an Orthodox Christian. The other book that had a big
effect on me was The Boxcar Children in third grade. It was the
book that made me realize I loved to read-and I became a
bookworm after that.”
{The College-
Anna Perleberg (SF02): “Alot ofbooks have been influential
in my life-kind of like breathing. But the first was Mystery at
Lilac Inn, a Nancy Drew that my kindergarten teacher gave me
when she realized I’d read all the picture books in the class
room. Not only did it have exciting girly adventures, it began to
instill confidence in me that I could educate myself at my own
pace and not have to fit into a mold.”
Rhonda Ortiz (A04): ''''Pride andPrejudiccw^s, the first
‘grown-up, thinking’ book that I read and enjoyed. This
coincided with taking a class from my most influential teacher
in high school, Mr. O’Malley (AP history). Together, they mark
the beginning of my adult thinking. Reading Euclid and
Apollonius taught me to appreciate and love the beauty of
mathematics. The Bible and the liturgy, however, have been the
most formative of my life.”
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
�{From the Bell Towers}
5
Determinate Negation:
Razing the Santa Fe Greenhouse
BY Shane Gassaway (SFo6)
In early January, a call went out
from Mike DiMezza (SF98,
EC99), former assistant
gardener. He was spreading
the word to those who helped
him huild it that the adohe
greenhouse behind the Fine
Arts Building would soon he
taken down. Its decommission
makes way for a fire safety road
that will serve the Norman and
Betty Levan Hall, the center
for the Graduate Institute, on
which construction will begin
later this year.
For many people, the green
house, built in 2003, stood as
a legacy and a proud accomplishment. It was distinct
among buildings on the Santa
Fe campus in that students
conceived of, designed, and
built it-with help from alumni,
the Buildings and Grounds
office, and friends of the
college. A “green” structure,
it served as a model for owner
ship, stewardship, and
belonging in the St. John’s
community. Even though its
destruction makes way for a
great benefit to the college,
many will feel its loss deeply
and for a long time. That’s why,
when Mike suggested a recon
vening of some of the old crew
to deconstruct the greenhouse,
I agreed to join in. We would
salvage the materials to be
reused elsewhere-perhaps for
another greenhouse built by a
later generation of students.
Upon reflection, of course,
the idea seems a bit crazy.
After all, Mike was
calling me in New
Orleans from his
place in Brooklyn,
where he lives with
his wife, Amy, and
one-year-old son,
Lucca. The old crew
is scattered to far
corners at this point.
But as Mike said later
in Santa Fe, “So
many people helped
build that green
house, so much
heart, love, and care
went into the site, to
have just destroyed it
would have been too
much to bear.” In March,
Mike and I flew to Santa Fe.
Together with some students,
staff, old guard B&G workers
and David Perrigo, the campus
architect, we brought down
the greenhouse in four days.
I delighted in seeing John
nies again with tools in hand.
It felt similar to building the
greenhouse as a student along
side other students. The work
had been a diversion for some
of us, or an outlet for the
stress of the trials of the class
room; for others it was a
means of honing thoughts
engendered therein. For all, it
meant learning a practical
application of the St. John’s
method by addressing each
task, if not as a knower, then
as a thinker. It meant learning
to take stock of the tools and
resources at one’s disposal,
however few they were and
Deconstructing the Santa Fe
GREENHOUSE WAS AS MUCH A
LABOR OF LOVE AS BUILDING IT FOR
Mike DiMezza (SF98,EG99).
Materials were preserved to
REBUILD THE GREENHOUSE WHEN
THE BEST SPOT IS CHOSEN,
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
however crude, and using
them to the utmost with
creativity and deliberation.
For five years the greenhouse
stood as a monument to that
invaluable lesson, and as a
refuge and place of beauty for
the students, faculty, and staff
of Santa Fe. Will it have a
future incarnation? As Santa Fe
President Michael Peters told
me, a greenhouse does belong
on campus. Materials salvaged
from the greenhouse were
saved, and the structure will be
rebuilt as soon as the best loca
tion has been determined.
Until then, it shall live in
the hearts and works of those
whose hands shaped it and
whose lives it touched. *
Shane Gassaway is enrolled in
the PhD program in philos
ophy at Tulane University.
In New Orleans, he’sput his
building skills to use in
assisting in the construction
ofa playground through a
program called Kaboom,
whose mission is to build a
playground within walking
distance ofevery child in
America.
�6
{From the Bell Towers}
Weekend Warriors
Armed with Padded Weapons,
Johnnies Pursue Honor
BY Erica Stratton (Ao8)
The Melee Club, which wages a
(bloodless) battle on the soccer
field after lunch every Saturday
afternoon, has an important
niche at St. John’s: It reminds
armchair Iliad enthusiasts
what hand-to-hand combat was
actually like. Forget that these
weapons are foam instead of
bronze and that the partici
pants fight not for honor, but
until the last man is standing.
That’s not to say that there
aren’t moments of stoicism that
would do any Spartan proud:
though no face or groin hits are
allowed, everything else is
fair game.
“Things like Melee just
evolved out of warfare, like
most modern forms of martial
arts and weapon practice,”
explains Michael Sloan (Aii),
who has been playing since he
came to St. John’s. “The only
difference is that while things
like fencing and Aikido teach
the tactics and procedures of a
specific form of combat. Melee
is simply a brawl.” No specific
physical prowess is needed to
play-though many of the
veteran players will be happy to
demonstrate techniques that
would make any zombie
fighting ninja proud.
The traditional Melee
weapon is a foam sword called a
“boffer,” though soft rephcas of
axes, spears, and shields are
also common. They all have a
core of PVC, wrapped in pipe
insulation foam in the shape
and size appropriate to the kind
of weapon needed. After the
glue has set, the entire weapon
is wrapped in colorful duct tape
to add durability. Archon
William Kunkel (Aii) says,
“The name ‘boffer’ is probably
based on the sound one makes
when hitting someone solidly.
With a well padded one, it actu
ally sounds like ‘boff.’ ”
This year’s Melee group
numbers around 20 students,
including several women. The
rules of battle are simple and the
objective is clear. Club members
split up into two opposing
“armies,” chosen by “captains”
as if it were a soccer game.
Usually the opposing teams
stare at once another for a few
seconds, then suddenly rush at
each other, screaming a battle
cry. Combatants get their arms
and legs “cut off’ with the slap
stick glee of a Monty Python
movie. Once a limb is
“disabled,” the player must act
as if it no longer functions,
leading to the classic Melee pose
of hopping after someone on
one foot. And, though they
might start out as two armies,
loyalties are fluid and any game
can quickly become “everyman
for himself.”
With all this treachery and
risk of bruising, why do people
play?
Killian Gupton (Ari), who
just started playing this year,
says, “I play because I really
need an opportunity to wail
away at someone and let off
steam without hurting
anybody. It just helps me
relax and get something out
of my system.”
Kelly Trop (Ari), one of
the female players, gets
straight to the point: “I play
mostly because it’s fun to
attack people with giant
foam weapons.”
The origins of Melee on the
St. John’s campus are lost to
those who play the game now,
but Archon Jason Ritzke (Art)
believes this particular game is
unique to St. John’s. “Many
other padded-weapon fighting
groups exist,” he says.
“However, this has the special
nature of allowing us to truly
communicate (to a classmate)
what we really thought about
that point made in seminar.”
Above, Scott Jones, Michael
Sloan, and Bill Kunkel let off
STEAM
in pretend
BATTLE.
Bottom left, Kunkel, Scott
Jones, Cameron Thompson,
Sloan, Jason Ritzke, Robert
Mercer, and Daniel Dausman
mount a charge. All are
members of the class of
{The College.
St. John’s College . Summer 2008 }
aoii.
�{From the Bell Towers}
News & Announcements
New GI Director in
Annapolis
Tutor Marilyn Higuera is the
new Graduate Institute director
in Annapohs, taking over for
Joan Silver. Higuera has heen a
tutor at St. John’s since 1979.
She earned bachelor’s and
master’s degrees at the Univer
sity of Michigan and spent two
years as a mathematician at the
Apphed Physics Laboratory of
Johns Hopkins University.
Having taught graduate
students at St. John’s, Higuera is
excited about spending the next
four years strengthening the
institute, recruiting new
students, and supporting
students. “They have come to
St. John’s after earning an
undergraduate degree some
where else, and they know that
they’ve really missed some
thing. Many of them have fulltime jobs and commute long
distances to come to the
college,” she says. “I’m touched
by their level of commitment,
the lengths that they go to in
order to be here.”
One of Higuera’s most
important charges as the
new director, succeeding
tutor Joan Silver, is to
continue to promote the
Hodson Trust Teacher
Fellowship. The program
pays up to 70 percent of the
total cost of attending the
program for kindergarten
through rath-grade
teachers.
Honors for Aicla
Head Sensei Ferol Arce,
9th Dan and one of the
highest-ranked martial
artists in the country in
Karate-Do, came to the
Santa Fe campus for his
first visit in February aoo8, with
three other Black Belts. St.
John’s Dojo members, including
tutor Jorge Aigla, were pleased
to be able to work out with him.
But Arce also had a surprise in
store: he awarded Aigla a 7th
Dan, making Aigla the highestranked martial artist in New
Mexico, according to Arce.
Aigla has been teaching
Karate-Do free of charge on the
Santa Fe campus for 22 years
and has been practicing for
39 years. The St. John’s Dojo has
about 15 committed members
and comprises students, faculty,
and staff. Aigla accepted the
award on behalf of the St. John’s
Dojo, adding that “this distinc
tion really belongs to the
students and to the college.”
New Look for the
Web Site
The St. John’s College Web site
was redesigned this spring by
Baltimore firm no/inc, with the
college’s Web team imple
menting the changes. The new
look prominently features the
great book authors, and offers
improved navigation through
drop-down menus and quick
links.
Staff News
Anna Sochocky is the new
College in Santa Fe. She brings
18 years of experience in areas of
media cultivation, advertising,
promotion, and electronic and
print pubheation development.
During the past 10 years, she
has operated a successful
consulting business in these
areas as well as government rela
tions and creative writing. Most
recently she was director of
Pubhc Relations and Marketing
at the College of Santa Fe.
Sochocky earned a bachelor’s
degree in history and political
science at Macalester College
and a master’s in liberal studies
at Hamline University.
Melissa Latham-Stevens, art
director/senior graphic designer
for the Santa Fe campus, has
been recognized for her design
talents by the Council for the
Advancement and Support of
Education (CASE). LathamStevens won a Silver Medal in
the Alumni Relations Pubhea
tions category for her design of
the St. John’s Homecoming
2007 brochure.
Correction
In the Winter 2008 issue of
The College, an article on the
Annual Fund incorrectly identified Jack Walker. We regret
the error.
director of Communications and
External Relations for St. John’s
Tutor Marilyn Higuera
Helping High School
Students Get to College
The Ronald Simon Family Foundation, which helps high school
students prepare for and succeed in college, chose St. John’s
College as the site for its tutoring efforts in Santa Fe, creating
opportunities for St. John’s students interested in education. The
foundation provides educational support in areas including test
preparation, college admissions counseling, and tutoring.
Steve Simon, coordinator for the foundation’s New Mexico
program, chose St. John’s as the Santa Fe tutoring site because of
the college’s emphasis on classical education. In the fall of 2007
the foundation hired St. John’s students and alumni to tutor local
high school students participating in the program.
{The College.
Martin Timmons
(SFLA07, EC05) is the
tutoring coordinator,
and works with Kay
Duffy (SF04, EC05),
Jennifer Fain (SF09),
Liam Goodacre (SF08),
Juhan Gress (SFio),
Kathryn Leahey (SFii),
Brooke Nutini (SF05),
Adam Perry (SFii),
Aaron Kane Turner
(SF09), and Nicholas
Weeks (SF05, EC06).
St. John’s College . Summer 2008 }
Brooke Nutini (SF05), left, tutors
HIGH school student AdRIANNA
Romero.
�8
{Commencement}
“A Shared Experience”
inutes after
Cole congratulated the
the reces
parents of the 106 graduating
sional
seniors and 2,2 Graduate Insti
marking the
tute students who obtained
end of the
master’s degrees by leading a
ai6th
round of applause. He praised
Commencementthe
in Annapolis,
college’s “democratic”
Nancie and Bill Lee
education,
of Mi I i Ian
which
i, he described
Hawaii, hurried to McDowell
as “the sense of a shared expeHall carrying two Banana
rience-what one St. John’s
Republic shopping bags with
alumnus has described to me as
their gifts: 130 purple orchid
an ‘intense commonality.’ ”
leis, one for each new graduate
Appointed by President
and their tutors. In Hawaii a lei
George W. Bush to chair the
is a gift of affection and celebra NEH in 2001, Cole was previ
tion. The Lees, whose son
ously Distinguished Professor
Justin was among the Class of
of Art History and Professor of
aoo8, presented the leis in the
Comparative Literature at
spirit of community that is at
Indiana University in Bloom
the heart of St. John’s College.
ington. He praised the value of
Bruce Cole, chairman of the
a liberal arts education, but
National Endowment for the
emphasized the unique nature
Humanities, touched on this
of St. John’s. “I can say with
spirit when he described his
confidence that the great books
meeting with the students who
education you have received at
visited him at the NEH to invite St. John’s is truly one-of-a-kind.
him to speak at Commence
At this college, you haven’t
ment: “One thing that struck
acquired knowledge in the form
me when I met with some
of textbooks and lectures, pre
members of this graduating
packaged for easy consumption
class in January was how consis like a frozen TV dinner. You
tently all the students spoke in
haven’t absorbed these great
works through the filter of
terms of‘we,’ not ‘I,’ when
discussing their experience
another person’s mind, however
here at the college,” he said.
brilliant that person might be.”
Graduates of
St. John’s, Cole said,
leave the college with
a “moral sense”
acquired through
books and discus
sions. “By their very
nature, most of the
books you have
encountered at
St. John’s have forced
you to constantly ask
yourselves, ‘What
should I do? What
does it mean to live a
good life?’ On too
many campuses
today, these funda
mental questions are
M
{The College-
Above: The Lee family brought leis to help graduates celebrate
(l. to r.): Jessica Lee, Bill Lee, Justin Lee, and Nancie Lee.
left: John Travis Pittman (A08) celebrates. Right: John
LEAVE the college WITH THE TOOLS TO LIVE A “gOOD AND FLOUR
ISHING PRIVATE LIFE,” NEH CHAIRMAN BrUCE CoLE SAID.
Bottom,
nies
left unasked-sometimes, as
incredible as this might sound,
because other questions are
deemed higher priorities; and
often, simply because it is
presumed that ultimately we
cannot find the answers. At
St. John’s, these questions have
guided your whole education,
and for that, you should be
profoundly grateful.”
By educating students
through careful reading and
genuine conversation. Cole
said, “St. John’s has given you
more than just the means to
St. John’s College ■ Summer zoo8 }
make a living-it has also given
you the tools to make a life, a
good and flourishing private hfe
as an individual, as a spouse, as
a parent, as a friend.”
—Patricia Dempsey
PwiZThe College magazine
online at www. stjohnscoUege. edii
to read the commencement
addressesfrom both campuses
and view aphoto gallery ofthe
ceremonies.
�{Commencement}
“Great Books
for a
t the 41st
Commencement
on the Santa Fe
campus, 89
undergraduates
and 30 Graduate
Institute students received their
degrees. Rain was in the fore
cast, hut Saturday’s sky was
clear, and the weather not
unlike a brisk fall day. The
Artemis String Quartet
provided music for the
procession and recession, and
the college Commencement
Choir sang pieces by Palestrina
and de Cristo before and after
the address to the graduating
class given by Richard N. Haass. director of policy planning for
the Department of State and a
Haass is the president of the
principal adviser to Secretary of
Council on Foreign Relations,
State Colin Powell. He has been
an independent, nonpartisan
vice president and director of
membership organization,
foreign policy studies at the
think tank and publisher dedi
Brookings Institution, a senior
cated to helping the public
better understand the world and associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International
foreign policy. He has authored
or edited 10 books on American Peace, a lecturer in public
policy at Harvard University’s
foreign policy, the most recent
John F. Kennedy School of
of which is The Opportunity:
Government, and a research
America’s Moment to Alter
associate at the International
History’s Course. Prior to
Institute for Strategic Studies.
serving on the Council on
“We were so pleased to have
Foreign Relations, Haass was
Global World”
At left (l. to r.): Joel Klein,
Chancellor of the New York
City Department of Education,
A
{The College-
9
AND
father of
GRADUATE JuLIE
Howard Klein; Commencement
speaker Richard N. Haass;
President Michael Peters.
Bottom, left (l. to r. ): Eliiah
Berry, Louise Blake, Adam
Braus, and Elyse Brejla. Right:
A beaming Abigail Petry,
followed by Jessica Perry, with
their diplomas.
someone of Richard Haass’
stature and experience speak to
our graduates about great
books, great ideas and their link
to global issues and the lives of
our graduates,” said Michael P.
Peters, president of the Santa Fe
campus, who before joining
St. John’s was executive vice
president of the Council on
Foreign Relations.
Haass began with an outline
of the nonpolar nature of
today’s foreign relations,
operating within a world
that has moved from
concentrated power to one
of distributed power. “All
of you-no matter your
career path-will be
affected by nonpolarity.
The world is not Las
Vegas: what happens there
will not stay there.”
He referenced Thucy
dides’ The Peloponnesian
War, with its many exam
ples of hard-headed
analysis. “Through his
exploration of the politics,
diplomacy, and conflicts of
the great powers of his
day, Thucydides provided
foreign pohcy insights that
remain relevant in our
time,” said Haass. He
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
suggested five books that would
add greatly to one’s knowledge
of foreign policy: Hedley Bull’s
The Anarchical Society, Henry
Kissinger’s A World Restored,
Michael Walzer’s Just and
Unjust Wars, Carl von
Clausewiz’s On War, and
George Kennan’s American
Diplomacy.
“Understanding of the world
is essential not only for your
role as competitors, but also for
your duty as citizens,” said
Haass. “This understanding will
enable you to meet your obliga
tions to society and to live up to
the credo of this wonderful
institution, namely, ‘to make
intelligent, free choices
concerning the ends and means
of public life.’ ”
— Jenny Hannifin
�{The Program}
TALKING ABOUT
Scien ce
CONSIDERING THE CHALLENGES
OE LABORATORY
BY Jenny Hannifin
AND Rosemary Harty
ate April, 9 a.m. Tuesday, senior lab: With Reality
George Doskow, then dean in Annapohs, said: “The lab program
parties behind them and graduation days away, it’s
remains, as it always has been, the most problematic part of the
understandable that the students in tutor Adam
program.”
Schulman’s laboratory have trouble mustering up
The reasons he hsted remain issues today:
enthusiasm for the Lederberg-Tatum experiment. But
• How do you cover such a scope of material in three years and
as the students move away from the table to the laboratory to beginstill allow time for thoughtful discussions and meaningful
agitating E. coli bacteria, even the most serious cases of senioritisexperiments?
are chipped away by the beauty and simphcity of the experiment,
• How do you present difficult material in a way that makes it
which Schulman enticingly touts as “bacterial sex,” This experi
accessible to students and to faculty who lack scientific
ment, demonstrating gene transference in bacteria, is the last one
backgrounds?
these students will do at St. John’s, completing an education in
• How do you make room for new discoveries without dropping
science that began when they read Theophrastus’ Inquiry
foundational works?
Concerning Plants and went outside to carefully observe the
The first question remains open-ended. Neither campus is actively
magnolia trees in Mellon Courtyard.
considering adding more time for laboratory, although some tutors
As with every aspect of the Program, laboratory at St. John’s is a
would hke to see it revisited to slow down the pace and allow more
work in progress. The classic fruit fly experiments of the r95os are
time for biology. The remaining questions can be considered in the
gone; students today work on Einstein’s photoelectric effect and
context of junior and senior laboratories. Though an essential work
Millikan’s oil-drop experiment. Manuals have been revised and re
in junior lab. Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism is
revised. Study groups have introduced new and interesting material
described variously as a “hard slog” and a “stretch,” especially for
to tutors, who work them into laboratory. Through it all, laboratory
students for whom math does not come easily. And in senior labora
remains grounded in Barr and Buchanan’s basic plan for science at
tory, a lack of experiments and a need to include some of the new
the college. “These laboratories,” Buchanan wrote in the 1937
discoveries in biology have prompted both campuses to think about
Bulletin ofSt. John’s College, “wiU provide a proper pre-professional
including different works and experiments in laboratory.
scientific training, will illustrate the hberal arts in the liveliest
“A Continuing Quest”
contemporary practices, and will focus the past on the present for
the whole course.”
A fundamental question for the college, says Annapohs tutor Nick
Nevertheless, the college has faced challenges in its laboratory
MaistreUis, is “what is the place of science in a hberal arts educa
program over the years. In A Search for the Liberal College,
tion?” That raises other questions, he adds, such as: How should the
J. Winfree Smith recounted how faculty and students in 1948
college accommodate modern science in a curriculum based on the
expressed concerns that science was becoming less integrated with
classics? “That’s the great problem St. John’s has always faced in lab,
the rest of the curriculum and that faculty were employing conven
and it’s a continuing quest,” MaistreUis says.
tional textbooks. The decision in 1976 to reduce the laboratory
When MaistreUis joined the college in r967, lab had already
program from four to three years, so that students could devote more
changed away from the direction set for it by the Program’s founders,
attention to the sophomore music tutorial, was controversial. And in
“Under Barr and Buchanan, lab focused a lot on using scientific
a report he gave to the Board of Visitors and Governors in 1985,
equipment and experiments, on measurement and quantifying
L
{The College-
St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }
�{The Program}
things. It did not follow the normal division of the sciences.”
The change of direction happened under Dean Jacob Klein, who
was urging the college to focus more on the deeper questions of
scientific theory. Maistrelhs has been involved in some of the
changes and improvements to the laboratory over the years. Thanks
to investments made in the laboratories on both campuses-many
funded by grants and gifts to the college-the labs are better
equipped and more functional. Without a doubt, the program is
stronger, more coherent, and more vital, he says. But in his view,
more time is needed for biology.
Back in 1976, Maistrelhs supported the move to reduce the labo
ratory to three years. Students were clearly overburdened and soph
omore lab was a weak part of the program. “It involved dissecting a
lot of animals and tended to be very much hke a standard biology
course,” he says. Now, students have biology in freshman year and in
the last semester of senior year-in all, just 23 weeks for biology. To
accommodate modern developments and allow for a slower pace,
Maistrelhs would hke to see “the question of getting more time for
laboratory raised.”
What we do in biology at St. John’s, we do better than in pastyears,
Maistrelhs says. The program has already improved by shifting away
from “dissecting dead things” to more observations on the biology
of hving things. More freshmen are spending laboratory classes
down at the restored shoreline of GoUege Greek, a hving laboratory.
Students in Santa Fe take advantage of a verticle mile of chmate
zones-including high desert, transitional and sub-alpine—when
learning about classificiation. “New and wondrous things are being
{The College.
Laboratory—IN 1941 and today—is not a history of science or
“physics for poets,” but an integrated part of the Program.
discovered all of the time,” he says. “Biology is a living and progres
sive science and we should always he attentive to what we’re doing.
The very best thing about science at St. John’s, Maistrelhs says, is the
simple fact that “everybody does it all. The students do it, the tutors
all teach it. The way we do it, there’s an emphasis on hands-on
experiments and discussion, making science something to be talked
about.”
How Hard is Too Hard? Considering
Maxwell
For Bruce Perry, who served as archon for junior lab in Santa Fe last
year, the second year of laboratory illustrates how well science
speaks to and draws from other aspects of the Program. “We start
with Galileo, who’s sort of the father of modern science, and it’s
beautifully sequenced with other readings,” he says. “Students do
some Newton in math, they do Newton in lab. They do Leibniz in
math, and Leibniz in lab. So you’re seeing the same author in two
different paths: one as a mathematician, one as a physicist. It’s really
interesting.”
After considering Gilbert, Ampere, Coulomb, and Oersted, junior
lab devotes a month to Faraday. “Everyone knows how magnets
work, but people didn’t know that magnets and electric currents
could interact or that you could have magnetic fields. And then
people noticed that currents could attract. So you start seeing aU
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
�12
{TheProgram}
these weird overlaps with these phenomena,” says Perry. “Faraday
sorts out all the phenomena, and a way of accounting for them.”
One reason laboratory devotes so much time to Faraday is to set
the stage for Maxwell, who in turn sets the stage for studying
Einstein in senior mathematics. For lo weeks, students read
Maxwell’s Treatise and attempt to translate Maxwell into modern
vector calculus. The material can be frustrating for students, some of
whom find it a “hard slog,” says Perry.
To explore Maxwell, Santa Fe uses a manual originally developed
by tutor Peter Pesic and subsequently revised by tutor Jim Forkin.
Annapolis uses a book by Tom Simpson that comprises three short
papers by Maxwell and many notations by Simpson, supplemented
by further notes by tutor Chester Burke. At i,ooo pages, the Treatise
is “not very approachable,” so Santa Fe juniors read ao to 30 pages
of it along with many pages of tutor notes. Perry says. “There’s a
division about whether we’re going to stay with the Treatise as what
we do here in Santa Fe, or do something like what Annapolis does.”
A faculty study group is meeting this summer in Santa Fe to explore
this issue in depth.
A balance is needed, he suggests, between working out the equa
tions and understanding the process. “The whole idea is to under
stand where the science comes from, why one hne of thought
emerged, why some other path did not. It’s not just theory, it’s not
the history of science; it’s more like seeing what science looks like in
the actual messiness of how it emerges, and the limits of what one
knows or doesn’t,” he says, adding, “that’s one of the things at the
college that’s wonderful.”
In Annapolis, tutor Dylan Casey agrees that Maxwell is difficult
and that students can get frustrated. As a physicist, one of the things
that drew him to St. John’s was the college’s inclusive approach to
science and mathematics-everybody does it all, regardless of their
particular aptitude for math and science. Frustration is only a
problem if students give up, but Casey believes that juniors have
adapted to working through difficult material. “We read the
Republic, we read the Metaphysics, and there are all sorts of things
there that we acknowledge that we find confusing. But we say, ‘let’s
try to understand it.’ I think that works well here at St. John’s.”
The quest to comprehend Maxwell’s equations while following the
development of his ideas, Casey suggests, is similar to memorizing
Ancient Greek paradigms to approach the Meno. “You want to learn
the language, but you’re not there to learn it in itself, to master it,”
he says. “There’s a similar tension in Maxwell. We’re confronting a
very challenging thing, and mathematics that students recognize but
that many are not comfortable with: differential equations and proto
vector calculus. Maxwell is developing what he calls a physical
analogy and he’s presenting it through mathematical work, but
because we are less facile with the mathematics it makes it harder for
us to see the work in a physical analogy.”
Underlying the tension is that at St. John’s, we strive not to take
anything for granted. Casey questions whether this is always
possible. “When we study Euclid and mathematics, we want to
understand the geometry, but a lot of the focus is on trying to under
stand why he is trying to say what he does,” he says. “With Maxwell,
we may have to take some things for granted and then see how his
argument plays out, to look at it in itself.”
{The College-
Perhaps some of Maxwell’s derivations can be taken for granted to
allow for more time to discuss his conclusions. “It’s a little bit hke
understanding how to drive a car without understanding how the car
was built. It might be helpful to understand the physics, but really,
only part of that really matters,” he says. “I think we overestimate
sometimes how much doing the derivation will enhghten us as to
what the final equation means. It’s something we have to work out
every day.”
The college will always grapple with whether there’s too much,
whether the pace is too quick and where precious time is best
invested, but Casey anticipates that “the basic shape of the junior lab
is going to stay the same.”
Brave New World: Senior Laboratory
Senior laboratory, says Marilyn Higuera in Annapolis, has two chal
lenges to address: i) not enough experiments and 2) a need to get
from Darwin and Mendel to beyond Watson and Crick. Both of these
issues speak to heightening the excitement of discovery and wonder
in students.
“For a while now, tutors have thought maybe that the story of the
gene is not as thought-provoking as it once was,” Higuera explains.
“Students already come to the college knowing that Mendel’s factors
are in some way connected not only with the chromosome, but with
part of the chromosome. The articles are still quite interesting but
students already know pretty much what they were looking for.”
Higuera also wants to see more experiments in senior year. The
problem is “evolution, in general, doesn’t lend itself to experi
ments” that can be done in the time allotted for laboratory in senior
year, one month less because of essay writing. Right now, the labora
tory experiments with fast-growing plants that are similar to the
ones Mendel used in his genetic experiment. “After that, we’re a bit
puzzled,” Higuera says. “We do some chemical things with bacteria,
but you can’t see the bacteria until they colonize. So we’re hoping,
eventually, to include more plant work in the lab and maybe in
Annapolis we can take advantage of our wetlands.”
Faculty study groups offer a way for tutors to help shape improve
ments to laboratory. Annapolis faculty members who participated in
tutor Kathy Blits’ 2004 group on ecology and evolution went away
excited by the subject matter, and Higuera later chaired a lab
committee that met to review papers that could be studied in senior
lab. “We began to be aware that there are really philosophically
interesting questions coming up as scientists try to refine their
knowledge of how the gene works. It’s not clear what you want to
identify as its function. We are entertaining the notion that there
might be papers we want to read and ways of raising these questions
in our own classes.”
Higuera is fascinated by the norm of reaction, a phenomenon of
genetic development referring to the fact that organisms with
exactly the same genes do different things when exposed to different
environments. “There are so many interesting questions,” she says
enthusiastically. “How does an ‘organism’ recognize that it’s in a
different environment? What should one call the environment? We
tend to think of it as ‘outside your body’ but genes have an environ
ment and they interact with their environment. Where do you draw
the boundaries? These are wonderful questions that have scientists
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
�{TheProgram}
13
as Kant thought it was, but it’s really a statistical connection.”
As for second semester, Houser sees it as “a pretty coherent
whole” that starts with Darwin and the issue of inheritance, then
moves to Mendel and the discovery and exploration of the function
of chromosomes, and how those might be related to heredity.
Houser would like to see the college include The Triple Helix, a
book by Richard Lewontin: “That’s the perfect way to end the
semester because he talks about the broad-ranged questions that
come up for us, and lots of new questions as well. But he brings back
the question of the role of reductionism in the question of evolution,
to some extent, what an organism is,” Houser says.
If Houser would suggest one improvement for laboratory, it would
be finding away to better unite the biology of freshman year with that
of senior year. “The larger debate in biology is the debate between
those who take a more holistic view-environmentalists, ecologists,
that sort of thing-and reductionism. Some of the tendency in the
freshman year has been to go in the holistic direction, and yet most
of the work we do in the second semester of the senior year is reduc
tionism. If we’re going to engage in a reductionist enterprise in the
senior year, then maybe we ought to do a httle bit more preparation
in the freshman year.”
Tammie Kahnhauser and Daniel Rekshan (both A08)
THE CLASSIC HeRSHEY-ChASE BLENDER EXPERIMENT.
replicate
Guiding Principles
wringing their hands.”
It always comes down to the question: where do you fit it in?
“It would be tough to get from Darwin to that level, but I think tutors
and students would be really interested in that.”
While he agrees that more time must somehow be made for
biology, Stephen Houser, senior lab archon in Santa Fe last year, is
fairly satisfied with senior lab these days. The first semester of senior
year is particularly exciting he says, because of the questions it raises
through the study of quantum physics about the nature of science
and the human relationship to the world we’re observing. These are
questions that “don’t get asked in other parts of the Program,” he
says. “We just scratch the surface, but certainly the Indeterminacy
Principle is one of those areas that suggest that, in some way, our
minds and the world may not be fully commensurate. There are a
number of different aspects to that. Particle-wave duality is another
example, which is also connected to Heisenberg. That’s just another
place where it seems like our minds are not geared toward what
seems to be a paradox in reality.”
The arrangement of having quantum physics in the first semester
and biology in the second is a “historical accident,” says Houser, but
there some connections. In Santa Fe, students read Shrbdinger’s
What is Life? that helps connect physics to biology. Although
he explores questions of entropy before the discovery of DNA,
Shrodinger suggests “there was some large complex molecule that
did govern the operation of cells,” Houser says. “That’s an inter
esting problem, because living organisms represent a very high level
of order, and it’s hard to understand how they can maintain that
order because they don’t have the statistical basis upon which order
is based in the rest of the world.”
Shrbdinger’s text underscores the discovery in first semester that
“cause and effect turns out not to be a necessary connection.
{The College-
The St. John’s way of doing science-no matter how vigorously the
college fine-tunes it-will always have its detractors. One would have
to experience the Program in its entirety to see the beauty and
wisdom of science’s place at St. John’s, says Higuera. “What I love to
see is that aU our students awake to all of these fascinating questions
and they develop a certain kind of confidence in their own ability to
think about them. That’s true for everything in our Program.”
As far as science goes, studying a magnolia leaf, carrying out the
oil-drop experiment, and colonizing bacteria are valuable even
when they don’t work exactly as they should. “We try to see
through the eyes of the scientist, follow his thinking, and see if we
agree. That’s a valuable skill to practice-for science, for any disci
pline. Students are engaging in observing the world and thinking
in a way that one doesn’t if one is just memorizing laws and
working problems,” she says.
Because the goal is to cultivate an ability to ask questions and
consider conclusions with a skeptical eye, experiments have a
different role at St. John’s than they would in an upper-level course
in organic chemistry or developmental biology at another institu
tion. “An experiment is always a work in progress,” says Houser,
more like a “brief encounter with the material world.” Last year in
Santa Fe, Houser’s students were discouraged because their
Millikan experiments didn’t turn out as expected. “That’s one of the
lessons that could be learned in the lab,” he says. “That is the
difficulty and level of frustration you have to live with as a scientist.”
Casey points out that when students discuss Lavoisier and the
problem of naming, the first question they may ask is “why is this
problem important?” For Casey, that’s what sets the college apart.
“We put our hands on things. We ask questions and we try to read
between the lines,” he says. “That’s what made me really interested
in St. John’s.”
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
�{Radical Inquiry}
RADICAL INQUIRY
at the heart of the Program prepared them to
explore deep questions in their respective
fields. Graham Redgrave (SF90) uses analo
gies to Homer along with MRI scans in his
work with patients diagnosed with eating
—Francis Bacon, The New Organon
disorders. Cynthia Keppel (A84) divides her
mong the characteristics that time between applied and basic science, work
unite Johnnies, across disci rooted in her fascination with nuclear physics.
plines and time, are these: At the National Institutes of Health, Steven
A burning desire to investi Holland (A79) seeks genetic links to infec
gate theories for themselves. tious diseases. Patricia Sollars (A80) hopes
Boundless curiosity. A will her work in a tiny area of the brain may
clues about the biological clock. And
ingness to doubt even the mostprovide
entrenched
in her
laboratory at the University of Chicago,
doctrines and ideas. Perhaps most
important
is a willingness to doubt themselves, to hold Leslie Kay (SF83) learns more about the brain
their judgments up to a critical light, by studying how rats distinguish one odor
abandon what doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, from another.
In some cases, these determined inquirers
and formulate new ideas.
These are traits shared by the Johnnie scien have more questions than answers. But
tists profiled here, who attribute at least a instead of finding “despair” in their dead
share of their success to their experiences at ends, they draw satisfaction from the contin
St. John’s, not just in the laboratory but in all uing quest.
aspects of the college. The “radical inquiry”
“Byfar, the greatest obstacle to the progress of
science and to the undertaking of new tasks
and provinces therein is found in this—that
men despair and think things impossible. ”
A
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15
Why do people get sick?
Graham Redgrave: Psychiatrist
BY Tom Nugent
When the youthful patient began to describe the alluring
temptation of self-starvation and binge-eating, the
psychiatrist tried a metaphor. “Have you read the
OdysseyV' She nodded. “Do you remember the scene
where his sailors tie him to the mast?” As the two of them
continued to discuss the ways in which her psychological
disorder tempted her to engage in binge-eating, he asked
her: “Are you saying you feel like Odysseus, as you
struggle with the impulse to overeat?”
The patient nodded. “That’s right,” she told Johns
Hopkins University psychiatrist Graham W. Redgrave,
M.D. (SF90), during a recent therapy session atHopkins
Hospital. “I can see that when I’m tempted to start
gorging on doughnuts or cookies. I’m like Odysseus
hearing the music of the Sirens.”
Helped along by Homer’s great epic poem, the discus
sion at the eating disorders clinic continued, as the
patient told the doctor that although the “singing of the
Sirens was beautiful, Odysseus knew he shouldn’t hsten,
because if he got distracted by the music, his ship would
crash on the rocks.” Redgrave listened carefidly-then
used the metaphor to reassure that patient that it was all
right to “give up” the disorder and then “go home” (like
Why does a
the wandering Odysseus) to a healthier way of living-a concept
that the troubled patient had been strugghng to accept.
healthy woman starve herself?
Graham Redgrave
( SF90 ) COUNSELS PATIENTS WHILE CONDUCTING RESEARCH ON THE
NEURAL MECHANISMS INVOLVED IN EATING DISORDERS.
For the 40-year-old Redgrave, who last year won a coveted
NARSAD Young Investigator grant for his groundbreaking
research on the functional neuroanatomy of anorexia nervosa, that
“In the case of that particular patient, the discussion about
recent conversation about Odysseus at the hospital’s nationally
Odysseus was an important part of the dialogue, because it helped
renowned Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore was a “fabulous
her achieve some useful insights about the recurring ‘temptation’
example” of how the liberal arts (and especially classical philos
to engage in an eating disorder that was wrecking her life.”
ophy and literature) can often play a helpful role in the practice of
psychotherapy.
During the months that followed that therapy session in the faU
of aooy, Redgrave says his patient “continued to make important
“More than anything else,” says Redgrave, “a psychotherapy
strides in understanding the psychological issues-the areas of
session is a conversation in which both participants are trying to
broken meaning-that had been key factors in causing her episodes
communicate about problems related to what Freud described as
of starvation and overeating.
‘broken meaning.’ ” And so, in one way or another, the challenge
“As a psychiatrist, I feel very fortunate to be able to work in a
is always to persuade patients to lay aside these broken meanings
by gradually bringing understanding and insight to them.
setting where I can study both the physical brain and the ideas that
emerge from it,” the therapist and researcher explained. “More
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''Eating disorders affect millions in this country
and cause immense suffering
Graham Redgrave (SF90)
and more, it’s becoming clear to me-in my [brain] research and
also in my clinical treatment of patients-that knowing how to
patients,” Redgrave recalls. “This doctor was achieving some very
positive results among a highly stressed, inner-city population, and
organize the knowledge you gain in a coherent epistemological
1 was intrigued by that. When he described his approach to patients
framework is absolutely essential to effective psychiatry.”
as ‘based on Dr. McHugh’s system,’ and then as 1 watched him
interact with the patients and saw how effectively he communi
Ask Redgrave to account for his passionate interest in “the hnks
between epistemology and psychiatry,” and he’ll tell you that it
began during his junior year in Santa Fe .., when he agreed to take
on the “marvelously exciting” challenge of analyzing and then
writing an essay on Plato’s Theaetetus.
“That was an extraordinary experience,” he recalls with a
nostalgic smile, “because it forced me to think long and hard about
what knowledge really is. When can you be sure you understand an
idea accurately, and what should you do with the knowledge you’ve
obtained? What’s the best way to think about an idea, if you really
want to grasp its essence?”
cated with them, 1 was struck by how clear-headed and sharply
focused that approach really was.
“After a few months of working with him, 1 realized that the
McHugh approach was a truly deep way of thinking about psychi
atry, and that it was based on an epistemological system that in
many ways seemed to have come straight out of Plato. That was
very helpful for me, because it showed how effective psychiatry
must be built on a clearly focused epistemological framework.”
Born in London in 1968, Redgrave moved with his family to the
Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., as a fourth-grader, then
More than a decade after his graduation in Santa Fe, Redgrave
landed on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s in the faU of 1986. A
says he was “just amazed” to discover-while en route to an even
tual residency in general psychiatry at Hopkins-that the legendary
JHU psychiatrist and co-author of the classic The Perspectives of
dedicated classics student in high school (he took four years of
Latin and loved it), at St. John’s he liked the way “the education
flowed out of the continuing ‘conversation’ between you and your
Psychiatry, Dr. Paul McHugh, had centered his entire approach to
tutor and your classmates. I remember being blown away by Euchd,
psychotherapy on a carefully thought out epistemological frame
work based in large part on concepts Redgrave had first encoun
and by the elegance of his definitions.
“You got the sense that you were right there at the intellectual
roots of Western civilization,” he says, “and the conversation kept
tered in the Theaetetus.
“During my first year in medical school at Johns Hopkins, 1
wound up ‘shadowing’ a psychiatrist who was treating HIV/AIDS
getting richer and richer. And everything we read was part of that
hving conversation. In many ways, I think the reason I’m so excited
about doing research in psychiatry these days is because I get to
participate in a similar conversation, but now it’s about the brain
and the mind and behavior and meaning.”
After meeting his future spouse, Brooke, in Santa Fe (they’re
now raising three young children in the Baltimore area), Redgrave
spent several years working as a computer programmer in San
Francisco, then opted for med school in 1994. “I found computer
science very challenging,” he says today, “but psychiatry ulti
mately seemed much richer and more complex. What I really like
about my current role at Johns Hopkins is that I’m able to conduct
MRI-based research on brain function in eating disorders, while
also treating illnesses like anorexia and bulimia.
“As our treatment methods continue to get better, it’s a privilege
to find yourself working in both arenas. Eating disorders affect
miUions in this country and cause immense suffering. The stakes
are high, and we need every tool-including the Greek and Latin
classics [-that can help us to better understand these illnesses.”
Redgrave spends many of his afternoons (and more than a few of
his nights) in a speciaUy designed, state-of-the-art “imaging lab” at
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The Johns Hopkins Hospital. His quest: to pinpoint some of the
key changes in hrain function that take place during episodes of
the eating disorder anorexia nervosa-a potentially lethal behav
ioral syndrome in which young women starve themselves as part of
a pathology that often involves several different psychological
factors.
In his role as a chnical psychiatrist, Redgrave treats eating
What are
17
the fundamental
BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER?
Cynthia Keppel: Experimental Nuclear Physicist
and Cancer Researcher
BY Rosemary Harty
disorder patients in psychotherapy sessions that explore the
psychological vulnerabihties contributing to anorexia. During
these encounters, the psychiatrist employs the standard tech
niques of traditional psychotherapy to help patients overcome a
disorder that reportedly affects up to one percent of the U. S. female
population (or about 1.6 million American women).
Once he steps into his lab at the Hopkins Hospital’s Phipps
Chnic, however, the chnician puts on a different hat. He becomes a
researcher who’s more interested in the activation of brain regions
At some point, every thinking being looks to the stars and
wonders about the nature of the universe. Where did all of this
come from? What is everything made of? What keeps everything
from flying apart?
“These are probably questions that we all ask ourselves at one
time or another,” says Cynthia Keppel (A84). “Some of us just
become a little obsessed with them.”
Keppel spends her days probing questions that could keep a
than in behavior patterns among struggling patients.
Although the neuroanatomy involved in Redgrave’s studies is
person busy for a lifetime-several lifetimes, perhaps. Most of
complex, the strategy behind them can be easily understood.
By using (MRl) technology to chart the flow of oxygen-carrying
are bound together tvith gluons that form into larger particles
them deal with the behavior of quarks, elementary particles that
such as protons and neutrons. “My approach to physics is very
hemoglobin in the brains of patients with severe eating disorders,
St. John’s-like. I’ve always been most interested in the big
the researcher can monitor the ways in which the neurons (brain
questions,” Keppel says. “There are so many basic, fundamental
cells) respond to anorexia-related “cues” in the behavior of the
test subjects. Hopefully, gaining a better understanding of the
and compelling questions to pursue.”
patterns of activation involved in such disorders will aid
position as University Endowed Professor of Physics at Hampton
Keppel balances many professional roles: She holds a joint
researchers in developing interventions (such as new drugs or
University in Virginia and Staff Scientist at the Thomas
psychotherapy techniques) that will eventually help to reduce or
Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. She also directs the
even prevent them.
Explains Redgrave: “By studying the change in levels of
oxygenation in areas of the brain such as the dorsolateral
Hampton University (HU) Center for Advanced Medical Instru
mentation and a joint medical physics program with the Eastern
Virginia Medical School, where she is leading efforts to develop
prefrontal cortex or the insula, we can measure the activity that’s
advanced diagnostic and treatment tools using nuclear
taking place in neurons in women acutely ill with anorexia and
technology.
compare it to healthy women.
“Studying neural mechanisms of eating disorders is a relatively
Keppel has a fourth job that takes top priority; she and
her husband, Barry Hellman (A84), a pathologist, have three
new frontier in psychiatry, and the rapid evolution of imaging tech
children, ages ar, r4, and 7. It’s not unusual for her to be at
nology makes this an especially promising area of research. I don’t
think we’re going to find a magic bullet for eating disorders
the university laboratory in the morning, return home to
“hang with the kids” in the afternoon, and head back to the
anytime soon, but we are getting closer to understanding the basic
laboratory for late-night research. “I think the greatest advance
building blocks of the disorder, which may one day help relieve the
in my work,” she quips, “has been the development of the
suffering of anorexia patients everywhere.”
home office.”
One of her most exciting endeavors is directing the scientific
and technical aspects of Hampton University’s Proton Therapy
Institute, a $200 million project to treat cancer patients
more safely and effectively. Five proton therapy centers are
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i8
Cynthia Keppel (A84)
currently operating in the
ENJOYS A CAREER THAT
COMBINES THE BEST OF
BOTH THEORETICAL AND
APPLIED SCIENCE,
ALLOWING HER TO WORK
TOWARD BETTER TREAT
MENT FOR CANCER WHILE
PROBING MYSTERIES OF THE
SUBATOMIC WORLD.
United States. Hampton’s
center is under construc
tion and scheduled to
treat its first patients in
August 3010. As the Scien
tific
and
Technical
director, Keppel is respon
sible for machine opera
tions,
nuclear science,
and winter breaks
at
and treatment planning for
St.
the patients.
computer modeling and
“It’s not news that
radiation kills tumors,”
imaging, gained skills in
John’s.
applied
She
did
mathematics,
Keppel explains. “The
and
trick is to kill the tumor
about physics. She chose
read
extensively
side
American University for
effects and increasing
graduate studies prima
while
reducing
safety for those under
rily to work with Ray
going the therapy.”
Traditional radiation
Arnold, who was among
therapy directs a photon
making exciting discov
beam
eries in particle physics
to
the
Keppel says.
the prominent scientists
patient,
As
force
carriers, photons “interact
at the Stanford Linear
Accelerator
Center
all the way through the
(SLAG) in California. At
patient’s body, even some
SLAC, it costs $100,000
times all the way through
a day to run an experi
the table.”
ment on the particle
In contrast, protons
beam
accelerator, but
deposit all of their energy
into a well-defined (tumor) space and interact only minimally
secure time for her experiment on resonance electroproduction,
beforehand with healthy tissue. After careful positioning,
the subject of her dissertation. Resonances are extremely short
patients are exposed to the proton beam for only about a minute,
lived elementary particles (they exist for about 10-33 seconds)
as an intense energy burst is targeted precisely to the tumor.
that are produced in proton scattering experiments.
Keppel
managed
to
“That translates into exactly what you want for battling cancer,”
“When you hit a nucleon, like a proton, they might do elastic
she says.
Her work has had direct and beneficial medical applications,
scattering, like billiard balls striking each other, and stay intact.
Or the electron beam can hit the proton and completely break it
and that has been immensely rewarding for Keppel. But, at the
apart. Another thing that can happen is that the electron hits
Jefferson Lab, she spends her time exploring abstract and
the proton, but the proton absorbs it and goes into an excited
puzzling questions of experimental physics that first captivated
state and grows. The quarks then have to align themselves into
her while she was a student at St. John’s.
different spin structures. That’s a resonance state.”
Keppel first gained experience in scientific research
What Keppel was exploring then and continues to probe
by working at the Naval Research Laboratory during summer
today is the question: how do quarks align themselves to remain
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19
‘7/2 my research, n e re irorkinyon questions we
may not know the answers tofor 20 years.
Cynthia Keppel (A84)
bound in a resonance state? What force holds quarks together,
engineering [at other colleges and universities] have been
and how does it differ from the force that holds nucleons
working so many problems, not in a global sense, but sitting
together?
“The strong force that holds quarks together must somehow
there with paper and a computer, and doing lots of applied
also be the same force responsible for holding protons and
something we don’t do at St. John’s,” she says. “Nevertheless,
neutrons together,” she explains. “For physicists, these are
we make it.”
phenomena on vastly different scales. How do we link these
math. That is a skill on its own and thinking on its own, and it’s
In her sophomore year-when she first settled on a career in
science-Keppel seriously considered transferring to another
things together?”
Scientists understand the force that holds quarks together
institution; instead she listened to a “strong feeling” that she
through quantum chromodynamic (QCD), a quantum field
had a lot more yet to learn at St. John’s. Getting comfortable
theory of the strong interactions based on the exchange of force
with difficult questions in the liberal arts-posed by Hegel and
carrying gluons between quarks and antiquarks. But the force
Aristotle as well as Einstein and Bohr-prepared her to be a tena
holding nuclei together is “fraught with mystery,” Keppel says.
cious and creative researcher, still filled with wonder at the
“It doesn’t fall into any of our fundamental field theories.”
mysteries of the universe.
“In my research, we’re working on questions we may not know
Keppel’s work straddles classical and modern science, prac
physics. “Nuclear physics is like classical mechanics-it works.
the answers to for ao years,” she says. “One of the most valuable
things I learned at St. John’s was to keep at it-to keep ques
We can make MRI machines, smoke detectors, nuclear power
tioning.
tical and theoretical applications, and nuclear and particle
and bombs. On the other hand, we know from a couple decades
of experiment now that quarks and gluons are the fundamental
things that everything should be made of.”
But there’s no bridge between nuclear and particle physics.
Why do people
get infections?
Steven Holland, M.D.: Physician and Researcher
“That’s my little niche,” Keppel says, “trying to find that
bridge.”
Physicists at the JLAB probe these questions about subatomic
After a morning of hospital rounds at the National Institutes of
matter by running experiments in the Continuous Electron
a young boy whose lungs were under attack by a mysterious
Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). The accelerator allows
fungus, a young woman with an unidentified infection causing
Keppel and her colleagues to propel electrons at a nucleus and
painful skin rashes, and a woman in her 30s with a rare genetic
then study the output: data such as energy, wavelength, and
disease that has killed four members of her family.
Health, Dr. Steven Holland (A79) was up to speed on the cases of
geometric patterns. Getting time on the particle beam acceler
As Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases at
ator at this national laboratory is extremely competitive, says
NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
Keppel, and takes much more time than the actual experiment:
“You describe what the experiment is, who your 50 to 100
Holland devotes much of his time to research. But periodically he
takes his turn as the consulting physician at the Institute’s
collaborators are, and you write this whole thing up and present
hospital in Bethesda, Md. For a month, he works in close contact
it to a Program Advisory Committee composed of internation
with the medical staff who treat the sometimes stubborn, baffling
ally distinguished scientists. The committee approves only a
fraction of the proposals submitted and invites researchers to
and debilitating infections that have brought patients here.
The team began with an update on the condition of the 12-year-
present their experiment.” Her St. John’s education is helpful in
old boy. “He has fungi in his lungs, and we’re working very hard to
that Keppel knows how to state her case succinctly and effec
figure out what his problem is,” Holland explained later. “It must
tively, as well as stand up to prolonged questioning.
be genetic and it must be profound, and we’re desperate to figure
In one way, her analytical skills were sharpened at St. John’s,
it out because he’s got a fatal problem.”
but Keppel notes “there’s no sugarcoating” the disadvantage
Getting to help patients while researching the causes of their
Johnnies may encounter in graduate school in the sciences.
“Most people who find out they want to do math, science, and
disease combines the best of two worlds for Holland. “What I get
to do as a physician is to identify the problem, meet the patient.
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try to understand her illness at a molecular and genetic level, and
Everyone is exposed to mycobacteria in air, water and dirt. Infec
try to treat it with specific, directed therapies,” he explains,
tion is extremely rare except in severe cases of HIV, in patients
adding with a grin: “That’s pretty fun.”
with profound immune defects, and a third group that Holland is
The NIH is like a small city, and Holland’s laboratory has a
investigating: North American and Western European women
hroad charge, studying everything from frightening staph infec
who are post-menopausal, Caucasian, and thinner and taller than
tions and drug-resistant tuherculosis to preparing a defense for
their peers. “This is a new disease we’re studying, and it must
potential hioterrorist attacks. The welfare of each individual
have some genetic basis,” Holland says. “It’s got ethnicity and
patient is at the heart of their work. “It’s a wonderful thing to he
morphological restriction, and we’re very interested in trying to
here because patients come who have rare or undiagnosed prob
definitively characterize it and identify the genes responsible.”
lems, and we get to take a holistic approach that nobody else can
afford to take anymore.”
convinced he would find a genetic defect in their immune system
After graduating from St. John’s, Holland earned a medical
that was responsible for their lung disease. Holland’s newworking
degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in
thesis is that these patients have normal immune systems, but
When he first began studying these patients, Holland was
1983. He stayed at Hopkins as an intern, resident, and chief
share some genetic flaw in the lung surface itself. His research
resident in internal medicine, followed by a fellowship in infec
team now includes a lung specialist as well as infectious disease
tious diseases. He joined NIAID in 1989 to study the molecular
and immunology specialists. “Part of the fun in doing science is
biology of HIV, and in 1991 moved to the Laboratory of Host
every now and then being able to say how wrong you were,”
Defenses to study phagocytes and phagocyte immunodeficiencies.
Holland says. That’s why studying science the St. John’s way was
He’s been Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases
valuable, he adds: following the thinking of scientists throughout
since 2004.
the ages-even when they were wrong-fosters resilience and
creativity in problem solving.
In medical school Holland developed an interest in working in
the developing world, perhaps speciahzing in tropical diseases or
“Ptolemy is wrong-elegantly, definitively, comprehensively
nutrition. He eventually focused his interest on infectious
wrong,” says Holland. “I was like Ptolemy, but not as smart. The
diseases such as tuberculosis, largely eradicated in the U.S. but
beauty is once you get to realize that you’re wrong, then you stiU
have space to go to find out what’s right.”
still a major killer in the developing world. “With the advent of
HIV, which came up just as I was starting medical school and resi
Holland and other researchers were successful in making
dency, the importance of infectious diseases to global health
really became obvious,” he says.
important discoveries about the genetic cause of a devastating
The research side of Holland’s work is driven by a desire to
often causes painful boils, one of the many trials God inflicted on
understand why human beings are susceptible to diseases. The
more interesting question to think about, Holland suggests, is:
Job. “It’s a fascinating disorder in which one gene is mutated, but
it affects the function of everything, from brain to bone, to
why don’t more of us get sick more often? “It’s been many
immune system to lung, to heart,” says Holland. He led an NIH
millions of years since [humankind] began, and we’ve become the
research team that discovered that Job’s patients had an immune
disease called Job’s Syndrome-so named because the disease
dominant species,” he says. “It isn’t because of antibiotics, it’s
system that was doing part of its work too well, with white blood
because we’ve really become damn good at fighting off infections.
cells in overdrive, attacking systems of the body, but other parts
incompetently.
We have found an accommodation with all the biome in the world
that has, most of the time, for most of us, kept us pretty happy.”
A decade ago, Holland and his collaborators published the first
Holland examines immunodeficiency at the molecular level and
comprehensive paper on Job’s. For the past decade, he and other
at a functional level, seeking to pinpoint the reasons individuals
develop rare diseases. He has a driving interest in genetic causes
researchers hunted the gene that caused the disease, and just last
year, they determined that mutations in the STAT3 gene were
of disease because “so much of immunity is genetic.”
responsible. “We’re still working on how to use those genetic
At any one time, his laboratory runs dozens of clinical protocols
observations to guide us to therapy,” Holland explains. “Finding
dealing with infectious disease. One seeks to find the genetic
a mutation is exciting; understanding exactly what that mutation
cause of mycobacterial infections, which are similar to TB.
does is more complicated.”
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""Part ofthefun in doing science is every now and
then being able to say how wrong you were. ”
Steven Holland {A79)
Not unlike the St. John’s Program, research science calls for
quality of life, and perhaps he can gain knowledge that can help
asking questions and making connections in unfamiliar territory.
her relatives. He admires her courage, and he’s grateful for all his
For the last four years, Holland has been working with a patient in
team has learned from her. “I’m a pretty hopeful guy,” he says,
her 30s, who first sought medical attention for a movement
“but I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think there’s a chance we can
disorder, but was referred to him because of the infections she
also suffered. Her family history was intriguing: her grandfather,
help her.”
The day that started at 8 a.m. will extend to well after 6 p.m.,
father, sister, and brother all died young of the disease, which also
when Holland will conclude an interview with a fellowship candi
caused infections.
date. His wife. Dr. Maryland Pao, is a child psychiatrist who also
Holland had no answers until he delivered a paper at a confer
has a demanding job as deputy clinical director for the National
ence and providentially decided to stay through the meeting,
Institute of Mental Health. The couple have three daughters
most of which was outside his research area. “Somebody
ranging from rg to 9 years old. For fun, “we stay home,” he says,
presented a case that was exactly this woman,” he says. Back in
although once a week he makes time to play ice hockey.
his laboratory, Holland looked up the gene responsible in that
Holland draws interesting parallels between the college and his
case and arranged to have his patient’s DNA sequenced. He
work at NIH. “St. John’s is about trying to come up with new
discovered a deficiency in the Thyroid Transcription Factor-r
insights about the past in general. It’s wonderful and I loved it.
(TTF-i) gene. “It controls the function of some of the cells in the
I wouldn’t have gone any place else.”
At NIH his work is about “trying to come up with new insights
brain that control movement, the formation of thyroid factors,
some of the lining of the lungs, as well as some of the neurological
about the future. There’s a greater opportunity for failure, but
function of the intestines. It also controls the production of some
there are real opportunities for tangible success. When some
of the immunoglobulins, also called antibodies, which fight off
body gets better, that’s fun. They get up and they do what they’re
infections in the body.”
This woman’s case allows Holland to explore compelling ques
supposed to do.”
As for the answers he doesn’t have yet, “I don’t mind not
tions about genetics and infectious diseases. TTF-r requires two
knowing,” says Holland. “I would mind if someone said you don’t
know and you can’t know. That would be irritating. That’s why I
copies, one each from the mother and the father; only one was
have a laboratory. The beauty of
passed along to his patient, and this
haploinsufficiency is what has made
science is that there’s a reward for
her so ill. What turns this gene on?
both saying, I don’t get it, and then
How could it be stimulated to do its
saying, I want to figure it out. You
don’t get penalized for being igno-
work?
rant-you get penalized for staying
In early spring, the woman had
ignorant. ”4-
already spent three months at the
—Rosemary Harty
hospital, undergoing experimental
treatments to boost proteins in the
TTF-r gene to stimulate it to func
tion better. It’s the first time anyone
has tried any therapy for patients of
this disease, Holland notes. “Now
we’re going in to give her a second
set and see if we can’t push her cells
to finally make enough of this
protein that she has not had all the
Even
modern scientists hit road
years of her life,” he says.
blocks
Perhaps he can make significant
improvements in this patient’s
find
AND dead-ends, SAYS
Dr. Steven Holland, who hopes to
CURES FOR BAFFLING DISEASES
SUCH AS Job’s Syndrome.
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2,2.
What
Patricia Sollars (A80)
regulates
THE body’s internal
studies the
BIOLOGICAL CLOCK THAT GOVERNS CIRCADIAN
RHYTHMS IN MAMMALS; HER RESEARCH MAY
BE HELPFUL IN DEVELOPING REMEDIES FOR
JET LAG AND SEASONAL AFFECTIVE DISORDER.
CLOCK?
Patricia Sollar.s: Neuroscientist
questions related to the brain function,
and Pickard focuses more on anatomical
research.
Located in the hypothalamus, the superchiasmatic nucleus is the primary
in
Sollars eventually completed her
mammals. It cues human heings to the
doctorate at the University of Oregon.
regulator
of circadian
rhythms
sleep-wake cycle, and it tells creatures
She completed a fellowship at the Univer
with seasonal breeding cycles that it’s
sity of Pennsylvania, where she served on
time to get going.
the faculty, then joined her husband at
As a graduate student in neuroscience,
Colorado State University. Until this
Patricia Sollars (A8o) first thought about
year, she was a research scientist at the
the concept of an internal clock in a purely
Department of Biomedical Sciences at
abstract, St. John’s way: “I thought, ah,
Colorado State University; this fall she
temporality-what is time?” she says,
and her husband will move to the Univer
laughing at the memory. “Of course that’s
sity of Nebraska, where they will teach
and conduct research as part of the
not even in the same ballpark.”
university’s new veterinary program.
Sollars was studying at Columbia *
University, rotating through laboratories
In Nebraska, Sollars will continue to
that were studying various questions in
research the SCN and its role in the circa
nucleus (SCN). Although her initial concepts of the internal
dian system. The term “circadian” comes
from the Latin, Sollars notes, for “about a day.” Most human
neuroscience, when she first learned about the superchiasmatic
clock were “naive,” she says, the SCN captured her imagination
beings have a circadian rhythm of about 24 hours-unless some
in the same way in which she once pondered the nature of time
thing knocks it out of balance, for example, shift work or flying
along with Augustine. In one tiny area of the brain, she discov
across time zones. In her research, Sollars has deliberately
ered a rich source of inquiry: Does the SCN alone regulate the
altered the circadian rhythm of mice, hamsters, and rats to try to
internal clock? Is it part of a distributed network in the brain?
demonstrate that the SCN-relying on cues relayed through the
When sight is taken away, how does the SCN continue to regulate
circadian rhythms?
optic nerves-autonomously regulates an important character
istic of circadian rhythms.
“Here was this one little nucleus that sits just on top of the
Sollars devised and carried out an experiment she believed
optic chiasm in the brain,” she says. “It was always there, but
would show definitively if the SCN was the master circadian
people knew so little about what it was doing. There were so
many questions to ask, so many experiments to develop, on a
oscillator. She based her experiment on the knowledge that each
species, and even strains within species, have different endoge
molecular and a behavioral level. All biological creatures have
nous circadian rhythms. “If you keep a mouse in constant dark
the ability to regulate their activity to day/night cycles, and in
ness with no temporal cues, it will run [on an exercise wheel]
mammals that is thanks to the SCN.”
with a period 0123.5 hours, and every day it gets up a half an hour
Sollars met her husband, Gary Pickard, then finishing up a
earlier,” she says. A golden hamster has an endogenous “free-
post-doctorate fellowship in neuroanatomy, in the laboratory at
running” rhythm of 24.06 hours, and a rat, 24.3 hours. Sollars’
Columbia. They have collaborated on research for most of the
experiment involved a little meddling: what would a hamster do
past 35 years, though Sollars is more interested in pursuing
with the SCN from a mouse brain? If the clock was in the SCN,
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
�{Radical Inquiry}
a3
''The best thing about St. Johns was the
chance to get to play with ideas. ”
Patricia Sollars (A8o)
Sollars theorized, the hamster should have the mouse’s circa
other physiological phenomena in your body are out of phase,”
she says. Knowing more about the SCN’s regulatory role may
dian rhythm.
The first step was for her to test her transplant theory from
lead to the development of better remedies for jet lag.
hamster to hamster. “That worked like charm,” she said.
It’s in her nature, Sollars says, to demand to be intrigued,
“When you lesion out a hamster’s SCN and transplant one from
invigorated-even entertained-by her work. After two years of
another hamster, it restores rhythmicity at 24.06 hours.”
studying biology and chemistry at the University of Michigan,
Next, she knocked out a hamster SCN and implanted one from
she started over again at St. John’s. Here she discovered how a
a mouse. When the hamster started running in his exercise
good question, paired with a sound method of inquiry, could lead
wheel, Sollars didn’t know what to expect. Amazingly, the
to discoveries-or at least, new and more interesting questions.
hamster established a reliable rhythm of 23.5 hours-exactly that
“The best thing about St. John’s was the chance to get to play
of a mouse.
“Then,” she says with a sigh, “I made the mistake of taking it
with ideas,” she says. “We’d have these long discussions, and
one step further.” She implanted the SCN of a rat into the
was most important.”
you’d never know where they were leading because the process
hamster, expecting a 24.3-hour cycle to emerge. “When the
“That’s what I loved most about the Program and that’s what I
rhythm was restored, it was 23.5-the mouse again,” she says. “I
carried into the study of neuroscience. When you take on some
transplanted a rat SCN into a hamster, and the rhythm that
thing as vast as the human brain, one of the most important
comes back out is that of a mouse.”
Far from being discouraged, Sollars has an entirely new line of
things is the ability to ask questions from a variety of perspec
inquiry: “One possibility is that this is species-specific. Perhaps
don’t expect.”
tives, to be open to all sorts of possibilities-to look for what you
the mouse and the hamster have autonomous clocks in the SCN
—Rosemary Harty
and the rat could have a distributed clock network. Perhaps when
leaving part of the clock behind.” She published the findings of
How DO WE CREATE OUR INTERNAL
COGNITIVE WORLD?
her experiment in \\\& Journal ofNeuroscience (March 1995).
Sollars had to put this question aside while she devoted more of
Leslie Kay: Neuroscientist
you transplant the SCN from the rat into the hamster, you’re
her time to raising her children: Galen, 23, and Emilia, 17. She
has continued to work with her husband on laboratory experi
Why do people who suffer from Parkinson’s disease lose their
ments at Colorado State that are more concerned with the
sense of smell as the disease progresses? How does a whiff of
anatomical underpinnings of the SCN, several of which may have
Coppertone trigger memories of family beach vacations? And
what exactly is happening in the network of our brains when we
beneficial medical applications.
Among their current projects is an investigation into the
SCN’s role in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a debilitating
condition linked to the shorter days of winter. Evidence suggests
that a serotonin deficit makes some people more vulnerable
to the disorder. “With this particular deficit, you’re not as
responsive to the light input from the outside,” she explains.
“You end up having an altered phase relationship, then that
affects hormones, affects mood, and a lot of other secondary
components.”
Another clinical application of her work is the link between
circadian rhythms and jet lag. Is there a way to enhance the way
the internal clock works with other systems in the body to help
individuals adapt to major shifts in time zones? “Your internal
clock, it turns out, will rapidly shift to a new time-hut all the
stop to smell the roses?
Leslie Kay (SF83) can’t answer these questions yet, but she
knows a lot more about how our olfactory system interacts with
other circuits in the brain than when she began conducting
research 17 years ago at the University of California at Berkeley.
As an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the
Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago, Kay
spends her time studying what happens in the brains of rats
when they are faced with the task of distinguishing between two
similar but distinct smells. Her research may someday
contribute to a better understanding of devastating diseases
such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Kay came to St. John’s after dropping out of Stanford to take
some time off. She went to Santa Fe with her then-husband, a
{The College. St John’s College
• Summer 2008 }
�2.4
{RadicalInquiry}
Johnnie, sat in on some classes, and soon enrolled
as a January Freshman. The Program, she says,
was a good choice for someone interested in too
many disciplines to choose just one to study. “I
was flipping hack and forth between being a
writer, a scientist or a mathematician. At Stan
ford, I switched my major four times,” she
explains. “The freshman year at St. John’s hooked
me. I love geometry, and studying Euclid, I was in
heaven.”
Between Kay’s junior and senior years, St. John’s
tutor Gerald Meyers helped her secure an intern
ship at Los Alamos National Laboratories with
GenBank, an international repository of known
genetic sequences from a variety of organisms.
At that time, a clerked typed in the sequences, and
Kay and the other students annotated coding
regions and proteins. Still unsettled on her career
path, she ended up working there for two and a half
years after graduating from St. John’s.
Kay went to grad school at UG Berkeley,
dropped out, and worked as a programmer for
several years before returning to the GenBank project, where
she was a scientific reviewer and software designer. With
programmers in great demand, Kay worked in the insurance
industry for a brief time, but the attractive pay wasn’t enough
for her. In search of something fascinating, she returned to
Berkeley, where she studied math, physics, and biology.
Convinced that she had found her niche, she walked into
researcher Walter Freeman’s neuroscience laboratory and asked
to do computational modeling of the brain. “He was a gruff guy,
and said, ‘we’ll see.’ He gave me data to analyze. I came up with
an effect in the data, but not enough to prove it. I had to do
experiments, and the experiments got me excited.” Her “secret
love” of statistics, combined with a desire to test theories for
herself, propelled Kay into serious laboratory research.
For her doctoral thesis, Kay studied how different regions in the
rat’s brain talk to each other when the rats perform an olfactory
task. At CalTech, where she did post-graduate research, she
narrowed her focus to the activity found in single neurons. She
tried to draw conclusions about objective odor responses from her
research, “but it didn’t work.” She did discover, however, that even
at the level of a single neuron, the activity of the first cells in the
central olfactory pathway are strongly modulated both by the
{The College-
Rats
can tell scientists a great deal about circuits in the brain
INVOLVED in
the SENSE OF SMELL. ShOWN ARE (l. TO R.): DoNALD
Frederick; Leslie Kay (SF83), with RG07 perched on her
shoulder; Cora Ames; and Daniel Roias-Libano.
meaning of the odor (whether it suggests a sweet or bitter taste to
the rat) and the behavior the rat is trained to carry out in response.
After her post-doc, Kay had her choice between two positions:
one in New York at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, and one
in Chicago. “The University of Chicago was the only place I
interviewed where they were excited by the fact that I went to
St. John’s,” she notes.
While her laboratory focuses on the olfactory system and
brains of rats, her findings may some day help scientists learn
more about neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and
Huntington’s, because the sense of smell is affected early in the
progression of these devastating diseases-sometimes many
years before other symptoms appear.
“The interesting thing in the olfactory system is that you
go directly from the nose to the olfactory bulb in the cortex,”
she explains. Then information is transmitted to the limbic
system, including the hippocampus, amygdala and hypothal
amus, which is important in emotional states and in memory
St. John’s College • Summer 2,oo3 }
�{Radical Inquiry}
formation. The signals are also carried to the basal ganglia,
which is involved in disorders snch as Parkinson’s.
Kay and her students implant electrodes inside the brains of
rats to record brain waves while they perform various odor
discrimination tasks. When animals inhale, the olfactory bulb is
as
It has been shown that part of the olfactory deficit in
Parkinson’s disease is due to difficulty in sniffing, and Kay
showed in a paper in 2005 that sniffing behavior couples the
olfactory bulb with the hippocampus when rats learn odor asso
two to ten cycles per second-are observed. But when a mammal
must distinguish between one smell and another, faster gamma
ciations. “We lose some of our olfactory sense as we age, but
changes seen in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are more
pronounced, and the reason is unclear. We also know that if
the olfactory bulb is taken out of rodents, they act depressed,
waves of 40 to 100 cycles are observed in the olfactory bulb.
their eating patterns change, they become more afraid of
However, in some circumstances when a rat has learned the
association for a smell, a different pattern of 15- to 30-cycle beta
frustrating, and not because they can’t smell, but because the
stimulated, and theta waves-slow electrical pulses ranging from
open spaces, and they give up more easily in tasks that are
waves emerges.
Gamma and beta waves are both evoked when rats smell the
odors-but the results change dependent on the behavior
olfactory bulb is missing,” she says. “If they are treated for
involved in the experiment. This breakthrough came when Kay
and her students observed differences in two experiments they
were conducting. One researcher directed her rats to press the
my attention all these years is: how do we create our internal
cognitive world? The olfactory system offers a nice way to study
left lever for one odor, the right for another (a two-alternative
choice task). The other student conducted a “go/no go” task, in
which the rat would press a lever for one odor, and not press the
lever for the other. In the latter experiment, the rats learned the
task faster and displayed enhanced beta oscillations. In the
former, they learned slowly and showed large gamma oscilla
tions when the odors were difficult to discriminate.
It appears the go/no go task was much closer to what an
animal does in its natural environment.
she explains. “When an animal is
foraging around and smells something,
depression, they improve.
“The question I got started on, and the one thing that’s held
that question because it is connected with all these other
systems. And the circuitry is relatively simple-or it was. It’s
turned out we just didn’t know as much as we thought we did.”
A satisfying part of Kay’s work is training graduate students
to interpret data, to look for effects “that aren’t visible to the
naked eye.” This analysis demands patience and skepticism
something philosophy teaches, too. Kay has never been willing
to take anything for granted. “You think you know something
and you go looking for the thing you know. It’s like the hubris of
the Sophists. We have a lot of prejudice
Reading List:
Hume and Descartes, and those guys
it’s either something it eats, runs away
from, or approaches,” says Kay.
Disconnect the link from olfactory
bulb to the higher brain-for example, by
injecting lidocaine into the pathways
and the system only makes gamma oscil
lations, not beta. “Through many
different studies, what we’ve seen is that
beta waves are not isolated; they involve
the entire olfactory system all the way
into the hippocampus,” she says. In this
Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduc
tion, by Frank Close
The New Cosmic Onion: Quarks and the
Nature ofthe Universe, by Frank Close
The Ideas ofParticle Physics: An Intro
ductionfor Scientists, by G. D. Goughian,
J. E. Dodd, and B. M. Gripaios
Don’t Fear the Big Dogs, by Bill Vancil
happening in the higher brain, indi
Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in
the Twentieth Century, by Bettyann
Kevles
cating that “the whole system is working
Suggestions from Cynthia Keppel
task the brain wave activity in the olfac
tory bulb correlates with what’s
about what the sensory systems might be
telling the brain. I always go back to
together,” says Kay.
{The College-
St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }
it’s really about constructing our
internal representation of the world.”
“The thing about biology “ Kay adds,
“is that we can make hypotheses, and
almost invariably [the answer] comes out
somewhere in the middle. Then you have
to do to more experiments to understand
that result. We never quite prove
anything. And I find that fascinating.”
—Rosemary Harty
�{Student Voices}
A Work in Progress
BY Kea Wilson (A09)
ost St. John’s students
spend their last night
before freshman year
trying to cram that last
sweater into an over
stuffed suitcase and get
those last 20 pages of the Iliad read. I
spent mine at a $2 million benefit gala in
Miami, where Placido Domingo shook my
hand and Vanessa Williams gave me a kiss
on the cheek. A week earlier, I had flown
to Florida as a finalist in a youth arts
competition to which I had submitted a
short story on a whim. Twelve master
classes, eighteen hotel lunches and one
ridiculous photo-op in a botanical garden
later, I found myself at this surreal party
with a medal hung around my neck, starstruck and eating hors d’oeuvres with the
playwright Sam Shepard. Three hours after
that, I boarded my plane to Albuquerque,
still unsure of what had happened to me.
From the moment when I landed to the
moment I write this now. I’ve been a little
embarrassed about telling
this story. But I’ve been
embarrassed, too, of
calling myself a writer at
all, and especially so since
I first dragged my trunk
onto the Santa Fe campus
and began to call myself a
Johnnie. No i8-year-old
with an ounce of perspec
tive would ever presume to
say she had gained the
experience, insight, or
originality necessary to
call herself an artist by the
time she had finished high
school, no matter how
many awards she had won,
or how much encourage
ment she had received.
No i8-year-old who’s just
finished reading about the
burial of Hector in the
lobby of the Sunport would
even dare to think that she
was an artist, regardless of
where her plane had just
arrived from.
After three years at
St. John’s, I’ve often
wondered just how many
students have had
Laurel Price (A09) makes
TIME FOR MUSIC AND DRAMA
ALONG WITH HER STUDIES AT
St. John’s.
{The College-
St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }
moments like these. While I’ve managed to
write almost every day since coming to St.
John’s-despite my embarrassment and
often my own best efforts to quit-many of
my friends have either banished their
guitars to the dark recesses of their dorm
room closet, or else been too caught up
with Newton to ever take it up in the first
place. From my original 28-student
January freshman class in Santa Fe, at least
six left to pursue some form of a career in
the arts. I’ve been the editor of a literary
magazine, a member of a filmmaker’s club,
and devotee of a dance class that have all
lapsed due to a lack of student interest or
energy. When I first decided to apply to St.
John’s, I was especially swayed by a video of
then-Santa Fe Dean David Levine (class of
1967), posed in front of the Meem Library:
he said that “there should be no realm of
human endeavor that we should feel
ourselves excluded from” once we have
completed the St. John’s education. Why,
then, is the artistic realm of human
endeavor so cut off from many Johnniesand could we make art, even if we
wanted to?
Making Time for Art
Needless to say, I didn’t come to St. John’s
to be a writer-and I’d venture to say that
even fewer students come to the college to
play the clarinet, or act, or more generally,
for any reason other than to read great
books and attempt to understand them in a
community of intelligent people. After all,
I had spent the past four years of my life
learning to be a writer at a fine arts high
school, where I had saddled myself with a
creative writing major at age 14. By the
time I graduated, I had taken enough
English and creative writing credits to
fulfill St. John’s entrance requirements six
times over, not to mention written a port
folio of my own terrible amateur writing
that had a page count roughly equal to that
of War and Peace.
When I applied to college, there was no
doubt in my mind that I knew how to write,
�{Student Voices}
at least insofar as I’d done it, consistently
and with varying degrees of success, every
day for years. When I walked into my first
seminar, I still hoped to pursue my writing
professionally-hut like most young artists.
I’d listened to the advice of my parents, my
guidance counselors, and every successful
writer I’d heen lucky to meet while at arts
school; “Have a hack-up plan.” “Study
something you enjoy.” “Don’t put all your
eggs in one basket.” I ran across St. John’s
and marveled at the Weh site, which adver
tised itself holdly and with QuickTime
video testimonials, as a strong foundation
for any endeavor I might undertake. I
thought I’d found the answer.
I hgured out pretty quickly that many of
my friends had the same idea when coming
to the college. After years of classical piano
training, Sam Richards (SF09) had not
only learned the nuances of his sonata
repertoire, hut also the slim odds of
success in the music world. “I actually
chose St. John’s partly because I was so
interested in playing music,” he says.
“Knowing that it would be hard to actually
have a career as a professional musician,
I figured that it might help me to have a
‘strong liheral arts education’ as a hackup.” Once immersed in the difficult work
of the tutorials, however, Richards found
that there were simply too many “lah read
ings, Newton to figure out, Racine to trans
late, Nietzsche to read... .Part of me feels
really had because just about everyone I
know ends up telling me that I’m a talented
musician, I should keep playing the piano.
I’m good enough to be professional, and so
on. . . but I just don’t feel it anymore.”
It’s no secret that all too often, the
rigorous work of the Program eclipses the
often extraordinary time and energy it
takes to practice and perfect an art form
er, God forbid, produce any new material
yourself. But this argument isn’t enough to
explain why so many Johnnies manage to
find time for week-long rock climbing trips
in Arizona and so few manage to find time
to write a novel. While Eron Wiles (SFio)
doesn’t “find St. John’s to be discouraging
to art in particular” and has even managed
to sustain her own interest in the arts
through a craft club, time in the pottery
studio and small sewing projects, she
misses the sustained community she
enjoyed as an art major at a previous
college. “A big part of going to art school is
a class critique of each other’s work. I
know I was constantly comparing my work
with others.” At St. John’s, students not
only lack the time, but simply the common
vocabulary necessary to critique one
another’s composition or use of a certain
rhyme scheme.
For some, however, St. John’s doesn’t
only lack a common artistic dialect, but
actually demands that we speak about
books, the arts, and everything else
through the rigidly defined analytical
language that we’re taught in seminar-and
in the process, neglect our artistic
impulses entirely. Caitlin Cass (SFog), a
rising senior and prodigious visual artist,
says that she is “constantly blown away by
how apathetic our student body is when it
comes to anything that does not involve
critiquing [or] discussing the work of
others.” While many students are discour
aged by the lack of artistic community at
the college, however, Cass has taken it as a
form of encouragement: she says that her
“frustration with this is probably the only
{The College -
John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
a?
Fine
arts classes—offered free to
STUDENTS—OFFER AN OPPORTUNITY FOR
STUDENTS INCLUDING SaRA FrY (Alo) TO
EXPLORE THEIR CREATIVE SIDES.
reason I’m even considering a career in the
arts. The one truly useful thing I’ve
learned at St. John’s is that I could never
spend my entire life discussing what other
people have created. I need to create things
myself.”
Like Cass, Simon Tajiri (SFog) came to
the college with a passion for art, but
quickly found himself saddened by “how
much talent people have shelved in order
to do the Program.” A talented poet, blues
guitarist, songwriter, soundtrack composer
and general Renaissance man himself,
Tajiri quickly found himself feeling stifled
by the St. John’s “culture which says that
there’s a certain way of writing, a certain
way of speaking, a certain way of reading,
thinking. If you want to be part of the
conversation, heard by your tutors and your
�2,8
{StudentVoices}
Magdalen Wolfe (A07) portrays
Desdemona in the King William Player’s
Othello production. Tutor Will
Williamson played the title role.
classmates, it’s got to go a certain way. And
there’s room for individuality in that. But
not rehellion.”
Finding A Voice
Like many of the subjects I interviewed,
I’ve neglected my art form for months at a
time while I’ve become embroiled in life at
the college. During my sophomore year in
Santa Fe, I logged countless hours on the
layout computers in the basement of
Peterson Sudent Center, painstakingly
adjusting page margins on the school
literary magazine rather than writing
anything new of my own to submit. I’ve
spent more than a few excruciating semi
nars biting my tongue rather than
commenting on Shakespeare’s use of word
play, if only because I knew that my
comment would be met by a round of
silence if I spoke. And while I am,
absolutely, still dying to understand just
how Shakespeare, as a writer, frames a
sentence or captures Iago’s specific brand
of ego in words. I’ve come to be just as
hungry to understand what Shakespeare,
as a thinker, has to tell me not just about
writing, but about human life.
My freshman language tutor, Cary
Stickney (A75) has always stood out in my
mind as the first person who showed me
what it truly meant to study at St. John’s.
He was the first tutor to tell me, point
blank, in my don rag, that it was not
enough for me to simply love books the
way I had loved books in high school-as
something I wanted to write and the way I
wanted to spend my time-hut that I must
love books as a testament to the infinity of
human perspectives they represent, and
the invaluable mirror they provide for
myself and the species I’m a part of. He
also stands out in my mind as the tutor who
could always be seen on the lower Placita
on Wednesday afternoon, mandolin in
hand, surrounded by students and other
tutors making music.
When I asked him whether or not a
St. John’s student could pursue a career in
the arts, Stickney responded that “insofar
as the chief thing is to love the beauty and
depth of the work that is possible in any
given art so as to be inspired to produce
that kind of work oneself, I do indeed.
Insofar as really getting anywhere with
Kant or Newton requires that same appli-
{The College .St John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
cation of the seat of the pants to the seat of
the chair, that same eager, stubborn
persistence that a career in the arts
requires, yes, there again I think so.”
But he was also careful to question
whether or not there had “ever been a
school that knew how to turn out great
artists. It is hard enough to get students to
speak their minds and ask their own ques
tions and listen to one another and to the
texts. If the creative arts are about finding
one’s own voice, then I think St. John’s
may be one of the best places to prepare to
practice such arts.”
And Stickney’s question is, after all, not
a purely rhetorical one. While it remains to
be seen whether or not any school can
guarantee their alumni that specific breed
of creativity, inspiration, sensitivity to
beauty, personal richness and yes, success
that any artist craves and requires, it
cannot be ignored that St. John’s does
produce alumni who go on to successful
careers in all manner of art forms. One
alumnus that I spoke with, David JLidd
(A85), came to St. John’s after abandoning
his dream of becoming an architect, and
ended many years later restoring classical
homes as part of his larger practice as
painter, muralist and restoration artist
with Kidd Studios.
While the road was not a direct one for
Kidd (he also spent several years in the
Navy and had a successful career as the
senior clinical trial researcher for the
neurosurgery department at Johns
Hopkins University), he says that it was his
broad-based education at St. John’s that
taught him the adaptability not only to
draw on the skills he learned from every
fork in his career path, but to eventually
gather the courage to apply those lessons
to his new career as an artist. “I can’t tell
you how many times I’ll be painting a
mural and need to use perspective and I’ve
fallen back on what Winfree Smith taught
me [in freshman math],” says Kidd. “And
�{StudentVoices}
doing clinical trials and helping people
with chronic pain symptoms, it doesn’t feel
hke that was a waste of time at all either,
not in any way... I learned all this stuff
about grant writing and business and
managing people, and there were all these
hfe skills that came with it that even if I
didn’t stay in that career-I took to the
next thing.”
While Kidd makes no pretensions that it
was this adaptability alone that led to his
success as an artist, he cannot help but
credit his education here for providing him
with the foundation not only to pursue any
field he chose, but also to address those
essential human questions that artists, in
particular, explore when they assert their
perspective on the world through paint.
stone, or pencil. “[Program authors] were
able to look at the same thing, the same
group of data and come at it from different
directions and give it a whole new
meaning,” he says. “1 swear that’s what art
is. There are artistic scientists, and there
are pedantic artists on both sides of the
divide. 1 think real art and real creativity
crosses all the disciplines like anything
else.... [The things that Johnnies are
taught] are broadly applicable to every
thing from writing a computer program to
saying ‘1’11 put this element on this
painting here because that’s where it will
look good in the composition...’ Every
thing that goes on around us, as we are able
to understand it, is logical. It may be
chaotic, and maybe we don’t know what the
2,9
process is, but there’s always a process. If
you can bring that to your art, 1 think it
only improves it. That ability to synthesize,
to take a bunch of disparate things and pull
them together into a composition, that’s
what an artist does, and the training here
just gives you practice.”
As 1 stumble through Newton, Kant,
Maxwell, and the other challenges of junior
year-and inevitably, editing whatever stub
born metaphor in whatever short story I’m
writing at the moment-I often find it
difficult to follow Kidd’s advice. It’s hard
sometimes, as I’m trudging through the
electro-magnetic equations, to understand
how my fiction can even fall under the
same umbrella as the vast and brilliant
works of the minds we encounter here, and
how I’ll ever be able to say something as
new, as daring, or as genius as they have
already said. I’m only comforted to know
that generations of St. John’s students
before me have struggled with these ideas
and emerged in awe, with an expanded
faculty to enjoy and marvel at the world
around them, and more courage to express
their reverence and perplexity and excite
ment for those ideas than when they
entered. I’m comforted when I hear the
words of a current St. John’s student,
Simon Tajiri, and to know that they echo
my thoughts exactly:
“I’m pretty sure that I’ll spend my life
creating, whether it be writing, music,
whatever. I don’t know if it’ll be any good
at all, or if people will want to hear what I
have to say. But I want to be responsible
about it. I want to make sure I’m hstening
to the conversation before I jump in. I want
to be honest about what I’m thinking and I
want to be disciplined enough to be loyal to
my beliefs... I don’t want to create more
dogma. I just want to be honest and I want
to be able to tell when what I’m saying is
real. Maybe St. John’s can help me do that.
Here’s hoping, anyway.” ♦
St. John’s
may provide an ideal education
FOR AN ASPIRING WRITER, SAYS KeA WiLSON
(A09), BUT EVEN THE MOST DEDICATED ARTISTS
FIND DIFFICULTY BALANCING CREATIVITY WITH
THE Program.
{The College. St. John’s
College • Summer 2008 }
�30
{Bibliofile}
The End__________________________
Completing The End was a io-year quest
FOR Salvatore Scibona (SF97), who drew on
HIS experiences at St. John’s for scenes in
Salvatore Scibona (SF97)
Graywolf Press, 2008
HIS NOVEL.
BY Rosemary Harty
Salvatore Scibona’s first novel begins on the
Feast of the Assumption, in the fictional
Italian enclave of Elephant Park in
Cleveland, with Rocco, the baker:
He wasfivefeet one inch tall in street
shoes, bearlike in his round andjowlyface,
hulking in his chest and shoulders, nearly
just as stout around the middle, but hollow
in the hips, and lacking aproper can to sit on
(though he was hardly ever known to sit),
and wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny
feet, a man in the shape ofa lightbulb.
Having devoted himself to work, Rocco
can’t grasp the latest piece of bad news in
his sad life. Confused and heartbroken, he
finds himself at Niagara Falls, confronting a
deceiver in the guise of an ice cream man
and learning the ultimate truth about
his fife.
The novel ends with the memories of
Costanza Marini, a widow who runs an illicit
but profitable business in her Elephant Park
home. Mrs. Marini harbors a fierce but
oppressive love for those she cares about,
rich memories from her youth and
marriage, and persistent demons:
Fouryears into her widowhood, Satan
visited her in her garden. She was on her
knees, yanking the quack grass out ofthe
spinach. Iridescentflies dappled the carcass
ofa bass in thefurrow. “Egoist, ’’said the
tempter. “Despair!” To despair is a sin.
But, true enough, she had no hope. She could
not remember having hoped. “Die! ” said
the Devil.
Rocco, Mrs. Marini, and many other char
acters, from a menacing jeweler to a restless
and intelUgent young man named Ciccio,
had been hvingwith Scibona for a third of
his life as he worked on his novel. The End.
The characters and the world he created for
them became so real that he was bereft at
leaving them behind when he completed the
novel, published in May. He came to think
of them as individuals with their own will,
an understanding that ultimately made it
easier for him to write. “In the last few
years, I went from thinking of myself as
being the characters’ parent, to being their
peer, to finally being their child,” Scibona
says. “I respected them as elders.”
Throughout the novel, Scibona changes
the point-of-view and plays with time, some
times retreating to the past of one character
and at other times abruptly shifting back to
another character in the present day, which
in the novel is r953. To write genuine char
acters and speak genuinely for them means
“cultivating a human relationship with
someone who’s not really there,” Scibona
explains. Mrs. Marini, for example, can be
“severe, judgmental and nasty,” Scibona
says, but she’s also extraordinary, and he
grew to love her for her independent spirit
and generosity.
A third-generation Italian American,
Scibona grew up in the suburbs, but he
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
spent a great deal of time with his grandpar
ents and enjoyed hearing about the old days
in their old neighborhoods. Their stories
inspired him to create Elephant Park, and
he dedicated his novel to them. “I ate up
their pasts,” Scibona says. “I felt as though
the suburb I grew up in was such a culturally
vacuous place, and the neighborhoods
where they grew up in Cleveland seemed
full, vibrant, awake.”
After graduating from St. John’s, Scibona
went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where
he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.
There he learned to develop a writing habit
to complement the reading habit he formed
at St. John’s. “St. John’s was the perfect
place for me, and I miss it every day. Rut at
the Writers’ Workshop I finally made up
my mind that-out of all the many options
St. John’s allowed me to entertain-I wanted
to write novels. I didn’t want to do anything
else with my time, and I had to make aU
my other work and financial decisions
accordingly.”
Scibona won a Fulbright Scholarship to
study in Italy (where he worked on his
Italian and conducted research for his
novel); held fellowships at the prestigious
artists’ colonies at Yaddo and MacDoweU;
and taught writing at Iowa, Harvard
Summer School, and Boston University. He
won the Pushcart Prize for his short story
“Prairie” in aooo. It was pubhshed in The
Pushcart Book ofShort Stories: The Best
Storiesfrom a Quarter-Century ofthe Push
cart Prize. “The Platform,” a short story
that later became a chapter in The End, was
selected for pubheation in the Best New
American Voices in 2004. Since 2004, he’s
been the writing coordinator at the Fine
Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.,
a part-time job that allows him time to write.
His body of work is relatively small,
Scibona says, because for 10 years, he
devoted himself to the novel, which began to
form in his mind while he was a student at
St. John’s. The first half-dozen drafts went
into the trash, Scibona says, as he struggled
to find an authentic voice. “I learned how to
write by writing this book,” he says. “I
wrote longhand, then typed what I had onto
�{Bibliofile}
a manual typewriter, then marked it up with
pencil, and retyped, over and over, trying to
get the sentences to sound the way I wanted
them. All of the other changes-to plot, to
character, to the book’s ideas-came out
through revision of the sentences.”
St. John’s was an indispensable experi
ence for Scibona, and he creates a similar
experience for his character Ciccio in the
form of a rigorous Jesuit school for boys.
Ciccio endures oral examinations that are
very much patterned on orals at St. John’s,
fielding questions that are “straight out of
sophomore year.” Scibona includes
concepts from Aristotle, Aquinas, and
Kierkegaard in Ciccio’s dialogues with his
teacher, a dying priest. “The book tries to
express its ideas as much as possible in
action and in things. But the boys’ school
resembles St. John’s because I needed a way
to briefly ask certain Johnnie questions in
an overt way,” Scibona says.
Scibona’s girlfriend, Emily Shelton, came
up with the title The End. (He had briefly
considered somehow using “being-at-workstaying-itself,” from Annapohs tutor Joe
Sachs’s translation of entelecheia, but even
tually decided it would be “kind of absurdly
and laughably overblown.”)
The title he settled on reflects a main
premise of his story: that each fife is a
purpose in itself, each fife has an ultimate
end. “It’s the telos end,” he says. “Hope
fully, if our fives have meaning, then they’re
culminating, not just stopping. When we
die, it’s not like someone just pulled
the plug-your end has meaning in the
Aristotelian way.” For the stonemason,
Enzo, his end is a well-deserved rest. For
his son, Ciccio, the end is a departure, a
“coming into being of the potential.”
As he wrote about Ciccio, Scibona
remembered his own departure and begin
ning. “I will never forget the first day I got
out of my car and walked up the steps in
Santa Fe-I thought, ‘now I’m a real person.’
That’s what St. John’s meant to me,”
he says.
Everything Beautiful in the
World
Lisa Levchuk, SFGI05, EC06
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
BY Deborah Spiegelman
A novel’s journey from inspiration to
fruition can find a short cut or meander for
years, and in the case of Lisa Levchuk
(SFGI05, EC06), the direct path finally was
3^
Studying classic works of the East helped
Lisa Levchuck (SFGI05, EC06) finish her
first novel.
revealed in the Bhagavad-Gita. Freed from
focusing on the result. Levchuck was
inspired through the Eastern Classics
program to complete Everything Beautiful
in the World, which will be published this
fall by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Fifteen years in the making, Lisa’s debut
novel began as a short story in her MFA
program at the University of Massachusetts.
During her thesis defense, she was told that
it could be something longer. Degree in
hand. Levchuck decided to settle in Massa
chusetts and by 1993 was teaching English
full time. Meanwhile, the short story
stubbornly refused to take on the shape
of a novel.
Looking for a break from teachingLevchuck admits to a penchant for accumu
lating degrees-she decided to apply to the
St. John’s Graduate Institute. After
completing the Liberal Arts program, she
was drawn to Eastern Classics. “I’d been
working on the book on and off... and I was
blocked up with expectations of what would
happen if I ever finished,” Levchuck
remembers. “Reading Krishna’s words to
Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita helped me to
understand that anticipating outcomes is
really deadly to the creative process,” she
says. “I wish I could return to that mindset
now. It’s proven to be quite elusive.”
Studying Sanskrit also played a
supportive role. “Doing Sanskrit taught me
focus,” Levchuck recalls. After sitting in the
library for hours with her Sanskrit
dictionary, writing her own book felt fike a
pleasant distraction. By the time she left
{The College-
St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }
St. John’s, Levchuck had the lion’s share of
her novel completed.
Everything Beautiful in the World is set in
New Jersey, where Levchuck grew up in the
early 1980s, a time “closer to what I
remember [about high school],” she
explains. It is the story of 17-year-old Edna
dealing simultaneously with a gravely ill
mother and with her own relationship with a
teacher. According to advance copy from the
publisher, Edna figures that “the only good
thing about having a mother with cancer is
that people are willing to let [her] get away
with pretty much anything.... But there’s
one thing Edna’s fairly certain even she
can’t get away with-her burgeoning
romance with Mr. Howland, her fourth
period Ceramics teacher.”
While broaching a sensitive subject, the
book “is more about the relationship
between two people who both suffer in the
end,” Levchuck summarizes. “And it is
funny, too,” she adds, suggesting that even
serious subjects can be examined through
the lens of levity. While Levchuck claims
that the idea for the story “just came to
her,” she also acknowledges having been
interested for a long time in issues facing
adolescent girls.
As the novel took shape. Levchuck shared
sections with a few of her creative writing
students at the Williston Northampton
School, where she has taught for 10 years.
“They made really great comments about
making it more realistic to high school.” In
the classroom, she shares both the pleasures
and the frustrations of writing. Not infre
quently a story resists the telling. “Some
times, you just can’t know at 17 years old
[what someone will achieve]... It doesn’t
mean that someone can’t tell the story
later,” she reasons, keenly aware of her
own journey.
Reflecting on her summers in Santa Fe,
Levchuck credits the Graduate Institute
with not only making her a better teacher,
but also changing her approach to peda
gogy. “My emphasis as a teacher shifted
from talking to listening and responding,”
she says, admiring the way her St. John’s
tutors would approach ostensibly familiar
texts “always with a sense that each discus
sion might turn up something new.”
�{Alumni Profile}
3a
The Kid Who Ran Away With The Circus
Buddy Mondlock (A82)
BY Cathi Dunn MacRae
f you listen to legendary folksingers
-particularly Peter, Paul & Mary
and Art Garfunkel-you may have
been caught in the net of a spell
binding song called “The Kid,”
a contemporary classic written
by Buddy Mondlock (A82).
I
I’m the kid who ran away with the circus
Now I’m watering elephants
If you were on the Annapolis campus in
1978 or 1979, Mondlock might have been
sitting next to you in freshman or sopho
more seminar. You couldn’t have missed
the long-haired, blue-eyed, soft-spoken
Mondlock playing guitar on the Quad, but
even he couldn’t have imagined then the
success he would later find as a musician
and songwriter.
Alumni who made it back to Annapolis
for Homecoming in 2007 were treated to a
concert of original music by Mondlockpoetic, punch-packing songs relieved by
humor as gentle as his voice. Introducing
his fifth album, The Edge of the Worldwinner of the Indie Acoustic Project’s Best
Album in 2007 by a male singer-songwriter
-Mondlock sang in the Great Hall about
skin, mud, and the breakup of a marriage,
ending with the affirming “I Count You My
Friend.”
Mondlock’s music features dramatic
lyrics, entrancing melodies, and intricate
guitar. “The Cats of the Colosseum” is
hypnotic, with Roman cats “older than the
ruins.” A sprightly dance down “Magnolia
Street” transforms “a funk/Going ’round
and ’round with thoughts you already
thunk.” Mysterious “New Jersey Sunset”
evokes uneasy flashes of “The Sopranos.”
He first recorded his signature song,
“The Kid,” in 1987 on his debut album.
On the Line. David Wilcox gave it further
exposure on his 1989 album. After Mond
lock recorded it again on his self-titled
1994 album, Peter, Paul & Mary included it
on their 1995 Lifelines album and then
invited Mondlock to sing it with them in
their 1996 TV special. It won the 1996
Kerrviffe Music Award for Song of the Year.
Seeing it “headed for the canon of folk
songs,” Richard Shindell, Lucy Kaplansky
and Dar Williams chose it for their rggB
Cry Cry Cry album. Mondlock recorded it
again with Art Garfunkel in 2002.
Mondlock admits that he’s “the kid”
whose circus is “this life as a
folksinger/songwriter/troubadour. It’s a
romantic notion to be traveling around as a
professional musician, but in real life it has
its ups and downs.” Is it scary without a
net? He laughs. “Itwasn’t scary when I was
younger. It’s scarier now! It’s been a mostly
happy and rewarding life so far. Even
though ‘The Kid’ has never been a big
radio hit, people in the folk world have run
across it, which means a lot to me.”
Growing up in Park Forest, Illinois,
Mondlock heard about St. John’s College
from a neighbor. “The history of Western
thought seemed so fascinating,” he says.
“Part of my goal in going to college was
to figure out what I wanted to do in my
life. St. John’s seemed like a natural
place to start.”
Bonding with fellow Febbies,
he was “into everything
going on in my freshman year,
Aristotle and Homer and all
that really chewy stuff.” As a
sophomore, he found the
Romans and Aquinas “a lot
dryer” than the Greeks, so he
spent more time with his
guitar. He had been playing
since he was 10 years old, when
he wrote his first song. After
listening to Simon &
Garfunkel and the Beatles and
harmonizing with his sisters on
Crosby, Stills, & Nash songs,
songwriting seriously snagged
him at 16.
Writing songs and performing
ARE “inseparable” FOR BUDDY
Mondlock (A8a), who has
recorded albums with legends
INCLUDING Art Garfunkel.
{The College . St. John’s College
. Summer 2008 }
�33
{Alumni Profile}
""My [songwriting]
workshops reflect
what we were doing
[at]St. Johns. ”
Buddy Mondlock (aSs)
Back home for the summer of 1979,
Mondlock was encouraged by his musician
cousin Ray to play open stages at a folk
club, the Earl of Old Town in Chicago.
Instead of returning to St. John’s, he
“jumped into the music with both feet.”
When he was 21, Mondlock opened a
New Year’s Eve show for folk icon Steve
Goodman. “Steve was a big influence on
my style and one of the best performers
I’ve ever seen. He had this impish light
dancing in his eyes; he could totally capti
vate an audience. Getting to open for him
at such an early stage in my career was a
real validation.” Mondlock’s own “No
Choice” appears in the CD of songs
inspired by Goodman that accompanies the
recent biography, Steve Goodman: Facing
the Music by Clay Eals.
“No Choice” also launched Mondlock’s
career. Influential songwriter Guy Clark,
who hosted the open stage at the Kerrville
Folk Festival in Texas, reports: “This kid
in a bathing suit walked up and played ‘No
Choice’ to an audience of 30 to 40 people.
By the time he got to the second verse, he
had 200 people singing along with him.
He blew me away! ”
“Guy walked straight over to me after
ward,” says Mondlock, “and asked for a
tape of the song. I gave him the tape and
didn’t expect anything more. A couple
weeks later, I got this phone message:
‘This is Guy Clark and I hke the songs.
We’ll see if we can get you into the music
business.’ I’m doing back flips in the
kitchen!”
Clark’s recommendation “couldn’t have
been a better calling card,” says Mondlock.
“Guy Clark says listen and people listen.”
Among those who heard was Bob Doyle
from ASC AP, a performing rights organi
zation. “Bob invited me to stay in his spare
room in Nashville, and I thought, wow.
I’m off!”
Mondlock won Kerrville’s 1987 New
Folk Competition for Emerging Song
writers and released his first album. As a
Nashville staff writer, he received “a draw
every month, just enough to live on
without having to work at 7-11. It was an
advance against royalties I might make.”
Collaborating with other songwriters,
“you make appointments and get out your
notebooks and trade ideas back and forth.”
One collaborator was “a fellow from
Oklahoma named Garth Brooks. We wrote
several songs together.” When Brooks
became a country mega-star, he recorded
one of those songs, “Every Now and
Then,” on his 1992 album. The Chase,
which sold about eight million copies.
Mondlock’s share of royalties amounted to
“what a good dentist would make over a
couple years.”
When Mondlock played at Nashville’s
Bluebird Cafe, Janis Ian turned up in the
front row; they ended up writing songs
together. “I brought Janis this raw stuff
from sitting up in one of the writer’s rooms
at EMI, looking out the window writing
down images: ‘Just the pattern of sunlight
on a building, just a flash in a window I
was passing.’”
Wondering where this haunted story was
taking place, “we kicked names around:
Cincinnati, Schenectady. One of us said
Amsterdam.” His images became the first
verse of “Amsterdam,” which appears on
the Buddy Mondlock album and Ian’s
album, Billie’s Bones. Ian played
“Amsterdam” for her friend Joan Baez,
who promptly recorded it herself.
Mondlock’s most intensive collaboration
began in 1999 when producer Billy Mann
invited him to make an album with Art
Garfunkel and Maia Sharp. “The chance to
work with Art was pretty exciting,” says
Mondlock. “We were both a little intimi
dated because the songwriting process was
new territory for Art.” Mondlock found the
germ of their first song, “Perfect
Moment,” in a poem in Garfunkel’s book,
Stillwater. The album. Everything Waits to
Be Noticed, features Garfunkel, Mondlock,
and Sharp performing songs written
together and with others. Mondlock’s and
Garfunkel’s high tenor voices sing in
unison for a double-tracked effect; Sharp’s
harmonies weave around them. After the
album was released in 2002, the trio
toured 25 U.S. cities followed by a month in
Europe, including a thrilling appearance at
the Royal Albert Hall.
Mondlock drives all over the countryand Europe-performing in folk clubs,
house concerts, and festivals. He also
presents songwriting workshops. “Writing
{The College-
a song is like writing a short story or
character study. My songwriting work
shops reflect what we were doing at St.
John’s seminar: asking questions and not
taking things for granted; looking deep
into the words that are appearing in front
of us; thinking things through logically
and then emotionally; and looking at art in
all the ways that it can impact us.”
In Mondlock’s musical epics, Johnnies
will discover an evolutionary song as well
as cameos by Newton and Einstein.
How does the writer in Mondlock
interact with the performer? “Before I was
writing songs,” he says, “I was playing
music and loving it. But then the writing
became such an important part of my art.
To me, they’re inseparable. To write a song
is to want to sing it, too.”
St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }
For more on Buddy Mondlock, visit:
WWW. buddymondlock. com.
Discography:
On the Line. 1987. (Due back in print.)
Buddy Mondlock. Doyle/Lewis
Productions, Inc., 1995 and 2007.
Poetic Justice. Sparking Gap, 1998 and
2007.
Everything Waits to Be Noticed.
Manhattan Records, 2002.
The Edge of the World. Sparking Gap,
2007,
�{AlumniNotes}
34
1946
Along with 200 other “last
simdvors,” PETER WeISS (class of
1946) went to Vienna in May at the
invitation of an organization
sponsored by the Austrian
government, which has put 40,000
high school and university students
in touch with people who survived
the camps or had to flee Austria
after the Anschluss: “I visited both
the high school I attended from
1935 to 1938 and the one to which I
was expelled for reasons of ‘racial
purity.’ Got my grades, could have
been better. Meeting in Parhament
on the theme ‘I was never a child.’
Gave human rights lecture at the
faculty of law. Interesting but
unsettling experience.”
1949
Allan Hoffman continues to be
involved with the college: “I’m an
honorary member of the Board of
Visitors and Governors of the
College and an emeritus member of
the Alumni Association Board.
At BVG meetings, I see Chuck
Nelson (class of 1945) and Ray
Cave (class of 1948). At N.Y. SJC
chapter meetings and seminars, I
frequently see JOHN VAN DOREN
(class of 1947). I stiU ski and enjoy
fishing and swimming. This June
Margie and I will spend about four
weeks touring Newfoundland by car
on our own. We have four
grandchildren; they keep us on our
toes. We are looking forward to the
Class of ’49s 60th reunion in the
fall of 2009 in Annapolis. If any of
you, dear friends, who read this
have any ideas on how to make this
Homecoming as good as possible,
please contact me.”
1959
Patience Garretson Schenck
wants her classmates to start
planning now to attend their
50th reunion in 2009. “Let’s have a
great turnout and opportunity to
see classmates we haven’t seen in
many years.”
Immense Delight
Vowels (A73) shares her “immense delight at
being granted tenure at Washington College, and
being promoted to associate professor. I teach
Management Information Systems in the Department
of Business Management, and I love being part of a
wonderful liberal arts community while being able to
share what I’ve learned in the world of industry. It has been a
great joy to embark on this second career, and I am looking
forward to many, many years of teaching.”
usan A.
1965
Bruce Preston writes: “A couple
of years ago I began to take classes
at the National Cathedral, and
evidently as a consequence, I was
baptized this past Easter. I have just
signed up for a four-year program
given by the University of the South
School of Theology. The program is
called Education for Ministry and
my motives, while not entirely clear
to me, may have something to do
with reconsidering questions raised
by Kyle Smith (and others) in
sophomore seminar: the garden,
the serpent and the apple. In any
event, this may keep me out of
trouble as I begin to wind down my
architectural practice and move
into semi-retirement. I am also
writing when I find the time, and I
have a httle personaf essay coming
out in the Washington Post in
August.”
1966
Christopher Hodgkin has two
new grandchildren to celebrate.
“My identical twin daughters,
having married identical twins,
have within the pastyear each
given us a wonderful grandson to
enjoy. With both daughters living
next door to us, we are able to see
(andbabysit!) the grandchildren
every day. I am continuing to slide
out of my law practice into full-time
retirement. Should be there within
a year or two!”
Sylvia Shapiro is retired and
hving in Mexico: “My husband,
Paul, and I have a lovely house with
a huge yard and swimming pool
with solar heat. We could not even
afford an apartment in California
for the rent we pay. I volunteered at
the Animal Shelter for three years,
acquiring five dogs. Now I am
looking for more intellectual
stimulation, playing Scrabble by
S
e-mail and applying for jobs that
might interest me enough to return
to California.”
moved from an active retirement to
an even more active semiretirement.
1967
1969
Karen Shaven is a doctoral
Mike Anthony (A) writes:
student in Educational Leadership
for Changing Populations at the
College of Notre Dame in
Maryland. She passed her compre
hensive exams and is working on
her dissertation. In a moment of
insanity, she was looking for
another challenge, something
completely different from her
assessment work in beginning
reading at the Maryland State
Department of Education, so she
joined the firm of Keffer Wdhams
Realty in Baltimore. If you are
thinking of buying, seUing, or
investing, contact her. If she can’t
help you, she can find an agent in
your area who can!
“On June i, my daughter, Efspeth
Anthony, wilf be graduated from
Linfield College/Good Samaritan
Hospital in Portland, Oregon, with
a BS in Nursing. In July, Beth will
start work in the ICU at Salem
Hospital.”
1968
Byron Wall (A) writes: “I
recently completed my term as
Master of Norman Bethune College
at York University in Toronto and
am now enjoying the reward of a
sabbatical at Cambridge University.
When I return in the fall, I will take
up a new position as coordinator of
the new Science and Technology
Studies Program at York. Last year
I was also promoted to senior
lecturer in the Department of
Mathematics and Statistics. This
August, my son Alex (A03) will
marry Kristin Ah in Toronto.”
W. R. Alhury (A) writes: After
retiring from full-time employment
at the University of New England in
Armidale, NSW, Australia, at the
end of 2004,1 was able to enjoy a
few years devoted entirely to
research, some consulting work
and family responsibilities. At the
end of 2007, however, I was
appointed Chief University
Ombudsman at UNE, giving me a
new range of duties to fit in with my
previous activities; so I have now
{The College. Sf. John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 )
1970
Rabbi Yehoshua (Jeff)
Friedman (A) sends news from
Israel: “My wife, Janet, and I just
celebrated our sixth wedding out
of eight children. We have 15
grandchildren, aU hving here in
Israel. I teach at Yeshivat Ma’ale
Efraim in Israel’s Jordan Valley.
Anyone planning a visit to Israel
or otherwise interested in
�{AlumniNotes}
conversation can contact me by
e-mail at friedyoy®
netvision.net.il, U.S. phone
216-455-0500 or Israel local phone
oa-994-1965. Discussions of the
Athens and Jerusalem question are
especially welcome.”
Les Margulis (A) writes: “I am
semi-retired now, which means I
consult rather than have a full-time
job working for someone. Just as a
reminder, I am in advertising and
for the last three years hved in Kiev,
Ukraine and Moscow, Russia. I am
now back home in Sydney where
the weather is a bit better. I have
been lucky as far as assignments go.
I spent two months in
Johannesburg (scariest place I ever
lived-everyone lives with violence
every day of their hves). Then I
worked in Israel for a month. I am
going to Dubai for a month and
America for several months. So I
am keeping busy and trying to stay
out of trouble. I hope the rest of the
classmates are all good and I
assume that most are looking at
retirement jobs.”
For the last several years, HUDI
Podolsky (SF) has been teaching
at San Jose State University in a
master’s program for teachers who
are seeking to become adminis
trators and other types of
educational leaders: “I also work
with high schools that are engaged
in restructuring into smaller
learning communities. I volunteer
with a non-profit school for
children with disabUities, and I
tutor in a wonderful middle-school
reading program. After a long
career in high tech. I’m back where
I’m happiest-in education. My
beloved husband, Joe Podolsky,
died of lung cancer in July 2007.”
1972
Barbara Rogan (A72, graduated
from Santa Fe in ’73) invites fellow
alumni to visit her brand new Web
sites and say heUo. Her home site,
www.barbararogan.com, features
her work as a writer, with lots of
information on her eight novels and
other books, a recently revised bio
(why should politicians be the only
ones who get to revise their pasts?),
and “in the writers’ lounge, lots of
useful information for published or
aspiring writers, based on my
checkered career in pubhshing as
an agent, editor, and writer. I’ve
also created a new site that focuses
on my teaching and editing work:
www.nextlevelworkshop.com.”
1973
Michael Aaron (SF) has been
promoted to the role of IBM
Director of Banking and Financial
Markets, Asia-Pacific. In this role,
Michael is responsible for the
Banking and Financial Markets
Industry vertical and joins the IBM
executive team. Michael continues
to hve in Sydney, Australia, with his
wife, Danuta, and his two sons,
Daniel and David.
Richard Cohen (SF) has been a
journalist for more than soyears
and is currently the editor of two
publications in the healthcare field:
Healthcare Marketing Report and
Physician Referral & Telephone
Triage Times', and one in higher
education: Admissions Marketing
Report. “I am also the founder and
chairman of our nation’s principal
annual conference for healthcare
call center managers. I have used
St. John’s educational principles to
great advantage both in journahsm
and in conference planning. I hve
in Decatur, Georgia, am married to
a Unitarian-Universahst minister,
and have a son, Ben, graduating
college this year with majors in film
and history.”
Jon Ferrier (A) retired from the
Family Court a lit tle over a year
ago. “Sadly, I only lasted a couple
months as a gentleman of leisure
before I flunked my retirement and
went back to work, part time,
practicing domestic relations law
with a firm here. It’s been a good
move for all, and my long-suffering
spouse is particularly pleased with
the resumption of my productive
life, given that she has a few years to
go before she takes a crack at
‘retiring.’ I was starting to fear I’d
have to push her out the door to
continue working, had this new
position not come along. It’s been
an adjustment, the sometimes
amusing spectacle of an old dog
trying to learn new tricks, but I’m
deeply grateful for the opportunity
to continue being of use. For those
of my fellow alums burdened with
the disturbing memory of my first
novel, “My Long, Hard Journey to
Enhghtenment,” the encouraging
news is that you must wait a bit
longer for the sequel! One of these
days. I’ll get around to it, however,
so take appropriate precautions.
For now, my only writing will
remain the oxymoronic ‘legal
writing.’ Can it be only 35 years
since we met Walter Cronkite’s
mother at graduation? Reminds
me of sophomore seminar with
St. Augustine on time: when after
about five minutes of preliminary
silence, the seminar leader
(forgotten who) finally remarked,
‘Time passes.’ The ever-sublime
Fred Mattis (A73) replied:
‘Does it?’ That turned out to be the
opening question that evening, and
a good one to ask ourselves. From
my perspective, the answer is yes!
And the only real question is, ‘how
did it pass so quickly?’ ”
1974
Karen Cook (SF) writes:
“I graduated May 10 from the
University of Alabama with my
PhD in Communication and
Information Sciences. My research
was a history of the Mississippi
Freedom Libraries, established by
civil rights activists during the
1960s. Currently I am employed as
the government documents
librarian at the University of
Louisiana at Monroe. My first
grandchild, Moushumi Stella
Huffman, will be one year old on
August 15. (I could go on and on
about my six children and
daughters-in-law, so I won’t start.)”
{The College. St. John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
35
“How does anyone ever get
anything done before retirement?”
wonders MARGARET SanSOM
(SFGI). “I have been so busy since
retiring in June 2004 that I can
scarcely believe I ever had time to
work.” She has been traveling,
taking courses, and starting a
foundation, the Friends of Central
High School, to award scholarships
to students who have been out of
school for a few years and have
discovered the desire and/or
necessity for further
education/training to reali2e their
dreams. “Central High is an
alternative high school (where I
taught for 34 of the 38 years of my
teaching career) for those students
who either do not want or are not
allowed to remain in the regular
high school program; therefore,
many either do not graduate or do
not continue their education
beyond high school. Many finally
find out that they do not want to
remain in a dead-end job, but they
often have no clue how to obtain
assistance to become a barber,
welder, chef, nurse, or whatever.
This foundation will not only
provide scholarship money but also
aid in obtaining additional funding.
It’s been exciting to finally realize a
dream that I held for a number of
years. We are in the beginning
stages of fundraising and will kick
into high gear this summer.”
1975
Mary and Peter Kniaz (both A)
continue to live in Hopkinton,
right outside of Boston. “Three of
our children are at, or have
graduated from Thomas More
College in Merrimack, N.H.,”
Peterwrites. “Thomas More
College has a traditional liberal arts
program somewhat similar to the
St. John’s program.” After
spending many years as a director
of information technology, Peter is
now working as a business
development manager for a distri
bution company in New England.
“Mary continues to homeschool
our younger two children.”
�36
{Alumni Profile}
Sting Operation
Melanie Kirby (Sb'gy) Raises Gentle Bees
BY Deborah Spiegelman
queen bees) to other beekeepers and
eing persistent, inquisitive, and
open to various perspectives is
are happy to share their expertise.
a lesson from St. John’s that
Concentrating less on honey produc
tion and more on the propagation of
apphes to many things in life,
quality genetics, Kirby and Spitzig are
says Melanie Kirby (SF97). It’s
involved in a niche within a niche:
especially important in her
sustainable
queen-bee rearing and
work breeding productive and hardy
queen
beekeeping
management techniques.
bees, avocation she discovered through
her
Sustainability in the beekeeping
work as a Peace Corps volunteer.
Kirby joined the Corps after graduating
industry means, among other things,
from St. John’s, pursuing her grade-school
avoiding use of commercial chemical
dream and the path inspired by her mother’s
pharmaceuticals, making sure that
own journey in the late 1960s. “I recall her
honeybees are placed in safe (organi
sharing her stories fondly and I thought I
cally certified) zones, and achieving
would like to serve my country (without
healthy bees through nature’s
carrying a weapon) and immerse myself in a
“survival of the fittest” dictum.
different culture,” Kirby says. Her assign
“Queen bees are the heart of their
ment; agricultural sector beekeeping exten
hives,” Kirby says. “Without them,
sion volunteer, in Calle Mil, Guaira,
there is no colony.”
Paraguay.
Assisted by a grant from Western
“I was probably one of a few who penciled
Sustainable Agriculture Research
in [on the Peace Corps apphcation] that they
Education for the Southwest Survivor
wouldn’t mind working with stinging
Queen Bee Project, Spitzig and Kirby
insects,” she guesses. After her Peace Corps
participate in a rigorous breeding
stint ended, Kirby learned more about
program to produce queen bees that
commercial beekeeping and breeding
thrive in the diverse, challenging
through subsequent jobs with companies on
microclimates of the Rocky Mountain
the Big Island of Hawaii and in Florida. The
regions. Their business caters to clients of aU
“bees found me,” she says. “I also found that
types-from amateur to professional-who
the experience of keeping bees is profound.”
have in common “the strange capacity to
Zia Queenbee Co.-the name honoring her work with stinging insects” and who benefit
pueblo (Tortugas) and southern New
from the bees’ exceptional pollinating
Mexican heritage-is based in Dixon, N.M.
ability, whether the result is a glorious
Partner Mark Spitzig established sister
garden or robust crops.
company Superior Honey Farms on
Beekeepers require freshly mated queens
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They sell their
on a regular basis. Kirby and her partner
hardy and productive bees (Rocky Mountain
share stock with other experienced
Reinas and Great Lakes Sooper Yooper
beekeepers, hoping to perpetuate “a quality
genetic pool of honeybees
chosen by beekeepers for
beekeepers.” They also collabo
rate with local research institu
tions, community organiza
tions, and others to develop
B
Top: Melanie Kirby breeds
HARDY queen bees AT A TIME
WHEN honeybees ARE ENDAN
GERED. Bottom: Honeybees are
POLITE AND gentle, SAYS KiRBY,
WHO LEARNED HER PROFESSION AS
A Peace Corps volunteer in
Paraguay.
{The Cxj.l
lege
•
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
sustainable, environmentally responsible
projects and to inform people about the need
to promote habitats for these beneficial polli
nators.
Honeybees originated in Europe, and
today present as orange, black, eggplant, or
a mix of browns, reds, and grays-not, Kirby
says, the black-and-yeUow cartoon image
which more accurately depicts yellow jackets
or hornets. Worker bees are all female. And
the worst enemies to honeybees, she says,
are human beings.
“Honeybees are quite polite creatures,”
she explains. Kirby prides herself on raising
gentle queens, which involves painstaking
attention to behavior and other traits.
Because keeping aggressive honeybees can
be a liability and requires specialized
management, gentle bees “who respond to
Mother Nature’s dynamic interface are in
high demand,” she says.
For Kirby, beekeeping is a humbling
profession. “It keeps me constantly yearning
to learn more,” she says. “My mind repeat
edly succumbs to the addictive Johnny-esque
inquiries of‘why and what does that mean?’
The mystery is the allure.”
�{AlumniNotes}
K.C. Victor (A), an executive
recruiter for lawyers in Los Angeles
(www.victorls.com), is delighted to
report that her good friend Ed
Bronfin (SF78) has been
appointed District Court Judge for
the Second Judicial District of
Colorado (the City and County of
Denver), effective July i, 2008.
1976
Rick Lightburn (SF) has
become a docent for the Chicago
Architecture Foundation, giving
tours on the “historic” and
“modern” skyscrapers in
downtown Chicago.
Adam Wasserman (A) began
working last March on the National
Security Council’s staff in Iraq.
Dinah Wells (A) has a solo art
show running from June 29-July 23
in Stony Creek, Conn. The 33
paintings in the show are all
watercolor insects.
1979
Marie Toler Raney (A) and
Jon Raney (A74) “are getting
close to our first offshore voyage in
our intrepid steel sloop, Phoenix.
Our plan is to hoist the sails June 16
in Washington state and arrive in
Hilo, Big Island, Hawaii, in early
July. We would spend a month
saihng amongst the islands and
then return to Washington in
August. We are being joined on the
outbound voyage by two good
friends and able sailors: CHUCK
Hurt (A79), who has quite a bit of
offshore experience single-handing
his sailboat based in Florida, and
Warren Buck, who has done many
voyages in the Atlantic tropical
waters. More information can be
found at our Web site,
www.svphoenix.net.”
1980
This year the New York Public
Library is commemorating the
quadricentennial of the birth of the
poet John Milton with a small but
artful exhibition. WILLIAM
Moeck (A) was responsible for
putting together a series of free
lectures on various Milton-related
topics-blindness, heresy, Goethe,
and Norman Mailer, to name just a
few. More information is available
at www.nypl.org/research/
calendar/class/hssl/talks.cfm.
1981
Buffy Bowser (A), now the
Rev. Elizabeth Affsprung, is
serving as pastor of the First
Presbyterian Church in Sunbury,
Penn., an hour up the Susquehanna
River from Harrisburg. Husband
Eric is a psychologist in the
counsehng center at Bloomsburg
University. Their boys, Joe and
Daniel, are into football and
blacksmithing respectively, with
acoustic and bass guitar thrown in.
She writes: “Class of 81: please
mark your calendars for Thanks
givingweekend, come to our
hometown of Lewisburg, and join
us for a big 50th birthday party! ”
Joshua Berlow (SF) is now a
realtor in Baltimore! “Ifyou want
to buy a house in Baltimore, please
e-mail romarkin@gmail.com or
call 443-858-5527. I’m with City
Life Realty on The Avenue in
Hampden. My real estate Web page
is atwww.joshuaberlow.com/
real.htm. I’m also getting back into
acting and recently appeared in a
Heinz Ketchup commercial.
My acting resume, headshot, and
some chps (including the Heinz
commercial) can be seen online at
www.joshuaberlow.com/actor.htm.
If there are Johnnies skilled in Web
design who can suggest
improvements to my Web site,
I’d hke to hear from them. My
daughter Meira is three and a half.
Her favorite philosophers include
Dora the Explorer, Spongebob
Squarepants, and Hannah
Montana.”
Marilynn Smith (SFGI) retired
from pubhc school teaching in
2002, but taught Enghsh part time
at the community college in Palm
Desert, Calif., for three more years.
“In July 2005,1 sold my house in
California and moved to Spring,
Texas, about a mile from where my
daughter and her family live. It’s
much more interesting and fun to
be here to watch three of my
grandchildren grow up. They were
in kindergarten, 4th grade and
7th grade when I moved here, and
it’s wonderful to attend their field
days, hoedowns, concerts, baseball
games, gymnastics practices, etc.
I’m stiU teaching-my
grandchildren, tutoring at my
church, and two online tutoring
sites.”
1982
Phillip E. Bovender (A) writes:
“Despite the divine retribution I
deserve for my own student
mischief (perhaps as a result of it), I
have become a clinical instructor in
Adult Health at the University of
Maryland School of Nursing in
Baltimore. A perpetual student,
I am following the education track
for an MS in Health Services
Leadership and Management. I just
concluded 18 years at bedside in the
multi-trauma ICU at Shock Trauma
in Baltimore and look forward to
being a teaching assistant in
addition to being a student/
instructor this fall. My nephew,
born my freshman year, just
finished his MBA at Duke.”
John (SF) and Elizabeth (SF84)
Bush of Blacksburg, Va., having
nothing major to report to fellow
Johnnies and friends. Summer
gardening and fly fishing are the
two biggest things going on, as well
as some camping and hiking in the
{The College -St. John’s College
. Summer stooS }
37
Blue Ridge Mountains. John is
planning an addition to the house
on 203 Wharton Street and also is
trying to use his grill as often as
possible.
Elizabeth is hoping to be able
attend the reunion this fall in Santa
Fe and also visit with son Salem,
who fives in Vail. “Warm wishes
and summer fight.”
Jonathan Edelman (A) has
reason to celebrate: “I recently
passed my PhD Qualification Exam
in Mechanical Engineering at
Stanford! Now I can go on to
research and write my dissertation.
My work goes under the title:
The Agency ofRepresentation in
Engineering Design. My wife,
Annie, has found work in the Bay
area as both a consultant and an
actress. Our son Liam is nearly
three years old and is a mean
pirate! I would love to hear from
you guys! You can e-mail me at:
edelman2@stanf0rd.edu.”
Peter McClard (SF) writes:
“I’m currently running three
businesses: Gluon.com,
CaptureWorks.com, and
TechneMedia.com, and raising my
darling children: Sohan, 8, and
Karina, 6, with my lovely Russian
wife, Valeriya, in New Jersey. I still
love my guitar(s) and I have an art
persona which is viewable at
www.tracymac.biz. So thanks,
St. John’s, for fostering my inner
Renaissance man! Now let’s hope
our nation can rebirth itself to a
greener, nicer, smarter, and more
hopeful future. Love to all my
actual and potential friends!
pm@gluon.com.”
1984
Peter Green (A) is in New York
where he’s a real estate editor for
Bloomberg News, watching the
U.S. housing market crash and
burn, living la vida local, and
learning Spanish.
MarkNiedermier (A) recently
completed his second year as head
of school at Pacific Northern
�{Alumni Notes}
38
Academy in Anchorage, Alaska.
After serving 15 years as head of
school for Friends School of
Minnesota in St. Paul, he decided a
change was in order and made the
move north. His daughter Sophie
just completed third grade at the
school, and his son Caleb will enter
the school’s early kindergarten this
fall. His wife Karen is a provider at
a pediatric chnic, and together they
enjoy the unique mix of urban
hving and wilderness access of
Alaska’s largest city.
integrating profit with social justice
and environmental care. “Our
daughters, Melissa and Faith, are
now teenagers considering their
own right livelihoods,” writes
Demi. “We’re using our property
for permaculture, developing
resilience in our local
communities, and striving to do
good well.”
1986
Renee Bergland, (A), an
1985
Judy Houck (SF) recently earned
tenure in the departments of
Medical History and Bioethics,
History of Science, and Gender and
Women’s Studies at the University
ofWisconsin, Madison. In 2006,
Harvard University Press pubhshed
her book Hot and Bothered:
Women, Medicine, and Menopause
in Modern America.
News from Demi (A) and Eric
(SF) Rasmussen: Eric finished his
undergraduate work at Stanford
while getting his MD. He was a
Navy physician until 2007, retiring
with 25 years of service as Chair of
the Department of Medicine at
Naval Hospital Bremerton. While
in the Navy, he focused on refugees,
weapons of mass destruction, and
humanitarian assistance, carrying
out the Strong Angel series of
exercises and demonstrations
(www.strongangel.org). He worked
in Iraq in 2003, in New Orleans
after Katrina, and in Indonesia
after the tsunami. Eric is now CEO
of InSTEDD (www.instedd.org), a
nonprofit sponsored by Google and
the Rockefeller Foundation that
focuses on global information
sharing for urgent pubUc health
response. Demi received her MBA
in Sustainable Business in 2007
from the Bainbridge Graduate
Institute (www.bgiedu.org). BGI is
a triple-bottom fine start-up
business school near Seattle, intent
on changing business for good. She
focuses her writing and editing on
English professor at Simmons
College, published a book this
spring: Maria Mitchell and the
Sexing ofScience: An Astronomer
Among the American Romantics
(Beacon Press) tells the story of a
forgotten scientific heroine. “I
couldn’t have written it without the
solid background in history of
astronomy that St. John’s gave me,”
she writes.
Michael Silitch (SF) writes:
“After five years in Switzerland, we
are back in Chamonix, France,
where I run my small mountain
guiding company. I guide people
skiing and climbing around the
Alps and have been developing
spring and fall rock-climbing trips
on Mediterranean Islands like
Kalymnos, Sardinia, and Mallorca.
My wife (Dartmouth ’94) and I have
two boys now: Anders, 2, and
Birken, 4. They are both dabbling
in skiing-the younger one to try to
keep up with his brother.
Chamonix is a nice small town and
a great place for the boys and for my
business. I take the tram up into
the high mountains in the
mornings and am usually home for
dinner.”
1987
From Michael Smith (A): “In
May 20071 graduated summa cum
laude from Wesley Theological
Seminary, receiving my Master of
Divinity degree with a concen
tration on Biblical Interpretation.
I was appointed to serve the
Arkport United Methodist Church
in Arkport, N.Y. My wife, Kristen,
and I took up residence last
summer. We love Arkport, a rural
village in the Finger Lakes region
ofwestern New York. In
September, we added a new
member to our family: a dog named
Baby. We love to stay in touch with
old friends, electronically or in
person. I can be reached on the SJC
alumni site or on Facebook. My email address is msmith@codefu.com. Blessings to all!”
By day, Brett Surprenant (SF)
teaches algebra to D.C. pubhc
school students. At night, he is the
father of three energetic boys, and a
husband, and is pursuing a master’s
degree from George Washington
University in secondary
mathematics.
1988
Rowing Champ
Rachel Ankeny (SF) moved
from Sydney to Adelaide, Australia,
at the end of 2006, to take up a
ike van Beuren (A75) captured the world
position in the history department
indoor title for his age group at the World
at the University of Adelaide,
Indoor Rowing Championships (also known
teaching in a gastronomy (food
as the CRASH-B Sprints) held at Boston
studies) program and continuing
University in February. (CRASH-B stands
her research in the history/
for “Charles River All Star Has-Beens.”)
philosophy of biomedicine and
A lifelong rower and former crew team member and assistant
bioethics. She was promoted to
crew coach, van Beuren covered 2,000 meters in 6 minutes,
associate professor of history in
45.1 seconds, on the ergometer. He won the title for the
2008 and also gave birth to a
men’s 55-59 lightweight division, coming out on top in a field
gorgeous baby boy, Luca De Grazia
of II, and listing St. John’s College as his affiliation.
Ankeny, in March. She and Luca
A denizen of Hartland, Vt,, van Beuren was inspired to give
unfortunately will be in London
the competition a try as he faced the milestone of his 55th
during the class reunion, but she
birthday. He began training in May 2007 and put in some
sends her best and would be pleased
where between two to three million meters on the erg. He
to hear from classmates, especially
was awarded a golden hammer for his achievement, and he
anyone traveling to Australia. Her
listed St. John’s College as his affiliation.
contact details are available on the
For two months every year, van Beuren returns to
University of Adelaide Web page.
Annapolis to work with his old friend. Athletic Director Leo
Pickens (A77), on coaching the St. John’s crew team. Pickens
Shirley M. Banks (SF) writes:
was mightily impressed with his friend’s dedication to the
“I recently earned the credential of
challenge. “In doing it by example, he’s helping me give our
Certified Sexuality Counselor by
rowers a workout,” Pickens told the Valley News, van
the American Association of Sex
Beuren’s local newspaper.
Educators, Counselors, and
For those who want to view van Beuren’s victory, the video
Therapists. I was also named to the
is available on www.youtube.com.
M
{The College ■ St John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
�{AlumniNotes}
executive board of the Emory
University President’s Commission
on LGBT Concerns and will serve
as Co-Chair in the aoog-aoro
academic year. Other thrills come
from maintaining hiking trails for
the Benton MacKaye Trail and
American Hiking Society. It has
been a pleasure to re-connect with
a few Johnnies lately via Facebook.”
Ted (A) and Kate (Irvine)
DedDENS (A87) are living in
Owensboro, Ky. They classically
homeschool their four children;
Maris (15), Abby (10), Ted (7), and
Samuel (whom they welcomed into
their family on November ri, 2007)
and just opened Tedtoy’s first retail
store, Tedtoy: Miniatures, Books,
and Toys. The store is a fusion of
Ted’s military miniatures
(www.tedtoy.com) and their small
book business. Boarding House
Books. This summer they are
celebrating 18 years of Tedtoy
Miniatures, almost a decade of
homeschoohng, and their 20th
wedding anniversary. They’d love
to hear from you, so call (370-6894060), e-mail (cmided@aol.com)
or visit them on the banks of the
Ohio River.
Bernard H. Masters (A)
writes: “I can report that I left my
law firm in Dallas after 17 years and
decided to take an in-house
position as associate general
counsel with a company that moved
its international headquarters to
Salt Lake City, Utah. I have been
here for one year and the family
loves the change. I five in
Cottonwood Heights and the really
important news is that I caught a
brown trout in the stream 15
minutes from my front door.
I would love to hear from my
classmates of 1988, particularly if
they are going to be in town. I can
be reached through the SJC
Web site.”
1989
Burke Gurney (SFGI) and his
wife, Deborah, have two children.
He completed his PhD in
physiology/biochemistry from the
University of New Mexico in 3000,
and is currently an associate
professor in the Physical Therapy
Program in the UNM School of
Medicine.
1990
David Long (A) writes: “We have
had a busy year. After turning
around a financially troubled
Chicago-based college, I have left
my career as a corporate executive
to launch Trapped Bee
Productions, an independent film
company. Back in February,
Liz gave birth to our first child,
Benjamin. When not filming or
changing diapers, I consult for
universities and companies seeking
to launch new businesses.
dblong@trappedbee.com.”
David Marquez (SF) has
returned to Santa Fe after nearly a
decade away. “I am currently
studying film editing at the New
Mexico Filmmakers Intensive.
Where Ufe leads at the conclusion
of this five-month program is a
mystery at this point, but no matter
where I end up-New York, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver,
or good old Albuquerque-I’ll be
happy to be in contact with any of
my classmates (most of whom seem
to be alive and well on Facebook,
by the way).”
Christopher Newman (A) is
moving to Arlington, Va., this
summer. “I will be starting my new
job as assistant professor of law at
George Mason University School of
Law. I will be teaching Intellectual
Property and Civil Procedure, and
am looking forward to being back
within day-trip distance of the
AnnapoUs campus.”
Joshua Kerievsky (SF) and
Tracy Reppert Kerievsky
(SF91) welcomed their third
daughter, Eva Katherine, on
March 30, 3008, in Berkeley.
Michelle (Baker) Vest (SF) is
happy to say that she and her family
are doingvery well: “My husband.
Matt, started a video editing
company two years ago. Along with
working, he is participating in a
five-month editing intensive
through the NM Film Institute,
along with fellow classmate and
core-group buddy for three of my
four years at St. John’s, David
Marquez (SF90). Our son, Wil,
turns 3 this summer. He keeps us
beyond busy. Thankfully, his energy
is contagious.”
1991
39
1993
Jane McManus (A) writes:
“I was just named the New York
Jets beat writer at The Journal
News, meaning I’ll be covering the
NFL this season, and I am still
working as an adjunct professor at
the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism. I have also
joined a roller derby league, and my
alter ego, Leslie E. Visserate, will
be competing all summer long.
Johnnies in New York/Westchester
can e-mail me at janesports@
hotmail.com to check it out
or join.”
James Lank (A) is now General
Counsel of Tesco Corporation, an
international oilfield services
company based in Houston, Texas.
He and his wife, Theresa, have
three children.
Kemmer Anderson (AGI)
John C . Wright (A) has a new
published an essay, “Those
Tenured Tyrants: How Milton’s
Tenure ofKings and Magistrates
Influenced Jefferson’s Dedaraiion
ofIndependence’' in the book.
Milton in France. Last fall at
the Milton Conference in
Murfreesboro, Tenn., he presented
a paper on “How Jefferson Might
Have Read Milton’s Lycidasi”
He win present a paper on
“Gardening by the Book” at the
9th International Milton
Conference in London, celebrating
Milton’s 400th birthday.
novel. Null-A Continuum, in
bookstores now. “This book is a
sequel to another author’s work:
the Golden Age great A.E. van
Vogt. His most famous book, now
sadly neglected, was World OfNullA, first published in 1943. This
book was a seminal attempt to use
science fiction as a vehicle for
exploring the concepts of the ‘NonAristotelean’ Philosophy (or ‘NuUA’) of Alfred Korzybski, a pioneer
in multi-valued logic systems. This
book had a profound effect on my
youth and the development of my
philosophy. It is the book on which
I wrote my entrance exam to get
into St. John’s. Desiring, as an
adult, to write in the background of
the most cherished storybook of my
childhood, I contacted the Uterary
agent representing the estate of van
Vogt. He expressed reluctance: he
said no pubUsher in the field could
handle a new van Vogt book, except
for one David Hartwell. It was with
infinite pleasure that I told him
David Hartwell was my editor. With
that happy coincidence, the deal
was made. It took over five years of
negotiations to hammer out the
JonArno Lawson (A) published
two books this spring. Im Inside
Out: Children’s Poets Discuss Their
Work (Walker Books, London),
he selected 34 different children’s
poets from around the EngUshspeaking world and asked them to
write about the origins of one of
their poems. A VoweUer’s Bestiary
(Porcupine’s Quill, Erin), is a book
of hpograms for children. JonArno
and his wife are also expecting their
third baby in June.
continued
{The College. St. John’s
College ■ Summer zoo8 }
�{Alumni Notes}
40
From Human Services to Social Solutions
Adrian Bordone (AGIq6)
BY Rosemary Harty
altimore native Adrian
Bordone (AGI96) was
eagershows
to leave
hisas
home
Popular television
such
Homi
townhave
behind
when he the
cide and The Wire
dramatized
enrolled
in the Graduate
city’s problems
for a national
audience,
Institute
Fe.how
but Bordone could
see in
forSanta
himself
social problems such as drug use and
unemployment were hurting the city.
It was a little ironic, then, that the
classic texts Bordone read at St. John’s
ultimately led him back to Baltimore,
where he would work for seven years in
human services before helping to launch
a company devoted to helping
nonprofits operate more efficiently.
Bordone attended the Naval Academy
for two years before deciding a military
career wasn’t for him. He studied history
at the University of Baltimore, where he
discovered a desire to read and learn
more. “The first seminar I did at St.
John’s was on Lucretius, and it was every
thing I hoped it would be,” he says. Books
such as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s
Nichomachean Ethics inspired him to think
about justice, citizenship and social engage
ment, he says. “I wanted to be a more active
citizen.”
He transferred to the GI in Annapolis and
finished his last semester while working as a
teacher for disadvantaged youth. Later, he
joined an organization called the Learning
Bank, where he developed and implemented
coursework and activities designed to foster
personal accountabifity and other employ
ment-related skills in his students. “It’s
unfortunate that in Baltimore, individuals
and famihes can be beaten down by the chal
lenges they face,” he says. “We were able to
show folks a path through which they could
move with our assistance to a more sustain
able and long-term employment opportu
nity.”
Bordone left the Learning Bank to help
start the Maryland Genter for Arts and Tech
nology (MCAT), dedicated to improving
training and education for Baltimore’s
underemployed residents. Along the way, he
reconnected with Steve Butz, a former
Adrian Bordone
(AGI96)
never
EXPECTED TO BE A SOFTWARE ENTREPRE
NEUR, BUT HIS WORK IN HUMAN SERVICES
LED HIM TO A NEW CAREER.
B
Yspent thefirstyear
working in a coat—and
loving it. ”
Adrian Bordone (AGI96)
colleague from the Learning Bank, who told
Bordone about his efforts to develop soft
ware to help nonprofit agencies better track
their efforts and outcomes.
Bordone had been trying to do the same
thing at MCAT, where he became chief oper
ating officer. He supervised six teachers, five
case managers, a job developer and
fundraisers, and spent much of his time
tracking outcomes and crunching numbers
for reports and grant applications.
Butz and Bordone started out by adapting
off-the-shelf software and from there devel
oped their “Efforts to Outcome” program, a
Web-based application that enables organi
zations to measure the effectiveness of their
programs. They released their first version in
April aooa and today have 25,000 users in
5,500 nonprofit and human service agen
cies. Their clients include the Girl Scouts,
United Way, the New York City Department
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
of Education, and Casey Family Services.
As vice president, Bordone works with
new cfients, customizes the software to
their needs, conducts training work
shops, writes proposals, manages legal
affairs including contracts, responds to
requests for proposals, hires and
manages staff, and does anything else a
small business requires.
Starting a new business just when the
tech bubble was bursting meant Bordone
and his business partner had to work
harder to attract funding and prove their
business model was viable. They
launched Social Solutions in a warehouse
that was leaky, windy, had no air-condi
tioning, and very httle heat. “I spent the
first year working in a coat-and loving
it,” he says. “As a small business that was
entirely self-funded, we’ve remained
lean, and that’s helped us remain close to
our chent base. We’ve always been very
respectful of the few dollars we have.”
Human service agencies typically have
small budgets for administration, so the
company has to demonstrate that their soft
ware will help them serve their clients better.
“We’re a tech firm by default, but more
importantly, we are a firm that has a social
venture,” he says. “Everyone who works
with our cfients is a former practitioner of
human services, and we understand the work
that they do.”
Social Solutions now operates in better
quarters in an emerging technology center in
Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood. In aoo6,
the company was named Maryland Incubator
Company of the Year, and in 2007, one of 50
incubator companies nationwide.
The tough part of Bordone’s job these
days is frequent travel, long hours away from
his family (his wife, Gatina, and three young
children) and building a business with a very
lean budget.
“I’d love to say that I spend my spare time
re-reading my copies of Moby-Dick and the
Brothers Karamazov ” he says. “Right now,
I work a lot.”
�{Alumni Notes}
legal details before all parties were
satisfied, and, at times, the project
seemed dead. I persevered and
eventually prevailed. The book was
written, sold, and is now pubhshed
and distributed. Preliminary
reviews have been positive. To
write in your favorite author’s
background and decide the fate of
your favorite characters from
childhood is a privilege few others
have been granted.
I also converted from atheism and
joined the Roman Cathohc Church
this year. My new name is John
Charles Justin Wright, named after
Justin Martyr, patron saint of
philosophers.”
1994
Jean Holman (A) is pleased to
announce her engagement to
Youngstown, Ohio, native, Clinton
Pavelko: “We will marry next
summer in Erie, Penn. We live in
Washington, D.C., and plan to
settle there after the wedding.
Clinton never went to St. John’s
and never heard of it. Otherwise,
he is handsome, young, and
devoted. Besides a husband. I’ll be
getting a stepson as well, Chris
Pavelko, aged two and half”
Mathieu de Schutter, (SF)
MD, MPH, writes: “Sara
(Roahen, SF94) and I have moved
back to New Orleans from our post
Katrina exile. Her book Gumbo
Tales, about assimilating into the
New Orleans culture while working
as a restaurant critic, should be
released as a paperback by now.”
(Ross) Mosheh Vineberg (SF)
writes: “I have been living in
Jerusalem, Israel, for the last eight
years. My wife, Tamar, is Israeli, we
have a httle girl, Naomi, who is
2 years old, and we are expecting
another baby this June. I am
learning Torah in the mornings in a
koUel, while my wife is finishing a
medical degree in another two
years. I’d love to visit Santa Fe
again with my family. Maybe in a
few years we’ll do it.”
1995
Geoff Giffin (AGI) writes:
“ Life is good in White Rock, B. C.,
just a few kilometers from
Vancouver (the best city in the
world in which to live, according to
many surveys). In my second year
as a beekeeper here, I am
struggling along with aU other
beekeepers to understand what is
happening to this most important
of animals. We are not helped this
year by having had a very long,
cold, wet spring in the Northwest,
but there are larger problems.
Honeybees are responsible for
about 30 percent of all human food
and if they disappear, as they are
increasingly doing, we will add yet
another problem to the global food
crisis. On the positive side, bees are
endlessly fascinating and amazing
stress reducers. I can watch mine
for hours, seeing the foragers come
home with different varieties of
pollen, the guards inspecting
everyone who approaches
(Homeland Security should be so
efficient!) and the signahng
between individuals to pass on
information about nectar
sources, etc.
“When I’m not working with my
bees (which is most of the time), I
am mentoring engineering/physics
students at UBC, getting my 38'
Ericson sailboat ready for summer
cruising, reupholstering furniture
and gardening. I also have a new
job: I am the unpaid assistant to my
wife, Senga, who after a long career
as a teacher and school adminis
trator has taken up a career in real
estate. Anyone who wants to move
to this most incredibly lovely part of
Canada should contact me so that
we can give you insight into what
living here is really like.”
Veronica Gventsadze (AGI)
writes: “This spring I graduated
with a veterinarian degree from the
University of Guelph and two weeks
ago launched a brand new career.
My httle Yaris made it all the way
across Canada to the mountains
north of Vancouver. As I write,
I hear a cat in the background
complaining about the service in
this hospital. I disagree: I think this
hospital is a great place to work,
though at times it feels
overwhelming. The days go by fast,
the learning curve is about as steep
as the surrounding mountains, and
my propensity for muffing things
over is effectively curbed by the
need to make prompt decisions.
At the end of each day I take a miniholiday as I walk or bike the
mountain trails. The mountains are
majestic, the coastal rainforest
must not have changed much since
prehistoric times, and the real
estate prices are obscenely high.
(A popular excuse is that the 2010
Winter Olympics will be just up the
road in Whistler.) There is even a
new university up in the
mountains. Quest University. I
would love to hear from anyone
who remembers me, and to catch
up on our hves since St. John’s.
You can reach me at
vgventsa@telus.net.”
Clara Murray (A) writes:
Wesley and I were married in 2003
in a small but beautiful ceremony
on the Hudson River. Several
Johnnies were in attendance. Ezra
Alexander Beato was born in
December ’04. He’s a total joy
intense, inquisitive, and very
active. Talks nonstop from the time
he wakes up to the time he goes to
sleep. (Future Johnnie?) We are
enjoying family life in Brooklyn,
though occasionally dream of
leaving the city in favor of a
vegetable garden and preschools
that cost less than St. John’s. We
are both working, Wesley as a
business research manager (I’m not
sure what he does either, but
suspect aU these years of
‘civilization’ help). I continue to
work with Early Intervention,
doing verbal behavior-a form of
applied behavior analysis, with
chUdren diagnosed with autism.
I’m also enjoying classes at the Art
Student’s League. Would love to
hear from former classmates and
friends. You can e-mail us at
clmurray@usa.net.”
{The College. 5t. John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
4^
Heather Nordloh (AGI)
writes: “CHRIS (AGI96) continues
to serve as CFO for a Chicago
based non profit. Nick is 31/2 and
very into Spiderman. Chris and
Nick Nordloh spent most of the
spring in Hong Kong with
Heather’s job.”
Bethany O’Connell (SF)
writes: “I find myself teaching and
working on the alumnae magazine
at Stoneleigh-Burnham School,
an all-girls’ boarding and day school
in Greenfield, Mass. While
teaching French, I am often
looking out for those young,
inquiring minds who I can
encourage to apply to St. John’s. I
can stiU smell the pinon burning on
a clear winter night! I hope to bring
my family back for a visit soon.”
Kira Zielinski (SF) is taking a
break from flying helicopters and
has turned her attention to learning
the ropes of being a small business
owner. “I bought a coffee shop here
in Mobile, Ala., in March-the
experience has been amazing!
Little by httle my fiance, Nathan,
and I are turning it into the
community crossroad that we’ve
been craving in our fife. Not to
mention I’m enjoying the stress of
syrup and whipped cream
‘emergencies’ to engine
malfunctions over the Gulf of
Mexico any day! Our first addition
to the coffee shop was, of course, a
library. You can catch a glimpse of
our shop at drjava.com.”
1996
Jenny Bates Glaubrecht (A) is
a second grade elementary school
teacher in Palm Beach County. She
earned her master’s degree in
education, has acquired ESOL
Endorsement, Gifted Endorsement
and a real estate Ucense.
J. Stephen Pearson (EC) passed
his dissertation defense and will be
graduating in August from the
University of Georgia with his
doctorate in Comparative
Literature.
�{AlumniNotes}
4^
Teresa Taylor (AGI) and her
husband Steve Bromley gave birth
to Brock Remington Taylor
Bromley on May r, aoo8, at nearly
to pounds. Teresa has been
practicing law as an associate at the
British law firm, Clifford Chance
US LLP, in international white
collar/litigation defense for
financial corporate clients. She will
be leaving the firm this summer
following maternity leave in search
of a law position that does not
require extensive international
travel and extreme hours so she can
enjoy being a new mom. Prior to
Clifford Chance, Teresa was a
federal law clerk in Virginia, and
previously spearheaded a non
profit organization focusing on
international humanitarian law
violations and justice. Steve is also
doing weU, having started a
renovation company in Annapolis.
Teresa would love to hear from
former classmates. The Bromleys
reside at 700 Caleb Lane,
Annapohs, Md 21401.
my PhD in English Literature from
the University of Cambridge.
Living abroad was fantastic.
Cambridge is an international and
vibrant place filled with beautifid
architecture, too many distracting
activities (like rowing and May
Balls), and fascinating and brilliant
people. All the same, it’s good to be
back in the U.S. to catch up with
family and friends and enjoy the
New Mexico culture and scenery.”
Leah Fisch (SE) writes: “I am
working as a reorganizer of
businesses and homes here in NYC,
Massachusetts and the tri-state
area. Beginning in July, I will be
offering workshops in the East
Village to foster community
between those with difficulty with
clutter/efficiency, as well as offer
easy-to-implement tips to
reorganize on their own. If any
Johnnies are interested in attending
the workshops, please e-mail me at
leah@leahfisch.com, or feel free to
call me at 917-678-9634.”
Will Gorham (A) writes:
“Siobhan Boyer (SF99) and I
1997
Amy Ryce Knowles (A) writes:
“1 teach mathematics at Durham
Academy, and recently visited India
to tour schools there. My husband
is wrapping up a PhD at Duke
University in Medieval English
Literature. 1 have a 4-year-old son
named James. I attribute my
appreciation of math to the
St. John’s curriculum. My
encounters with Descartes,
Apollonius, Newton, and Ptolemy
continue to inform my teaching as
well as my perspective. Working
with teenagers is inspiring and
because of them, there is never a
dull day at work.”
1998
Jana Giles (A) is back in the U.S.
“After four years of living in the
United Kingdom, and wishing I’d
taken even more Easyjet and Ryan
Air flights to Italy, I’ve completed
said our first “Hey, baby! ” to
Larkin Rose Kate Gorham on April
23 in our new hometown of
St. Petersburg, Fla., after 25 hours
of... let’s call it ‘gentle coaxing.’
Larkin took in the scene, howled at
the heavens, and began the long
process of learning to love us for
who we are. Other than that httle
7-pound 8-ounce bit of everything,
not too much is new here in
Paradise. Siobhan is bringing home
the big slabs ofveggie bacon as an
environmental biologist. I’m
finishing a novel and also working
for pay as a researcher at the
St. Petersburg Times (where
classmate WILL Van Sant [A98]
also makes news/a hving). Our dog
Hektor has giardia and our cats
Mason and Dixon hate him for it
since it means they can’t come out
to play. Florida and parenthood are
great. Both are tiring and exciting
at the same time. Full of great ideas
and weird, often stinky, results.
We’d be happy to get coffee or
worse with any Johnnies who come
to the Tampa Bay area. We’ll drive
you past ah the fancy mansions for
{The College -
foreclosure and introduce you to
the Most Recklessly Sunburned
Homeless Dude Ever. Ifyou’re here
on a weekend, we’ll do even more.”
Amy Marcetti Topper (A) is
working as a consultant doing
education research, and has
enrolled in Arizona State
University’s PhD program in
Educational Leadership and Policy
Studies. “Claire, my daughter, is
about to turn 3 and doing all those
wonderful and frustrating things
toddlers do at this age,” she writes.
“Love to hear from SJCA friends:
amtopper@hotmail.com.”
1999
Since graduation, Gary Temple
(A) has been splitting time between
China and Easthampton, Mass.,
working variously as a freelance
writer, English teacher, music
producer, mental health counselor
and clothing designer. “These days
I’m narrowing my focus to music
production with a hit of newspaper
writing and clothing design thrown
in. This fall I’ll be starting a
yearlong intensive Chinese
language program in Beijing.
Please let me know ifyou’re going
to be in town, or if you need some
music produced, or an article
written, or some clothing
designed.”
2000
Deberniere Torrey (AGI) is
marrying Nathan Devir on June 27
at Penn. State University. The
couple win move to Vermont in
July, where Nathan will teach
Hebrew at Middlebury College.
Valerie G. Whiting (A) of
Washington, D.C., recently
returned from Antigua, where she
was working to prevent HIV/AIDS
through education as a Peace Corps
Response Volunteer.
The country of Antigua and
Barbuda is located in the Eastern
Caribbean in the middle of the
St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }
Leeward Islands. Whiting was
working with the AIDS Secretariat
to provide assistance in behavior
change communication efforts.
In doing so, she was to assist in the
planning, designing, implemen
tation, and evaluation of national
HIV/AIDS public education and
awareness activities. Whiting
helped produce HIV education and
awareness activities at national
events and developed
educational/promotional materials
for local target groups.
Whiting previously served as a
community organization Peace
Corps volunteer in Panama from
3001 to 3003. Among her
accomplishments, she led a youth
group that took part in national
HIV/AIDS programs and also
organized and succeeded in an
effort to pave the five-kilometer
entrance to her site.
Whiting has begun a master’s
program in international training
and education at American
University in Washington, D.C.
Logan Wink (SF) writes: “I
finally finished medical school and I
am now busy working through my
first year as a psychiatry resident at
Indiana University School of
Medicine. I married Chuck Pate
last June, and we are hving and
working in Indianapolis, Ind. No
babies yet-I spend way too many
nights at the hospital for that.
Chuck finished his MFA in
ceramics in December and is
working on establishing his career
(currently he is teaching kids to
throw pots at the local community
art center). Please look us up ifyour
path leads you through the
heartland! ”
2001
Riana Kettle (SF) is back in
Colorado and getting married this
summer. She also recently finished
a master’s degree in secondary
education in mathematics and has
been teaching math for the past
�{Alumni Notes}
several years. “I’m still singing
opera. Hope everyone is doing
well!"
Eric Maddox (SF) writes: “I just
returned to the States in March
after five months spent conducting
research for my MA in Conflict
Resolution. While based out of
Ramallah and Dheisheh Refugee
Camp in Bethlehem, I traveled
around Israel and the West Bank
filming interviews with elder
Israelis and Palestinians who
experienced the 1948 war that
created the modern State of Israel
and the first Palestinian refugee
crisis, also known as Al Nakba or
‘The Catastrophe.’ The film
footage will be used to produce a
short documentary film project for
Defense for Children InternationalPalestine. Concurrently working on
my master’s thesis, which focuses
on the role that these events have
played in shaping the individual
and collective identities of the Jews
and Arabs who experienced the
events of 1948. Hoping to do future
conflict-documentary work (where
I actually get paid) in the near
future. Looking for opportunities
in Africa, Southeast Asia, or the
Middle East.”
2002
Jessica Godden (SF) and
Peter Speer (A) were married on
A Johnnie Haven
ouisa Griffin Parkinson (SF93) is married and
L
succulents, everywhere I can place
them. I’m also still fiddling with
Web comics, Web pages, and
dashing out strange stories when I
get the chance. So I guess I am still
figuring out what I am supposed to
be doing, but I’m doing well
regardless!”
John Rankin (SF) writes: “This
Justin (A) and Dillon (A05)
Naylor will be serving as dorm
fall I will leave my position as a
spokesman at the U.S. Treasury
Department to enroll in the MBA
program at the University of
California Los Angeles. This means
the end to nearly five years in
Washington, D.C., at various
communications jobs in the Senate,
on political campaigns, and in the
Bush administration. After
business school, I will probably
shift my focus to the private sector.
Johnnies in the Los Angeles area
(or SF for that matter) should
drop me a note at
johnrankin@gmail.com.”
Sean Nelson (AGI) is currently
hving in Cairo, Egypt, and studying
Arabic.
2004
Tatiana Hamboyan Harrison
has two children, Mariana (4), and James (6).
(A) has been busy doing a lot of
They are “living luckily on the Eastern Shore of
writing
(trying to get a picture book
Maryland in Easton, which strangely enough
pubhshed!) and reading (mostly
seems to be a Johnnie haven. Johnnies pop up
books about writing): “I’m also
everywhere: one instructs my children and me in
having surgery on June 30 to get
tennis at the Y, another teaches knitting at the local holistic
my left wrist replaced. I’ve been
arts center, while others still make local news by impeding
doing quite a bit of beUy dancing
airport growth via kick-ass estate planning. And without fail, I
and have been very involved in my
meet people at dinner parties and fundraisers who ‘wished
Quaker meeting. Anyone who
they’d gone to St. John’s’ but nonetheless satisfy their thirst for
wants to contact me can do so by
knowledge by attending some seminars ingeniously offered
e-mail, or by visiting my Web site at
through the college. Their enthusiasm really can make you feel
www.thefunnel.org.”
like a rock star! Anyway, greetings to all my fellow Johnnies in
Santa Fe and Annapolis.”
Conor J. Heaton (AGI), in his
first year of lawyering, is a litigator
in a small civil litigation firm in
Dave Prosper (SF) writes: “As of Mark Stratil (SF) is hvingand
Chicago. “I graduated from Loyola
teaching high school physics in
now I’m still living in Oakland,
University Chicago School of Law
Brooklyn. He and his band. Judge
Calif., and working in IT at Bio-Rad
and had the pleasure of studying
Roy Bean (www.myspace.com/
Laboratories. I’m currently pulhng
under JUDGE Thomas More
judgeroybeanband), are celebrating
double-duty and trying not to burn
Donnelly (SF81). My wife,
the release of their first album.
out doing both as a support systems
Ashley, is four months pregnant
Shovelhead, available on iTunes.
administrator and PC support for
and we just bought our first condo
“If any of you are going to be in
my company’s Hercules, Calif.,
in the Lakeview neighborhood of
New York this summer, come out
location. I’m also gradually turning
Chicago. I was delighted to hear
and
see
a
show!
”
he
writes.
my apartment into a bizarre version
that we defeated the Academy in
of that garden ship from Silent
this year’s non-sanctioned croquet
Running (much to my roommate’s
battle.”
chagrin) with plants, especially
Feb. 29, 2008.
parents at Wyoming Seminary
Preparatory School next year,
where Justin teaches Latin and
math. “We continue to grow
vegetables, teach cooking classes,
and cater private events at our
farmhouse in northeastern
Pennsylvania.Our son, Peter, will
be a year old in July! We have a
guest room and welcome visitors to
the farm.”
43
2003
Aaron M ac Lean (A) was
commissioned as a Second
Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine
Corps on November 30, 2007.
“I’ve just learned that I’ve been
selected to attend the Infantry
Officer’s Course at Quantico, Va.,
this summer, which will put me out
in the fleet as an infantry officer by
this fall. Anyone who wants to is
more than welcome to contact me
at aaron.maclean@gmail.com.”
Jeffrey Zwillenherg (AGI) was
married last August to Jennifer
Goulston: “We now five in our new
house in Baltimore, Md. Most
recently, I accepted a new job in
development for a nonprofit
organization (New Leaders for New
Schools) in Baltimore. On another
note, while snowboarding at Stowe
in Vermont with CoREY HaydEN
(AGI06), we encountered another
Johnnie, owing to my St. John’s
bcense plate. We are everywhere!”
{The College. 5t. John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
Kimberly (Bryan) Gaud inski
(A) and Martin Gaudinski (A)
were married on December 29,
2007, at the Shrine of the Sacred
Heart in Baltimore, Md. “Now local
to D.C., we went on a phenomeno
logical honeymoon to a plane of
existing in the District that we will
rarely inhabit until many years
hence,” writes Martin. “We dined
at some of the finest restaurants the
city has to offer. While celebrating
our marriage at Citronelle,
Kimberly met the eidos of black
beans. Martin finally understood
Plotinus after his first sample of the
Chateaubriand. Now firmly back in
our normal fives, Kimberly is
teaching kindergarten at Potomac
Crescent Waldorf School in
Arlington, while Martin is in his
first year of professional training at
Georgetown University School of
Medicine.” ■
Kristi Meador (A) writes:
“I’ve been sojourning these past
two years in the former Soviet bloc
�{Alumni Notes}
44
Gwen Gurley (A) writes:
Happy in Alaska
“I thought I would send an update
letting the school know that I am
receiving my master’s degree in
Italian Studies with a focus on
translation and linguistics from
Middlebury College this August.
I have been in Florence, Italy, for
the pastyear working on my degree
and will be home in July. From
there I’m moving out to the West
Coast, hopefully to Portland, Ore.”
elissa
(Fecht)
Hougland
M
(SFGI06)
moved to
Fairbanks,
Alaska, in aooywith her
husband, Jarrett, to take the
associate director position with
the Fairbanks Arts Association.
“Seven months later, on
November 15, 2007, we were
blessed with a beautiful baby
boy, Blaise Anthony Hougland.
We are all happy here in Alaska, loving both the a4-hour
summer sun and the -40 degree winters!”
country of Belarus. I’ve also been
blessed with visits to the Ukraine,
Lithuania, Russia, Denmark,
Hungary, Egypt, and South Korea.
My time has been focused on
studying Russian, helping
university students wrestle with
important questions in their search
for God and truth, and loving
orphans and foster children.
I’ve been reading a wide range of
Russian hterature and after four
years have found myself immersed
in The Brothers K once again. My
next destination is Kentucky, where
I will be eagerly awaiting the arrival
of my fiitiue niece from Ethiopia!
I’d be glad to hear from Johnnies.
I can be reached at
kristimeador@gmail.com.”
2005
Samantha Buker (A) writes
from Baltimore, Md: “I’ve recently
taken the mantle of associate editor
and managing editor of five
financial pubheations for a fabulous
outfit caUed Agora Financial. In my
spare hours. I’m writing a new
novel-delightfully absent of
murderers, devils, and afterlife
sequences. Think the morally
immoral French novels of Balzac
and Zola meeting the vivid lyricism
of Gatsby in the form of a hardboiled hero of contemporary Wall
Street. Yes, as with Zola, there’s a
courtesan. But unlike Nana, she’s
no fool. Nor are the father whose
mistress she is or his son (who is in
love with her). At bottom, it’s a
critique of the modern American
financial system. And, unlike most
who post to these pages.. .1’11 not
tell you of nuptials or newborns.
I subscribe to Gustave Flaubert’s
style of living: Stay out of the thick
of Paris, and when your lover
barges into your study uninvited:
throw him out! But true, close
friends should plan to visit often:
sam.buker@gmail.com.”
Dwight Knoll (A) has become a
partner at Music Works
Publications (musicworkspubUcations.com). “Also the podcast I
am working on at FAQautism.com
is really starting to take off,” he
writes. “Finally, I’m going to Delft,
Holland, this July to participate in a
servant evangelism event.”
Miranda (Foster) Merklein
(SFGI) is a PhD candidate in
English / Creative Writing at the
University of Southern Mississippi.
Her poetry and fiction have
appeared in many hterary j ournals
and magazines, including The
Columbia Review, South Carolina
Review, Permafrost, and others.
She is currently completing her
first book of poetry.
“I am a certified yoga instructor
registered with Yoga Alliance and
have my own yoga business. Yoga
Edge, teaching privately at studios
and at universities. My Web site is
www.yoga-edge.com.”
Jonathan Coppadge (A) is
finishing up his year as a St. John’s
admissions counselor. He wiU be
returning to Phillips Academy
Andover this summer to teach
philosophy and French before
coming back to Annapolis in
August and beginning at Indian
Creek Upper School in
Crownsville, where he will teach
English. He is happily settled into
fife as an Eastporter, and reminds
his classmates that they always have
an open door and furnished table
when they come back to town.
“I am currently an AmeriCorps
member building houses for
Habitat for Humanity in Raleigh,
N.C.,” writes DEBORAH ManGUM
(A). “Anyone interested in
traveling, experimenting with
different fields, gathering different
experiences after/during/before
college should look them up at
americorps.org.”
Joshua Suich (A) was a youth
Heather Cook (SF) earned her
private pilot license in September
3007, and is enjoying flying around
northern New Mexico in her
Cessna i8a. She also wrote and
published her first book, the
Aviation Scholarship Directory
2008, in October 3007, which is
helping flight students, pilots, and
other aviation professionals to find
and win aviation scholarships.
Heather is stiU living in Santa Fe.
Paul and Anita Fairhanks
(SF) are delighted to announce the
birth of their daughter, Charlotte
Eden, on May 20, 2008: “She has
brought us so much happiness,”
Anita writes. “We are living in
Columbus, Ohio, where Paul is
studying business in preparation
for dental school. I am simply
enjoying motherhood; my current
ambitions are to sing lullabyes and
read great books aloud.”
{The College.
pastor in Florida for a year, then
spent a little over a year teaching
EngUsh in the public school system
of Daigo, Ibaraki, Japan. “Daigo is
the city, Ibaraki is the prefecture,
which is a few hours north of
Tokyo. I climbed Mt. Fuji and saw
the sites and had a great time.
I kept a travel blog of it:
www.jsuich.blogspot.com. Right
now I am back in my home town of
Augusta, Ga., working as the head
swim coach of the Augusta Country
Club and will be going to GordonConwell Theological Seminary in
Charlotte, N.C., in the fall.”
2006
Erin Callahan (A) and Mark
Ingham (A05) married on April
37, 3008. This August the Inghams
move to Santa Fe to do the Eastern
Classics program. Erin writes:
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
What’s Up?
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you’re doing. The next issue
will be published in October;
deadline for the alumni notes
section is September 10.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine
St. lohn’s College, P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404;
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
In Santa Fe:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
�45
{Obituaries}
Chris Colby
Print Shop Manager, Annapolis
Chris Colby, a 30-year member
of the St. John’s College
community, died of cancer on
Thursday, March 27, 2008,
at the age of 58. He joined the
college in 1977 as assistant
manager of the Print Shop and
was promoted to manager in
1979. Earlier this year, he
guided the purchase and instal
lation of a new press that
greatly expands the college’s
printing capabilities. He was
known by those who worked
with him as a gentle and kind
man, a hard-working and
helpful colleague, and a
talented artist and craftsman.
He enjoyed-among many
things-weaving, cooking for
friends, writing short fiction,
and sharing stories of his
adventures in life.
At a memorial service held at
the college in April, friends,
co-workers and students
remembered Colby’s gifts to
the community. John Chris
tensen, the college’s director of
admissions, said Colby missed
vacations and weekends to
finish Print Shop projects on
deadline, but also “gave of
himself’ in many ways outside
of work.
“For some, he built book
shelves in our apartments or
houses; for others he repaired
harpsichords and other musical
instruments; for still others he
built kitchen cabinets and
helped construct decks,” Chris
tensen said. “He loved these
projects for the lasting friend
ships that often resulted, but
also because he simply enjoyed
putting his skills to use for
others in the community. .. .
“I think he was at his
happiest in these activities, but
he was also happy in another
role-that of mentor and surro
gate father for any number of
students, some of whom
worked for him and some of
whom he met in the writing
workshops he attended or
through working with them on
the Gadfly and Energia."
Howard Morsberger worked
alongside Colby since 1981.
“He was so much more than
just a ‘boss,’” he said. “He was
above all a mentor, a friend,
and a companion. Chris was a
passionate, but calm and softspoken man who gave me room
to make mistakes and grow
from them.”
Jack Brown (A08) described
his initial dismay at being
assigned to work at the Print
Shop; as he grew to know Colby
he realized how fortunate he
was. “I had requested a job at
the library, or IT, and did not
relish spending a year standing
in the dark making photocopies
while a vaguely sinister-looking
man looked on from the
shadows,” Brown said. “As you
can probably guess, that atti
tude changed; the Print Shop
quickly became my home away
from dorm-room, and Chris my
St. John’s mentor. It was in the
Print Shop that I learned
unofficially about the college. I
heard the latest news, absorbed
the 30 years of lore Chris had
stored up in him and loved
sharing. . . When I look back on
four years here, Chris will be
one of a few people who really
stand out. He was one of the
people I was most looking
forward to keeping informed
about what I was doing with my
life, and visiting when I came
back.”
Colby became his unofficial
mentor and career adviser.
Brown added. “I will go better
places for having known him,
my experience at this school
was enriched for having known
him, and I cannot express my
profound sadness for the
knowledge that when I leave
here. .. I will be leaving behind
a school, a Print Shop, and a
community that is a lesser
place for having lost Chris
Colby.”
Colby’s wife, Mary-who
worked for 15 years in the
college’s Admissions officepreceded him in death. They
are survived by their daughter,
Yve. Associate Admissions
Director Roberta Gable (A77)
described how St. John’s was
like another home for Colby.
“He loved the college, and he
loved the Print Shop, and he
loved us,” she said. “And I
would say that the Print Shop
was the great love of his life if it
weren’t utterly eclipsed by the
great and steadfast and abiding
love he had for Mary and Yve, a
love which was, I think, the
defining purpose of his life.”
Also Noted
Laurie Fink Colberg, class of
1966, June 21, 2007
IsAiAS Grandes del Mazo,
class of 1955, February 22,
2008
Commander William W.
Grant, class of 1941,
January 4, 2008
Marigene Boyd Hedges, class
of 1958, November 19, 2007
Lawrence Myers, class of
In his 30 YEARS AT St. John’s,
Chris Colby mentored
STUDENTS, SHARED HIS STORIES
AND TALENTS, AND EARNED THE
FRIENDSHIP AND ADMIRATION OF
THE GREATER COLLEGE
COMMUNITY.
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
1951, February 2, 2008
Anjali Pai (SFGI08),
March 30, 2008
Richard H. Pembroke, Jr.,
class of 1932, January 4, 2008
�46
{Obituaries}
Al Toft
He worked quietly at night in a basement work
shop IN Mellon Hall, and laboratory in
Annapolis relied on Al Toft.
BY Mark Daly, Director of
Laboratory
Albert Ritchie Toft, who was a
lab technician at St. John’s
College in Annapolis from i960
to aoo5, died of complications
from Parkinson’s disease April
30 in Annapolis. He was born
August 1,1933, in Pasadena,
Maryland, attended George
Washington University, and
was a scientist at Goddard
Space and Flight Center in
Greenbelt for 35 years.
I heard about Al when I was
hired as director of Laborato
ries at St. John’s in July 1985.
He worked as a machinist along
with a carpenter named John
Cooke in the laboratory’s
physics workshop. The physics
workshop was, and still is,
located in the basement of
Mellon Hall. As Director of
Laboratories, one of my
responsibilities was super
vising the workshop. I would
collect broken equipment,
equipment that needed to be
modified to suit the college’s
needs, and pencil drawings of
ideas from me, students and
tutors, and place them on a
workbench in the empty
physics laboratory during the
day. Al worked evenings and
weekends, so I communicated
with him through notes and
pencil drawings. The next day I
would return to find my equip
ment repaired or modified, and
my pencil drawing coming to
life with a note, “Is this what
you wanted?” Most of the time,
Al would take our ideas and
improve on them. I would push
his creative talents further with
a revised drawing, place it on
the empty workbench, and the
next day the new creation
would take shape. I could
dream, scribble down an idea,
and put it on that empty work
bench, and he, with his gifts of
knowledge and creativity,
would make it happen.
When I finally got to meet Al,
he lived up to the picture I had
painted of him in my mind. I
walked into the dusty old base
ment workshop to be greeted
by a cheerful, “Hello, young
man.” Here was the man who
could make those drawings
come to life. He looked like a
scientist: clean cut, dark
rimmed glasses, and a lab coat.
He was friendly and had an
intelligence that commanded
respect.
Some time later, I visited Al at
the Goddard Space and Flight
Center, and he gave me a tour
of the facilities. I came to
realize the prize St. John’s was
keeping in that dusty physics
workshop. Al was hired at
Goddard as an entry-level tech
nician and worked his way up.
He was now a leading scientist
in the optics laboratory. His
major contributions to the
space program were inventing
a new coating for the mirrors in
space and inventing a way to
coat them uniformly. He was a
distinguished scientist with
published works and his accom
plishments were noted in the
Smithsonian Air and Space
Museum.
Al was a
problem solver
who loved a chal
lenge. His posi
tive outlook and
problem solving
abilities perme
ated his entire
being. As his
Parkinson’s
disease
advanced, he
remained upbeat
and always talked
about the future.
I remember once
he pointed to a
dollar bill on the
bench, and told me, “I couldn’t
reach to pick up that dollar and
put it in my pocket. I took my
pill, sat down for five minutes,
and now I can do it.” He was
fascinated by his affliction; he
looked at it as a scientist.
Al was a caring and compas
sionate man. When his good
friend John Cooke was
approaching 90, he was still
working in the workshop. His
vision was going, and his work
suffered. Al wouldn’t hurt his
friend and tell him to retire, so
he came up with a way to do it
gently. I learned from Al’s
example, and when Al’s
Parkinson’s began affecting his
work, I offered him the same
respect and compassion.
Today as I walk through the
laboratory classrooms in
Mellon Hall, I see Al’s legacy
around me. The equipment
that was repaired, modified, or
created by his hands speaks to
me. Some speak to me of the
brilliant scientist, the problem
solver. Others remind me of his
compassionate, friendly nature.
They just say, “hello, young
man.”
{The College -St John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
Rozanne Kramer (SFGI68)
Rozanne Edwards Kramer, a St.
John’s Santa Fe Graduate Insti
tute alumnus and former
manager of the St. John’s
Annapolis bookstore, died
March 31, 3008. Ms. Kramer
was born in Leavenworth,
Kansas, and as a child of an
army colonel, she traveled
extensively throughout her
childhood. She earned a bach
elor’s degree at Oberlin
College and worked on The
Evening Star in Washington,
D.C., and The Evening Capital
in Annapolis.
She joined the St. John’s staff
as manager of the Annapolis
bookstore. When St. John’s
opened its Santa Fe campus,
she moved West with her thenhusband, Clarence Kramer.
After earning her graduate
degree at St. John’s, Ms.
Kramer earned a second
master’s degree in Special
Education and enjoyed a 15year career as a teacher and
drill team coach. She is
survived by three children, five
grandchildren, and three great
grandchildren.
John Droege (A85)
John Patrick Droege, of
Plymouth, Mass., died on
January 38, 3008. He was 46
and was employed as a tech
nical salesman.
After graduating from
St. John’s, Droege earned a
master’s in American History
from the University of Notre
Dame. An avid outdoorsman,
Droege was a member of
the Manomet Center for
Conservation Science.
His parents, John and Aileen
Droege, would love to hear
from classmates and tutors who
knew John; contact them at;
JDroegei@comcast.net.
�{Alumni Voices}
47
The Face of America
BY Christopher Allison (SF97)
was to discern those who planned to follow
uring my years at
the rules from those who did not in the
St. John’s, I never
space of a two- to three-minute interview.
suspected that Thucydides,
In places like India, where wages are lower
Plutarch, and Machiavelli
and poverty more widespread than in the
were secretly preparing me
I am a Foreign Service Officer (FSO)
U.S., this is no simple task. I typically
for a career in diplomacy,
of the U.S. Department of State. FSOs
did 75-roo interviews every day. It was
hut in hindsight it seems so obvious.
compose the U.S. government’s diplomatic
interesting work, though often draining.
corps, staffing embassies and consulates in
At the conclusion of my assignment to
more than 250 cities around the world. As
India, I transferred to Japan to work at
such, we represent the United States to the
Embassy Tokyo. Japan and India could not
governments of other countries and look
be more different, and the abruptness of
out for the welfare of American citizens
this transition left me reeling. Where India
abroad. As my employer frequently reminds
is colorful, noisy, and a trifle chaotic, some
me, I am the face of America overseas. I
people find Japan to be grey, rigid, and
know this may seem strange to some of my
subdued. Despite its recent economic
classmates who haven’t seen me in a few
progress, India is still very much a devel
years, but it couldn’t be a more natural fit.
oping country, where the morning
After joining the State Department in
commute is regularly impeded by ox carts
the spring of 2004,1 was first dispatched to
or free-range cows blocking major thor
interview visa applicants at the U.S.
oughfares. Japan, by contrast, is one of the
Consulate in Chennai, India. One of the
most highly developed economies and most
core functions of American consulates is
orderly societies in the world. While I am
reviewing visa applications of foreign
normally the type of person to enjoy the
nationals who wish to travel to the United
sensory stimulation of the developing
States. Though I joined the State Depart
world, after two years of it, Tokyo’s more
ment as an Economic Officer, adjudicating
muted tones were a welcome change
visas is a sort of rite of passage for FSOs.
of pace.
Every newly hired officer is required to do
The work could not be more different as
at least one year of consular work upon
well. I currently work on the staff of U.S.
joining the department, and this usually
Ambassador to Japan J. Thomas Schieffer,
means working the visa line in a place
helping to keep him informed about a wide
hke Chennai.
array of issues requiring his attention.
(Incidentally, Ambassador Schieffer has a
St. John’s connection: his son Paul gradu
During my two years in India,
I stood at a window much like
one might encounter at the
Department of Motor Vehicles
and listened patiently as people
explained why they needed to
travel to the states. In order to
approve most types of visa, an
officer must be convinced that
the applicant plans to depart
from the states after a short
period of time, regardless of
why they wish to visit. Of
course, there is also a
responsibility to try to keep
out criminals, terrorists,
human traffickers, drug lords,
and other undesirables. My job
D
{The College. St. John’s
College ■ Summer 2008 }
ated from the Annapolis campus in 2007.)
In some ways, I am little more than a stan
dard-issue bureaucrat: I read reports, I go
to meetings, I brief people, I compile
reports, and I push papers-some virtual,
some made of actual paper-from one place
to another.
But that’s only one part of the job. I have
a ringside seat for what former Ambassador
to Japan Mike Mansfield famously called
“the most important bilateral relationship
in the world, bar none.” My boss is on the
nightly news on a regular basis. In the next
couple of months, Japan will host the G-8
Summit, and I’ll be in the middle of it.
I have met cabinet secretaries, members of
Congress, one former and one current
Vice President, and the home run king of
Japan. Not bad for a humble bureaucrat,
if you ask me.
This may seem like a strange career
choice for someone who not that long ago
spent his days playing Frisbee in front of
Meem Library and his nights pondering
Kant, but I can’t imagine doing anything
else. The Foreign Service is, in some ways,
like St. John’s: a small and somewhat
obscure organization with a lot of tradition
and a culture all its own. The variety of
different skills-and different parts of my
brain-that the work requires on a daily
basis is also familiar. I have to speak
persuasively, write clearly, struggle with
foreign languages, and work through
countless situations that lie outside of my
core competencies. If St. John’s
provides the ultimate generalist
education, then the Foreign
Service is the ultimate generalist
career. The longer I do this and
the more I come to understand
the values of the Service, the
more I feel like this is what St.
John’s was preparing me for all
along.
Chris Allison (SF97) shown
HERE WITH HIS WIFE, BeTH
Rollins, at the statue of the
Great Buddha of Kamakura,
Japan, revels in Japanese
culture and traditions.
�{Croquet}
48
IN LOVE WITH
CROQUET
Jennifer Wright (Ao8), a wry observer oflife
at St. John’s, offered this tribute to croquet,
herfavorite time ofthe year, after her last
match as a student.
’ve secretly smuggled a book to every
football game my family has ever
taken me to, raising my head only
sporadically to say things hke, “when
they jump on each other-is that
good?” Usually around that point,
the man sitting next to me spills a plate of
nachos on me, possibly out of rage. 1 fare no
better when it comes to understanding the
rules of croquet.
This is not for lack of trying on the part of
the members of the croquet team, who have
gallantly attempted to explain it to me. But
they start rambhng about wickets and
driving the ball into the ground, and I get
distracted, and end up asking them what
their costumes are going to be for the match
this year. My total lack of understanding of
the rules of the game has proved advanta
for a group of people who don’t particularly
geous, at least during freshman year. I heard
care for sports. Much of our bookishness at
wild cheers from the audience and assumed
St. John’s may stem at least in part from our
we’d won. We hadn’t. 1 went around
inability to compete with our peers on the
congratulating everyone. No one had the
soccer field. While students at other schools
heart to correct me until the next day.
remember their winning touchdown, John
That does not in any way change the fact
nies remember striking out at T-ball.
that croquet day is the best day of the year.
Which makes it even more amazing that
In fact, croquet is the perfect sporting event
we’re good at croquet. In fact, we’re the top
I
ranked team in the country. My assuming
we’d won was a fair assumption, considering
the fact that we usually do. As a result, we’ve
occasionally taken to having the victory
party the night before croquet. And the
party is almost as amazing as croquet day
itself. The big band music plays hard and
fast. And everyone is united in a single,
bloodthirsty. Machiavellian desire to beat
the Navy-though the bloodthirstiness, to be
fair, is tempered by Cole Porter and straw
berries and champagne.
For one week in the spring, we have a
bitter school rival. We chant things about
how we will “sweep” by winning every
round of croquet. I learned after freshman
{The College-
St. John's College ■ Summer 2008 }
year that when members of the croquet team
come up to you and scream “how are we like
a broom?” the correct answer is to scream
back “we sweep! ” and not to meekly reply
“we remove debris?” We enact in essence,
the rituals seen on most Big Ten campuses
that rarely make their way to quaint little
St. John’s.
Because in a way, beating the tough guys
at Navy at any sport seems to make up for
the fact that were always picked last for
dodgeball. Watching the Johnnies sweep on
the croquet field, we feel, as we rarely do,
like wild Spartan warriors. Just for a Uttle
while though, before we go back to reading
our T. S. Eliot for language class.
So, if you haven’t yet made it, venture to
Annapolis for croquet. You’ll be glad you
did. And nobody will judge you for bringing
a book.
�{Croquet}
Heavy rain
49
threatened cancellation of the
CROQUET MATCH, BUT THE COMPETITORS PLAYED ON
AND THE WEATHER IMPROVED.
The result: 3-a St. John’s in a hard-fought and
HONORABLE MATCH. OPPOSITE: IMPERIAL WiCKET
Ian Hanover (A08), sporting a navy “uniform”
BOUGHT online; Jennifer Wright and Jessica
Perry (A09). Clockwise: John Ertle (A84) and
HIS son, David, io, and President Christopher
Nelson (A70); MaryIrene Ruffin Corrigan (A04)
WITH DAUGHTER MACKENZIE; FASHIONABLY ATTIRED
Johnnies: (l. to r.): Sasha Munters (A09), Ellen
Barnhart (Aio), SamYelton (A09), Elizabeth
Fleming (Aio)
and
Elsabe Dixon (Aio).
Todd Grier (Class of 1938) opened
the match by
STRIKING THE CEREMONIAL FIRST BALL; MaRY GiLLMARTEN, MOTHER OF CHARLES (Ao8), OFFERED
CUSTOM-MADE CROQUET COOKIES.
{The College. St John’s College
■ Summer 2008 }
�5°
{Alumni Association News}
accept his Award of Merit. (Mr. Ertegun
continues to contribute to our community
through the Ahmet Ertegun Education
Fund; Led Zeppehn reunited to raise
money for scholarships on the Annapolis
campus as well as several European
schools.)
Our Award of Merit winners represent a
broad spectrum of alumni in many
different fields. Also in the music industry,
there’s Jac Holzman (A52), who started
Elektra Records in 1950 when he was a
student. In journalism, Ray Cave (A48),
editor of Time magazine; in filmmaking,
screenwriter Jeremy Leven (A64) and
cinematographer Tom Stern (SF69), whose
many films include Unforgiven, American
Beauty, and Mystic River, Annapolis tutor
Howard Zeiderman (A67), was honored in
2002 for his work with the Touchstones
Discussion Project. He shared the podium
that year with classmates including
Candace Brightman, who created the light
ast night I saw Martin
shows for the Grateful Dead. Our alumni
Scorcese’s Shine a Light, a
have also made tremendous contributions
concert film of the RolUng
in government, industry, and in not-forStones at New York City’s
profits and non-governmental organiza
Beacon Theatre. The final
tions as well as significant contributions
image of the film is a photo
to the future of St. John’s. We recognize
graph of Ahmet Ertegun, class of 1944;
these at the Homecoming Dinner on
the him is dedicated to his memory.
Saturday night.
Mr. Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic
Our Honorary Alumni are welcomed
Records, was hackstage at the Beacon on
into our community each year during the
the hrst night of this concert, October 29,
All-alumni Gatherings held during the
2006, when he suffered the fall that led to
day on Saturday of Homecoming. These
his death later that year.
are individuals who have demonstrated
Seeing that tribute from a remarkable
an outstanding commitment to our
hlmmaker to a legend in the recording
educational program and the community.
industry made me think about the ways in
Last year, we gave the award to two
which we honor people. St. John’s, unlike
members of the Annapolis community,
most other colleges and universities,
Robert Hunt and Alton Waldron, each of
doesn’t grant honorary degrees to the
whom has participated in the college’s
distinguished individuals who speak at
community seminars for 50 years. Often,
Commencement each spring. However, the
we honor retiring tutors and long-time
Alumni Association, since r949, has
staff members, recognizing their
honored people in two ways: granting the
Award of Merit to our alumni “for distin
guished and meritorious service to the
United States, or to his/her native state,
or to St. John’s College; or for outstanding
achievement within his/her chosen field,”
and granting Honorary Alumnus/a status
to people who have had such close involve
ment in the St. John’s community that we
want them to join us as “permanent
members of the college.”
Ahmet Ertegun, who shaped the careers
of so many amazing musicians and co
founded Rock ’n Roll Hall of Eame, was
proud to come to Homecoming in 1994 to
From the Alumni
Association
President
L
These are individuals
who have demonstrated
an outstanding
commitment to our
educationalprogram
and the community.
Jason Walsh (A85)
{The College - Sr.
John’s College • Summer 2008 }
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in
the St. John’s College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors
elected by and from the alumni body. The
board meets four times a year, twice on each
campus, to plan programs and coordinate the
affairs of the association. This newsletter
within The College magazine is sponsored by
the Alumni Association and communicates
association news and events of interest.
President - Jason Walsh (A85)
Vice President - Steve Thomas (SF74)
Secretary - Joanne Murray (A70)
Treasurer - Richard Cowles (SFGI95)
Mailing address - Alumni Association,
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis,
MD 21404, or rr6o Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
impact-people like Barbara Leonard
(HA55) and Brother Robert Smith (HA90).
Last year, we again honored Jeffrey Bishop
(HA87), the long-time vice president of the
college, who died last July. Jeff was one of
the very few Honorary Alumni to also be
recognized with an Award of Merit,
presented posthumously, for his great
contributions to the college.
This year at Santa Fe Homecoming, the
Alumni Association will also single out a
special group for recognition: the Class of
1968, the first students to graduate from
the campus. These men and women
were bold enough to be the pioneers
of an emerging campus and they deserve
recognition.
Complete lists of our Award of Merit
recipients and Honorary Alumni are on
the Alumni Association Web site. Go to
the St. John’s Web site at:
www.stjohnscollege.edu, and click on
Alumni. If you would like to nominate indi
viduals for the Award of Merit or as
Honorary Alumni, contact the Alumni
office on either campus: Jo Ann Mattson in
Annapolis, jamattson@sjca.edu; or
Michael Bales in Santa Fe,
michael.bales@sjcsf.edu. The Nomina
tions Committee of the Alumni Association
will be pleased to consider your sugges
tions.
Jason Walsh (A85)
Alumni Association President
�{Alumni Association News}
Seminars, Croquet and Fun
California Johnnies Enjoy a Lively Chapter
know, the quality of the readings for
week after St. John’s put
seminars, and whether a tutor is leading
away Navy during the
the discussion,” says Miranda. Younger
annual croquet match in
Johnnies, especially those new to the area,
Annapolis, a group of
tend to look for networking opportunities.
Johnnies were carrying on
“This is one of our great challenges, how
the tradition 3,000 miles
to better meet that need,” he adds.
away by taking on some recent graduates
Fortunately, the Northern California
Informal
happy hours for recent alumnifrom the University of California,
Berkeley.
chapter of the Alumni Association also
coordinated by Laura Manion (A04) every
carried on the tradition of winning.
two weeks-have been popular among
Co-Imperial Wickets Jessica Finefrock
younger members of the chapter.
(SF05) and Nathan Stalnaker {A04) led the
Johnnies to a dramatic, down-to-the wire
victory in the first-ever Westside Croquet
Match. Stalnaker hit the winning stroke:
“It went through two wickets-all from one
swing,” he says. About 25 chapter
Reynaldo Miranda (A99)
members and friends attended the match
and a picnic afterward at Lake Merritt in
Oakland. The event could become another
The 2008 season of seminars and
tradition for this lively chapter that
dinners was launched by a January visit
combines social events and seminars that
from Santa Fe tutor Phil LeCuyer, who led
appeal to younger and older alumni alike.
a seminar on Hans Jonas’ essay, “Is God a
“The spirit of the chapter is fun,” says
Mathematician? The Meaning of Metabo
chapter president Reynaldo Miranda (A99).
lism.” Fifteen chapter members attended
Despite the challenges of travel
the seminar, hosted by Neal Allen (SF78)
distances and hectic schedules, chapter
at McKesson Corp, headquarters in San
events are popular draws for alumni of all
Francisco. Then attendees drove an hour
ages. “I think what inspires people to come
to savor more conversation over dinner at
and join in is seeing other Johnnies they
Cafe Zoetrope, a restaurant at filmmaker
A
^The spirit ofthe
chapter isfun. ”
51
Valley. Andrea S. Hines (SF05) hosted the
dinner.
In February, Santa Fe President Michael
Peters led a well-attended seminar on
Shakespeare’s Henry V', about 65 alumni
turned up for a reception afterward.
Tutor Peter Pesic led two seminars on
Heidegger in San Francisco, and many
alumni traveled to nearby Moraga to attend
Pesic’s piano recital at St. Mary’s College.
The chapter also invites local tutor
emeriti and former St. John’s tutors.
For example, Jim Forkin, a former Santa Fe
tutor, delivered a lecture on Shakespeare’s
Tempest and Machiavelli. Former tutor and
Annapolis dean Tom Slakey (HA94) of
Sacramento usually leads one of the semi
nars at the chapter’s annual summer Stag’s
Leap Wine Cellars reunion in Napa, hosted
by Warren and Barbara Winiarkski of the
classes of 1952 and 1955 respectively.
Last year, Howard Zeiderman (A67)
drew a crowd of 49 for a seminar on Jorge
Luis Borges’ stories “The Library of
Babel” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quihote.” Participants filled a long confer
ence-room table and some sat along the
walls, but as big as the group was, the
seminar worked, he says. “I think all the
people participated. Also there was a
wonderful blend of text, experience, and
reflection on the college, so it was never
merely academic.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery in Napa
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowfor information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Robert Morgan, SF76
505-275-901^
rim2u@c0mcast.net
CHICAGO
Rick Lightburn, SF76
847-922-3862
rlightburn@gmail.com
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon,
A94
410-332-1816
emartin@crs. org
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
Paula Fulks, SF76
817-654-2986
puffjd@swbeU.net
AUSTIN/SAN
ANTONIO
Toni Wilkinson,
SFGI87
512-278-1697
wilkinson_toni
@hotm ail.com
DENVER/BOULDER
Elizabeth Jenny SF80
303-530-3373
epj727@comcast.net
BOSTON
Dianne Cowan, A91
617-666-4381
diannecowan@rcn.com
HOUSTON
Norman Ewart A85
713-303-3025
norman.ewart@rosetta
resources.com
MADISON
Consuelo Sanudo,
SGIoo
608-251-6565
sanudoc@tds.net
PHILADELPHIA
Helen Zartarian, AGI86
215-482-5697
helenstevezartarian@
mac.com
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles,
SFGI95
505-986-1814
rcowles2@comcast.net
MINN./ST. PAUL
Carol Freeman, AGI94
6l2r822-32l6
Freem013@umn.edu
PHOENIX
Donna Kurgan, AGI96
623-444-6642
dakurgie@yahoo.com
SEATTLE
James Doherty, SFGI76
206-542-3441
jdoherty@mrsc.org
NEW YORK CITY
Daniel Van Doren, A81
914-949-6811
dvandoren@
optonline.net
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray, A70
724-325-4151
Joanne.Murray@
basicisp.net
SOUTH FLORIDA
Peter Lamar, AGI95
305-666-9277
cplamar@yahoo.com
NORTH CAROLINA
Rick Ross A82
919-319-1881
Rick@activated.com
Elizabeth Ross A92
Elizabeth@
activated.com
PORTLAND
Jennifer Rychlik, SF93
503-547-0241
jlr43@coho.net
NORTHERN CALIF.
Reynaldo Miranda, A99
415-333-4452
reynaldo .miranda@
gmail.com
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico, A86
619-429-1565
srico@sandi.net
SOUTHERN CALIF.
Jan Conlin, SF85
310-490-2749
conlinjani@yahoo.com
FOR MORE ALUMNI
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Ed Grandi, A77
301-351-8411
egrandi@aol.com
SALT LAKE CITY
Erin Hanlon, SF03
916-967-2194
e.i.mhanlon@
gmail.com
{The College. Sf. John's
Providing
OPPORTUNITIES
College ■ Summer 2008 }
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Peter Weis, SF84
413-367-2174
peter_weis@
nmhschool.org
TO CONNECT
MORE OFTEN AND
MORE RICHLY
�52.
{St. John’s Forever}
An Emerging Campus
rider stops to gaze up at the
worked with the architecture firm Holien
St. John’s campus in the
and Buckley on the master plan.
early 1960s. A few years
In a piece he wrote for a college promo
before, St. John’s President
tional brochure, Meem described the
Richard Weigle described
Territorial style and why it was right for
the property-the bulk of
St. John’s. “The buildings of St. John’s
which was a gift from architect John
Gaw
College
in Santa Fe will reflect practically
Meem and his wife. Faith, as “240
acres
of
all the
historical
phases.... Their
pinon- and juniper-studded land on the
terraced, flat-roofed masses recall their
lower slope of Monte Sol.”
ancient aboriginal American origin; the
This was the campus that greeted the
balconies, portales and patios recall the
members of the class of rgGS when they
Spain they came from, and the stuccoed
first arrived in Santa Fe. As Weigle raised
walls with their brick cornices will remind
funds to build the new campus, Meem
us of our Territorial past.”
A
{The College. St. John’s College
■ Summer 2008 }
The campus’ design would be
“completely contemporary and yet
reflecting the rich inheritance of the past,”
Meem wrote. “Perhaps in a small way, this
may be a worthy symbol of the way
St. John’s College looks at its task in the
world.”
Many more buildings have been added to
the campus since, and more will be added
in the next few years: a new residential
center and the Dr. Norman and Betty
Levan Hall, which will house the Graduate
Institute.4"
�{Alumni Events Calendar}
Alumni Calendar
Make plans for Homecoming!
Annapolis^ September 26-28, and
Santa Fe. on October 10-12.
See you there.
Santa Fe Alumni Art Show:
“The Lunatic, The Lover, The Poet”
September 19 - October zi, 2008
A highlight of the fall semester in Santa Fe
each year is the opening of the Annual AllAlumni Art Show, marking its eighth year
in 2008. This year’s theme is inspired by a
passage from Shakespeare’s^ Midsummer
Night’s Dream:
“Lovers and madmen have such
seething brains.
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever
comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet.
Are of imagination all compact...”
Eagerly awaiting the next Homecoming in Annapolis
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 19, 5-8 p.m.
Closing Reception for Homecoming
attendees:
Saturday, October ii, 6-7 p.m.
In Paca Garden, walled and dry
they built the Old World in the New,
and there walked girl and woman, I
with man and boy (remember?), you.
a flash of gold; I wore it round
my neck for days. You wondered why
I prized the broken chain you found;
you feared and could not meet my eye.
As if to keep all life at bay
and shut our eyes to hear a story
we dressed the truth in solemn play:
my quiet house of ancient glory,
We played pretend, but much came true:
our Old World gave us the refrain,
with words dictated by the New.
I have, but never wear, the chain.
linen and tea; your Russian home,
the dying count, a summons back.
Were those bricked streets our sunny
Rome,
or Paris? You spotted in a crack
Like faery queen and knight of old
we lingered in determined bliss:
a string of nonsense, trampled gold,
a small thing, but too bright to miss.
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Summer 2008 }
—Ruth Johnston (Stayer, A85)
�STJOHN’S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
Published by the
Communications Office
P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED
Non-Profit Org.
U.S. Postage
Paid
Annapolis, MD
Permit No. 120
�
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<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
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The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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52
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The College, Summer 2008
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Volume 34, Issue 2 of The College Magazine. Published in Summer 2008.
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Santa Fe, NM
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The College Vol. 34, Issue 2 Summer 2008
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Dempsey, Patricia (assistant editor)
Hannifin, Jenny (Santa Fe editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Allison, Christopher
Brooks, Ethan
Gassaway, Shane
Johnston, Ruth
Dunn MacRae, Cathi
Nugent, Tom
Spiegelman, Deborah
Stratton, Erica
Wilson, Kea
Wright, Jennifer
Johnson, David
The College
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/68190bebffa74bd866b58d77fb647b47.pdf
751fce1e57d573efed8dd69e6f4f4549
PDF Text
Text
The
St.
John’s
College
•
Winter
a o o 7
Annap
W.E.B. Du Bois
In Annapolis
�“We claimfor ourselves every single right that belongs to afree-born American, political,
civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the
ears ofAmerica. The battle we wage is notfor ourselves alone butfor all true Americans. ”
-W.E.B. Du Bois, 1906
On W.E.B. Du Bois
SIJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS . SANTA FE
Imost five decades after publishing his landmark work, The Souls
ofBlack Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois stepped off a train a few blocks
from the Annapolis campus. There to greet him was Martin Dyer,
the first African-American to attend St. John’s College. Dyer had
already been accepted to a historically black institution. Coppin
State in Baltimore, but he changed his plans when St. John’s
admitted him. Dyer walked next to Du Bois with a sense of awe.
amazed at how a man with such small stature could convey such a sense of greatness,
and that a man in his Bos who had already been through many trials could be so
vigorous and lively. This issue of The College recounts Du Bois’ visit to Annapolis to
deliver a lecture.
Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois earned a bachelor’s degree at Fisk
University and then a second BA at Harvard, where he later earned a PhD. He taught at
Wilberforce University in Ohio, then at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta).
I’l 1905’ Du Bois helped to found the Niagara Movement and later was instrumental
in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). In 1910, he left his teaching post at Atlanta University to work
as publications director at the NAACP full time. He wrote weekly columns for
newspapers and was editor-in-chief of The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, in which
he decried lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and sexual as well as racial inequality.
Du Bois’ most famous idea was that a “talented tenth” of the black population would
lead his race to advancement and equality. To that end, he was a fierce advocate of
education and self-determination. In addition to his work for racial equality in his own
country, he was very much a citizen of the world, fighting against colonialism and
imperialism in Africa, and traveling the globe, speaking and writing, well into his 90s.
Persecuted for his political activity and disillusioned with America, he moved to Ghana,
where he died in 1963, on the eve of the historic March on Washington.
Du Bois was a marvelous writer, and The Souls ofBlack Folk includes some of
his most powerful prose. He described Lincoln as “the long-headed man with carechiselled face who sat in the White House. ...” In the poignant essay he wrote on the
death of his infant son, haunting imagery can be found: “He died at eventide, when the
sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when the winds
spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his
breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that
travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train.”
There’s no record of what Du Bois thought of St. John’s, though Dyer remembers him
congratulating St. John’s for voluntarily accepting black students. But in accord with
the St. John’s way, he thought that education should go beyond preparing men and
women for work; black and white, one must have “ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring
ends of living.”
—RH
The Gollege (usps 018-750)
is published quarterly by
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD,
and Santa Fe,NM
Known office of publication:
Communications Office
St. John’s College
Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800
Periodicals postage paid
at Annapolis, MD
postmaster: Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John’s College,
Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404-2800.
Rosemary Harty, editor
Patricia Dempsey,
Emily DeBusk,
assistant editors
Jennifer Behrens, art director
Annapolis
410-626-2539
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
Contributors
Sally Benson (SF03)
Eva Brann (HA57)
Elizabeth Burlington (A08)
Jon Enriquez
Oliver Lemke (SFio)
Gabriel Pihas (A92)
Thomas Scally
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
�{Contents}
PAGE
IO
DEPARTMENTS
Endowing St. John’s
Why building the college’s endowment is
the most important goal of the ongoing
capital campaign.
PAGE
l6
The Day Job
Five ambitious Johnnies brave cattle-call
auditions, rejection letters, and uncer
tain incomes in pursuit of their dreams.
PAGE
PAGE
z6
2
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
New Endeavors for Former Deans
Christopher Nelson’s Fiction Group
Celebrating Fish
Twenty Years of Karate-Do
The Man Behind the Covers
The Music of Homer
Challenging Alumni
36
Bibliofile
•
A new translation of Plato’s Republic
by Joe Sachs.
Harrison Sheppard (A61) considers
consumerism in America.
Joshua Kates (A80) deconstructs Derrida.
•
2121
Race and Human Nature
’
A Graduate Institute preceptorial
explores race through autobiography,
literature, and Supreme Court cases.
38 ALUMNI
PROFILES
38 For architect David Schwarz (A72), a good
PAGE
2'Y
opening question makes all the difference.
42 Portfolio manager Steve Bohlin (SF81)
Du Bois IN Annapouis
finds integrity and success go together.
44 At a time when most are enjoying
Alumni remember a quiet, dignified man
who came to campus.
retirement, Martha Jordan (SFGI83)
makes a leap of faith.
47 Jon Ferrier (A73) is still pursuing justice.
PAGE
Chaninah Maschler
48
Obituaries
A respected tutor emerita looks back on
an interesting life.
•
•
A Tribute to Brother Robert
Alumnus Ahmet Ertegun (class 011944),
founder of Atlantic Records
PAGE
Homecoming
50 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
PAGE
38
The memories of six alumni from six eras
reflect an evolving St. John’s.
ON THE COVER
W.E.B. Du Bois
Illustration by DavidJohnson
52 ST. John’s forever
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Life After the Dean’s Office
While Michael Dink (A75) in
Annapolis and Victoria Mora in
Santa Fe have settled into the
role of dean on their campuses,
their predecessors have been
industriously using that time to
enter into new ones. Harvey
Flaumenhaft and David Levine
expound on their new lives.
The Amphibious
Mr. Flaumenhaft
The St. John’s community will
be pleased to learn that, after
his unusually long eight-year
term as dean (second only to
Jacob Klein’s nine-year stint),
Harvey Flaumenhaft says he is
“staying off the streets and out
of trouble.” What a relief.
Although he doesn’t regret
the time he spent as dean
(1997-2,005), Flaumenhaft
relishes his new freedom,
which has allowed him to
pursue his many intellectual
interests. “I’m glad I did it, but
I’m glad I’m done,” he says.
“We have a large operation
here so the dean has a wide
variety of functions, the kinds
of things that other institutions
have many people to do. You
don’t get much time to read,
study, and think. There’s a lot
of putting out fires and
preparing for the future by
talking with many people.. .It’s
interesting work, especially to
me because I’m very interested
in what kind of thing adminis
tration is. But prior to being
dean, I had never been a
manager, let alone had this
kind of responsibility.” The
difficulties of being a dean were
not limited to new administra
tive duties, he says, but also
included the things he couldn’t
do. “I had a number of writing
projects I had to put on the
back burner; that was a hard
part. I also didn’t teach because
of the demands of the job. It is
very nice to get back to the days
of writing and reading without
somebody needing me at any
moment,” he says.
Flaumenhaft, who has been
with the college for nearly 40
years, points out that St. John’s
has a unique approach to the
role of dean, which is effec
tively a safeguard of the official
relationship between the
faculty and the administrators.
“One of the particularities of
this college is that the deanship
is not a career track. The
faculty recommends someone
from their ranks to be dean
temporarily-you do it for a
finite stretch of time then go
back to being a tutor. In a lot of
places, to be dean is the end of
being a teacher and student.
This is a way of making sure
that people who make adminis
trative decisions remember the
work and needs of the faculty.
We keep the
dean amateur, in
the best sense.
It’s good for the
faculty and good
for the full-time
professional
administrators
to have someone
who is an
‘amphibian.’ ”
After finishing
his term as dean.
Harvey Flaumen
haft:
Captivated
BY Geometry.
Flaumenhaft took
his long-overdue
year of sabbatical,
followed by a year
of unpaid leave of
absence.
So what exactly
has been keeping
him off the streets
and out of trouble?
Geometry. He
spent his sabbat
ical and this year
revising, format
ting, and editing
his forthcoming
book in two
volumes entitled
“Insights and
Manipulations:
David Levine: Exploring phronesis.
What Classical
Geometry Was
Like at Its Peak
and How It Was Transformed.”
break from professional duties
before returning to teaching.
Flaumenhaft describes the
book as “a close reading of
When describing the dean’s
major mathematical texts,
office, Levine calls it a “work
trying to understand the
room” where members of the
contrast and transition from
faculty, board. Instruction
classical to modern mathe
Committee, and student body
matics.” Students can look
are able to come together to
forward to benefiting from
meet. “Here, you’re trying to
Flaumenhaft’s “amphibious”
make it possible for people to
flexibility; after to years of
grow into and with the
administrative and intellectual
Program,” Levine explains.
exercise, he will be resuming
“And that requires a lot of
the role of tutor in the fall.
conversations and working
with the faculty, trying to make
—Emily DeBusk (Ao6)
it as effective as possible.”
During Levine’s tenure as
David Levinedean, approximately one-third
Back in the Swing
of the current faculty was
These days, an average week
appointed. “These are people
for David Levine (A67)
who will continue to shape and
includes not one, not two, but
influence the school for years
three games of racquetball,
to come, so those decisions are
something Levine claims he
momentous.”
could not have done prior to
In addition to working with
taking his sabbatical after his
the faculty to support the
five-year stint as dean. And,
Program, Levine placed
according to his playing part
priority on improving the
ners, his game is stronger than
quality of student life, lowering
ever.
the rate of attrition, and
Levine, who first came to
expanding the assistant dean
teach at St. John’s in 1986, and
position into a full-time job.
whose tenure as dean of the
During the Santa Fe campus’
Santa Fe campus was 2001presidential transition and
aoo6, is enjoying a year-long
search, however, he absorbed
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Story Time with Christopher Nelson
In the spring of 2005, after
spending more than a year
splitting his time hetween the
two campuses while the Santa
Fe presidential search was
underway, Annapolis President
Christopher Nelson (SF70) was
eager to reconnect to the
Annapolis community. He
decided to do it the St. John’s
way-talking about hooks-and
began a study group on short
American fiction, co-led by
tutor Deborah Renaut (A68).
Open to all in the campus
community, the group has
attracted students, staff, tutors
and tutors’ spouses.
To choose his material.
Nelson spent the summer of
2005 reading more than too
short stories to select the
reading list for the study group.
He read works by authors such
as Hawthorne, Melville, and
Poe and sought advice from
faculty members. Three stories
were at the top of his list:
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,”
Poe’s “William Wilson,” and
Wright’s “Fire and Cloud.”
“They have open, endless ques
tions and are deep, difficult,
complicated stories,” he says.
Nelson had another reason
for pursuing American fiction
in the seminar: as an exchange
student he spent his senior year
in high school in Amsterdam
and missed out on 20thcentury literature and history
classes. Also, he acknowledges,
“fiction didn’t speak to me
when I was younger the way it
does now.”
Every other week. Nelson is
joined by about six to ten
“regulars” who attend most of
the study groups. Among them
is Jeff Peters (AGI06), who
plans to pursue a doctorate in
18th-century British literature.
Although he was an English
major at St. Mary’s
College, Peters says
the seminars connect
him to fiction
without considering
secondary sources.
He also finds it fasci
nating to look at the
short stories of
authors who are well
known for greater
works. “These are
works I never would
have read.”
Another regular,
Eileen McFarren,
additional responsibility
while Annapolis president
Christopher Nelson commuted
between campuses and was not
always available.
“I used to joke during
difficult times that I couldn’t
get paid enough to do this job,
but other times, I wanted to say
‘you’re paying me far too
much.’ When you know how
much people are learning and
you hear people playing the
piano and the conversations in
the coffee shop-all of these
things that wiU lead to one’s
personal growth-then it’s well
worth our efforts.”
Relinquishing some adminis
trative responsibility and
returning to his life as a tutor is
a transition that agrees with
Levine. “I’m happy to read and
write and talk. Our primary
role is to teach. Will I be happy
to be back in the classroom?
Absolutely.”
For the moment, however,
Levine is enjoying his time off.
He and his wife, Jackie, have
traveled to visit their children
and eight grandchildren as well
Short
lunch:
attends the study group not just
for the readings and discussion,
but also to feel more a part of
the college community.
McFarren and her husband,
tutor Louis Petrich, moved to
Annapolis five years ago.
“When we lived overseas we
both taught American fiction.
I was automatically part of a
group since the ex-pats hung
out together,” she says. “Here I
know a lot of other tutors and
their spouses, but not in the St.
John’s way-through a seminar.
3
So this group gives me that
chance.”
McFarren finds that the
discussions she likes the most
are about the stories she likes
the least. “I’m forced to see the
story in a completely different
way,” she explains.
Nelson and Renaut plan to
lead the fiction study group next
year, though Nelson hints that
there may be a shift away from
short American works to collec
tions by a single author. “ ‘The
Dead’ may be the greatest story
in the English language,” he
says of Joyce’s story.
—Patricia Dempsey
stories and
Frank
Rowsome, Jeff
Peters (AGI06)
and
Chris Nelson (SF70).
as made a trip to Greece.
Several intellectual projects are
also in the works. Levine is
finishing the last two chapters
of a book he began some years
ago, which is about one of
Plato’s smaller dialogues, the
Charmides. “a dialogue about
‘moderation’ featuring two of
Athens’ most politically
notorious figures.”
In the spring, Levine plans
to follow up on his fourth
dean’s lecture on Aristotle
and Plutarch, which explores
the question ofphronesis, or
{The College - St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
practical sense. He believes
that this project will hkely
result in a book, but for now,
he simply wants to find out
what’s next. “What is the next
question, and where does it
lead?” Levine asks. “Which
authors might help me under
stand the questions better?”
Is there a relationship
between these two projects,
practical sense and modera
tion? “That’s a longer story,”
says Levine, smiling.
—Sally Benson (SF03)
�4
On Fish
More than 100 students, tutors,
staff, andparents turned out in
Octoberfor a ceremony to
welcome back the denizens of
the Santa Fefishpond, housed
temporarily in Schepp’s Garden
and at President Michael
Peters’house while thepond
was repaired and improved last
year. A giftfrom the Class of
2005 helpedfund theproject.
Among the speakers was tutor
Ewen Harrison, who asserted
thatfish are the true center of
the St. John’s Program:
As some of you may know, I
spent many years studying the
evolution and behavior of fish,
before I saw the light and came
to teach and study at St. John’s.
I thought that when I came to
St. John’s I would put my fishy
ways behind me. How wrong
could I have been! Over the
past few years I have come to
understand that contemplation
of fishes is the true heart of the
St. John’s Program. I offer
you rr brief observations to
help you see the truth of this
radical claim.
i) Homer: Since we begin
our freshman seminar with
Homer, I shall do the same.
Who is the true hero of the
lliadJ Achilles, you may say?
Think again. I quote from
Book 21: “Achilles let Asteropaeus lie where he was on the
sand, with the dark water
flowing over him and the eels
and fishes busy nibbling and
gnawing the fat that was about
his kidneys.” Fish are the true
heroes of the Iliad, the subtle,
behind-the-scenes players.
They Uterally incorporate
the products of the absurd
activities of men at war.
3) Heraclitus famously said
that we can’t step into the same
river twice, which of course is
inspired by the deeper observa
tion from the fish’s perspective
that you can’t swim in the same
pond twice (especially after it
has been renovated).
{From the Bell Towers}
3) Plato: Who can forget
the comparison in the
Meno between the greatest
philosopher of antiquity,
Socrates, and the torpedo fish;
or the metaphor of fishing in
Plato’s Sophist: fishing as a
means of acquiring truth no
less. Elsewhere Plato would
have us look for the form or
eidos of the fish, which has
more reality than the fish we
think we see in front of us.
men?” In Job, some think that
the Leviathan is a crocodile,
but of course we now know that
it is in fact an enormous fish.
I leave it to the reader to inves
tigate the significance of the
fish that swallowed Jonah.
6) Shakespeare: Hamlet,
Act IV: “A man may fish with
the worm that hath eat of a
king, and eat of the fish that
hath fed of that worm.” This is
clearly a reference back to the
It’s all about the fish, says Santa Fe tutor Ewen Harrison.
4) Aristotle used fish as
prime examples of how to think
about motion. Is it a stretch of
logic to claim that his prime
mover is in fact the great
cosmic fish, whose tail
produces all other motions in
the cosmos? I think not.
5) The Bible is of course
replete with fish references, too
many to quote here: What does
Jesus mean when he tells Peter
and Andrew to “Follow me, and
I will make you fishers of
wisdom of Homer: consump
tion by fish as the means to
becoming one with nature.
7) We don’t like to provide
contextual information about
our program authors, but here
it is warranted. Immanuel Kant
was in fact a failed fisherman.
This failure to catch fish was
the origin of his argument that
we can’t know things in them
selves. Fish are the symbolic
precursors to the concept of
Noumena.
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter zoo^ }
8) It is not widely known that
Georg Hegel during one of his
more meditative moments was
sitting along a pond (much like
this one) watching fish, when
he fell in; at that moment
conceiving of the notion of the
unification of subject and
object, in this case becoming
one with the fish.
9) In the post-Darwinian
world, we see that we are all
descendants of fish about
390 million years ago (a group
of lobe-finned fishes known as
Rhipidistians or Osteolipimorphans that are the most likely
ancestors of all tetrapods), and
therefore these very individuals
that we see before us are our
distant cousins.
10) The Graduate Institute
has fish prominently located on
their promotional material.
A coincidence? I think not!
11) Geography: it is surely
no accident that the fish pond
occupies the physical center
of the Santa Fe campus. We
already appreciate the wisdom
of the founders of the New
Program. It is time that we also
appreciate the wisdom of the
first landscape architects of the
Santa Fe campus.
I hope it is now clear to you
that contemplating fish is the
forgotten eighth liberal art, in
need of restoration to its
former glory. I urge you all
therefore to read fewer books
and spend more time watching
and thinking about fish, as all
of the great thinkers have
done.
I offer you a summary of the
four undergraduate years at
St. John’s as seen from the
perspective of a fish contemplator:
Freshmen: There are no fish.
Sophomores: God created fish.
Juniors: You are better than
fish.
Seniors: You are fish.
�{From
Karate-Do
BY Olfver Lemke (SFzo)
In the gymnasium at St. John’s
GoUege (Santa Fe), there hangs a
plaque commemorating 20 years
of Karate-Dd. A Ddjd has existed
at the college since 1986, run by
tutor Jorge Aigla, M.D., 6th
Dan, Kyoshi, and is composed of
students, tutors, alumni, and
staff members.
A Ddjd, as Mr. Aigla says, is
not a spa group or a fitness
center, nor is it a club. The
Japanese word means “hall of
enlightenment.” In the true
study of Karate-Dd, students
must confront themselves,
learning to understand and
control their fears and anger.
Commitment is the primary
requirement. Yet Karate-Dd has
no prescribed result.
“It is not a means to
anything,” Mr. Aigla says. “I do
it because I must do it.” And
although some students come to
him expecting to get in shape or
to learn to fight, the ones who
stay are inevitably those who
come to value Karate-Dd as an
end in itself.
Mr. Aigla’s own story in some
ways exemplifies this principle.
As a teenager, he conceived a
keen interest in the martial arts;
his mother saved 200 pesos
the
Bell Towers}
(about $i6) to allow him to begin
to practice Tae Kwon Do at a
Dojo in Mexico City in 1970.
He earned a black belt in Tae
Kwon Do before proceeding to
its Japanese counterpart,
Karate-Do.
Mr. Aigla began practicing
Karate-Do in 1974, at the
San Francisco Karate-Dd Dojo
headed by Sensei Johnny Pereira
(and assisted by Sensei Greg
Barron). This, he says, was a
pivotal experience in his hfe.
“It’s very rare,” says Mr. Aigla,
“to come across a real Sensei.”
Most Karate instructors
resemble coaches or trainers,
competitive and motivated by
the prospect of gain and recogni
tion. A Sensei is something else
entirely. “If life brings you to
one,” Mr. Aigla says, “you drop
everything and follow him.”
Mr. Aigla found his Sensei in
Johnny Pereira, and studied with
him for many years until Sensei
Pereira’s untimely death in 1993.
Mr. Aigla has remained associ
ated with this style of Japanese
Karate-Do: Wa Do Ki Kai, now
headed by Sensei Ferol Arce in
Oakland, Cahfornia.
Some of us have seen adver
tisements offering a black belt in
one year, but this is misleading,
on par with the one-year degree
programs found at onhne
universities. When Mr. Aigla was
asked to teach Karate-Do at
St. John’s, he did what he felt
was necessary to counter this
shortcut mentality and accepted
the offer by then Student Activi
ties Director, Istvan Fehervary
in 1986. “I said, ‘only if I’m not
paid,”’ he recalls. While practice
sessions were a significant
commitment on top of his
academic duties, a lack of pay
came with a high degree of
autonomy.
“Since I don’t get remuner
ated, I have very high stan
dards,” Mr. Aigla says. “I require
that students always be there and
give a hundred percent spirit.”
Thus, there is no selling of belts.
The only true way to progress in
the Dojd-as in the study of
Karate-Dd itself-is to appreciate
the art for its own sake. “I am
simply passing on what I was
given: a Zen Way.”
For many years, students
practiced thrice-weekly (Basics,
Form/A'ara, Sparring) in the
Great Hall. Mr. Aigla himself
arrived early to move chairs and
tidy up, making sure that the
sessions would start on time.
In 2000, the college gymnasium
opened, and the Ddjd has met
there ever since. Mr. Aigla
comments that this is more
convenient, hut not necessarily
any better, than previous
arrangements. “Ifyouwantto
workout, you can
work out
anywhere,” he
says. The Ddjd
holds to a prin
ciple which seems
important in the
college as a whole:
where there is
interest, commit
ment and disci
pline, material
requirements are
small.
The resem
blance between
the Ddjd and the
college seems.
5
indeed, hardly accidental. The
Zen Way of Karate-Dd, fike the
teaching of the Program, is
deeply traditional and not
inclined to change. It attracts a
small but dedicated group of
students, and it is in a sense
inimical to the fast-moving and
result-oriented culture of
modern America. Membership
in the Ddjd has declined since
the eighties; students have more
obligations and fewer unfilled
hours. Many are uneasy about
the commitment the Ddjd
requires. But, as Mr. Aigla says, a
Ddjd is not strong in proportion
to the number of students it has,
but in proportion to its spirit.
Since 1986, Mr. Aigla has
awarded four black belts,
including one to his son,
Andres; three Second degree
blackbelts, one Third degree,
and one Fourth degree blackbelt
(to fellow tutor Bill Kerr). Other
tutors have been involved, and
the number of students has
varied between eight and 20.
Some have not stayed long;
others have continued for many
years, and several have come
hack years after graduating.
“If you want to hit people,”
says Mr. Aigla to prospective
students, “this is not the place
for you.” Karate-Dd is about
self-control and etiquette,
and in some ways about
communion. The word kumite,
commonly translated as
“sparring,” in fact means
something closer to “an
exchange in trust.” Students
spar as partners, not opponents.
“Kumite is nothing but
an intense conversation,”
Mr. Aigla says. “It is a way of
learning to acknowledge the
other as a human being.”
In light of this, it is no wonder
the Ddjd has flourished at
St. John’s, and it seems likely
that the past 20 years are only
the beginning.
The Santa Fe Ddjd celebrates ao years.
{The College. 5f. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�6
The Man
Behind
THE Covers
Most compliments on
The College usually come with a
follow-up question: “Who does
those illustrations on the
covers?” That’s David Johnson,
a fond reader of great hooks
and an award-winning
illustrator who lives in New
Canaan, Connecticut. Johnson
began drawing in high school
and began selling his work at
age 19. His pen-and-ink draw
ings appeared regularly in the
New York Times Book Review,
which led the magazine’s
designer, Claude Skelton, to
suggest him for the magazine.
Do you have afavorite author
ofall you have drawn sofar?
I’m not sure I have a favorite,
hut I am a reader. My grandfa
ther was a publisher; he ran an
export trade magazine. He was
a Harvard man, so he had a
library with the classics. I
didn’t go to college and was
living at home-my father died
when I was young-so we went
to live with my grandfather and
that became our permanent
home. I read my way through
his library.
My grandfather had some
pretty obscure things like
Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days
ofPompeii. He had these really
nice sets of books and I opened
them up and realized they
hadn’t been cut yet. They were
apparently part of my grand
mother’s dowry. In hindsight, I
felt fortunate to be around so
many books.
I think people don’t read if
they can get away with it. I
know so many people who Idled
up their life with reading in
college and that’s the last they
ever read.
{From the Bell Towers}
How didyou become an artist?
I went to high school in New
Canaan and I had one of those
teachers that some people are
fortunate to have-the synergy
was great and he encouraged
me. I didn’t go to college, I was
supposed to go to Cooper
Union-hut the concept of New
York-I guess I was too young.
So I took a year off, and then I
started selling work.
My style is a palimpsest of a
lot of artists. I grew up looking
at cartoonists like those in
The New Yorker, a bunch of
English line artists, and George
Price, slNcw Yorker-type
cartoonist. I like the way that
by just using a line he made
volume. I’m lucky because I
discovered something that
interests me, and I’m lucky
because I get to do something
I love.
I started working for the
New York Times Book Review,
and it really changed my career
from being a not very good
conceptual artist to being an
illustrator. My work is very
dependent on the design, and it
can look really awful. I’ve done
a lot of “whatever comes over
the transom” as they used to
say, and it’s become more and
more portraits.
The [College} covers are the
highest quality work I do of the
black-and-white portrait style.
I know it will look good,
because the design is good.
How do you create these
portraits?
I use watercolor paper and an
old-fashioned drafting pencilit’s sort of like a sports car. I
can make sharp turns, and then
start and stop. I use little ball
point pens, called Uniballs,
while my fiancee uses an
expensive loo-pinpoint. I use
the cheap $1.95 pens. Then I
fill it in with markers, because
I’m really messy. A really scary
thing to me isn’t a chainsaw
massacre; it’s an open bottle of
ink on a drawing table.
Self-portrait
by
David Johnson
How do you do the researchfor
The College covers?
I’ve done much of my research
on the Internet, but I also use
the library. New Canaan is a
very literate community and we
all do fund-raising for the
library, which is very small.
We’re near Storrs, where the
University of Connecticut is,
and the town library there is
good. Sometimes I find two
conflicting pieces of reference.
In one way I love to try to guess
the way they looked. The illus
tration of Virgil is a good
example. I don’t like trying to
draw wigs-Adam Smith wore a
wig. I’m not really sure how
wigs are supposed to look.
Which author are you really
lookingforward to drawing?
I haven’t drawn Dickens yet.
Dickens is just fun, though a lot
of people only know him
through A Christmas Carol.
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 2007 }
Our cat is named Pip. My sister
and I both like Dickens, and if
nothing else, we have lots of
good names for pets.
Well, we don’t read Dickens on
the Program.
What? How can that be?
lU/zrzZ are you reading now?
Thomas Mann, The Magic
Mountain.
We don’t read that on the
Program either right now.
Holy cow! I really like Mann,
especially his early books,
because I’m interested in my
own family and my own person
ality. I can trace my nose back
at least four generations.
�{Philanthropia}
The Fielding Challenge
A Generous Alumnus Raises the Stakes
Ronald H. Fielding (A70) gave
a promising start to “With a
Clear and Single Purpose”:
The Campaign for St. John’s
College with an unprece
dented gift of $10 million in
August aoo3. In January, he
decided to offer the college
another $2.5 million-provided
that alumni join him in
Ronald Fielding (A70), shown with Santa Fe seniors John
Carpenter
and
Melinda Miller-Klopfer, challenges alumni to
SUPPORT THE CAMPAIGN.
making the $125 million
capital campaign a success.
Fielding will match new and
increased alumni gifts, and
multi-year pledges dollar for
dollar up to $2.5 million.
The Campaign for St. John’s
College has raised more than
$100 million in gifts and
pledges. Fielding’s first gift
was directed to the college
endowment for continuing
support of financial aid. His
new gift has heen pledged
specihcally toward the
construction of a new dormi
tory complex in Santa Fe,
though alumni matching gifts
can he unrestricted or directed
to any goal of the campaign.
Through his challenge.
Fielding hopes to inspire
alumni to support the
campaign through the
Annual Fund.
“The dormitories are impor
tant for the Santa Fe campus,”
Fielding says, explaining one
motivation for his gift.
However, by issuing this
challenge, he is also seeking
to stimulate a burgeoning
“culture of giving” among
Johnnies from both campuses.
“To a great extent, this
capital campaign is about
positioning the college for the
future,” he says. “We can’t be
a strong institution without
the support of alumni.”
Sharon Bishop (class of
1965), chair of the board.
An Argos for Annapolis
Arcadia, a spirited Jack Russell mix, joined the Annapolis campus
community last summer. She spends much of her time in the
office of Assistant Dean Anita Kronsberg (A79), where she greets
visitors with enthusiasm and the hope of getting a treat. She’s also
been known to hang out on the Quad, watch croquet practice, and
chase a tennis ball through the corridors of Mellon Hall. Warren
Spector (A81), whose gift to the college made the construction of
Spector Hall, a new dormitory, possible, requested the college
consider a campus dog. Cadie-a rescue dog-got the job.
Student Services Director Taylor Waters (AGI96) is
Cadie’s
one of
many admirers.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
hopes the challenge creates
“new levels of alumni giving.”
“Ron’s first gift was remark
able in itself,” Bishop says.
“His leadership has set a
standard that we hope others
will follow.”
Fielding’s gift, combined
with an anonymous pledge
from another donor, brings the
college much closer to adding
dormitory rooms to the
campus. At 30,000 square
feet, and with 60 beds, the new
dorm will mean the college can
house about 80 percent of
Santa Fe undergraduates on
campus. In addition to student
rooms and common rooms, the
dormitory complex will add
four new seminar rooms and
ten faculty offices, greatly
alleviating a space crunch on
campus.
Santa Fe President Michael
Peters said the progress on
dormitory fundraising,
combined with a $5 million gift
from Graduate Institute
alumnus Dr. Norman Levan for
the construction of a GI center,
has allowed the college to move
construction planning to the
front burner. “These gifts help
us achieve one of our most
important goals-strengthening
our campus as a cohesive
community of learners,”
Peters says.
�8
{From the Bell Towers}
News & Announcements
Green Johnnies Win
MTV Award
Students for a Sustainable
Future, a group formed last fall
in Annapolis by freshmen David
Bronstein, Jean Hogan, and
Malcolm CecU-Cockwell, is one
of five college groups-the only
one from a small coUege-to win
a national competition for a
$1,000 eco-challenge grant from
MTV; Music Television. MTV
sponsors Break the Addiction
Challenge, a nationwide
eco-competition that challenges
students to demonstrate environ
mental changes in their lives and
schools. MTV chose five school
groups that had received print or
broadcast attention and awarded
each a $i,ooo grant. Last fall.
Students for a Sustainable
Future created media buzz with
an article that appeared in the
local paper.
Besides getting the word out
through the media. Students
for a Sustainable Future seeks
to educate St. John’s students
about global warming, ways to
improve recycling on campus,
and reducing energy use. The
group’s overall goal is to develop
strategies to move St. John’s
towards getting too percent of
its energy from renewable
sources, such as the geothermal
system that heats and cools the
new dormitories. “Global
warming will directly affect our
future. We want to use the
campus as a model for a greater
society,” says Bronstein, who
as a high school student in
Maryland’s Montgomery County
lobbied the County Council to
pass a bill requiring more use of
clean energy, such as wind and
solar power.
Santa Fe
HONORED
Students
Fourteen St. John’s students,
along with one alumnus and one
staff member, set out in March
aoo6 to St. Bernard Parish in
Louisiana. They put in 2,248
hours of assistance with the
Emergency Communities,
providing food and supplies at
the Made with Love Cafe, and
joining the nonprofit Common
Ground Collective, gutting
homes and businesses in prepa
ration for renovation. Their trip
was one of hard labor and a labor
of love. The students strength
ened existing relationships and
built new ones; they heard
stories of loss and pain while
creating memories of laughter
and good will; and they learned
up front about the devastation of
mother-nature and bureaucracy.
Their philanthropic deed did not
go unnoticed. President Bush’s
Higher Education Community
Service Corporation recognized
the college, with distinction, on
the Honor Roll for Hurricane
Rehef Service.
New Staff
Gail Griffith joins St. John’s
College as director of communi
cations in Santa Fe. Griffith has a
bachelor’s degree from the
University of California,
Berkeley, and an advanced
degree from Georgetown
University. At Georgetown, she
ran executive training programs
for international leaders for the
university’s School of Foreign
Service. She later joined the
Vietnam Veterans of America
Foundation where, throughout
the 1990S, she worked on the
foundation’s campaign to ban
landmines. She is the author of
Will’s Choice, a memoir based on
her teenage son’s battle with
depression. She serves on the
board of directors of the
American Foundation for
Suicide Prevention and was this
year’s recipient of the Tipper
Gore “Remember the Children”
Award, from the National Mental
Health Association.
Ironman Tutor
On June 25 Santa Fe tutor
J. Walter Sterling Jr. (A93)
completed his first Ironman
triathlon: a 2.4-mile swim,
112.5-mile bike, and 26.2-mile
run, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
He took on the grueling
enterprise not just to challenge
himself physically: “I ran for
Team Ironman, raising money
for local charities, and in
memory of several deceased
dear friends from the
community in which I used to
work: Project H.O.M.E.,
Philadelphia.
“Though I am a long-time
runner, this was only my
second triathlon,” says
Sterling. “I trained as well as
my schedule allowed (with
much help from friends and
many runs up Atalaya), and,
eventually, I was able to finish.
Up at 4:30 a.m., on the beach at
5:30, in the water at 7. After
roughly two hours of swim
ming, eight hours of biking,
and five hours of running later.
Santa Fe tutor J. Walter
Sterling Jr. (A93) rides for
A CAUSE.
{The College* St. John’s College ■ Winter 2001 }
I crossed the finish line at
10:17 P-m. The mid-day temper
ature had reached the mid-pos.
Quite a day!”
Sterling describes the
experience as “a wonderful
catharsis” for both body and
soul. “Physical training has
proven to be the one great
source of balance in my life as a
tutor, and Santa Fe is a glorious
place for it,” he says. “But it is
not just a counterweight. For
some of us, physical discipline
and duress of this sort is an
intrinsic part of liberal educa
tion, but that is a longer story.
In any case, it is probably one
of the best ways to cleanse ‘the
doors of perception.’ ”
Sterling is scheduled to
compete in his next Ironman
this April in Arizona. “I hope
to raise money for Project
H.O.M.E. in its effort to combat
homelessness,” he says. His goal
is to finish in 12 hours.
�{From the Bell Towers}
There’s No Place
Like Homer Club
While they are not the first ones
at St. John’s to explore the
musical qualities of Ancient
Greek, the Homer Club might
be the most technologically
savvy. These Johnnies, who
endeavor to build enough of a
vocabulary to sing passages of
Homer out loud, tape record
themselves and then listen to
the playback to critique their
tonal chanting. “We plan to
present a performance that
emphasizes the scansion, the
musical qualities of Homer,”
says Ben Hoffman, a junior
from Stanford, Connecticut.
“Mr. [Amirthinayagam] David
(A86), a former tutor came up
with the idea of exploring the
musical qualities of Homer. But
we want to become aware of the
whole experience of Homer’s
story.” Hoffman is joined once a
week by core members Bradley
Van Uden, a freshman from
Thousand Oaks, California;
Schuyler Sturm, a junior from
Lyndonville, Vermont; and
Alexandra Walling, a freshman
from Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
The Homer Club practices
two types of singing: chanting
and rhapsody. “With the
chanting you have the circle
dancing,” says Hoffman. “The
physical experience is a huge
part of the circle dancing. It’s
almost a conjuring. If you are in
the circle, you are being swept
away by the sounds of the
words. It’s so powerful you
don’t even need to know what
the story is saying. But with the
rhapsody there’s more drama,
you vary the timing, there are
subtler voice qualities, and you
need to have an audience.”
Hoffman says that rhapsody is
easier to perform than a dance
because it takes just one
person. “You vary the rhythm,
no one is dancing to it, so the
aesthetic value comes from the
dramatic aspects,” he says.
The musicality of the Greek
language derives from the fact
that the Greek accents are pitch
accents, tonal. Hoffman demon
strates by chanting a passage
from the Iliad. “One of the
prettiest passages in Homer is
9
the ‘catalog of ships’ when the
ships are sailing off to Troy,” he
says. “It’s probably not the most
dynamic from a plot stand
point.” Normally there would
be a circle of dancers moving
around the singer, with no other
sound or accompaniment.
“But there is the stomping of
the feet,” says Van Uden. “You
stomp hard so the pattern of
the dance comes through the
rhythm.”
Hoffman is preparing to
perform a rhapsody from the
first book of the Iliad, in which
Chryses asks Agamemnon to
accept ransom for his daughter.
“Schuyler and I plan to perform
this rhapsody for Gollegium as
one of our goals at the end of the
spring semester. Rhapsody is
usually performed by one
person-so it may be somewhat
inauthentic with two but, hey, it
will be fun,” he says.
—Patricia Dempsey
The Homer Club is
captivated
BY THE MUSIC OF AnCIENT GrEEK.
Shown
here
(l. to r.)
Alexandra Walling
are
and
Bradley Van Uden (both Aio),
AND Ben Hoffman (Ao8).
{Letters}
Grateful for
Brother Robert
I had the grace of having
Brother Robert as my tutor for
seminar my freshman year in
Annapolis (1987-88). Those
benignant eyes were consoling
during my first don rag. I
remember him having a group
of students over to his house for
dinner (great chef) to discuss
some aspects of the Iliad and
some psalms in Greek.
At present I am working in
the Vatican, heading up the
“Church and Sport” Section
within the Pontifical Council for
the Laity-a new office dedicated
to the Church’s pastoral care of
the world of sport. Everything
from the Gregorian chant with
the then Dean James Carey in
Santa Fe to the seminars on
Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas
(et alia) were a great start for my
future priestly vocation. (I was
ordained a to the priesthood in
the Congregation of the
Legionaries of Christ January 2,
2001. It may seem ironic that a
former Johnnie would be
involved in an office for sport,
but I can boast of playing inter
collegiate sports at St. John’s:
crew in Annapolis, soccer and
basketball against the College of
Santa Fe in Santa Fe!
Above all, I am indebted to
both Brother Smith and St.
John’s for helping me to find my
vocation in life. I continue the
pursuit of the great books as I
am working toward a doctorate
in dogmatic theology at the
Pontifical Ateneo Regina Apostolorum in Rome.
—The Rev. Kevin Lixey, LC (SF91)
Correction:
In the previous issue’s Alumni
Notes, alumna Janie (Bosworth)
Bingham was incorrectly listed
as Sallie Bingham. Also, Janie
graduated from the Santa Fe
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
Graduate Institute in 1994, not
1993-
The College welcomes letters on
issues of interest to readers.
Letters may be edited for clarity
and/or length. Those under
500 words have a better chance
of being printed in their
entirety.
Please address letters to:
The College magazine,
St. John’s College, Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404.
Letters can also be sent via
e-mail to; rosemary.harty(^
sjca.edu.
�{Capital Campaign}
“WITH A CLEAR AND
SINGLE PURPOSE”
Endowing a Future, Supporting Students
wi Rosemary Harty
s a student, Sharon
involved in the Alumni Association and
Bishop (class of 1965)
later joined the college’s Board of Visitors
always worried about her
and Governors, she could see firsthand
St. John’s tuition bills.
the disparity between the college’s
But immersed in the
renowned academic program and the
Program, she and her
financial resources available to support it.
fellow students gave little thought
the times when we had to go to
“Theretowere
financial state of the college.the
“When
we a loan to make payroll,” she
bank for
were students, money was thought of as a
says. While the college is on firmer
necessary evil or filthy lucre,” she says.
financial ground than it has ever been
“We were above that.”
(with 15 straight years of balanced
After graduation. Bishop began a career
budgets), at the root of the problem is a
as a social worker and later helped estab
college endowment that is still inadequate
lish and build a successful consulting firm.
for the college’s needs.
Caliber Associates, Inc. When she became
A
{The College -St John’s College • Winter 2002 }
�{Capital Campaign}
“The endowment is an
essential foundation for
accomplishing our goals,”
says Bishop, now chair of
the Board of Visitors and
Governors. “Yes, we’re
much better off than
we used to be. But being
a more solid college
financially means every
thing to our future. One,
we can attract more
students, and two, higher
quality students. Three, we
can attract more support
from alumni, friends, and
foundations when we
demonstrate that this is a
good place in which to
invest their dollars. It’s a
question of confidence.”
Increasing the college’s
endowment is one of
three primary goals of
“With a Clear and Single
Purpose”: The Campaign
for St. John’s College. The
campaign goal of $125
million includes $46.5 million for endowment. Along
with tuition revenue, gifts to the annual fund, and state
and federal support, endowment constitutes an impor
tant source of revenue for the college. Drawing about
5 percent from the endowment each year provides
II percent of the college’s budget. A larger endowment
ITie college’s capital campaign
seeks to address priorities that
will sustain the Program and
strengthen the college.
Funding these priorities will
require $125 million. To date,
$101 million has been raised.
THE campaign FOR
STJOHN’S
College
“WITH A CLEAR &
SINGLE PURPOSE"
$33 million for
need-based aid.
iB
$34 million to incrcdsfe faculty
salaries to the median of peer
instilii tions; provide fatuity
development opportunities.
means more growth and
more revenue.
The
endowment-intended to
grow in perpetuity-is
more critical to the life of
the college than any
other goal of the capital
campaign.
“The endowment is
not just to cushion the
blows, to protect the
college in lean times,”
says Bishop. “It helps
relieve the pressure on
annual fundraising and
makes us less dependent
on tuition income. It
means we can do more to
support faculty, student
life, and every aspect of
the academic program.”
A Reversal
of
Fortunes
An inadequate endow
ment has hampered St.
John’s since its founding
in 1784. While Johns
Hopkins University is named for the millionaire who left
$7 million in his estate to endow the university and
hospital, and a Puritan clergyman named John Harvard
left half his estate to a college in Cambridge, no wealthy
philanthropist stepped forth to support St. John’s at its
beginning. Many prominent Annapolis citizens pledged
$3.5 million
to improve services Io students,
fund internship opportunities.
and provide grants so that
elementary and secondary
teachers can attend the
Graduate Institute.
$5 million for library collec
tions and laboratory equip
ment; improving Information
Technology infrastructure.
{The College -St. John’s College ■ Winter 200^ }
ELDING
S49.5 million for
building projects, including a
Santa Fe dormitory, a Graduate
Institute Center in Santa Fe,
and the addition to and renova
tion of Evans Science Labora
tory. The renovation of Mellon
Hall and the addition of two
new dormitories in Annapolis
are completed and fully funded.
�12
{GapitalCampaign}
''St. John s had no business surviving. But it did.
Bud Billups (HA03)
money to help found the college, hut the largest share in
its early years was to come from the coffers of the state of
Maryland, whose lawmakers chartered St. John’s and
Washington College to serve as the state’s institutions of
higher learning.
Unfortunately for St. John’s, the Maryland General
Assembly in 1805 withdrew funds promised to the
college. The college’s supporters were as vexed by the
Assembly’s decision as were faculty and students. In a
letter to the Rev. William Duke, Rev. Joseph G.J. Bend of
Baltimore wrote:
“I have read in the public prints that our sapient Senate
have passed the bill of our more sapient delegates for
depriving the colleges of the whole funds by the promise
of which their predecessors induced a great number of
persons to subscribe very handsomely to their establish
ment. The more I see of democracy the more I detest its
principles, if its votaries act upon them. The reign of the
Goths and Vandals was not more destructive than the
ascendancy of these men has been.”
Goths and Vandals aside. Bend captured the outrage
and dismay that followed in the wake of the General
Assembly’s decision. The bright promise of St. John’s
beginnings was dimmed by this reversal, and the college
would continue to experience periods of serious financial
struggles, interrupted by brief periods of prosperity and
stability, until quite recently.
The advent of the New Program in 1937 garnered the
college respect and admiration, along with international
attention in the media. But barely having survived bank
ruptcy, St. John’s had little opportunity to build an
endowment, especially during the lean war years. A
dogged fund-raiser. President Richard Weigle (HA49)
worked hard to attract gifts to the college. In his final
report to the college in 1980, he reported a $10 million
endowment for Annapolis and slightly over $2 million
in Santa Fe.
Even as recently as 10 years ago, the collegewide
endowment hovered at only $30 million-far below what
was needed to sustain the college. Bud Billups (HA03),
recently retired as Annapolis treasurer and now a
consultant to the college’s Management Committee,
studied the college’s financial history prior to joining
St. John’s in 1991. “St. John’s had no business surviving,”
he says with a smile. “But it did.”
One factor in the college’s survival was the support of
philanthropist Paul Mellon, a student at the college for a
year in 1940. Mellon made regular and substantial gifts to
the college that could have been directed to endowment
but instead went to cover deficits and to build Mellon
Hall. “He kept the doors open,” Billups says.
Another reason the endowment could not grow was the
college’s practice of drawing too much out of the fund.
In the years before Billups joined the Annapolis campus,
the college had been drawing up to 10 percent of its
endowment to balance the operating budget. That was a
practice that had to end, Billups says. The college’s board
endorsed a plan to reduce draw from endowment by
r percent each year over five years. (Today, the college’s
spending policy restricts draw from endowment to 4.5 to
5.5 percent of the endowment, according to a formula
that factors in the rate of return, as well as an educational
price factor.)
Reducing the draw meant several years of severe
budgets for the college. All available resources were
devoted to the academic program and financial aid, which
meant that improvements and repairs to buildings were
deferred, as was routine maintenance. In Annapolis,
eight positions (most vacant) were cut from the college
staff. Salaries for faculty and staff were frozen, and
sabbaticals were eliminated. Among the most difficult
decisions was going to one-tutor senior seminars for a
time.
“We started cutting, but we saw that we could still
operate. A lot of things we did, we did for one year, and
then we put them back. When the community could see
that these cuts weren’t permanent, it made it easier to
endure,” Billups says.
Managing the budget in Santa Fe during the leanest
years was similarly difficult, says Bryan Valentine, Santa
Fe treasurer. “For years we put together what we needed
and then began the gruesome task of cutting everything
{The College- St. John'’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{Capital Campaign}
13
but the bare bones,” he recalls.
member investment committee.
Building Meem Library was
Why Endowment Matters
“These are individuals who are
delayed while the college strug
leaders
in the investment
The chart below illustrates how St. John’s meas
gled to assemble financing for the
industry,” says Billups. “And
ures up compared to peer institutions. As of June
project.
30, 2005 (the most recent year for which audited
each one brings a different area
data is available), the St. John’s endowment
Positions to improve the quality
of expertise.” Gregory Curtis
stands at about $102 million, which means the
of life on campus-for example, a
(HSF02), a long-serving member
college has available a little more than $101,000
student activities coordinatorof
the college’s board and current
per student.
were created and then later cut.
• Grinnell
chair
of the board’s investment
$862,337
•
Tutors went beyond their
Pomona
committee, is chairman of Grey
$750,470
• Swarthmore
$724,850
teaching duties to run student
court & Co, which provides
• Bowdoin
$313,181
clubs or counsel students. “It may
financial advisory services to
• Haverford
$300,709
be one reason Search & Rescue
wealthy
families and select
• Reed
$258,292
was so successful,” Valentine
endowments.
• Oberlin
$208,039
• St. John’s
suggests. “For years, there was
In 1994, the investment
$101,599
little else for students to do.”
committee recommended shifting
Though a bit draconian, the
the bulk of the college’s assets to
cuts of the 1990S ushered in a new era for the college:
the Commonfund, a nonprofit investment management
sustained financial stability. The college went from deficit
firm that invests money in a common pool, improving the
budgets to small surpluses, which were directed to
college’s rate of return. “There was no way, with our
overdue capital projects. The college successfully
limited amount of money, to get good managers for the
completed the collegewide Campaign for a Fourth
college’s endowment,” says Billups. “The Commonfund,
Century in 1996, raising $35 million. “You could feel
with about $18 billion or so in investments, could help us
things turning around,” says Billups. “Projects that were
achieve the diversification we were looking for. And they
put off for years were finally completed and the campus
had a very good track record.”
started looking better. We had really turned a corner.”
The remainder of the endowment is invested in other
funds chosen by the college with support from the
Managing the Money
investment committee, which approaches the college’s
endowment in the same manner that a prudent individual
The college maintains three separate endowment funds,
manages
a retirement portfolio, Curtis says: seeking the
which totaled $102 million as of June 30, 2006, the end of
best
rate
of
return while minimizing risk. “You see in the
the last fiscal year. Each campus has its own endowment,
college’s portfolio very broad kinds of index holdings,
comprising gifts earmarked for a specific campus. A third
some hedge funds and private equity. The portfolio is now
was established because individual donors and founda
large
enough that we need to have exposure to more
tions wanted to make a gift to both campuses. Under the
cutting-edge
kinds of product. We can gain access and we
purview of the Management Committee, the college
have the expertise on the investment committee and the
develops budgets. The two campuses each have a separate
board to do it,” he says.
operating budget, drawing from their own endowments
As the St. John’s endowment continues to grow, the
and sharing the draw in the college fund. The college’s
college may engage an outside expert to advise the board
board reviews and approves the budgets.
and the college management committee. But it doesn’t
All three endowment funds are now invested according
take
an expert to point out how well the college would be
to a college-wide strategy under the guidance of a five{The College -St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{Capital Campaign}
14
''We re at thepoint where we re lookingfive years ahead.
Bronte Jones, Annapolis treasurer
served if it reaches its
capital campaign goal,
maintains conservative
spending, and grows
the endowment through
prudent investing. “Every
thing gets a lot better,”
Curtis says.
Looking
Future
Income from endowment
SUPPORTS THE INSTRUCTIONAL
PROGRAM AT St. John’s.
to the
The new treasurer in
Annapolis, Bronte Jones,
has a different perspective
on endowment. She joined
St. John’s last July from
Huston-Tillotson Univer
sity in Austin, Texas,
where she managed chron
ically limited resources.
With an endowment of
$io million, the university
is enduring the kind of
crises St. John’s managed
2,0 years ago, and it affects
every facet of their opera
tion.
“They would love to be
able to offer the kind of
financial aid St. John’s
can,” says Jones. “Without our endowment, that couldn’t
be done. And through the capital campaign, we are
protecting that capability.”
Although she has just recently joined the college, Jones
agrees with Billups’ assessment that the college is beyond
the days of living fiscal year to fiscal year. “We’re at the
point where we’re looking five years ahead and consid
ering the financial implications of our plan. We have a
wish list of things we want to do, such as creating
additional common rooms or refurbishing our existing
ones. Where St. John’s
used to be, those would be
luxuries.”
The college’s financial
policies today aim for
“financial stability over
the next 50 to 100 years,”
Jones says. “You can’t
ever relax. It’s a nice place
to be, but there are still
plenty of serious issues.”
Sharon Bishop attrib
utes the college’s financial
health in part to good
management, but also to
the extraordinary gifts the
college has received from
alumni, friends, and foun
dations. Bishop herself
has pledged $i million to
the campaign, directed to
the endowment in support
of financial aid.
As in her student days,
the cost of tuition remains
an ongoing concern for
Bishop. But as long as the
endowment is well-managed and continues to grow to
ensure access for all qualified students, she’ll support
tuition increases that keep the college on solid ground.
“I had more concerns about raising tuition in the past,
because I felt that we’re sending the wrong signal. Now I
know we have the right approach, as long as we support
students who don’t have the resources to pay tuition.”
{The College- St. John’s College - Winter 2001 }
�{Capital Campaign}
Every Dollar Tells a Story
BY Emily DeBusk (A06)
The college’s endowment fund comprises a host of individual
funds-many established to honor the memory or contributions
of a tutor, classmate, or long-serving staff member. Some
endow a special purpose, while others are unrestricted. All
funds are at work in the daily life of the college.
A Sacrifice
Remembered__________________________
After his graduation from St. John’s in 1965, James McClintock
was just settling into his first job as a teacher in Connecticut
when he was drafted into the Army. Two years later, he was in
Vietnam, serving with the Army’s 69th engineer battalion. As
the now infamous Tet Offensive seeped toward the borders of
South Vietnam, McClintock, along with only five other soldiers,
was given the impossible task of defending the perimeter of an
airfield at Can Tho. He was killed in action on January 31,1968,
at age 25. After his death classmates and friends began making
gifts to St. John’s in his name. With the additional aid of his
family, the fund became established as the James R. McClintock
Memorial Fund, used exclusively for the annual mathematics
prize in Annapolis. In correspondence with President Richard
Weigle, McClintock’s mother wrote, “St. John’s has had a
special meaning to us-and now more than ever-it represents
true America.”
Philosophy, Football,
and
Floorboards
According to the citation for his Alumni Association Award of
Merit, given in 1978,
Bryce Jacobsen (class of
1942) “consistently
demonstrated that
Socrates and softball,
philosophy and football,
and Ptolemy and tennis
are by no means incom
mensurate.” Jacobsen
came to St. John’s as a
tutor in 1958, and
although he was a
favorite mathematics
tutor, he is best remem
bered as a champion of
the college’s intramural
athletics program. The
class of 1986 set up an
endowment fund to be
Bryce Jacobsen, in his famous
used for one of the two
barber’s chair.
mathematics prizes
awarded at graduation,
which thereafter became known as the Bryce Jacobsen
Mathematics Prize. As a creative fund-raiser for the
endowment, members of the class of 1986 sold plaques made
from the maple wood that used to be the floorboards of Iglehart
Gym. Jacobsen retired in 1988 and died a decade later.
A Fitting Tribute________________________________
Twice a year students, faculty, and Annapolis community
members attend the Steiner lectures, which are known for their
diverse subjects and distinguished speakers. This lectureship
was specially designed to be as intellectually versatile as
alumnus Andrew Steiner (class of 1963), who was killed in a car
accident in 1991. In addition to being the president of NHP
Corporation for 20 years, Steiner was known to the St. John’s
community as a loyal and generous friend who was deeply
concerned with the welfare of the Program. Established by gifts
from the Advanta Corporation, Dennis and Gisela Alter, and
Steiner’s family and friends, the Andrew Steiner Visiting
Lecture Scholars Fund brings two visiting personalities from a
wide range of studies each year to spend time on campus with
students and faculty and to preside over one of St. John’s most
honored traditions-the Friday night lecture. Steiner’s widow,
Lenore, remains an active and invaluable friend of the college
by serving on the Board of Visitors and Governors.
Two
Maryland Institutions
In 1699, a Welsh immigrant named Thomas Linthicum
acquired part of a tobacco farm in what is now Crofton,
Maryland. The home built there by his grandson Thomas
Linthicum III, “Linthicum Walks,” is thought to have housed
George Washington on his journeys. Throughout the genera
tions, eight Linthicums have passed through St. John’s, from
Matthias (1844), to Cadwallader (187g) who went on to become
a famous mathematician, to William (1913) who was the last
Linthicum to graduate. In 1997, St. John’s received a $50,000
bequest from a magnanimous descendent, local attorney
Sweetser Linthicum, in addition to the generous gifts he made
throughout his life.
Celebrating a Courageous Precedent_____________
In 1952, Martin Dyer of Baltimore was the first AfricanAmerican to graduate from St. John’s College. St. John’s was
in turn the first college south of the Mason-Dixon Line to
voluntarily end the practice of segregation. Dyer later
congratulated the college for taking the important first step of
not only allowing, but recruiting, black students in a time when
segregation was still common. The Martin Dyer Book Fund was
founded in 1997 to enable students who could not otherwise
afford to buy Program books to do so. Dyer-who makes an
annual gift to the fund himself-continues to encourage his
classmates to give.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
15
�{The Day Job}
THE DAY JOB
Ambitious Johnnies Pursue their Dreams
BY Rosemary Harty
Archer arrived in New York in August 2004 and has held a series
ometimes dreams change,
of day jobs that range from wretched to pleasant while she audi
get put on hold, or replaced
tioned for roles. “I’ve held a string of negligible jobs,” she says.
“The first tele-marketing job was for a company that helped sell
by new dreams. Sometimes
tickets for theater organizations, so I didn’t feel too bad about
they just grow more urgent.
that, though people were still pretty annoyed to be bothered.
Another was tele-marketing those vacation time-shares; that was a
The College talked with five
total disgrace.”
Johnnies who over the past
The stereotypical job for aspiring actresses is waitressing, but
didn
’t have enough experience to land a restaurant job. “I
year were trying to break into theArcher
fields
of
did some catering, but that was an appalling failure,” she says.
acting, opera singing, fiction writing
and
“Part of my problem is that I refuse to get a job that doesn’t allow
S
filmmaking.
Callbacks
and
Tele-marketing
Larissa Archer (SFot)
A few years ago, Larissa Archer auditioned for a top Broadway
agent. She performed one of her favorite pieces, from Strind
berg’s Miss Julie. When she finished her monologue. Archer knew
the agent was impressed.
“He said, T love your work, I love your style. But as tall as you
are, I don’t think I can get you work,’ ” she says.
Archer stands 6'2" in her stocking feet. Her height is one of the
things working against her in her aspirations to break into
acting.“It can get discouraging, but it’s just how it is,” Archer
says. “If someone doesn’t think they can make money off you,
they’re not going to take a gamble.”
me to skip out when I need to for an audition; I need jobs that just
give me that kind of freedom.”
Archer’s acting ambition developed in high school in San Fran
cisco. “I studied acting when I was home from college in Santa Fe,
and after I graduated I studied more. I was part of a theater
company called the Actor’s Theater. I performed, did some
dramaturgy, and even swept the stage.”
As a performance artist. Archer worked up a slam poetry
monologue that stole the show every night. She played the title
role in Sr. Mary Ignatius Explains It Allfor You.
On the same day Archer quit her theater job-‘T badly needed a
change,” she says-her mother, a jewelry designer, returned home
from a trunk show in New York. With a few phone calls to friends,
she had found Larissa a cheap room to rent in New York. Later,
since her mother visited the city so often, she bought a
“semi-affordable” condo in the Bronx to give her daughter a base.
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�{The Day Job}
Commuting to Manhattan by subway can be tiresome, “but not
having a roommate is great.”
Archer made a practice of signing up for Equity Principle
Auditions. “You get up at 6 a.m. to stand in line at the Equity
Center, sign up at 8 and around 10 a.m. they tell you whether
you’re going to be seen. I’ve been seen by Second Stage and Yale
Repertory, and I’ve done off-off-Broadway auditions. I’ve done
more audition in theaters that are less likely to cast me, but I
figured I’d aim high.”
This fall. Archer took her dreams a step further by moving to
London to enroll in a master’s degree program in classical acting
at the Central School of Speech and Drama. She played Hamlet for
her first-term assessment. Cast in two shows, she had to turn the
roles down because of her class schedule.
Archer is glad she went to St. John’s before pursuing drama
training-it will help keep her on the right path to virtue and excel
lence in a field that can challenge such notions. Imagine if Marlon
Brando had studied Aristotle? she wonders. “I’m glad that I’ll
always have something worthwhile to occupy my mind,” she says.
17
Larissa Archer (SFoi) poses by Central Park’s Delacorte
Theater. She hopes a master’s degree will help her career.
Opera and the Office
Aaron Silverman (Agd)
By night, you’re Papageno, Balthasar, or a peasant in the chorus.
By day, you’re an administrator, answering e-mails and scheduling
appointments. That was Aaron Silverman’s life for three years in
New York City, as he tried to break into the opera scene.
Silverman balanced auditions, performances, and singing lessons
with his office job, never losing sight of his passion for the opera.
Those who aren’t drawn to perform may not grasp the lure of it
all: the stage, the audience-the applause. But opera is satisfying
on a deeper level, says Silverman. “It really is fantastic to be up
there and singing over an orchestra, being able to connect with
people who were writing 300 years ago. It really is exciting to be
able to bring their art to life,” he says.
{The C o l l e g e . St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�i8
{TheDayJob}
Silverman has always loved
to sing; in high school he took
part in musical theater with
roles in plays such as Guys
and Dolls. During his sopho
more year, spent in Santa Fe,
he took voice lessons with
Mary Neidorf, the widow of
former Santa Fe dean Boh
Neidorf (HA83). As his voice
matured, he developed a
strong hass baritone, and at
the college he studied the
St. Matthew Passion and Don
Giovanni.
“I wrote my junior essay on
Don Giovanni and my senior
essay on Otello. I did have a
little trouble defending it.
One tutor asked about the role
of God and the role of good
and evil as Verdi saw it. I
wanted to show that Verdi did
have religious ideas in mind,
but one of the tutors on the
committee said, ‘it’s just an
opera. How can it mean
anything more than that?’” At
commencement, Silverman
was vindicated when his paper won an essay prize.
After graduation, Silverman won a full scholarship to study at
Catholic University’s Rome School of Music. The program was
demanding, including two years of French, German, Italian, and
classes in music theory and performance. He also had the oppor
tunity to sing, with the school’s chorus, for the pope.
Most opera singers choose music conservatories for their
undergraduate degree, but Silverman believes his liberal arts
studies will be advantageous in the long run. “I feel like St. John’s
was the ideal education for an opera singer,” he says. “Being able
to analyze a text, having the background in literature and
philosophy, you can see how these composers were working.”
At this stage in his career, Silverman still considers himself a
semi-professional opera singer. He auditions all the time, even for
small parts or a slot in the chorus. “You make the best of the jobs
you get and try to turn them into jobs for the future,” he says.
Among the highlights so far: he played Jose Castro, a bit part
in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West for City Opera. Friends and
family from all over came to see him during the six-week run of
the opera.
Aaron Silverman (A96)
PRACTICES
and
AUDITIONS,
WAITING FOR HIS BREAK IN
OPERA.
Like many in the arts in
New York, Silverman took
temporary jobs while he
auditioned and performed.
One job led to a permanent
position as assistant to the
chair of psychiatry at Cornell
University’s Weill Medical
College. Affordable housing
was elusive; he moved seven
times.
Recently, Silverman’s life
changed dramatically. He and
his girlfriend are having a
baby, so he’s moving back to
the D.C. area, where he’ll
find a day job conducive to
supporting a family. He’s
planning to audition with the
Baltimore Opera and perhaps
some smaller companies. A
recent audition with the
opera at Wolftrap went
poorly when Silverman tried
to audition even though he was sick. “I would have loved that
job,” he says.
Silverman is realistic, but not discouraged. “I don’t think I’m
going to be doing opera as a primary thing for at least two years.
But I’m going to keep practicing.”
Shopping Scripts
and
Teaching English
Benjamin Friedman (SFg§)
After the civilized courtesy of St. John’s seminars, Benjamin
Friedman was ill-prepared for film school at the University of
Southern California. Lecture classes, cutthroat competition,
and savage criticism from professors were something of a shock
to him.
After graduation, Friedman took a video production class at the
College of Santa Fe and liked it so much he decided to apply to
use. He had been warned about the competitive nature of the
business, but it didn’t seem too bad-until the students started
scrambling for funding. “There are only so many films that they
allow to be made, and you start submitting scripts and past work
{The College - St John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{The Day Job}
19
''Temping can bepretty
depressing although I was at
apoint that I was so relieved
to have a steady income.
to try to show the faculty that
films. While completing his MFA,
you’re the right person to get the
he worked on others’ films,
resources,” he says. “After the first
recording sound, managing equip
year, people start feeling a little
ment or handling other technical
pinched.”
matters. He’s made two short films
Benjamin Friedman {SF95)
Friedman had to get used to blunt
with autobiographical elements:
criticism. A particularly bad
Aimless told the story of a young
moment came when he pitched a film idea about a crazy man who
man who graduates from college without any idea of what to do
cages a woman like a bird. Where he saw metaphors of free will
next. Hopeless picks up the same story, with a “lonely, neurotic
and human destiny, his professor saw a bondage film. Another
man” who meets a “lonely neurotic woman” and then keeps
idea, for a film about a man who discovers another woman was
blowing his chance at love. “It’s a talky romantic comedy-far
given his dead wife’s heart, was similarly shot down. “I though it
from Woody Allen, but I like it.” The main character, he says, “is
was touching and upbeat,” recalls Friedman. “I showed the script
a schmucky Jewish guy, just like me.”
to three faculty members, and one actually said that it disgusted
With his screenwriting partner, Camille Landau, Friedman
him. Those USC guys-they don’t mince words.”
recently finished a full-length script of one of his shorter films.
Nevertheless, Friedman still enjoyed his studies, putting his
“Our script has attracted the interest of an independent produc
creativity to work in writing scripts and turning them into short
tion company,” he says. “Everything is extremely preliminary at
the moment, but it’s exciting to be talking to people.”
Friedman has pursued a number of day jobs including
teaching and temping. He helped out in the script depart
ment for a television special and did filing at an art gallery.
“Temping can be pretty depressing, although I was at a
point that I was so relieved to have a steady income,”
he recalls. “Rather than working harder or getting more
day jobs, I made my living expenses more and
more slender.”
Fortunately for Friedman, a more interesting day job
came along. He began teaching English as a second
language to adults. “This is a day job I like very much,”
he says. “The students are wonderful, they’re highly
motivated, they’re very gracious and grateful, and there’s
that feeling you get of doing something to contribute
to society.”
Friedman has applied to law school and may pursue a
career in public interest law. “I hope to continue writing
scripts, but in the short term I don’t expect filmmaking to
be a major part of my life. I’ve had great experiences
working in entertainment. It’s exciting, it’s full of
surprises, and you meet a lot of interesting people,” he says.
Though if a Johnnie asked him for advice, Friedman
isn’t sure he’d recommend film school. “Better, perhaps,
to start working in the business as a gofer or production
assistant, learn the ropes and work your way up,” he says.
Benjamin Friedman (SF95)
teaches
ESL while
shopping
SCRIPTS TO PRODUCERS AND CONTEMPLATING LAW SCHOOL.
{The College-
St. John’s College • Winter 2oot }
�20
{TheDayJob}
Arthur Allen (Ao6) pursues
Shakespeare and
Curious George
ACTING GIGS AND TEACHES SPANISH.
Arthur Allen (Ao6)
Arthur Allen had just auditioned
for an anti-littering commercial. “I
was supposed to glare at somebody
who was throwing a cigarette on the
ground. In the next take, I was the
one throwing the cigarette. It was
kind of fun.”
It was a bit basic for Allen, but it
could mean a paying gig-some
thing that would help him pay the
rent and buy food while he
performed without pay as Duke
Orsino in Twelfth Night for a new
fringe theatre company in Seattle.
Since he returned to the Seattle
area last fall, Allen has been lucky
to have many auditions and several
paid acting jobs in his hometown.
In late January, he was gearing up
for his last performance as Curious
George for a repertory company
called “Book-It,” which adapts
works of literature for the stage.
The traveling company performs at schools in the Seattle area, and
Allen was looking forward to performing at his old high school,
where he first got the acting bug. “To be on the other end this time
is exciting,” he says. After his gig as a monkey ended, Allen was to
take on the role of a villain in a production based on Isabel
Allende’s House ofSpirits. “I go from playing a lovable monkey to
molesting a woman and chopping off her fingers,” he says.
Allen knew he didn’t want to study acting as an undergraduate.
“I felt I would gain more in terms of my art by understanding the
human condition,” he explains. “I asked myself, what was the
point of knowing how to tell a story if I didn’t have a story to tell?
There was never a doubt in my mind that St. John’s was the place
for me.”
After graduation, Allen moved back home and lived briefly with
his parents in Mukilteo, about an hour outside Seattle. When
commuting interfered with auditions and performances, he found
a room with family friends in Seattle. To support himself, Allen
tutors and teaches Spanish to kindergartners, first-graders, and
second-graders in a parochial school.
Allen worked briefly in the men’s department of Nordstrom,
selling neckties and other accessories. He gave it up shortly after
having to turn down an audition
for the part of a terrorist on the
hit TV show 24. The script was
intriguing. “I had to smash some
one’s face against a desk while my
superior interrogated him,” he
says. But Allen couldn’t find
someone to cover his shift at the
department store and was too
conscientious to call in sick. “I
guess it’s St. John’s-all those read
ings in ethics,” he says.
He has an agent who calls him
often for auditions; everything from
modeling gigs, which can pay $150
an hour, to commercials and televi
sion shows. “It’s very important to
detach yourself from the outcome.
Actors encounter rejection all the
time, so you can’t get discouraged.
Most of the time, they’re not
looking at what you can do as an
actor. They’re out for a particular
look. For now. I’m pretty content.”
Allen doesn’t see himself heading for LA or New York to look for
the big break. “It’s more satisfying to be part of the arts culture
here,” he says.
Recently Allen has combined great books, acting, and entrepreneurism by launching his own one-man theater company,
specializing in bringing great books to life. He called it Voices
Verbatim, and only uses works written or translated before 1930,
“to avoid paying royalties,” he adds. More is available on his Web
site: VoicesVerbatim.com.
Writing
and
Waitressing
Sally Benson (SFog)
One of the things that’s sustained Sally Benson (SF03) is enjoying
the journey, not focusing too much on the destination-though
she sometimes wishes the journey came with better pay and health
insurance. Benson studied dance briefly in college, but aban
doned that path and found herself in Washington, working for the
National Endowment for the Humanities in an administrative
support position. A rejected St. John’s grant application, with a
Program Statement attached, made it to her desk one day for
{The College- St. John’s College ■ W^inter 2001 }
�ai
{The Day Job}
recycling. She pitched the application,
Critique sessions in which she read her
hut kept the statement and eventually
work aloud gave her the incentive to
visited the Santa Fe campus. “I sat it on
write seriously and the courage to find
a discussion of Aristotle’s Metaphysics,
her voice. “Writing short stories is
Sally Benson {SF03)
and it was the most wonderful thing,”
hard-you’re really got to hook the
she says.
reader and have a strong plot, so I’m
After graduation, Benson stayed in
working on that. Now I’m wondering
Santa Fe for as long as she could afford to, ultimately deciding to
about flash fiction or prose writing and I’m curious about writing
poetry.”
move to New York. She hoped to find a good job to support herself
while pursuing an interest in writing. “I’ve always had a love for
The workshop leader, a literary magazine editor, was blunt in
language,” she says. “I had taken fiction writing classes before I
his critiques, though not unkind. “I didn’t take it personally. He
went to St. John’s, and I found that some of my papers at St. John’s
was treating us as if we’re published writers.” Benson is ready to
pushed the envelope in terms of creative writing. In junior year,
start sending her fiction pieces out to literary journals, but she’s a
one of my essays was a dialogue with David Hume. I had him come
little wary of rejection. “I understand if you get a note back
over to tea, arguing with him about the idea that we don’t have
with the rejection, that’s a really great thing. It must be pretty
personal identity.”
discouraging when it’s a form letter,” she says.
Studying poetry in language tutorial was also a joy. “Words to
By the end of last spring, Benson’s enchantment with New York
had worn off. She took a
me are like brush strokes on
summer job working at a
paper. How we refine our
vineyard in Southern Mary
words, our phrases, our para
land to clear her head. Finan
graphs, it’s fascinating to me
cial realities-rent, car insur
what you can do with language.
ance, food-often intrude on
I definitely know that writing is
her vision of a writer’s life.
important to me.”
“It’s important to make room
But there was the small
to imagine doing something
matter of supporting herself in
different than just struggling
one of the costliest cities in the
to pay my rent,” she says.
world. And while plenty of
Last summer, Benson
administrative jobs were avail
headed back to Santa Fe,
able, Benson knew she
where she landed part-time
couldn’t sit behind a desk
work at the Meem Library
again. Instead she talked
while pondering her next
herself onto the wait staff of a
move. Should she pursue the
high-end French restaurant.
practical realm-perhaps law
“It was really a professional
school? Or follow her
French kitchen. It was six days
passion? “I miss writing very
a week, all day long.” Though
much these days,” she says.
she was making $40,000 a
“But at least here in the
year, it was overall a tough job.
library, I can enjoy more
It did give her great material
reading.”
for three short stories, called
“Small Bites,” which examine
fife at a restaurant.
Soon after hitting the city,
Benson began taking classes at
the Gotham Writer’s Work
shop. She took part in several
Sally Benson (SF03) had to
FLEE EXPENSIVE NeW YoRK,
classes, including some all-day
BUT SHE LEFT WITH GOOD
sessions with other writers.
'' Words to me are like brush
strokes on paper.
STORY IDEAS.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 3001 }
�2,2,
{Race
and
Human Nature}
UNDERSTANDING THE
“OTHER”
A Graduate PreceptorialExplores
Race and lliitnan Nature
wi Rosemary Harty
hat does it mean to
be the “other”? Why
do human beings
make distinctions
based on skin color
or supposed racial
heritage? Is racism a
type of ignorance
that can be remedied
with education and integration? What are its sources in the
human soul?
Joan Silver (MA76), director of the Graduate Institute,
has been thinking about the first question for much of her
adult life. The other questions evolved from the readings
Silver chose for the preceptorial she offered last spring, on
Race and Human Nature.
“The distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ is deeply
embedded in American society and carries the additional
weight of the history of slavery,” explains Silver. “We often
act as if we can avoid issues of race, but in fact they are with
us every day as is the general human tendency to make
some group into the ‘other.’ ”
When she began planning her preceptorial. Silver says,
the topic of race and racism had been “brewing” in her
psyche for some time. In the undergraduate program, she
had led students in discussions of stories such as Faulkner’s
“The Bear” and O’Conner’s “The Artificial Nigger,” rich,
complex stories that look at the difficult question of racial
distinction, slavery, and at what underlies these matters in
the human soul. Tutor George Russell helped her plan the
course by making some suggestions based on a course in
African-American literature that he had taught at a private
secondary school many years ago. Over the 16 weeks of the
preceptorial, students read and discussed works including
the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Richard
Wright’s Black Boy, Huckleberry Finn, Supreme Court
cases, and poetry by Langston Hughes.
Silver knew her own experiences and attitudes
influenced her desire to work on these texts. She grew up in
a predominantly white community in California in the
1950S and early 1960s with little exposure to AfricanAmericans, but acutely aware of the importance of the first
efforts to bring about integration. Minority students and
faculty were also an important element of the community
at a college she attended as an undergraduate. State
University of New York College at Old Westbury, started
as an “experimental school” in 1968. Contact with these
individuals-and with their differing relationships to their
racial heritage-had an enduring impact on her thinking
about race.
It was also at Old Westbury that she learned of St. John’s,
where she came to do the undergraduate program
and ended up as a tutor. Silver later joined the Santa Fe
faculty in 1989. When she returned to the Annapolis
campus in 1997, she and her partner, April Gifford, settled
in Cheverly, Maryland, an integrated community within
{The College - John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{Race and Human Nature}
the predominantly AfricanAmerican Prince George’s
County outside of D.C.
Their new community
offered their children an
opportunity to grow up in a
setting rich with diversity.
Yet Silver was startled hy
her reaction to their first
weeks in Cheverly. “It was
very interesting to me to he
a minority in the grocery
store,” Silver says. “I think
for anyone to he in a
minority anywhere, one
feels certain things-that
feeling of being ‘other.’ I
love living in this community-it’s so sane to live in
such a setting.”
That experience of being
“other” was valuable. It
helped to foster in her a desire to lead a sustained look at
issues she had touched on in these seminar readings with
undergraduates.
Many more graduate students than could be accommo
dated listed the preceptorial as one of their choices. Those
who got in-Wesley Scott Brown (AGI07) among themconsidered themselves fortunate to be sitting at the table
with students of different races and different backgroundsall equally enthusiastic about the readings and drawn to the
topic. “There were readings in that class that I’ll go hack to
for the rest of my life,” says Brown.
Brown grew up in the South and has a compelling
interest in race relations. He hopes to work for a nonprofit
community development group, preferably in an inner
city such as Washington, D.C. “Growing up in Georgia,
you still feel the vestiges of what the institution of slavery
did to that region. I think that experience, combined
with my Christian beliefs, developed in me an under-
as
GI Director Joan Silver found
PERSISTING QUESTIONS ABOUT
HUMAN NATURE IN WORKS THAT
EXAMINE RACE AND
DISCRIMINATION.
standing of race relations
and a desire to work toward
reconciliation and equality,”
he says.
No passage in the readings
was more thought-provoking
for Brown than this section
from Frederick Douglass’
autobiography,
where
Douglass stands watching
the ships on the Chesapeake
Bay and yearns for freedom:
“ ‘You are loosed from your
moorings, and are free; I am
fast in my chains, and am a
slave! You move merrily
before the gentle gale, and I
sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swiftwined angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in
bands of iron! O that I were free! ’ ”
“Perhaps it’s because this is happening on Maryland’s
Eastern Shore, not too far from Annapolis, that made it so
moving to me,” Brown says. “I thought it was such a
compelling example of the human desire for freedom,
about the brutality of slavery.”
Douglass’ narrative should be required reading for high
school students. Brown says. “It forces the reader into the
shoes of the one being oppressed. That’s what’s so powerful
about all the books we read in the course. Any time you can
put yourself in the shoes of another, that’s a way to empha
size the equality of all mankind,” he says.
A high school teacher in Severna Park, Maryland, Kelly
Nash (AGI07) teaches a diverse group of students and knew
the literature and autobiographies in the preceptorial
could inspire insights she could share with her own
{The College - John’s College ■ Winter 2001 }
�2,4
{Race
and
Human Nature}
Dream Variation
by Langston Hughes
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun.
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently.
Dark like meThat is my dream!
students. “It looked like an interesting way
On the first day of class. Silver asked
to look at a modern problem,” she says.
students why they had chosen this precepto
Just as Silver had an eye-opening experi
rial.
“I looked around the table and said,
To fling my arms wide
ence in the grocery store near her home,
‘
isn
’
t
it obvious’?” Sawyer says, laughing.
In the face of the sun.
Nash experienced what it was like to be a
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
She wanted to dispel the kind of tension
Till the quick day is done.
minority when she was a Peace Corps
that can arise when white people talk about
Rest at pale evening...
volunteer overseas. Particularly in China,
race and racism in a group that includes
A tall, slim tree...
where she taught in a small farming village,
African-Americans.
Night coming tenderly
she felt like an outsider as a Caucasian
“We had really good conversations,
Black like me.
and as an American. She stood out
really open conversations,” says Sawyer,
among others and sometimes felt hostility
who said hearing the perspective of
because of it.
students from the South opened new
The readings were thought-provoking, and at times,
avenues of thought for her as well.
difficult-but they’re important for Americans to read about
At St. John’s, she was part of a campus that is predomi
and understand racism, both historically and in a modern
nantly white. But because of the nature of the Program and
context. “The narrative by Frederick Douglass really
the respect of her classmates and tutors, she never felt that
stands out,” Nash recalls. “It was so honest. You could see
race mattered: “I was having a discussion with another
the point where he broke, he had put up with so much. He’s
African-American student in the GI program, and I asked
being whipped and he reaches this point where he’s not
her what she thought about it-she said she felt ‘colorless’ at
going to be whipped any more. You see how arbitrary, how
St. John’s, that the books and ideas mattered. And I had to
cruel, the treatment of slaves was.”
agree I felt the same way.”
Stepheca Sawyer (AGI06) had read all the works in the
In her preceptorial paper on Richard Wright’s autobiog
preceptorial with the exception of Flannery O’Conner’s
raphy, Black Boy, Sawyer considered how human beings
“The Artificial Nigger.” Yet talking about them around a
wear “masks of pride” that camouflage their fear. “A
table with students of different races and different
common thread in our discussion was the fear of the
backgrounds was new to Sawyer, as she had earned under
unknown. We may be saying one thing in public, but we
graduate and graduate degrees at historically black
believe something else. A lot of things we shouldn’t do are
colleges. She is currently a professor of business leadership
done in the name of pride.
and the business retention coordinator at Morgan State
“Every week, I would ask, “what are people afraid of?’
University in Baltimore.
Whether you want to admit it in front of everyone in class or
Sawyer had planned to attend divinity school but chose to
not, we are afraid of things. I know we dealt with that ques
attend the Graduate Institute because she wanted to better
tion in every single book. What are we still afraid of in our
understand the foundations of Western thought. Initially,
society today? I don’t know if we can answer that but I guess
she wasn’t a big talker in class. But by the time she took
that goes with the St. John’s way-you don’t focus on the
Silver’s preceptorial, she had found her voice. “This time, I
answer, you just think about it. And maybe, you get closer to
approached these texts more from the human nature side,
the truth.”
instead of the political view. Because I was looking at them
Perhaps the hardest thing for her was reading and
with a St. John’s eye, I saw things I had never seen in them
hearing the racial slurs, particularly the word “nigger,”
before,” she says.
found in many of the readings. “The first 20 times it came
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter zooi }
�{RaceandHumanNature}
25
''We may be saying one thing in public, but we believe something else.
A lot ofthings we shouldn i do are done in the name ofpride.
Stepheca Sawyer (AGI06)
up, it almost felt like somebody was jabbing me,” she says.
“It’s a painful word, aword full of hate, and I had to kind of
numb myself to it. Some of my classmates came up after
ward and apologized when they had to read a passage.”
Another African-American participant in the class was
Crystal Watkins, who until recently was the admissions
counselor for diversity at St. John’s. Watkins grew up in
Annapolis and attended the Key School, where she recently
returned as alumni director. She attended the University of
Virginia and the University of Maryland, where she was
active in groups for African-Americans. Although she
audited the class to learn more about the St. John’s
Program for her job, Watkins sat at the table and took part
in the discussions.
Talking about race comes easily to Watkins, she says.
Often problems fester when
views go unsaid. “Race and
ethnicity and culture had
been such a part of my world
for the previous six years, I
want to hear what other
people have to say about it. If
tension enters the room, I
want to work through that
and come out the other
side,” she says.
Watkins had read many of
the works in African-Amer
ican studies classes, where
they were always discussed
within the context of
history, politics, or soci
ology.
Reading
and
discussing O’Conner’s “The
Artificial Nigger” was a
particularly memorable part
of the class for her. Focusing
just on the characters and
the action in the story-
instead on the social context of racism in the Southallowed her to reflect on what the story said about
humanity.
“It was a short story, but so very powerful, with inter
esting characters in just about every paragraph. We found
deeper meanings talking about it together-black vs. white,
city vs. country, the differences between the generations.”
Several participants in the class, including Watkins, were
intrigued by one question a student raised. “He asked
whether that people may be happier being in the wrong
than finding out the truth,” Watkins says. “They want their
truth, their justice. They would rather live with their own
constructed truth than with what is morally right. I think
the class did settle on something like that-something a
little disturbing.”
Leah Lavin, who gradu
ates from the GI this spring,
was also intrigued by what
the question raised about
human nature. “The ques
tion was, ‘isn’t it interesting
that we humans are more
afraid of being proven
wrong than continuing to
live out the wrong that we
do?’ We were talking about
Faulkner’s
Go Down,
Moses.''''
Lavin grew up in Signal
Mountain, Tennessee, where
the schools, and perhaps the
community, were “quietly
segregated and maybe even
quietly racist.” She was
amazed that most of her
friends chose to attend the
In class and in her paper,
Stepheca Sawyer (AGI06)
EXPLORED THE FEAR FACTOR,
{The College* St. John’s College • Winter 2001 }
�a6
{RaceandHumanNature}
Cotton Ball, held for debutantes
of “Confederate descent.” “I
thought that was so obvious that
it was ridiculous,” she says.
In every class of the precepto
rial, Lavin felt she was delving
into the kind of issues and :
discussion that drew her to 5
St. John’s in the first place.
“The books in this class were
important, but the mix of students was so strong that we
really looked forward to hearing one another talk-this
class had almost a friendship sort of atmosphere to it,” she
says. “We talked about fear. We talked about this tendency
we have to define the ‘other.’ There’s pain in some of these
readings, especially the Faulkner and Frederick Douglass.
You feel you have to approach it with care.”
Courtney Lawrence, who completed the graduate
program last December, wrote in an e-mail that one
reason she took the class was curiosity about “how a
predominately white campus with a predominately white
staff would tackle the issue of race as it relates to human
interactions.”
“Actually, I thought the scope [of the class] was a little
narrow to gain a great deal of insight into human nature-at
least not any more than I’d struggled with before,” she
wrote. “The course and readings alone spoke volumes.
Though as the only race we focused on was the black
American race, I wonder how the course would have played
out had we tackled the treatment of Native Americans,
Asian Americans, or Hispanic Americans. All of these
groups shape the culture in which we live, yet most courses
dealing with race exclude the minorities of minorities.
I worry sometimes that as white people we think if we talk
openly about the pains blacks have endured, we can erase
some of that pain or some of the hate that still exists.”
For Silver, reading and discussing O’Conner’s “The
Artificial Nigger” always raises the most interesting ideas.
There’s an analogy to he found in trying to see beyond an
Teacher Kelly Nash (AGI07)
EXPERIENCED DISCRIMINATION
WORKING OVERSEAS.
offensive title to seeing beyond
the ignorance and petty-mindedness of the protagonist, a
weak and frightened man. In
the story, Mr. Head and his
grandson. Nelson, take the
train to the big city so that Mr. Head can show him what a
dangerous and unsavory place the city is, Mr. Head
believes, in part because of the blacks who live there. Some
saw Mr. Head as incapable of redemption and believed the
story showed how a legacy of hatred and fear is passed down
through generations.
“There was a fair amount of disagreement on that story,
about whether Mr. Head’s transformation is real, or
whether there was any hope for poor Nelson,” Silver
recalls.
Silver confesses she argued her point rather forcefully.
She believes Mr. Head gives us a chance to see a little bit of
the human condition, a small piece of redemption.
Through encountering a plaster statue of a black man, one
depicting human suffering and degradation, Mr. Head may
experience a revelation of sorts. He certainly knows the
depths of his own sin and weakness; perhaps that. Silver
suggests, is a start.
“The story presents to us something that’s very hard to
accept,” she explains. “It’s really interesting that what the
main character has kept hidden is sinfulness and pride.
What I saw in that story is that you need to give yourself
permission to be flawed-what’s key is understanding that
the ‘other’ can be a part of one’s self.”
Silver says the preceptorial confirmed for her that the
works chosen for the class were “great books” in everyway
St. John’s defines them. “You don’t ever really get to the
end. They will keep revealing things as you keep working
with them.
{The College- St. John's College ■ Winter zoo? }
�{W.E.B. Du Bois}
a?
W.E.B. DuBois Comes to St. Johns
Many dignitaries visited St. John’s in the 1950s: Dwight Eisen
hower came to dedicate Mellon Hall and Eleanor Roosevelt
dehvered a lecture. But the visit W.E.B. Du Bois made to the
college in April 195a is remarkable in that an author who would
one day be read on the Program came to the college to lecture to
its students.
The invitation came from Martin Dyer (class of 1952), the first
African-American student admitted to the college. Recruited by a
group of St. John’s students. Dyer had attended the segregated
Dunbar High School in Baltimore. His loth-grade history teacher
was Yolande Du Bois Wilhams, Du Bois’ only child. Dyer greatly
admired Du Bois: “In my view, Du Bois was in every way the equal
of the famous and not-so-famous people who came to the college to
deliver lectures in those days, and I resolved sometime in my junior
year to do all that I could to get him to the college,” says Dyer.
In January 1952, Dyer wrote Du Bois’ daughter to ask if she
thought her father would accept a lecture invitation. Williams
wrote back to say she thought her father would be pleased. “We’ve
been hearing about your fine program there,” she added, “and you
know Dunbar is proud of you.”
That same month, Du Bois wrote a short response to Dyer’s
inquiry: “If requested by the authorities of St. John’s College,
I think I can arrange to come for one Sunday evening lecture some
time during the spring.”
Dyer next approached President Richard Weigle (HA49) with
his request, concerned that Weigle would object to Du Bois’ left
leaning politics. But Weigle issued the invitation, dated February
14,1952. In his letter, he wrote that St. John’s had a custom of
inviting “outstanding men and women to speak to students, faculty
and interested members of the community on some contemporary
topic of a political, economic or sociological nature.” More
informal than Friday lectures, these
talks were held in the King William
Room on Sunday evenings. “The topic
could be one of your own choosing,
although we would prefer to have you
deal with the general racial problem in
the United States,” he wrote. St. John’s,
Weigle continued, “is one of a relatively
small number of southern colleges to
have opened its doors to Negro
students. The community here is there
fore conscious of this great national
issue and feels rather strongly on it.”
Dyer was assigned to meet Du Bois at
the train station in Annapolis and
escort him to campus. “Du Bois and I
walked the relatively short distance
from the station to [the college guest
house]. I accompanied Du Bois to
Weigle’s office and did not see him
again until lecture time that evening,”
Dyer recalls.
The lecture was well attended by
students and faculty. Dyer says.
“Although he did take time to
congratulate the college on the fine example it set in admitting me
to the college, Du Bois was true to form in condemning the treat
ment of blacks in the United States during the preceding three
centuries,” he says. “Probably correctly, he saw little significant
progress in civil rights gains even after World War II when the
country demanded no lesser sacrifice from black soldiers than it
did from white. Having been so intimately involved in the fight to
improve the pfight of American blacks, Du Bois seemed genuinely
depressed by how little progress had been made. He, of course, had
no way of knowing what dramatic changes would begin just two
years later with Brown v. Board ofEducation and reach a boiling
point in the early 1960s.”
After the lecture, Du Bois joined students at the home of
Priscilla Bender-Shore (class of 1955) and Mel Shore (class of 1954),
students who lived in the converted barracks installed on back
campus to house married students and their families. Mel Shore
died in 2006; PrisciUa has vivid memories of Du Bois. She recalls
that Jacob Klein, then dean, objected to the visiting lecturer’s
politics. Klein was a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe; Du Bois
an active supporter of the communist party. “There was a funda
mental difference in ideology,” she says.
Yet the Shores felt strongly about hosting a post-lecture question
period. “We could see that he wasn’t going to be honored and we
thought he was a really important person,” Bender-Shore recalls.
“He was famous even then for his ideas and his works and activities
in the black community.”
The Shores’ house was filled with students who were eager to
question Du Bois about civil rights and politics. Bender-Shore
remembers little of the lecture topic or the discussion at her home,
but Du Bois left a lasting impression. “He was a small man, very
firm and confident, genteel,” says Bender-Shore. “We felt very
honored to have him among us.”
The morning after the lecture. Dyer
walked Du Bois back to the train station
alone. “There was no fanfare that I can
recall,” he says.
The contact between St. John’s and
one of its future seminar authors,
though unceremonious, was indicative
of the important changes in store for
the college. Six more African-American
students enrolled in St. John’s just a
few years after Dyer. The Program at
St. John’s later included works by
Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
{The College- St. Jo hn’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
W.E.B. Du Bois
St. John’s
congratulated
on opening its doors to
STUDENTS OF ALL RACES, BUT REMAINED
DISCOURAGED ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS WHEN
HE SPOKE ON CAMPUS IN I952.
�2,8
{The Tutors}
Chaninah Maschler
A LIFE
BY Chaninah Maschler (HA98)
INTERVIEW BY Robin Weiss (SFGI86)
was born in Berlin, Germany, two years before
I hid together, at the house of our former cleaning lady. But
Hitler became Chancellor. The Nazi epoch
soon we had to split up. After staying with many different
profoundly affected my family’s life. My mother,
families (some communist, some Gatholic, some Calvinist;
having been a teacher (especially of “classical
some rich, some poor) I landed in Utrecht, with the family
gymnastics”) at some rather la-di-da finishing
Mook. Mr. Mook was an upholsterer and paper hanger;
schools for German upper- class young women, was
Mrs. Mook had been a maid; when I arrived she was mothering
prepared to take Hitler’s anti-Jewish rage seriously.
seven children, ranging in age from to less than one year. I was
She left Germany for the Netherlands in the midthe oldest, being it at this time. I was very fond of the Mook
1930S and there became a leader of a hachsharah (a
children, except for the eldest, a girl, who felt displaced by me
school preparing Jewish youth to be farmers in what was then
and, not unnaturally, gave me a hard time. She and 1 had to
Palestine). My parents had settledin Palestine two or three years
share a bed. During the roughly three years that 1 spent with the
after the conclusion of World War I (long before my birth).
Mook family the children thought of me as a non-Jewish orphan
My brother was born there. They had joined Martin Buber and
girl from Rotterdam. (Everyone knew that Rotterdam had been
Judah
Magnes
in hoping
a bi-national
and expressed
bombed to bits by the Luftwaffe).
Hitler
’s Blitzkrieg
was for
totally
effective state
in conquering
the
this
hope when
they chose
a European,
and Hebrew
About half a year after liberation my mother returned from
Netherlands:
Between
May 1940
and May Arabic,
1945 Germany
ruled
name-Peter
Achmedits
Yehuda-for
myracial
brother.
Owing,
part, to
Bergen-Belsen, where my brother had died. By Dutch standards,
there
and enforced
Nuremberg
laws
with in
gradually
my brother
’s suffering
severely
from
asthma,
my parents
neither of them looked particularly Jewish, so they had been
increasing
strictness.
I believe
it was
in 1942
that Jewish
young
returned
1925.kidnapped
Not long from
after the
my streets
birth my
working in the underground associated with the Quakers. But
men weretoforGermany
the firstintime
of
parents wereand
divorced.
owing to the treachery of a woman double agent, both of them,
Aunsterdam
sent to “labor camps” such as Mauthausen.
separately, were turned in and sent to a concentration camp.
News of the death in Mauthausen of one of my brother’s friends
My mother and I went back to Amsterdam. There I enrolled at
convinced us to go into hiding. At first my mother, brother, and
a classical gymnasium. I had not attended school for three years
and was so ignorant as to be quoted in the school newspaper for
my laughably uninformed remarks. The return to school was a
source of great joy to me. I did not want to go to America. But I
went, after just a year and a half of gymnasium. That meant that
I’d learned a little French, Latin, and the Greek alphabet.
I
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{TheTutors}
“ .. Where ebe couldIhaveflourbhed as Ihave at St. Johns?''
Chaninah Maschler (HA98)
Chaninah Maschler (HA98), tutor emerita
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
2,9
�30
{TheTutors}
After a stint at two New York
high schools, I enrolled at
Queens College, one of the four
free colleges in New York City.
Paul Klapper had been presi
dent of Queens College and the
program of studies instituted
under him was first rate, as were
many of the faculty, especially
the music, mathematics, and
chemistry departments. But
under a new president, John J.
Theobald, McCarthy machina
tions took hold. Many members
of the faculty, unwilling to sign
the required loyalty oath, left
for teaching positions in
California. When the City
College of New York (CCNY)
opened its doors to women, I
transferred to City College and
switched majors from chem
istry to philosophy. The teacher
I most admired at the time was
Felix Cohen. He had a law office
in D.C. but also taught philos
ophy of law-meeting with the rich kids at Yale law school one
day a week, and with the poor kids at CCNY on another day.
Unlike his famous father, Morris Raphael, Felix was very gentle
in class. Together with his father he brought out a book of read
ings in jurisprudence and legal philosophy, which is still in
print. To this day I find its preface’s use of Deuteronomy 30:11
profoundly moving.
After finishing college in New York I moved to New Haven to
do graduate work in philosophy at Yale, where I had been given
a fellowship. Curiously, I was oblivious of the fact that in a
group of, say, 25 grad students, only four were women and that
women faculty at the University were limited to “native inform
ants,” that is, female speakers of such languages as Chinese or
languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent.
I arrived at Yale too untutored to use the university’s riches
wisely. There were no advisors. My fellow graduate students in
philosophy were vastly better educated than I and much more
sophisticated and worldly. I profited from associating with the
linguist-historian of philosophy, Rulon S. Wells, and from the
friendships I formed. Also, of course, from the wonderful
Chaninah on her way to school,
1939, Amsterdam.
library and the free time I was
granted. But I did not, otherwise,
use my years well there. Today,
when Johnnies come to talk to
me about doing graduate work in
philosophy, I always urge themmake sure there is something
else you become semi-expert at,
where you can make progress,
where you find out what it is like
to have a skill. Philosophy is no
such enterprise.
My first experience of teaching
came at Bryn Mawr College,
where I was given an assistant
ship and sometimes filled in for
absent faculty. Next, Penn State
University hired me. I remember
being frightened as I traversed a
meadow and encountered young
men of horrific, formidable
build and registered that any one
or more of these immensities
might, the next day, turn up in my Introduction to Philosophy
or my Logic classes. Only later did I learn that these young men
were wearing shoulder pads. They were on the football team.
In 196a Henry Maschler (HA98) and I were married. My alma
mater, CCNY, hired me to teach evening logic classes. I enor
mously enjoyed these. Old and young, men and women, black
and yellow. . .everyone was there. We worked our way through
an elementary symbolic logic text. Also, we analyzed arguments
in Platonic dialogues, and Sherlock Holmes’ reasoning as he
dealt with this or that case. Next, Barnard College invited me to
teach history of philosophy. I did not much enjoy my classes at
Barnard. My experience there confirmed what I had felt at Bryn
Mawr, that I much preferred classes in which both men and
women participated. It seemed to me that Barnard women were
too anxious to please.
John Kennedy’s assassination shook me. I interrupted
teaching. While waiting for the birth of our twin girls, I served
at the Hunt’s Point Library in the Bronx. There, for the first
time, I had a female African-American boss. Even at the time I
was aware that this was an important experience for me.
{The College. 5t. John’s College ■ IVinterzooi >
�{TheTutors}
The willingness to start over
and be^in at the beginning
is goodfor all ofus—no one is
shutout. ”
31
While at Yale I made the acquain
fact that mathematics and labora
tance of Eva Brann. After receiving
tory classes are part of the required
her degree from Yale she taught at
liberal arts curriculum. I am deeply
Stanford hut left its classics depart
grateful to the college for requiring
Chaninah Maschler (HA98)
ment after just a year to join the
of me that I learn some of the
St. John’s faculty. Her letters showed
elements of ancient and post
that she was profoundly happy there. When I visited her in
Galilean astronomy; that I learn enough to appreciate how
Annapolis to attend a Friday night lecture I’d bring a suitcase
mathematics and the physical sciences grew up in tandem. And
full of bagels. The bread situation in Annapolis was dreary in
there I understood in freshman lab about there not having been
those days. Like so many other repeat-visitors at the college, I
a Moses who brought us the chemical periodic table. St. John’s
experienced the wonderful hospitality of Dean Jacob Klein and
is also quite singular in so accustoming us to the absence of
his wife. I found out that Mrs. Klein had briefly attended one of
jargon that when unexplained technical or pseudo-technical
the boarding schools in Germany where my mother had taught
vocabulary is used it has a slightly comical effect. The willing
(though not during the years when my mother was there). Later,
ness to start over and begin at the beginning is good for all of
when I had come to join the Annapolis faculty and my mother
us-no one is shut out, if they are willing to concentrate; and the
came for a visit, I introduced the two women to each other.
more competent are obliged to check on whether they
At the time, when I came visiting, I felt the St. John’s faculty
adequately understand and whether it is true.
was too self-absorbed, too smug. I had reservations. On the
In some respects it seems to me that the college has changed
other hand, the students were strikingly courteous, friendly,
for the better over the years of my association with it. For
and helpful to strangers; eager to share thoughts.
example, whereas in former years the career counseling office
When our twin girls were about five it was suggested to me
was hardly spoken of, work is today recognized to be central to a
that I apply for a summer teaching position at the then recently
good life. Even mentioning money has become legitimate ever
established St. John’s Graduate Institute in Santa Fe. I took the
since then President Bill Dyal toasted the seniors at the senior
children with me. Their memories of the beautiful Santa Fe
dinner in Spanish, wishing them Love and Money. It is probably
landscape are vivid to this day. Having participated in the
also a good thing that more faculty today have spouses and
writing of a book about the Joseph story in Genesis, I selected
children, and that there are more women tutors.
Genesis and the opening chapters of Exodus as texts for my first
In the years since my retirement I have spent time reading
19th-century authors-William James, George Eliot, Darwin,
St. John’s preceptorial.
Dewey. Previously I had been on a more intimate footing only
That first appointment at the Graduate Institute led to my
becoming a faculty member of the Queens College Liberal Arts
with Charles Peirce. It now seems to me a little odd that a
school so profoundly American as St. John’s should exclude the
Institute, a mini-St. John’s program within the confines of a
standard undergraduate education. I taught there for some
pragmatist tradition. It is true that St. John’s does well by
years and have exceedingly happy memories of the students in
students and faculty and the nation in demanding that all
my classes at Queens. But when the city of New York was on the
acquaint themselves with some of the Supreme Court cases,
verge of bankruptcy, I (along with many other non-tenured
with Lincoln’s speeches, with the Constitution and the
Federalist Papers. But why favor continental philosophy to the
faculty of the city university) was fired. As it happens, my
exclusion of American authors that are studied and valued all
husband too lost his job at that time, so I applied for a full-time
teaching position at St. John’s and was accepted.
over the rest of the world?
Given the fact that undergraduate philosophy classes across
I do not want to end on such a chiding note. Given my
the nation tend to be taught by way of discussion rather than
intellectual and pedagogic ways, where else could I have
flourished as I have at St. John’s? I am hugely in the college’s
lecture, there is a sense in which my manner of teaching has
never been very different from what goes on at St. John’s. But at
debt.
other schools the students’ other classes take the form of
lectures, and that made a difference also for the classes I was in.
One of the things I have always greatly valued at St. John’s is the
{The College -Sf. John's College ■ Winter 2oot }
�{Homecoming}
SIX JOHNNIES,
SIX DECADES
BY Emily DeBusk (Ao6) and Rosemary Harty
ome remember Jacob Klein, Barbara Leonard and the Liberty
Tree; others knew Christopher Nelson and Tom May. Some saw
wars end, some saw wars begin. Many have raised families and
some have sent their own children to St. John’s.
Visiting with six alumni who returned in October for Home
coming-one from each decade-yielded a rich trove of memories and
glimpses of lives lived after St. John’s.
Among
the
Veterans
John Wallace (Class ofig4g)
Then: John Wallace entered St. John’s
during World War II, saw veterans on the
GI Bill invade the campus at the war’s end,
knew Barr and Buchanan, and loved the
parties and general rowdiness that marked
campus life during his years.
“I know the folks at the church nearby
used to complain about the noise. They’d
be going to church, and we’d be going to
bed. The girls at the Naval Academy dances
would come over here after their dates had
to go in for the night. We wore coats and
ties to every meal and lecture. I’m pretty
sure the food was good,” he recalls.
There were about 30 students in
Wallace’s class. Many had won state schol
arships to attend St. John’s, as he did.
“Four years free-you can’t beat that with a
stick,” he says, grinning. He saw many
students drop out. “Some decided they
wanted to go elsewhere. Some couldn’t
get through don rags. And some just
stuck it out,” he says.
A historic change came to the campus
during Wallace’s time. The college
admitted its first African-American
student, Martin Dyer (class of rg5a).
Wallace still feels proud about the campus
community’s response. “He fit in fine, he
was accepted, and it all happened with
absolutely no objection,” he said.
Now: Wallace’s career as a civil engineer
grew out of his first job after graduation:
working on construction of the Bay Bridge.
For Wallace’s first few days, the foreman
training Wallace led him on perilous walks
over narrow beams hundreds of feet above
the Chesapeake Bay. “Every day, he’d ask,
‘you coming back tomorrow?’ After three
days, he stopped asking.”
When the bridge was completed, Wallace
went to work on building the Garden State
Parkway, then helped build a bridge over the
Ohio Turnpike. He took night classes to
earn his master’s degree in engineering at
Johns Hopkins University. And in 1985, he
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
became partner of an engineering firm,
Wallace, Montgomery and Associates, in
Towson, Md. Today, he’s semi-retired, and
he and his wife, Pamela, have three children.
Money and Women
George Wend (Class oftg^t)
Then: Times were simpler when George
Wend was a student in the early r95os.
Between classes Wend fenced, designed
boats, and worked in the wood shop. Semi
nars lingered late into the night, and dance
parties into the early mornings. Two issues
complicated the scene: money and women.
Money was tight and the Naval Academy
wanted to take over the campus: “The college
was small enough that we would have meet
ings about it in the Great Hall. Jacob Klein,
who had just retired, was called in.” Wend
distinctly remembers Klein’s calming, avun
cular manner. After one collegewide
meeting, he simply said, “Gentlemen, get a
good night’s sleep.”
In 1951, the college admitted women. The
change was “anticipated with mixed feel
ings,” says Wend. “Jacob Klein was highly in
favor of the idea. In the rgsi variety show, I
remember, someone made a joke, ‘You don’t
have to go to Europe to study a broad.’ But I
remember someone stopping me on Main
Street to ask what I thought about women
coming to St. John’s. I said ‘I don’t see why
not.’ They definitely brought something new
to the college.”
�{Homecoming}
33
Now: Wend enjoyed a long career in physics
and engineering at the Westinghouse Elec
tric Corporation. He is now retired and lives
in Pennsylvania. “I moved to this particular
community for the small liberal arts college
in my town. I can take classes there and keep
up my learning,” he says. Wend was pleased
to reunite with six other classmates for their
55th homecoming.
All Dressed Up
Vicki Davis Cone (A68)
Then: The jean-clad students of today might
look askance at having to dress up for
dinner, seminar, and lecture, but Vicki
Davis Cone treasured the tradition. “We
would wear skirts or dresses and stockings
or heels, and the men wore jackets and
ties,” she says. “I think most people were
perfectly content to dress up.” There was
one time when a male student donned
jacket and tie and nothing else, she notes.
Men and women lived in separate dorms,
with the opportunity to visit each other in
common rooms informally dubbed “sin
bins.” “Women were locked in at midnight,
but the men were free all night,” she says.
During Cone’s time, the college began
allowing men and women to visit in each
others’ dorms during visiting hours.
Cone enjoyed the way dinners were
served family-style in the dining hall by
white-jacketed student waiters. She met her
husband. Bill (A67), in the dining hall. “He
was the most handsome waiter,” Cone says.
Simon Kaplan, Richard Scofield, Jacob
Klein, and John Kieffer dominated the
intellectual life on campus. “They seemed
so wise and knowledgeable, sophisticated
and cultured,” says Cone.
The mood of the campus changed as the
Vietnam War intensified, but the campus
itself seemed removed from the war, at least
in Cone’s memory: “Most of the students
took that time to get away from the world
and figure out who they were, reading the
books and getting lost in the ideas.”
Now: Cone started working in the library
soon after graduation and her marriage.
She spent most of her library career at St.
John’s. Cone worked as a cataloguer for
many years until she took a decade’s hiatus
to raise the couple’s two children. She
Henry Robert (class
of
1941), Jack Ladd Carr (class
of
1950)
and
Christopher Nelson
at a
REDEDICATION CEREMONY FOR THE CAMPUS CANNON. Mr. RobERT FUNDED THE RESTORATION AND
PROPER INSTALLATION OF THE igTH-CENTURY CANNON, DREDGED FROM THE BALTIMORE HARBOR.
returned to the college in 1980 and worked
for two decades, earning her Master of
Library Science degree at the University of
Maryland.
In aooo. Cone joined Anne Arundel
Community college, where she is informa
tion resources management librarian. She
was recently promoted to tenured associate
professor.
A War
Ends
Paula DavidoffiArii)
Then: Single-sex dorms were still the norm
when Paula Davidoff entered the college in
197a. “Although boyfriends and girlfriends
slept in each others’ rooms,” she notes wrly.
“The difference was you just had to be
careful about it.”
The Vietnam War ended during
Davidoff’s years at the college. She vividly
remembers the impact it had on campus. “I
remember coming out of a seminar and
hearing that Johnson had just said it was
over. If the bell in McDowell Hall wasn’t
ringing, in my memory it seems that it
was.”
Davidoff also remembers an easy
mingling of students and tutors. “I got to be
friends in a tutor-student way with Robert
Bart, and he was an extraordinary person.
Students and tutors had get-togethers at the
Little Campus, and in tutors’ homes, and
{The College ■ Si. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
the conversation was real St. John’s. There
was gossip, there was laughing-even if we
weren’t talking about books or ideas from
seminars, the ideas in our readings carried
over into fife. Robert had this wonderful
way of making you feel smart even when you
were doing just the dumbest things.”
For two wonderful years, Davidoff
enjoyed the best digs on campus: with three
other girls, she lived in the Reverdy
Johnson house. “We used to have cocktail
parties on the lawn for the tutors in the
spring,” she recalls.
Now: Davidoff met her husband, Bernie
(A69), when he returned to campus to study
with Leon Kass, then a tutor. She married
Bernie a week before she graduated and
settled in New Jersey. There she studied
classics for a while, then turned her atten
tion to raising five children, now ages 17 to
29. Two (Ada and Esther, both seniors) are
current Johnnies; Sam graduated in 1999;
and Davidoff’s youngest is a prospie.
For the past 15 years, Davidoff has been a
professional storyteller, a career that
evolved from her years as a teacher. “I’m
hired to come to a school for a residency,
and what I’m teaching is literacy skills,
often to very young children: listening,
speaking, writing, teaching kids to think
about story beyond the surface. I tell myths
and folktales. They’re the foundation for all
�{Homecoming}
34
the other literature we have; they’re the
dreams of a community or a civilization.”
A Different
Downtown
Stephanie Rico (A86)
Then: Students who enjoy dance and yoga
classes in the dance studio of Iglehart can
thank the lobbying efforts of Stephanie Rico.
“The gym has really improved,” she says. “I
started the first aerobics class in 1985, and we
had to meet backstage [of FSK Auditorium]
because there was no room in the gym.”
Rico and her family returned to Annapolis
for her aoth reunion in October. There are
some obvious changes, such as the two new
dorms on College Creek, but Rico was most
struck by the “vast changes” in downtown
Annapolis. “I lived on Fleet Street which
was, back then, pretty run down. Now every
thing has been built up and gentrified. On
campus it was even more remarkable to see
what was pretty much the same. We saw
students talking on the quad, selling Reality
t-shirts. They could have been us.”
Now: Rico holds a PhD in Curriculum
Studies and Teacher Education from Stan
ford University. She splits her time between
a San Diego high school, where she teaches
science, and co-directing the California
Science Project, a professional development
network for science teachers. “My driving
interest in education started at St. John’s,”
she says. “The way we learned was so
different from the way I had to learn in high
school. So a lot of my work is dealing with
restrictions, but there is a lot of school
reform going on. I’m pretty unusual in that I
teach all three sciences: physics, chemistry,
and biology. I didn’t even like science before
I went to St. John’s. The fact that I’m a
science teacher is directly due to St. John’s.”
Waiting for the
Hall Phone
this new industry, so I just jumped right in,
without having to go to graduate school. And
I know a lot of my classmates have gone into
Web design as well.” Although he wasn’t on
campus when the college had to cut down the
Liberty Tree, Sirkin says the “front campus
just doesn’t look the same to me without it.”
Cell Phones and
Hurricanes
Craig Sirkin (Agg)
Lizzie Jump (Aoi)
Then: Craig Sirkin witnessed several mile
stones. “I went to the last lecture delivered by
Mortimer Adler,” he recalls. “The audito
rium was packed, because he was such a
celebrity here. I also remember that when I
was a sophomore, the school really pushed to
cut down on underage drinking. That’s when
ID checking became strict.”
St. John’s also saw enrollment rise. “By the
end of my freshman year, the school was
running out of housing and the administra
tion was encouraging people to move off
campus,” he recalls. The college was also
stepping gingerly into cyberspace; during
Sirkin’s senior year, the computer lab was
wired for the Internet. “It was a big deal
because when I was a student, we didn’t even
have phones in the rooms, which meant that
if you had someone on your floor who was a
talker, you could never use the hall phone.”
Now: Sirkin enjoys a career that reflects the
information revolution that hit the campus
during his college years. He now sells hard
ware for a telecommunications company in
Denver. “I got out of school and there was
Then: “I remember, when I was a senior,
being shocked to see so many lower
classmen with cell phones,” recalls Lizzie
Jump. “We were closet cell phone users,
but these kids were just using them on the
quad. It was like a cell phone revolution.”
Now, not a semester goes by without the
occasional renegade phone call interrupting
a seminar.
“Campus was pretty much walloped by
Hurricane Floyd in ’99, especially the
Liberty Tree. I lived in 201 Pinkney and I
was one of about eight who had to be
temporarily evicted because the Liberty
Tree was so close to our rooms. For a while I
had to live in the prospie room in Campbell.
I was pretty mad about that, since lower
classmen were getting singles. Then they
had to take the Liberty Tree down; that was
very sad.”
Despite these changes. Jump reckons that
two things will never change about
St. John’s: the Program, and the general
spirit of mischief that inspires bizarre
pranks and campus-wide jokes. “I think it
was my junior year when some people stole
the seal from the bricks on the Quad steps.
They hid it in the trunk of a car, and for
about a month the administration kept
getting postcards from the seal from all over
the world.”
Now: After graduation. Jump spent two
years in Americorps, followed by some time
as an adoptions counselor for the ASPCA.
She currently works as a receptionist for a
social services organization. “It’s seriously
like the movie Ojfice Spaced she says. “I
think I’m going to ask for a red stapler for
Christmas.
Saturday’s
banquet featured an
Oktoberfest
{The College -5f. John’s College . Winter soo^ }
theme.
�{Homecoming}
35
A Family Affair
Homecoming in Annapolis this
year included a spate of family
friendly activities: a story-teller
regaled children with the tale of
Rumpelstiltskin; a carnival on
the lawn gave kids a chance to
play games and win prizes; and
pony rides and face-painting kept
the young ones entertained while
classmates caught up with each
other. Adults enjoyed seminars in
the mornings and a banquet with
an Oktoberfest theme in the
evening. (It was the best of times,
it was the wurst of times.) There’s
no telling whether the beer or the
kids’ activities brought alumni
home, but another new record for
attendance was set: 320 alumni
attended Homecoming, bringing
no family members or guests
with them. The children’s activi
ties were a big draw, says
Stephanie Rico (A86). “We had a
great seminar with all of us
smashed together around one
table-it was awesome,” she says.
“But Homecoming was definitely
more kid-friendly this year; it just
gives more people more freedom
to enjoy Homecoming.”
Clockwise, from top
left:
Sandy Israel (A85),
with
Katie
AND Jake. Everett Wilson (class of 1956) received the
Alumni Association’s Award of Merit. Shown with Everett,
(second
from left) are his son
DAUGHTER Elsie. Johnnie kids
Anton, wife Mia, and
enjoy picnic games.
students perform for homecoming.
1986. Don Hitt (AGI06) raises his
GRADUATES EVERYWHERE.
{The Colleges:, John’s College ■ Winter 2007}
Members
Current
of the class of
glass on behalf of
GI
�36
Plato’s Republic
Translation, glossary, and introductory
essay by Joe Sachs. (Afterword “Imita
tion,” by John White, class of 1964,
Focus Publishing Company, 2006
BY Gabriel Pihas {A92), tutor
Sometimes the original cannot be heard
until a new translator comes along to
liberate us from a habitual dependence on
older translations. If we are not always
reading in the original, it feels to us as if
the author had to wait for the translator’s
response in order to fully voice its appeal.
The Republic is a case in point: most of us
have become habituated to the fine 1968
translation by Alan Bloom, which, despite
its many virtues, may have blocked up our
ears to certain elements in the dialogue.
Joe Sachs’ new translation of the Republic
helps make it young and beautiful.
Together with the translation come two
pieces worth reading to anyone interested
in the Republic. Mr. Sach’s introduction is
written to be readable for first-time
readers, but is full with insights into the
text. John White has provided the after
word, “Imitation,” a developed version of
a truly excellent piece that appeared in
the 1989-90 St. John’s Review double
issue on the Republic (Vol. XXXIX,
Nos. I and a).
For those familiar with Mr. Sachs’
series of translations of Aristotle, his
translation of Plato’s Republic, may come
as a surprise. His translations of Aristotle
are so helpful exactly insofar as they are
distant from ordinary speech, and un
Platonic in style. Phrases like “being-atwork-staying-itself’ or the somewhat
menacing sounding “thinghood,” could
never be taken straightforwardly in a
Platonic dialogue. What is surprising in
the new translation of the Republic is not
that Mr. Sachs avoided such language, for
how could he not? Rather, it is that his
translation of the Republic so convinc
ingly brings the real conversation of the
original to life, without even a trace of the
Aristotle translator we may have thought
we had come to know.
Although dialectic takes place in
conversation, it aims at a pure vision of
what is that is beyond speech. A conversa
tion about a vision that goes beyond it,
and that cannot be put into words, is
neither a tragic loss of that vision, nor
{Bibliofile}
does it perfectly recollect it. Exactly
because it is neither the one nor the
other, it is quite similar to the translation
of a Platonic dialogue. An ordinary
conversation is difficult to translate
because it takes place in a community,
and hence an adequate translation would
have to include an account of the inter
locutors themselves. In order to include
this, one would have to capture the
nuances of their interactions, and so,
presumably, a literal translation would
not be an adequate one. But a Platonic
dialogue, because it aims beyond words, is
at the same time extremely translatable
for someone attentive to who the speakers
are and to where the conversation points.
A good translator can at least point us in
that direction by putting the reader inside
the talk Socrates had with good-natured
Glaucon and Adeimantus, wolfish Thrasymachus, Polemarchus and his hypocrite
father Cephalus. Mr. Sachs has done an
outstanding job of this. Where Mr. Bloom
was sometimes old-fashioned in his
language, this new translation tries to be
much more conversational. Also, where
Bloom never varies the translation of a
term at the expense of the feel of a
passage, Sachs will take liberties with a
word for the sake of the passage. The
result is an extremely readable Republic,
which is at the same time, very accurate.
Once one reads it, it comes as a surprise
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
''[Sachs] genuinely
encourages the reader
to mull over multiple
interpretations, and he
gives the reader an even
picture ofboth sides in
the various debates. He
alwayspushes the
reader to decidefor him
or herself by asking the
dialogue (and not the
commentator)for the
last word. ”
that we have had to wait such a long time
for a translation like this.
Of course, there will be disagreement
about the translations that will largely be
based around the commentaries of the
translators. Those who see the Republic as
mainly a work of political theory will find
Bloom’s interpretive essay and notes
more helpful, while those who are
interested in the dramatic character of
the dialogue will prefer Mr. Sachs’
introduction and notes. But there is
something more important than either set
of preoccupations. I have learned from
both translations, but I would wish to
point out that the humility with which
Mr. Sachs makes his claims in his
commentary is not just a question of
politeness. He genuinely encourages
the reader to mull over multiple interpre
tations, and he gives the reader an even
picture of both sides in the various
debates. He always pushes the reader to
decide for him or herself, by asking the
dialogue (and not the commentator) for
the last word. Leaving the reader open
is more important for a translator of
Plato than any set of preoccupations,
since it lets the dialogues be just that,
dialogues. Jfr
�{Bibliofile}
Too
The
Much for Our Own Good:
Consumeritis Epidemic________
Harrison Sheppard (Class of 1961)
and Alex Aris
Aristotle and Alexander Press, 3006
BY Eva Brann (HA57), tutor
affluence and its by-prod
ucts, on the roots of Amer
ican materialism, on the
social, political, and
economic costs of, and
finally the cure for,
consumeritis.
The book ends with a set
of graphs and tables. All
the graphs go dramatically
up or down: up for
spending, personal and
public; down for savings
and voter participation.
A final table displays
remedies, among which
self-awareness is number
one (surely a Johnnie-mark: “Know
Thyself’ is what we try for). There follow
policy proposals that should raise debate,
such as a consumption tax. Indeed, the
whole book should cause reflection. I’ll
give an example of my own: “Nothing in
excess,” said the Temple at Delphi, and we
should surely let Harrison Sheppard’s
alarm at our excesses infect us. Yet here’s a
question: Suppose we were morally and
legally inhibited in our buying from and
selling to one another-what other things
might we then be doing to each other? It is
a real question for me: Can people being
able to get so freely what they want be such
a bad thing?
Harrison Sheppard and I were freshman
together in seminar, back in 1957, he as
student, I as tutor. St. John’s is mentioned
at the beginning and the end of the book,
and is silently there all the time. For a
semi-explicit thesis is that we should be
less addicted to buyable stuff and more
involved in reading great books-and
watching good movies.
This is a readable, spirited, double-track
work. On one track it is in the tradition of a
type of popular “how-to” book, the “howto-save-our-souls” track. What we need to
save ourselves from is a social ill,
“consumeritis,” a termed coined on the
model of “conjunctivitis” and the like.
I’ll say a little in a moment of how the
diagnostic signs of the illness are framed
and what remedies are proposed here.
The other track puts good movies,
particularly some golden oldies of the
thirties through fifties, in the service of
remembering a more non-acquisitive
ethos. To me that sweeter descant to a book
dealing with a psychic corruption rings
true; these movies overlooked much we
Essential History: Jacques
now deplore, but there was a good-heartedDerrida and the Development
ness-call it innocence-and, within the
OF Deconstruction_______________
framework of their times, a social rightby Joshua Kates (A80)
mindedness about them that still makes
Northwestern U. Press, 3005
them somehow salubrious.
On the main track, we run across a lot of
interesting and disconcerting information
BY Thomas Scally, tutor
about the “consumer
At St. John’s College, our
epidemic,” which is
inquiry is driven by
defined as buying in excess
Joshua Kates
thoughts, ideas, and ques
of the satisfaction of our
tions that are immortal
needs. The introduction
and transcend particular
contains seven bold-face
times and places. Our
paragraphs that collect
conversation becomes
these unwanted intruders
i
Jacques Derrida
deep rather than decora
on consciousness, the
I
and the Development
tive because we read our
come-ons, imperatives,
f
of Deconstruction
texts in a manner that
and promises of adver
frees them from mere
tising, from “You Could
temporal and historical
Instantly Win” (ifyou’re
determinations. However
the one in three million) to
noble and rewarding this
“Bankruptcy Sale!” (ifyou
maybe, we have, at
don’t mind feeling slightly
present, a curricular
like a vulture). There
problem that cannot be
follow chapters on
1
Essential
& History
{The College- St. John ’5 College • Winter 200’^ }
37
resolved entirely apart
fiom such determinations.
A crass statement of this
problem might be put thus:
How do the great books in
that lump of time called the
last half of the 30th
century converse with the
books we have found to be
speaking to each other
across the preceding
centuries? In his Essential
History., Josh Kates shows
us important ways in which
such a clumsy question
can be rethought and
reformulated.
Although I could rehearse the praises
this work has received from professional
philosophers and theorists, what I would
like to highlight instead is the way it can
enhance our understanding of what we do
in our reading of texts at St. John’s. Let me
start on the inside and work out. In chapter
7 of Speech and Phenomena Jacques
Derrida writes: “Going through the First
Investigation (Husserl’s), we must try to
ascertain how far these concepts respect
the relations between signs in general.. .and
presence in general. When we say through
Husserl’s text, we mean a reading that can
be neither simple commentary nor simple
interpretation.”
Kates’ book shows us how Derrida goes
through Husserl’s text by itself going
through Derrida’s text. By “going
through” both Kates and Derrida mean
that what they each come to think is inex
pressible and unthinkable without such a
passage.
At St. John’s, we may not readily formu
late our own work in this way, but a little
reflection will show that this “going
through” is what we have always tried to
do. Of many possible examples, an obvious
one is how our going through Newton and
Maxwell makes Einstein possible and
thinkable. So we have in a sense gone
through what makes the thought of the
second half of the 3oth century possible.
Kates’ reading of Derrida’s reading of
Husserl shows us how to make such going
through explicit and how to connect our
own reading with other powerful readings
of the same books. Kates’ Essential
History is, not only a remarkable scholarly
accomplishment, but also a significant
contribution to the maturing of intellec
tual life at St. John’s.
�{AlumniProfile}
3^
Good Design Starts With Good Questions
Architect David Schwarz (A’^2)
BY Rosemary Harty
n 1991, when Washington architect
David Schwarz (A7a) was competing
with larger, more established firms to
design the Ballpark in Arlington, the
stadium for the Texas Rangers, he
approached the project from a sound
business perspective. He analyzed the
revenue streams a baseball team relies onfrom ticket sales to broadcasting rights-and
ensured that his design maximized income
potential.
That was one winning approach, but
Schwarz went deeper in seeking a design
that would reflect the unarticulated visions
of those building the park: he asked Rangers
President Thomas Schieffer what color he
associated with the sport of baseball. “When
he answered ‘sepia,’ I knew that our building
needed to be nostalgic,” Schwarz says. “For
an architect, success is rooted in asking the
right question. It’s very rare that a direct
question will give you the information you
need and want. If I had asked him if he
thought of baseball as nostalgic, he would
have said no.”
Schwarz’s Washington-based firm had
The desire for a rigorous education led
already made its mark in Texas, with the
David Schwarz to St. John’s.
design of the Cook-Fort Worth Children’s
Medical Center, and Sundance, a mixed-use
project in Forth Worth. But landing the Ball
park in Arlington (later rechristened
says some of the fundamental principles
Ameriquest Field), a $165 million project,
instrumental in his success, such as the
was a triumph. Schwarz beat out 16 other
ability to formulate a penetrating question,
firms. His architects worked nights and
were developed at St. John’s College.
weekends on a proposed design for the
Schwarz as a child decided to pursue a
competition, on top of the firm’s existing
career in architecture. He enrolled in a
work. “I told everyone they’d have great job
program in St. Louis but quickly grew
security if we won and no job security if we
dissastified. “I got a 3.9 on a 4.0 scale
lost,” Schwarz said.
without going to half my classes or ever
But Schwarz did win, by proposing a
cracking a book. I decided if I truly wanted
design with arched arcades, red brick and
pink Texas granite, and a pedestrian-friendly to be educated, I would have to go some
where where I really had no choice, and
site plan that made the stadium seem more
that’s the nice thing about the Program at
hke an urban center than a suburban desti
St. John’s: you really do have no choice.”
nation surrounded by a vast parking lot.
Schwarz is frank in his assessment of
Today, Schwarz directs a 40-person firm in
St. John’s, to which he admits something of a
Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth that has
love-hate relationship. He did gain a valu
carved out an international reputation,
able education at the college, but was
winning scores of awards for its work.
He studied in one of the finest graduate
rankled by what he describes as the “holierthan-thou” attitude of some tutors. He
programs in the country, Yale University,
where Vincent Scully was one of his mentors. butted heads with President Richard Weigle
(HA49), whose support for LBJ during the
While he owes a great deal to Yale, Schwarz
I
{The College • St. John’s College ■ Winter 200^ }
Vietnam War infuriated some students,
Schwarz among them.
He also believes he was too much of an
independent thinker for some aspects of the
college, and he sometimes went out of his
way to make fun of the Program. He wrote a
sophomore paper he titled “The Unification
of the God Concept in Plato, Aristotle,
St. Anselm, and Aquinas” in which he main
tained that the concept was the same for all.
“It was obviously ludicrous, but my
reasoning was impeccable,” Schwarz recalls.
“My view was that you can use much of what
St. John’s does in ways that are heretical or
sophistic.”
When his proposed senior essay on the
Laocoon was rejected (“because art wasn’t
something you could talk about because
there was no truth in it,” he says he was
told), Schwarz was hvid. He wrote instead on
Jonathan Swift, borrowing his title from a
Nietzsche quote: “Behold the asses who are
bold and most beautiful.” “It was a very
articulate work making fun of St. John’s.
I don’t think the college quite knew what to
do with my senior thesis.”
In spite of his mixed views, Schwarz values
his education and recommends St. John’s to
anyone, as long as they plan to go to grad
uate school. “It is wonderful training for the
mind,” says Schwarz. “It gives you three
things, and only three things: it teaches how
to think, how to read, and how to speak.
If you’re lucky, it will also teach you how to
write, but you have no choice in those other
things-you have to learn to express yourself
in a clear manner.”
At St. John’s Schwarz developed an
approach to problem solving that could have
helped him in any career. “The tools I
learned at St. John’s are very applicable to
my architecture practice and very applicable
to what I do as a businessman,” he says.
“I think the other thing that St. John’s
teaches subliminally, but not intentionally, is
to recognize the biases of other individualsvery important to being an architect.”
Asking insightful questions helps him
design buildings that suit the owners’
needs-even when they can’t teU him what
they are. “For example, in designing a house
for a married couple, an obvious question is:
‘Do you like brushing your teeth with your
�{AlumniProfile}
spouse or not?’ It’s an extremely important
question because it tells you a lot about
their relationship. They’re perfectly happy
to answer that question, but they’re not
happy to answer all the things that question
imphes. Getting to a client’s personal truth
in architecture is trying to understand
people’s actual hopes and goals, aspirations
and desires. There are overarching princi
ples that form everyone’s views of them
selves and those are really what you have to
design to.”
Beyond designing beautiful houses that
contribute to marital harmony, an architect
has an opportunity to contribute to how
people live, making communities more
vibrant, and, ideally, conserving resources.
“If our society wants people to give up their
cars, for example, it needs to give people
places worth walking to and walking in,”
says Schwarz. That’s the principle behind
projects such as Frisco Square, north of
Dallas, which will be one of the largest
mixed-use developments in the country,
mixing retail/restaurant space, offices,
residences, and public offices, including a
library and city haU.
“Our view is that you don’t change the
world by trying to change human behavior,
you change the world by understanding
human behavior and causing human
behavior to work in a way that’s better for
the world,” says Schwarz. “The kinds of
communities we’re trying to create are
extraordinarily successful but they take
longer, they require more thought and
more work, and some developers just aren’t
going to do it.”
Schwarz is on the naional council of the
World Wildlife Fund, and he’s disturbed by
the way Americans use up resources such as
farmland without careful thought. That’s
one reason he’s eager to do redevelopment
projects. One of his firm’s current commis
sions is a major redevelopment project in
Houston, a mixed-used development near
the city’s center.
“We’re very interested in how you take
existing places and make them more viable
in a changing world. We want to create
places where people are comfortable, but the
goal is to force people to intermix in a way
39
that does’t seem forced. When [President]
George W. Bush was our client for the
Ballpark in Arlington, one of the things he
said that has really stuck with me is that
baseball is one of the few things that the
chairman of the board and the person on the
assembly line can talk about together. And
he’s right-in most of the work we do there is
something that works that way, a great
equalizer. It causes greater commonality.”
The diversity of the work his firm takes
on-from concert halls and hotels to
luxurious private homes and offices-is
driven in part by Schwarz’s personality.
He hates to be bored or trapped in a niche.
“One of the things that has probably been
most important to my practice came right
out of St. John’s, and that is the belief that an
educated man can think anything. The
philosophy of this firm is that a good
designer can design anything,” he says.
“We’re constantly looking at the things that
cause us to have new ideas and to think
differently, readjust our world view.”
When he won the commission for the
children’s hospital in Fort Worth in 1985,
Schwarz knew he wanted to design some
thing that would elevate the spirits of sick
children and their families, without
resorting to bright colors and cartoon
figures . The hospital’s most striking feature
is its majestic central atrium. “It gives
patients, we hope, a larger view than
spending their whole lives in the hospital,”
he says. “It really does function as the public
space of a small town.”
The hospital remains the project of which
he is most proud. “There isn’t a time when I
go to Fort Worth when someone doesn’t
come up and thank me,” he says. “It is an
extremely humane kind of place to have a
sick child and it’s very comforting to parents
to be there. It’s done a huge amount to
change the experience of tragedy in
parents’ lives.”
Keeping the firm small, while accepting
many commissions, means Schwarz has little
time to pursue his passions outside of work.
He enjoys gourmet cooking and loves to read
and listen to music. But everything is subject
to the demands on his time. “I have a very
hard time saying no to great opportunities,”
he admits. *
David Schwarz’s design for the Cook
Children’s Medical Center sought to
raise the spirits of sick children and
THEIR FAMILIES. A SEVEN-STORY CENTRAL
ATRIUM EMPLOYS A MIRRORED CURTAINWALL TO
EMPHASIZE SPACE AND LIGHT.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{Alumni Notes}
1942
1948
1965
Ernest Heinmuller reports:
George R. Trim hi e, Jr.
Bart Lee Kaplan became a
“After TOO weeks of study I
have been ‘commissioned’ as a
St. Stephen’s minister for
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in
Easton, Md.”
proudly announces the birth
of his third great-grandson,
Aiden Gabrieli Dodge, born
on August 26, aoo6.
grandfather for the first time
on December 8, 2007. Grand
daughter Kathryn Rose Jirousek
was born in Cleveland to
daughter Molly and son-in-law
Bill Jirousek.
1946
“I will retire from the remunera
tive practice of law at the end of
this year,” says Peter Weiss,
“and devote the rest of my
days to quixotic efforts to
abolish war, rid the world of
nuclear weapons, and get
social and economic rights
taken seriously.”
1956
Joe Wase describes himself as
“an attorney married to an
attorney. In my dotage, at the
age of 73,1 am struggling to
learn to play the guitar and
banjo.”
1959
1966
1969
In January 2007, Peggy Escher
(A) was awarded a PhD in
Comparative Literature from
New York University. In August,
she defended her dissertation on
“Configurations of Trickery in
Boccaccio’s Decameron,
Marguerite de Navarre’s
Heptameron, Masuccio’s II
Novellino, and Shakespeare’s
OiheUo".
Judy (Millspaugh) Anderson
(A) reports: “1 survived radia
tion, chemotherapy, and a
major surgical rearrangement
of my innards, and am doing
really well.”
Constance (Bell) Lindgreen
(A) marvels at the minds of her
classmates as she surfs the Web:
Patience (Pat) Schenck
“Mel Kline (A) e-mailed that
writes: “The class of 1959 is
he’d been in contact with
looking forward to our 50th in
Pheme Perkins (A) at one
2009. Please plan to attend.
point. . .got me thinking. . .Mel’s
Register online, and send your
a well-known Jewish scholar
e-mail address to Pat Schenck at
(www.chaver.com/), Pheme
pscenck@toadmail.com”
is a well-known Catholic
Biblical scholar (www.bc.edu/
schools/cas/theology/faculty/
pperkins/), and William
McKeachie (A) is The Very
Reverend, Dean of the Anglican
Cathedral of St. Luke and
St. Paul in Charleston
ee Fischler (SF68) writes: “Jean K. Fitzsimon
(A73) and I moved to Philadelphia after Jean was
(www.stlukeandstpaul.org/
appointed a federal judge. The investiture was very
content/view/16/35/). What
moving. Under the great seal of the United States,
can that mean? Was there some
in a WPA 1930s, all cherry-wood courtroom with
thing in the water? And of
30-foot ceilings, attorneys from all over the country
course we have our share of
lauded Jean’s accomplishments. Attending the event as representa
minds, including
famous legal
tives of the college were Barbara Gdyette (A73) and Jeff Bishop
Larry Silverman (A) and
(HA96). Other St. Johnnies appeared as well including Larry
Peggy Winter (A), and doubt
Feinberg (class of 1964), Harvey Goldstein (class of 1959),
less
many others. And a brain
Mary Bittner-Wiseman (class of 1958), Paul Heylman (A74) and
surgeon. Really. It’s amazing
Roger Greene (A73). Jean and I both are having trouble adjusting
what Google can find. Even
to having a permanent home after years on the corporate trail.
(maybe) Ethan Pavlo (A)
I, who was born and grew up in Philadelphia and vowed after I left
(
www.sinehead.com/
never to return, am reflecting on predestination and free will ‘in
alhyg.html). Internet vivat.”
wandering mazes lost’ about the peculiarities of my fate. I really
thought I had had my last Philly cheesesteak in 1970. And lemon
pie Tastykakes? Fuggeddabout it.”
Of Free Will and
Cheesesteaks
L
{The College - St. John’s College • Winter zoo'^ }
1971
Barbara Sherman Simpson
(A) is a veterinary behaviorist.
She is clinical associate
professor at the North Carolina
State University, College of
Veterinary Medicine, and
president-elect of the American
College of Veterinary Behavior
ists. She fives in Southern Pines,
N.C., with her 15-year-old
daughter Diana, three horses,
and one dog.
David Gleicher (SF), a
professor at Adelphi University,
recently published a book.
Rescue ofthe Third Class on
the Titanic.
1972
Kevin Snapp (SF) writes:
“My fife has been adrift
following an unexpected divorce
and the resulting loss of my job.
Although I still need a job, there
is fight in the darkness, coming,
appropriately (with a twist) from
the Gospel of John. After a
chance incident led me to revisit
the prologue, I discovered that
John’s narratives conceal an
esoteric, highly heterodox
�{Alumni Notes}
Seven Deadly Sins
1979
OANNE Charbonneau (SF72) sends news from Montana:
Carol Colatrella (A) was
“I’ve recently taken early retirement from academia and
awarded a Fulbright New
live happily in the Bitterroot Valley with my husband,
Century Scholars grant in
Richard Rice. I spent many years in English departments
fall 2005. In 2006 she and
(from Freshman English director to chair) but found my
her family enjoyed three months
niche in hberal studies and humanities programs. I coordi
in Denmark as part of her
nated the Arts and Humanities core curriculum program
for her Fulbright
for four years at James Madison University and recently finished research
a
two-volume study guide for Prentice-Hall’s new text Exploring
project on the university in the
Humanities. This past summer I spent five weeks in Cambridge,
age of globalization.
England, as a participant in the NEH summer program on the
Seven Deadly Sins. I’m going to try my hand at distance learning
Marilyn L. Schaefer (SFGI) is
while continuing research on Middle English romances.” 4"
enjoying her retirement from
teaching at the City University of
New York. She spends a lot of
account of who Jesus really was.
Her responsibilities include
time reading, enjoying the
It makes sense of a number of
overseeing the foundation’s
pleasures of New York and an
things in the other Gospels and
support for public radio and
occasional St. John’s alumni
is specifically corroborated by
independently-produced
event. “I love the St. John’s
similar clues in Luke. It is
documentary film and video,
magazine and read every word,”
strange that I should be the first
designing and implementing
she reports. “In the summers,
to see these things, which only
special initiatives, making
I sometimes go to France or to
require some Jewish back
grants in response to special
the University of Chicago’s
ground and careful reading to
opportunities, and imple
alumni program in Oxford. I’d
pick up, but apparently I am.
menting the foundation’s
love to hear from other alumni.”
I am grateful to tutor Bob
program of large institutional
Sacks (class of T954) who intro
grants.
duced me to the concept of
esoteric writing and techniques
of careful reading to uncover it.
Whether or not this account of
Professional adventurer Peter
Jesus is true, it puts John,
Herman Grubb (A) has been
first-century Christianity, and
R. Spencer Porter (SF) has
married 22 years to the lovely
the writing of the Gospels in an
embarked on a new endeavor. “I
Betsy Bowen, with two kids, ages
entirely new light. I have
have a 7-year-old daughter in the
12 and 15. “Our newest adven
considerable work ahead of me
second grade and am training to
ture
is the hrst-ever Galapagos
to put these findings in context
be a Jungian psychotherapist.”
Islands
sea kayaking trip with
and present them persuasively.
camping
on beaches. Read about
Does anyone know of a source
it
at
www.rowinternational.com
of funding for someone who
or see the January 8, 2006
neither has a doctorate nor is
feature
story in the New York
pursuing one?”
Times travel section. Our Idaho
log cabin resort is doing as well
After four years of teaching in a
as our whitewater rafting trips.”
Cincinnati public high school,
J
1980
41
give, as generously as they can,
to the Ralph Swentzell Memo
rial Fund. He touched so many
of our lives so deeply, it’s the
least we can do.”
1983
From Jack Armstrong (SF):
“Greetings from West Chester,
Pennsyltucky (as Bob used to
call it). All is well, kids growing,
nobody sick. Michael is a senior
now, and applying to college.
His primary concern is choosing
a school with a rowing team.
Emily is nine and very interested
in dragons and the electric
guitar. Carmen and I are doing
Othello and The Taming ofthe
Shrew in the spring at the
Shakespeare Festival, come see
if you can. Peace.”
Desiree Zamorano’s (SF)
short story “Mercy” was
recently published in the
Los Angeles Times Sunday
magazine. West.
1977
1978
1973
Last September, Elspeth
Revere (A) was promoted to
Vice President, General
Program, at the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation in Chicago.
Michael Berger (A) is now
teaching composition and
coordinating writing across the
curriculum at The Christ
College of Nursing and Health
Sciences in Cincinnati.
1982
C. Randal (Randy) Linder
(SF) writes: “I would like to
challenge all of my classmates to
{The College. 5f. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
1985
Norman Ewart (A) joined
Rosetta Resources Inc. as
associate general counsel.
Rosetta Resources is engaged in
the exploration and production
of natural gas. Norman also has
been: studying and making
sculptures at the Glassell School
for Art, attending his son
Thomas’ baseball games,
encouraging Thomas’ guitar
playing and artistic talents,
dancing, traveling the world,
and working out rvith his wife,
Charlotte, general counsel of
ICO Polymers Inc. Alumni
interested in the arts or life in
continued onp. 43
�4^
{AlumniProfile}
Conservative Contrarian
Steve Bohlin (SF8i)
BY Patricia Dempsey
able assets-landfills. I asked myself:
” hen faced with a
how many new landfills are going to
tough invest
open up?”
ment decision,
Bohlin made the choice to invest. His
Steve Bohlin
clients hated this decision, but it turned
(SF8i) heads for
out to be a shrewd one. “I think the
the Rio Grande
basis of my success is that I have not
and Rio Chama to go fly fishing.
been wrong very often,” he says. “You
“I study the water all around me and
cannot be too cocky, but you have to be
focus,” he says. “It’s like meditation.
decisive. Either way you are relying on
I empty the mind and think only of one
thing: Am I dumber or smarter than the
your own judgment. The rules are
constantly changing.”
fish?” Bohlin brings this single-minded
The insights gained at St. John’s help
focus back to the office where, as a port
folio manager and managing director
guide Bohlin today. “One of my epipha
for Thornburg Investment Management
nies at St. John’s came from the
opening question for a Leibniz reading.
in Santa Fe, he is responsible for
managing billions of dollars for institu
Tutor Paul Mannick asked ‘What’s at
tional clients.
stake?’ At first the question seemed as
A FLY FISHING investor: Steve Bohlin, with his wife,
inane as the reading about monads, but
“There are parallels between fly
Rachel O’Keefe (SF8i), and daughter Audrey.
fishing and the investment work that I
the point of the question is essential for
do, one of which is this ability to focus,”
all the works we read. There are truths
Bohlin explains. “With fly fishing you
in these books, but they may not jump
take a little piece of yarn and maybe a
out and bite you at first look. It is very
with less risk in the market whether the
steel rod and you act like a bug on a river.
important-in philosophy, in life-to deter
interest rates are up or down. “The
It takes enormous concentration, minding
mine what’s at stake.”
economy is on a knife’s edge: Is it strong, is
the line.”
Bohlin, who considered pursuing
it weak? Everything is overpriced so there is
mathematics or law after graduating from
As a portfolio manager, Bohlin regularly
very little value in the marketplace,” says
questions whether he is “dumber or
St. John’s, cultivated his business acumen as
Bohlin. “I do not know where the interest
smarter” than the prevailing economic
a matter of survival growing up outside
rates are going-no one does. Seventy
predictions. “There are no right answers in
Chicago. He worked a graveyard shift in a
percent of economists are wrong all the time
this business,” says Bohlin, who reads
factory that made decals for products like
with their predictions, so you look for a
hundreds of pages of economic data,
Buster Brown Shoes and Corning Ware.
strategy that works anyway.”
research, and legal documents every day as
He discovered St. John’s when he took his
Bohlin questions accepted assumptions
he manages portfolios for funds such as
sister Denise (SF81) to visit the college. “I
about the market and searches out less
Thornburg’s Limited Term Income Fund.
was hooked when I found St. John’s. Every
desirable companies that investors often
To safeguard his investment decisions,
bit of it-the readings, the discussions as
overlook. “I am a contrarian in the aspect
Bohlin, a self-professed “conservative
opposed to being lectured-seemed like the
that I like to find those companies that are
contrarian,” says he believes in the return of
best thing since sliced bread,” he says.
beaten up by the marketplace and find out
principal first, then a return on principal.
At St. John’s Bohlin met his wife, Rachel
why,” he says. “It might be a whim, there
He uses a philosophy for bond investments
O’Keefe (SF81); the couple now has a
might be a good reason as to why. The
called fixed-income laddering. Laddering,
daughter, Audrey, age 4.
market is not always right. The data is not
which allows Bohlin to build a portfolio of
One of Rohlin’s jobs after graduating
always right.” Bohlin allows three to five
bonds with staggered maturities, demands
from St. John’s was as a “paralegal of sorts”
years minimum to study a company to see if
the same careful observation and patience
for one of his tutors, Tom Simpson, who was
it shows signs that it will turn around and
as fly fishing. For example, Bohlin might
involved with a large anti-trust lawsuit. Two
grow. “In 1998 for example, waste manage
spread the maturities over a lo-year period,
months later, the lawsuit was settled and
ment companies were beaten down. This
with the average maturity being five years;
Bohlin, out of a job, gave Garrett Thornburg
one company had done a merger but they
when each bond matures he strategically
a call. Thornburg initially hired Bohlin to
had wreaked havoc with their accounting
reinvests the profits into bonds with higher
analyze private placement investments and
systems. They had $8 billion in debt.
yields. This conservative, cantilevered
reams of legal documents. “I enjoyed it and
However, they had $74 billion in irreplace
approach allows him to participate well and
it surprised me. I barely knew what a stock
W
{The Colleges:. John’s
College ■ Winter 2007 }
�{Alumni Notes}
continued
the Houston area would be
well- advised to contact Norman
or fellow alumnus Dimitri
Seletzky (A92), who is senior
counsel at Chevron. Contact
information:
norman.ewart @rosettaresources.com, 713-335-4041.
David Kidd (A) is alive and
well and living in Baltimore.
You can visit him online at
www.kiddstudios.com or in
person “like the good old days.”
Sally Shaw (A) is working for
peace and clean, renewable
energy every day. “No nukes,”
she writes.
Silitch, UIAGM Mountain and
Ski Guide, 370 Chemin de la
Deviaz; 74400 Chamonix,
France, tel. +33 6 89 48 4118,
michael @high-alpine. com,
www.high-alpine.com.”
1987
Paul Anderson (A) finished his
PhD in Comparative Literary
Studies at Northwestern
University in June 3006. He
currently works as an academic
adviser in The College at the
University of Chicago.
Michael Silitch (SF) lives in
Chamonix, France, with his
wife, Nina (Dartmouth ’90),
and their two sons, Birken-3 in
January 3007, and Anders-2 in
February 3007. “I work as a
mountain and ski guide here.
My wife recently stopped
teaching with the arrival of
Anders. Chamonix is a great
place to come climb, hike, ski,
and cycle. Contact me: Michael
Dr. Kim Paefenroth (A) is
associate professor of Religious
Studies at Iona College in New
York: “My new book is Gospel of
the Living Dead: George
Romero’s Visions ofHell on
Earth (Baylor University Press,
3006), in which I show how
Romero’s zombie movies use
images from Dante’s Inferno,
as well as his own ruminations
on the excesses of modern
American culture, to create new
visions of evil and damnation.”
1989
Aaron Rosenbaum (A) writes:
1988
1986
43
John F. Gibson (SF) writes:
“Smita and I have a little girl:
Uma Patricia Lahiri Gibson,
born May 7, 3006. She’s
absolutely adorable. See
www.cns.gatetech.ed/gibson/
photos. I am a postdoctoral
fellow at the Center for
Nonlinear Science at Georgia
Tech, working on turbulence,
dynamical systems, and chaos.”
or bond was when I was at St. John’s, and I
didn’t know anything about mutual funds.
But I developed a confidence at St. John’s
that I can learn and research anything.” He
was especially influenced by tutor Bob
Neidorf. “He taught me that the St. John’s
experience is not about knowing things, but
about the pursuit of knowledge,” says
Bohlin. “Learning how to learn from every
experience has held me in good stead all my
adult life. I believe I finally ‘got’ that lesson
from him.”
Since he joined Thornburg Investment
Management in 1984, the company has
grown from five employees to 135. Bohlin is
also an equity holder in a second company.
“My daughter just started
kindergarten, my son turned
three, and my wife, Jessica, is
expecting our third in January.
My audio visual contracting
business is now three years old.
We just finished the second
THX-certified screening room in
a residence in the world (George
Lucas has the first) and won an
award for the best residential
system design for 3006 at our
industry’s big conference.
Any Johnnies looking for a job
in AV? Or just passing through
the Bay Area? E-mail me:
arosenbaum@al.net.”
1990
“Greetings and best wishes to
all former classmates, tutors,
and acquaintances from
Annapolis,” writes Andrew
Ghiz (A). “My wife, Christi,
and I have been in Houston
since September 3000. We are
happy to report that our son
Nicholas was born February 17,
3006.1 can be reached by e-mail
at ahghiz@yahoo.com.”
1991
Andrew M. Schwartz (A)
works in Philadelphia as a
member of a regional defense
litigation firm called Marshall,
Dennehey, Warner, Coleman,
and Goggin. In December he
was named a shareholder of the
firm by the president and CEO.
continued on p. 45
Thornburg Mortgage Corporation, a mort
gage real estate investment trust. When
judging his own performance over the
course of his career, Bohlin considers not
only a successful track record but also the
integrity he brings to his job. “There is a
deteriorating financial trend, particularly in
the area of trust, with all the corporate
scandals,” he says. “The confidence in
corporate America and in financial
managers has been rocked by these. I sign a
document, it says, ‘I am fiduciary for this
company’ so I cheer when I see corporate
wrongdoers brought down.”
In spite of recent financial management
scandals in corporate America, Bohlin is
{The C o l l e g e ■ St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
optimistic about the future. “Yes there has
been an erosion in financial confidence but
this is still the most viable capital market in
the world. But one cannot be too cocky.
Like the fish, the economic data keeps me
questioning.”
Bohlin has another reason to be opti
mistic: he is retiring. “I have been
approached by some not-for-profit boards
and will probably join one or two of them
and I will continue my work on the over
sight committee of the New Mexico State
Treasurer’s office.” Bohlin also plans to
spend more time with his family-and fly
fishing on the Rio Grande.
�44
{Alumni Profile}
Answering a Cali.
Martha Black Jordan (SFGI86)
BY Rosemary Harty
inging in the choir of
for part of the year, and Martha
Christ Church
enrolled in the Graduate Institute.
Anglican Episcopal in
Her first segment in the GI was
Mexico City helped
Philosophy and Theology, in which
nurture the Reverend
she studied the Bible and other
Martha Black Jordan’s
works and discussed her ideas
call to the priesthood. “It was
with others. “It was a heady
more of a process, over many years,
experience,” she recalls, and one
rather than something that came
she savored, “especially in the
on suddenly,” Martha (SFGI86)
seminar (led by Mr. Darkey and
says of her vocation. “Music is an
Mrs. Knight) when we almost
unmediated thing. Hearing, and
proved the existence of God.”
singing, those heautiful words
Martha has expressed her
every week, as a member of the
gratitude to St. John’s in several
choir, opens you up to God.”
ways: she has served as a member
Martha committed herself to a
of the college’s Board of Visitors
long but fulfilling journey when
and Governors since 2003. And in
she decided to pursue ordination in
July aoo6, she and her husband,
the Episcopal Church of Mexico.
Purdy, made a generous gift to the
She enrolled in a graduate pastoral
ongoing capital campaign to estab
theology program at St. Mary-oflish a tutorship in their name.
the-Woods College in Indiana,
Purdy’s encouragement and
traveling to the campus four times
support were instrumental in
a year for residencies lasting from
Martha’s decision to enroll in the
three to seven days. Between
GI, 35 years after graduating from
sessions, she studied, wrote
Sweet Briar College, and to later
papers, and corresponded with her
study for the priesthood. Both
professors by e-mail. In addition to
Jordans grew up in Mexico
her assigned courses, she read
(Martha was born there), and they
other works of theology and philos
met at a party one summer after
ophy to prepare for her canonical
college. “He thinks I can do
exams. Last winter in Mexico City,
anything,” Martha says of her
she sat through three days of
husband, who owns a Coca-Cola
rigorous examinations, and having
bottling franchise in Mexico.
passed them, was ordained to the
Reading great literature and
deaconate in the spring.
writing have been lifelong passions
On November i8, Martha was
for Martha. In Mexico City, she
ordained a priest at Christ Church, Martha Jordan (SFGI86) says all her past pursuits were
joined six other women to form a
ALWAYS LEADING HER TO SERVE HER CHURCH.
the same church in which she was
group called Tramontane,
baptized and where she married
“beyond the mountain,” which
her husband, Purdy. Family and
initially offered a forum for
friends from all parts attended the
sharing and critiquing each others’
“My granddaughter Cecilia, who is ii,
ceremony. When her bishop, the Most
personal writing. “We decided that we
Reverend Carlos Touche-Porter, Primate of was the crucifer at the head of the proces
wanted to do something to make Spanish
sion,” Martha says. “And the three grand
Mexico, finished reading the Prayer of
language poets better known in the United
sons were there, in various stages of
Consecration, the Rev. Martha Black
States,” she explained. The group trans
somnolence.”
Jordan became, at 74, the oldest woman
lated a collection of Mexican poetry with
St. John’s deserves much credit for
ordained to the priesthood in Latin
the poems printed in English and Spanish
fostering her natural spirit of inquiry and
America. “Eve either ruined my old age,”
entitled Ruido de Suenos (Noise of
she quips, “or I’ve begun what I was always preparing her for the disciplined and
Dreams). It was published in 1994 with
meant to do.”
lengthy study required for ordination,
great success. Martha is also the author of
Martha says. The Jordans live in Santa Fe
S
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter zoo^ }
�{Alumni Notes}
1992
Patricia Dougherty (A) offers
this “aoo6 Review in Haiku:”
One dress code, whose socks?
Grammy’s condo yields date
night
Dear dog departed
live in Watertown, Mass. Valerie
can he contacted at
vsd_str@yahoo.com.
Francie Roberts (A) is going
abroad to continue her graduate
studies: “I finished my MA and
45
all the coursework for my PhD in
Medieval Studies here at the
Catholic University of America
in D.C. and have now received a
fellowship to go the Catholic
University of Leuven (about la
kilometers from Brussels) where
Where Have You Been?
Aaron Garza (SF) just finished
a semester of law school at the
University of Utah.
Christopher Hadley, S.J. (A)
writes: “I am in Cambridge,
Mass., now, starting the MDiv
program at Weston Jesuit School
of Theology, I will be here and
maybe at Boston College soon,
for a few years. New England
Johnnies and anyone else too,
feel free to drop me a line,
chrishadleysj @yahoo. com ”
All 3975 MEMBERS OF THE BURGEONING AlUMNI OnLINE COMMUNITY
HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU. NEARLY HALF THE COLLEGE’S ALUMNI HAVE
REGISTERED WITH THE SITE. DURING A MONTH’S TIME, THE SITE HAS
MORE THAN 8,000 LOG-INS FROM THE COLLEGE’S FAR-FLUNG ALUMNI.
1993
Valerie Duee-Strautmann
(SF) and her husband, Jake
Strautmann welcomed their
daughter Northanna Mildred
Strautmann on August 8. They
The NUMBERS GROW DAILY.
Job hunting? Check out the latest postings to the job bank.
Jobs from all over the
You
nation are listed.
can post your opening here too.
Hiring
a fellow Johnnie?
The site hosts 70 networking
GROUPS covering A vast RANGE OF PROFESSIONS. PoST TO YOUR OWN
GROUP OR EXPLORE ANOTHER IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING A CAREER CHANGE.
Find
a long-lost classmate or hook up with your local alumni
CHAPTER.
So PULL UP A CHAIR AND CATCH UP WITH YOUR CLASSMATES.
They’re waiting for you. Visit the
college Web site at
WWW.STJOHNSCOLLEGE.EDU; CLICK ON AlUMNI.
two books of bilingual poetry, Manos en
Agua/Hands in Water and Espacio entre
Palabras/Spaces Between Words.
A few years later, Martha turned her
attention to a seed planted back in her days
at St. John’s: her deep interest in serving
the church. “It all seemed so inevitable,”
she says. “Even from the beginning, almost
every choice I made, whether consciously
or not, was leading to this state of serenity
and fulfillment. And happiness! ”
As an unpaid member of the church
staff, Martha preaches at least once a
month, provides pastoral care and
counseling to members of the church
community, and officiates at services.
“There is one rector and two women
priests, so we take turns preaching and
conducting the services,” she said.
She conducts study groups on theolog
ical topics and is helping the church build
its membership by reaching out to the
community. “One of the things we’re
trying to do is make the Anglican Church
accessible to Spanish-speaking people who
have left the Roman Catholic Church for
one reason or another, or who are looking
for a church home. We’re not trying to
convert anyone, but we are accessible to
those who are looking for a community that
is a via media between Rome and GenevaCatholic and Protestant.”
Martha will continue with her studies;
she has two more courses to complete and
{The College -St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
I have been rather generously
funded as part of a project on
“Concepts and Concept
Formation from 1350-1350.”
1 leave in January and will be in
Belgium for four years, where 1
will earn my keep by writing a
dissertation on the development
of late medieval doctrines of
mental language. This means at
the end I will wind up with
“Leuven” on my diploma, rather
than “America.” It also means
there’s a space on my floor for
anyone who wants a place to
sleep in Belgium. My e-mail is
suavoluntade@yahoo,com and
I’ll post my new address on the
alumni website once I have one.
If you’re in Europe (and even
if not), feel free to send me a
note.”
1994
Marilyn Medlock Roper
(AGI) and her husband, Dan,
have moved into their newly
built house at Hilton Head, S.C.
After three moves in two years
while tearing down one house
and building another on the
same lot, they’re ready to stay
put for a while and hear from
friends in Annapolis and all over.
two major papers to write to fulfill the
requirements for her master’s degree in
theology from St. Mary’s. She juggles her
academic writing with preparing her
Sunday sermons, sometimes struggling
with deadlines and writer’s block. “I am
resigned to living in a state of terminal
Paper Anxiety-now Sermon Anxiety,” she
says, “always an assignment pending.” And
she adds, “In the end, if it is a good
sermon, or paper, God is present.”
�{Alumni Notes}
46
They can be reached by mail at
13 Marsh Wren Rd., Hilton Head
Island, SC aggaS, or by
telephone (843) 4ag-i6ag.
grandchildren across the
country and now the globe,
Janie and George are challenged
to keep up with them.
Janie (Bosworth) Bingham
(SFGI) is stepping down as
Chair of the Board of the Santa
Fe Conservation Trnst. She has
also served as the SFCT
Executive Director. Janie will
continue as an active member of
the SFCT board. Janie and her
husband, George (Kramer)
Bingham (SF66) spent several
weeks during the fall in Italy,
principally Rome, where Janie’s
daughter and family are
enjoying a well-earned sabbat
ical year. In early October,
George’s daughter Tanmaya
married her Aussie lawyer beau;
they are living in Canberra, with
plans to move to Melbourne.
With five children and eight
1995
In May 2006, Rosemary
Ingham (AGI) received the
United States Institute of Tech
nology award for Distinguished
Achievement in Costume
Design aoo6.
A move for Mike Layne (SF)
and family: “I finally moved the
family out of Alaska this past
November. I am the new grant
administrator for the San
Manuel Band of Mission Indians
in Highland, Calif. We are
moving into a home in
Redlands, which is about one
In the Aloha Spirit
mile from the University of
Redlands campus. I’m still
married (eight years as of June
2007). Audrey Rae will turn five
in February 2007, and Thaddeus
Jackson will be two in March
2007. My new e-mail is:
mlayne@sanmanuel-nsn.gov.
I miss Alaska, but the weather
down here is much warmer. And
we are now much closer to
family and friends. Tell Dan
Myers (SFg3) I said HOOT!
He was in Italy when I moved,
and I’m dying to know the
details of his trip.”
1996
Loreen (Lori) Keller (AGI)
is in her second semester of
teaching at McHenry County
College in Northwest Illinois.
She teaches Introduction to
Philosophy and owes all her
inspiration and motivation to
the great days she spent at
the GI.
loha! From MaryIrene Corrigan Ruffin (A04):
“The last two and a half years have been a total
Having defended her disserta
whirlwind! On January i, 2005,1 married Devin
tion in philosophy at Penn State
Corrigan (USNA 2003) and moved to Pensacola,
University, Kirsten Jacobson
Fla., to join him while he went through flight
(SF) is now an assistant
school. In March of 2005, we moved to Corpus
professor
Christi, Texas, and in the following August, Devin got winged
asof philosophy at the
University of Maine.
a Naval Aviator in Fixed-Wing
Aircraft. Last September, we
moved to Jacksonville, Fla.,
where he learned to fly the P-3
Orion. Recently, we have finally
settled into our first actual duty
station: Kaneohe, Hawaii!
Jacob Curtis (SF) and Dayna
There aren’t any words to
describe how beautiful the
Sims Curtis (SFg8) would like
islands are and how awesome it
to announce the birth of their
is to get a chance to live in
baby girl, Clio, born August 8.
Hawaii, but I do miss simple
“She is our precious muse! We
things like Maryland crabs, EST,
enjoy reading about what
and seasons. But, the experience
everyone is up to, so say more.”
is worth it, and there is still
much exploring to do! Through
all the moves, I have had the luxury of sampling a variety of jobs.
I’ve been a bartender, receptionist, an associate at a dog park, and
most recently, have found my niche as a Customer Service Repre
sentative for Marine Corps Community Services, which definitely
allows me to use all devices of sophistry I can muster.” 4"
A
1997
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
1999
Patrick B. Reed (AGI) and his
family are living in Bithus,
Germany, where his wife, Jana,
is serving with the Air Force.
They have enjoyed traveling and
teaching German to their oneyear-old year old, Lucy.
200^
Sarah Seitz (SF) is pursuing
her interest in green building.
She was recently at work on a
passive-solar design tire house
near Bancroft, Ontario (about
four hours from Toronto and
Ottawa by car). “The house will
be approximately 500 square
feet and I expect it will take at
least the next six weekends to
get it built and closed in. If
anyone is interested in learning
more about this building tech
nique and participating in the
construction, feel free to send
me a message.” Her contact
information can be found on the
alumni online directory.
After living and working in
Washington, D.C., and Boston,
Emma Wells (SF) has relocated
and is in her first year of law
school at the James E. Rogers
College of Law at the University
of Arizona in Tucson, Ariz.
“Law school has been a
completely new experience for
me and while I am used to
receiving large reading assign
ments, it was the first time I had
to take long and stressful final
exams. I would love to hear from
old friends, Johnnies in the
Tucson/Phoenix area and any
others who have any advice for
surviving law school sanely.
Please feel free to contact me at
ewells@email.arizona.edu”
�{Alumni Profile}
47
A Champion of Justice
on Ferrier (A73) credits
St. John’s for posing a
question that has formed
the shape of his entire life.
What isjustice? “I
rememher being blown
away by my seminar on the
Nicomachean Ethics. At St. John’s
we spent a lot of time talking about
justice, and now I work in a busi
ness where that’s what we peddle,
but you don’t hear people asking
what it is.. .1 was tainted into
thinking about the nature of
justice a lot.”
As a Circuit Court Referee in
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ferrier
takes his passion from the theoret
Jon Ferrier (A73) was honored as “champion of the
ical to the practical as he strives to
underdog” by the Michigan Bar Association.
uphold justice as best he can. He
hears the family cases of the circuit
court, sorting through cases of
of people-rich, poor, smart, dumb-you
divorce, juvenile delinquency, and
hope that the judge has some standard of
domestic violence daily. As a referee, he
justice and doesn’t just cater to some. St.
hears and judges cases, but his decisions
John’s is where I began to understand that
are subject to the revision of a judge if an
justice is the never-ending pursuit of
appeal is made. “I’ve worked with all strata itself.”
J
2003
“I am very excited to have
advanced to candidacy this
December,” writes Natasha
Vermaak (SF), from California.
“Now to walk the path I have
defined.”
Robert Morris (A) is in
Afghanistan. “I am leading an
unmanned aerial vehicle
platoon that flies pilot-less
reconnaissance drones,” he
writes. “I am very excited about
going. I think being away will be
the worst part of the whole
deployment.”
After almost 30 years in the legal
profession, Ferrier’s conscientious
approach to his job has earned him
the recognition of the State Bar of
Michigan, which named him a
“Champion of Justice” in
September 2006. The “Champion
of Justice Award” is given to
practicing lawyers and judges with
exceptional integrity and compe
tence, whose extraordinary
professional accomplishment
benefits the community. “This
career-capping honor was a truly
humbling experience and at the
same time, the proudest moment
since I started practicing law”
Ferrier says. At the awards cere
mony, Ferrier traced his career
path back to his childhood fascina
tion with Raymond Burr’s portrayal
of Perry Mason on TV, as well as his
experience at St. John’s, where, he says,
“I got the equipment to turn myself into
the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be: a free
human being.”
—Emily DeBusk (Ao6)
In December, Greg Green (SF)
married Anne Deger, soon to be
a Johnnie herself. Greg is the
evening and weekend supervisor
at the Meem Library.
What’s Up?
3006
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you’re doing. The next issue
3004
Rebekah Coleman and
Patrick Evans (both A) were
married on October 2r, 2006.
Rebekah is in the neuroscience
PhD program at George Mason
University.
3005
Charles Claunch (SFGI)
began the MA program in pohtics at the University of Dallas in
August 2006. “I’m happy to
discuss the program with anyone
interested in studying in the UD
pohtics department.” Classmates
can contact him at cclaunch@
alumni. stj ohnscollege. edu.
NIC Zakheim (A), soon to be
will be published in May; dead
Nic Strahl (as she is changing
her name), has taken the posi
tion of Circulation Coordinator
(a wonderful title that does not
actually describe what she does,
she tells The College} at
Scientijic American magazine in
New York, N.Y.
line for the alumni notes
(The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
section is March 15.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404;
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
In Santa Fe:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
�48
{Tribute}
“An Abiding Presence”
Brother Robert Smith (HAgo)
BY Steve J. Werlin (A85)
Brother Robert liked to climb
trees.
This is probably not true about
the decades in which most of us
knew him. But he once told me
that, as a hoy, he had been fond
of climbing. Climbing anything,
really. He said that a favorite
place for him to read was on the
roof of his parents’ house, sitting
outside his bedroom window.
I can add this: As recently as the
mid-8os, when he was already
much closer to go than to ig he
hopped nimbly out the window
of a Paris hotel room to have a
rooftop picnic with a friend
and me.
As a child, he also liked a candy
bar named “Oh Henry! ” I had
beheved that the candy was
named for Henry Aaron, the
baseball player, who was featured
in its commercials when I was a
kid. Learning of Brother Robert’s
fondness for it, 50 years before,
cleared up my misconception.
I’ve known people who were
older than Brother Robert was,
and I’m sure some people,
though perhaps not many, are
active and capable into their 90s,
or even beyond. But it’s worth
thinking about how long Brother
Robert lived and, even more so,
about how long he worked.
Last year was something like
his 70th as a teacher, with only
graduate school and assorted
short adventures intervening.
In the late iggos, he visited my
home institution, Shimer
College. On the day of the visit,
one of my very senior colleagues
remarked in the course of a
meeting that the question we
were discussing seemed to come
up about every five years. Most
of us present were impressed by
that colleague’s long sense of
history. Later that evening, in a
seminar he led for us on one of
Plato’s dialogues. Brother
Robert said something about a
certain student attitude and
mentioned that it seemed to
come into vogue about every
ao years.
But it would not always have
been easy to tell that he had been
teaching for that long. Watching
him prepare for a seminar on the
Bible or the Summa Theologica,
books that he knew more-or-less
by heart, was a lesson. He would
spend hours doing his reading,
looking for all the world as
though he was studying those
pages for the very first time.
I think one piece of Brother
Robert’s greatness as a teacher
was how often he was able to find
so very many things new. It’s not
that he never developed clear
positions. Lots of us know aU too
well that he had very, very strong
opinions on a surprisingly wide
range of subjects: from Stalin to
Clinton, from William of
Ockham to the Talking Heads.
But he was able to find the
books he read with us continu
ally new because of the way he
understood the classes he was
reading them for. Brother
Robert knew that conversations,
whether in seminars or other
wise, are neither about books
nor about authors’ opinions.
They are about what we, and
especially about what our
students, think. He expressed
that clearly in one of the two
guiding principles for teachers
that he shared with me, “Start
where the students are.”
The enduring friendships he
developed over his many years of
teaching, friendships with the
widest variety of students, are
nothing if not a
testimony to one
simple fact: Brother
Robert, through his
know-how and his
character, through
the livehness of his
curiosity and the
generosity of his
heart, was able to
help us all think
seriously, deeply,
and openly about
ourselves and about
our world. And so
our conversations
with him could
become decisive
moments in our
lives.
I don’t miss
Brother Robert. I
don’t see how I
could. He is so very
much a part of me.
Brother Robert Smith (HAgo) will be
He’s with me in so
REMEMBERED FOR HIS DEEP FAITH, ECLECTIC
much of what I do:
INTERESTS, AND JOIE DE VIVRE.
from my teaching, to
my cooking, to my
you to get up on the table and
reading and writing. He’s with
dance upside-down, then you get
mewhen I chat with colleagues,
up on the table and dance
students, and friends. I don’t
upside-down.” The perhapsknow how I could ever feel him
never-realized image of Brother
as absent.
Robert dancing upside-down on
The first time I left Annapolis,
a seminar table is an emblem of
in the summer of ig85, he
his devotion to teaching that
embraced me with one arm, put
ought to endure.
his hand on my head, and said,
“May you be blessed in all you
Editor's note: Mr. Werlin's
do.” The gift of his abiding pres
remembrance was one ofmany
ence, for over ao years, has gone
shared at Brother Robert's
a long way towards making that
memorial service last November.
prayer come true.
A collection ofall the tributes
I’d like to close by passing
is available; contact the
along the other guiding prin
Communications office,
ciple that Brother Robert shared
Annapolis, for a copy:
with me. It’s not as rhetorically
reharty@sjca.edu; 443-716-4011.
sharp as the first, but it’s memo
rable. “If what it takes to make a
class work,” he told me, “is for
{ The College . St. John’s College • Winter 2002 }
�{Obituaries}
Ahmet Munir Ertegun,
Annapolis class of 1944
BY Jon Enriquez
Ahmet Munir Ertegun,
Annapolis class of 1944, died in
New York City on December 14,
2006. He was the founder and
chairman of Atlantic Records,
one of the most successful
record companies of the 30th
century.
Mr. Ertegun was born in
Istanbul in 1923. His father,
Mehmet Munir Ertegun, was a
diplomat and advisor to Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, founder of
modern Turkey. During his
boyhood years in London and
Washington, D.C. Ahmet
Ertegun developed an interest in
jazz under the tutelage of his
older brother, Nesuhi, especially
after their father became ambas
sador to the United States in
1934. Mr. Ertegun also credited
his brother for ensuring his
study of Western thought,
including his studies at
St. John’s.
In 1947, Mr. Ertegun and a
partner. Herb Abramson,
founded Atlantic Records in New
York City, with financial backing
from Mr. Ertegun’s dentist.
Working with Abramson and
others, Mr. Ertegun built
Atlantic into a formidable record
company. Atlantic focused on
African-American music, a
genre largely ignored at the time
by the major record labels.
Atlantic developed a strong
jazz catalogue, but the label’s
principal strength lay in rhythm
and blues, especially after
Atlantic entered a partnership
with the Memphis-based label
Stax Records.
In 1967, Atlantic was acquired
by Warner-Seven Arts Commu
nications, although Mr. Ertegun
continued to oversee the label.
While Mr. Ertegun no longer
worked closely on every record,
his passion for music and his
business acumen ensured
Atlantic’s continued growth.
Atlantic’s most successful acts
included Ray Charles, Aretha
Franklin, Led Zeppelin, the
Rolling Stones, The Drifters,
John Coltrane, Charles Mingus,
Bobby Darin, Otis Redding, and
Roberta Flack.
Mr. Ertegun was widely
regarded as one of the best
executives in the record
industry. Observers cited his
passion for music, his commit
ment to paying royalties to
performers, his sophistication
and style, his love for philos
ophy, and his ability to move
easily among people of
different ethnicities, classes,
and aesthetics. He enjoyed
juxtaposing interesting people,
introducing Wilson Pickett to
Henry Kissinger, for example,
or Kid Rock to Eva Brann.
Mr. Ertegun was a co-founder
of the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, and was inducted into
the Hall in 1987. Mr. Ertegun
was also instrumental in
founding the Rhythm and
Blues Foundation, a charitable
organization to support
destitute artists.
Among his many honors are
an honorary doctorate from
Berklee College of Music,
the Trustees Award and the
President’s Merit Award from
the National Academy of
Recording Arts & Sciences,
and recognition as a “Living
Legend” by the Library of
Congress.
“One of the best decisions I
ever made in my life was to
apply to go to St. John’s
College, rather than a conven
tional university,” Mr. Ertegun
said in 2005. “St. John’s, then
and now, offers a true educa
tion in everything. It is meant
for the student who wishes to
be able to become a truly
educated person-one who has
been exposed to the various
types of thought since the
beginnings of the Western
civilization, and therefore will
begin to understand where one
stands at this time in the
history of the world. . . .[And]
It seems to have prepared me to
help create rock and roll out of
the African American legacy of
gospel and blues music.”
49
In 1991, he told the graduates
of Berklee College of Music
how his thought and life were
shaped by philosophy. “In the
dialogues of Plato,” he said,
“a main thesis was that a
human being’s greatest goal is
happiness. And that happiness
is many things. Its highest state
is when a person gains under
standing of truth, that is, the
discovery of knowledge. It is
also attained when one can
create an object of beauty that
is an imitation or interpreta
tion of nature-an object of fine
art, whether it be a painting, a
literary work, or fine piece of
music. The state of happiness is
also attained by leading a
morally and ethically good life.
That is by developing a set of
habits which makes you choose
right instead of wrong almost
automatically. That is what
makes you a good person, which
is even more important than
being a successful one.. .”
Enriquez is registrar in
Annapolis.
Also Noted
Irene Dortch (class of 1966),
August 12, 2006
Frances Hotelling (AGI77),
October 8, 2006
BrewerNewton (class of 1947),
January 5, 2007
John O’Donnell (class of 1935),
September 8, 2006
Edward Senseney (class of
1952), September 9, 2006
Thomas Sigman (class of 1957),
January 5, 2007
Horace Witman (class of 1934),
October 24, 2006
CarlYannuzzi (SFGI69),
April IO, 2006
Ahmet Ertegun (shown here
THE 1944 St. John’s
in
yearbook)
WAS A MAJOR INFLUENCE IN
American music. He served
on
THE college’s BOARD IN THE
I97OS AND RECEIVED THE AlUMNI
Association’s Award of Merit.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
�50
{Alumni Association News}
From the Alumni
Association
President
More than Just
Memories
I feel very honored and excited to begin
serving as president of the Alumni
Association.
The Association has a solid history of
working in concert with the college to
enhance the opportunities for Johnnies
to stay connected with each other and
maintain a vibrant link with St. John’s as
an institution and with its program of
learning long after they leave the
campuses.
Over the years, the Association’s work
has included:
• Building strong regional chapters.
• Developing lively homecomings on
each campus.
• Supporting the production of alumni
directories, first printed and now
online.
• Helping seniors and recent graduates
network in the alumni community.
Today, we have 23 chapters across the
U.S. The Annapolis homecoming this year
and last had more attendees than the
undergraduate enrollment, the online
directory is approaching 50 percent
participation (sign up today if you haven’t
already!) and we host annual “senior
dinners.” In some chapters we have offered
recent graduate receptions to help new
alumni learn about career options and
build connections in the new cities and
towns to which they move.
The Alumni Association wants to keep
the experience we had of the college and
the Program available to alumni
throughout their lives, as more than just
memories of a time we spent in an “idyllic”
campus setting: as an accessible range of
programs and services. This year our plans
include:
• Increased on-campus alumni
programs. The college, with the
Association’s support, will begin
offering the “Piraeus” program of
alumni seminars in April 2007 and
January 2008 in Santa Fe, and in June
2007 in Annapolis’ new dormitories.
(Recall that Socrates went down to the
Piraeus at the beginning of the
Republic'].
• A stronger Santa Fe homecoming
program. While the Annapolis
homecoming historically has been
held during the school year, Santa Fe’s
homecoming has been in July. At that
time of year, the travel costs are at
their high-season peak and the
campus is empty of students.
These factors appear to have
diminished participation in Santa Fe’s
homecoming. To make the Santa Fe
event more vibrant and rewarding,
Santa Fe homecoming has been
moved to the fall.
• Continued growth ofchapter activities.
We continue to have interested alumni
stepping forward to start new chapters
where they live. Existing chapters are
organizing a broad array of activities,
ranging from formal seminars to
casual movie and beer nights. The
Association will continue to support
these expanded activities.
graduates, about 50 percent of our
alumni graduated in the last 20 years
due to the increase in class sizes on
both campuses.
In addition, the Alumni Association
continues its ongoing responsibilities in
support of the community: selecting nine
alumni trustees to serve on the Board of
Visitors and Governors; recognizing
outstanding contributions by our alumni to
the nation or community, their profession,
or to the college through Awards of Merit;
and welcoming as permanent members of
the community those beloved and long
standing friends, faculty, and staff of
St. John’s by making them Honorary
Alumni of the college.
We accomplish this by providing
directed funding for various alumni-related
programs organized by the college or our
Chapters, by providing volunteer efforts by
our members, and by advocating on behalf
of alumni and the college.
I look forward to serving the St. John’s
community by helping foster opportunities
for more alumni to connect more often and
more richly.
Jason Walsh (A85)
Alumni Association President
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in
the St. John’s College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors
elected by and from the alumni body. The
board meets four times a year, twice on each
• Moreprograms directed to recent grad
uates. We have a new committee of
young alumni working to develop
activities and services of high interest
to the growing number of recent
To make the Santa Fe
event more vibrant and
rewarding, Santa Fe
homecoming has been
moved to thefall.
campus, to plan programs and coordinate the
affairs of the association. This newsletter
within The College magazine is sponsored by
the Alumni Association and communicates
association news and events of interest.
The Alumni Association's Mission:
Tofoster opportunitiesfor more alumni
to connect more often and more richly
President - Jason Walsh (A85)
Vice President - Steve Thomas (SF74)
Secretary - Joanne Murray (SFGI95)
Treasurer - Richard Cowles (A70)
Mailing address - Alumni Association,
St. John’s College, P.O Box 2800, Annapohs,
MD 21404, or 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 200'^ }
�{Alumni Association News}
Glenda Eoyang (SF76)
Mission
Accomplished
On the surface, two accomplishments of
Glenda Eoyang’s six years as president of the
Alumni Association seem paradoxical: the
association has strengthened its autonomy,
and the association has forged a more
productive working relationship with the
institutional body that is St. John’s College.
Rather than clashing, these two goals
benefit the association and the college
equally, Eoyang says: “The goal of my
presidency was to strengthen the partnership
between the Alumni Association and the
college. It was clear that alumni wanted to
support the college community and get us all
working together.”
This needed to be done without compro
mising the independence of the association.
As the only permanent members of the
college community, alumni are protective of
the Program. The danger is that can turn
into “conservative and close-minded views
about the college,” Eoyang acknowledges.
“Stability, consistency, and coherence over
time are important to alumni,” says Eoyang.
“We can do our best if we are aligned with
the college, yet independent.”
For example, one of the things alumni
want to do is assist Johnnies and new
graduates as they consider careers and
graduate schools. “While the college is
more focused on the Program instead of the
working world, alumni can provide the
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowfor information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Robert Morgan, SF76
505-^75-901^
rim2u@c0mcast.net
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon,
A94
410-332-1816
emartin@crs.org
AUSTIN
Joe Reynolds, SF69
512-280-5928
jpreynolds@
austin.rr.com
BALTIMORE
Deborah Cohen, A77
410-472-9158
deborahwcohen@
comcast.net
Alumni Association
MINN./ST. PAUL
Carol Freeman, AGI94
612-822-3216
Freem013@umn.edu
worked to bring the
and college closer
TOGETHER.
career networking and the advice that are
important to Johnnies when they graduate.
Great strides have been made, Eoyang
says, particularly with the onhne community.
Launched two years ago, the online directory
and networking site was created with support
and suggestions from the association. About
4,000 alumni are part of the community.
“It has great possibilities to keep alumni
connected with each other and the college,”
she says.
Building membership and keeping
alumni involved with the college remain the
association’s top priorities. Chapters have
grown, more alumni are taking part in
chapter activities, and more alumni are
participating in the Annual Fund-all
encouraging signs. Eoyang beheves alumni
become involved with St. John’s when the
time is right for them. Her involvement
started when Barbara Lauer, then on the
NEWYORKCITY
Daniel Van Doren, A81
914-949-6811
dvandoren@
optonline.net
NORTHERN CALIF.
BOSTON
Reynaldo Miranda, A99
Dianne Cowan, A91
415-333-4452
617-666-4381
aldo.miranda@
diannecowan@rcn.com reyn
gmail.com
CHICAGO
PHILADELPHIA
Rick Lightburn, SF76
Helen Zartarian, AGI86
847-922-3862
215-482-5697
rlightburn@gmail.com helenstevezartarian@
mac.com
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
PHOENIX
Paula Fulks, SF76
Donna Kurgan, AGI96
817-654-2986
623-444-6642
puffjd@swbell.net
dakurgie@yahoo.com
DENVER/BOULDER
Tom Byrnes, SF74
720-344-6947
tbyr@pair.com
51
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray, A70
724-325-4151
Joanne.Murray@
basicisp.net
PORTLAND
Jennifer Rychlik, SF93
503-547-0241
jlr43@coho.net
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico, A86
619-429-1565
srico@sandi.net
SALT LAKE CITY
Erin Hanlon, SF03
91^67-2194
erin_hanlon@juno.com
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles,
SFGI95
505-986-1814
rcowles2@comcast.net
SEATTLE
James Doherty, SFGI76
206-542-3441
jdoherty@mrsc.org
SOUTH FLORIDA
Peter Lamar, AGI95
305-666-9277
cplamar@yahoo.com
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 2007 }
association board, encouraged her to start a
chapter in the Twin Cities. “I think for many
alumni, the college is important in their
lives, but they’re just busy. What brings them
back is friendships: personal relationships
with people who are currently engaged with
or at the college,” she says.
While she will continue serving the
college as a member of its Board of Visitors
and Governors, Eoyang says stepping down
from the association gives her more time to
devote to her business, the Human Systems
Dynamics Institute, which offers consulting,
training, and research. Eoyang applies
concepts and lessons from nonlinear
dynamics chaos theory and complexity
theory in building interventions for human
interaction. The goal is to help managers
and employees know how to deal with change
and conflict
“There are three large-scale issues,” she
explains, “sustainability, and not just of
ecological systems but of equity systems and
economic systems; conflict, everything from
individuals to youth gangs; and evaluationif you can’t predict, how do you evaluate
whether things are better or worse?”
Eoyang is also looking forward to more
free time to spend at home with her husband,
John, a psychologist. “He’s a Johnnie at
heart,” she says. “Our first argument was
over Pascal.”
SOUTHERN CALIF.
Elizabeth Eastman,
SFGI84
562-426-1934
e.eastman@verizon.net
TRIANGLE CIRCLE,
NORTH CAROLINA
Elizabeth (A92) &
Rick Ross (A82)
919-319-1881
Elizabeth@
activated.com
WASHINGTON, DC
Deborah Papier, A72
202-387-4520
dpapier@verizon.net
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Peter Weis, SF84
413-367-2174
peter_weis@
nmhschool.org
Providing
OPPORTUNITIES
FOR MORE ALUMNI
TO CONNECT
MORE OFTEN AND
MORE RICHLY
�5a
{St. John’s Forever}
A Wandering Library
n the summer of 1969, Santa Fe’s
to another institution. Without a perma
library was located in what is now
nent home, the library collection of 15,000
the bookstore in Peterson Student
books, phonograph recordings, and tapes
Center while fundraising for a new
continued meandering about campus,
library was underway. In 1968 the
stopping in various rooms in Peterson, in
college came close to receiving
the basement of Weigle Hall, on the first
funding from the New Mexico State
floor of Calliope House in the lower dormi
Commission’s Higher Education Facilities
tories, and on the first level of the Fine
Act, but was unable to raise the necessary
Arts Building.
match of $622,000. This meant Richard
Not until November 1990, under the
Weigle (HA49), at the time president of
tenure of President John Agresto, did
both campuses, had to relinquish the funds
Meem Library open its doors. At that point
Z
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2007 }
the college’s collection (now with more
than 67,000 books) found a permanent
home. One of the aims of the college’s
capital campaign, “With a Clear and
Single Purpose,” is to increase library
acquisitions on both campuses. The
college hopes to add to the collections and
to restore and replace outdated, damaged,
and missing volumes.
—Alexis Brown
�{Alumni Events Calendar}
Alumni Calendar
Introducing Piraeus, a new program
Don Quixote
for St. John’s alumni. Join your fellow
Johnnies for a weekend of revisiting a
favorite Program work or read something
new. More details are online:
www.stjohnscollege.edu
led by Victoria Mora and
Peter Pesic
January 18-20, 2008
Santa Fe
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on the
Unity of the Intellect
led by James Carey
April 14-15, 2007
Santa Fe
The seminar will meet in the morning and
afternoon on both Friday and Saturday,
concluding with a final seminar and
brunch Sunday morning. Participants can
also look forward to the Friday night
lecture and dinner together on Saturday
evening. $250 per person, includes
seminars, receptions, and brunch.
Saturday night dinner courtesy of the
Alumoi Association.
This weekend program includes morning
and afternoon seminars on Saturday,
dinner together with Mr. Carey at a fine
restaurant in Santa Fe, morning seminar
on Sunday and a concluding brunch.
BAnnual CBBlnetMal
$200 per person, includes seminars,
Johnnies vs. the Naval Academy
Saturday lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and
April 21, 2007
Sunday brunch. Dinner courtesy of the
Annapolis
Alumni Association.
Rain date: April 22, 2007
Homer’s Odyssey
led by Eva Brann (HA57) and David Carl
June 14-17, 2007
Annapolis
September 28-30
Participants may choose to stay on campus
in Gilliam Hall. Saturday afternoon is
reserved for exploring the metro area,
downtown Annapolis, or the Eastern
Shore, followed by a crab feast in the
Boathouse. $350 per person, includes
seminars, receptions, and brunch; an addi
tional $200 per person for three nights of
room and board. Saturday night dinner
courtesy of the Alumni Association.
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 200"^ }
Dan Caldwell (A86),
Johnnie.
wife
Li,
and a future
�STJOHN’S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS ■ SANTA FE
Published by the
Communications Office
P.O. Box aSoo
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
address service requested
Periodicals
Postage Paid
�
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The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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52
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The College, Winter 2007
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Volume 33, Issue 1 of The College Magazine. Published in Winter 2007.
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The College Vol. 33 Issue 1 Winter 2007
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Dempsey, Patricia (assistant editor)
DeBusk, Emily (assistant editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Benson, Sally
Brann, Eva
Burlington, Elizabeth
Enriques, Jon
Lemke, Oliver
Pihas, Gabriel
Scally, Thomas
Johnson, David
The College
-
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e56e5e9f4f2310153182d7cf8b4adf85
PDF Text
Text
�On Melville
n an acclaimed new biography of Herman Melville ^Melville: His World and
Work), Andrew Delbanco writes of how Melville drew on his experiences as a
seafarer to create his masterwork, Moby-Dick. However, Melville was at a
point in his literary career where he was ready to go beyond the adventure
stories of his popular earlier novels, Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket.
During a picnic on Monument Mountain, not far from Melville’s country home, the
Melville had been engaged in extensive reading, and a fateful meeting-with
author took cover during a rainstorm with Nathaniel Hawthorne, then 46 and much
another author in 1850 had such a powerful influence on him that he
admired by the younger writer. The two hours the men spent in conversation, according
approached his work-in-progress with an entirely new vision.
to Delbanco, left Melville filled with new aspirations. After that meeting, he revised
his novel with perspective gained from all the great works he had immersed himself in:
the Bible, Paradise Lost, Wc. Aeneid, Frankenstein, and Shakespeare’s tragedies.
He accomplished a “stylistic breakthrough,” Delbanco tells us, but the transformation
went much deeper: “In his fever of creation, Melville became Emerson’s proverbial poet,
whose ‘imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to
embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind.’ His book opened out into
the panorama of history and myth to which he had been exposed in his reading, from the
Western scriptures to Eastern tales of dervishes and devil worshippers.”
The publication of Moby-Dick in September 1851 came during a remarkable period for
American literature, when Americans were struggling with soul-wrenching issues such
as slavery which would determine the character of our nation. Between 1850 and 1855,
seven important books were published: Emerson’s Representative Men-, Thoreau’s
Walden, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House ofSeven Gables, Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass, and Melville’s Moby-Dick and Pierre.
Moby-Dick
a great commercial disappointment, selling only 2,300 copies in its
first months. The reviews were mixed. “The intense Captain Ahab is too long drawn out;
something more of him might, we think, be left to the reader’s imagination,” wrote the
reviewer for Literary World. The London Morning Post-was more insightful, if not
exactly prophetic: “There is much that is incredible and a little that is incomprehensible
in this latest effort of Mr. Melville’s wayward and romantic pen; but despite its occasional
extravagancies, it is a book of extraordinary merit, and one which will do great things for
the literary reputation of its author.”
His next novel, Pierre, drew on Melville’s life story, growing up in a family of
distinction but greatly reduced circumstances. His hopes of surviving on his literary
efforts crushed, Melville took a menial job as a customs inspector. He died in debt and
obscurity in 1891. Billy-Budd, a book that alternates with Benito Cereno on the reading
list for senior seminar today, was greeted with critical acclaim when published in 1924.
Johnnies who enjoy making literary excursions can visit Arrowhead, the 1780 farm
house in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville wrote his great novel. Those whose devotion to
the novel goes even further may want to take part in one of several annual marathon
readings Moby-Dick, such as one held aboard the Charles W. Morgan, the last
surviving wooden whaling vessel, or another held at the New Bedford Whaling Museum,
not far from where Melville shipped out on the Achushnet in 1841.
-RII
I
STJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS . SANTA FE
The College (usps 018-750)
is published quarterly by
St. John’s College, Annapohs, MD,
and Santa Fe, NM
Known office of publication:
Communications Office
St. John’s College
Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800
Periodicals postage paid
at Annapolis, MD
postmaster: Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John’s College,
Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404-2800.
Rosemary Harty, editor
Patricia Dempsey,
managing editor
John Hartnett (SF83),
Santa Fe editor
Jennifer Behrens, art director
Annapolis
410-626-2539
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
Contributors
Sus3an Borden (A87)
Barbara Goyette (A73)
Caroline Knapp (SF99)
Andra Maguran
Jo Ann Mattson (A87)
Erica Naone (A05)
Chris Utter (A06)
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
�"I "I
College
Vol
The
ZINE FOR Alumni of St. John’s College
y
Annapolis •
{Contents}
PAGE
IO
DEPARTMENTS
Santa Fe Welcomes a
President
At his Inauguration in October, President
Michael Peters received a warm welcome
and pledges of support from both the
St. John’s and Santa Fe communities.
PAGE
Iz|
Lives in their Hands
8
LETTERS
9
HISTORY
Bibliofile
Peter Pesic takes up a standard
childhood question.
Linda Weiner considers the limitations
of science.
Losing Moby
PAGE
Miss Brann Honored by the NEH
Santa Fe GI Program Supports Teachers
Intellectual Fisticuffs in Annapolis
Fishpond Renovations
Johnnies on the Water
Helping New Orleans
Grant Aids in Shoreline Restoration
30
20
How Moby-Dick has submerged and
resurfaced over the years offers a bit of
insight into decisions about the college’s
reading list.
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Gil Crandall (class 011936) shares
memories of being a “rat.”
Working with wood, metal, and glass,
four Johnnies make beautiful and
enduring objects.
PAGE
a
3a ALUMNI NOTES
PAGE
18
PROFILES
3a Joseph Houseal (A84) follows his love of
26
dance to the Himalayas.
36 Fighting fear with reason; David Veazey
O, Pioneers!
(A97) fights a deadly disease.
39 Shana Hack (A95) follows a dream.
Homecoming in Annapolis features a
tribute to the women of the Class of 1955.
41 Entrepreneur Paul Laur (SFGI95) keeps
family at the heart of his business.
48 OBITUARIES
Remembering Santa Fe Tiitor
Ralph Swentzell.
48 STUDENT VOICES
PAGE
26
After Katrina: Writer Sara Roahen (SF94)
describes a visit home.
50 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
ON THE COVER
Herman Melville
Illustration by DavidJohnson
5a ST. John’s FOREVER
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Miss Brann GJoes to the White House
Annapolis Tutor is one of Twelve NEH Medalists
November lo and ii
were whirlwind days for
long-time Annapolis
tutor Eva Brann: feted at
an award dinner hosted
by the National Endow
ment for the Humanities
in Washington, D.C.,
meeting George W. and
Laura Bush in the Oval
Office, and being one of
the guests of honor at a
State Dinner with lumi
naries including Judith
Martin (Miss Manners)
and actor Robert Duval.
But what is one of the
first things she mentions
when asked to recount
the experience? The
books she was given.
One was a novel, Henry
and Clara, written by
NEH’s acting deputy chairman, Tom Mallon, who sat at her table
during the awards dinner. “It is about Henry Rathbone, who was in
the box with Lincoln when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at
Ford’s Theatre. He later goes stark raving mad and kills his wife.
Thebookwas very well done,” Miss Brann says. The second was
Thieves ofBaghdad, a new work published by a fellow honoree,
Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who wrote about the efforts he led to save
Iraq’s antiquities. “It is a thriller,” Miss Brann says. “The work he
did required courage and ingenuity.”
In addition to bringing home a couple of very good books,
there was another tremendously gratifying aspect to the events.
Miss Brann says. Both President Bush and NEH Chairman Bruce
Cole referred to St. John’s as a “national treasure,” something that
caused her to glow with pride. “It is nice to know that the college
has a reputation in Washington and with the NEH that is real and
serious,” she says.
Miss Brann learned at the end of October that she was selected
to receive the National Humanities Medal, given in recognition
of outstanding scholarship. The honor is awarded to those
“whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the
humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities,
or helped preserve and expand America’s access to important
humanities resources.”
The news came from Mr. Cole, who phoned her personally. “I was
dumbstruck,” Miss Brann recalls. Soon after, she received a call
from the White House social secretary, who filled her in on the
protocol for the White House ceremony with the President and the
State Dinner. Miss Brann, who gets by with the most basic of
wardrobes, was forced to go on a shopping spree, buying three
outfits. She added costume jewelry that has been in her family for
decades. “My father was a doctor in Brooklyn, and when patients
had no money to pay, they
would bring him their
jewelry,” she explains.
Miss Brann could
choose three guests to
accompany her; she
invited her pubUsher and
good friend Paul Dry and
his wife. Cede, of
Philadelphia. The third
invitation went to
Annapolis President
Christopher Nelson
(SF70). The three
attended a reception and
dinner at the Madison
Hotel, where Miss Brann
was pleased to meet one of
her personal heroines,
Judith Martin. “I told her,
‘you’re the ruler of my
life! ’ She was very nice.”
The next morning.
Miss Brann, her guests,
Meeting President George W. Bush
AND First Lady Laura Bush was
and other honorees were
EXCITING, BUT THE BEST PART, ACCORDING
picked up by bus and
TO Christopher Nelson and Eva
brought to the White
Brann, was hearing St. John’s praised
House. One by one, the
AS A “national treasure.”
honorees were led into
the Oval Office. “I went in
and Mrs. Bush and the
President greeted me very kindly,” she says. “We had our picture
taken, and the President said, ‘you have a nice smile! ’ He was very
fit and very friendly.” The President hung her medal around her
neck, and soon all the medalists and their guests were gathered in
the Oval Office. “After talking with Miss Manners, the President
said, ‘I think now that I’ll send you over to the Congress.’ ”
The President told his guests about some of the famous items in
the Oval Office, including the Resolute desk, made from the
timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute, a gift from Queen Victoria to
President Hayes. “Then he said he had to go-’I’m going to meet
the president of Yemen,’ he said, ‘to talk to him very seriously
about terrorism.’ ”
Many speeches followed at the NEH ceremony at the Metropol
itan Club. “Again, the college was very much to the fore,”
Miss Brann said. Next, the honorees were brought to the NEH
Building for a panel discussion. “I was asked whom I would most
like to meet among the dead-I said Lincoln.” St. John’s student
Mark McClay (A09), whose father. Bill McClay (A73), is a member
of the National Humanities Council, attended the discussion.
“It was very nice to have a student there,” Miss Brann says. “I made
him absent from lab.”
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
continued on nextpage
�{From the Bell Towers}
Supporting Teachers
A Generous Gift Will Provide Santa Fe
GI Scholarships
Robert Warren (SFGI93) and his
wife, Carol, signed a planned
giving agreement that
establishes a scholarship for
working teachers pursuing
master’s degrees in the
Graduate Institute in Santa Fe.
The agreement, signed in
December, will provide financial
assistance to students attending
either the Liberal Arts or the
Eastern Classics programs who
are full-time primary or
secondary school teachers and
living and working in New
Mexico. The need-based scholar
ship may be granted to either
full-time or part-time students
in the graduate program. The
scholarship, tentatively valued
at between $325,000 and
$475,000, will be funded by a
percentage of the Warrens’
residuary estate.
The Warrens believe in the
value of a St. John’s education
and are particularly interested in
supporting the Graduate Insti
tute. Moreover, they want their
gift to recognize the value of the
GI to individual teachers living
and working in New Mexico
because they believe the
program enhances teachers’
effectiveness in the classroom.
When he attended the Grad
uate Institute from 1991 to 1993,
Bob Warren saw educators who
were committed to teaching and
to learning but who did not have
the resources to complete their
graduate studies in the same
timeframe as other students.
“I was with a number of teachers
who were doing the GI one-third
of a segment at a time. The
reason was money,” he says.
Warren is glad to be able to
help teachers who must take out
loans. “If we can help free
someone to get out from under
that rock of graduate school
debt, then it’s undeniably a
worthwhile undertaking,”
he says.
Krishnan Venkatesh, director
of the Graduate Institute, says
that teachers need this kind of
assistance. In New Mexico, the
average starting salary for
teachers is approximately
$27,500.
The Warren Family Scholar
ship at St. John’s College is the
Warren’s fourth endowment to a
college. They have established
and funded scholarships at his
and Carol’s alma maters, Hobart
and William Smith College in
Geneva, New York, at Cathohc
University’s Columbus School of
Law, where Bob earned his J.D.,
and a single funded scholarship
to enable an underprivileged
Seneca Indian girl to attend a
private elementary and
secondary school in Bob’s
hometown of Buffalo, N.Y.
For Bob Warren, creating the
Graduate Institute scholarship is
something he has wanted to do
for a long time. He hopes that
Carol Warren, Santa Fe
President Mike Peters,
Robert Warren (SFGI93), and
Santa Fe GI Director Krishnan
Venkatesh celebrate a new
SCHOLARSHIP THE WaRRENS HAVE
Others will follow in his foot
steps; in particular, he would
like to see more support for the
Graduate Institute in Santa Fe.
“Education is everything,” he
says. “What’s happened to the
idea that anyone who could do
well academically could receive
a higher education in this
country? It’s become reprehensibly expensive, curtailing that
opportunity for many who
deserve better.”
Santa Fe president Mike
Peters was delighted with the
Warrens’ support of the
Graduate Institute. “This is the
kind of continuing commitment
to the college that is really
vital,” he says.
While the Warrens’ scholar
ship agreement will help
Graduate Institute teachers in
Santa Fe at some time in the
future, the college’s own
National Educator’s Grant is
available now to support
teachers in the GI on both
campuses. For full-time public
or private school teachers with
at least three years of teaching
experience, the college will
grant a scholarship to pursue
either of the college’s graduate
programs. The grant provides
one-third of either program’s
tuition. Administrators,
curriculum developers, and
other educational professionals
are also eligible for this new
grant.
—AndraMaguran
ENDOWED.
continued
After resting and changing into her formal wear, it was back to
the White House for the State Dinner. “It was very elegant, without
being overpowering,” Miss Brann says of the event. “There were
endless, beautiful corridors, a quartet playing Mozart.” She and
President Nelson took their places in the receiving line, “and this
was really the high point,” Miss Brann says, “President Bush said,
‘Good evening, Eva. You have a wonderful college.’ ”
Miss Brann was seated at a table with Mrs. Bush. “We sat down to
a wonderful dinner,” followed by a performance by Allen Toussaint,
a jazz musician and composer who had lost his New Orleans home in
Hurricane Katrina.
Miss Brann tried with no success to find out who nominated her
for the award. After the story hit the national news, she received
warm letters from alumni all over the country. She is pleased, she
allows, but still a bit perplexed. “I think the college has more to do
with this than I,” she insists.
Her only disappointment in the whole affair was that DoUy
Parton, a Medal of Arts winner, was not able to attend. “I am a great
admirer,” says Miss Brann.
Seeing the White House, chatting with Robert Duval about his
films, and hearing accolades for his college also made the event
memorable for President Nelson, who had never been to the White
House before. He found it remarkable that the President knew
several former and current St. John’s students. One especially
enjoyable moment for Mr. Nelson was walking up to President Bush
in the receiving line and hearing the greeting, “and here’s the
other president.”
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
—Rosemary Harty
�4
{From the Bell Towers}
Fite Club
Tuesday-Nite Fites Allow Johnnies to Take the Gloves Off
BY Chris Utter { Ao6)
One of the most idiosyn
cratic parts of life on the
Annapolis campus in
recent years has been the
proliferation of clubs
with names like “Mabel
the Swimming Wonder
Monkey,” which meets to
watch and comment on
campy movies, and “Hoi
Strategoi,” organized
with the sole purpose of
playing the board game
“Diplomacy.” One of
these odd clubs, though,
the “Tuesday Nite
Fites,” has outstripped
them all in popularity.
On a good night, more
than 40 students partici- S
pate in the “fite,” a kind »
of sophistry contest.
It all began two years
ago with a series of
lectures given by Annapolis tutor Michael Comenetz. Comenetz
sent out a note to the Polity that ended with the statement, “there
will be some etymology and prostitution.” Erikk Geannikis (A06)
thought this was such a strange juxtaposition of subjects that he
wrote the two words on a chalkboard in the King William Room of
the Barr Buchanan Center. Throughout the day students drifted in
and out of the room, some deciding to vote on which concept was
superior by putting a mark under one of them. Geannikis saw this
and thought it was so funny that he decided to pit two new
concepts,''Puliteia vs. Caramella,” against each other, for people
to debate about and then vote on. Shortly thereafter Geannikis
institutionalized the process by securing a charter for the club
from the student council.
The kind of debate that goes on at a fite is, in part, something
we are used to at St. John’s. It is an exercise in comparing two
concepts in the abstract, even though we may not have related the
two ideas before. “That’s the benefit of Tuesday Nite Fites,” says
Brian Jones (Ao6)-gaining a clear idea of concepts we use every
day.” But the TNF format gives students the chance to indulge in
something we can’t do in seminar: debate, compete, and argue.
“It’s a kind of catharsis,” says Jones. “I think that’s why so many
students show up.”
Nevertheless, as in seminar, the merit of an argument depends
on its ability to get to the heart of the matter. “It’s not a candy
shop,” says Schuyler Sturm (A08), quoting one of the club’s
mottos. In other words, the outcome does not depend on which
concept people like more, but which one is demonstrated to be
superior. For example, in the debate “Pants vs. Dance,” at first the
debaters were at a loss even to compare the ideas, let alone decide
{The College
Beyond Sophistry: The
TOPICS MAY BE BIZARRE,
BUT THESE JOHNNIES TAKE
DEBATE SERIOUSLY. LeFT TO
RIGHT ARE AnNAPOLIS
STUDENTS Max Kronberg,
Meghan Lockard, Brian
Jones, Genna Hinkle,
AND Christopher Stuart.
which one was better.
Diagrams of pants were
drawn on the chalkboard,
and liters vehemently
tried to persuade the
other side that they were
right. Eventually,
though, the thought
struck someone that
“pants” could also be the
plural for “pant,” as in
panting for breath.
And since “pants,” as
breaths, are necessary in order to “dance,” pants ended up
winning because of its priority. Often, if something can be shown
to be a priori, that concept will win the fite.
There is always a “Title Fite,” which is the main fight of the
evening, and which is usually a little more serious, for example,
“Ways vs. Curves”; this is followed by the “Two Hole,” which
some have called “earthier” than the rest; the “Brian Jones Fite,”
and the “Seminar Fite,” which pits two, usually senior, seminar
topics against each other. At the end of the nite, each fiter votes
for a winner. A memorable recent Title Fite was “Furniture vs.
Friction.” Most people sided with friction following the priority
argument. But then one of the combatants, struck by the blindness
of his peers, walked up to the blackboard and wrote, “Friction: too
subtle to be serious?” And after a fierce debate, furniture won. ‘‘It
won,” says Sturm, “because superiority is based on a stronger
concept, what affects the human mind more. For this reason, I
often discourage people from using the priority argument. Many
of the debates can be reduced simply to Nature vs. Art.”
Geannikis is graduating this year, but he has passed on the
archonship of the Tuesday Nite Fites to Sturm. Sturm was the only
freshman to show up for the first fite of his freshman year. Sturm
sees a bright future for TNF, which he views as more than just a
weekly sophistry contest.
“It’s useful as exercise for seminar in that we can think of
concepts purely in the abstract. I don’t know that this could exist
at another school; it would probably seem strange to outsiders.
But people here are used to strange oppositions between
subjects,” he says.
- St John’s College •
Winter 2006 }
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Fish on the Run
Students read by it. Faculty
fiddle by it. Children peer over
its edge. With the exception of
the bell tower of Weigle Hall, no
physical feature is more
emblematic of the Santa Fe
campus than the fishpond on
the Upper Placita, in front of
Peterson Student Center.
The pond and surrounding
garden were gifts from film
actress Greer Garson, who
donated funds for the project in
1964 in memory of her mother,
Nina S. Garson. Garson’s
husband. Buddy Fogelson, was a
member of the Board of Visitors
and Governors, and the two
were supporters of the college.
Designed as a two-foot deep
reflecting pool, the pond was
not originally intended to
accommodate fish, says Pat
McCue (SFGI83, EC97), land
scape and grounds supervisor.
It’s not quite deep enough for
healthy and happy fish, but that
didn’t stop local residents from
releasing overgrown goldfish
into the pool. It quickly became
a refuge for Santa Fe’s rejected
fish. (Several “legitimate” koi,
an ornamental variety of the
common carp, were donated by
former president John Balkcom,
SFGIoo.)
Later this spring, the
fishpond and its residents will
benefit from a much-needed
renovation project. The pool
will be made deeper, the water
fall will be repaired, and a water
line that runs beneath the pond
will be replaced. During
construction, he says, all of the
fish except the koi will be up for
adoption. Fish that are not
adopted will be distributed to
the pond in Schepp’s Garden, to
the president’s home, and to a
fish tank.
Most of the pond’s fish are
goldfish; a few catfish and
minnows have also taken up
residence with the elegant koi,
and every once in a while some
Johnnies on the Water
Annapolis Athletic Director
Leo Pickens (A78) has been
seeing more and more students
turning out for crew and
sailing. An analytical sort, he
crunched some numbers.
“With 61 students involved-45
in crew, 16 in sailing-that’s 13
percent of the St. John’s under
graduate students spending
time in boats on the water,”
he says.
Also a competitive sort,
Pickens did some comparing:
Washington College, on the
Chestertown River, and St.
Mary’s College, a sailing
powerhouse regularly atop the
collegiate rankings, each have
just 7 percent of their student
bodies involved in boat racing
sports. “Then I thought, ‘what
about the Naval Academy?
They have all those boats,’”
Pickens says.
The academy has just 9
percent of its midshipmen in
thing exotic-a rainbow trout,
for example-turns up. When he
has time, McCue feeds the fish,
though they could easily survive
on the pond’s algae and larvae.
For the most part, pond
maintenance is minimal, that is
until McCue has to repot all 18
of the water lilies. Among the
fish pond flora there is one
special variety, a lotus flower
symbolic of Eastern philosophy
that McCue donated in honor of
the Eastern Classics program.
Johnnies seem to develop a
special affection for the
crew or sailing. That’s 360
individuals, Pickens allows, but
percentage-wise, St. John’s wins.
In part, the new interest in
sailing is due to a fleet with
nine good boats. The program
also has a dedicated coach in
Buildings and Grounds
Supervisor Pat McCue sits on
THE EROZEN FISH POND, DUE FOR A
MAJOR OVERHAUL THIS SPRING.
ichthyoid residents of the pond.
Several years ago, “Stan,” a very
large koi, ruled the pond for
four years. When Stan died,
some students paid to have him
stuffed and mounted in the
dining hall, where he hung for a
few years until he mysteriously
disappeared.
—Andra Maguran
Skip Kovacs, also the college’s
boathouse manager, “a world
class sailor,” Pickens says.
“Sailboat racing is just plain
fun,” Pickens says. “They prac
tice as a team on Tuesdays and
Fridays, and on Wednesdays,
members are invited to go and
scrimmage with Navy.”
This spring, the team will
take part in a competition
hosted by the Mid-Atlantic
Intercollegiate Sailing
Association. “We’re taking
advantage of the great natural
resource of the Chesapeake
Bay, to get students out and
involved in water sports. It’s a
great fit for us-not like foot
ball,” says Pickens.
Johnnies churn up the Severn
River during crew practice
LAST FALL.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�6
{From the Bell Towers}
News and Announcements
Award for President Nelson
Last November, the Rosenbach
Museum & Library of Philadel
phia honored Annapolis
President Christopher B.
Nelson for “his passion for liter
ature and teaching.” The award
was presented at the museum’s
annual fund-raising event.
One of the cultural treasures
of Philadelphia, the Rosenbach
seeks to inspire curiosity,
inquiry, and creativity through
its exhibitions and programs.
A quick review of the museum’s
collections indicates why the
Rosenbach’s board of directors
would appreciate President
Nelson and St. John’s College.
Among the museum’s collec
tions are the finest known copy
of the first edition oiDon
Quixote, original drawings
and books by William Blake,
manuscripts by Joseph Conrad,
and a manuscript of James
Joyce’s Ulysses.
and Santa Fe community
together. Eakes is currently
principal of The Holly
Company, a consulting firm.
The society sponsors special
seminars, called Inviting
Conversations, which are
modeled after 18th-century
salon conversations, are led by a
St. John’s College tutor, and
take place in the home of a
Philos member.
The society’s newest
initiative, the Xenos Program,
seeks to involve St. John’s
students in their community by
arranging informal gatherings
at the homes of local residents,
who provide students with
career advice, local networking
contacts, or just a homecooked meal.
Off-Broadway Hit
New Tutors
Gabriel Pihas (A93) joined the
Annapolis faculty in January.
After graduating from
St. John’s, Pihas went on to earn
an M.A. and M. Phil in Medieval
Studies at Yale University. He
studied at the Committee on
Social Thought at the University
of Chicago, where he earned
master’s and doctoral degrees in
Social Thought. His academic
honors include an Evelyn S. Nef
Fellowship, the Marian and
Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral
Rome Prize, and a Dissertation
Teaching and Research Fellow
ship at Chicago.
SF Chooses Philos Society
Chairman
Thomas G. Eakes, a busi
nessman and civic leader in
Santa Fe, has been elected to
serve as chairman of the Philos
Society, a steering group of
St. John’s College supporters
that works to bring the college
Santa Fe
sophomore
Laura Sook made
her directorial debut with
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, produced last
FALL BY Santa Fe students. It was met with critical acclaim from
both the campus community and locals who turned out for an
EVENING of musical THEATER FEATURING “MISTAKEN IDENTITIES,
PIRATES, AND OF COURSE, A LOVE STORY,” SoOK SAYS. FrOM LEFT TO
RIGHT, THE THESPIANS ARE: SOPHOMORES AbBY PetRY AND E. ElNOWSKI,
AND SENIOR Jeanne Bustamante.
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 2006 }
Search & Rescue Honors
Volunteer
Winter usually sends the
St. John’s College Search and
Rescue out into the snow,
looking for lost skiers. But this
past November, the team found
one of their own to honor, dedi
cating the team’s emergency
operations center to Dr. Jerry
Allen in honor of his years of
service. AUen, a Santa Fe family
practice physician, joined the
team in 1973.
About 40 current and former
team members came together
to honor Allen. During the
ceremony, the center-located in
the basement of the Evans
Science Laboratory-was
officially renamed the Jerry
Allen Emergency Operations
Center, with a bronze plaque
installed. The center is the
team’s command post, where
radios are tuned to state police
and civil air patrol frequencies
and mission boards track teams
in the field.
In his remarks, Allen
shrugged off the attention. “I
would have to say that for all the
years I was on this team, I got
far more from the team than the
team got from me,” he said.
Team President Mike
Ongstad (SF06) recounted his
first meeting with Allen. “I
showed up for my first mission
with my pack full of gear. It was
about a a.m. And here was this
old guy who was going to lead
our team into the wilderness,
and I thought, ‘oh great, this is
going to be so slow.’ After the
first hour on the trail the
students had to ask him to slow
down so we could catch up,”
said Ongstad.
Team founder Herb Kincey
said that over the past 3a years,
Allen invested “tremendous”
effort into the volunteer organi
zation. “He’s worked with
generations of St. John’s
students and has always been
there for them,” he added. 4—John Haktnett
(SF83)
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Johnnies Help in New Orleans
A few hours after their last
seminar in December, five
Annapolis Johnnies piled into a
car and headed south to New
Orleans to work in the city’s
devastated Ninth Ward. They
had volunteered for a group
called Common Ground, a New
York-based nonprofit housing
and community development
organization. Caleb Nolen (Ao8)
had been looking for a way to
help, and his Web search led him
to the group.
Nolen and Jessie Seiler (Ao8)
organized the trip, which also
included Joshua Becker (Ao8),
Micah Gates (Aog), and Rebecca
Harrison (Aog). Some of the
students stayed for the whole
winter break, sacrificing hoUday
celebrations with their families
to go to New Orleans. The
students spent their nights
sleeping on cots in the commu
nity center of a church and their
days gutting homes that were
badly damaged by flooding and
rendered uninhabitable by mold.
The experience was unsetthng,
the work was exhausting and
even dangerous, and at times,
the students felt overcome by a
tragedy of such proportion.
“The night we drove in, we saw
these mountains of trash piled
everywhere,” Seiler says. “It was
eerie, apocalyptic.”
At the same time, the
dedicated volunteers the
students encountered, especially
those working for Common
Ground, gave them some hope
for the city. “There are a lot of
really good people doing really
good things,” Nolen said.
Each person in the group was
assigned work suited to his or
her skills. Gates did technical
work; Becker worked in the
kitchen feeding volunteers.
Nolen, Seiler, and Harrison
gutted flood-damaged homes in
the lower Ninth Ward.
As they worked in damaged
homes, the students wore
respirators and suits to protect
them from mold and asbestos.
''The night we drove in, we saw these
mountairts oftrashpiled everywhere.
It was eerie, apocalyptie. ”
Jessie Seiler (Ao8)
Back to Nature
Annapolis campus Johnnies
have long used College Creek as
a source of recreation. Today’s
Johnnies also use it as a source
of study, ever since a iggg
project turned a portion of the
shoreline back to its original
marsh. Now, a $200,000 chal
lenge grant from the Arthur
Vining Davis Foundations will
help return the entire shoreline
to marsh.
College Creek, a Chesapeake
Bay tidal tributary, has for a
long time been considered a
prime candidate for shoreline
restoration. Stabihzing the
shoreline will create natural
filters for stormwater runoff
Using sledgehammers and
crowbars, they gutted the walls
of homes right down to the twoby-fours, tearing out insulation,
paneling, ceilings, and drywall.
Both Seiler and Nolen got very
sick, and Seiler had to move to
another assignment: assisting
the Common Ground legal
team. One project she worked on
included trying to get FEMA
trailers to the city’s homeless.
Thousands of the trailers sat
unoccupied while political and
practical obstacles kept them
from being used.
In addition to the stench of
rotting refuse, the acrid smell of
bleach-used to eradicate mold
and to disinfect tools, boots, and
protective clothing-wiU stay
with the volunteers for a long
time. So will the things they
threw out: a notebook in which
someone had copied half of the
and keep nutrients from the
creek, creating healthy habitats
for vegetation and wildlife.
The iggg restoration
returned approximately onefifth (170 linear feet) of the
shoreline to marsh. The marsh
has been used as a laboratory
field site and has been inte
grated into the laboratory
curriculum. It also provides
opportunities for independent
student and faculty study.
Annapolis tutor Nicholas
Maistrellis describes some of
the work done with the marsh:
“We collect and identify estu
arine organisms, particularly
fish, and marine invertebrates.
{The College.
We identify the plants indige
nous to the marsh and think
about their distributions over
the marsh. This allows us to
raise the question of whether
the plants are restricted prima
rily by physical factors or by
competition with others. This,
in turn, leads to the study of the
changing distribution patterns
of different types of Spartina
alterniflora. The latter problem,
whose study requires the use of
molecular biological tech
niques, has so far been done
only by students working inde
pendently. However, I would
hke to see it included in the
senior lab curriculum.”
St. John’s is now in the plan
ning stages to remove the
remaining 680 feet of structural
John’s College • Winter 2006 }
7
psalms from the Bible, a man’s
photo album with pictures of his
daughter, all of a child’s doUs
and other toys.
Walking through the city,
Nolen and another volunteer
marveled at surreal scenes such
as an abandoned March Gras
float and homes spray-painted
with bright red numbers indi
cating how many dead were
found inside. They spotted a
dead dog that had been rotting
on the street for several months.
To Nolen, it seemed hke a small
but important thing to do
something about that dog.
“Jessie and I went back the
next day and put it in a plastic
garbage bag,” says Nolen. “I was
afraid it was going to fall apart
when we picked it up.”
“That was a long day,” Seiler
adds.
Nolen is taking the spring
semester off to continue working
in the lower Ninth. It would be
difficult for him to study right
now. “Here is a chance to do
some good,” he says.
Seiler plans to go back over
spring break and hopes to spend
next summer volunteering in the
city. She is certain there will still
be plenty of work to do.
—Rosemary Harty
bulkhead and restore this area
to its natural wetland and shrub
buffer. Current funders, in addi
tion to the Arthur Vining Davis
Foundations, include the Vernal
W. and Florence H. Bates Foun
dation and the Chesapeake Bay
Trust.
Maistrellis fists the ways the
fully restored marsh will benefit
St. John’s: “As an outdoor site
for scientific investigation of
living things; as a resource that
can be shared with the larger
Annapolis community; as a way
to decrease the amount of sedi
ment entering the creek. This
improves water quality, and
thus the fruitfulness of the
creek in fife forms.” And, he
says, “it is beautiful.”
—SUS3AN Borden (A87)
�{Letters}
World Government
World Federalism was indeed
an interesting movement, but
what if the world government
turns out to be a tyranny? This
would seem to be an obvious
possibility, but Mr. Baratta
[author of The Politics of World
Federation, reviewed in the
Fall 2005 College} and other
proponents of “global
governance” hardly ever seem
to consider it. Today we have,
so to speak, a free market in
governments: if you don’t like
the government you live under,
you can move somewhere else.
True, the price is high, and
some people are unable or
unwilling to pay it, but many
do. Under a world government,
there would be no escape.
Moreover, the hope that the
world government would be a
federal system and therefore
would not meddle in the
internal affairs of its member
states is a feeble one.
In the United States, we
have a “federal” government
that has in effect become a
monolithic national govern
ment, spends more money
every year, and is never reined
in by the states that created it.
A world government, alas,
would do the same.
Geoffrey Rommel,
SF81
Mr. Sarkissian’s Stories
It was with great sadness that I
learned of John Sarkissian’s
death from a recent issue of
The College. John was both a
legend and a good friend to our
generation of students at the
college. He could discuss
Darwin or Leadbelly with
equal facility, as could the
other members (Barbara
Leonard, HA86, Bob Spaeth,
Nick Maistrellis and a few
wannabees) of what we
then called “The Biology
Department.”
What truly set John apart
was his ability to convey the
reassuring thought that life
existed beyond four years of
intense reading and discussion
in the sometimes claustro
phobic Town and Gown
atmosphere in 1960s
Annapolis. John was an
endless source of information
on travel and suggestions for
books that while maybe not
“great” were certainly very,
very good. In the days before
formal graduate school
counseling was available, he
also served as a savvy guide to
what these schools had to offer
and how to put together a
successful application. A lot of
this knowledge was built up
through his ongoing contact
with alumni, and it never failed
to impress me that when
former students returned for a
visit, John was usually the first
tutor they sought out.
But it was the stories, both
those he told and those told
about him that really were a
source of endless enjoyment
and such a gift to us; I can
honestly say that I never heard
him tell the same story twice.
There was the one about the
five jockeys who jumped into
his cab in Chicago, and who
insisted on climbing back and
forth between front seat and
back as they loudly demanded
to be taken “where they could
have a good time.”
And there was his fellow
tutor who wheeled a typewriter
rather than his newborn
around Annapolis in a pram.
Or there was the time, while
serving as a radioman on a
World War II PT boat in the
Pacific (“because I knew how
to use a Japanese dictionary”),
when a torpedo was shot
through the wooden hull of the
ancient craft. The inevitable
Sarkissian punch line was that
the water was so shallow that
they only sank a few feet and
were soon rescued.. .
My favorite was the tale of
Boa Vista. .. John and
colleagues had been traveling
up the Amazon for days
looking for this legendary
beauty of a town with paved
{The College
streets and running water.
“ ‘Beautiful Sight’ my foot,” he
snorted, “nothing but dirt
roads, scrawny chickens, and
flies. But wait, wait,” this last
delivered with leaping
eyebrows and an ash now
longer than its cigarette, “a
Chinese restaurant with the
best Peking Duck I’ve ever
had, no, seriously, better than
in Beijing.”
John and I met up
occasionally, but far too
infrequently, over the past
35 years. One evening at the
old Salaam Supper Club in
D.C. stands out, John in a fez,
banging on some borrowed
bongo drums in time to the
combo’s accompaniment of the
belly dancer. . .
I last saw John a few years
back at an alumni reunion.
He was leading a seminar on
Coriolanus. .. It was one of
those crisp, timeless, October
afternoons when nostalgia is
invigorating and old friends
are new joys. .. We exchanged
reading suggestions. I think at
the time he was devouring
John Buchan’s work or George
MacDonald Frazier’s Flashman
series, or something by
Graham Greene, or, who
knows, maybe all three at once.
I don’t remember what I was
reading but I had been trav
eling overseas and tried to
muster up one or two pale
imitations of a Sarkissian-level
adventure to share with him.
John was one of the most
approachable and delightful
people I have ever known. I
will miss his stories and tips for
good reading, but what I will
miss even more is always
looking forward to hearing
them in person.
Juan B. Ianni,
A70
Euclid with Mr. Swentzell
I haven’t had a lot of contact
with St. John’s in these nearly
20 years since I graduated. But
I have lots of fond memories,
and I know that St. John’s
- St John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
contributes to my sense of
coming from somewhere in
spite of having moved around a
lot in my life.
When I tell people about
St. John’s, I always mention
the books. But of course, it
isn’t really, or mainly even, the
books. It is the conversations
and the relationships they
engendered. Upon hearing the
sad and surprising news of the
death of Ralph Swentzell, what
is brought home to me, in my
sadness, is not the immortality
of books, but us mortals and
the relationships we share.
It was a joy to study Euclid and
be in seminar with Ralph
Swentzell.
I hadn’t spoken to
Mr. Swentzell in all these
years, but I sure carried a
sense of wonder and admira
tion for him. He loved so much
but never played favorites. He
was a big man with a big voice
and a grand enthusiasm.
I am not sure whom to thank
for the gift of Ralph Swentzell,
but for anyone listening, let it
be known that it is one I
cherish.
Liz Barnet,
SF86
The CoZZege welcomes letters
on issues of interest to readers.
Letters may be edited for clarity
and/or length. Those under
500 words have a better chance
of being printed in their
entirety.
Please address letters to: The
College magazine, St. John’s
College, Box 2800, Annapolis,
MD 21404, or The College
magazine. Public Relations
Office, St. John’s College,
rr6o Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
Letters can also be sent via
e-mail to: rosemary.harty@
sjca.edu.
�{History}
9
The St. John’s Trombone Blues
BY Gil Crandall, class of 1936
It has been 73 years since I
enrolled at St. John’s. That
previous June I had graduated
from Annapolis High School and
turned 17 a month later. Like
most teenagers, I was filled with
confidence. Yet I felt a bit intimi
dated as I walked up to
McDowell Hall knowing that I
was just a “Rat,” a holdover
term for freshman from the era
when St. John’s had a military
program.
Being an Annapolis native,
I was a day student, but never
theless subject to the same
“Rat rules” as other freshmen.
We were required to wear rinkydink black-peaked caps, with the
number 36 in orange on the
front, ill-fitting cover that had a
tendency to fall off easily. (I still
have mine, but it is a bit motheaten.) There were other Rat
rules enforced by the student
council, and transgressions
resulted in various punish
ments, including corporal, but
nothing really harmful except to
one’s ego.
It had been my intention to
participate in some extracurric
ular activities. However, I had a
part-time job at Gilbert’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain on State
Circle, a business owned by my family. I also played the guitar, an
instrument slowly gaining popularity in dance bands. The Swing
era was just then on the rise.
One day, not long after the semester started, I received a
circular advising that the college marching band would welcome
new members. I filled in the accompanying application answering
the question, “What instrument would you like to play?” with
“trombone.” Guitar was not then a marching band instrument,
and to my knowledge, it still isn’t. The director of the college
musical activities was Professor Adolph Trovosky, a longtime
Annapolitan who had emigrated years earlier from Poland or
Germany and had never shed a thick accent. He was regarded as a
fine musician and a kind man with a cheerful disposition.
On the first day of band practice the good professor must have
been somewhat agitated, as he busily distributed instruments and
scores. He handed me a nickel-plated trombone and several
musical scores. Never before had I ever touched a trombone and I
could not read a note of the music. When the time came for the
band to play the first selection, “St. John’s Forever,” I simply sat
with the trombone on my lap.
Professor Trovosky, observing that I was not participating,
stopped the band and asked me why I was not playing. Somewhat
Gil Crandall in 1936; a gig with
OTHER Johnnies helped him buy a
NEW GUITAR.
embarrassed I responded, “Sir, I
can’t play trombone.” With a
look of total astonishment, he
said, “Veil, Mr. Grandall, vy in de
vorld dit you zign up to play der
trombone?” I meekly responded,
“Sir on the application form I
answered the
question, ‘What instrument
would you like to play?’ I would
like to play trombone.’ ”
Visibly confounded. Professor
Trovosky glared at me while the
band members roared with
laughter. Placing the trombone
and sheet music on the gym
bench, I quickly departed as the
band resumed playing.
Fortunately that experience
did not adversely affect my
college career, nor my inauspi
cious future as a guitarist.
The college did not sponsor a
dance band, so I formed a small
off-campus combo dubbed “The
Collegians.” The roster included
myself, two local musicians, and
three other Johnnies: highly
talented Bill Quimby on sax, clar
inet, and flute; robust Bob Murphy on stringbass (both of the class
of 1936); and Bill Herson, class 011935, a mad-man drummer.
The Collegians, sans trombone, gained popularity in the
Annapolis area, playing gigs at various venues with slim financial
reward. The country was enduring the Great Depression. Our
biggest success came when an RKO movie team arrived in
Annapolis to shoot a scene for Shipmates Forever, featuring Dick
Powell and Ruby Keeler. The storyline centered on the Naval
Academy, with Powell as a midshipman and Ruby his sweetheart.
I was lucky to book the Collegians and a few extra musicians to
play “sideline music” for a scene replicating the academy’s
Graduation Ball, shot in Dahlgren Hall. All the band had to do was
to play a few bars of a foxtrot as 50 couples, attired in formal dress,
started dancing. The camera rolled, a dialogue between the two
stars was recorded, and we stopped playing on the director’s cue.
Later in Hollywood, the studio orchestra provided the real music.
That gig was a financial windfall for the Collegians. It paid for
my then-costly ($184.50) Epiphone guitar, with enough left over
to buy a six-dollar derby hat de rigueur for hip musicians.
Professor Trovosky now plays a heavenly harp, as do all the
Collegians, except for me. I strum guitar rather poorly and still
yearn to play the trombone,
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�{Inauguration}
“SOMETHING
EXTRAORDINARY
HAPPENS HERE”
Santa Fe Welcomes a President
ore than 700 students, alumni, and friends of
St. John’s College filled the gymnasium of the
Student Activities Center for the October 28
Inauguration ceremony for Michael Peters, the
sixth turned
president
the into
Santaa Fe
campus.
Creative decorating
theofgym
venue
fitting for an
occasion of such importance, with faculty in academic robes
joining military officers (friends and former colleagues of Mr.
Peters, a West Point graduate and retired Army colonel) in their
dress uniforms. With music performed by faculty and students,
the ceremony was short on pomp and rich with substance
reflecting the nature of the individual chosen to lead the college.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson set the tone for the evening
with his enthusiastic pledge to support St. John’s College. In a
state where “tradition rests right next to high-paced modernity,”
the governor said, “... it is only fitting that such a place is also
home to a unique institution of higher learning like St. John’s.”
Gov. Richardson expressed admiration for St. John’s College
and particular admiration for Mr. Peters, a retired Army officer
who served in the Vietnam War, former chief of staff at West
Point, and most recently, executive vice president of the Council
on Foreign Relations. Mr. Peters, he said, is a “forward-looking,
visionary. . . committed to developing and strengthening the
bonds that make St. John’s such a special place.”
“Mike Peters is a man who has served his state, his country, and
his community with honor and courage-from soldier, to
diplomat, to statesman. And he has spent the better part of his
career working with young people as an educator-helping to
bring positive influence to the next generation of soldiers,
scholars, innovators, and leaders.”
M
In just a short few months, the governor said, Mr. Peters has
come to know “the unique nature of New Mexico, as well as the
critical importance of higher education here in this state.” As a
college that prepares students to take their place in “an increas
ingly dynamic world,” St. John’s is important to the future of New
Mexico. And under Mr. Peter’s leadership, Gov. Richardson
predicted, the college will thrive.
“The intellectual heft, the diplomatic savvy, and the disci
plined personality he brings to the table will only lead to bigger
and better things for both St. John’s College and New Mexico,”
Gov. Richardson said. “His thirst for learning and his appetite for
aiming higher is contagious-and sure to help motivate and
inspire the students, the faculty, and the family of St. John’s
College to do great things, well into the future.”
Santa Fe Dean David Levine recalled the beginning of the New
Program in Annapolis in 1937 as he considered the future of
St. John’s with Mr. Peters at the helm. The St. John’s Program was
founded at a time when the world was in crisis, he said, when “we
were all to be tested, not only our physical strength, but our moral
fiber.”
A second beginning came in 1964 with the founding of a second
campus, when “a great experiment was undertaken, to see
whether the same college, the same living curriculum, could exist
in two different places.” Today, though “the look and esprit are
quite different” at the two campuses, “what is not different is the
generous spirit of learning, the openness, originality, profundity,
and common purpose.”
Formally installing Mr. Peters as the president of St. John’s
Santa Fe campus another new beginning, one of great promise.
Dean Levine said. The college took on an extended national
{The College- St. John's College ■ Winter 2006 }
�{Inauguration}
u
Passing the torch: President Michael Peters
AND Former Santa Fe President John Balkcom
(SFGIoo).
made a point of thanking his family for their
support and encouragement: his wife, Eleanor,
and their children, Mike and Rebecca; and his
parents. Max and Peg Peters, “who have been
my models since I was a child.” He also
thanked Moravian College President Ervin
Rokke, a mentor and friend, and the person
who encouraged him to consider life as a
college president-to the good fortune of
St. John’s College.
Inauguration Address
BY Michael Peters
search for a president and “along came a tall, unassuming, articu
late, generous man of the world, who, too, recognized that some
thing extraordinary happens here.”
“And so it is that today we now call Michael Peters to this great
venture of liberal education as its guardian and spokes-man,” he
continued. “We welcome him to our midst and ask him to join us
in our effort to find a place in our complex world for such a bold
vision of education, at once enabling, encouraging, and
ennobling.”
Speaking for the students, senior Shane Gassaway, Polity presi
dent, admired the way Mr. Peters has devoted time to getting to
know students and the Program by taking part in an international
affairs study group, attending dormitory meetings, and becoming
a genuine advocate for students.
“But if there were only one way to win the heart of a Johnnie it
would be to read the books that we read with the same care and
reverence that we show them,” noted Mr. Gassaway. “And this
Mr. Peters has undertaken to accomplish. Beginning with the
January Freshmen last winter, Mr. Peters has attended seminar
every Monday and Thursday night. And now he does the same
with the sophomore class.. . We’ve known him so far as a prospy,
as a January freshman, and now as a sophomore. It is sometimes
said of the January freshmen that those who don’t leave right away
turn out to be the best Johnnies. With such a valuable addition to
our community. I’m hopeful we can say the same thing about
January presidents some day.”
Acknowledging each of the guests and speakers at the cere
mony, particularly students and alumni of the college, Mr. Peters
Eighteen months ago, as I was comfortably
ensconced at the Council on Foreign Relations
in New York, I could not have imagined that I
would be at the podium in the St. John’s College
Student Activities Center in Santa Fe addressing
you as the president. But as a reformed New Yorker, I recall the
insight of that renowned contemporary Western philosopher,
someone who is not included in our curriculum: Yogi Berra. Yogi
is purported to have said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially
about the future.” I can certainly attest to the wisdom of Yogi’s
remark. However, when I walked into a classroom on the
Annapolis campus in July last year and observed the engagement
and commitment of the students and faculty to our distinctive
program, I knew this was the place for me. Everything that has
happened since then-a quick trip to interview in Santa Fe while
trying to adjust to mountain time and 7,000 feet; a mid-winter
move; and getting to know the incredible students, faculty, staff,
alumni and friends of the college-have reinforced my first impres
sion and love for the college.
St. John’s is a community of learners centered on what we call
“the Program,” an all-required curriculum in math, science,
language, social science and philosophy based on study of the
great works in Western thought. This community is enhanced by
our Graduate Institute, which offers two master’s programs,
including one in Eastern Glassies, where students study the key
texts in the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian traditions.
As I said, the students and faculty are a very talented group who
share a commitment to the Program. At St. John’s we don’t put
much credence in reviews and rankings like those of U.S. News
and World Report, but there is one I’d like to share with you that
speaks to the excellence of our faculty and their dedication to
teaching: The Princeton Review. In the most recent edition, the
{The College- St. John ’5 College • Winter 2006 }
�12.
{Inauguration}
liberal education is ourpurpose.
A purpose that is important in and of
itself but abo important four
Republic b to be up to the challenpps
improve our classrooms, create a
it willface in the years ahead.
home for the Graduate Institute,
Santa Fe faculty was rated number
one in the country. What is most
and build a modern auditorium
gratifying about this ranking is
President Michael Peters
that would benefit both the
that it is based not on abstract,
campus and the community.
external criteria but on the opin
Second, connection with the community. St. John’s is a vital
ions of the students themselves. My congratulations and thanks to
part of Santa Fe and New Mexico. Each year we bring more than
the faculty for their great work.
loo of the best students from around the United States and the
The central idea behind the St. John’s program is to help all of usworld to New Mexico. Many of these students remain in the state
students and faculty-learn not what to think, but how to think and
after they leave St. John’s and contribute to New Mexico’s
think deeply. In other words, we are seeking a truly liberal educa
tion. Why are we so single-mindedly dedicated to studying the
economy and welfare.
Of our 8,000 alumni, almost i,ooo are residents of New
hberal arts? In part because, as Vartan Gregorian, the president
Mexico, and of this number more than 30 percent are involved in
of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and former president of
education. Also, more than 50 New Mexico teachers and adminis
Brown University, said, “. . . When people do not know how to
trators have attended our Graduate Institute in the past four
question deeply, to separate fact from fiction, and to give coherence
and meaning to hfe, they can feel a[n] . . . unsettling emptiness in
years, and with programs like Tecolote, we have hosted hundreds
their lives.”
more New Mexico educators on campus.
Through our lectures, art exhibits, musical performances,
With this clear sense of who we are and what we are about, allow
community seminars, and summer programs we bring the
me to highlight the three areas I will focus on in the days ahead.
community to St. John’s and the St. John’s experience “off the
They are: support for learning, connection with the community,
hill.” In addition, our students and staff volunteer their time to a
and heightened visibility.
number of deserving enterprises in Santa Fe.
First, support for learning. With fundamentals as solid as ours,
But we want to do more, and we’ll be looking for ways to
my foremost priority is, as one of my predecessors put it, “to facil
strengthen the connections between St. John’s and our friends
itate the work of the faculty . . . [and] ... to create appropriate
and neighbors in Santa Fe and New Mexico. Part of this effort is a
conditions for learning.” I’m not going to list every aspect this
greater emphasis on attracting qualified New Mexico students to
might entail, but it includes continuing to attract and retain the
highest-quality students, faculty and staff; to provide the need
the college, especially those from traditionally underrepresented
based financial aid necessary to support deserving students; to
groups. Our Opportunity Initiative is designed specifically to
address this issue. We are also hopeful that with the Governor’s
ensure a vibrant campus life, where students can exercise and
develop their mind, body, and spirit. And, of course, it also entails
strong support we can convince the legislature to extend the lottery
scholarships to New
building and main
Mexico residents who
taining first-class facili
attend private colleges in
ties and grounds. In this
the state, hke St. John’s.
regard, I apologize that
My final priority is to
you may have to navigate
heighten the visibility of
around some construc
tion on your way to the
the college and the
reception at the Peterson
campus. For too long we
Student Center. This is a
have been content, as
sign of progress for me.
the New Testament says.
We are also in the
initial planning stages
for a new dorm, so we can
house
a
larger
Mr. Peters thanked
MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY
percentage of our under
FORTHEIR SUPPORT (LEFT
graduates on campus,
TO right): his wife,
and we are looking for
Evelyn; son, Mike;
ways to expand and
DAUGHTER, ReBECCA;
AND FATHER, MaX.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�{Inauguration}
to “keep our light under a bushel basket.” We cannot continue to
do so. Prospective students, friends, the higher education
community-and if it is not too presumptuous, the nation-need to
know about us. Who we are, what we do and how we do it. In part
nership with our sister campus in Annapolis, we need to tell our
story and to be what some have called “a beacon of liberal educa
tion.” Once again to quote Vartan Gregorian, “[HJigher educa
tion . . . must focus on a revival of the liberal arts. Yet, paradoxi
cally, liberal education is in decline just when we need it most....
Liberal education is needed to integrate learning and provide
balance-otherwise students will graduate into a world in which
dependence on experts of every kind will be even more common
than it is today.”
A liberal education is our purpose. A purpose that is important
in and of itself, but also important if our Republic is to be up
to the challenges it will face in the years ahead. For example, as
David Brooks of The New York Times said regarding reform of the
intelligence community, “I’ll believe the intelligence community
has really changed when I see analysts being sent to training
academies where they study Thucydides [and] Tolstoy ... to get a
broad understanding of the full range of human behavior.” Well,
at St. John’s we do study Thucydides and Tolstoy. Not because we
are trying to develop intelligence analysts, but because we believe
that a responsible citizen needs a number of attributes that come
from a liberal education including a “broad understanding of
human behavior.”
To tell the St. John’s story we need the help of everyone herealumni, parents, friends, students, faculty and staff. It deserves to
13
be told-I’m certainly going to do it and I hope you will join me.
As I conclude, you’ll forgive me, but sometimes I just can’t get
beyond my old military training. One aspect of that training was in
a presentation, you should always tell’em what you’re going to tell
them, tell them and tell’em what you told them.
So again, my priorities are: First and foremost, support for
learning; second, connection with the community and last, but
certainly not least, heighten visibihty for the college and the campus.
Blessed with a very sohd foundation, a clear sense of who we are
and what we wish to accomphsh, and the
talent and commitment of the entire
college community, I am confident that
St. John’s best days are ahead. I am
pleased to play a part in fulfiUing this very
promising future. Thank you for demon
strating your support for St. John’s by
being with us today,
Above: Gov. Richardson
CONGRATULATES PRESIDENT PeTERS.
Left: The after-Inauguration party at
THE Peterson Student Center was an
all-inclusive and festive affair that
FILLED BOTH THE DiNING HaLL AND THE
Coffee Shop. Tutor Carey Stickney
(A75) JOINED STUDENTS IN PROVIDING THE
Coffee Shop music.
{The College. St. John’s College • Winter 2006 }
�{Johnnies at Work}
LIVES IN THEIR HANDS
Johnnies Workfor Lasting Beauty
wi Caroline Knapp, SF99
Wiener’s character is with his craft. The patience, elegance, and
hese Johnnies make different
deliberation that characterize boatbuilding are just as evident in
things: timher-frame homes,
his words as in the boat frames all around him.
jewelry, wooden boats, furniture.
He came to the work, Wiener explains, “theoretically.” While
he attended St. John’s, Wiener’s developing interest in the
What they share is the desire to
manual arts was encouraged by tutor William Darkey (class of
build something enduring and
194a), who built his own harpsichord. But it wasn’t until gradu
beautiful and to improve in their
ating that Wiener set himself to training his body “in as rigorous a
I had trained my mind at St. John’s.”
craft with each new project they take on.fashion
Theyasare
The desire for rigor led him to boatbuilding. It was, in his way of
idealistic and practical, enterprising and
imagi
thinking, the “most uncompromising” of the woodcrafts, the one
native, and when they finish a day’s work, they
with the lowest margin for error. “Furniture,” he says, “has to
hold up to the demands of the human body, but ships have to hold
have the pleasure of standing back and regarding
up to the full force of nature out on the water.”
the fruits of their labor.
However, learning to build wooden boats in the United States in
T
Michael Wiener,
SF69
Boatbuilder
Carrying on a conversation with Michael Wiener at the Spaulding
Center for Wooden Boats isn’t for the easily discouraged.
Although the boatyard in Sausalito, Calif, is just big enough for
a half dozen wooden boats in various stages of reconstruction, it’s
humming with activity. Two young men are carting planks from
one neat stack to another, an older man in a straw hat is cranking
a hand-operated crane, and from inside the wood-beamed ware
house comes the hiss of welding equipment. In the middle of the
yard a group of adult students peers up at the partially de
constructed hull of a loo-year-old pleasure boat, Freda. The
atmosphere is of steady, unhurried industry. As head of the yard,
Wiener can’t go more than two minutes-even on his lunch hourwithout being called over to consult on one of the dozens of tasks
at hand.
Wiener answers each question with the same measured, precise
attention. Under his soft cloth cap his expression is affable; his
eyes, while alert to the yard’s activity, are relaxed. When he tells
the story of his journey to this boatyard, it’s clear how consonant
the early 1970s was no easy task. After an unsuccessful search for
a boatyard in Maine, Wiener returned for a time to his native San
Francisco Bay. There he found one yard whose boatbuilders were
“taken aback and flattered” that he would request an apprentice
ship in a dying art. But after he’d put in a year learning the
rudiments of the trade, he recalls the yard’s Irish foreman taking
him aside and asking, “Do you know what you’re doing?” When
he answered in the affirmative, the man said, “Well, my lad,
you’re doing it in the wrong place.”
That recommendation sent Wiener on an international hunt for
a traditional boatyard willing to take on an American apprentice
during the height of the Vietnam War. He found it eventually in
Denmark, where he spent four years as an unpaid apprentice,
studying from master boat builders.
When he returned to the United States, Wiener was well
qualified to build wooden boats, but uncertain whether he wanted
to. Instead, hoping to integrate his academic and practical
training, he went to work for Charles and Ray Eames in their
famous San Francisco design office. The Eames brothers,
intrigued by Wiener’s combination of intellectual and hands-on
experience, soon put him to work on one of their most ambitious
projects, the feature-length science movie Powers of Ten. Wiener
{The College- St. John ’5 College ■ Winter 2006 }
�{JohnniesatWork}
Michael Wiener (SF69)
15
sought rigor in his life and
FOUND IT IN BOATBUILDING.
{The College -Sf. John’s College • Winter 2006 }
�{JohnniesatWork}
i6
''Given the choice between moreperfect and
more quick, I always choose moreperfect.
Kait Schott,
designed an innovative camera stand and shot the film, which has
since become something of a cult classic.
Though his work with the Eames brothers brought him closer
to the fusion of knowledge he’d envisioned in Mr. Darkey’s
freshman math class. (“Lining up a 2o-foot animation stand, I
used plenty of Euclid,” he explains.) Wiener wasn’t quite satisfied
with that compromise either.
Wiener worked instead as a jack-of-all-trades builder in the tiny
Tomales Bay town of Marshall, co-founded the first organic dairy
west of the Mississippi, and taught himself to build furniture.
Slowly though, the boatyard began to pull him back. “I thought
that when you learn something rigorous like boatbuilding, you
can apply it to anything,” he says. “That’s not true.”
Wiener moved back to Sausalito with his wife and two daugh
ters, joined the Spaulding yard in 1978, and took over yard opera
tions in 2000. In 2002, following the death of its founder, the
yard became a nonprofit, the Spaulding Center for Wooden Boats.
Wiener is on the board of directors.
It would be a pleasure to talk more, find out what he’s reading,
if he finds time to sail, and how he thinks St. John’s has changed.
But the lunch break is over, and Wiener’s eyes are already darting
back to the corner of the yard, where his expertise is needed.
For more information on wooden boat restoration classes at the
Spaulding Centerfor Wooden Boats, call
Kait Schott,
SF91___________________________
Jewelry maker, metal and glass worker
Kait Schott may have spent the years since her graduation
learning fine craftsmanship of the most demanding sort, but for
Johnnies her most impressive achievement is one seemingly unre
lated to her professional life: Schott completed freshman lab five
times, once as a freshman and four times as a lab assistant.
After graduation, rather than taking up a career as a profes
sional baros specialist, Schott returned to her native Minnesota.
There, after spending nearly five years employed as a goldsmith,
she now crafts her own jewelry out of metal and glass.
But all those years in freshman lab helped lead Schott to her
work. Her lab experiences contributed to her interest in working
with actual, not metaphoric, materials. In freshman lab, she
explains, “there’s a struggle with a physical object, with the
tension between you and the physical stuff.”
In freshman lab, the stuff in question is likely to be clay
weights, simple chemical solutions, or cat innards. Eor gold
smiths, the stakes are somewhat higher. But Schott maintains
SF91
that both are expressions of the same contest, “over whether or
not you are going to achieve the eidos of the thing that’s in your
head.”
Having grown up in a family where her mother and grandmotherwere “always making something,” she was inspired by the
wealth of materials available in Santa Ee. While still a student at
St. John’s, she began visiting the bead dealers at the city’s flea
market. Soon she was making simple jewelry for friends and
giving it away. Later, she began selling her work “just to support
the habit.”
Though she had had no professional training at this point,
Schott had already identified one of the key principles drawing
her to work with jewelry. “Jewelry is so personal,” she says. “It’s
expressing a really primitive urge. You find a little trinket that just
has something about it, and you want to take it with you. So you
put it on a string.”
She also realized early that she wasn’t interested in making
jewelry that looked like everyone else’s: “Jewelry is also very
personal in the sense that it’s expressive. The pieces I make are
not particularly narrative, but the person who wears them makes
a decision about what they want to portray.”
Schott’s own decision, after graduating from St. John’s, was to
continue the experiment she had begun as a student, “to really
engage the physical stuff of the world.” Her first steps took her to
the San Francisco area, where she took metalsmithing classes at
the Richmond Art Center. Armed with new technical skill, she
moved back to Minneapolis, found a glass workshop, and eventu
ally attended trade school for metalworking.
There, she learned to cast, polish, solder, and set stones in an
atmosphere that encouraged neither creativity nor discussion.
Though, she muses, “it was like St. John’s in that everything was
laid out for you.”
After graduating from trade school, she worked for four-and-ahalf years as a hired “pair of hands” in a large jewelry shop
specializing in complex and expensive gold wedding bands. The
work was challenging, but not creative, and it demanded speed
and skill. “As a goldsmith, there was a constant battle of will
between me, the stuff, and the clock,” she says. While the first
two elements of that equation were familiar, the third posed more
difficulty: “Given a choice between more perfect and more quick,
I always chose more perfect. I do have an appreciation of having
some efficiency and speed. But I also know that there are limits to
how fast I’m ever going to do something and still enjoy it.”
In 2003, Schott quit work as a goldsmith, moved to an artists’
co-operative, and decided to concentrate on her own work. “I
want to sit back and think for a while again about what I really
wanted to make,” she explains.
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�{Johnnies at Work}
Lately, that has led her to work extensively with glass; she’s
fascinated hy the way that glass responds to heat. “I think most
people can anticipate what metal will he hke when it’s heated. But
glass becomes really fluid when you work with it. It’s just magic.
The material itself is a seduction.”
The new work pattern has also given her time to return to her
roots. With a local alumni chapter, she recently revisited Goethe’s
“On the Metamorphosis of Plants.” At this distance from
freshman year, she sees in the essay a meditation on the artist’s
struggle. “It’s a great metaphor for feeding yourself creatively,
for developing into something new and different,” she says.
“The sense of striving that Goethe seems to ascribe to the plant is
hke the struggle to take the world and try to making something
out of it.”
Kait Schott’s work, including a recent series ofplantforms in glass
inspired by Goethe, can be viewed at www. kaitschott. com.
Ben Shook, SFoo
Carpenter
Ben Shook explains his decision to become a craftsman as though
it were composed, like a wooden joint from one of the chairs he
builds, of two separate pieces which fit together perfectly;
“St. John’s left me with student loans and some inextricable
idealism. I probably already had the idealism. So I had to make
a living.”
Shook’s tone is self-mocking, but he’s perfectly serious about
In her work, Kait Schott (SF91) struggles with
“the eidos of the thing that’s in your head.”
17
materials and
the idealism. It kept him up nights as he was beginning his
apprenticeship, practicing in his own shop the skills he’d
observed during the day. And today it’s the driving force behind
the thriving small business he runs out of his Portland home.
Shook felt the first stirrings of interest in fine woodworking
while visiting a museum. He spent the year after his graduation
traveling and working in France. One day, he visited the Musee
des Arts et Metiers, the Paris museum devoted to the finest prod
ucts of French craftsmanship and engineering from the Middle
Ages to the present. The masterworks in wood, stone, and metal
that he saw there convinced him that “the depths to which one
could take this craft are unfathomable.”
Shook returned to Dayton, Wash., found a job as a bartender,
and bought some tools. Working from books and studying furni
ture, he began to build what he now calls “rustic things,” roughhewn desks and bookcases made using wood salvaged from old
barns. He still had no formal training, but the results were
compelling. “One day, this woman who owned a gallery came by,”
he recalls. “And she bought everything, about ao pieces. She just
said, T’ll take all of it for my shop.’”
Encouraged by the sudden success. Shook decided to get
serious. In aooa he apprenticed with a French master carpenter
in Washington, working for low wages and “asking him questions
every second there wasn’t a machine on.” By the end of the year.
Shook had learned the basics of timber-frame construction and
{The College • St. John's College ■ Winter 2006 }
�i8
{Johnnies at Work}
felt ready to strike out
on his own.
Today, Shook em
ploys two assistant
woodworkers in a
large shop attached to
his Portland home.
His business has
grown rapidly in the
last few years, mostly
through word of
mouth. Working by
hand and with power
tools, he and his assis
tants spend at least
one month on each
major furniture piece.
The shop spent nearly
half of last year furnishing a whole house for just one client.
Slowness is one of the qualities Shook appreciates in his work,
one of the principles he’s distilled from his beginnings in the
craft. “Working with wood requires a different orientation to
time,” he says. “The time is so great with some projects. You just
have to let go of the male perception of working at something from
beginning to end. You have to think in days and weeks. You have
to have a real patience for letting glues set up, for just learning to
let something sit.”
Shook’s latest passion is building chairs. “I’m getting really
into them,” he confesses. “Chairs are the most human kind of
furniture, the thing that you put your body in rather than on.” The
chair design he’s working on now has no metal parts; the seat is
hand-shaped. Its secret. Shook says, is a special central joint orig
inally designed by master builder Sam Malouf: “It’s such a beau
tiful and simple joint, and it’s so strong.”
Joints are, of course, the heart of the furniture maker’s craft, and
Shook has spent some time considering them. At the moment, it
seems to him to be a question of creating union. “The marriage of
two pieces of wood in a joint is such a delicate and precise thing,”
he says. “And when it’s done right, it’s a forever marriage.”
If Shook sounds as though he’s been considering words closely
as well, that’s no accident either. When he isn’t working in the
shop, one of his interests is writing poetry, which he says is “sort
of like making furniture.”
Visit WWW. benshook. com.
Ben Shook(SFoo)
WORKS ON A CHAIR,
“the most human
KIND OF FURNITURE,”
IN HIS Portland shop.
Jordan Finch
(SFoo)
Builder
Jordan Finch’s career
as a builder of beau
tiful homes has its
roots in his junior
year at St. John’s,
when he experienced
a revelation. Having enjoyed woodworking as a hobby, he knew he
wanted to build things-big things, beautiful things-after gradu
ating from the college.
“I had this idea that I wanted to build cathedrals,” he says. “I
went on this long search to learn about them, but it never quite
panned out-there just weren’t many cathedrals being built.”
However, Finch has found something nearly as satisfying in
building timber-frame homes, characterized by soaring ceilings,
heavy exposed beams, craftsmanship, and durability. He is
rapidly becoming a master of the same post-and-beam construc
tion methods that contributed to the majesty of Europe’s great
cathedrals.
Timber framing has been practiced for centuries, but in modern
times, stick-built construction-faster and cheaper-has prevailed,
“until the 1960s, when hippies began reviving the craft,” says
Finch.
Picture an old-fashioned Amish barn raising and you’ll get a
sense of the work Finch does. Without a few dozen men to raise
the frame that serves as the skeleton of the house. Finch relies on
the modern crane. But in every other way-the precise fitting of
tenon into mortise, securing joined timbers with pegs of solid
wood-Finch uses time-honored and traditional methods to build
homes. “There’s a great geometry to it all. When you’re building
these homes, you have to hold this visual image in your head. It’s
like doing Euclid in 3-D,” he says.
Finch took up carpentry as a teenager, and he has been
perfecting his craft since graduating from St. John’s in 2000.
While spending junior year in Annapolis, he stole time from his
studies to build a boat. That summer, the college’s Placement
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�{Johnnies at Work}
office (now Career Services) helped Finch find a job with Steve
Whalen (SF83), who had a carpentry business in Southwest
Harbor, Maine. “I told him I was attending St. John’s and knew
how to use a hammer and he said, ‘come on up.’ ” After gradua
tion, Finch served a two-year apprenticeship with Vicco von Voss,
a custom furniture maker in Chestertown, Md. “It’s probably
been the highpoint of life in craftsmanship so far,” he says.
Von Voss began designing his own timber-frame home, and
Finch contributed his construction expertise to the project. Along
the way, he recognized that he had found a solid substitute for
cathedrals. When his apprenticeship ended. Finch found a job
with Lancaster County Timber Frames in Pennsylvania. “I had the
basic skills, but I wanted to get faster,” he explains. “There are
shops like these throughout the country and a lot of them do
beautiful work, but it really is high tempo.”
Finch’s “meditative” methods weren’t a good fit with highpressure shops, so he took his tools and went out on his own as an
itinerant joiner, subcontracting for other timber framers on proj
ects in Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and Massachusetts. After a year
and a half of honing his craft on the road. Finch moved to Virginia
to marry Quinby Owen (Aoa) and settle down in the Shenandoah
Valley town of Mount Jackson.
19
When Quinby’s parents needed to find a builder for their home,
their new son-in-law talked them into hiring him. It was his first
opportunity to design a home and to build it from start to finish.
Never mind the r6-hour days; it’s been well worth it, he says.
“We raised the frame on Oct. 33, 2004. I’ve been involved in
quite a few raisings, and there’s always a sense of expectation and
eagerness in the air, but this time, it was really satisfying,” he says.
There is a wholeness to the work that appeals to Finch each time
he takes up his tools. “I’ve gone from milling the tree to sanding
something to a mirror polish. Sometimes you smell like a
chainsaw, other days you need a surgeon’s touch just to take a
sliver of wood away,” he says. “That really gives me a sense of
fulfillment-it feels natural and complete.”
People are surprised to hear that timber framing is a green
building method, he says. “Timber framing does take larger,
mature trees,” he acknowledges. “But if a building will stand for
300 years or more, that’s a responsible use of materials.”
Happy to create anything out of a beautiful piece of wood. Finch
still makes furniture and recently accepted a commission for a
dining room table. With Quinby expecting a baby when he
started his business. Finch named his shop Finch and Sons Fine
Woodworking. Since the arrival of daughter Aurelia, now almost
one, he’s had to reconsider the name.
“How does Finch Family Woodworkers
sound?”
For questions on timber-frame construc
tion, contact Finch at Jordanafinch®
yahoo.com or at 540-333-0034.
—Rosemary Harty
Quinby (Aoa), Jordan (Aoo), and Aurelia
Finch, in the home Jordan is building in
Virginia.
{The College -St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�ao
{The Program}
SMALL WAVES IN
A TRANQUIL SEA”
Melville, Literature, and the St. Johns Reading List
wi Rosemary Harty
ow many Johnnies have read-or even
heard oi-The History of Henry
Esmond?. Thackeray’s novel, the
story of Henry and his love for
Beatrix, was on the list of hooks that
Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan
assembled for the New Program, first
published in The Bulletin ofSt. John’s
College. It was the Bulletin that in
1937 set out the specifics of the Program for prospective students
and the rest of the world, and here, the college’s criteria for
choosing a classic was defined. The first two involve magnitude:
“A great book must have been read by the largest number of
persons”; for clarity, works by Plato and the Bible are mentioned
in this regard. The work also must offer the possibility of many
different interpretations. It must “raise the persistent unanswer
able questions about the great themes in European thought.” And
the final two criteria: it must be “a work of fine art” and a
“masterpiece of the liberal arts.”
These criteria have guided choices for the college’s reading list
for nearly 70 years. A self-study conducted by Annapolis faculty
for reaccredidation two years ago acknowledged that, “although
there is broad agreement about our reading list, certain authors,
texts, and text selections regularly come up for discussion. The
Senior Seminar list, which contains the most recently written
books, is always the most controversial. Even here, however,
upon annual review of the Program by the Instruction
{The College.
Committee, there is far more stability than change, and our
concerns amount to small waves in a largely tranquil sea.”
Changes-major and minor-to the list come slowly and with
careful deliberation. This is not done to preserve a canon, but
rather, a continuum, as the self-study report states: “Year after
year, for at least two hours on Monday and Thursday nights,
students and tutors discuss the same books in the same way with
the sense that here, in the thinking, speaking, and listening that
go on in the Seminar, the College is most alive and most itself.”
A number of books read for seminar have dropped off that first
list included in the Bulletin, including Goethe’s Faust, Fielding’s
Tom Jones, and Corneille’s Le Cid. Moby-Dick-'wXdCti many
faculty and alumni would consider a perfect match with that 1937
definition of a great book-has been out of the list for some time.
It hasn’t been read in seminar in Annapolis for 3r years and has
made sporadic appearances on the Santa Fe seminar list. In recent
years Flannery O’Conner and William Faulkner have joined the
senior seminar list at the urging of some tutors and over the
objections of others.
Considering suggestions and objections from tutors and
students is the work of the Instruction Committee, comprising
13 tutors (six from each campus), the deans of both campuses,
and the two presidents as ex-officio members. The IC is respon
sible for the program of instruction, and with it, has the power
to add or remove a book from the reading list. Changes are
made by consensus, not by majority rule, and also are governed
by transferability.
St. John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
�{ThePrOGRAM}
{The College -St John’s College • Winter 2006 }
ai
�aa
{TheProgram}
''Chiefamong these motives was the
overwhelming idea ofthe great whale hitnself
Such aportentous and mysterious monster
roused all my curiosity ”
Ishmael
Annapolis tutor Anita Kronsberg (A79) says the committee
considers factors such as “whether a book has the kind of weight
and substance” worthy of study and discussion, and whether it
connects in interesting ways to other books on the reading list.
Each year, the committee reviews reports submitted by the tutors
who served as the recorders for their seminars. These reports help
the committee decide if a certain reading is working well in
seminar, and along with specific requests, factor in decisions to
change the list.
When a book comes off the reading list, it’s usually to make
room for another. There are sacrifices and sometimes compro
mises, because in the harsh light of reality, “we can’t read all great
books,” Kronsberg says. The nature of the college’s Program
(roughly chronological) means that fewer changes will be made
when Ancient Greek and medieval works are concerned.
A few years ago, the committee made an earnest attempt to find
room for The Sound and the Fury, “but we couldn’t put it any
where in the seminar where the students could read it,” she says.
“It’s a very beautiful book, some of Faulkner’s finest writing,”
Kronsberg says, almost wistfully. “The approach he takes is not
like anything else we read.”
Don Quixote is one of a handful ofvery long novels Johnnies are
asked to read in the Program, most timed for summer or winter
breaks to allow time to read and ponder before seminar meets. But
discussion is still condensed to two meetings on books like War
and Peace and Middlemarch.
It’s not entirely satisfying, but that’s another reality of the
Program: “We acknowledge that St. John’s is a place where some
books get a first reading,” says Kronsberg. Whether it’s a long
novel, a complex poem, or a passage from Kant, returning to the
work provides a fuller view.
Santa Fe tutor Frank Pagano says the IC on his campus usually
concentrates on two years of the Program at a time: freshman and
junior years, or sophomore and senior. When the committee
makes changes to the list, it’s often in the interest of choosing
books that “work well in seminar.”
“We want books to be great,” says Pagano, a tutor of aa years.
“That’s easy to experience, but hard to nail down.” To illustrate
his point, Pagano points to difficulties in reading Supreme Court
decisions for seminar. While important, they don’t quite work as
Program books, in his opinion. “Inevitably they require historical
background-that’s a sign that something isn’t great,” he says.
In Santa Fe about five years ago, the IC decided to add
Maimonides (Guidefor the Perplexed} to the sophomore reading
list. “It’s a great book in itself. But the second reason it works in
seminar is that you have two traditions that the Bible represents,
and we had no theology that was Jewish.” Maimonides also speaks
to other Program authors, says Pagano: “He’s picked up on in
junior year by Spinoza, especially.”
Although changes to the reading list have not been monu
mental ones, the Instruction Committee could vote by consensus
to remove Plato’s Republic-Mt^My unlikely, but by the rules
governing the committee, not impossible. “The thought is we
could change anything,” Pagano notes.
However, substantial changes to philosophy are pretty rare.
“They’re all part of a tradition, and it’s very hard to take one out
and put one in,” he says. “If you’re going to do Hegel and not
do Kant, you’re not going to be able to see who Hegel is
responding to.”
Pagano would like to see Johnnies read Absalom, Absalom—“a
book that encapsulates the American tradition better, as well as
the Southern problem.” He’d choose Faulkner over Moby-Dick,
which he finds interesting, but not as compelling.
“I delivered a speech on Moby-Dick in high school,” he adds as
a side-note, “and that speech was a bit of a bomb.”
Moby-Dick first appeared on the college reading list for seniors
in 1952-53. It was read for many years in the 1950s and made brief
reappearances in Annapolis and Santa Fe, most recently in 2003.
It lives on in preceptorials, yet some tutors think it’s a shame not
all students read the work because it is the type of work-like so
many books that remain on the Program-that needs to be
discussed to be understood.
How did Melville’s novel first get the boot? The prevailing
legend in Annapolis is that too many students were writing essays
on the book. With only a list of prize-winning essays available to
check, the memory of veteran tutors was consulted.
“Oh, it’s absolutely not apocryphal,” says Eva Brann (HA89).
“I distinctly remember one year there were at least 10 essays
written on the book.”
Tutor Malcolm Wyatt (HA03), who joined the college in 1958,
recalls that too many bad essays were being written about MobyDick. “The temptation of allegory was too much for students-the
white whale, why is he white, the peg leg-itwas away to grind out
a senior essay without much serious thought,” he says.
In Santa Fe, the book was last read in senior seminar in the
spring of 2003, but it wasn’t a success in the eyes of tutor Howard
Fisher. That may be because it was read while seniors were writing
their senior essay. (In Annapolis, seminar is suspended with all
{The College- St. John's College • Winter 2006 }
�{TheProgram}
as
“ .. ril chase him round GoodHope, and
round the horn, and round the norway
maelstrom, and roundperditions
flames before Igive him up.
Ahab
Other classes for the writing period, while Santa Fe students meet
for seminar for part of the time.) “As wonderful as the book is, the
seminars were not a success,” Fisher says. “I had been in a senior
seminar or two in Annapohs where we read it as part of the
Program, and it seemed to me that we had as good a discussion as
any other book. It is episodic, and that makes it difficult to sustain
a unified conversation, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible.”
Most years, on one campus or the other, Moby-Dick is offered in
preceptorial, and it’s a popular offering. Annapolis tutor
Jonathan Tuck tried to lead a precept on the novel a few times,
only to find other tutors got there first. “In some ways, having
frequent preceptorials honors Moby-Dick more, because it gets
the reading it needs,” Tuck offers.
Santa Fe Thtor Claudia Honeywell loved the preceptorial she
led on the book. “Oh, would that it could be on the Program,” she
says. “At the time I chose it for precept, I was really interested in
it. I felt like it was my discovery-T’ve found this great book, let’s
read it together.’ ”
For Honeywell, Moby-Dick more than meets the college’s
criteria for a great book: “It’s endlessly fascinating. You’re never
done reading it, and there’s no way to be done reading it. Even as
you’re formulating the line of interpretation, you’re left in an
uncomfortable place-just as Ishmael is. The book has no
apparent resolutions.”
It was “a bummer” that the novel came off the reading list,
Honeywell says, because “we don’t have it as an element of our
common discourse. It’s a book that can really accompany us
through the moral uncertainty of life. There’s the famous passage
where Ahab talks about how human life is lived, that men hide
behind a pasteboard mask if they’re there at all. I think about that
now and then, I see situations that trigger memories of it.”
As one of their rewards for finishing the novel, Annapolis tutor
Nathan Dugan invited his students a few years ago to a party,
complete with clam chowder. Dugan had read it for the first time
just a year before and was eager to read Moby-Dick with students.
The preceptorial was productive, but it took hard work to make
such a vast book the subject of coherent discussions, he notes.
“The good thing is that you can go through very slowly and spend
a lot more time on the parts,” he says. “The difficult thing is
that you can’t require everyone to read 1,000 pages before you
start. But with the right of questions, a glimpse of the whole can
come out.”
What the novel would add to the program as a whole is a
portrait of human beings as seekers and interpreters of symbols
{The College.
and meaning, Dugan adds, something that relates well to Platonic
dialogues Johnnies read as freshmen. “In the end it’s telling us
something about why we need to be self-aware,” he says.
Dugan sees no compelling reason Melville’s tale must be on the
reading list. And yet, he allows, “fife would be more full” if he
could teach Moby-Dick and Joyce’s Ulysses.
Having taught two preceptorials on the book, Annapolis tutor
David Townsend acknowledges the impracticality of Moby-Dick
as a seminar reading. Yet in his view, the novel is “one of the dozen
great novels ever written.” The book confronts themes of man and
nature, hierarchy and obedience, freedom and equality.
“It addresses the struggle to build a community and how
essential that is,” he says. “It points out that you don’t have an
individual self outside of the community. It’s eclectic and diverse
in the cultures that it depicts. And it’s also contemporary in that
it’s one of the first books to address a global economy and the
psychological and moral effects of commerce.”
In addition to the length, one problematic issue in Melville’s
tale is an absence of women, something that can’t be said
about Middlemarch. Townsend would not want to see Eliot’s
novel sacrificed for another fictional work. “It’s a very rich and
coherent story, more manageable in two seminar discussions”
than Moby-Dick.
St. John’s is not trying to establish a canon, even if it seems that
way to outsiders, says Townsend. And yet the college gets letters
and e-mails from those who look to “the great books college” to
decide what “great” books they should read. A few years ago, a
group of Canadian doctors asked for the reading list. Most
recently, an Iowa man wrote to ask for a copy of the list; he
planned to ask his local library to post it for patrons.
“Because we don’t have time to read everything, it often seems
that if someone’s not on our reading list, it’s because we’ve found
that the work is not as important,” says Townsend. That’s not the
case, he adds. “These books at this moment in time are the ones
that work well in conversation for our community.”
Honeywell expresses a similar sentiment. “There are so many
friends out there, and we can only invite so many to the party, yet
you still think about your friends. We form our own relationships
with books, and they are like friends.”
To find out what Johnnies are reading today, visit the St. John's
Website: www.stjohnscollege.edu.
Sf. John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
�{TheProgram}
2.4
PLATO, ARISTOTLE,
BALDWIN?
The College magazine asked readers to suggest books they would
like to see on the St. John’s reading list. The question drew an
interesting variety ofresponses, with essays, novels, and works of
philosophy suggested. Here are some ofthe offerings:
Notes ofa Native Son would be a happy addition to the senior
seminar list, perhaps following close upon the Lincoln and Faulkner
readings.
—Kevin Schnadig,
SF98
Death in Venice
Notes ofa Native Son
The playwright August Strindberg once wrote about his experience
of reading the complete works of Balzac, something over 50
volumes. When he had finished he felt, as he tells us, that he had
lived an entire life condensed into the space of a couple of seasons.
And that his own life now, whatever remained of it, took on the
quality of a kind of second life, a strange addition to the life he had
lived vicariously through the great author.
There are other kinds of works, however, not oeuvres but single
volumes, that leave their readers with a much different impression.
They do not make us feel that we have passed through the entirety of
a life but rather, and this is their particular strength, convey to us a
sense, both tortuous and exhilarating, of the essential incomplete
ness of life, of time fraught with interruptions, cut into so many
fragments of unclear and mutilated histories, and interwoven with a
dizzying variety of fictions and hes.
The book 1 have in mind is James Baldwin’s Notes ofa Native Son,
a collection of essays first published in 1955. These essays, brilliantly
incorporating original insights into the works of Shakespeare,
Dante, Milton, Faulkner, Kafka, and so many others, deal primarily
with two themes, both literary and philosophical in scope: the
encounter between human beings with different cultures, different
ways of thinking and different superficial appearances; and the
experience, individual as well as collective, of being an exile,
geographically as well as psychologically. Notes ofa Native Son is,
but is also much more than, a book about the experience of black
Americans in the aoth century. Speaking of this experience,
Baldwin writes that “the depthless alienation from oneself and one’s
people is, in sum, the American experience.” But it is also, one
comes to realize while reading these essays, an essentially philo
sophical experience. For there is a certain kind of understanding
that arises only from the point of view of an exile. St. John’s students
and tutors will immediately call to mind the cases of Socrates,
Christ, Dante, Spinoza, and Frederick Douglass, to name a few. It is
the moment when all that is familiar becomes violently and threat
eningly unfamihar, and one is compelled, if one has a penchant for
intellectual honesty, to re-evaluate those most fundamental notions
of self and other, truth and lies.
As I believe St. John’s is at bottom an attempt to cultivate these
moments of understanding by passionate discussion of ideas, I think
I first encountered this book during my freshman year at Kenyon
College, an experience which instantly changed my life. I have
re-read it several times since... and after each reading, as in all the
works on the reading fist, I understand more, both about the book
and about the experience of being human, particularly that of falling
in love. It would be wonderful if all St. John’s students had the oppor
tunity to read and discuss Death in Venice.
I suggest this book for three reasons. First, the reading list
contains very little 20th-century fiction, and Mann’s tale is certainly
one of the best examples, written before the First World War and the
emergence of Modernism, yet the style and tone appear to signal the
approach of the movement. Second, Death in Venice is short enough
to be discussed in one seminar class, while containing enough chal
lenging material to provoke a thoughtful, lively conversation.
Third, and most importantly, the subject matter, the elderly
von Aschenbach’s erotic longing for the teenaged Tadzio, is
guaranteed to spark debate, especially in light of current events. At
the same time, however, it will require students to revisit their discus
sions of ancient Greek notions of eros, especially as expressed in
Plato’s Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus. Indeed, Death in Venice
maybe viewed as a 20th-century commentary on the Platonic idea of
love, even incorporating sections of the relevant dialogues into the
novella. This work serves as a transition of sorts, from the values and
beliefs of ancient Greece to those of the modern world, and for all
these reasons, it would make an excellent addition to the reading fist.
—Charles Green, AGIoa
The Decameron
It’s absolutely imperative that we add Giovanni Boccaccio’s
14th-century masterpiece. The Decameron, to the sophomore
curriculum. Boccaccio’s tales of true love and high adventure (and
depraved monks, which are what everyone who reads The
Decameron seems to remember best) will provide a wonderful relief
to sophomores recently completing their study of St. Anselm and
Aquinas. Rather than depicting how people ought to behave in an
ideal world-a “city of God” so to speak- The Decameron depicts
how they behave in the real world, wherein people are more apt to
pursue love, and sex, and wealth than divine absolution. As such we
shall be reassured that not everyone in the Middle Ages spent all
{The College. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�{TheProgram}
their time woefully
recounting their sins
and attempting to
understand God’s
power and majesty.
But of course,
perhaps the greatest
case for adding
The Decameron to
the curriculum is
Brother B,obert, who
has long feared the
deduction of his
beloved Rabelais
from the Program
list. Obviously, as
The Decameron is
about IO times dirtier
than anything that can be found in Pantagruel and Gargantua it
would be wholly illogical to deduct Rabelais from the curriculum
and leave Boccacio on. Thus, the fears of one of our oldest and
most respected tutors will at long last be assuaged, and sophomores
will have gotten a delectable new read which provides a different,
lighthearted, and secular perspective on the Middle Ages.
—Jennifer Wright, ao8
The Rule of St. Benedict, The Philosophy ofFreedom
I have always thought that the jump from Augustine to Aquinas is
too large, a thousand years, and that The Rule of Saint Benedict
would fit nicely, as it was much read and often observed in between,
so preserving literature from one era for the next.
The aoth century is the serious question.. . Which Western
writers of the aoth century will be studied through the aist?
How many thinkers have given new direction to painting, sculpture,
dance, speech, music, drama, agriculture, finance, medicine,
religion, and education? There is only one whose insights into
embryology, physiology, astronomy, geology, botany, and zoology
wfil guide fruitful research for generations.
Rudolf Steiner has put before us in a new light so many subjectsepistemology, moral technique, meditative practice, evolution of
consciousness, social life-that the prospect of rethinking every
thought we hold may keep us from approaching his books.
Yet the faculty of St. John’s is under pressure to study anthroposophy from at least two directions. Advances in physics are rapidly
overwhelming Cartesian dualism. Philosophy cannot disregard
science. New generations of students will expect their college
professors to understand the foundations of their experience...
Die Philosophic der Freiheit (1894) is the best introduction.
There are at least three English translations... Rudolf Steiner’s
contribution to Western thought is placed in the same rank as the
work of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. In The Philosophy of
as
Author James
Baldwin belongs on
THE READING LIST,
SAYS AN ALUMNUS.
Freedom, Steiner
leads the reader, by
means of pure
thinking, to the
source of his
knowledge. Having
made that effort, one
is competent to eval
uate his statements,
which the faculty of
St. John’s will shortly
be obliged to do.
—Lisa S. Turner, parent
(Douglas Turner, A04)
Atlas Shrugged____________________________________________
While scorned by many academic philosophers, the book has had a
tremendous impact on popular perceptions of philosophy,
including among many highly educated people. In addition, the
book has gained at least some ground in academia. There are a
handful of colleges where some philosophers embrace Ayn Rand,
and many others where at least short selections from her books are
included in survey courses on ethics and political philosophy.
I recently re-read the book after more than ao years. My
perceptions have evolved and changed, and I was dismayed to
discover how flawed much of the writing is. In particular, Rand’s
“bad guys” are drawn as comic-book characters. Even so, there is
much that is compelling in her writing, and the philosophical
heroes of the novel give some very thought-provoking speeches.
The ideas in the novel span the entire range of philosophical
issues, from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics, politics, art,
and even the role of sexuality in human relations.
Possibly the best reason: With the lone exception of Aristotle,
whose metaphysics and logic she embraces, Rand attacks virtually
the entire canon of Western philosophical thought, from Plato to
Descartes to Hume and Kant, right up to the present day post
structuralists and post-modernists. One of the best lines in the
whole novel, found in the long Galt speech, is: “The choice is still
open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to
stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical
error, to declare: T am; therefore I will think.’”
The purpose of reading a book at St. John’s is to provoke lively
discussion. And particularly for seniors in the undergraduate
program, I can’t imagine a better book to challenge the entire
body of work they have read in earlier years of the Program. . .
{The College. John's College ■ Winter 2006 }
—Steve Oppenheimer, AGIoa
�^6
{Homecoming}
O, PIONEERS!
The Class ofigss Returns
BY Rosemary Harty
oyce Kittel Wilson (class of 1955)
had a lot to learn from men like
Jacob Klein, J. Winfree Smith, and
Curtis Wilson. She also remem
St. John’s-particularly her classmate,
bers some of the things she learned
Anita (Jane) Gerber Denison.
from women-the first to attend
“Jane taught me how to smoke,” Wilson
recalls.
“I just don’t remember that,” Denison
says.
Cigarettes were an ever-present prop for
students and tutors alike. “We could
smoke in class, and most of the students
and tutors did,” Wilson recalls,
Denison and Wilson were catching up in
the home of Sam (class of 1954) and Emily
(class of 1955) Kutler, who hosted a
Saturday-afternoon luncheon at their
home during Homecoming Weekend. As
with most of the conversations around the
room, the subjects alternated between
“what are you doing now?” and “do you
remember this?”
Homecoming is always festive, lively,
and full of memories, but this year it was
especially nostalgic, as members of the
Class of 1955-the first to include women-returned for their 50th
anniversary. The class had 48 members, nine of whom have
passed away. Sixteen members of the class attended their reunion,
traveling from far and wide. They smiled at imitations of Jacob
Klein’s accent or memories of President Richard Weigle’s
attempts to keep the female citizens of St. John’s safe from bad
influences. They were pioneers, and they had pioneers’ stories,
such as the “open door” rule required for men and women to be in
the same dorm room at the same time. They also talked about
getting their tutors and male classmates used to having women in
class and on campus.
As Wilson puts it, the men of St. John’s did not accept the inva
sion of women quietly. “They went kicking and screaming into the
fray,” she says.
Denison graduated from Towson High School, north of Balti-
J
{The College
They encountered many challenges, but Joyce Wilson and Jane
Gerber Denison ( both class of 1955) share fond memories of
BEING the first WOMEN TO ATTEND St. JoHn’s CoLLEGE.
more, and she won a scholarship to attend St. John’s. She made it
through three years at the college and found it rigorous, chal
lenging, and sometimes overwhelming. “The college was so much
smaller then. You had 15 in a seminar, and there was no way you
could hide. If you weren’t prepared, everyone knew it,” she says.
“The oral exams, and the don rags-I dreaded those like poison.”
She left close to the end of junior year and returned to
Baltimore to find work. But she was summoned back to Annapolis
by Jacob Klein, then dean of the college. “I went to his house.
He was a very persuasive man. He wanted me to come back, and I
did, but I was very confused, and I left again.”
- St John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
�{Homecoming}
A Toast to Toasts
women cloy/ The appetites they feed: but she-this college
makes hungry/ where most she satisfies.’”
It’s a fine tradition: at the end of the Saturday-night
Homecoming banquet, alumni raise a glass in honor of their
classmates and in gratitude to the college. More recent classes
go first, paving the way for the Johnnies who studied in the
old program. Here are a few of the sentiments offered this year
in Annapolis:
Graduate Institute, all years, Linda Stabler-Talty
(SFGI76): “We’ve always heard it said that the Graduate Insti
27
tute is a refined version of the program. And we do admit that
we are an amorphous group, we don’t have [typical] reunions.
We dare say our wise perspective has helped us understand
what St. John’s means to all of us together.. .. We raise our
glasses to this collective enterprise of St. John’s College.”
Class of 1995, Zena Hitz : “At reunions, we tend to think a lot
about the past, partly because we’re St. John’s alumni, and
we’re sentimental. . . . What I’ve enjoyed about Homecoming is
seeing what people are doing now, what their lives are like,
meeting the people they love, hearing about their work,
finding out what they’re thinking about-so I would like to raise
a toast to the class of 1995: Our lives, our love, our work.”
Class of 1980, Ken Ross: “I know some of my classmates
knew me as a very shy person in r98o and so they elected me
anyway. I really enjoyed meeting my old friends and making
new friends here. And to this very special college-here’s to the
class of 1980!”
Class of 1975, Jim Jarvis: “One of the most delightful things
about being at a 30th reunion is to realize that we’re now the
reunion where most of the people have gray hair-which is
great. And to see that so many of these people are so amazingly
accomplished, and have not lost their love for books and ideas.
All of us I think would say about St. John’s College, what
[Domitius Enobarbus] says in Antony and Cleopatra'. ‘Age
cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety: other
Denison went on to a marriage, a rich family fife that included
five step-children, and a satisfying career as a professional editor.
But she can still see Klein, who died in 1978, as if it were yesterday.
“He always had this little twinkle in his eye.”
Yet Denison left St. John’s feeling well prepared for the future,
and she treasures the memories she took with her.
“At that time, it was a very small community, and all of us
women were new to it. We were close, and that was nice,” she says.
If Denison left because she was young and unsure of her path in
fife, Wilson left for another reason many college-age women
encountered: marriage. She married Gerald Wilson (class of
1956) and became pregnant with her first child in her third year.
“There was a saying at St. John’s, ‘ifyou’re unable to enable, have
a baby,”’ she recalls,
Wilson enabled, but left when classwork became too much for
her. “I remember I had trouble keeping up with my fruit fly exper
iment-! had let some get loose,” she recalls.
She went on to have four children, and was one of the first
women on the East Coast trained in the computer language
COBOL. “I liked the logic in programming, and I was good at it,”
she says. Later, after moving to California for her husband’s
career, she earned a paralegal certificate and worked for law firms.
{The College.
Class of 1970, Steve Forman: “When people ask me if I went
to St. John’s for the books I say no, I actually came here for the
sports. Upon reflection I realized who I studied Euclid with, I
know who I studied the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle with. I also
remember who played for the Druids and how we hated the
Hustlers. Because of what I realize is important about that
other side of the Program that provided the balance in our fives
with the studying and the thinking and the conversations, I
think I’d like to [toast the late] Bryce Jacobsen [class of 1942,
former athletic director].”
Class of 1935, Roland Bailey: “. .. A toast to all of us who
have lived in accordance with the philosophy of Rabelais: ‘To
five: in general and tolerant fellowship with man and nature; in
grateful appreciation of the good things of fife; and in cheerful
expectation of all of fife’s inescapable vicissitudes.’ ”
(A poetic toastfrom Priscilla Husted Griscom, class ofiggs, can
befound on the inside back cover q/The College./
The women who entered St. John’s in r95r paved the way for
those who would come later; several women from later classes-all
the way up to 2004-joined the Kutler luncheon to hear the
stories and help the pioneers celebrate. Steered to St. John’s by a
teacher in her Cleveland High School who spotted her engrossed
in Moby-Dick, Josephine Jaster Poe (class of 1957) thought
St. John’s was still for men only when she first heard about it.
“Then I learned they had opened it up to women, but my father
said I couldn’t go,” she recalls. “I did anyway. And when I got
here, I had no sense that women were ever a problem. I was just
one of the boys.”
Her husband, Harvey Poe (class of 1952), later a tutor and dean
of St. John’s, recalls that the college embraced the idea that
“women could do anything the men could do.”
The college’s history also was a focal point of the weekend.
Tylden Streett (class of 1950) unveiled two plaster busts of New
Program founders Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan (see
page 5r). Class of T955 member Priscilla Bender-Shore brought
her series of oil paintings inspired by the Muses to share with the
college community and alumni during the weekend.
Charles Nelson (class of r945) set the tone for the weekend with
the Friday-night Homecoming lecture, “In the Beginning... The
St. John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
�2,8
{Homecoming}
''Thefreedom to choose the St. John spath
is essential to its success. ”
Charles Nelson (class of 1945)
Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937.” Nelson, who worked
closely with hoth men while he was a student, talked about Barr
and Buchanan separately-what type of childhoods and early
education they had-and what brought them together to launch
the New Program in 1937. He also talked about the decisions they
made, such as requiring faculty to teach across the curriculum,
and explained the rationale for such choices. He talked about
their struggles, such as a draining battle to ward off annexation by
the Naval Academy, and their triumphs.
Even as the college gained international attention for its
“radical” methods, Barr and Buchanan did not want the St. John’s
Program “universally copied,” Nelson said. “That would have left
the entering freshman without a significant choice, and the
ThemUSES
to
freedom to choose the St. John’s path is essential to its success,”
Nelson said. “The discipline and commitment required in order to
gain the rewards of the Program presupposes that the path is
freely chosen. In fact, I believe that most alumni would assert that
it must be not only freely chosen, but also pleasurable; otherwise,
it isn’t worth the pain.”
—Rosemary Harty
Homecoming
Seminars, book-signings, and parties are standard fare for
Homecoming in Annapolis. This year, thanks to artist Priscilla
Bender-Shore, class of 1955, there were The Muses, gracing the
Hodson Atrium (home to the Pendulum Pit) in Mellon Hall for
the full weekend. It was an appropriate visual tribute to the
women who in 1951 arrived in Annapolis to end the college’s
days as an all-male institution.
During a Saturday afternoon reception, Bender-Shore
provided insight into The Muses: Dancing at the Edge ofthe
World, which she graciously shared with the Annapolis campus
community. The series comprises several large paintings
depicting classically robed women engaged in graceful dances.
In her presentation, Bender-Shore said she was pleased that
this, her first visit back to St. John’s since graduation, gave her
a chance to share her work.
For Bender-Shore, the human figure, especially the female
form, is a muse. She studied at the Yale School of Art and
Cooper Union before attending St. John’s and earned her
M.F. A. from the University of California-Santa Barbara. She
currently lives and teaches in Santa Barbara.
“Priscilla won the Reader’s Digest award to study in Giverny,
France, and that was when she began to develop the ideas for
the Muse drawings,” notes Emily Kutler, class of 1955, also an
artist. “At a time when everyone was going modern, she stayed
with what she was doing: human figures. Everyone was glad to
hear her speak; she is so articulate and thoughtful.”
Bender-Shore showed through slides of her work how her
time as an artist-in-residence at Monet’s home in Giverny laid a
foundation for the series. 4-
For just a weekend, the Hodson Atrium became an art gallery.
On display was a series of paintings by Priscilla Bender-Shore
(class of Z955).
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
C
�{Homecoming}
Clockwise: At the afternoon picnic. Class
OF 1965 MEMBERS GeRALD ZoLLARS, MiKE
Woolsey, and Vivian Ronay trade stories;
Henry Shyrock (class of 193a) and Roland
Bailey (class of 1935) represented the
“old” program at the Saturday banquet;
Members of the class of 1955 and friends
AT the Kutler home; Two future Johnnies
enjoy Homecoming.
{The College- St. John
s College ■
Winter 2006 }
�30
New Books from
Santa Fe Faculty
{Bibliofile}
skv
,/in a bottle
Sky in a Bottle___________________
by Peter Pesic
MIT Press 2005
t starts with the simplest questionone every parent has heard, and few
have answered satisfactorily: why is
the sky blue? For Santa Fe tutor
Peter Pesic, the question is the first
step in a scientific journey that
starts with Plato and Aristotle and ends, if
it does in fact end, with Pesic. Sky in a
Bottle, the latest in Pesic’s remarkable list
of scientific and philosophic books, chroni
cles the search for an answer to a question
confronted by scientists and philosophers
for centuries. Plato, Leonardo, and Newton
all wrestled with the problem, as did the
understand the first two questions, the
ancient Chinese and Middle Eastern scien
third question becomes “Can we recreate
tists. The color of the sky is intimately
the color of the sky here on Earth? Can we,
connected with one’s view of the structure
in effect, put the sky in a bottle?” Pesic
of the heavens, the properties of fight, the
traces
the various attempts to answer the
functioning of the eye, the composition of
first two questions, taking the reader on a
elements, the nature of air, and man’s rela
tour through the central ideas of chem
tionship to the cosmos. As late as i86a. Sir
istry, optics, and atomic physics.
John Herschel claimed that the color and
In true seminar fashion, rather than
polarization of skylight was one of “the two
show how each thinker improved upon
great standing enigmas of meteorology.”
previous work, the book attempts to eval
The book begins by dissecting the
uate each of the proposed solutions on its
central question into three related ques
own merits, uncovering the scientific and
tions. The first question is “Why does the
cultural assumptions behind each thinker’s
sky have color?” The second is “If the sky
work. “One of the things that struck me
does have color, why is it blue rather than
was how long the question remained totally
some other color?” Once we think we
unresolved. Until almost 1900 people
really didn’t know why the sky was blue.
Many great physicists really barked up the
wrong trees trying to answer the question,”
said Pesic.
Pesic first encountered the question in
another scientist’s work. “I read a few years
ago about a physicist named Smoluchowski
who was working on the problem of trying
to duplicate the color of the sky in a bottle.
The more I learned of his work, the more I
began to wonder if it was possible. Could it
be done?”
Although the inspiration for the book
started with Smoluchowski, Pesic says the
question at the heart of the book has its
roots in his experience at the college.
Z
A SCIENCE EXPERIMENT LED SaNTA Fe TUTOR
Peter Pesic to ponder blue
skies.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter aoo6 }
“When I first came to St. John’s the first
class I taught was freshman lab. We were
studying the atomic theory and the question
“Do atoms exist?” Here I was a physicist
and I had never really asked myself this.
How could you prove atoms exist? I had a
Ph.D. in physics, but the question never
came alive for me until freshman lab. It
occurred to me that many of the things we
take for granted, like the color of the sky,
are, in fact, deep and interesting questions
worthy of reconsidering,” he says.
Sky in a Bottle explores Rayleigh’s scat
tering law and the connections between the
appearance of the sky and Avogodro’s
number. Pesic also discusses the depictions
of the sky in art, the secrets of matter and
light, and even what the sky’s brightness
might tell us about the size and density of
the universe.
For those who prefer to take a more active
role in tracing the conversation about the
sky, the book contains an appendix of 11
important experiments related to light and
color. “Some of the experiments in the book
are simplified versions of the experiments
we do in junior and senior lab. I included
them to see if it was possible to demonstrate
that light is a wave without using elaborate
equipment,” says Pesic.
—John Hartnett,
SF83
Excerpt:
Giotto was among the earhest artists to
paint the sky blue, as in his fresco of
the raising of Lazarus in the Arena
Chapel in Padua (1305-1306). Blue
pigments became much more available
through the use of the mineral azurite.
Yet even in the early part of the
fifteenth century, the secret of mixing
blue pigment was still closely guarded.
Ultramarine was the preferred hue,
made by grinding up lapis lazuli into a
powder, which then could be used as
pigment. It was ruinously expensive, so
rare that it was said to come “from
beyond the seas,” the literal meaning of
ultramarine. This extraordinary blue
long continued to be used for the most
special passages in paintings by Giotto
and later artists, usually reserved for
the robes of the Savior or the Mother of
God. Its expense also meant that only
the master artists would dare use it.
-Peter Pesic, Sky in a Bottle
�{Bibliofile}
Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on
THE Questions Science Can’t Ask
by Linda Wiener and Ramsey Eric Ramsey
SUNY Press, 2005
t might seem strange for a
St. John’s tutor to suggest in the
title of her new book that there are
some questions that can’t be asked.
In Leaving Us to Wonder, Santa Fe
tutor Linda Wiener and her
collaborator propose that he who poses a
question just might have already limited
the answer. Consequently, many of today’s
most important questions, when posed by
scientists, are doomed from the start to
limited or inadequate answers.
The book is an interesting collaboration
between a biologist and a philosopher.
Wiener is the biologist; Ramsey is a
philosopher and associate dean of the
Barrett Honors College at Arizona
University West. The two met at a
conference 10 years ago and struck up a
conversation on some of the issues that
had bothered Wiener in graduate school.
Their work explores the meaning of the
scientific worldview and how it plays out in
our everyday lives. Their book investigates
alternatives to what they call “scientism,”
the view that science is the proper and
exclusive realm for thinking about and
answering every question.
One might expect that the impetus
for such a book would come from the
biologist’s critique of the philosopher’s
methods and the philosopher’s objections
to those of the scientist. For Wiener, the
book really began when she was in
graduate school as a scientist and began
to question her own methods. She says,
“I wanted to be a biologist because I
wanted to be out with plants and animals
and living things. But in graduate school,
we treated animals and plants as if they
were purely mechanical and mathematical.
To the extent that science can study them
they are, but I couldn’t find anyone who
wanted to question that view. My
colleagues thought that science was the
way to understand everything. It seemed
to me to be too narrow.”
Although the book warns us about the
dangers of a scientific worldview in
general, Wiener uses a specific examplethe conclusions of evolutionary biologists-to help illustrate the case. Wiener
shows how researchers working in
evolutionary biology have stretched their
Z
conclusions to cover answers to questions
about dating and divorce, relationships,
childrearing, and the complex relations
between the sexes-questions that cannot
be answered from a scientific view alone.
But the blame for this worldview is not
limited to the scientists. At stake is the
commonly held idea that a question is not
properly answered until it has been
answered by scientists. Our modern
Leaving Us to Wonder
“My colleagues thought
that science was the
way to understand
everything. ”
Linda Weiner
popular worldview includes the erroneous
assumption that the only real and true
knowledge is the knowledge gained
using the scientific method. The book
challenges this worldview by asking
probing questions about modern inquiry.
Do the facts procured by technoscientific
systems render inconsequential our lived
experiences, the wisdom of ancient and
contemporary philosophic insight, and
the promise offered by time-honored
religious beliefs?
Drawing on authors from the Program,
including Socrates, Darwin, Nietzsche,
{The College.
5t. John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
31
Kant, Heidegger, and others, Wiener and
Ramsey demonstrate how many of the
claims and conclusions of technoscience
can and should be challenged. They offer
ways of thinking about science in a larger
context that respect scientific practice,
while taking seriously alternative
philosophies whose aims are freedom, the
good life, or living well. For Wiener, many
of these ways of thinking were first
suggested by her experience at the college.
“Being a tutor here allowed me to see how
others have thought about the facts of
biology in different ways. In the Program
we see how Aristotle and Goethe and
Nietzsche are looking at some of the same
things as scientists, but with a different
approach. Those approaches allow you to
see new things that the modern scientific
paradigm doesn’t reveal,” she says.
As one might expect from a collabora
tion between a philosopher and a
biologist, the book is respectful of the
power of scientific thinking. Wiener is
not proposing that purely meditative
thinking, to borrow a term from
Heidegger, should supplant and replace
the calculative thinking of the scientific
method. Instead, she carefully presents
the idea that both kinds of thinking have a
role to play in getting at the truth-neither
has a monopoly on metaphysical reality or
objective truth. Calculative thinking
might propose that humans are
fundamentally collections of DNA and
should be viewed as such. Meditative
thinking might propose that humans are
fundamentally rational creatures who
exercise their will. Neither answer has a
monopoly on the truth, but each ignores
the conclusions of the other at its peril.
The book concentrates on the limits of
scientific thinking only because of its
prevalence in the modern world. Wiener
points out, “If you seek solutions in a
strictly scientific way you don’t tend to get
good solutions. First you have to figure out
what the problem really is. Once you hnd a
solution is needed, then you bring in more
technical knowledge at the end. You don’t
start with science. You end with it.”
—John Hartnett,
SF83
�3a
{Alumni Profile}
A Quest to Preserve Ancient Dance
Joseph Houseal, A84
BY Patricia Dempsey
raveling off-road in the
Himalayan Kingdom of
Bhutan means leaving
behind modern modes
of transportation-even
wheels. “Off-road
means traveling on yak, horse, or
foot” through windswept mountain
passes and isolated valleys, says
Joseph Houseal (A84). A gifted athlete
who once held the half-mile track
record in Michigan and was a profes
sional dancer, Houseal says that even
he gets weary traveling this rugged
terrain on his quest to find sacred
rituals and dance festivals. He travels
in Bhutan for up to seven months at a
time as part of a five-year project to
document Bhutan’s ancient dance
forms before they are lost to modern
culture.
When Houseal is in Bhutan-some
7,600 miles from his home in
Chicago-he is closer than ever to the
rural roots of his youth in St. Joseph,
Michigan, where his father is a blue
funded by the Core of Culture and the
berry farmer. The Bhutanese, a majority
Honolulu Academy of the Arts, will become
ofwhom practice Tantric Buddhism,
part of a traveling exhibition, “The Arts
recognize in Houseal a fellow farmer, a man
of Bhutan,” which will appear in several
on “a divine mission,” says Houseal.
U.S. cities, and in Europe and Asia before
“Everything in my life has come together
finding a permanent home in the New York
into this work of dancers preserving dance,” PubUc Library’s Performing Arts Dance
he says. “I am alive because I have this
Collection.
purpose.”
Landlocked in the eastern Himalayas,
Over the decades that he has devoted
between China and India, the Kingdom of
himself to dance, Houseal has attained the
Bhutan is an isolated sanctuary of nature
Eastern ideal of integrating body, mind, and and ancient culture, where dance is
spirit. He trained rigorously for his first
integrated into every aspect of life. The
career in professional ballet companies such
Bhutanese practice monastic dances, lay
as the Washington Ballet, made his choreo
religious dances, masked dances, and other
graphic debut on the Quad at St. John’s with sacred dance rituals. Dance is a form of
Aeschylus’ Choephori. He later moved to
meditation, communication, and informa
Kyoto to study the ancient Japanese Noh
tion. “Dance in Bhutan is not the same
Theater and there formed a dance company
thing as it is here in the states. We have one
that attracted critical acclaim. Today, as
word for dance. In Bhutan, they have over
executive director of the Chicago-based
20 words for dance,” says Houseal. Dance in
Core of Culture, Houseal leads a project to
Bhutan is also endangered, as centuries-old
videotape and preserve the dances of
forms of feudalism meet the 21st century.
Bhutan, In 2008 this ethnographic record.
“Today the Bhutanese are on the brink of
T
{The College
Sf. John's College ■
IVinter 2006 }
Joseph Houseal, posed for a Nihon
Buyo portrait. NihonBuyo is an
ANCIENT form of TRADITIONAL
Japanese dance.
creating a generation that will have
young people who cannot dance,”
says Houseal.
In Bhutan, Houseal travels ancient
mountain paths with his British
associate, Gerard Houghton, and
Bhutanese film director Karma
Tshering, who speaks 14 of the 22
Bhutanese languages. Last spring,
for instance, they had three months
to shoot 125 hours of film, but it took
up to five days each way trekking off
road to reach each of the six festivals
they recorded. A festival can last up
to five days, and dances last all day.
“It can take a lifetime for a deep spir
itual transformation, linked closely
to Tantric Buddhism, to take place,”
says Houseal.
Houseal’s journeys often lead him
to encounters with the mysterious and
mystical. In one such encounter he saw
exactly what is endangered in Bhutan. “We
met a monk named Lopon Sangay. He has
been a monk since he was eightyears old.
When we met him, he had been awake for
16 days, dancing five-and-a-half hours a day
in an elaborate three-week ritual. He
couldn’t understand why we thought that
was amazing. In his mind he was simply
acting out the Dharma, his practice as a
monk-this is a way of life in Bhutan,
dancing as a practice. And it is these
internal teachings that are endangered,”
says Houseal. “Movement can be preserved
and taped, but the internal teachings
training the body and the mind, the organs,
using visualization, projectory movement,
and energy awareness-cannot. When
Lopon dances, his body, mind, and spirit
are transformed.”
The audience or observer is also trans
formed. “It is a fusion of mind, body, and
spirit that leaves a karmic, compassionate
�{Alumni Profile}
imprint on the audience,” says Houseal,
“In Bhutan, you don’t applaud after a dance
is performed; you absorb the energy-so you
can’t help but be transformed and take
something away from it with you.”
The ambitious scope of Houseal’s work in
Bhutan is characteristic of someone with his
perseverance, passion-and, he admits, luck.
Growing up in rural Michigan, with eight
siblings, Houseal had little time or money
for dance. As karma would have it, a
92-year-old ballet teacher, classically trained
by Russian immigrants, lived within driving
distance. “She taught me the total art of
ballet: character, music, plot, costumes,”
says Houseal. After high school, he success
fully auditioned for the School of the Wash
ington Ballet and began as a scholarship
student. Then in the late 1970s, the touring
New York City Ballet needed performers to
dance as extras in Coppelia. with Barysh
nikov in the lead; Houseal was chosen from
among hundreds who auditioned. “I saw
how Baryshnikov lived and worked-in the
dressing room, with the press, dancing the
ballet-but I didn’t see myself living his life.”
Houseal, the valedictorian of his high
school class, wanted intellectual fulfillment,
so he left the world of dance for St. John’swhere he also learned to take himself seri
ously as a dancer. “I was trained as a
performer, but my tutors, especially
Chaninah Maschler, got me to explore the
profundity of being a dancer,” Houseal
recalls. “This was my first serious probe for
four years into the question: ‘What is the
nature of dance?’ ” Houseal also discovered
what has become a lifelong love of ancient
dance. He took 600 lines of ancient Greek
and choreographed a dance to be performed
on the Quad. “The Greek plays were meant
to be spectacles, meant to have a civic
purpose, a theatrical purpose. Where else
can you recreate such a spectacle but at
St. John’s?”
In Annapolis Houseal was also influenced
by Barry Talley, then musical director at the
Naval Academy, for whom he worked as a
choreographer. Houseal learned how to
reconstruct baroque operas, ballets,
colonial dances, and ballad operas. And it
was Houseal’s friend at St. John’s, Grady
Harris (A84), who introduced Houseal to
ancient theater forms and gave Houseal
translated Noh plays to read. Houseal was
also influenced by Francis Mason, Jr. (A43),
editor of The Ballet Review, who encour
aged him to “go to the source and find out
what dancers are teaching.”
Inspired by ancient dance of Greece and
drawn to an Eastern sensibility, Houseal
moved to Kyoto after graduation to study
Noh Theater under Master Matsui Akira.
Houseal later formed the Parnassus
Dancetheatre, which showcased dancers
from all over the world performing
Houseal’s avante garde choreography.
During the seven years he lived in Kyoto,
Houseal watched the city evolve into a
cultural Mecca. But by the early ’90s, the
cultural renaissance in Kyoto was devastated
by the city’s economic downturn and AIDS.
Houseal, a fortunate survivor of the disease,
pursued his life’s work with renewed passion
and studied for a graduate degree at the
Laban Center for Movement and Dance
in London.
He returned to Chicago, where he says he
33
found the “bald eagerness for money offputting,” While meditating one day in his
lakefront apartment, Houseal spotted a
monk walking by on the beach and invited
him in for tea. The monk told him to go to
Ladakh, a region in the Himalayas. Soon
Houseal found himself at a monastery in
Ladakh, where he was “transformed to
accept Fate’s call and recognized the need to
preserve ancient dance.”
As Houseal considers the transformations
in his life-from a farming youth to
professional dancer, from a college student
to choreographer, and now as a dance
preservationist, he observes that it can take
30 years of meditation and practice in
Bhutan to become a monk. “I look at myself
and see how it took only four years at
St. John’s to cultivate what has become a
deep part of my being,” he says. “At
St. John’s I developed my mind after I had
already trained my body. And look where it
took me-to the source, the Himalayaswhere I can reach my life’s purpose.”
For more information on the Core of
Culture’s dancepreservation project in
Bhutan, visit: www.coreofculture.org.
Top: Houseal in Kumasaka, a Japanese Noh
PERFORMANCE, AT KlI TeMPLE. HoUSEAL SAYS
HE WAS THE ONLY FOREIGNER IN 8OO YEARS TO
BE ALLOWED TO PERFORM NoH AT THE TEMPLE.
Left: Bhutanese
farmers, who are also lay
MONKS, REHEARSE A TRADITIONAL DANCE IN
THE VILLAGE OF UrA.
{The College. 5t. John’s College . Winter 2006 }
�34
{Alumni Notes}
1942
Ernest J. Heinmuller
writes, “Having moved from
St. Michaels, Md., I am now in
Easton, Md., recently
appointed to the Emergency
Medical Treatment
Committee.”
Adventures in the Orient
-OAN E. Cole (class of 1957) has been seeing the world
since her retirement from the New York Public Library
System and just returned from a trip to Japan and China.
“Seeing the evidence of their long pasts puts our past
in greater perspective. The U.S. is just a baby that can
and should learn from the ‘elders.’ Museum visits,
temples, and a performance of acrobats made it a most
memorable trip.”
J
Lee Mace is enjoying
retirement life at Leisure
World in Silver Spring, Md.
“Indulging myself with
travel-mostly cruises! ”
1948
“I became a great-grandfather,
doubly, with George Klimov
born October 5, aoo4, and
Shawn Trimble, born October
13,2004,” writes George R.
Trimhle, Jr.
1964
Attention, any Johnnies living
in England: Patricia Carney
would be glad to organize a
seminar for college alumni
living in the U.K. “I am in
Cambridge. Suggested
reading: Omerus by Derek
Walcott.”
1969
Andrew Garrison (A) writes:
1962
“Our son Jesse is in his third
year at Oberlin, studying
metaphysics and documentary
filmmaking.”
Michael Elias is set to direct
his adaptation of the Anthony
Burgess novel A Dead Man
in Deptford on the life of
Christopher Marlowe. Michael
is living in West Los Angeles
with his 13-year-old son, Fred,
1970
Les Margulies (A) has been
living in Kiev, Ukraine, for
almost a year. “I am Chief
Operating Officer of a group of
companies in the advertising
area (The Atlantic Groupwww.agl-media.com).
“Kiev is nothing like you
would think. It is not grey,
Soviet, and depressing. It looks
like a combination of Vienna,
Paris, and Prague. There are
not too many ex-patriots over
here (excluding government,
probably less than 1,000, so
that makes me a bit of a big fish
in a small pond). I love living in
Europe and can’t imagine why I
had not moved years before
when various opportunities
presented themselves. I do miss
certain foods, such as peanut
butter. Wheat Thins, and corn
muffins. But on the other hand,
excellent vodka is $3.5o/liter
and that more than makes up
for the other bits lacking.
“Living is much more expen
sive than you would think.
With the exception of vice
products (local beer, wine,
vodka, and cigarettes (50 cents
a pack), everything is the same
price or more as in the States.
Decent wine at a bar is
$io/glass.
“Intellectually the work is
very challenging and fun. Even
though most of my friends and
I am sure my fellow classmates
are retired to warm climates
somewhere, I am still going
strong. I may not remember the
details of Plato’s Republic, but I
sure remember my first mixer
at Chase Hall.”
{The College -5f. John’s College - Winter 2006 }
1972
Ilene Lee (A) celebrated her
birthday this year with an
early-morning ascent to the
top of Mount Tam in Marin
County, Calif. She writes:
“Wow-what a view!”
1973
Sheila Bobbs Armstrong
(SF, SFGI95, EC93), had an
intellectually stimulating
summer. “I just did the
Summer Classics: Nietzsche,
three comedies, and Sri
Aurobindo. I needed to kick
start my brain. My eldest son,
Ian, is a junior at St. John’s,
and my son Gamon is a senior
at Occidental College in L.A.
My third son, Quinn, is a high
school senior at Idyllwild Arts
Academy in L.A. Mike and I
are still in Santa Fe, Perth,
and traveling. I still teach
occasionally.”
Dr. Mary Batteen (A) was
made a full professor at the
Naval Postgraduate School in
July. She is the chair of the
Oceanography Department
there and regularly teaches
graduate courses in physical
oceanography and advises M.S.
and Ph.D. students. She was
recently interviewed for a
book. Careers in Focus, which
was published in 2004. She has
two children: Matthew, 13, and
Elizabeth, 8. Her husband,
Tim Stanton, is a field
oceanographer who has
traveled to the North Pole,
Antarctica, and Brazil, all
this year.
�{AlumniNotes}
Bursting with parental pride,
Jon T. Ferrier (A) writes,
“Our daughter, Valerie, is
halfway through law school at
St. John’s University in New
York, and Kayne and I are on
the L.S.D.-the Law School
Diet-for the next couple of
years-just in time for our 35th
class reunion! Pride abounds,
and our hearts soar, like the
eagle.”
1976
Richard Bradley Bonds (SF)
is a nursing student.
“Things have heen a little quiet
since St. John’s and law
school,” writes William W.
Campbell (A). “In 3004,1 got
the Honorary Young Farmer
Award from Pennsylvania
Young Farmers for ‘support of
adult farmer education in
Pennsylvania.’ Now that is
excitement!”
1979
Susan Herder (SF) loves
living in San Francisco and
working as a self-employed
neuro-muscular therapist: “I
have more free time now, as I
completed a pre-med program
at San Francisco State
University last year. (What a
trip, to have come t8o degrees
from shunning the sciences!)
I do a lot of sports-I’ll run my
first marathon (in the wine
country in France!) in
September, and regularly swim
in the bay. I think about my
classmates often and send you
all the best.”
1981
Marilynn Smith (SFGI)
reports that her move from
California to Texas went
smoothly last summer. “Living
near my daughter and her
family (including three
grandchildren) is priceless,”
she adds.
Edelman, born on May 36.
I can be contacted at
edelman3@stanf0rd.edu.”
Margaret Graham (SF) is still
living in Boulder, Go., with her
husband, three kids, one dog,
two budgies, and ii chickens.
She recently began taking
prerequisites for nursing
school, but notes there is a
three-year waiting list to get in.
1984
Peter Green (A) just started a
new job as deputy business
editor at The New York Post.
He often runs into Robert
George (A85), who writes
editorials for the Post. Catch
up with him on his work
e-mail: pgreen@nypost.com
News from Barry and Cynthia
Hellman (A): Thia Keppel
Hellman is one of the Hampton
University leaders organizing
the effort to build a state-ofthe-art proton radiation
therapy center in Hampton,
35
Va. The project will cost
approximately $180 million
and take several years to
complete. The certificate of
public need (COPN) was
awarded recently.
Fr. Robert Nicoletti (SF)
was apologetic about not
sending in his Alumni
Association dues this year, but
he has good reason, he notes:
“As a missionary with two
orphanages and a soup kitchen
(300 people a day), I need to
find funds.” He asked
St. John’s alumni to consider
supporting “these very human
itarian activities in the
Ukraine. Many thanks and
prayers.”
1987
John Sellers (A) is “married
to Becky Woods, teaching
grades 8-r3 math and science,
including chemistry and
physics. Challenging!”
continued onp.
1977
David Pex (SF) got married
August 14, 3005. “Complete
with instant family! Ages 4, 6,
and 8!”
1983
Jonathan ANroNio Edelman
Carla Schick (A) is still
writing. “I will he published in
a small independent journal
called Defect Cult. Other
poems have been published in
the Peralta Press and Word is
Bond.^"
(A) returned to graduate
school after 30 years in the film
industry. “I am working
towards a master’s degree at
Stanford University in the
Joint Program in Design
(mechanical engineering and
art). My wife, Annie, and I are
very happy parents of a new
baby boy, Liam Elijah Talbot
Honoring Excellence
“IM Sawatzki (AGI91) a teacher at Bethel High School in
Spanaway, Wash., has been named Washington History
Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of
The History Teacher of the Year Award honors one excep
American History and Preserve America. He received a
tional K-13 teacher of American history from each state and U.S.
$1,000 honorarium, and a core archive of history books
territory;
is was
based
on criteria
including
experience in
andselection
materials
donated
to his
school library.
teaching American history for at least three years; a deep career
commitment to teaching American history; evidence of
creativity and imagination in the classroom; and close attention
to documents, artifacts, historic sites, and the other primary
materials of history.
J
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�36
{Alumni Profile}
Logos in Action
David Veazey, Ayr
BY Rosemary Harty
man who uses the power
HIV hysteria must first be eradicated.”
of rational speech
The writing he does now is much
unjustly can do great
different from the approach he took when
harm, Aristotle writes in
he sat down to pen his senior essay on
Rhetoric. David Veazey
Plato’s Sophist. “St. John’s requires a
(A97) does just the
different sort of writing that I never use in
opposite; he employs carefullythe
chosen
outside world-that is, asking a lot of
words, solid evidence, and a well-crafted
questions and not necessarily coming to
argument to save lives by helping to fight
any conclusion compared to thesis
the spread of HIV/AIDS in Russia, where
argument-conclusion that the rest of the
the government has downplayed the risk
world is used to,” he explains.
while new cases rise at an alarming rate.
Veazey developed persuasive writing
Veazey lives in Moscow, where he works
skills on his own, noting that four years
as a grant proposal writer for AIDS
of the Socratic method prepared him well
Foundation East-West (AFEW), a Dutch
for the work he does today. “When I am
non-governmental humanitarian public
working on grant proposals I try to act as
health organization that seeks to reduce
sort of a Socratic midwife. I’m not an
the impact of HIV/AIDS in Eastern
expert on any particular AIDS issue,
Europe and Central Asia. The job taps two but I try to ask the experts questions that
of his best attributes: he’s passionate
will help them come up with a good
about making a difference in the world
project that will be interesting to a donor.
and skilled at drawing together informa
This approach has St. John’s written all
tion from many sources and assembling a
over it.”
persuasive argument.
Consider Veazey’s
editorial in the Kiev
Post, which sought to
meet the “rising
hysteria” about
HIV/AIDS in the
Ukraine tvith clear and
dispassionate logic.
He pointed out that
the stigma associated
with the disease
discourages people
from being tested,
tackled prevailing
myths about how HIV
is spread, and asked
ordinary citizens to
educate themselves
and get involved in the
fight against the
disease. “In order to
seriously address the
HIV/AIDS epidemic
in Ukraine,” he
concluded, “the
epidemic of fear and
A
Veazey’s route to Russia began at
Fordham University in New York, where
he was attending graduate school in
economics and working part time and
during summer breaks for Doctors
Without Borders. He worked as a
grant writer, then as a researcher for the
international humanitarian organization’s
access-to-medicines campaign. Ulti
mately, the work steered him away from
economics.
“I became very interested in how the
pharmaceutical industry worked and how
it affected drug development for tropical
diseases,” Veazey says. “I wanted to tie it
to my economics studies in industrial
organization somehow. I came up with
several good thesis topics but the problem
was finding the data to work with. All of
my classmates were working on very
esoteric topics with little relevance to
people’s lives. This was mainly because
the availability of data largely determines
the topic. So I
became more
convinced that
economics is
inherently unable
to answer any
meaningful ques
tions. . . I couldn’t
see myself doing it
as a career because
of that.”
When the
September ii
terrorist attacks
sent the city of
{The College. St. John's College ■ Winter 2006 }
continued onp. gr
Life in Russia is
ALWAYS INTER
ESTING, SAYS David
Veazey,
here with
HIS WIFE, Elena
Rudych, in Voloko
lamsk, A SMALL
TOWN TWO hours
from
Moscow.
�{Alumni Profile}
continued
New York into an economic downturn,
Veazey’s position at Doctors Without
Borders came to an end, and he couldn’t
find work anywhere-even part time.
Veazey decided that the time was right to
visit a friend in Moscow, where he could
explore the job market.
It was a risky move, primarily because
English is not widely spoken in the city,
and Veazey spoke no Russian. At first he
patched together freelance work writing
for magazines and newspapers for the
U.S. expatriate community. That led to a
job working for the Russian news agency
Prime-Tass. Veazey’s language skills
improved and he learned to edit “really,
really fast,” but the job paid very little.
Then he spotted an advertisement for a
position with Aids Foundation East-West,
“jumped on it, and got it.” His title is
senior adviser on proposal development;
in other words, bringing in money. He’s
been at it for three years now, and his
work is driven by urgency.
The AIDS epidemic is still new to the
former Soviet Union, he says. According
to UNAIDS, 860,000 people in Russia
have HIV/AIDS, the majority of whom
are drug users who contracted the virus
from contaminated needles. The outbreak
may be much higher than reported by the
government, says Veazey. Many more
people may not be aware they have HIV.
“The estimates vary widely because
there isn’t any good data available. Some
estimates are higher than a million. In the
highest HIV-prevalence areas like Irkutsk
and Samara, more than i percent of the
population is estimated to be HIV
positive. Once it goes beyond i percent,
the epidemic can easily become selfsustaining,” he says.
East-West sponsors projects supporting
local organizations that work with
injecting drug users, a method called
“harm reduction,” says Veazey. “The
ultimate goal is to get them not to use
drugs, but in the meantime, they can use
clean needles.”
Another foundation project seeks to
prevent the spread of HIV in prisons;
inmates have been trained as outreach
workers, medical professionals and
psychologists were trained on preand post-HIV test counseling, and
disciplinary and custodial staff received
training on reducing risk in the work
place.
Until about five years ago, the Russian
government was not aggressively involved
with the spread of AIDS, Veazey says.
“Politicians had been talking about
increasing border security because they
think the disease comes from abroad,”
Veazey says.
The government became more active
after Veazey’s organization and four
others attracted grant funding from the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis,
and Malaria, an international fund with
$7.a billion in pledges to fight three
deadly epidemics. The Russian govern
ment donated $20 million to the fund,
''When lam working
on grantproposals
I try to act as sort ofa
Socratic midwife. ”
David Veazey, A97
but did not apply for any grants itself.
“In 2003 AFEW and the four other
organizations applied for and won
$89 million in grants over five year for
HIV prevention,” says Veazey, who was
the lead writer. “This caused some
embarrassment among proud Russian
officials. There were a lot of behind-thescenes discussions about whether they
were going to allow us to go forward or
not. One faction of the government even
put together its own proposal at the last
minute to try to sabotage ours. But in the
end, we prevailed.”
The following year, the government
submitted its own successful proposal to
the Global Fund for a similar amount, but
focusing on HIV treatment, Veazey adds.
“Now things are starting to change.
President Putin announced in a speech
recently that he was ordering the
government to increase its budget for
AIDS by 20 times. Of course, we have to
see what they actually do with this money,
but the environment is sharply different
from a few years ago,” he says.
A favorite aspect of his job is writing
editorials and getting them published in
{The College
.Sf. John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
37
newspapers such as the Kiev Post. Once,
he criticized the European Union for not
taking a big enough role in prevention;
another time he admonished the
U.S. government for advocating
abstinence-only programs. The U.S.
“essentially enforces abstinence because
they offer a lot of money and people
normally don’t refuse.”
Life in Moscow can be hectic. A native
of Chattanooga, Tenn., Veazey has never
grown used to living among so many
people: “At 12 million people, Moscow is
much bigger than New York. There are a
lot of high rises, and the city has a kind of
a grim exterior. There are a lot of reasons
to be grim, because there’s so much
poverty here.
Then there are the challenges of
everyday life in a city where some modern
conveniences have not quite caught on.
Says Veazey, “the most annoying thing for
a Westerner are small food shops called
producty. You walk in and there are about
four different counters for different kinds
of goods and you have to ask each person
for what you want, they weigh it and tell
you how much it costs, you go back to the
cashier and pay for it, you bring your
receipt back, and you can get whatever
you bought. Then, you have to do it over
again at the other counters.”
Life in Moscow improved dramatically
for Veazey in 2003, when he married
Elena Rudykh, who works as an assistant
network administrator. Elena’s family
lives in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, and
Veazey loves visiting the region. “Once
you get outside the city, the countryside is
beautiful, especially in winter, with birch
trees and snow,” he says.
His favorite thing about Russia is the
character of the people: good-natured in
spite of a hard life, resilient, friendly-and
devoted readers of great literature.
“Everyone here has read Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky. It’s pretty amazing,” he says.
Veazey and his wife are starting to think
about moving back to the U.S., where
Veazey would like to attend law school.
He’s still interested in advocacy. “I think
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not
going to save the world,” Veazey says. “It
just feels good doing this kind of work,
and I want to continue doing it.”
�{AlumniNotes}
38
Josephine Lucia DiggsGalligan on July 20, 2005, in
Washington, D.C. Big sister
Sophia Emmanuelle is enjoying
her new status immensely.”
Senegal Bound
(SFoi) has been busy:
“After leaving Santa Fe, I went back to school at
the University of Maryland, where I completed a
B.S. in Soil Science. I then worked for two years
Anne Schuchman (A) and Jim
as a carpenter’s apprentice/site manager for
Berrettini (AGI93) joyfully
Blakketter Craftsmen (whose newest employee is
Anne Neadham, Aoi.) I also took time off to volunteerannounce
with Red the birth of Augus
Feather Development Group, building strawbale homes
onJames, August 22, 2005.
tine
Indian Reservations (Hopi and Chippewa). I’m now on my way
Gus joins Samuel (6) and Stella
to Senegal as a Sustainable Agriculture Extension Agent with
(3). Jim is a manager at Time,
the Peace Corps. If anyone will be traveling through, they
Inc. Anne received her Ph.D. in
should see me (for the next two years).”
Italian Studies from New York
University in 2004 and is an
adjunct professor at NYU and a
research affiliate with the
University of Michigan. “We’re
living in Rutherford, N.J., have
started homeschooling, and
would love to get in touch with
Laurie Cooper (A) and Don
Graham Harman (A) reports
other Johnny homeschoolers
Kugelmass were waiting the
that his book Guerilla
(ams8050@nyu.edu or
arrival of their third child,
Metaphysics was published in
jpb@alum.mit.edu).”
expected this January. Laurie
August by Open Court. He is
continues to practice
still teaching at the American
psychotherapy in a community
University in Cairo, Egypt.
mental health clinic.
llison Anne Arnold
A
1988
1990
Clinton Pittner (SF) “got
1989
Beverly J. Angel (SFGI) is
now practicing intellectual
property law with the firm
D. McDaniel LLP.
divorced, but took a cross
country motorcycle trip from
Alabama to California (6,500
miles round trip), which was
nice. Found out there’s a K-ia
school that has a program
[similar to St. John’s], and even
has two Johnnies as teachers!”
Ken Turnbull (A) writes,
Lee Carpenter (A) is busy
completing a law degree at the
University of Maryland School
of Law; he expects to graduate
in May aoo6.
“My wife, Leslie, and I
continue to be astounded and
delighted by our i6-month-old
daughter, Fiona.”
1991
Teddi Ann Galligan and
David Alan Diggs (both AGI)
“announce with great joy the
birth of their second daughter.
1992
Elyette Block Kirby (SF)
writes, “I am living half an
hour south of Paris with my
husband and three children,
Benjamin, 4; Bronwyn, 3; and
Luca, I. I’m always looking to
meet other Johnnies living in
the area...or traveling
through.”
1993
Valerie Dufe-Strautmann
(SF) gave birth last August
to Northanna Mildred
Strautmann. She and her
husband, Jake Strautmann, live
in Watertown, Mass. You can
{The College -St John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
drop her a note by e-mail:
vsd_str@yahoo. com
1994
Bill Kowalski (SF) and his
wife, Alexandra Nedergaard,
are proud to announce the
birth of their second child,
Chloe Sophia Kowalski, on
December 6. “On the very
same day, the paperhack
edition of my fourth novel.
The Good-Neighbor (Harper
Collins), arrived on my
doorstep, reminding me that
December i was the official
release date. This edition
includes a P.S. section,
comprised of an essay, an inter
view, and a recommended
reading list, all by yours truly.
The essay is about St. John’s.
It’s written for people who
have never heard of us, and it
gives a very general overview of
the Program, so it won’t
contain anything particularly
new or enlightening for John
nies. But I hope it helps bring
SJC some more of the national
exposure it so richly deserves
(and international as well-the
hook will be translated into
German and Swedish).”
Colin and Emily Ray (both A)
have big news: “Our daughter,
Marina Claire, was horn on
December 2, 2004. We just
moved into our new house in
Tokyo. We’d enjoy having a
Johnnie visit us!”
�{Alumni Notes}
39
Fair Play
Shana Hack (Ag^) Loves Toys
wi Rosemary Harty
ince graduating from St.
John’s College, Shana
Hack (A95) has heen
selling toys for a living,
primarily in various stores
around Santa Fe. When
the time came to make some deci
sions about her future. Hack decided
that she was happy selling toys. “I just
realized I wanted my own toys,” she
says.
Hack was sorry to miss what would
have been her loth reunion last
September, but she had just opened
Moon Rabbit Toys, a block from the
Plaza on Guadalupe Street in Santa
Fe. It’s a family enterprise. Hack’s
husband, Scott Cox, a carpenter, built
shelves for the store. Her mother,
Karen, became her first employee.
From the beginning. Hack was out to
create an extraordinary toy store, one
that reflected her own values. Only
two toys in her store require batteries.
Most toys are made from natural
wood, and Hack scours catalogs and Web
sites to find toys produced under fair labor
conditions.
“I found some amazing companies in
Thailand that make toys of renewable wood
and that follow European Union labor stan
dards. I buy a lot of toys made in the U.S.,
and some wonderful board games made in
Germany. If I buy something from China,
it’s because it’s a really decent toy. Where
else are you going to get rubber chickens
and Ruble’s Cubes?”
Shana Hack, with
Rabbit Toys.
S
Don’t look for an Xbox or Game Boy in
Hack’s store. “I love simple toys,” she says.
“Take out a yo-yo and learn a trick. Who
doesn’t love a Slinky? And Frisbeesthey’re just brilliantly designed.”
Parents who remember how much fun it
was to play with a Jiberwheel-a hand-held
toy with a gyroscope-are buying them for
their kids, but playing with them instead.
Another popular toy is the goofy drinking
bird, which provides a physics lesson every
time he leans over to drink.
1995
M. Louise Heydt (SFGI)
writes that her first book.
Divine Rainbow, Nature as a
Spiritual Teacher, was
published in July 3005. It is for
sale at the St. John’s bookstore
in Santa Fe.
1996
“Hello Johnnies,” writes
Gwendolynne Barr (SFGI).
“What do you think-evolution
and/or intelligent design?
Experiment today by stirring
up the gene pool of the
Northern California Alumni
Association: www.teamrioja.org/
sjcaanc/index.html. We hold
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Winter H006 }
Moon
Hack’s stock of board games has
already attracted Johnnies who enjoy
strategic games. “There’s the ‘Settlers
of Catan,’ all about trading and
developing cities; ‘Carcasonne,’
which involves building a map; and
‘Hector and Achilles’-how could I
resist that?”
When she’s a little better estab
lished, Hack would like to start a
game night for Johnnies. Bringing
students into the store would give her
someone with whom she can discuss
her favorite books: Herodotus’ HistorfcA-which she keeps in her store to
peruse at leisure-and Moby-Dick.
With just a little advertising and a
good location. Moon Rabbit Toys has
already attracted a good base of
parents, tourists, and children of all
ages. The downside is that she’s been
known to work a month without a day offa small price to pay for the rewards of
running her own show and being able to
play with toys. “I’ve been dreaming about
this for four years, planning it for two,
and now I get to wake up every day and
say, ‘I own my own toy shop-how cool is
that?’ ” ♦
Tracy Christine Whitcomh
(A) writes, “One more year of
nursing coursework and I’ll be
an RN-BSN! I spent a semester
in Perth, Australia, and
enjoyed riding camels as well
as removing staple stitches.
I’m still in Vermont. Anyone
coming up to Burlington,
feel free to look me up at tracywhitcomb1973@hotmail.com.
Cheers!”
friends, at
seminars throughout the year,
as well as an annual symposium
at Stag’s Leap winery in Napa.
Good times, great (and other
wise) books.”
�{AlumniNotes}
40
1997
Jenn Coonce (A) works for
WcightWatchers.com and is
getting an M.A. in modern
psychoanalysis at the Boston
Graduate School for
Psychoanalysis in New York.
Casey McFaden (AGI) recently
accepted a position at Akin,
Gump, Strauss, Haver, and
Feld, LLP in Washington D.C.,
with a focus on the federal
regulation of electric utilities.
he writes. “I have asked David
Reber (AGI) to be a consultant
with our math curriculum, and
if possible, to teach part time.
The other six members of our
development team are not
Johnnies; however, they are
aware of and support our great
books approach. Most of them
have attended at least one
Touchstones workshop, and we
expect to be asking for
additional help from the
Touchstones program as well
as the great books program
once we have a contract and
start hiring additional
personnel. We are constantly
running into problems with
our Milwaukee Public Schools
administrators who don’t
understand why we don’t want
to operate the same as all the
other schools.”
1999
Mike and Arby Soejoto (both
A) are proud to announce the
birth of their son, John
Anthony, on July 10. Their
daughter, Lucy, turned 2 last
fall. The Soejotos live in
Los Angeles, where Mike is an
attorney, and Abby is a stay-athome mom. They’d love to
hear from any friends at
msoejoto@pircher.com or
asoejoto@sbcglobaLnet.
John Cowherd (A) writes,
“I took a month off and now
I’m back working at the same
place and waiting to get my
Virginia bar exam results in a
few weeks.”
2000
Paul E. Tanner (AGI) recently
William Conway (A) is living
accepted the Erickson
Research Fellowship in
Educational Policy at Michigan
State University.
in Philadelphia, working at
Saint Joseph’s University in
administration. “I’m studying
towards an MBA and am
available to talk to students
and alums about business
school and working in higher
ed administration:
wconway@sju.edu.”
Out of the Loop?
1998
Chris Jones (SF) writes that
Stephen Conn (SF) is happy to
all is “well in Tennessee. I’m
practicing pastoral counseling,
art, and Isha yoga. I miss
St. John’s and friends there, so
I hope to hear from some at
kierkegaardvark@yahoo.com.”
announce that one of his
comic-strip series, “The
Radioactive Rahbi,” has heen
picked up hy the Newport, R.L,
free weekly, the Mercury
(WWW. newportmercury. com).
He would also like to
shamelessly plug his Sgt.
Pepper/Great Books Authors
T-shirt, available in both
campus bookstores. He writes,
“Best to all the ’97/’98ers!”
Glen Scott Cooper (AGI) is
involved with an exciting new
endeavor. “We are opening a
new public charter school Aug.
I, aoo6-Downtown Institute of
Arts and Letters, a great books
high school that is part of the
small schools initiative of
Milwaukee Public Schools,”
Catch up on all the latest news. Join the St. John’s College
Alumni Online Community. Here, you can let friends know where
TO find you, discover what former classmates are up to, share
“For the next eight months, I
will be sailing as the director of
Resource Development on the
Voyage of Makulu,” writes
Todd Wilson (SFGI). “We will
sail from Australia to Italy,
teaching New York City public
school students world
geography along the way.
You can track the voyage at the
organization’s Web site:
www.reachtheworld.org.”
PHOTO galleries AND BLOGS, KEEP UP WITH ALUMNI EVENTS AND
COLLEGE NEWS, AND CONNECT WITH OTHER ALUMNI WORKING IN YOUR
FIELD. From the St. John’s home page (www.stjohnscollege.edu),
CLICK ON ‘‘For Alumni” and follow the directions from there.
continued on pg. 42
{The College- St. John's College ■ Winter 2006 }
�{Alumni Profile}
A Sweet Deal
PaulLaur (SFGIg^) Pursues a Values-CenteredEnterprise
BY Erica Naone (A05)
" hen he drove up
to Denver
recently to pour
cider samples at
a new chain
grocery story,
Paul Laur (SFGI95) took his 7-year-old
son Gavin along. As president of Santa
Fe Cider Company, Laur manages his
business with Gavin and Nathaniel (4)
in mind-involving them in the world
of work while enjoying the time he
spends with them.
“My sons go with me to pick the
apples or to drive the truck to the
press,” he says, “and that’s part of
what makes the job fun.”
The manager of the grocery store
had other ideas and told Laur it was
unprofessional to have his son
with him on the job. True to the
marketplace and with the community in
philosophical tendencies that brought him
which we live.”
to St. John’s, Laur went home and thought
Laur’s background, in fact, is
it over. What emerged was a clear view on
adventurous and far ranging. He began
the role of business in a person’s life,
his college career as a physics major at the
particularly his own.
University of California-Irvine, hoping to
“The manager was talking about
become a theoretical physicist. Sidetracked
corporate ethics-not professionalism at
into a sailor’s life, he found himself, in the
all,” Laur says. “I have a family-run
late 197OS, sailing a boat to Australia with
business. It makes total sense to me to bring three undergraduates from St. John’s in
my family along for the ride. It’s a shame
Annapolis: Steve Scott (A78), Preston Kelly
that corporations have to be so faceless.”
(A8a), and John Fleming (A78). Laur had
Laur has worked hard to bring the
already heard about the college and had
personal into the professional. When he
considered applying to St. John’s. Another
started his business in Santa Fe, he looked
old friend, Nick Kennedy (A81), had gone to
for a way to fit himself into his chosen
St. John’s and introduced Laur to the three
community. He wanted to attach his
men in his Annapolis crew. The experience
business to an existing story, and he found
on the boat, Laur says, “elevated St. John’s
that story in the orchards of New Mexico.
to the short list of things I wanted to do in
Planted by Spanish settlers 400 years ago
my life.”
with rootstock from Asturias in northwest
“I suppose the main point about sailing
Spain, the orchards risked losing their
with these guys,” Laur adds, “was that
water rights to fast-growing urban
during the 10 weeks or so that it took us
communities nearby. Laur wanted to help
to reach Australia, we had one or two
keep water in rural communities and began
conversations about life and our condition.
working to create a market for apples from
We didn’t spend much time in port-three
local orchards.
days in Panama and three days in Tahiti-so
The way he approached being an
most of the time we were logging miles at
entrepreneur came out of his liberal arts
sea and under sail, only running the engine
sensibilities. “My background has not been
an hour a day to charge the batteries.”
a business degree from Harvard,” he says.
After finishing his undergraduate degree
“It’s been about creating synergies with the
at the California Maritime Academy, Laur
W
{The College
- St. John’s College ■
Winter 2006 }
Paul Laur went
from sailing the seas
IN A MERCHANT MARINE CAREER TO
SELLING CIDER MADE FROM NeW MeXICO
APPLES.
found a career in the Merchant Marine
that allowed him to attend the graduate
program at St. John’s in Santa Fe
between trips to sea. He met his wife,
Ruth, just as he was finishing up at
St. John’s. It was then that Martin
Crowley, who had hired Laur years
before to deliver a sailboat, invited
Laur to manage a rum factory for him
in the Caribbean. This experience with
Pyrat Rum introduced Laur to the art
and science of taste.
“I became really good at picking up
subtle differences and could identify
which component was causing what,
yet I still had a lot of stuff that fed my
scientific geekism,” Laur says. “I love the
scientific process, but without the tasting
that goes along with it, it makes you a
plumber at best, rather than a composer.”
When Laur and his wife had their first
son, they returned to Santa Fe rather
than raise him in the Caribbean, “where it
would be a battle to get him to wear shoes.”
They founded the Santa Fe Cider Company
in 1999Being in Santa Fe allowed Laur to
participate in community seminars at
St. John’s that have fed his intellectual and
entrepreneurial interests. At a community
seminar on Flannery O’Connor, Laur met
Owen Lopez, executive director of the
McCune Foundation, which supports small
business and community development in
Santa Fe. Lopez became a great supporter
of Laur’s company. Laur also enjoyed a
seminar led by tutor Krishnan Venkatesh,
Graduate Institute director, on food, taste,
and the culture of connoisseurs.
Laur aims constantly for connection:
education to business, science to art,
living to livelihood. “Having a liberal arts
education,” he says, “means thatyou’re
liberated from being ultra-conservative and
having to have all the hghts green before
you go forward.”
�4a
{Alumni Notes}
2001
Matthew Lippart (SF) writes,
“After four years of crashing
up against the system, my
school is getting its own
building! Yay! In addition, I
would like to teach overseas
next year (China or India,
preferably) so any advice,
suggestions, or connections
would be appreciated. (Online
at mlippart@hotmaiLcom.)”
Talley Scroggs (A) and
Louis Kovacs (Aoa) are
living in Baltimore, Md. Lots
in the works, Talley writes:
Lou’s in medical school, Talley
is working three jobs and
applying to JD/MB A
programs, and they’re getting
“hitched” next June. They’d
be happy to hear from anyone
in town.
Southern Methodist University
in Dallas, Texas, this August.
She will be joining her
husband, George Finney
(SF99), who is starting his
second year in the same
program.
Erin Krasniewicz and Randy
Pennell (both A) are living in
Philadelphia and would love to
hear from other Johnnies in
the area. Randy works for the
Associated Press, and Erin
works for the Pew Charitable
Trusts. “If you are going to
visit Philadelphia and want to
know where to find the best
cheesesteaks, drop us a line
first! (Hint: It’s not Pat’s or
Gino’s.)”
nothing special.” He lives in
Philadelphia and is studying to
be a counseling psychologist.
Please contact him at
woollyrubric@yahoo.com if
you have any leads regarding
the whereabouts of a video
copy of Philoctetes: the
Musical, the class of 2002’s
notorious RealPlay. Also, he
writes, please contact him if
you can offer him a job in the
Philadelphia area.
2004
from chiropractic school this
April and will be spending the
summer in Brussels, Belgium,
learning French. She writes:
“I would love to hear from
anyone from St. John’s:
Drlauren@gmail.com.”
John C. Gorczynski (SF)
writes: “I have enjoyed
working for the mayor’s Office
of Public Safety and Homeland
Security in Houston, Texas. I
am very excited to be moving
to the San Francisco Bay area
this fall with Katie de Mahy
(SF03). See all you alumni out
there.”
Mark Ingham (SF) is living
the contemplative life: “I drive
a vacuum in the North
Canadian Oilfield while
listening to my own audio
recordings of Nietzsche.”
2003
In June, Ann Carruthers (SF)
finished her master’s degree in
philosophy at the University of
California, Irvine. She is now
living in Austin, Texas, with
Steven Orsinger (SF03) and
beginning a Ph.D. program in
political philosophy in the
Government department at
the University of Texas.
Mary Duffy (A) has signed on
for a lo-month stint with
AmeriCorps at the South
Whidbey Community
Engagement Center in
Washington State. “Whidbey
Island is in the Puget Sound,
about an hour north of Seattle,
including the ferry ride,”
writes Mary. “I’ll be living on
the island, sharing a house
with two other volunteers on a
stretch of Sunlight Beach,
which sits on Useless Bay.
I am still writing poetry and I
hope to finish a novel in verse
by next summer. I would love
to hear from Johnnies in the
Pacific Northwest, and can
be e-mailed at
hisgirlfriday@gmail.com.”
What’s Up?
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you’re doing. The next issue
will be published in May; dead
line for the alumni notes
section is March 15.
Alumni notes posted to the
college’s online community will
also be included in The College.
Visit www.stjohnscollege.edu;
click on Alumni.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 3800
Annapolis, MD 31404;
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
In Santa Fe:
Rebecca Anne Dwyer (SF)
Amanda Kennedy Finney (SF)
will begin her first year in the
evening law program at
2005
Lauren Shofer (A) graduates
2002
Evan Draper (A) is “doing
Applied Linguistics beginning
in fall 3006: “I am very
excited about this, having
spent the last two years
teaching English as a second
language in Taiwan and China
(which, according to the
Chinese, are the same),” she
writes. “I am glad that the
St. John’s education has
prepared me for graduate
study and that the good people
in Scotland realize it. The
program is 13 months long.
Edinburgh was my first choice
because of the vast linguistic
resources they have.”
has been accepted to study at
the University of Edinburgh’s
Master of Science program in
{The College -St John^s College ■ Winter 2006 }
The College Magazine
St. John’s College
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
�{Tributes}
43
Remembering Ralph Swentzell
Santa Fe tutor Ralph Swentzell, a faculty
member from 1966 until his retirement in
2003, died of cancer last summer. At a
memorial service September 25, he was
remembered as a lifelong learner, as a man
with many diverse interests, and as a
devoted husband and father. In the words
of Dean David Levine, Mr. Swentzell
represented for many of his colleagues
“the paradigm of the St. John’s tutor:
An insatiable desire for learning joined to a
generous spirit, he mentored and inspired
generations of students and tutors alike.”
Similarly, Mr. Swentzell’s ability to
balance the demands of being a St. John’s
tutor, while raising a family and pursuing
many diverse interests, inspired colleagues
such as Tim Miller, who joined the faculty
shortly after Mr. Swentzell. “Because of
the hours of study needed by a tutor
teaching parts of the Program for the first
time, the strain on the tutor’s home life is
enormous. . . I think Ralph found a
balance between the two
obligations as well as any tutor
I have known. The collaboration
of Rina and Ralph in designing
and building their beautiful solar
home remains an inspiration for
me and I’m sure for many
others.”
The following are some
additional remembrances from
Mr. Swentzell’s colleagues and
friends:
"'He liked to play
with ideas, not because
he took them lightly,
but because hefound
them so beautiful and
fascinating.
Tom Simpson
met his wife and life companion, Rina.
After Mr. Bunker and Mr. Boyd were
recruited to St. John’s College,
Mr. Swentzell followed, and he joined
our faculty in 1966, retiring in 2003 after
37 years of active and exceptional teaching
(and learning).
Jorge AiGLA,Tutor
Ralph Swentzell was born in East
Patterson, N.J., on July 13,1938,
attended the local public high
school, and joined the U.S. Air
Force Band at the age of 17 in
1956, where he remained for four
years playing clarinet. In his free
time he read widely and was
much affected by the writings of
Freud. He went to study
psychology at Highlands
University in Las Vegas, N.M.,
where he came under the
tutelage of Robert Bunker and
Stuart Boyd, and where he also
Ralph Swentzell made significant
contributions to our Program: he was
instrumental in introducing original papers
to our music and junior mathematics
tutorials, and his helpful handwritten notes
for the junior and senior laboratories and
senior mathematics are legendary in their
clarity and true liberal approach. Ralph was
an early incentive in the planning and
formulation of the Eastern Classics
program, and was responsible for the firstever computer-based Chinese lexicon.
Several of us had the privilege to be in his
“Computers and the Mind” Schmidt
Study Group the first year this fellowship
was awarded.
If there ever was a man who learned from
learning, it was Ralph Swentzell. For him,
teaching was an excuse for touching
students and colleagues. To co-lead a
seminar with him or to be in a tutors’
meeting with him, were transforming
experiences. Every conversation (about
anything) was a conversion. One
could feel oneself learning from
him and being changed by his
authentic human presence.
Ralph illuminated the texts,
never disposing of them; he opened
the books while he allowed himself
to be intimately and personally
opened by them. One could often
hear him in the hallway or Quad. ..
saying to his interlocutor: “Yeah,
yeah that sounds right, and from
what you are saying it is as if.. .”
and then he went on clarifying and
amplifying whatever was centrally
at stake in the conversation.
His personal interests were deep
and broad: neural networks,
consciousness, quantum
mechanics, computer modeling,
relativity, emergence, Chu Hsi
and Neo-Confucianism, Bodhid
harma, thermodynamics,
biochemistry. Ralph was an
intrepid wind surfer, a house
A MAN WITH MANY INTERESTS, TUTOR
Ralph Swentzell left his mark on
St. John’s College.
{The College - St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�44
builder (he and his family
built their lovely home in
Santa Fe and their weekend
home in Madrid), a jogger,
and a lover of sweets and
used bookstores, and since
his retirement, he was
engaged in learning how to
play the guitar.
As an individual he was
kind, gentle, acute, compas
sionate, without a tinge of
pride in his polymathy or
intelligence. Through him
many of us were granted a
glimpse into the mystery of
friendship.
Ralph was a devoted
husband for 45 years and a
loving father of three
wonderful daughters,
grandfather of twelve, and
great-grandfather of three
children. He made time to be
with his family, and to make
a family.
Tom Simpson
Tutor Emeritus
In thinking about Ralph Swentzell, the
word that comes first to my mind is
“hearty.” I think of his hearty laugh, his
zest for ideas, his love for people and for
the world-his total dedication to the
pursuit of truth, and an almost diffident
modesty about any claim to having arrived
at it! For many years, Ralph and I have
been good companions in adventures of all
sorts, including, most of all, adventures of
the mind. Whatever crazy idea I came up
with, I could always count on him to give a
hearing to, and find some possibilities in it,
but when I came up with a seemingly safe
and innocuous idea, he would say gently
that he’d been wondering about that-and I
would find that the idea I had thought so
simple and secure in fact had a very
different side, and opened up in ways I had
never imagined.
He liked to play with ideas, not because
he took them lightly, but because he found
them so beautiful and fascinating. The
more seriously he took them, the more he
delighted in that play. I think it’s fair to say
that however far afield his personal inter
ests took him, the college was always in
some way close to the center of his life-not
{Tributes}
in its institutional aspect, certainly, but
because those books and those questions
were always so vivid and vital to him. They
were part of his lifeblood, and that is why it
was always so exciting to share them with
him. He suffered immensely-more than
most of us, I suspect-when institutional
constraints seemed to cramp and distort
that open chase for truth.
He did indeed voyage far from the known
shores of our Western learning! Armed with
that computer program he had devised to
open Chinese works to our tutorial way of
starting out by reading fascinating texts -he
took off for the far shores of Eastern thought.
He went to the core of the question of what
language is, and how it serves thought. He
knows, as Scott Buchanan had before him,
that it is only by getting far outside the
confines of our presuppositions, that we
might be able to see ourselves in our true
proportions-not as Western, or Eastern, but
as fully human. With the Eastern Studies, he
threw a challenge to the college, one which I
always felt we had really failed to hear. It is
not too late for that!
When Ralph got hold of a good idea, he
would not let go of it. Many years ago,
when he and I were thinking about possible
spaces and other worlds, we began
wondering about the strange structure of
the Lobachevskian geometry. What would
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
it mean, we wondered, to be
living in a world like that?
We tended to conclude, as
everyone does, I guess, that
depending on the scale,
things might not seem so
different. The closer you got,
the less you would know
where you were! There
seemed to be a moral in that.
We had that conversation
long ago. But just a few
weeks ago I had a chance to
visit with Ralph one more
time, catching him, as it
happened, at a moment when
he was briefly filled again
with his old exuberance. He
went up the little stairs to his
computer room to make me a
copy of the latest version of
the Chinese dictionary-and
then called down, “Hey!
Come on up! I want to show
you something! ” Thinking
back to that old conversation, he had
worked up a computer program which was
ready to take you anywhere you wanted to
go in the Lobachevskian world. You could
go to any farthest corner, and there look
around to see what the cosmos looked like.
Sure enough-our old speculation was
verified: the deeper you got into that
cosmos, the more it looked like home!
Ralph had achieved a special stance, at
some far corner of the cosmos best known to
him-from which he could see all his worlds
at once-the Western one, with the music,
the mathematics, the quantum perplexities
he loved so much-the Pueblo one, in its deep
peace with the cosmos-and the Chinese one,
with its special power to see truth as at once
aesthetic and whole. He hasn’t solved every
thing, or maybe anything, but he had seen so
much! He was ready to take it all on, with
that hearty laugh and an undying sense of
wonder and amazement.
It was very typical of Ralph that at the
end of our last few minutes together, he
said he wanted to lend me a book. It was
the philosophy of Hua-Yen, and he thought
it might be just what I was looking for. I
don’t yet know just what he meant, but I
still have the book. I have my assignment,
and I’ll see what I can do with it! ♦
(Read by Hans von Briesen)
�{Tributes}
45
A Homecoming Tribute to Bill O’Grady
William O 'Grady was a tutor at St. John's
Collegefrom nj7o until his death in tgS6.
In a relatively short time at the college,
Mr. O 'Grady made a lasting impression on
many students and tutors, and his absence
is stillfelt.
Mr. O’Grady now has a permanent
memorial: aframed collage ofpictures
taken on his wedding day, unveiled during
Homecoming in the Coffee Shop. Several
former tutors, friends, and colleagues of
Mr. O ’Grady gathered to share their memo
ries. Santa Fe tutor Cary Stickney, A’25,
offered this tribute:
When we call to mind the dead that we love
we sometimes make them better than they
were. Especially if they diedyonng or
untimely we try to balance our sense of
what was taken from them with the most
generous account of what they took: unahle
to see why they should he gone while we
remain, we conclude that it should he vice
versa. So a certain kind of eulogizing is
distantly akin to what Priam does when he
calls his remaining sons worthless after the
death of Hector, or even heaping dirt and
ashes on his own head. There may also he a
kind of suspicious ease in praising the
dead: let their virtues he what they will, we
feel we cannot he properly compared to
them until our lives, too, are over.
I mention these dangers not supposing
that hy naming them I can be sure of
entirely escaping them, hut as an
invocation of the spirit of truth. It should
he possible to praise someone, even
extravagantly, while speaking truly. I
hope you will take what I say with less
than a grain of salt.
I knew Bill O’Grady first as my
sophomore math tutor, then through his
Friday night lectures, then as a colleague
when I became a tutor in Santa Fe and he
spent several years on that campus.
I do not remember much of that math
tutorial 33 years later; I was not working
at it with real devotion or deep interest.
I may not have been atypical: what I
remember is Bill reading aloud to us
sometimes-an essay or maybe a story
in what I now recognize were attempts to
kindle a fire in our unseasoned, soggy
souls. He did not try to blame or
intimidate the class into more serious
learning, nor did he lecture on what he
himself had learned or was learning. He
kept presenting us with opportunities.
Of the things he read, I remember only
one. It was about a Mexican bullfighter
whose nickname was “El Loco,” perhaps
because on his bad days an unprejudiced
observer might decide that he had just as
good of a reason to be in the bullring as a
lunatic escaped from an asylum. On those
days it seemed a miracle he was not killed.
But on his good days every move he made
seemed a miracle of grace and skill. You
left the stadium proud of the whole human
race. El Loco had an enormous following,
whether in spite of or because of one’s
never knowing if a particular performance
would be his best or his last. What, asked
the writer, would it be like for us to judge
one another and ourselves not on the basis
of our everyday fumblings but according to
what we are at our very best? That question
continues to resonate for me, occasioned
not only by my students or colleagues but
also by my own mysterious inertia and
capacity to disappoint myself.
But it was as an interpreter of texts in
Friday night lectures and question periods
that Bill O’Grady seemed to me to fully
manifest his own gifts. He was the most
penetrating reader I have ever known.
He read not only with his mind but also
with his heart. Under the light of his
attention books revealed themselves to be
more beautifully put together than I could
have imagined possible, and to be more
directly addressing my own heart and soul
than I could have dared to hope, and these
were not separate. . . He never talked down
to students. I think this was because he had
read and thought, to paraphrase Pascal, not
like a professional scholar, but like a
human being.
He once proposed as an example of what
Socrates meant by finding his corroborating
witness within the very one he sought to
persuade the story of Nathan the prophet
rebuking King David for his murder of
Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah. Nathan tells
David of a rich man who has taken his poor
neighbor’s one ewe lamb, his beloved pet,
and slaughtered it to feast a visitor, though
he had many flocks of his own. David
exclaims, “That man deserves to die!” and
Nathan replies, “Thou art the man.” It is
the vividness of David’s realization that the
story is about him that I find in all of Bill’s
encounters with texts. He is not present as a
specialist, an impartial expert who has built
an airtight case that will be most interesting
only to fellow experts, but as a fellow doer
and sufferer with the author, with the
characters, whose own fate is tied to the
questions of issue.
We are all prone to imagine that it might
after all be best and most admirable to
be some kind of expert about some
thing. Even El Loco on his good days
looked as if he knew everything about
bullfighting. And whether best or not,
all kinds of expertise are necessary, if
life is to be more than just survival. But
whether all things in the world are as
they are merely by necessity or because
it is somehow for the best is not a
question to be decided by expertise.
And those for whom that question can
be a matter of their own happiness or
misery, of life or death, could do worse
than to take Bill O’Grady as an
exemplar, to read what he wrote and
remember what he said and did, and to
find his spirit alive in all that is best
about St. John’s College.
Tutor William O’Grady
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 2006 }
�{Obituaries}
Thomas McDonald, Class of 1948
Former Tutor
Thomas McDonald, a tutor for three
decades on both the Annapolis and Santa
Fe campuses, died after a long illness from
complications of Parkinson’s Disease on
December 27, 2005, in Baltimore, Md.
Mr. McDonald was born in Atwood,
Kansas, and lived in Kentucky, Missouri,
Iowa and Illinois before arriving in
Alexandria, Virginia, in 1941 at the age of
13. He enrolled in St. John’s at the age of
16. The following summer at age 17, when
informed that at 6'5" he was too tall to be a
Marine, he requested and received a Senate
Naval Affairs Committee waiver to enlist in
July 1945Discharged in late 1946, Mr. McDonald
attended the University of Virginia briefly
and then entered the New School for Social
Research in New York. There he studied
philosophy under Karl Lowith and Hans
Jonas. In 1958, after serving as a lecturer at
the New School, he taught for three years
in the University of Chicago’s Basic
Program of Liberal Education. Following a
year in Europe, he joined the St. John’s
faculty in 1963. He taught for several years
in the 1970s and 1980s at the college’s
campus in Santa Fe, NM. He also served as
a visiting professor at East Texas State
University and as a visiting fellow at the
Kennedy Center for Bioethics at
Georgetown University. An authority on
Kant, he spent his 1976-1977 sabbatical
year in Germany. He retired in 1991,
but continued to teach part-time.
Santa Fe tutor Jim Carey (class of 1967)
had Mr. McDonald for his freshman
math tutorial in 1963, and felt very
fortunate to have known him as a tutor
and a colleague. “He was in, my opinion,
the finest tutor who ever taught at
St. John’s,” Mr. Carey said.
Howell Cobb, Class of 1944
FederalJudge
Howell Cobb, class of 1944, who had a
distinguished career as a jurist, died
Sept. 16. 2005. Judge Cobb was born in
1922 to lawyer and state circuit Judge
Howell Cobb and his wife, Dorothy Hart
Cobb, in Atlanta, GA. He was reared in
Georgia and Washington, D.C. From 1940
to 1943, he attended St. John’s, but World
War H interrupted his studies. He served
as a second lieutenant in the Marine
Corps, where he saw action as a
John Mack, class of 1945
fighter/bomber pilot in
the South Pacific.
After the war. Judge
Cobb earned an LL.B,
from the University of
Virginia 1948. He
attended the University
of Texas Law School to
prepare for the Texas Bar
Examination and in 1954
was hired by the firm of
Orgain, Bell, & Tucker in
Beaumont. He became a
partner in 1956. In 1985,
President Ronald Reagan
appointed Cobb a U.S.
District Judge. He served
for 20 years, assuming
senior status as a sitting
judge in March 2001.
Judge Cobb is survived
by his wife, Amelie; six
children; and 21 grandchildren.
John Mack, Class of 1945
Former BVG Member
John Duncan Mack, class of 1945, of
Concord and Chatham, Mass., died
Sept. 27, 2005.
Mr. Mack was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in
1924 to Josephine and John George Mack.
He served two tours as a sergeant in the
U.S. Army Infantry in World War II in the
South Pacific and was awarded a Silver Star
and a Purple Heart.
Mr. Mack’s studies at Annapolis were
interrupted by the war. He began at
St. John’s as part of the class of 1945, but
received his diploma in 1948. He became a
very active supporter of the college, serving
as a member of the Board of Visitors and
Governors and as national fund-raising
chairman. He graduated from Harvard
Business School in 1950.
Mr. Mack began a long career as a
marketing executive at Welch’s Grape Juice,
followed by Procter & Gamble, Clairol,
Bristol-Myers, and Gillette. From 1976-1992
he was president of Carter-Products, CarterWallace, in New York City.
During his career, he was president of the
Wave Hill Environmental Center in
Riverdale, N.Y., and was elected to the
Township Committee of East Amwell, N.J.,
{The College
St John’s College ■
IVinter 2006 }
where he served as Deputy Mayor. While
living in Concord, he was a trustee of the
Thoreau Society, trustee of the Thoreau
Farm Trust, and a member of the Historic
District Commission.
Mr. Mack is survived by his wife, Lorna
Carey Mack; by his sisters, Anne Dean and
Mary Hurst; by his four daughters, Pamela
Mack, Sheila Mack, Carey Weber, and Lorna
Sheridan; and by seven grandchildren.
Theodore X. Barber, class of 1947
Psychologist
Theodore X. Barber, 78, whose pioneering
research and writings explored hypnosis
and the nature of consciousness, died of a
ruptured aorta Sept. 10, 2005, in Boston.
Hailed as one of the most prolific and
revolutionary authors on hypnotism.
Dr. Barber, a psychologist, developed the
Barber Suggestibility Scale to examine
scientifically the experience of individuals
under hypnosis. He conducted his work
for more than 35 years at the Medfield
Foundation and Cushing State Hospital in
Massachusetts.
Doing post-graduate work at Harvard,
Dr. Barber read a paper in a British
medical journal describing how hypnosis
had improved an “incurable” skin
condition of a teenage boy. The case, he
later wrote, “indicated that the royal road
�{Obituaries}
to solving the mind-body problem” was
hypnosis.
Dr. Barber served as president of the
Massachusetts Psychological Association
and of the Hypnosis Division of the
American Psychological Association.
He received numerous awards, including
the Presidential Award for Lifetime
Contributions to the Field of Hypnosis, by
the Society for Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis (aooa).
Two of his most widely read books are
still in print; Hypnosis: A Scientific
Approach (1969), and Advances in Altered
States of Consciousness and Human
Potentialities (1976).
In his work The Human Nature ofBirds:
A Scientific Discovery with Startling
Implications (1993), he showed how birds
have intelligence equal and sometimes
superior to that of humans.
Born in 1927 to Greek immigrant parents
in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Barber graduated
from high school at age 15 then enrolled at
St. John’s. He earned his doctorate in
psychology at American University in
Washington, D.C., and then moved to
Boston to do post-graduate work at Harvard.
Henry Clay Smith, Class of 1934
Psychology Professor
Henry Clay Smith, a member of the class of
r934, died in West Tisbury, Mass., at the age
of 92. Dr. Smith was born in T913 in
Catonsville, Md., was raised by maiden aunts
after the death of his mother, and attended
St. John’s on a scholarship. After graduation,
he went on to earn a doctorate of psychology
at Johns Hopkins University.
For 38 years, he was a professor of
psychology at Michigan State University.
He taught, conducted research, and
puhhshed books on industrial psychology,
personality development, and sensitivity to
people. His early work on the effects of
music on productivity of assembly line
workers helped make music part of the
background of daily work hfe. Among his
publications were three major textbooks and
numerous articles.
Dr. Smith strove to achieve a rich, balanced
life in the manner of his idol, Thomas
Jefferson. He designed and built a house
based around a three-story tower, which was
his home for the past 30 years. His self
improvement projects ranged from yoga to
developing a legacy blueberry patch and
reading rpth-century novels. He was an avid
player of tennis, golf, and croquet. The last
of his writing projects, a biography of
Thomas Jefferson, was in progress as his
illness progressed.
Dr. Smith is survived by his wife, Nancy,
three children, eight grandchildren, and six
great-grandchildren.
Tania Forte, Anthropologist
by Michael N. Fried (A8a)
Tania Forte (A85) died from a cerebral
aneurysm on November 17, 2005. She was
46. At the time of her death she was a visiting
scholar at Hamline University in St. Paul,
Minn., on leave from the anthropology
department at Ben Gurion University of the
The goodness ofher
friendship was in its
being both pleasing
and elevating
Michael N. Fried
(A82), on Tania Forte
Negev in Israel. She was highly regarded by
her professional colleagues and she was
loved by all those who had the good fortune
of knowing her.
After leaving St. John’s, Tania studied
anthropology at the University of Chicago
and completed a Ph.D. there in aooo. Her
doctoral work concerned transactions, land,
and histories in a small Arab village in the
Galilee. Her research during the last few
years centered on the production and use of
images of the Palestinian-Israeli conllict-the
conflict through the lens of the television
camera, one might say. She was also working
on a book on the everyday practices of three
generations of Palestinian women in the
Galilee. In all this work, she saw people
producing stories and images, and she was
fascinated with how these verbal and visual
accounts served both to represent the world
and to define the identities of those
producing them, in short, how people create
themselves by the histories they teU.
Tania’s own history was itself an extraordi
nary tale. Her grandparents came from Gaza,
Turkey, Iraq, and Italy; her parents. Clement
and Daisy, were born in Egypt, were exiled
by Nasser after the 1956 Suez war, and even
47
tually immigrated to France. Tania grew up
in France, but she was born in London and
kept a British passport-her only passportall of her life. Tania would probably have
allowed her British passport to quietly
expire, were it not necessary to have some
passport: such things were of little impor
tance to her. Thus she wrote in a little piece
called “Weedlings”: “Since I’m not very
good at nationalities I have not changed it
[her passport] through years of living in
four other countries, where the last thing
anyone would suspect about me is that I
am a subject of Her Majesty.” She was one of
those people who seem to belong nowhere
and everywhere.
Tania entered St. John’s in Annapolis as a
Febbie in 1982.1 graduated that year and
hardly knew Tania in the few months we were
both at the college. But when she came to
Ben Gurion University, we spoke about the
college constantly. Like most of us, she felt a
great sense of loyalty and debt towards
St. John’s and believed it to be a central
locus for her intellectual formation. Indeed,
I can remember a conversation shortly
before she left for Minnesota in which she
said that it was becoming increasingly clear
to her how genuinely different we are from
our respective colleagues because of those
four years in Annapolis.
I hope I will be forgiven for speaking just
now in the first person, but Tania was a very
good friend. And here I must say that Tania’s
intellectual gifts were equaled by her
capacity for friendship. As a friend she was
warm and generous, she knew how to laughshe had a wonderful laugh-but she also knew
how to demand. She would not allow her
friends to fall into easy self-pity, moral or
intellectual laziness. The goodness of her
friendship was in its being both pleasing
and elevating.
Also Noted:
Winston Gilbert Gott, class of 1931,
May 3005
W. Morris Shannon, Class of 1937,
July 39,3005
Thomas Spence Smith, class of 1938,
February 3005
{The College -St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�48
{Alumni Voices}
GOING HOME
Life in Katrinas Wake
BY Sara Roahen, SF94
n the last Tuesday in
October, I flew home to
New Orleans for the
second time since
Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita lashed and inundated
the city. On the approach, the plane sailed
above Lake Pontchartrain, whose calm
waters appeared impossibly untouched
by the storms, and it cut across the
Sara Roahen, SF94
Mississippi River’s bends, around which
barges pushed and containers waited in
tidy rows to he emptied or filled, just like
they always had. The pilot took a wide
on a triumvirate of New Orleans institu
right turn and noted over the intercom,
tions: Angelo Brocato’s, an Italian ice
“Ladies and gentlemen: there’s downtovwi
cream parlor and bakery founded in 1905;
New Orleans to your left.” It didn’t occur
Venezia, an Italian restaurant where
to me until later that he would have said
almost nothing comes without red sauce;
the same thing to a cabin of tourists; at the
and Pho Tau Bay, a local Vietnamese chain
time it made sense for him to point out a
that marked a refugee community’s
hopeful, unflooded area to those of us
breakthrough into New Orleans’ popular
whose stomachs wrenched at the thought
food culture when it opened along the
of returning to our devastated city. But as
high-profile strip last year. The flood’s
my seat was on the right side of the plane,
unforgiving waters had marked the three
I saw what he didn’t mention; thousands of businesses with brown, waist-high stripes.
downed cypress trees turning fragile
Brocato’s and Venezia’s vintage neon signs
swampland into a game of pick-up sticks;
had smashed to the ground; we found Pho
aqua-blue FEMA tarps reflecting like
Tau Bay’s two blocks away. It was a full
swimming pools in the sun from nearly
month after Katrina, but no one had begun
every rooftop of suburban Kenner; dump
cleaning yet. I have never heard a sound so
upon dump of maggot-clogged refrigerators, startling as the silence that crashed down
some hurled willy-nilly into heaps, others in
when we shut off the car motor. No kids,
formation. This didn’t look like our city.
no streetcar, no electrical buzz, no birds.
We were a cabin of tourists after all.
We couldn’t even hear the flies that dark
My husband, Mathieu de Schutter
ened the ice cream parlor’s windows from
{SF94), and I took our first post-Katrina
the inside.
trip home exactly a month earlier, before
When people ask us about New Orleans,
we technically were allowed back into the
which happens less and less, the first
city. Matt is a resident at Children’s
question is always about our house. We’ve
Hospital, and a flash of his ID was
lived in New Orleans since 1999, when
convincing enough for the two peachMatt entered medical school at Tulane
fuzzed National Guardsmen securing
University, and we committed to the city
Earhart Boulevard. Before heading toward
last April by purchasing a house two blocks
our house, which we had heard was dry and from where we had rented for six years. We
standing, we drove to one of my favorite
wanted to stay in the neighborhood,
blocks, in an area called Mid-City, to check
mostly because it’s at the start of the Mardi
O
. though our house
is intact, our lives,
and those ofourfellow
New Orleanians,
are not.
{The College- St. John’s College • SVinter 2006 }
Gras parade route. The area turns into one
big, feel-good, family-oriented block party
for the two weeks preceding Mardi Gras;
even when we don’t feel like watching the
parades, we enjoy hearing the marching
bands warm up, feeling the bass drums
boom, watching families tromp along with
empty bags they hope to fill with beads,
doubloons, and penny toys. Our new
house, by the way, endured the storms like
a champ. We’ve had to replace some
roofing tiles, and a whole wall of siding,
and the ceiling in the living room, which
sagged precariously when the house
settled weeks afterward. A pecan tree fell
in the backyard, crushing our fence (but
thankfully not Matt’s skateboarding ramp),
and the house’s foundation cracked in
several places. All that can be fixed,
though, especially given that we have a
multi-talented neighbor whose six-pack
lunches we abide when no professional
bosses will.
Hearing the positive news about our
house, most people stop asking questions
and move onto the news of the day-that
sickening earthquake in Pakistan, White
House indictments, winter-which means
we rarely get to mention anymore that,
though our house is intact, our lives, and
those of our fellow New Orleanians, are
not. To begin with, we are moving to
Philadelphia. Matt got a second residency
position in anesthesia at the University of
Pennsylvania once it looked certain that
the program we had been banking on, at
Tulane, had lost its appeal (the program, in
fact, moved to Houston). We are the best
case scenario: we are alive, we have
insurance and savings, and we had our cat
with us when Katrina bore down. But that
doesn’t help our friends, who are damaged,
or the city we’re leaving behind, which
needs us.
You see old people, as old as my grand
parents, at The Home Depot buying new
�{Alumni Voices}
toilets and carrying
two-by-fours. You
talk to a co-worker
who didn’t have
insurance, and you
know that no one
will ever buy her
another house. You
read obituaries-too
many of them-for
people who died of
heart attacks and
strokes during their
evacuations, deaths
that don’t factor
into the official
hurricane death
toll. You see homes
that used to contain
lives gone silent,
smudged from the
black waters, and
spray-painted by
inspectors warning
“NO ENTRY.” The
owners of one of
them wrote back:
“Mom Is Okay.
We’ll Miss
Everyone. God
Bless.”
Four other
Johnnies took a
bigger hit than we
did and are staying. Sarah Todd and David
Olivier (both A94), and their two girls,
Louise, 4, and June, a, are renting a
friend’s guest house while their own home
is gutted and rebuilt. Billy Sothern and
Nikki Page (both A98) are soggy but
surviving. Billy’s father, a specialist in
mold remediation, has become a local
celebrity.
Fortunately there are light moments,
every day. When I finally got in touch with
our exterminator, we had a love-in over the
49
Sara Roahen and
Mathieu de
SCHUTTER, IN FRONT
OF THE HOME THEY
BOUGHT LAST APRIL.
Even though the
HOME WEATHERED THE
storm, the couple
HAD TO MOVE TO
Philadelphia.
phone, exchanging evacuation stories and
well-wishes. Natural disasters remind you
that people matter more than anything,
and that’s entirely good. We have room
mates now, friends whose apartment is too
moldy to inhabit, and another friend stops
by to take warm showers because his
neighborhood doesn’t have natural gas yet.
Our busy little household embraces us
with the sweet illusion that the city is
bustling again rather than barren. On top
of that, they say the oysters are safe to eat.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
our water is potable
even if it smells like
a Jacuzzi, and
restaurants in our
neighborhood are
busier than ever
with people who
would have killed
for a proper bowl of
gumbo during their
evacuations. The
other day, my friend
Cynthia and I took
the walk we used to
take once a week
before the storms:
through Uptown,
across the levee,
down the streetcar
line, past Audubon
Park, and back
home. Neither of us
mentioned the
bundles of branches
we had to hurdle, the smelly refrigerators
we passed, how empty the park seemed, or
how quiet it was on the streetcar tracks.
Like in our past lives in New Orleans, we
just felt lucky to be there.
�50
{Alumni Association News}
From the Alumni
Association
President
Dear Alumni,
I’ve been thinking
about Montaigne
lately.
He seemed
mundane and irrele
vant to me in sopho
more year, but he
has informed my life
in ways that other teachers have not. I’m
not sure why, but I think it has something
to do with practicality.
Every day I bump into challenges-some
more mundane than others. Each one asks
me to think carefully about myself and
others, about thought and action, about
perception and possibility. These situations
also demand that I act, hopefully in accord
with my insights and commitments. In the
Essays, Montaigne does the same thing,
but he does it better. He thinks about the
dilemmas of a normal life, makes sense of
them in ways that are moving and
profound, and takes courageous action.
A practical integration of the true and
the useful did not come easily to me. Even
with a pragmatic bent and the push of
economic necessity, it took me several
years to begin to braid thought and action
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowfor information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
into a graceful whole. In midlife, the task is
still far from complete.
I think of this as my personal version of a
community-wide challenge. How do we
commit ourselves to the highest values
while living in a demanding and mundane
world? Montaigne can be a guide, but we
must work to live up to the challenge as
individuals and as the college.
These days, St. John’s is doing much
more to help alumni bridge this gap
between real and ideal than the college did
in earlier decades. For example:
Both campuses offer internships (the
Hodson Internship in Annapolis and the
Ariel Internship in Santa Fe) to help
students and recent alumni experience
professional lives that may interest them.
The Career Services offices on both
campuses are well stocked with informa
tion, and the directors and staff are quite
knowledgeable about options for work or
further education.
The Virgil Initiative matches alumni
with current students to help them under
stand the issues of transition and find
resources to help them thrive.
Association chapters welcome current
students and alumni into their seminars
and social events to help smooth the way.
As an institution, the college is also
making strides to integrate practicalities,
performance, and accountability into the
life of the mind. For example;
Our new president in Santa Fe, Michael
Peters, is attending to the practical issues
of the aging physical plant and other
matters that shape the health of the
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
Paula Fulks
817-654-2986
ALBUQUERQUE
Bob & Vicki Morgan
505-375-901!^
BALTIMORE
Deborah Cohen
410-472-9158
DENVER/BOULDER
Lee Katherine
Goldstein
720^46-1496
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon
410-280-0958
BOSTON
Diane Cowan
617-666-4381
dianecowan@rcn.com
MINNEAPOLIS/
ST. PAUL
Carol Freeman
612-822-3216
CHICAGO
Rick Lightburn
rlightburn@gmaiLnet
NEWYORK
Daniel Van Doren
914-949-6811
AUSTIN
Charles Claunch
512-446-0222
college.
A new college-wide chief information
officer, Cathy Smith, has joined the
community to build and implement infor
mation management solutions.
Christopher Nelson (SF70) continues to
shape a productive community in
Annapolis.
Under the leadership of Jeff
BishopfHAqb), the college-wide advance
ment effort continues to thrive, and alumni
support those efforts in a variety of ways.
Friends and foundations recognize the
quality of management and administration
for the college as well as the excellence of
the Program.
Both campuses reach out to prospective
students who represent the diversity of the
larger community.
The growing strength of the college
paves the way for new and ambitious goals
for tutor salaries, new facilities, and excel
lent services to support students and
alumni.
The college is healthy, and alumni are
thriving because we all recognize that the
practical and the theoretical are mutually
dependent, not mutually exclusive. Even if
I didn’t understand that as a sophomore, I
certainly understand it now. And
Montaigne showed me the way.
For the past, present, and the future,
Glenda H. Eoyang (SF76)
President
St. John’s College Alumni Association
NORTHERN CALIF.
Deborah Farrell
415-731-8804
SALT LAKE CITY
Erin Hanlon
801-364-1097
PHILADELPHIA
Helen Zartarian
215-482-5697
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles
505-986-1814
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray
724-325-415Z
SEATTLE
Jon Bever
425-778-6372
PORTLAND
Lake Perriguey
lake ©law-works .com
SOUTH FLORIDA
Jonathan Sackson
305-682-4634
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico
805-684-6793
SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Elizabeth Eastman
562-426-1934
{The College- St. John’s College - Winter 2006 }
TRIANGLE CIRCLE
(NC)
Susan Eversole
919-968-4856
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Deborah Papier
202-387-4520
drpapier@verizon.net
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Peter Weiss
413-367-3174
�{Alumni Association News}
Barrand
Buchanan
IN Bronze
BY Patricia Dempsey
When Tylden Streett, class of 1950,
unveiled the busts he created of
Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan at
Homecoming in Annapolis, there was a
sigh of delight from alumni gathered in the
Conversation Room for the All-Alumni
meeting. Though works-in-progress in
plaster, the life-size busts capture the spirit
of the two visionaries.
Streett created the busts as a personal
tribute to the two men, but also as a way to
keep Barr and Buchanan’s legacy at the
forefront. “At St. John’s, we are indebted to
Barr and Buchanan,” says Streett. “I think
some of the young students today are not as
aware of the fact that the college’s program
exists today because of them. They were,
to me, the most important thing about
St. John’s. I was very fond of them and the
memory of them, because St. John’s
changed my way of thinking and the
direction of my life.”
A few years ago during a slow period
with commissioned works, Streett began to
work on the busts. “My years at St. John’s
had an enormous influence on me-so these
portraits were appropriate,” says Streett,
who attended St. John’s after a military
career as a fighter pilot in World War II.
“I looked into a lot of colleges, but at
St. John’s I was impressed with how Barr
and Buchanan were educating students by
having them read the original works of
great thinkers.”
Streett worked from memory and photos
to sculpt the busts. Ideally when he sculpts
a subject, Streett poses the person once
and takes photos from many angles. “For
these portraits I didn’t have this luxury,”
says Streett, “but I knew them both.
Buchanan interviewed me before I
attended St. John’s, but I didn’t remember
his appearance; I knew Barr when I was a
student. Also Barr has a memorable kind of
face, an actor’s face-the features are put
together in such a way that one easily
remembers it.”
Streett, who graduated from the
Maryland Institute College of Art in 1955
after attending St. John’s for two years,
was invited to pursue graduate studies at
mica’s Rinehart School of Sculpture,
where he earned his master’s degree in
1957. A former director of the Rinehart
School who still teaches at MICA, Streett
has received numerous awards and grants.
In addition to his privately commissioned
work, he has created public works such as a
limestone gargoyle for the National
Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Streett starts with a life-size head shaped
in clay, “an ordinary head with no distin
guishing features,” then sculpts it to look
like the subject.”
When it came to Barr and Buchanan,
Streett sent those who were familiar with
Barr and Buchanan photos of the clay
sculptures and asked for suggestions.
“Many, such as John Van Doren (class of
r947), were very helpful. I’m still getting
comments. Some felt that Buchanan is
younger-looking in relation to Barr.”
Once Streett feels the clay stage is
complete, he moves on to the molds and
castings. “The mold is chipped off and I
end up with a plaster replica of the clay
bust.” Then comes a mold over the plaster
replica and a wax cast of the sculpture is
ready. Streett shapes and shades the wax
cast, and when he’s satisfied with it, a
ceramic mold goes over the wax cast.
At the foundry, the wax is melted out and
molten bronze is poured in.
When this mold is broken off it reveals
the bronze bust, but there is more work to
be done. “There are certain imperfections
created by the process and the hightemperature furnace which can cause the
mold to crack, and wax may flood out. So I
do what’s called a ‘chaste’ and go over the
whole surface with a hammer and a chisel
tool. I might polish the nose, a cheek
bone-surfaces where I want to bring up
51
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in
the St. John’s College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors
elected by and from the alumni body. The
board meets four times a year, twice on each
campus, to plan programs and coordinate the
affairs of the association. This newsletter
within The College magazine is sponsored by
the Alumni Association and communicates
association news and events of interest.
Glenda Eoyang, SF76
A85
Secretary - Barbara Lauer, SF76
Treasurer - Bill Fant, A79
President -
Vice President - Jason Walsh,
Getting-the-Word-Out Action Team Chair-
Linda Stabler-Talty, SFGI76
Mailing address - Alumni Association,
St. John’s College, P.O Box 3800, Annapolis,
MD 31404, or 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
light.” In the final stage, Streett creates a
patina using chemicals to change the
coloration.
Once the busts are completed-currently
they are at a Baltimore foundry being cast
in bronze thanks to the generous donations
of several alumni-they will be displayed on
campus, perhaps in the Barr Buchanan
Center. If their presence inspires future
and current Johnnies to learn more about
the two men who brought a “radical” new
concept of education to a small and
struggling college, that would be a good
thing, says Streett. In any case, he feels
that he has done
something to honor
two men who changed
his life.
“I did it for me,” he
adds. “They seemed
awfully important
to me.”
Tylden Streett
UNVEILED HIS TRIBUTE
IN PROGRESS—TO THE
New Program
FOUNDERS DURING THE
All-Alumni
{The College- St. John’s College • Winter 2006 }
meeting.
�5a
{St. John’s Forever}
A Changing
Campus
A comparison of these two aerial shots (top,
1939; bottom, 2004) shows the changes
that have come to the Annapolis campus
and its environs over the past sts decades.
Still to be built, as the historic photo shows,
were Campbell Hall, a dormitory, and
Mellon Hall, also home to the Francis Scott
Key Auditorium. The Carroll Barrister
House had not yet been moved from down
town to the campus. The turrets still graced
Pinkney Hall. The ungraceful stack
looming high above the trees was part
of the college’s heating plant, torn down
in 1950Shortly after the older photograph was
taken, major changes were made along
College Creek; trees were cut down and the
shoreline was filled in. The college’s
neighbors have also changed. State office
buildings and housing now flank the
campus on the west, and the rail lines are
long gone, replaced by Rowe Boulevard.
And of course, the Liberty Tree-aligned
with the south face of Pinkney in the older
photo-is missing from the contemporary
shot.
Yet even this more contemporary aerial
photograph is now outdated: Spector Hall,
nearly identical to Gilliam Hall (shown here
on back campus) and just south of the
building, is now complete and occupied.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Winter 2006 }
�T
Priscilla Husted Griscom , class of 1955,
^955by Priscilla Hustei
DELIVERS HER TOAST DURING THE
rnscom.
Homecoming banquet; Alumni Association
President Glenda Eoyang looks on.
Class of 1955
Fifty years later
the names have all fled
Aristophanes, Euclid
old white men are dead
what did we study?
why did we so?
to all be forgotten
from a half century ago
we studied for pleasure
we studied for fun
we studied to talk
our ideas to let run
we studied to hear
what others did say
of nature, of gods,
of death, in their way
we studied to show
those unwelcoming men
how women could do it
better than them
we studied for power
we studied for pride
no study for grades
were then ever made
we studied for Wi n free
and Curtis and Bart
we studied our life
to live fuller and smart
we studied to argue
and studied to laugh
and studied to see
what women we’d be
we studied for love
for St. Johnnies we were
true to ourselves
we studied for HER
—Ki
Alumni Calendar
Opening Celebration, “With a Clear
and Single Purpose,” 7 p.m. Friday,
April 21,2006
;
Croquet
Sunday, April 23,2006 - i p.m.
Summer Alumni Seminars
gathering. The evening begins with coffee 5 in Santa Fe, July 24-28, 2006
and desserts, moves into FSK auditorium
for a program which features an overview
Homecoming, Santa Fe: July 28-30
of plans for the college’s future, and end^^ ,
with a champagne reception.
Homecoming, Annapolis:
Sept. 29-Oct. I, 2006
Homecoming in Annapolis, 3005
Left: Rachel Bartgis (A09) and beau
Joseph Pereira enjoy the Waltz Party;
Annapolis Dean Michael Dink (class of
1975)
ENJOYING HIS 30TH REUNION.
Above: Admiring a future Johnnie.
PHOTOS BY ALEX LORMAN
{The College
-Sf, John’s College •
Winter 2006 }
�Periodicals
Postage Paid
STJOHN’S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS ■ SANTA FE
Published by the
Communications Oefice
P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
ADDRESS service REQUESTED
*****************5-DIGIT 87529
S292 P1 15817 ANN1
MS. AMY MCCONNELL FRANKLIN
HC 74 BOX 24512
EL PRADO NM 87529-9546
�
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<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
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The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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English
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thecollege2001
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52
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The College, Winter 2006
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Volume 32, Issue 1 of The College Magazine. Published in Winter 2006.
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St. John's College
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
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2006-01
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pdf
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The College Vol. 32, Issue 1 Winter 2006
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Dempsey, Patricia (managing editor)
Hartnett, John (Santa Fe editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Borden, Sus3an
Goyette, Barbara
Knapp, Caroline
Maguran, Andra
Mattson, Jo Ann
Naone, Erica
Utter, Chris
Johnson, David
The College
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/46ec33268c4dacd9a8300dc8b9655bf8.pdf
8d39ce9603c29f99dab973a4f153b4b3
PDF Text
Text
�On St. Augustine
ugustine’s life and works reflect intellectual rigor, curiosity,
STJOHN’S
and a desire to see beyond the surface of things to find real
understanding. Driven by a restlessness that at times turned
College
to self-loathing, he engaged in a relentless quest with many a
SANTA
wrong turn and dead end. He was determined to distinguish
“the charm of words from the truth of things,” as he writes in the
The College (usps 018-750)
Augustine was born
in Tagaste He
(modern
dayabout
Soukdifficult
Ahras) in
North Africa
in 354. in
Confessions.
thought
questions
we confront
is published quarterly by
As a schoolboy he hated
Greek,
Latin,
and
faced
was idle
many
worksloved
we read
at St.
John
’s, beatings
from the when
Bible he
to War
andin
Peace-. What is sin?
St. John’s CoUege, Annapolis, MD,
his studies. At times,Why
his education
waspleasure
interrupted
because
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do men take
in doing
the wrong
thing?’sIsfinances,
free will real-or an illusion?and Santa Fe, NM
but Augustine
What
is love? was clever, had an excellent memory, and excelled at the art of
Known office of publication:
rhetoric. He went to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric, and did well in his
Communications Office
St. John’s College
public life, seeking out applause and recognition for his talents. He saw rhetoric as a
Box a8oo
way to “conquer” others, but ultimately, his success as a great orator gave him no
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800
real satisfaction.
Periodicals postage paid
His search for wisdom led him to the Manichaean religion, which ultimately
at Annapolis, MD
disappointed him with empty answers to his questions. “Nearly nine years passed in
postmaster: Send address
which I wallowed in the mud of that deep pit and in the darkness of falsehood, striving
changes to The College
often to rise, but being all the more heavily dashed down,” he writes in Book Three.
Magazine, Communications
His restlessness and dissatisfaction led him to the works of Plato and Plotinus.
Office, St. John’s College,
Box
2800, Annapolis, MD
He found a harmony between Christian belief and neoplatonism that paved the way
21404-2800.
for his eventual conversion. In 387, at the age of 33, and on Holy Saturday, Augustine
Rosemary Harty, editor
was baptized. His mother, St. Monica, never gave up on him.
Patricia Dempsey,
Soon afterward he returned to Tagaste, where he lived a monastic life. In 391, while
managing editor
he was visiting in Hippo, he became a priest. For the rest of his life he remained in
John Hartnett (SF83),
Santa Fe editor
Hippo, where he became auxiliary bishop in 395 and bishop soon after. He died in
Jennifer Behrens, art director
430, as the Vandals lay siege to Hippo, and he spent his last days reading in his
library.
Annapolis
410-626-2539
His Confessions (written in his 40s) is considered a classic of Christian autobiogra
phy, as well as a compelling account of one man’s intellectual and spiritual journey.
Santa Fe
He spent 13 years writing The City of God, which he finished in 426.
505-984-6104
Sophomores at St. John’s read from the Hebrew scriptures and from classical
Contributors
Roman poetry and history before moving on to Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm.
Jason Bielagus (SF98)
In the reading list today, Aristotle’s On the Soul serves as a bridge between the great
Barbara Goyette (A73)
shifts of thought occurring between Roman and medieval times. “Augustine was a
Andra Maguran
man caught between two worlds: that of paganism and Christianity, of being a
Jo Ann Mattson (A87)
believer and a nonbeliever,” says Brother Robert Smith, Annapolis tutor. “In the
Erica Naone (A05)
Libby Vega (SF06)
Confessions, he works that all out, and all the moral problems that are connected with
Roseanna White (A05)
that. Besides that, he’s a very good writer.”
A
ANNAPOLIS •
FE
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
�{Contents}
PAGE
IO
DEPARTMENTS
St. Augustine
a
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
How should we think about the concept
of sin? Does the average person really
have the capacity for evil? Augustine
scholar Kim Paffenroth (A88) offers
perspective on the Confessions.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Faculty study groups
Making Johnnies out of GIs
A new vice president in Santa Fe
Opportunity Initiative
Enterprising Greek scholars
A garden grows in Annapolis
New tutors
9
LETTERS
PAGE
l8
Commencement 2005
16 ALUMNI VOICES
In Annapolis, one speaker imagines
Callicles as the perfect commencement
speaker; in Santa Fe, another tells
graduates that great riches lie beyond
the land of the Phaiacians.
PAGE
A Johnnie way of life-only different.
a8 STUDENT VOICES
Through photography, Donald Stone
(A06) helps teens find their own paths.
30 BIBLIOFILE
2121
A Long
A new two-volume history by Joseph
Baratta (A69) explores the world
federalism movement.
Time Coming
In her years away from St. John’s, Peggy
O’Shea (SF87) sold BMWs. Nick Colten
(A97) worked as a baker. Ultimately,
their paths brought them full circle.
PAGE
3a ALUMNI NOTES
PROFILES
32 Antiques Roadshow’s Peter Fairbanks
(A73) knows the real McCoy.
36 An island of her own: Sarah Mara (A61)
and life on Lone Pine.
38 Kira Zielinski (SF95) takes to the skies.
42 Chris P. Nelson (SF99)-blogging his way
to fame and fortune.
2Zj.
Homecoming
A birthday party for Eastern Classics,
Shakespeare in action, and a new
president in Santa Fe make for a lively
Homecoming.
46 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
48 ST. John’s forever
PAGE a4
ON THE COVER
Augustine ofHippo
Illustration by DavidJohnson
�2.
{From
the
Bell Towers}
Faculty Study Groups
Sustaining the Life ofthe Mind
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses is
one of the most famous passages of modern literature, with the
final few lines punctuated by the repetition of the word “yes”:
. Iput my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so
he couldfeel my breasts allperfume yes and his heart was going
like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. ”
As he prepared for a faculty study group meeting on the novel
last July, Santa Fe tutor David Carl planned to play a recording of
an actress reading part of the soliloquy. “My opening question
will be, ‘what is Molly saying yes to?’” Carl explained. “The book
is about the Blooms’ marital problems, her infidelity, the death
of their child, and there are a lot of things that have been said no
to. But she’s affirming something at the end of book, and I’d like
to hear thoughts from the group.”
Carl was actually a bit surprised to find him
self leading an eight-week faculty study group
on Ulysses. He had proposed War and Peace,
but the Instruction Committee had settled on
Joyce, and he gamely accepted. “It’s a very
difficult book,” he says of Ulysses. “But it’s
been fun, because talking about it out loud
helps sort out the meaning.”
Faculty study groups have been a part of
sustaining the intellectual life of St. John’s
tutors since the New Program was established
in 1937. Groups of 4-12 tutors meet under a
variety of circumstances, reading and working
through a variety of texts, both Program and
non-Program. This kind of study is important
to tutors: it enables them to think in-depth
about a certain subject or
book, when their normal
teaching schedule calls
them to cover material
more quickly; it helps them
consider proposed changes to
the Program; and it helps
them prepare to teach in
areas of the curriculum
where they may not have
much experience.
This past summer, about 25
faculty members in Santa Fe
took part in five funded study
groups. In Annapolis, 43 fac
ulty members took part in six
funded groups. (On both campuses, several tutors took part in
more than one group.) Because it is such an essential part of
keeping St. John’s a true community of learners, faculty development-as it is often called in the academic world-is among the
college’s most important strategic goals. To allow more tutors
to take part, the college has been seeking-and finding, from
entities such as the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation,
the A.W. Mellon Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute-outside funding for study groups.
A grant supported the Ulysses study group, and Carl was
gratified to be paid for the time and effort he put into leading the
group. “In the Nichomacean Ethics, we read that a life of study
and contemplation is the happiest life a human being can lead,”
he says. “Tutors really believe that, and if
that’s what you believe, surely someone
doesn’t have to offer you money. On the other
hand, leading a group is time consuming, and
it turns out the compensation is pretty gener
ous. That helped because of all the things that
turn out not to be a part of the life of the mind,
but still matter-like rent and insurance.”
Spontaneous and informal study groups
spring up frequently at St. John’s, says
Santa Fe Dean David Levine (A67). However,
on a practical level, funded study groups
allow tutors to be released from their teaching
schedule. “Now that we have the financial
support, it means that tutors can concentrate
on a study group in ways they haven’t been
able to before,” he says. “We’re working
Supportingfaculty
development
is one ofthe
colleges most
important
strategic goals.
Thursday afternoon with
Joyce: Santa Fe faculty
MEMBERS (l. to R. ) BoB
Richardson, David Carl,
AND Peter Pesic took on
Ulysses in a summer study
GROUP.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
J
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
3
toward giving tutors more release time to pursue their
his most satisfying experiences has been holding the NEH Chair,
own inquiry.”
which gave him a year off from teaching to study Plato’s Philebus,
Study groups solidify the faculty community and feed tutors
then lead a faculty study group and deliver a lecture on thumos in
with energy and ideas. “At other colleges, faculty study groups
The Republic.
are the icing on the cake, whereas here, they’re a necessity-they
Providing compensation for study groups ensures more oppor
are part of the cake,” says Levine. Because tutors teach across
tunities for all tutors, Dink says. “It levels the playing field to
the curriculum, the college asks “everyone to extend themselves
allow anyone-regardless of financial need-to engage in the study
beyond their area of comfort.”
group,” he says. “Tutors will always want to keep learning. Their
Last summer, Ingo Farin, a Santa Fe tutor since 2002, took part
appetites are not exhausted by the Program.”
in a srx-week mathematics study group led by John Cornell and a
Tutor Erik Sagengwas asked to lead a faculty study group on
two-day session on Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian motion,
probability and statistics, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical
led by Peter Pesic. They were both exciting, says Farin, whose
Institute. He spent a year planning, originally expecting to focus
doctoral work was in philosophy. “It’s good to offer study groups
on techniques of statistical analysis, but the study group eventu
for those who are not experts, so they can catch up with what
ally took a more philosophical look at the topic. “I had no idea
more experienced tutors say about the matter,” he says. “But the
that there were so many different and actively debated systems of
primary focus of study groups should be the intellectual focus of
foundations for probability and statistics,” he says. “I found that
tutors. That means that [the groups] go outside the canon of
really interesting and exciting.”
things we teach here. If we don’t do that, there’s a danger we
The group had three two-hour meetings each week for eight
could become experts in the Program.”
weeks. Four members of the group had fund
For that reason, he was pleased to lead a
ing, but one took part without any compensa
study group on “ Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”)
tion. They read works by Richard von Mises,
by Paul Celan, a Romanian-born poet whose
Karl Popper, F.P. Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti,
parents were killed in the Holocaust and
and John Maynard Keynes. “This particular
who escaped death by working in a Nazi
topic was especially valuable, because it can
labor camp.
bear on how we learn and how we change our
Claudia Honeywell has been on the faculty
opinions in the face of evidence,” Sageng says.
for 12 years and has yet to teach senior labora
WTiile some study groups meet for just one
tory. After completing a study group on the
summer, one Annapolis group has been meet
Michael Dink, Annapolis dean
first half of senior lab, led by Howard Fisher,
ing for 21 years, two hours each week, for eight
she feels that she can approach Faraday,
weeks, to read works in phenomenology.
Millikan, and Rutherford with
They’ve spent years on each
more ease. It was enjoyable to
work, just completing a fiveconduct the experiments with
year exploration of Hans-Georg
her colleagues and talk about
Gadamer’s Truth and Method
the results. “This has really
last summer. The works they
opened up something for me.
Or, don’t. A/oZ>y-7)ZcA:-considered by some to be the great
read may not be on the Pro
When I go into laboratory.
American novel-hasn’t been on the seminar reading list in
gram, but they help us under
I’ll have more confidence,
Annapolis since 1974. It hung on in Santa Fe several years
stand the Program, says tutor
and I’ll feel I can engage the
longer before vanishing. Relegated to preceptorials, the
Jon Lenkowsi, who also took
students,” she says, adding
novel has been replaced in seminar by Benito Cereno.
part in a Donne study group.
with a laugh, “I’m still afraid
Here’s your chance, readers of The College. What should be
“What we do in our classes can
to teach music.”
on the official Reading List of St. John’s that is not there now?
be traced back to some kind of
Annapolis Dean Michael
Joyce’s Ulysses, instead of The Dead? Proust’s Remembrance
phenomenology. We’re always
Dink (A75) still remembers the
of Things Pastl Should we bring back Gibbon’s The Decline
reflecting on our own experi
and Fall ofthe Roman Empire I
study group he participated in
ences and on our own lives,”
Make your case in a few hundred words or less why a par
during his first year as a tutor
he says.
ticular work should be added to the Reading List. Note that
in Annapolis in 1984. “Curtis
Lenkowski is one of the
The College has no sway with the Instruction Committee,
Wilson led a group on the idea
original members of the group,
which decides such things. We invite your suggestions in the
of universal gravitation in
which also comprised John
interest of sparking lively conversation.
Newton’s thought. It made a
White (A65), Sam Kutler
Those whose suggestions end up printed in the Winter
big impression on me.”
(A54), and Debbie Renaut
2006 issue will be rewarded with either an Albert Einstein
Over the years, he’s partici
{A68). The composition of
or Jane Austen action figure (retail value: $8.95). Please
pated in many groups, some
the group has changed from
mail submissions to: Editor, The College, P.O. Box 2800,
with funding, most without.
year to year. “The excitement
Annapolis, MD 2T404-2800. The current reading lists for
Last year, he formed a twocomes in having the leisure
the Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses can be found on
person study group with tutor
to do this with like-minded
the college Web site: www.stjohnscollege.edu; click on
Nathan Dugan. The two met
people.”
Academic Program.
once a week to translate
—Rosemary Harty
Genesis from Hebrew. One of
''Tutors will
always want
to keep
learning.
“Call Me Ishmael”
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
�4
{From
the
Bell Towers}
Making Johnnies Out of GIs
At St. John’s new undergradu
ates forge bonds in shared
classes, meals, intramural
sports, and parties. At the
Graduate Institute in Annapolis,
students’ ages range from 22 to
72, they are in different life
stages and careers, and they
can live an hour or more from
campus. But none of that has
stopped Annapolis GI Director
Joan Silver (A76) from launch
ing new initiatives to make
graduate students feel that
they’re part of a wider
community.
“Creating more community
for the GI students both within
the GI itself and within the
college as a whole remains a
challenge,” says Silver, now in
her second year as director.
Energetic, creative, and familiar
with what it’s like to be an older
student in a young population.
Silver has been determined to
make GIs feel like full-fledged
Johnnies. When she came to
St. John’s as a student. Silver
already had a bachelor’s degree.
She ended up becoming a parttime tutor while she finished the
Program, eventually earning a
master of arts from the college.
After earning a doctorate in the
ology, she became a full-time
tutor in Santa Fe in 1989 and
returned to Annapolis in 1996.
There are obstacles to build
ing a community for a diverse
group of students, many of
whom are juggling their studies
with full-time jobs and family
obligations. Silver acknowl
edges. Some attend part time,
and not all can linger late for
regular after-seminar gather
ings on Monday nights. This fall
Silver began inviting each of
the 93 Annapolis GI students to
join her and other students for
lunch or dinner.
Recently, President Chris
Nelson began hosting recep
Broadening the Search
Crystal Watkins grew up in
Annapolis and attended The
Key School, founded by
St. John’s tutors. However,
except for attending an occa
sional event on the campus,
she didn’t know much about
the college. When it came time
to apply to colleges, St. John’s
was not on her list. “It was
totally based on a stereotype,”
she says. “I just didn’t think I’d
fit in.”
Since July, it has been
Watkins’ job to dispel stereo
types about St. John’s. As part
of the college’s Opportunity
Initiative, Watkins joined the
college as admissions counselor
for diversity, sharing regular
admissions duties along with
taking on special initiatives to
introduce St. John’s to minority
students. She will attend col
lege fairs, visit high schools,
and establish relationships with
community groups.
for
In Santa Fe, the college has a
similar initiative, with a special
emphasis on introducing the
college to Hispanic and NativeAmerican students. The goal for
both campuses is to broaden the
college’s recruitment efforts to
ensure that qualified high
tions for graduate stu
dents. Silver is helping
several GIs who are
reviving the Graduate
Council as a way to
foster academic and
social events, while
connecting with the
undergraduate Student
Committee on Instruc
tion. “As a result, we
now have undergradu
ates participating in
our orientation
seminars on the Meno
at the beginning of each
semester,” she says.
Krishnan Venkatesh, director
of the GI in Santa Fe, says the
campus has done much to make
graduate students feel like part
of the community. In Santa Fe,
GIs are invited to attend under
graduate preceptorials, bring
ing the two populations
together in the classroom. This
year, the GI has 71 students in
Joan Silver hopes to
STRENGTHEN THE GI COMMUNITY.
the liberal arts program and 31
in Eastern Classics.
“The GIs usually live and
work about 15 minutes from
campus, so they are able to be
here during the day for some
thing as informal as lunch with
fellow students and extracurric
ular activities,” he says.
— Patricia Dempsey
Prospectives
school students from a wide
variety of ethnic, racial, and
economic backgrounds have a
chance to hear about St. John’s.
Watkins majored in English
and African-American studies
at the University of Virginia,
where she earned a Bachelor
of Arts. She became
interested in issues of
access to higher education
and began volunteering
in the undergraduate
admissions office and
as a peer adviser in
UVA’s Office of African
American Affairs. She
later earned a master’s
degree in Education,
Policy, and Leadership
from the University of
Maryland.
Crystal Watkins hopes to
DISPEL STEREOTYPES ABOUT
St. John’s.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
Watkins recognizes that
many things keep a student
from applying to the college,
among them, the availability of
merit and athletic scholarships
at other colleges, the small
size of St. John’s, and more
than any other factor, the
college’s academic program.
It’s hard to find students who
are right for St. John’s, and
Watkins’ work is just one
part of a highly developed
admissions strategy geared to
identifying those students.
Watkins’ role is to make sure
that unspoken fears about
“not fitting in” do not deter
prospectives. “I think it’s a
valid concern that if you visit a
college, and you don’t see many
minority students, you wonder,
‘well, why aren’t they here?’
My job is to show that although
St. John’s isn’t right for every
student, we are a welcoming
community.
�{From the Bell Towers}
5
Linking a College with a Community
Jim Oslerholt Leads Development Efforts in Santa Fe
James W. Osterholt heard his calling
in 1971, when he was attending Union
Theological Seminary in New York
City on a Rockefeller Fellowship.
Although he soon decided that the
ministry wasn’t for him, Osterholt
discovered a new vocation while
working in Union’s development
office. “I decided then that I wanted a
job where I could be a part of the sub
stance of the academic environment
but also a part of the world outside
the university-to be a bridge between
the institution and the society it
serves,” he says.
In a similar way, fate played a hand
in bringing Osterholt to St. John’s
College. Santa Fe President Michael
Peters and Osterholt had a mutual
friend at Pepperdine University.
When the friend heard that Peters had
accepted the job as president and that
the vice president’s position was
open, the friend thought Osterholt
and Peters would work well together
and “played matchmaker,” explains
Osterholt. In July, Peters welcomed
Osterholt to Santa Fe as the college’s
vice president of advancement, successfully concluding a national
search for a key position on the college’s management team.
The Santa Fe campus and the college are fortunate to have
someone with Osterholt’s background and experience, says
Peters. “He will be a strong and effective partner, not only for
advancement, but also in the broader management of the campus
and the college,” he says.
Osterholt finds his new position challenging and rewarding.
In addition to directing plans for the president’s inauguration in
October, Osterholt’s priorities include planning for the college’s
upcoming capital campaign, scheduled to launch in spring aoo6.
He has begun working to strengthen relationships between the
college, the community of Santa Fe, and St. John’s alumni. He also
intends to increase the breadth and depth of the college’s friends
and supporters. How will he do it? “By working my tail off,” he
says. “But I’m fortunate to have a marvelous group of faculty,
colleagues, and staff to support these efforts.”
Osterholt is a self-described collaborator who most enjoys being
part of a successful team of professionals. His ai-year tenure at
UCLA culminated in serving as the associate vice chancellor of
development. There Osterholt planned a $i billion campaign.
Most recently Osterholt worked as vice president of external
relations at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where
he managed an array of external programs including development,
trustee relations, public information, government relations, and
marketing and communications. At the Milken Institute, he
served as vice president for development. He also was executive
Advancement is all about building
RELATIONSHIPS, SAYS JaMES OstERHOLT,
Santa Fe’s new VP.
director of development at the RAND
Corporation, and director of develop
ment and alumni affairs, director of
annual giving, and assistant director
of development at Union Theological
Seminary.
Osterholt attended Stanford University,
where he earned a bachelor’s degree in
American history in 1970. After his year
as a Rockefeller Fellow at Union, Oster
holt went on to earn a master’s degree
from Columbia University in 1974.
His greatest pleasure so far has been
learning to convey the essence of the
Program to existing and potential friends
of the college. Explaining what St. John’s
is all about gives more people the oppor
tunity to become involved in the life of
the college.
“There are a number of special attrac
tions that contribute to the quality of life
at St. John’s in Santa Fe, such as really
getting to know members of a smaller
community. It’s all about building relationships,” he says. “When
you have a real relationship, you are sincerely helping friends of
the college express something they are already interested in
accomplishing. In a way we are working on the same objective
furthering St. John’s.”
Osterholt’s wife of 30 years, Debbie, has been a part of every
institution her husband has served. She works as an executive
recruiter for development officers, but has never found her
husband a job. “She has, however, steered me away from a few,”
he says.
Throughout his many years in advancement, Osterholt has
acquired a collection of interesting anecdotes. One involved a gift
request that occurred over lunch with a prospective donor in a uni
versity dining hall. Osterholt recalls, “There had been a lot of
prior discussion about how large a request we should make. When
the conversation finally turned to the point where he was asked for
his gift, the gentleman passed out, literally. I guess he was asked
for too much.”
In fund raising, however, no gift is ever too small or insignificant,
and even the most modest gifts are appreciated. Osterholt saw this
firsthand when his daughter’s school had a financial emergency and
he was drafted to do the fund raising. “One of the smallest gifts in
that drive was a gift of $5, paid at $i per month for five months,”
he recalls. “It was from my daughter, who was in first grade.”
The Osterholts’ daughter, Katie, has since graduated from the
University of Arizona and is studying to become a paralegal.
{The College. St John’s College • Fall 2005 }
—Andra Maguran
�6
{Bell Towers}
Paradigm Shift
Initially, self-interest inspired
Erikk Geannikis (Ao6) to try to
assemble a Greek paradigm
handbook designed to “take the
heartache out of Ancient
Greek.” During his junior year,
he had planned to apply to
graduate school for study in the
classics and was advised that
completing an independent
project-such as compiling a
didactic tool for Greek-would
look good on grad school
applications.
Although he’s now more
interested in neuroscience,
Geannikis decided to
pursue the project anyway.
He recruited Andrew
Romiti and Paul Wilfordpartners in his Greek study
group and both juniors
planning to study the
classics-to help.
Working independently
in three different cities and
meeting in an Internet chat
room to compare notes and
exchange their sections,
they completed the project
over the summer and sent it
out for review by the faculty
and Dean Michael Dink.
Romiti took care of the
copying and binding at
Kinkos. By the time the fall
semester started, loo
copies of their “Greek Paradigm
Handbook: Reference Guide
and Memorization Tool” were
sold out.
Pocket-sized and spiral bound
to lie flat when opened, the little
booklets include paradigms for
nouns, adjectives, pronouns,
verbs, and participles and go for
$9.95. The three charged just
enough to cover their costs, and
may pursue finding a publisher
and marketing their project
beyond the college. But they
weren’t in it for entrepreneurial
reasons. They just love Greek,
explains Geannikis. They had all
been making quick-reference
charts they carried in spiral
bound notebooks, and these
served as the genesis of the
handbook.
Giving up a large portion
of their summer vacation to
the project wasn’t easy, says
Wilford. “But when we saw the
copies, it was all worth it.”
Dink was impressed with the
trio’s final product. “I suspect
students-and tutors-will find
it useful both for learning
paradigms and as a reference
tool. It does for Greek morphol
ogy something analogous to
what Green Lion’s The Bones
does for Euclid’s Elements^
he says.
“People told us it was some
thing that should have been
done long ago, so it’s been very
gratifying,” says Romiti.
Even though they no longer
have Greek in tutorial, the
three will use their own refer
ence guides as they pursue their
next independent project
together. Last year, they worked
on Philoctetes and the Sympo
sium, meeting every week
for most of the year.
They’re also compiling
notes and preparing an
index for the next volume
of their handbook.
If they ever make a profit
on their book, Geannikis,
Romiti, and Wilford don’t
want to make it from John
nies. They consider the
project a gift to the commu
nity-even a type of offering-to the Program, to
Greek, and to St. John’s.
—Rosemary Harty
Ancient Greek meets the
Internet: (l. to r.) Erikk
Geannikis, Andrew Romiti,
AND Paul Wilford used a
CHAT room to compile
THEIR PARADIGM HANDBOOK.
Ariel Program
Emily Meyer (SF06) pictures herself as a psychologist, helping
children with developmental disorders. Her interest in clinical
psychology stemmed from a conversation with the mother of a
classmate who works with autistic children. Thanks to her
Ariel Internship at the University of New Mexico’s Genter for
Development and Disability, Meyer has a better picture of
what it would be like to work in the field, along with practical
experience for a resume and grad school applications.
Born out of the Santa Fe Initiative-a college-funded program
to improve student services and the physical environment on
the college’s Western campus-the Ariel Internship Program
provides up to $3,600 to support a student in an internship.
In 2005, approximately 30 students applied; Meyer was one of
nine whose internships were funded. She administered tests,
assisted with research, and visited rural communities in New
Mexico, where she helped with consultations. “I got experience
in all areas that I could,” she says. “I worked with other profes
sionals in the field, including physical therapists, occupational
therapists, and speech therapists.”
The Ariel Program is similar to the Hodson Internship in
Annapolis, a program funded by money from an endowment
established with a grant from The Hodson Trust. Both programs
are coordinated through the Career Services offices on campus.
As with the Hodson program, Santa Fe students can use the
funding for income while working in an existing unpaid
internship or develop their own internships.
Her St. John’s studies prepared her well for the internship expe
rience, says Meyer. “Other interns I met were just not as flexible as
I was in the way I could learn. The people I worked with were all
surprised that I didn’t come from a psychological educational
background and that I could work at a graduate level.”
{The College- St. John's College • Fall 2005 }
— Andra Maguran
�{Bell Towers}
7
A Garden Grows in Annapolis
To anyone who has sat in the
courtyard of Mellon Hall in
years past, the small reserve of
green space must have seemed
a pleasant enough place to pass
an afternoon. A lawn, a few
magnolia trees, and concrete
benches under a spectacular
willow oak gave the courtyard
some charm. But now, thanks
to a gift from one of the col
lege’s board memhers, the
courtyard has a true formal
garden with graceful rows of
perennials and annuals, flower
ing trees, teak benches, and a
birdhath in the center of a lawn
rich, green, and thick enough
for croquet.
The courtyard wasn’t an
original part of Mellon’s
design; originally, the long
classroom wing faced an open
field. Adding an administrative
wing to the building created
the courtyard in the late 1980s.
For many years, college plan
ners have hoped to improve the
space, but other buildings and
grounds projects took priority.
The transformation began
last year when the college
received a gift from Frederika
Saxon, a memher of the college’s Board of Visitors and
Governors, to fund a formal
garden. Saxon is a builder and
developer in Baltimore, and
she has frequently shared her
expertise with the college.
Other gifts helped
the college complete
the project. Both
Ted Wolff (A74) a
landscape architect
and partner of Wolff
Clements and
Associates, and
Cathy Umphrey, a
garden designer and
wife of tutor Stuart
Umphrey, worked
on the project for
substantially
reduced professional
rates. Wolff provided
the design for the
plan, while Umphrey
worked closely with
Wolff and the
campus planning
committee to choose
the native plants
and arrange them
in beds.
Cathy Umphrey, the director
of horticulture at Historic
London Town and Gardens,
said the magnolias gave her a
starting point for planning a
garden that will be beautiful
year-round. “The magnolias
have this wonderful brown fuzz
on the underside of the leaves,
and we took that color as one to
pick up again in perennials and
deciduous trees. The crepe
myrtles in time will develop
this really pretty brown bark
structure. The flower heads of
the Annabelle hydrangea along
the back of the garden will turn
brown in the winter,” she says.
Local Annapolis firm Eden
Contracting did much of the
work last fall, returning to add
new plants in the spring.
Together with the glassenclosed Mellon Cafe, the
inviting garden offers the
Annapolis community another
pleasant refuge for reading,
discussion, or just sitting in the
sun. “It’s a beautiful natural
sanctuary, a private reflective
space that students, especially,
seem to enjoy,” says Don Jackson, director of operations.
{The College - St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
Above: A lush
lawn, teak
BENCHES, AND A VARIETY OF
NEW TREES AND PERENNIALS HAVE
CREATED A WELCOME NEW REFUGE
IN Annapolis.
Left: Board member Freddie
Saxon’s generous gift made the
garden a reality.
Saxon visited the garden last
spring when the fall plantings
were in and the first annuals
were in bloom. “She thought it
was wonderful,” Jackson says.
In addition to three different
planting beds, new sod was
laid and an irrigation system
was installed. Tutor Nick
Maistrellis, who has been
on campus long enough to
remember when the courtyard
was part of an open field, is
pleased with the way the
garden enhances the natural
environment on campus.
“The garden looks good no
matter where you’re sitting,”
he says. “It’s another welcom
ing place on campus.”
—Rosemary Harty
�{Bell Towers}
8
News and Announcements
New Tutors_______________________
Eleven new tutorsjoined the
Santa Fefaculty:
Keri Ames received a B.A.
from the University of Chicago,
where she did her graduate work
with the Committee on Social
Thought, earning master’s and
doctoral degrees. Her disserta
tion was entitled “The Conver
gence of Homer’s Odyssey and
Joyce’s UlyssesF
Lauren Brubaker received
his B.A. from Swarthmore Col
lege, and M.A. and Ph.D.
degrees in Political Philosophy
from the Committee on Social
Thought at the University of
Chicago. His dissertation was
titled “Religious Zeal, Political
Faction, and the Corruption of
Morals: Adam Smith and the
Limits of Enlightenment.” He
has been a visiting instructor at
the University of Notre Dame
and at the Air Force Academy.
Kenneth Davis (SFGIoa)
received his B.A. in Music Edu
cation from Georgia State
University. He holds a Mas
ter of Divinity from South
western Baptist Theological
Seminary, a Master of Music
from the University of
Tennessee, and a Doctorate
of Musical Arts from the
Eastman School of Music at
the University of Rochester,
where his dissertation was
entitled “A Performance
Analysis of Mendelssohn’s
Five Psalm Cantatas.”
Jessica Jerome received her
B.A. in Anthropology from the
University of California at
Berkeley. She received her M.A.
and Ph.D. from the University of
Chicago, where her dissertation
was titled “A Politics of Health:
Medicine and Marginality in
Northeastern Brazil.” She
recently completed a research
fellowship at the Pritzker School
of Medicine.
T. Andrew Kingston
received his B.A. in English Lit
erature from Kenyon College.
He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
of Aesthetics, History of Music
from Boston University, where
the title of his dissertation was
“Rhythm in the Aesthetics of
Western Music.” He has taught
and lectured in humanities, phi
losophy of the arts, and music at
B.U. and Kenyon College.
David McDonald (SF95)
comes to St. John’s from the Los
Alamos National Laboratory,
where he was a senior techni
cian for the Influenza Sequence
Database, Theoretical Biology
and Biophysics Group.
Frederick Monsma (A82)
holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
from Boston College, where his
dissertation was titled
“Descartes and the Gods of
Piety and Science.” Before com
ing to St. John’s, Monsma
worked in computer program
ming, Web design, academic
journalism, and education.
Laurence Nee received his
B.A. in Political Science from
the University of Illinois. He
holds master’s and doctoral
degrees in politics from the
University of Dallas, and a J.D.
from Northwestern University
School of Law. His dissertation
was entitled “Lockean Rhetoric
and Toleration: Language in the
Thought of John Locke.” Previ
ously, he was on the faculty at
John Cabot University and the
American University of Rome.
Gregory Schneider joins the
college from the Gallatin
Community Clinic in Bozeman,
Mont. He received his B.A. from
the University of Dallas and his
medical degree from the
Moving In
With a light to read by and a refrigerator for goodies, sophomores
Josephine Drolet and Haley Thompson have the essentials covered for a
NEW YEAR. In Annapolis, 149 students became Johnnies; Santa Fe welcomed
Z19
One new tutorjoined the
Annapolisfaculty thisfall:
Matthew Caswell (A96)
received his Ph.D. in
Philosophy from Boston
University with a disserta
tion entitled “Kant’s
Conception of the Highest
Good.” He has been the
recipient of a Presidential
Fellowship and a Disserta
tion Fellowship at B.U.
He spent 2002-03 at
Philipps-Unitersitat in
Marburg supported by a
DAAD research grant.
Awards___________________
Michael Ehrmantraut
received his B.A. in Political
Theory and International
Relations from Michigan
State University and his
Ph.D. in Political Science
from Boston College. His
dissertation was titled,
“Heidegger’s Philosophic
Pedagogy.” He received a
Bradley Foundation post
doctoral fellowship at
Boston College, where he
was visiting scholar for a
year.
University of MissouriColumbia.
Alan Zeitlin received his
B.A. and M.A. in English from
the University of California,
Davis. He received a J.D. from
the Boalt Hall School of Law,
and an M.A. and Ph.D. in
Classics from the University of
California, Berkeley. His
dissertation was titled
“Terence’s Dark Comedy.”
He has taught at Bard College
and Emory University.
William Donahue (A67) will
serve as Director of Laborato
ries. Donahue received his Ph.D
in the History of Science, from
the University of Cambridge.
A former St. John’s tutor, he is
the publisher of Green Lion
Press. He has also worked as
supervisor for the Department
of History and Philosophy of
Science at Cambridge and as a
laboratory technician for the
National Bureau of Standards.
freshmen.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
_
The builder of Gilliam
and Spector halls on the
Annapolis campus has
been recognized with an
Excellence in Construction
award from the Washing
ton, D.C. chapter ofthe
Associated Builders and
Contractors. Bovis
Lend/Lease completed
Gilliam Hall late last sum
mer. Spector Hall, the
second new dormitory,
will open in January,
�{Letters}
Fine Memories___________________________
The article on Brother Robert brought back
some fine memories for me, and I would
hke to share an anecdote to show how
Brother Robert influenced other people in
addition to his St. John’s students.
A year and a half ago, I had occasion to
have dinner with the poet Robert Hass,
when he came to give a lecture at our
school in Monterey, California. His wife
told us that she worked at St. Mary’s in
Moraga, California, and that gave me occa
sion to mention Brother Robert. It turned
out that Hass had Brother Robert as a
teacher and had always considered him one
of the most influential people in his life.
He also felt that he had betrayed Brother
Robert when he was a student, because it
was a time when St. Mary’s was deciding
whether to remain true to the eternal ideals
or to become more contemporary and polit
ical. Hass sided with the contemporary,
while Brother Robert decided to leave
St. Mary’s and come to St. John’s. Hass told
me that he had always wanted to get back in
touch with Brother Robert, but he was
reluctant. I urged him to do so. I hope that
he has.
Gerry Kapolka, A74
Piercing Festival
9
City. Yet, at journey’s end, they found that
one of them used more gas. The only dif
ference was that one of the twins went by
way of St. Louis, the other by way of Miami
Beach. Voila-the Gasoline Paradox!
Wigner’s point was that many things are
path-dependent. The only weirdness is that
time happens to be one of those things.
It is a loss, I believe, that the Program
excludes textbooks. Some of the great
books were textbooks (the Summa for
example). The Program has wonderful
benefits. It excludes rote learning, which
many an inferior text promotes. And yet,
when Johnnies face the original literature
without pedagogical support, something
else is at risk, and that something is the
substance,
James H. Cooke
BROTHER ROBERT, IN HIS St. MaRy’s DAYS.
Welcoming Women
This was the inspiration for a career in
psychology which has been most satisfying.
I think Stuart would be proud to know he
has been instrumental in creating another
generation of therapy helping families,
marriages, children, and above all, teen
agers.
Thanks Stuart, you were right. I was
myself, and I did just fine.
Joe Tooley, SF69
The College featured articles on Johnnies’
experiences abroad. John Hartnett (SF83)
A Clear Account
wrote a piece about the piercing festival he
I’m sure many Johnnies could respond to
witnessed near Kumarakom, Kerala, India.
Mr. Newell’s comments on “Weird Sci
He tried to find out the origin of this pierc
ence” (Letters, Spring 2005), but as a for
ing festival during the rest of his trip in
mer tutor (Santa Fe, 1999-2001), please
India, but to no avail. My husband, Stephen
allow me. Neither the “Electrodynamics...”
Joseph, is from that area of Kerala, and
nor the Minkowski readings state or resolve
when I asked him about the festival, he told
the twin “paradox.” A clear account is
me that it was a Shiite Muslim festival cele
given in Spacetime Physics, by John A.
brating Muharram, the first month of the
Wheeler and Edwin F. Taylor, particularly
Islamic calendar. Shiites also mark the mar
in Ex. 49 in the first edition. Briefly, the
tyrdom of H az rat Imam Hussain, the grand
rocketing twin does not remain in an iner
son of the Prophet Muhammad, during this
tial frame, while the earthbound twin does,
time. The observances can range from
at least approximately, because the surface
wearing black to the more unusual practice
of the earth is almost free of acceleration.
of self-injury witnessed by Mr. Hartnett.
The rocketing twin must decelerate and
Laura O’Keefe, SFga
then accelerate back. The situation is not at
all symmetrical, and both the earthling and
Remembering Mr. Boyd
the rocketeer agree that the earthling’s
Stuart Boyd changed my life. As a young,
world line is nearly straight, while the
confused student at St. John’s, I went to
rocketeer’s world line is bent.
Stuart for counseling and guidance. After a
Eugene Wigner made it a practice to
few meetings he asked me to help him lead
present “The Gasoline Paradox” to each
a therapy group of students. I was a little
class he taught on relativity: Two identical
taken aback and said I wouldn’t know what
twins drove two identical Volkswagens
to do. Stuart said, “Don’t worry, just be
(with consecutive serial numbers from
yourself. You will do fine.”
Wolfsburg!) from Los Angeles to New York
{The College. St, John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
A small comment on “Coeds Invade St.
John’s.” At the time, the 1950-51 academic
year, I managed the labs, taught a sopho
more lab section, edited the Collegian and
served as president of the Student Polity.
When the subject was broached, Dick
pVeigle, president] asked me to convene a
meeting of the Polity to assess the student
body’s reaction to the notion of co-educa
tion. The college’s financial problems were
well known. We met in McDowell. Members
of the Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washing
ton press were welcome, but as observers
only. When the meeting was adjourned, I
would answer any questions they might
have. All but one [reporter] understood
this. He was ignored.
There were a few loonies in the group, it
was after all, St. John’s. A couple of Roman
Catholics objected to the presence of
women on traditional grounds. Most of the
concerns expressed were practical. The
sense of the meeting was that co-ed dorms
would be impractical, but women would
be welcome.
Stuart Washburn, Class of 1951
The College welcomes letters on issues of
interest to readers. Letters maybe edited
for clarity and/or length. Those under
500 words have a better chance of being
printed in their entirety.
Please address letters to: The College
magazine, St. John’s College, Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404, or by e-mail to
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu.
�IO
{On Augustine}
AUGUSTINE
Seeing Our Lives in the Confessions
BY Kim Paffenroth, A88
his fall marks the 20-year
anniversary of my first having
read Augustine’s Confessions.
Ironically, the huge role it
would play in my professional
life was not apparent on that
first reading. Although the
Confessions are central to the
sophomore seminar readings
that would lead me in the direction of studying
Christianity in graduate school, I was much more
moved hy some of the other readings that year: the
Bible, Dante, Luther, and Shakespeare. Like many
other first-time readers, my initial reaction to
Augustine was mostly negative: he was, by turns, too
gloomy and pessimistic, and then too triumphalistic, judgmental, and arrogant. I don’t think I ever
could have gone all the way down the interpretive
roads that I have since found out are so popular in
the academic study of Augustine-“Augustine as
neurotic” and “Augustine as miner of Western
civilization’’-but I did not immediately connect
with his life and ideas. But I also did not completely
forget or ignore Augustine and his idiosyncracies,
mostly because he had one quality that most other
theologians lack: he had a story, full of fascinating
characters, compelling conflicts, and messy emo
tions. The often overwrought and melodramatic
quality of his story is exactly what puts off many
readers, but it is also what makes him undeniably
memorable. Such a preference for narration, rather
than exposition, is what would lead me to go on to
study the Bible, a book almost entirely composed of
stories, whose theology usually has to be inferred
and is not necessarily completely consistent. It
would also lead me not to reread that other giant of
sophomore seminar, Aquinas, for whom theology
seems to be a series of problems to be solved, not a
collection of problematic stories to be lived and told
and retold.
But appreciating Augustine for his narrative
power and his greater sense of ambiguity and drama
puts him at a distinct disadvantage in the long run,
for it puts him in competition with authors of much
greater artistry and beauty. In short, compared to
Aquinas, Augustine may sound like a Shakespeare,
but compared to Shakespeare, on aesthetic grounds,
Augustine is a complete dud, a theologian who rather
{The College. St. John’s College Fall 2005 }
�{On Augustine}
Painting
of St.
Augustin by Simon Marmion
{The College- St. John’s College - Fall 2005 }
n
�Ta,
{On Augustine}
“ . .Our sinfulness is
almost alwayspathetic
and meager and childish,
just like Augustine s. ”
heavy-handedly uses some episodes
from his own life to make his
theological points. This is one
case, however, where the dialogue
begun in seminar decades ago has continued most fruit
fully for me, because over the years 1 have found many dia
logue partners for Augustine in the books 1 have read.
Although many of those partners-Dante, Pascal, Goethe,
Dostoevsky, Melville, Flannery O’Connor-are much
more talented artists than Augustine, they engage him in
an ongoing dialogue that is enriching to our understand
ing both of Augustine and of their works. They all draw on
Augustine, especially his Confessions, as a source, a
source that helps illuminate their work, even as they elab
orate and complicate Augustine’s ideas. And, of course,
the ultimate goal of such a dialogue is not just to put
Augustine in conversation with other “Augustinian”
texts, but to put all of them in conversation with the intel
lectual and spiritual problems and questions of living
human beings in the present. 1 have had the pleasure of
participating in such conversations first as a student at
St. John’s, and now continuing as a student and teacher in
many classrooms in the years since. In a different, more
sustained but more static form, it is also the kind of
conversation 1 try to create and encourage in the books I
write on Augustine and others.
Scholarly work on Augustine strives obsessively to place
him in his time period, to understand all the religious,
historical, social, political, philosophical, and literary
influences of the late Roman Empire, and fit Augustine
into them. When this is done, we will presumably “under
stand” him, the way we would understand some fossil by
knowing its geological strata and the other dead objects
that surround it. Earlier scholarship tended to put a judg
mental tone on this process, usually leading up to some
statement that maybe crudely given as, “Poor Augustine
(or Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed), he was smart, but he
was just a man of his times! He thought the sun went
around the earth, he thought women were inferior to
men, and he thought slavery was okay. Aren’t we lucky
we’re not like that?”
Postmodern thought may be
thanked for being less arrogant (at
least on this one point) and
acknowledging that we are equally
as determined and limited as the
poor, benighted people of the past, but the effect on study
and an ongoing conversation is just as chilling: the
ancient text and person are still utterly irrelevant,
because each and every person lives isolated in his or her
historical context, a cubby-hole whose walls are transpar
ent to the enlightened historian, but which are never
permeable to anyone. What I propose here instead is a
very naive, but constructive, objectivity: of course Augus
tine and we have our different historical contexts, but I
regard them not so much as prisons, but as the unique
baggage each of us carries, and 1 assume that baggage is
being carried by women and men who are essentially very
similar, people who can even discuss and analyze either
their baggage or their fundamental human similarity, and
who can therefore learn from one another.
I offer here three of the striking scenes from the
Confessions, three vignettes which, it must be confessed,
form the basis of almost all my work on Augustine. I hope
this does not only show the narrowness of my own intel
lect, but the power of Augustine to make his story ours,
and to compel us to see our lives in his.
Sin
Confessions, Book Two
Augustine begins his Confessions famously with a
scandalous analysis of sin. Having alienated many readers
by asserting-not proving, I think, but asserting-that all
babies are just bad (Book One), he goes on to analyze a
youthful, though not infant, sin of his own (Book Two).
Augustine tells us how when he was i6, he and some other
naughty boys stole pears from a neighbor’s tree. What
focuses Augustine’s attention on this incident is that the
boys did not need or even want the pears: “I stole that of
which I had plenty, even of much better quality” (Conf
a.4.9, my translation, as are all subsequent); they do not
even eat them, but throw them away. Augustine, try as he
might, cannot come up with a reason for this sin, and this
{The College- St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
�{On Augustine}
is what bothers him, and what he thinks should bother us.
Plato-who, according to Augustine, is correct on many,
perhaps even most, theological points {Conf. 7.9.13-15)had taught that sin was always a mistake, an incorrect
assessment of the situation, and could never be a deliber
ate, knowing choice of something evil. But that is exactly
what Augustine thinks was going on with the pear tree:
“It was foul, but I loved it. I loved to perish; I loved my
own ruin, not that for which I ruined myself, but rather I
loved my very ruin itself’(Co/^ 2.4.9). Augustine claims
here that doing something for no reason does not defuse
or diminish the wickedness of that act, but instead
increases it beyond all previous estimations and beyond
any previous ethicist’s ability to explain or cure it. Even
that exemplar of senseless cruelty, Catiline, was suppos
edly analyzable under the assumption that sin is the
13
In Augustine’s thought, sinfulness is linked to the “fragile,
UNPREDICTABLE STATE IN WHICH WE ULTIMATELY LIVE,” WRITES
Kim Paffenroth.
pursuit of a mistaken good {Conf. 2.5.ii), while Augustine
claims that at the other extreme of human behavior-not
in the outrageous, powerful violence of an emperor, but
in the paltry prank of a teenager-there lies an unexplain
able mystery of self-destructive evil. Augustine goes on to
suppose that this self-destructive urge comes from pride,
from the desire to be God, rather than to love and serve
God, “a dismal imitation of omnipotence” {Conf. 2.6.14).
I think the profundity and longevity of Augustine’s
story lie in our ability to tease out its implications
and bring it around full circle, as it were. Starting with
what is a pretty laughable scene, one can delve into the
theological profundities behind it, but then see once
{The College. St. John's College ■ Fall 2005 }
�14
{On Augustine}
'Augustine bequeathed
to Christianity a
much stronger divine
grace than others
had imagined...
more both the humor and profun
dity in it, when one tries to put one
self in the story. Perhaps more than
other episodes in the Confessions^
this is easy to do, for the scene of
teenage idiocy is surely universal: I
and another dissipated youth ignit
ed about a half-gallon of gasoline in a dumpster when we
were i6, and could offer no better explanation than
boredom and laziness, the sense of “ennui” and the need
for “diversion” that Pascal would seize on so powerfully
in his analysis.
In exactly the same way, I remember a student in my
first semester teaching at Villanova University also agree
ing to the plausibility of Augustine’s story, admitting in
seminar that he and some friends had stolen watermelons
from a store and then gleefully but painfully gorged
themselves to the point of physical illness. When another
student asked when they had done this, expecting an
answer that it had happened in fifth or sixth grade, the
first student replied, “The beginning of August.” The
whole class laughed, quite appropriately. Laughing at
ourselves has an important educational value here, I
think: it is not that we are discounting our sins, but that
our sinfulness is almost always pathetic and meager and
childish, just like Augustine’s. If honest with ourselves,
we would realize that we don’t have it in us to be a Milton
ian Satan, or a Hitler or a Khan: about the most any of us
could pull off would be to become a petty thief, liar, or
lecher, with little to show for our misdeeds, except the
pain we cause others, and the complete buffoons we make
of ourselves.
And what of Augustine’s assertion of the universality of
such pathetic sinfulness? Perhaps my student and I and a
few other immature rakes can identify with Augustine,
but is it good or accurate for everyone do so? I will only
relate another anecdote that suggests that admitting sin,
dwelling on it seriously as well as laughing at it, is anoth
er important and useful lesson that Augustine has taught
us in this story. Also at Villanova, I remember one student
who didn’t say much in class, often seemed bothered if I
said something irreverent about the Bible, and always
wore a cross necklace. She literally came undone in the
first class on Confessions, however,
berating Augustine for hating
babies and me for defending him.
At first I appreciated her vigor and
umbrage, and did not see the harm
in someone believing in the innate
goodness of babies, or of people in
general, even if I didn’t share her estimation. Then I
caught her flagrantly plagiarizing later in the semester.
She didn’t seem the least bit apologetic or remorseful,
only angry at me for catching her, and a little angry at her
self for not being more adept at cheating. While this is no
proof that optimism and hypocrisy go hand-in-hand, it at
least suggests that introspection, analysis, and admission
of guilt may play some role in moral formation and
improvement.
As I said above, however, most of us aren’t that sinful, if
“sin” means really bad things that we do to hurt other
people. Most of us will probably outgrow high school
pranks and college cheating, and settle down to a middle
age of mediocre virtue, rather than move on to bigger
and worse sins. But there is another aspect of sin in
Augustine’s Confessions, to which we now turn.
Life and Death in Sinfulness
Books Four and Nine
In Confessions Book Four, Augustine gives one of the
most beautiful descriptions of the joys and rewards of real
friendship:
There were other things done with them that
captivated my mind more: talking together and
laughing together, and happily taking turns at giving
in to each others’ wishes; reading well-phrased books
together, joking together, and showing each other
respect; disagreeing sometimes, but without anger,
as a person disagrees with him-or herself, the
infrequency of our disagreements making our many
agreements all the more enjoyable; teaching and
learning from one another, sadly longing for those who
were absent, and joyfully welcoming those who joined
us. Such signs, coming from hearts that loved and
were loved in return, were shown in our faces, voices,
eyes, and a thousand pleasant gestures, and were like
{The College. St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
�{OnAugustine}
kindling to inflame our minds and make the many of
us into one. [Conf. 4.8.13)
But the conflict and drama of Book Four stem from the
fact that one of these friends has died, leaving Augustine
devastated and in despair. In Book Nine, Augustine gives
an equally beautiful, if rather more succinct, description
of his love for his mother, “A single life had been made out
of hers and mine” (Conf. 9.12.30), and then she too dies,
leaving him with another conflict over his painful emo
tions. These two stories together form a profound work
ing through of the implications of sin: not a dissection of
the actual act of sinning, as in Book Two, but a long look
at the facts and limitations of human life lived in a
sinful world.
In these two episodes, Augustine shows vividly the
main and unavoidable symptom of original sinfulness:
not that we inevitably sin, but that we inevitably die. And
dealing with others’ deaths is even more difficult for us
than our own mortality, for the sadness in which we live
after they’re gone can last indefinitely. This past year has
brought this unavoidable and uncomfortable truth home
to me more than in previous years, and with Augustine’s
help it has become both more meaningful and (a little)
less terrifying. In the months leading up to and then fol
lowing my 20-year high school reunion, I was constantly
reminded of Greg, a friend who died right after high
school. Never mind the sins that I and others commit
every day: I can think of no clearer proof that the world is
“fallen,” “broken,” or just plain “wrong,” than to
observe that in it a person of such obvious virtue as Greg
would die a slow, lingering death from cancer, at such a
young age, leaving no progeny, while a lazy, impatient,
short-tempered, sinful person like me gets the chance to
raise kids, surely with much less success than Greg
would have enjoyed. And shortly after the reunion, my
father died, after 24 years in which he never successfully
mourned or got past the death of my mother: his
loneliness and bitterness festered that whole time, till the
only emotions he could feel were hate and rage. Again,
one needn’t judge him an awful sinner to think that what
he did was “bad”-for it contributed to his misery, not
diminished it. In both these cases, as in the mysteriously
15
painful deaths that Augustine recounts, the world’s
sinfulness is shown most clearly not in the sinful things
we do, but in the faulty, sickened, fragile, unpredictable
state in which we inevitably live.
Augustine offers us not just a diagnosis of the diseases
of sin and death, however, but also the hope of a treat
ment. Though Book Two and the gravity of sin are the
most memorable parts of Augustine’s Confessions, they
are not the final word-just as hideous punishments are
the most memorable parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but
not his ultimate point. Augustine bequeathed to Chris
tianity the idea of a much stronger divine grace than oth
ers had imagined, stronger precisely because only it could
cure the horribly enlarged idea of sin that Augustine had
developed. And one of the simplest and most frequent
graces that Augustine saw in the world was the blessed
ness that comes from loving, human relationships:
“Blessed is the one who loves you [God], and his friend in
you, and his enemy for your sake” (Conf 4.9.14). The very
relationships that cause us pain, because the people we
love must inevitably suffer and die, can bring us joy when
God is a part of the relationship, for we acknowledge that
every moment spent with the beloved person is a gracious
gift of God, a gift meant to lead us back to the giver.
As in Plato, but with a far greater appreciation for how
difficult the ascent is, Augustine believes this urge to love
our creator is built into us from the very beginning: “You
have made us for yourself, and our heart is troubled, until
it rests in you” (Conf, i.i.i). Frequently titled a “Doctor of
the Church,” Augustine-like Socrates, who also claimed
to offer therapy for wayward souls-would probably prefer
the image of nurse or midwife for himself, for according
to him, only God can ultimately heal human hearts that
are broken by sin and mortality, but which still retain the
unique imprint of their creator and their only physician
(Conf. 10.3.3-4).
Kim Paffenroth (A88) is associateprofessor ofReligious Studies
and chairperson ofthe Religious Studies Department at
Iona College in New York.
{The College. St John’s College • Fall 2005 }
�{Alumni Voices}
A JOHNNIE WAY OF LIFE
The ExaminedLife Guides a New Journey
BY Brother Ezra Sullivan, O.P. (A04)
Shortly after he graduated from St. John’s in 2004, Randall
Sullivan entered a formation program of the Order ofPreachers,
also known as the Dominicans. He moved to Cincinnati to live at
the order’s friary, bringing to his small and austere cell few
personal belongings beyond his favorite Program books (Plato,
Aristotle, Dante). He traded hisjeans and t-shirtsfor a white robe
and a black cloak. He took the vows ofpoverty, chastity, and obe
dience, and a new name, choosing Ezra because Scripture por
trays Ezra, a priest and scribe, as a man who saw study as a
means to holiness. Several months into his new life, Brother Ezra
noticed the similarities between a Johnnie’s life ofthe mind and the
spiritual and intellectual life ofhisfriary.
nyone can tell what a college thinks of
itself hy looking at the glossy promo
tional pamphlets they use to recruit stu
dents. In one photograph, foothall play
ers and cheerleaders are prominent; in
another, students and professors in lah
coats. In the promotional material
St. John’s College sent me, one image is
predominant: hooks. Stacks of hooks,
students reading books, tutors and students discussing books.
Books and conversation capture the essence of the college.
In a similar way, if you were to leaf through a book of Catholic
saints, you would find that they are often pictured with a symbol
representing their characteristic quality. St. Peter is shown with
keys, reflecting his spiritual power over heaven and hell;
St. Augustine is shown with a pen in hand because he wrote exten
sively. There is one saint that many people do not know about,
perhaps because his symbol is so ordinary. It is St. Dominic, and
his symbol is a book.
Since August of 2,004, I have been a Dominican friar, a
follower of St. Dominic, and that means a book-lover. Almost 800
years ago, Dominic started the Order of Preachers, based on the
monastic Rule of St. Augustine, known to be a great reader and
writer of books. Since then, men and women have been a part of
Dominic’s Order, which was founded, like St. John’s, on the
insight that good books can do much good for the individual
and the community. The order’s mission-ropass on to others the
fruits of our contemplation-vs, strikingly similar to the college’s
goal to endow young men and women with critical thinking
skills in order to take their place as responsible citizens. The
Dominicans were founded on the insight that reading should lead
a person to contemplate, and contemplation should lead him to
share his insights. Though friars preach and Johnnies do not, they
are similar in that they read, contemplate and share insight as a
community of learners and for a community of learners, with the
goal of enriching community life and the world.
Consider first the main paragraph on the St. John’s Web site,
which describes the aims of the college: “Through sustained
engagement with the works of great thinkers and through gen
uine discussion with peers, students at St. John’s College culti
vate habits of mind that will last a lifetime: a deepened capacity
for reflective thought, an appreciation of the persisting questions
of human existence, an abiding love of serious conversation, and
a lasting love of inquiry.”
Notice its similarities with this passage Ifom the Dominican
Constitution: “[A brother’s] intellectual formation consists
principally in the development of judgment. Therefore, a critical
knowledge of sources, an understanding of principles, and an
ability to reason properly must be carefully cultivated, so that the
brothers may be fitted to study by themselves and to take part in
serious dialogue.”
I saw clear parallels between St. John’s and the Order of
Preachers during a Dominican studies class earlier this year. The
class was structured like a seminar: the novice master (in charge
of first-year Dominicans) opened class with a question about a
reading we had done the night before. Seated at a square table, we
would discuss the reading for a couple of hours. The novice
master would guide the conversation, but he certainly did not
dominate it. Everything you would expect from a good conversa
tion arose: opinions, arguments, questions, clarifications, and
the occasional dogmatic claim. These conversations, which often
cropped up again at dinner or recreation, illustrate a Dominican
saying about intellectual disputes: “Never deny, rarely affirm,
and always distinguish.”
One incident around Lent showed me that friars are like
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 200s }
�{AlumniVoices}
Johnnies in their desire to be free from the
ephemeral in order to think on things that
are more lasting. Every morning we had
newspapers in our eating area; these papers
distracted some friars, who tried to fix the
problem by throwing them away. This
caused some controversy, which the commu
nity addressed by keeping papers out of the
eating area during Lent. This is remarkably
like the controversy at St. John’s about put
ting a Washington Post\)<yti in the Annapolis
coffee shop. (The box prevailed.)
At St. John’s, the routine was very much
the same for four years: many hours spent
alone reading, writing essays, working out
proofs, or translating alone in our rooms.
Then the bells of McDowell would summon
our mandatory attendance to laboratories,
tutorials, and seminars. In the friary, I
awake at 6:15 each morning to start the day
with prayer, read until 7:30, then join the
community for common meditation in the
silence of a dark chapel. After breakfast,
there is usually a lecture or seminar discus
sion, followed by lectio divina—^xvi2i\i& study
of the Scripture in our cells. Midday prayer
and lunch are followed by an apostolate in
the afternoon; it might mean a speaking
engagement or shelving books (I was the
librarian this year). A free afternoon can
mean time for a walk in the woods or personal reading. We have
Mass and vespers at 5:15, followed by community recreation.
Dinner is sometime spent in silence (during Lent, for example);
when we can speak, theology is almost always a topic. After
dinner, it’s time for sacred study, followed by night prayer. Some
in the community go to bed afterward, but I stay up to read for a
few more hours.
Like St. John’s, such a seemingly rigid regimen actually allows
for great freedom. It’s like the freedom of writing a fugue or a
musical piece: inside those rules that give something its form,
there are infinite possibilities. At St. John’s, I could choose what
to doubt and what to accept as truth. In the friary, I can choose
what to read, I can choose who to speak with and what to speak
about-and those are the most important things. I have the free
dom to develop my own talents or hobbies, like playing the penny
whistle in our small Irish band.
At St. John’s we had Don Rags each fall and spring. At the
friary, I meet privately with my novice master once each month
and give him an account of my institutional life: my thoughts
about the readings, my performance in class, my relation to
brothers here, and what that means about my character. It is like a
self-led Don Rag. Once or twice a year I receive an analysis by the
senior friars who live with me to determine whether I should
continue being here. This June, as I stood in line with other friars
17
In service to his order. Brother Ezra, formerly Randall
Sullivan (A04), finds freedom.
for our “examinations,” I had very little anxiety. Three years of
Don Rags had prepared me for this type of evaluation.
While there are many similarities in the life I led for four years
at St. John’s and the life I have entered into now, there are of
course many fundamental differences. A friar is devoted to a life of
prayer, and our order is devoted to preaching the word of God. In
addition, a friar is permanently in a Catholic religious institution;
a Johnnie may be changed forever by his St. John’s experience,
but he will typically go on to many different endeavors in the
outside world.
Given the special place of St. John’s in American higher
education, some might bristle at their secular college being
compared to a band of medieval preachers-a perfectly reasonable
objection. It is a little like comparing the philosopher Plato with
the theologian Thomas Aquinas, men vastly separated by creed
and culture. For some, such a comparison will only produce
difficulties. For others though, for that rare breed of people
intrigued by difficult questions-what is the meaning of life?
What is truth? What is virtue?-the comparison might produce a
worthwhile conversation.
Brother Ezra Sullivan can be reached by e-mail at
rg_sullivan @hotmail. com
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall 200s }
�i8
{Commencement}
PARTING WORDS
“GREATER EXPERIENCE, MEASURED PASSIONS”
Alumni Send Grads on a Magn^centJourney
The Perma-Johnnie
In this excerptfrom his commencement speech, tutor Joe
Macfarland
referenced the Gorgias as he explored the idea
ofthe ''Perma-Johnnie in one sense, the graduate who hangs
around the Annapolis campus as long aspossible; in another, more
profound sense, the individual who is never willing to abandon a
lifelong questfor a deeper understanding ofimportant ideas:
.. .In past ceremonies, when I have sat to the side of the stage, I
have wondered. .. .What could I say to persuade you to rejoice, all
at once, at your accomplishments here as well as at your departure?
At that moment, in a darker, cynical turn of thought, I imagined
that the perfect commencement speaker would be Callicles. A
strange choice, you’re thinking, given that this Platonic character
seems wicked, or at least deeply troubled, since he argues that the
rule of the stronger is by nature just. But a few sentences from his
speech will explain my thought:
For philosophy, to be sure, Socrates, is a delightful thing, if
someone engages in it in due measure at the proper age; but if
he fritters his time away in it further than is needed, it is the cor
ruption of human beings. For even if he is of an altogether good
nature and philosophizes far along in age, he must of necessity
become inexperienced in all those things that one... must have
experience of.. .It is fine to partake of philosophy to the extent
that it is for the sake of education, and it is not shameful to phi
losophize when one is a lad. But when a human being who is
already rather older still philosophizes, the thing becomes
ridiculous.. .For seeing philosophy in a young lad, I admire it,
and it seems to me fitting, and I consider this human being to be
a free man, whereas one who does not philosophize I consider
illiberal, someone who will never deem himself worthy of any
fine and noble affair. But whenever I see an older man still phi
losophizing and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely
seems to me to need a beating. . .It falls to this man. . .never to
give voice to anything free or great or vigorous... .(Gorgias,
484c, ff.)
Callicles has a low reputation among us admirers of Socrates,
and the seniors would, I suspect, never invite him to speak;
nevertheless, I find it hard to avoid hearing at least a faint
Calliclean echo in many commencement addresses. He does not
A “PERMA-JOHNNIE,” SAYS JoE MaCFARLAND (A87), IS ONE WHO NEVER
STOPS SEEKING WISDOM.
say, after all, that you should not philosophize; he says you should
philosophize when you are young so that you may become a free
human being, well-educated, and capable of good and noble deeds.
So rather than giving you a Calliclean echo. I’ve given you the
outrageous original. I’ve even made it partly my own, because
whatever the faults of the man, there might be just enough truth in
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
continued
�{Commencement}
''What are the sources of
this excellence within us?''
Joseph Macfarland (A87)
In Santa Fe, Sarah Holmes and Christopher Horne are
PLEASED TO HAVE DIPLOMAS IN HAND.
{ TheCollege.5?. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
19
�ao
{Commencement}
Annapolis
GRADUATES ( L. TO
R.) Sandeep Das,
Janae Decker, and
Marshall Derks.
continued
this speech for me
to adapt it to my
own purposes and
to send you on your
way. I have, how
ever, two thoughts
on how to reconcile
his harsh words
with the things we
admire. . .
My first thought
is his association of
philosophy and
youth rings true to
me, not because
philosophy is child
ish, as he implies,
but because youth
seems somehow
more philosophical; there’s less of wisdom in it, and more yearning
for wisdom. Among these seniors it seems fitting to recall Alyosha
and Ivan Karamazov, ig and 33 years old, having tea and cherry pre
serves at the Metropolis, while they pursue the eternal questionsthe existence of God and the immortality of the soul-and while they
weigh the strenuous demands of justice and freedom against a faint
hope of forgiveness and love. I find the conversation intoxicating at
least in part because it is the conversation of young people: earnest,
impassioned, open-ended, revealing a hunger for rebellion that is at
odds with a simultaneous longing for solidarity. Wise and foolish in
confused ways, their words reach further than they themselves ini
tially understand because of the way in which their youth blends
naivete and audacity.
When I go to seminar I count on all these qualities being present.
In the afternoon I mull over questions distilled from what I have
learned since I was an undergraduate, but in the evening I wait
patiently until you no longer feel obliged to discuss my question,
when it is safe to shift the conversation to your own, a question
arising from your own convictions and doubts; it is often a question
I didn’t think of, yet still a question for me, and thus a question I did
n’t recognize as my own. Thus, I believe that philosophy is rightly
associated with youth, but I’ll draw a somewhat different conclusion
from this: however much our adult life is occupied with seemingly
more serious and urgent pursuits, we must not feel compelled at all
times to act our age; we must not be ashamed, in the company of a
good friend and prompted by a good book, to recover the intoxicat
ing audacity and naivete of youth, so that we do not fail to reopen
the eternal questions now and again, in the light, we may even hope,
of greater experience and more measured passions.
The second point I want to touch on is Callicles’ emphatic
elevation of an active public life over a private life of conversation
and inquiry. It is this emphatic assertion that makes his words seem
so fitting to commencement as well as so jarring to us. Recoiling
from the shock of
the assertion, I am
made aware of a
tension between
the openness of
our spirit of
inquiry and the
customs that bind
us together in it.
Prompted by the
various opinions of
our authors, we
wonder how to
weigh the active life against the theoretical. We wonder: does
human excellence take multiples forms, or one above aU? What are
the sources of this excellence within us? If the virtues are disparate,
how are we to weave them together into a single life? For years we
have come together on Monday and Thursday evenings to pursue
these and related questions; everything else in our schedule has
been organized around this fact. The force of this immutable custom
tacitly implies a specific answer to such questions, the answer that
lured us here in the first place. After you have crossed the stage, and
said your good-byes, when your Monday and Thursday evenings are
uncannily free even well into autumn, when you are free from the
customs that bound us in practice to a certain kind of a theoretical
life, those questions may seem more open-ended to you than they
ever did before, and what you then do in your freedom will consti
tute much more of an answer to such questions than anything you
have said here.
In the Land
of the
Phaiacians____________________________________________
After earning an engineering degreefrom Princeton University,
water rights attorney John Draper studied consumer law in Swe
den, then earned a law degreefrom the University ofNew Mexico.
He completed the college's Graduate Instituteprogram and earned
his degree in ujgr. He spoke, in this excerpt, ofHomer:
One of the things that I have found personally rewarding over the
years has been a focus on the stories of Homer, both through the
Program here, and through weekly meetings over many years of [a]
group .. .of about six people who get together for an hour and a half
every Sunday afternoon to translate from the original Greek for
discussion by the rest of the group. Our progress might look
outrageously slow to those outside the group, like my wife, but I
think of it as being like sipping a fine wine.
{The College. Sf. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
�{Commencement}
For me, one who has never formally studied ancient Greek, this
weekly exercise of many years stemmed originally from a desire to
get as close as possible to the people and gods of Homer’s world.
As a result, many of the Homeric episodes have stuck with me.
For instance, I imagine you remember, from the Odyssey, how the
Phaiacians, after entertaining Odysseus on their island, listening to
his stories and showering him with gifts, brought him to a beach in a
well-protected cove on Ithaka. He didn’t at first recognize that he
was in his own home country. He wondered whether the people in
that seemingly strange land were “savage and violent, and without
justice,” and whether they were “hospitable to strangers.” Athena
arrived and showed him a cave near the beach in which to store his
gifts from the Phaiacians. Homer described the cave as having the
sea-purple weavings of the nymphs on stone looms and, strangely, as
having two entrances-one for mortals-and one for the immortals.
Homer left unexplained what he meant by an “entrance for the
immortals.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve been in that cove and in that cave. Our family
had the opportunity a few years back to sail to Ithaka. It’s in a fairly
remote part of Western Greece, far from Athens. About 300 yards
behind the beach of the cove that is so well protected, as Homer
says, that you don’t even have to anchor or pull your boat up on the
beach, is a cave. Its entrance is very narrow, so narrow that it was
difficult for us to slip through it-but then it opened up into a large
room with a high arching ceiling and with the purple weavings of
the nymphs on the walls, the work of water seeping down the cave
walls since time immemorial. And there was the entrance for the
immortals-a shaft of sunlight coming down at an angle through a
hole high in the ceiling of the cave-not a place for mortals to try
to enter!
Those treasures of Odysseus were stored for safekeeping in the
cave, while Odysseus and Athena went out and “took care of
business.” He had arrived on Ithaka after a dream voyage, and now
he had to go out and take care of some practical issues, hke ridding
his kingdom of the insolent suitors, rescuing his wife and son, and
re-establishing law and order before he could retrieve his gifts.
John Draper (SFGI97) likened commencement to leaving a
“lovely island of a campus.” Treasures await, he said.
Below, Santa Fe grads process to the Placita.
This sequence of events in the life of Odysseus may have some
similarity to the sequence of events in your lives at right now.
You, too, have been in the land of the Phaiacians, sharing stories
and lessons on this lovely island of a campus. Today, you are being
deposited on what may look like a foreign shore at first, but it, too, is
really your home. You, like Odysseus, may be wondering whether
the inhabitants of the seemingly foreign world outside this campus
are savage and violent, and without justice and whether they are
hospitable to strangers.
Like Odysseus, you will find, I think, that this new world is not so
foreign after all, that it has a place for you in which you can make a
home. While there will be battles you will need to fight, just as there
were for Odysseus, you are likely to be successful because you are
well-equipped from the lessons you have learned here and, like
Odysseus, you will have Athena at your right hand whenever it is
necessary for you to fight against savagery and injustice.”
The complete commencement addresses are available on the
St. John ’j Web site: www.stjohnscollege. edu
{The Colleges?. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
�{Commencement}
aa
A LONG TIME COMING
Graduates Savor Completion after Many Years Away
BY Rosemary Harty
Santa Fe: Peggy O’Shea
In high school, everything came easily to Peggy O’Shea (SF87)*.
So it was with shock that she quickly felt overwhelmed after
joining the freshman class of St. John’s College in 1983. “Bottom
line, I really wasn’t prepared for the kind of personal challenge I
found at the college,” she says.
O’Shea grew up in Wilbraham, Mass. She chose St. John’s
because she was eager for an education that didn’t involve
memorizing and repeating back answers. But when she arrived at
the college, she found it hard to shift to what her fellow Johnnies
seemed to be doing so easily.
“I think what I had the most trouble with was that I didn’t know
how to read the material analytically and ask the right questions,”
she says. “I was still reading the material to spit it back. I didn’t
have the skills to challenge the books. When I would go to class,
it was very difficult to participate in the discussions. I was
intimidated in class, and everyone else seemed to be doing so
much better.”
After three semesters, O’Shea left the college and took a job in
health insurance. She began as a claims processor, but her super
visors noted her ability to pick up new things and promoted her
frequently. “Even though I was only at
St. John’s for three semesters, it made a
huge difference in my analytical skills and
reasoning-I think freshman math helped
a lot with that,” she says. “I found myself
in the information systems department,
even though I didn’t have a computer or a
degree. I could look at the software, figure
out where the logic was breaking down,
and give evaluations to the programmers
on how to fix it.”
O’Shea prospered in the field for 12,
years. “Then managed care came along
and took the fun out of everything,” she
says. She moved into sales, where she also
did well, particularly in a favorite job: sell
ing BMWs in the Baltimore area. She was
making a nice income, she was having fun,
and fife was good-until February 16, aoot.
“I was driving home from work and was
hit head-on in an intersection a mile from
my house,” O’Shea recalls. Her car was totaled and she suffered a
serious neck injury. Taking customers for test drives seemed less
appealing, and after she was rear-ended in 2002 and the lingering
injuries from the accident worsened, O’Shea knew it was time for
a change. She began job hunting. “For the first time in my life, I
found they weren’t even interviewing me because I didn’t have a
degree,” she says.
O’Shea had attended college part time, off and on, and consid
ered applying her credits to a program in which she could earn a
degree after about a year of full-time study. One program she
looked into would grant credit for her work experience. Good
grades would probably come more easily than at St. John’s.
It was tempting. But instead, O’Shea sat down and filled out an
application for readmission to St. John’s. “I really wanted that
accomplishment of challenging myself,” she explains. “I chose
St. John’s because to me, it’s more about who I’m going to be
as a person.”
Returning to the college in Santa Fe would allow her to make a
fresh start. With Buddy, her chocolate Labrador in tow, O’Shea
drove west and settled into an apartment. Being about 20 years
older than most of her classmates made her feel a little self-con
scious, especially when a bookstore clerk tried to give her a tutor’s
discount. Overall, O’Shea felt warmly
welcomed by the campus community.
Through the Career Services offices,
she learned of an internship in the Gover
nor’s Office, applied, and got it. Since it
was unpaid, she held down a second job,
working on a FedEx loading dock from
5 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning. “It was
really hard getting up for work after
seminar nights,” she says.
Through her internship O’Shea discov
ered a passion for public service. In Gov.
Bill Richardson’s Constituent Services
office, she was doing interesting work
that she felt was important. At the end of
her junior year, she was hired as a
contract employee.
{The College -Si. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
Celebration: Peggy O’Shea’s parents,
Patrick and Mary Ann O’Shea, were on
HAND FOR COMMENCEMENT IN SaNTA Fe.
�{Commencement}
In the classroom, the Program was just
as difficult as O’Shea remembered it, and
there were times during junior and senior
years when the workload became oppres
sive. After struggling with her sopho
more essay she took advantage of writing
assistance and improved her papers. Her
tutors were encouraging.
“I worked as hard as I possibly could
and just stuck it out,” says O’Shea.
“There was no way after so many years
away and giving up so much to go back
that I would drop out.”
“When Peggy O’Shea joined my sopho
more seminar, after ao years away from
SJC, I wondered if this quiet woman
would be able to hold her own among her
far younger classmates,” says Santa Fe
tutor Patricia Greer. “ Well, not only did
she hold her own, she shone! With
tremendous determination and dedica
tion, Ms. O’Shea found her voice at the table and her stance on the
books. She struggled to remember how to write a seminar paperand then began to produce fine work! During the two and a half
years she was with us in Santa Fe, she became such a solid and
important member of our community.”
On May 21, O’Shea’s parents, brother, and great-nephew; her
girlfriend, Susan; and Susan’s parents were all in the audience
when she received her diploma. “It was a great celebration,” she
says. Within weeks, she had packed up again, this time starting a
new phase of her life as a student in the LB J School of Public Affairs
at the University of Texas in Austin. She will take the LSAT this
fall, and if accepted into the program, hopes to shift to a four-year
joint degree program in which she would earn a J.D. and a Master
of Public Affairs. Ultimately she’d like to work as a policy adviser at
the federal level.
O’Shea can’t help but wonder how her life might have been dif
ferent if fate hadn’t set her on a course back to St. John’s. Some
times she misses that thrill of closing the deal. But the same skills
she used to put customers in a slick new 3 Series will come in handy
when she’s ready for Washington. “In politics, you have to sell your
ideas,” she says. “I really think I’ll be good at that.”
Annapolis: Nick Golten
For many years, Nick Colten (A97) was a baker. Day after day, he’d
rise in the dark for his 4 a.m. shift at a neighborhood cafe in
St. Paul, Minn., his hometown. Bundled up against the icy winters,
he’d walk to work and spend the day baking bread, rolls, muffins,
and cakes. Most of the time, he hated it-but he was stuck in a hold
ing pattern after leaving St. John’s in the spring of 1994.
“I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do next,” Colten says.
Several things had prompted him to drop out. Perhaps he wasn’t
quite ready for the full scope of the Program. He loved to read, and
he thought St. John’s was the place for him. “Academically, I did all
23
Nick Colten joined
clues and made
CONNECTIONS WITH OTHER JoHNNIES WHEN
HE RETURNED TO CAMPUS.
right,” Colten recalls. “And I liked the
give-and-take of discussions.” Yet he
didn’t feel connected to the community,
so after his freshman year, he went home.
Colten first found a restaurant job as a
line cook, and that led to baking. Baking
may seem a pleasant way to earn a living,
Colten says, but he found it hard, tedious
work. “For one thing, I was chronically
sleep-deprived. And managing so many
different tasks at the same time-that’s
the difficult part. Mix up the dough,
knead the bread, get that batch in the
oven, start a second batch, check on the
bread in the oven.”
After work, he’d take a nap, later
heading out to the Oak Street Cinema,
an art house where he volunteered in exchange for free admission.
He loved Buster Keaton and Francois Truffaut films. Citizen Kane
and Casablanca. His other intellectual refuge was the Minneapo
lis-St. Paul chapter of the St. John’s Alumni Association.
“The chapter seminars sustained me for a long time and ulti
mately got me interested in going back to school,” says Colten.
Friends and family nagged him. Eva Brann, whom he had visited
often while she was dean and he was a freshman, encouraged him.
After about eight years with his arms elbow-deep in bread dough,
Colten was ready to come back. He started in the fall of 2002.
“I was nervous about the Greek-I had my old manual and
tried to prepare,” he recalls. After a seminar on Genesis went
“especially well,” Colten found himself excited about his studies in
a way he hadn’t experienced the first time around.
“I also felt a great desire to be connected to the community,” he
says. “I joined the fencing club, study groups, EnergeiaC He
joined the waltz committee and learned to dance. He became a reg
ular contributor to the Gadfly, where he found an outlet for his
passion for politics and public affairs.
Colten worked on campus, in the mailroom and at other jobs he
could pick up. Supporting himself and keeping up with the Pro
gram was exhausting, but it was all so much better the second time
around. “I didn’t want junior year to end,” Colten says. Every year,
for his birthday, he’d bake a big birthday cake and leave it in the
Coffee Shop for others to eat.
On May 15,12 years after first coming to Annapolis, he graduat
ed. His plan is to attend law school and eventually work in public
interest law. “Holding public office-I don’t think that would be
good. But helping to get the right people elected, get the right
things done, that’s something I’m interested in,” he says.
*College tradition assigns alumni status based on the originalyear
ofmatriculation, for graduates and nongraduates alike.
{The College - St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
�{Homecoming}
24
-- ........
JOHNNIES
JOURNEY HOME
By Libby Vega (SF06)
anta Fe Homecoming 2005 welcomed seven nnderHomecoming seminars. “I cherish the seminar,” noted Khin
graduate reunion class years back to campus July i
BLhin Guyot Brock (SF88), and many agreed. Elaine Pinkerton
Goleman (SFGI88) made time for homecoming “for the chance
to 3, and also brought together more than 20
to really converse about great literature, and the mental
Graduate Institute alumni to commemorate the
loth anniversary of the Eastern Classics program.
challenges.” Reunions this year included class years 1970, ’75,
The Eastern Classics
’80, ’85, ’90, ’95, and 2000.
Seminar topics ranged from
graduates celebrated a decade of
inquiry into the foundational texts
Nietzsche to Chekhov to Joyce.
of India, China, and Japan with a
Alumni this year were also treated
special reunion at the Hunt House
to Shakespeare Reader’s Theater, a
on Friday, hosted by President
seminar and minimalist theater
Michael Peters, enjoying his first
performance in which there are no
homecoming. The EC party was
full sets or costumes. The script is
followed by a lecture and concert
used openly, as the emphasis is on
by renowned sitar player Allyn
the text itself. Both Reader’s Theater
Miner, a senior lecturer in the
performances, of The Tempest and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were
Department of South Asia Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania,
student-led under the direction of
where she is a teacher and scholar
Marnelli Hamilton (SF05), assistant
of Sanskrit, Hindi, and Urdu
director of alumni and parent
music. Drawing on her extensive
activities.
musical and historical knowledge.
“When I first learned how Reader’s
•r.u- Annval Homm-omim;
Miner spoke on the cultural
Theater works, I thought it would be
background and compositional
a unique and original way to examine
structure of sitar music, demon
texts many of us have read but few of
strating on the instrument.
us have performed,” Hamilton said.
“In classical Indian music,”
Later in the afternoon attendees
she explained, “a rag or raga is
were treated to a “Speaking Volumes”
the melody, whereas a ras or rasa
lecture entitled “Euclid Made Me
is the emotion of a rag.”
What I Am Today,” by William
«
fc»»>
.
After the concert, the music
Kowalski (SF94), author of the novels
played on with a rock ‘n’ roll party X
Eddie Bastard and The Guardian.
in the coffee shop. Many alumni
In his talk, Kowalski discussed why
said the spark of memory was
his lifelong ambition to be a writer led
ignited the minute they caught a
him away from creative writing pro
glimpse of old friends. “I came to
grams and toward St. John’s College:
reconnect with my classmates, most of whom I hadn’t seen for 10
a desire to study more than just the craft of writing, and to
years,” said Ben Friedman (SF95).
become a more well-rounded and interesting person.
On Saturday morning, alumni gathered for what might be con
continued onpg. 26
sidered the most familiar and popular offering of the weekend;
{The College - John’s College Fall zoos 1
�{Homecoming}
Homecoming in July in Santa Fe
FEATURED MANY HAPPY ENCOUNTERS:
(clockwise from top: Sharing
Homecoming yfith a future
Johnnie; Danilo Marrone (SF90)
catches up with a classmate;
Elaine Pinkerton Coleman
(SFGI88, left) and Dianne Cowan
(SFgzjpERFORM A Shakespeare
play; Santa Fe tutor Robert
Sacks (A54) engages an alumna in
conversation.
{The College. John's College ■ Fall 2005 }
35
�a6
{Homecoming}
ALEXIS Brown (SFoo,
EC03) RAISES HER GLASS
IN CELERRATION.
continued
Continuing the celebration of authors and artists, the doors
swung open to the All-Alumni Art Show immediately after the
lecture. The show featured works in an array of media, including
painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, jewelry, video,
textile, and glasswork.
With children ushered to special games and a pizza party,
alumni took part in a Homecoming banquet on the Placita. Each
class offered its own group toast, and toasts were made for new
honorary alumni Bonn Duncan and Elliot Skinner.
Elliot Skinner joined the Santa Fe campus a year after its
founding, having studied the classics and philosophy at
Princeton University and the University of Colorado. Alumni
Association President Glenda Eoyang remembered Skinner as
an outstanding tutor and a “gentle spirit” from her student days
in Santa Fe.
“We know that then, as now, each tutor and each student
engaged with others to make discoveries about themselves and
each other, the part and the whole, knowledge and opinion,”
Eoyang said. “Mr. Skinner was a master at such engagement.
One alumnus, a particularly snotty one, reports that in sopho
more language Mr. Skinner taught him to see that he was a snot
and how not to be one-a good lesson that we could all teach and
learn more often!”
Skinner, she noted, had a talent for drawing out reticent
students in seminar. “Though there are many examples of his
generosity and insight, one that distinguishes him in this com
munity is the support he has given to help quiet students find
their voices in seminar,” she said.
Duncan, Eoyang said, has been a true friend to the collegeone of the many people in the Santa Fe community who donate
their time and talents to support the college. As chair of the
Philos Society,
Duncan leads an
organization of
Santa Fe residents
who support the col
lege and its program
of study through
fundraising and
other activities.
Duncan earned his
bachelor’s degree
from the University
of Kansas and his
medical degree from
the University of
Missouri School of
Medicine. He completed his residency at the Johns Hopkins
Hospital and specialized in head and neck surgery. After a visual
injury ended his surgery career, he became the chairman of
Health Systems International, a computer company which he
brought from Yale University to the private sector.
“Not only is Dr. Duncan, himself, a friend of the college, but
as the chair of the Philos Society, he is also a leader of friends
and a friend of leaders,” Eoyang said. “Those ofyou who are my
vintage may be surprised that the college has committed and
active friends in the Santa Fe community-they were a rare breed
in my day. Because of Dr. Duncan and his friends, there is a
different story to tell today. Under his stewardship, the Philos
Society has demonstrated friendship to the college in
many different ways, including initiating the ‘Inviting
Conversations’ program and hosting events such as
Summer Classics and wine tastings.”
With hunger then abated and the night sky
resplendent, the Midsummer Ball commenced with a
swing band.
As the weekend drew to a close, the final event was a
Sunday brunch at Hunt House, home to President
Peters, and his wife, Eleanor. Always well-attended,
this year’s brunch gave many alumni their first
opportunity to meet President Peters and the new
vice president for advancement, Jim Osterhoft, and his
wife, Debbie.
Glenda eoyang welcomes Elliot Skinner to the ranks
OF ALUMNI.
{The College -St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
�{Homecoming}
a?
Artwork Unites Johnnies over the Years
t is said that art
transcends the hounds
of time, and so does the
fellowship that unites
St. John’s College
alumni. The college’s
annual All-Alumni Art Show
has always been a stimulating
venue for alumni of all ages
and backgrounds to celebrate
the spirit of art and creativity
that the Program inspires, but
it is not often that the artist
and patron are separated by
more than 6o years of age,
especially when the purchaser
is only 21. At the 2005 alumni
art show, one piece of artwork
stood out for Mia Posner,
(SF07). It was a small wooden
sculpture entitled Flash
Dancer, created by Billy Lieb (A45).
Despite the fact that Ms. Posner is an
undergraduate student on a tight budget,
she knew she had to have it. What com
pelled her was not only the charm of the
piece, but also the fact that it is the craft
work of an alumnus so much her senior.
“It’s so important for Johnnies to
support each other, even if we’re separated
by generations. There is no formal art
The annual Alumni Art
Show continues to be a
FAVORITE PART OF
Homecoming WEEKEND in
Santa Fe. Above, Santa Fe
SENIOR Mia Posner with
Flash-Dancer, by Billy
Lieb (A45). Below,
I
GALLERY VISITORS ARE
TAKEN WITH THE ARRAY OF
ARTWORK ON DISPLAY.
program here, so I appreciate Johnnies
who can explore their artistic side as well
as the academics,” she says. She wanted to
buy the piece before the art show even
opened. The sculpture had caught her eye
one afternoon while she helped Maggie
Magalnick, the gallery curator, set up the
exhibit.
The artist attended St. John’s College in
Annapolis for two years during and just
after World War IL He
then went on to get his
degree in film from
UCLA in 1952. He spent
25 years working in film
before retiring to become
a peace activist and
attend art school. Since
then, he has studied with
Jill Geigerich, Laddie Dill, Georg Herms,
and Betty and Allison Saar, and shown his
work at the University of California,
Riverside.
The sculpture is also significant to
Ms. Posner because she, too, is very inter
ested in film and art. She sees the piece as
inspiration. “It serves to remind me that
St. John’s alumni are a community. We may
be separated by years and miles, but
nonetheless, we are a family.”
—Andra Maguran
{The College -St. John's College ■ Fall 2005 }
�a8
{Student Voices}
“I AM A DISTANT SON
99
Annapolis Senior Joins Youth in a Questfor the Self
BY Donald Stone (Ao6)
“The whole ofthis doctrine leads as to a conclusion, which is ofgreat importance in the
present affair, viz. that all the nice and subtle questions concerningpersonal identity
can neverpossibly be decided, and [because ofthis, they] are to be regarded rather as
grammatical than asphilosophical difficulties. David Hume.
‘Tam a distant son, a man, a convict and a cousin. lam charitable, smart, strong and
talented. lam happiest when I’m on the good side ofpeople and they think lam a good
person. ’’-Will P., 17.
" ill wrote these
simple, poetic
words while par
ticipating in
Insights: Identity
Project, a Vision
Workshops program. Will’s words seem
to echo Hume’s conclusion that one’s
personal identity is not so simple as to
be articulated. According to Hume it is
possible for Will to be a convict and
everything else he lists. However, it is
not possible for one to ozt^be a convict,
for Hume would say that is our imagina
tion creating simplicity in a perception
of a person’s identity for the sake of
articulation.
In Treatise ofHuman Nature, Hume
explains that we are inclined to ascribe
identity to objects because of our
incapacity to always appreciate the great
variety of parts that compose these
objects. For instance, because of our
imagination “a ship ofwhich a consider
able part has been changed by frequent
reparations, is still considered the
Justin E., a self-portrait.
same” and “an oak that grows from the
small plant to a large tree, is still [consid
ered] the same oak,” although in each case
them. More specifically, participants in the
not even one part of the whole may be
program learn to use the tools of a photothe same.
journalist-writing and photography-to
As a photography instructor for Vision
explore and express aspects of their
Workshops, I am introduced to students
identities.
who have grown and experienced frequent
Based in Annapolis, the nonprofit
reparations. It is my job and my pleasure to
organization Vision Workshops partners
learn from the participants what else there is with the Juvenile Drug Court of Anne
besides “juvenile delinquency” in their iden Arundel County and National Geographic to
tities, and then I assist them in identifying
cultivate alternative means of expression in
parts of their lives, environments, and per
underserved youth. With the guidance of
sonalities that are particularly important to
writing and photography instructors and
W
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
dedicated volunteers, students are given the
opportunity to learn collaboratively with
their peers, gaining new perspective on
their self-image and controlling which parts
are shared with the world. On the first day of
the program, held at Maryland Hall, a cul
tural center not far from campus, each stu
dent is put in charge of a camera. Over the
next month, he or she will be responsible for
its safety and will use it to complete
home assignments. Some have never
used a camera before; others are sur
prised to be entrusted with it. In the
first two hours of the workshop they
shoot their first roll of self-portraits,
and later print their own photographsalways a highlight of their experience.
By the end of the program each stu
dent creates and polishes a short poem
or essay and a self-portrait photograph.
A great strength of the program is the
gratification the students feel in having
success in learning a unique skill, and
the pride associated with sharing the
final product they create. An effort is
made to have the students’ work widely
displayed in exhibits at the District
Courthouse on Church Circle and at the
Chaney Gallery in Maryland Hall.
I became involved with Vision Work
shops at the end of my sophomore year,
when photographer Kirsten Elstner, the
director of the program, accepted my
request to volunteer in the fall of 2004.
The exceptional group of people I
worked with, coupled with the capabil
ity of exploring my interests in photog
raphy and in working with teenagers, made
my time volunteering a lot of fun and helped
balance out all the time I spend with the
“old dead guys’ on the reading list.
Along with the support of volunteers.
Vision Workshops succeeds through the
energy and direction of Kirsten Elstner and
freelance writer Cindy Edwards, and with
the support of the Anne Arundel County
Juvenile Drug Court, Maryland Hall,
National Geographic, Nikon, and the Target
Corporation.
�{Student Voices}
Donald Stone (Ao6) volunteered last
year with Visions Workshops, helping
youth who have heen involved with
the court system to express their
feelings in words and images. He
also drew Chester Martin (Ao6) and
Freya Thompson (A07) into the
program as volunteers. “I’ve heen
grateful for its influence in informing
my post-St. John’s thoughts and
aspirations,” Stone says of the pro
gram, to which he returned for anoth
er year this fall.
Self-portraits by (clockwise, top right)
Raymond H., Henry M., and Paula T.
{The College.Si. John’s College . Fall 2005 }
29
�30
{Bibliofile}
World Federalism: Idealism Meets the Cold War
The Politics of World Federa
tion: Vol. i: United Nations, U.N.
Reform, Atomic Control. Vol. 2:
From World Federalism to Global
Governance.______________________
by Joseph Preston Baratta
(Praeger, 2004)
By Rosemary Harty
n his thorough two-volume history
of world federalism, Joseph Baratta
(A69) shows that the political
climate of the 20th century could
have heen vastly different, if after
World War II the idealists and
intellectuals had heen effective in drafting
a world constitution to unite governments
across the globe, if national leaders had
seen the necessity of founding a much
stronger United Nations to keep the peace,
and if millions of people had been prepared
to follow wiser leadership. The Politics of
World governments must seek newways to
World Federation is a comprehensive
UNITE FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL HUMANITY, SAYS
history of a movement supported by a wide
Joseph Baratta.
range of people of differing backgrounds
and political ideologies. Instead of world
federal government, Baratta shows, the
on to establish a new program at
world got the Cold War-complete with the
SUNY, Old Westbury, inspired in part by
Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
St. John’s.
decades of arms production that consumed
Baratta, who teaches history and
resources that could have been directed to
international relations at Worcester State
more beneficial uses.
College, labored for 25 years on the
The world federalist movement included
project. His interest was first piqued by
atomic scientists, such as Albert Einstein
encountering the “Preliminary Draft of a
and J. Robert Oppenheimer; intellectuals,
World Constitution” of 1948, republished
including Robert Hutchins and E.B.
by Robert Hutchins in 1965. Baratta
White; lawyers once connected to U.S.
admired the ideals of the movement for
government, such as Grenville Clark;
many reasons, first, after serving in the
energetic and passionate young students,
Marine Corps during the Vietnam War,
such as Harris Wofford; and seasoned
and second, studying works such as the
politicians, like Brooks Hays and Henry
Federalist Papers and Plato’s Republic at
Wallace. World federalists were men
St. John’s. “In the Marine Corps, we were
and women who reacted to the use of the
told that the purpose of a battle is to reach
atomic bomb with horror and with the
a decision,” said Baratta. “I wondered if
deep conviction that nations must join
there were not a more rational way to reach
together or face an inevitable third
a decision. At St. John’s I saw that the
world war.
reason why wars continue is that the world
The movement also attracted the
has no working rule of law.”
attention of Stringfellow Barr and Scott
Baratta began reading volumes of Com
Buchanan, founders of the New Program at mon Cause, the journal of The Committee
St. John’s, and many others intimately
to Frame a World Constitution, written by
involved with the college, including Mark
Hutchins, G.A. Borgese, and Adler.
Van Doren, Mortimer Adler, and Wofford,
“These people explored the anarchy of the
a close friend of Buchanan, who would go
national state system in the spirit of the
I
{The College- St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
conversation of the great books,” Baratta
says. He combed through thousands of
documents and conducted dozens of inter
views. He wrote his doctoral thesis at
Boston University on world federalism and
continued his research for what would
become The Politics of World Federation.
“I discovered a movement that hadn’t
made it into the history books,” he says.
His final product is not only an outstand
ing scholarly achievement, but also a
personal testament for his own strong
views that today’s governments must seek
out new ways to bring the world together
for the benefit of humanity.
Baratta concentrates on the period after
the failure of the League of Nations. In
1939, a journalist named Clarence Streit,
alarmed by Hitler and the portents of
another world war, published a book called
Union Now, which proposed a federal
union of democracies against the Axis
powers. “If ever a book made a movement.
Union Now was such a book,” writes
Baratta. Publication of the book led to
organizations including Federal Union in
the U.S. and Great Britain and World
Federalists in the U.S. The most active
years for the movement were those
immediately following the bombing of
Hiroshima. Internal dissent, a lack of
adequate funding, and McCarthyism
weakened the movement, and by 1954,
Baratta writes, it was largely defunct.
A pivotal issue in the failure of the move
ment was the rejection of the Baruch Plan
for the international control of atomic
energy, presented to the United Nations
Atomic Energy Commission, June 14,
1946. The plan proposed the creation of an
International Atomic Development
Authority that would manage “control or
ownership of all atomic-energy activities
potentially dangerous to world security,”
ultimately placing America’s nuclear
weapons in the hands of an international
body, which would have had many
attributes of a world government.
If the world federalists had the power
and numbers to back the Baruch plan, the
story might have been different, but “they
didn’t unite themselves until 1947,” says
Baratta. “Then President Truman
announced the Truman Doctrine, which
inaugurated the Cold War. Federalists got
organized too late.”
�{Bibliofile}
In his second volume, Baratta devotes a
chapter to another pivotal time: the events
surrounding the Pocono Conference of
T948, when Stringfellow Barr was most
actively involved in world federalism. Barr
and Buchanan had left St. John’s in 1946,
following a successful but bitter fight
against a Naval Academy takeover of the
campus. They attempted to start a new
college in western Massachusetts, but
could not attract adequate funding for their
vision. Barr took a year off, Baratta writes,
but he quickly became very involved in the
most revolutionary wing of the world
federalist movement. While others worked
gradually by U.N. reform, Barr and others
felt that the atomic bomb required
recourse to a “people’s convention
a grassroots approach to working outside
of national governments by selecting
international delegates who would draft a
world constitution. McCormick reaper
heiress Anita McCormick Blaine gave
$T million to the cause. Barr became chair
man of a planning committee, aiming at
election of 143 American delegates to a
constitutional convention in Geneva in
1950. Britain had a similar movement, led
by MP Henry Usborne, to elect 2,8 popular
representatives to the convention.
Scott Buchanan, who later worked with
Barr, opposed the people’s convention.
He believed the place to start was with the
U.N. and with national governments:
“World government is a revolutionary
idea. It would touch every last item of our
political life. Most people who believe in it
do not realize this. They also don’t realize
Michelangelo’s Mountain:
The Quest for Perfection in the
Marble Quarries of Carrara
by Eric Scigliano (SF75)
Free Press, 2005
Eric Scigliano has roots in Carrara, a village
in the Apuan Alps in northwestern Italy,
that run as deep as the veins of prized
marble that have been quarried there for
more than 2,000 years. Scigliano’s
great-grandfather and his relatives were
quarrymen and stone carvers in the
quarries of Carrara, the same quarries that
Michelangelo frequented to select the finest
marble for his sculptures. In Michaelangelo’sMountain, Scigliano offers a historical
perspective on Carrara and its famous
how much opposition there will be to it.
For this reason the PC horrifies me.”
Barr, however, continued the approach.
The money was used to establish the
Foundation for World Government, but it
all came to naught in all the difficulties of
the time for forming a more perfect union
''Contrary to so many
ofmy experiences in
life, I continue to have
faith in human reason.
Worldfederation
offers apositive vision
ofpeace.
Joseph Preston Baratta
with adherents of the Communist party.
Mrs. Blaine wanted Henry Wallace, the
Progressive party candidate for president,
to be a board member. Leaders among the
United World Federalists feared the Com
munist strains of Wallace’s challenge to
Truman in 1948 and would not take any
money. Barr, writes Baratta, “found
himself in possession of a million dollar
foundation for world government, whose
support the American movement would
not accept, at a moment when money was
marble-pietra viva, “living stone”-as
evoked in the gospels, Plotinus, Michelan
gelo, and folktales. Scigliano unearths
surprising Carrara connections, such as
how Dante’s wanderings in the marble
country influenced The Divine Comedy.
Long interested in the Italian Renais
sance, Scigliano wrote his sophomore essay
on Giovanni Bellini’s painting, St. Francis in
Ecstasy and Boticelli’s St. Augustine, and
drew insight and inspiration from a
preceptorial on Michelangelo. “I’m sure I
would have gone to Italy anyway, but this
preceptorial sharpened my eye and laid the
groundwork for this project,” says Scigliano.
In recent years, he has made several trips to
Italy, where he reconnected with his rela
tives who still work in the marble business.
{The College • St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
31
never more urgently needed to build up a
popular movement for an East-West settle
ment and permanent peace through world
government! ”
Nevertheless, the world federalist
movement had major achievements.
It brought about resolutions favoring
U.S. participation in a world government
in aa state legislatures, and some 16 bills
were introduced in Congress. Hearings
were held on the topic in the House in 1948
and ’49 and in the Senate in 1950. Senators
Hubert Humphrey, Wayne Morse, Claude
Pepper, and J. William Fulbright
supported these bills. A large literature
from over 70 nations on fundamental U.N.
reform has been produced, including the
Chicago draft constitution and Grenville
Clark and Louis B. Sohn’s World Peace
through World Law. Even Barr and
Buchanan’s foundation pioneered new
international fields like functional eco
nomic and social cooperation, Gandhian
nonviolence, and individual educational
field work anticipatory of the future Peace
Corps. Most federalists, like international
ists, have today mended their differences
in favor of universal membership, repre
sentation of democracies, maximal powers
affecting both peace and justice, and U.N.
reform for the transition.
“I’m an idealist,” Baratta says. “Con
trary to so many of my experiences in life,
I continue to have faith in human reason.
World federation offers a positive vision of
peace. Its history exhibits a new kind of
world political wisdom.”
The narrative traces Michelangelo’s
passion for his art and his grueling journeys
into the mountains of Carrara to find mar
ble that had never before been extracted.
He weaves Michelangelo’s life story with
the story of Carrara itself-a region of
intrigue and rivalries, including Medici
conspiracies to overturn the Carrarese
marble monopoly. It was also a region of
conflicts, such as those that took place
between Roman legions and Liguri tribes,
Napoleonic and Austrian invaders, and in
modern times. Fascists and resistance
fighters. Scigliano also considers Michelan
gelo’s legacy in today’s international
sculpture community,
—Patricia Dempsey
�{AlumniProfile}
3^
Peter Fairbanks, A73, Values the Authentic
BY Patricia Dempsey
t the Montgomery Gallery
in San Francisco, founding
director Peter Maynard
Fairbanks (A73) cuts a tall
figure, wearing his trade
mark bowtie and sipping
tea from a china cup as he confers with
clients at a round, inlaid igaB Saarinen
table. Trained at Sotheby’s, London, as an
art connoisseur, appraiser, and auction
eer, Fairbanks is also an art dealer and a
consultant appraiser to Antiques Road
show, the popular PBS series now in its
ninth season. Fairbanks’s work requires
expertise developed over 30 years in the
art world: the ability to distinguish the
authentic from the false.
One afternoon, Fairbanks received a
call from a man who had just purchased on
eBay two watercolors allegedly by Picasso
and Miro; the caller wanted to know if the
works were genuine and asked for an esti
mate of their value. “I told him, T can’t
tell you anything from a phone conversa
tion; I need to see them,’ ” says Fairbanks.
“He brought the two paintings to me and
besides it being immediately apparent to
me that they were fakes, I also recognized
the hand of the forger. After 3a years in
the auction and art business. I’ve learned
to distinguish the authentic from the
false-both with objects and the people I
meet.”
Fairbanks glides easily between describ
ing the billion-dollar fine arts fairs at
which he exhibits in London, New York,
Paris, and Maastricht, the Netherlands, to
nature. I enjoy the physicality of handling
his stint as an instructor at the Hurricane
objects, the discovery, the research, the
Island Outward Bound School in Maine. He
authentication. I needed to see the front
often draws upon his roots as a pragmatic,
and back of a painting, see what stretchers
flinty New Englander for the perseverance
and canvas it’s on, not just look at photo
to succeed in the art world. He combines
graphs or slides and learn from footnotes.”
his flair for business, nurtured during boy
Fairbanks’s desire to examine all aspects
hood summers when he “farmed” no lob
of a subject drew him to St. John’s. Fair
ster pots off the Massachusetts coast, with
banks came to St. John’s in his aos, having
his love of art. Growing up in Gambridge,
first attended Bard College for a year,
Fairbanks developed a deep appreciation
followed by three years of conscientious
for fine art, especially from his mother,
objector’s alternative service during the
who studied art history in the graduate
Vietnam War. “Given my way of learning,
program at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. “I
thought I would be a professor as well, but I the structure at St. John’s suited me-the
regular regime of small classes, daily read
found that academia was too dry for my
A
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall 200s }
Is IT REAL, OR A VERY EXPENSIVE FRAUD?
Peter Fairbanks knows the difference.
ings, dialogues, and theorems on the black
board, and most difficult for me, the fixing
of one’s thoughts in the written word. It
was a terrific education. It’s impossible to
compare St. John’s to any other higher
education institution-there is no place like
it. It’s like being in a monastery for four
years, where the students are speaking
their own language, so deeply immersed in
the ‘life of the mind.’ ”
There’s a connection, Fairbanks says, to
the type of careful analysis done in the
�{Alumni Profile}
Program and the work he does today, “I
think it was at St. John’s that I learned the
process of how to examine, and that has
been invaluable throughout my life, both
personally and professionally,” says
Fairbanks. “At St. John’s I learned to
question accepted postulates.”
After graduating from St. John’s,
Fairbanks took on a yearlong executive
program at Sotheby’s, London. The course
was directed by the late Derek Shrub.
“His approach to the history of art and
antiques was as unique as the education at
St. John’s,” Fairbanks says. “I was trained
to identify the style, date, nationality, and
perhaps author of an object with the idea
being that every object is a part of its
culture, a part of the spirit of that time.
I was expected to examine a leg of a chair, a
part of a candlestick, passage of a painting
and determine: Is it Southern German,
Eastern French Baroque, or Northern
Italian Baroque? While wildly annoying at
the time, this approach allowed me to look
at that Miro watercolor dated 194a and the
Picasso dated 1934 and determine they were
both most likely executed in the 1960s.”
Following his training at Sotheby’s, Fair
banks worked in the auction business for
15 years as an appraiser, executive adminis
trator, and auctioneer in New York, London,
and San Francisco. He went to San
Francisco to “grow” the then-small regional
Butterfield Auctioneers, making it the
1949
third-largest auction house in the United
States. By 1984, Fairbanks was “consumed”
by administrative tasks. “I realized my work
was far from the fine art objects that origi
nally inspired me to enter this profession.
So I founded the Montgomery Gallery with
two former employees.”
Even when he delivers the news that a
Picasso purchased on eBay is a forgery,
Fairbanks wants people to understand how
he arrives at that conclusion. He wants
them to be at ease with art. “A large part of
this profession,” he says, “is educating your
clients about the art they are attracted to,
assisting them in understanding that their
own-often unexplored-visual vocabulary is
valid. I try to help them feel comfortable
and show them they already have taste. But
many feel a tremendous imbalance between
the knowledge I have and their lack of it.”
Through his work for the past decade as
an appraiser for Antiques Roadshow,
Fairbanks has helped make knowledge of
fine art accessible to the wider public. “I
never thought of myself as a good student,
yet at St. John’s the great books were
accessible to me. It’s the same in the art
world-knowledge is accessible to every
one,” says Fairbanks. "Antiques Roadshow
has helped to demystify the world of fine
art. It has also been a lot of fun.’
1950
The Rev. Fredemck P. Davis
John R. Garland is continuing
writes: “Let me report to the
alumni of the early to middle
years of the ‘new’ program that
Rachel (Hinman) Hovde, widow
of Chris (class of 1945), died at
91 years on May i, 3005. Long
time organist and choir director
at St. Anne’s Church, she
became a clergy wife when Chris
took orders in Chicago.”
in an informal seminar group
started years ago by Tom
Williams (class of 1951). “After
55 years I’ve finally learned how
to finish reading before the
discussion,” he writes.
33
Good News, Bad News
Fans of the popular PBS series
Antiques Roadshow tune in to see
some guests discovering a valuable
find among their attic treasures, oth
ers learning that their item is nothing
but yard-sale fodder. In a February
2004 episode, appraiser Peter Fairbanks-who has been with the show
since its debut-had good news for a
California man who brought in a por
trait of his ancestor. Commodore
Thomas Tingey, painted in the early
19th century by John Trumbull.
Along with a framed copy of Tingey’s
commission (signed by President
John Adams) and his uniform, the
portrait represented “a great collec
tion of American history.” History,
swell-but the cash value? Fairbanks
estimated the well-preserved and dis
tinctive portrait as worth $30,000 to
$30,000. Too bad the painting wasn’t
in its original frame though, Fair
banks noted; that might have brought
the value as high as $50,000. 4"
attend Homecoming for my 50th
reunion, hut I felt poorly and soon
was told I had to undergo open
heart surgery on October 38.1 am
only just now really pretty much
back in living trim. I am writing
this to assure those of my class
mates I missed seeing this 50th
Homecoming that I hope to see
them at the next 50th.”
1964
1954
Richard B. Carter hated to
miss Homecoming last year in
Annapolis; “I fully expected to
William C. Triplett, II, and
Eleanor Noon Triplett are
pleased to announce the birth of
their first grandchild, Evelyn
Berwanger Triplett, born July 3.
{The College -St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
1967
Ginger Kenney (Gay Singer)
writes with professional and
family news: “Along with Sasaki
Associates’ principals Daniel
Kenney and Ricardo Dumont, I
have completed a book on
campus design for the
ACE/Praeger Series on higher
education. Written for institu
tions leaders and the planners
and designers who work for
them. Mission and Place:
Strengthening Learning and
Community through Campus
Design shows how institutions
can leverage one of the most
�{AlumniNotes}
34
powerful resources they have for
overcoming today’s challenges:
the campus and its environs,
providing a foundation for
making decisions about the
physical campus that are
grounded in the institutional
mission. Mission and Place is
available from Greenwood
Publishing Group (www.greenwood.com) andAmazon.com.
In other news, my son Adam,
23, graduated last year from
Brown University and is now
working in software develop
ment for Microsoft in Seattle.
My daughter Margot, 18, has just
started her freshman year at the
University of San Francisco and
is planning to major in Spanish
and Latin American studies.
Alas, neither one of them a
Johnnie, but both happy in their
choices, which is, after all, what
counts. Now empty-nesters, Dan
and I are hoping to travel a little
more in our ‘spare’ time. Can
you tell we’ll be heading west
from time to time?
I am now working in strategic
academic planning and in edito
rial consulting, as I progress
toward a certificate in financial
planning. I’ve also been active in
the Boston chapter for a number
of years. The chapter welcomes
visitors to the Boston area to join
in its activities.”
1969
Beth A. Kupe (SF) writes, “I’ve
moved to Longmont, Colo.,
about 12 miles from Boulder and
40 miles from Denver. I love it
here-there is so much commu
nity spirit! I’m just a day’s drive
north from Santa Fe, and I wel
come visitors: 3800 Pike Road
#30-203, Longmont, CO 80503,
303-682-0169, bethkuper@
yahoo.com.”
1970
Jeffrey D. Friedman (A)
writes: “We are up to eight kids
and eight grandchildren. I am
now using the analytical and
listening skills from St. John’s in
Talmud study, teaching, and life
coaching. Anyone in Israel,
e-mail, or call and come visit!
Friedyo7@netvisi0n.net.il.”
1972
David Carey (A) is a philosophy
professor at Whitman College
in Walla Walla, Washington,
“tackling Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, and Aquinas
annually. Thanks to SJC for the
wonderful preparation.”
1973
Jeff Angus (SF) has publishing
news: “In what seems a relatively
trivial note, my newest book
came out at the beginning of
baseball season. Management by
Baseball: A Pocket Reader
(Occam & Dihigo, $12.95) is a
management how-to book
predicated on the Truth that
almost everything you need to
know about management you
can learn from baseball. Using
lessons and stories from the
national pastime, it presents
practical tools to teach managers
and aspiring managers how to be
more effective at the work in any
kind of organization. A bit like a
Stephen Covey book, but less
Mormon. Anaximander,
Heraclitus and Lucretius
(still The One), are all small but
essential ingredients in the mix.
The book can be purchased
through independent book
New Beginnings
NDREW PiETRUS and ZoE Beatty (both A91) have
three news items: Sofia was born April 23; she
joins Marcel, a, and Matthias, 4. Zoe finishes OB
residency in Jnly and enters private practice back
in Raleigh (they planned to move in July from
Pennsylvania). Andy wraps up four years of being
a stay-at-home dad and will return to teaching middle-school
students at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Raleigh.
sellers or directly online from
the Management by Baseball
Web site: http://cmdr-scott.
blogspot.com
“I’m still doing management
consulting, still a contributing
editor at Info World, writing
product reviews and an occa
sional feature. I’m now writing
opinion columns for the online
version of the magazine
CIO Insight, and sabermetric
analysis for The Seattle Times.
“I’m about to become a
grandfather for the first time. My
step-daughter, Alexandra, who
lives in Paris with her French
husband, will have given birth to
a baby in July.”
Joan Heller (A) reports:
“David Humphreys (A69) and I,
for better or worse, are no longer
together, and I have reverted to
Joan Heller. Our four sons,
dialectically educated at home,
are: Justin Heller Humphreys,
20-year-old classics major at
Reed College in Portland, Ore.;
Samuel Barnes Humphreys, 17year-old aspiring ballet dancer in
NYC; Nathaniel Harding
Humphreys, 14-year-old student
of the Emerald Ozma Home
School in Ashville, N.C.; and
Nicholas Menzel Humphreys,
g-years-old with Down
syndrome, arguably our most
avid reader to date.”
{The College. St. lohn’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
1975
Four exhibitions of artwork by
Howard Meister (A) began in
August and continue through
the winter. “Stilled Lives”-lifesize digital scans of dead things
exhibited at the Contemporary
Artists Center in North Adams,
Mass., in late summer.
Other recent life-size scans of
food and eroticism were on
exhibit at the Last Minute
Gallery in Northampton, Mass.,
December 30-January 29. A
selection of Meister’s studio
“Art Furniture” from the 1980s
and 1990S will be on exhibit at
The Modernism Show at The
Armory (NYC) in November and
at Art Basel Miami in December.
Howard can be reached at
HMMeister@aol.com.
1977
Judy Kistler-Robinson (SF)
moved from Minnesota in Febru
ary and has enjoyed the long
spring in Plano, Texas. She is
working as a usability specialist,
improving voice user-interface
designs for banking, communi
cations, and other automatic
voice response systems.
Judy heard recently from
Katya Shirokow (SF76) inquir
ing about next year’s 30-year
reunion. Katya shared this news:
�{Alumni Notes}
35
Barrelhouse: Pulp, Pop, Prose
" hy must so-called
“literature” and
“pulp” always
remain at odds?
Why, asks Aaron
Pease (A98), can’t
there be a bridge between modern and clas
sic, something that will appeal to both
those who already love literature and those
who don’t know what they’re missing?
Barrelhouse is meant to be just that. A
literary journal featuring everything from
poems to short stories to essays, inter
views, and comics. Barrelhouse was created
by Pease and a few of his friends who meet
regularly to critique each other’s writing.
Pease has a day job as a proposal writer; by
night, he’s simply a writer, one with a love
for both classical literature and modern
writing.
“We toyed with the idea for a while, and
it started making sense,” Pease says. “We
thought there was a niche for this kind of
thing-something not just functional, but
site, where they receive writing submis
appealing on multiple levels. Something
sions from around the country in all differ
that looks good, has solid writing, but still
ent genres. From these, they selected a few
manages to reflect our culture without a
to put into their first print edition oiBar
jaundiced eye.”
relhouse, published late last fall. The goals
Barrelhouse was designed to appeal to
for the magazine remain fluid: for now,
both those who are already avid readers
they’re content to remain mostly Web
and those who are “interested in ideas and
based, while getting the print version out
brightly colored things.”
in the D.C. metro area.
Pease and colleagues started with a Web
W
“My son, Alexander, is now 10
years old. I am producing nature
and wildlife films for television
and still live in California. We
recently produced two films for
PBS called Kalahari: The Great
Thirstland and Kalahari: The
Flooded Desert. I’ve been
spending over 10 years traveling
frequently to Africa-mostly to
Botswana-bits that are still very
wild and very empty of people
and very, very far from the
troubled parts of that huge con
tinent.” Katya’s next project will
be in Latin America.
Asks Judy: “Any other class
mates thinking ahead to this
reunion?”
Gene Glass (A) writes: “I have
become a grandfather much
more quickly than I was pre
pared for! It’s all good, though,
as the son of my stepdaughter is
now almost five months old. I’m
looking forward to seeing friends
at our 30th reunion in 2007.”
1979
A LITERARY JOURNAL WITH AN ATTITUDE:
Aaron Pease (aSq) hopes to bring culture
TO THE MASSES.
“Putting together something like this
requires critiquing ourselves and our
choices, trying to figure out why we like
the stories we like,” he says. In selecting
material for the journal, the editors try not
to dismiss something because it falls into a
“type,” while not publishing a submission
just because it fills a “type” they haven’t
addressed. Eventually, they want to solicit
stories and essays from established
authors, take out ads in writers’ magazines
to target emerging writers, and assign their
poetry section to a full-time poet.
They’re off to a good start. The first
printed edition A Barrelhouse featured
stories from a combination of new and
recognized writers as well as an interview
with country/folk legend Emmylou Harris.
When asked how they managed to get to
talk with the legendary singer. Pease con
fessed that they had an “in”-one of their
good friends is a relative. “But,” he says,
“we’ve found that people are more willing
to talk than you might think. It’s publicity
for them, and they’re still just people.”
teacher, interpreter/translator,
and business owner in Japan;
1993-96, law school at Indiana
University in Bloomington; 1998
to present, lawyer. “Married to
Carmen, and loving it! Contact
me at leslie_westmoreland@
yahoo.com. I would love to hear
from you!”
1980
Leslie W. Westmoreland (SF)
is a deputy attorney general in
Fresno, Calif., and here’s how he
got there: 1980-82, Peace Corps
(Zaire); 1983-84, ESL teacher in
Saudi Arabia; 1985-93, ESL
—Roseanna White (A04)
1983
This fall Desiree Zamorano
(SF) will be a new member of
Occidental College’s Education
Department faculty, as well as
the director of their Community
Literacy Center.
1986
Bob Neslund (SFGI) will teach
Latin half-time the next two
years and write a history of
Shattuck-St. Mary’s School for
its 2008 sesquicentennial.
{The College. St. John ’5 College ■ Fall 2005 }
Susan Read (SFGI) writes
that she’s “still enjoying my
life in Connecticut, teaching.
�36
{AlumniProfile}
An Island Refuge
Sarah Mara, A6i, Has Deep Roots on Lone Pine Island.
ot everyone can experience
life on a tiny island in the
St. Lawrence River, suffer
the thrill of plunging into
icy water on a summer’s day,
or watch the lights of pass
ing freighters dance on the water at night.
Wanting to share some of the most vivid
memories of her childhood, Sarah Robin
son Mara (A6i) joined with her sister, artist
Nancy Rohinson Hammond, in creating
A Snug Little Island, a children’s hook that
presents the joys of life on Lone Pine Island
through the eyes of two children.
Sarah and her husband, John, spend five
months each year on Lone Pine Island, a
quarter-acre granite outcrop where they
built a cottage. Lone Pine is one of the
Thousand Islands, a group of more than
1,700 small islands in the St. Lawrence
River just east of Lake Ontario.
Farther east of Lone Pine is the slightly
bigger Long Rock Island, where Nancy
Hammond and her husband, Robert R.
Price, Jr., rent a converted skiffhouse.
In joining together on their book project,
the two sisters recaptured favorite
memories from their childhoods in the
Thousand Islands.
“I’ve been returning to the river every
summer for 65 years-missing only a fewsince I was six months old,” says Mara.
“The islands, the river, are my roots, where
family gathers. I understand the dangers:
hidden rocks in the water, navigating at
night, watching out for the looming hulls of
freighters in the total darkness. I love the
color of the blue water, how it sparkles on a
clear day when the wind is from the north.
Children who grow up here never forget it.”
After graduating from St. John’s and
marrying plastic and reconstructive
surgeon John Mara in 1972, Mara pursued
various career ventures. “You come out of
St. John’s a true liberal artist,” she said.
She worked in London at IBM, United
Kingdom, and for Eastman Kodak in
Rochester. She adored her stint as manag
ing editor of a weekly newspaper in New
York, writing the editorials and a regular
column, managing stringers, laying out the
paper, and taking the photos. When John
retired in 1992, Mara became the family
bread-winner, for several years commuting
by boat to her job as administrator of the
Antique and Classic Boat Society.
Abandoning the mainstream for a quiet
life with time for reading, organic garden
ing, and watching sunsets was a careful
choice the Maras made, one Sarah links to
her Johnnie days. “Without St. John’s in my
background, I doubt we would have had the
courage to make such a dramatic decision,
or even have known about the pleasure of
such a life.”
Along the way, the Maras built their cot
tage on Lone Pine, which Sarah’s parents
had owned, and where she and her family
camped out in tents during the summer.
On the island, self-reliance is key. “Lifting
all the time lifting! Bringing over filled
water jugs, groceries, boxes of books, and
taking away garbage. Slippery docks in the
autumn, slippery rocks after rain. No septic
system, no public sewer system.”
{The College- St. John’s College • Fall 2005 }
Sisters Nancy Hammond (r.) and
Sarah Mara (A61) brought talents and
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES TOGETHER IN A SNUG
Little Island.
Fog can trap the Maras on their island or
keep them from returning from the
mainland. They stock up on drinking water,
canned tuna, and dried fruit to sustain
them through bad weather. Once the
couple awoke to a violent storm that shook
the house. “Trees were cracking in half all
around us,” Mara recalls. “Waves slammed
against the shore. The storm cut a swath
through the islands, uprooting trees and
swamping boats. We lost electricity for
five days.”
Ultimately, the benefits far outweigh the
difficulties. “The island is a refuge,” Mara
says. “We can be boisterous, we can be
quiet. We can be idle or industrious. It’s
snug in the cottage, especially with a fire in
the woodstove when it’s cold or rainy.”
continued on pg.
�{Alumni Notes}
37
Policy. He previously served as
executive director of The Philan
thropy Roundtable. Prior to that,
O’Gara was a drug policy analyst
for the Senate Committee on the
Judiciary. Earlier in his career,
he served as a foreign policy
specialist, advising the adminis
trator of the Drug Enforcement
Administration at the
Department of Justice.
Jennifer Lee (SF) has career
news: “My family and I have
been back in the states four years
now. I am currently teaching
third- and fourth-graders at a
small progressive school where
the money is poor but the
teaching is good.”
1990
1989
Matthew Shane Heimann was born to Dave (A87) and Jeannie
Heimann on July 4, 2005. He weighed 7LBS. 14 oz and was 19 3/4"
LONG. He joins his brothers Jake, 4 z/2, and Noah, 2.
parenting, mountaineering, and
skiing. I’ve come to appreciate
the many natural attractions and
cultural events in New England.
Best to all.”
1988
James F. X. O’Gara (A) was
nominated by President George
W. Bush to be deputy director for
Supply Reduction at the Office of
National Drug Control Policy.
He currently serves as special
assistant to the Director of the
Office of National Drug Control
continued
Each October, when the days grow colder
and the river becomes dark and foreboding,
the Maras move to a home in Kingston,
Ontario. When they return to Lone Pine
each summer, they must reclaim the island
from a boisterous gaggle of geese.
Though she had never written fiction
before, Hammond’s encouragement-and
her offer to illustrate the project-were all
Mara needed to take on the project.
Summer on the St. Lawrence River was
translated into words and images, and two
children, Richard and Kate, were nudged
into life, complete with cheerful curiosity,
thin limbs, and blowing flaxen hair. In the
story, the two children are placed with their
duffle bags aboard Captain Harry’s water
taxi to be ferried over to Lone Pine Island
for a vacation visit with their aunt and
uncle.
Kilian Garvey (SF) recently
Nathaniel Herz (A) writes:
“Alexander Shulman Herz was
born on Feb. 27, 2004, and he’s
a beautiful baby! He joins
Charlotte Shulman Herz, born
on May 7, 2002-the apple of her
Daddy’s eye. Contact Nathaniel
at NH237@columbia.edu
Refactoring to Patterns, a soft
ware industry bestseller by Josh
Kerievsky (SF) is now in its
third printing and has been
translated into eight languages.
The adventures and mishaps of Richard
and Kate spring not only from memories of
Sarah and Nancy, but also from those of the
real-life Richard, Nancy’s son, now 33, who
loved the island life throughout his child
hood. (Mara named the young heroine of
her book after Richard’s wife, Kate.)
Along with illustrating the book, her
sister provided editorial advice and encour
agement, says Mara. “Nancy was my editor,
my sounding board, my critic. She insisted
on the ‘real’ thing-forcing me to dig deeper
into my memory. We exchanged memories.
I would ask her, ‘do you remember, did
Captain Harry wear a hat? What sound do
katydids make? How do waves sound hitting
the rocks?’ ”
From this partnership grew a handsome
book in which the children’s activities are
wholly familiar: learning to sleep in a tent,
operate a boat, shop for provisions, and
outrace a storm. The book captures a
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
finished his dissertation
(“Cerebral Laterality of False
Memories”) and received a Ph.D.
in cognitive neuropsychology
from the University of Toledo.
“I now do research in social
neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology at the University
of New England in Biddeford,
Maine.”
Alexandra Edelglass
Stockwell (A) writes, “Gabriel
Thomas joined our family June
9, 2005. He was born at home,
weighing ii lbs., 8 oz. Eight-yearold sister Josephine, 6-year-old
brother Christopher, and his
continued on pg. gg
timeless child’s world, an endless summer
vacation. Hammond’s bright drawings of
rock-strewn islands, herons, and barefoot
children bring the island world to life. A
longtime friend of the college, Hammond is
well known for her artwork, which for years
she sold in a shop near the campus.
Sarah Mara and Nancy Hammond return
to St. John’s in November to speak at the
the Caritas Society’s Meet the Authors pro
gram, an annual fund-raiser in Annapolis
that also features journalists Steve and
Cokie Roberts. A Snug Little Island can be
ordered from Pink Granite Press, PO Box
231, Thousand Island Park, N.Y. 136920231; or on Nancy Hammond’s Web site:
www.nancyhammondeditions.com.
—Nancy Zimmerman and Rosemary Harty
�38
{Alumni Profile}
High-Flying Ideals
Kira Zielinski, SFgs, Finds Fuljillment in the Skies
BY Erica Naone (A05)
helicopter, to Kira Zielins
ki, is “a bionic extension
of your body.” The energy
of the machine, which can
stay still in the air or make
tiny motions there, “courses through you and you have to feel
it.” Accidents happen, she says,
“when it starts flying you; when it
is a machine.”
Zielinski learned to fly helicop
ters during a seven-year stint in
the Marine Corps, which she
joined the day after graduating
from St. John’s in Santa Fe in 1995.
Now a civilian, she pilots Chopper
4 over the streets of Washington,
D.C., toting a WRC news crew
covering traffic, weather, and
breaking news.
Her passage from the academic
life at St. John’s to the technical
and physical training she received
to become a pilot makes sense in
light of what matters most to her
in the Great Conversation. A ques
tion she keeps at the forefront of
her thoughts and actions is, “What
is life?” At St. John’s, Zielinski
says, “it was a training in think
ing-in honing your being to the
maximum extent, in living
consciously and not as an animal.”
In the search for a conscious
life, Zielinski has tested herself
mind and body. She loved St. John’s for
its academic intensity, and she chose the
Marines in part for the rigorous physical
training. She has bicycled through the
Pyrenees. She has immersed herself in the
history of the Crusades, fascinated by “the
sheer corporeal nature of it all.” What
becomes clear about Zielinski after an hour
of conversation is that when she says she is
“not a cubicle girl,” she means that down
to her core. She is not satisfied with being
told the answer, with hearing about how
something works, or with anything besides
going out and trying it for herself.
It was this that led her to St. John’s in
the first place. Zielinski had always been
interested in classics. When a guidance
counselor at her Massachusetts boarding
school told her about St. John’s, she was
attracted to an educational philosophy
that required students to “read the books
themselves, to go out and chart the sun
with the Ptolemy stone, not just sit in the
classroom.”
Not A CUBICLE girl; Kira Zielinski (SF95)
ONE DAY HOPES TO FLY FOR HUMANITARIAN AID
MISSIONS ACROSS THE GLOBE.
Her decision to join the Marines
shocked some of her classmates, but
Zielinski was driven by a need to get out
from behind a desk and explore “the other
side of the Greek ideal.” The transition
was a bit of a jolt. After four years of
discussing honor and virtue in seminar,
she was handed a book on her first day in
the Marines that had definitions for both.
She respected the definitions she found
there, but the contrast in her environment
was clear.
Zielinski looks back on her time in the
military with respect and gratitude, but
she is also relieved to have returned to
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
civilian life. The only female in a squad of
13 men, Zielinski felt a pressure far differ
ent from what she had felt as the only
female lab assistant in Santa Fe. In the
military, she found herself in a situation
where “anyone with a sensitive soul was
picked on extra hard.” It was
emotionally difficult to be the
image of a Marine at all times, to
be always reserving a private
place in herself apart from her
identity as a marine.
As a marine, however, her peers
trusted her to act with a high
level of honor and integrity. She
enjoyed the respect she was able
to earn as an officer and misses
the understanding that “your
word is your honor.” Sharp
analysis of great historical battles
appealed to her, as did getting out
from behind a desk and learning
to fly.
After her discharge, and some
time off to travel, Zielinksi wound
up in Tucson, Ariz. The military
taught her how to fly, but she
lacked the flying time most
civilian employers require and
had a hard time finding a job in
aviation. “I was flipping through
the Yellow Pages, looking up ‘H’
for helicopter and making phone
calls,” she says.
Her persistence paid off. She
embarked on a series of helicopter odd
jobs, such as firefighting and flying short
sightseeing tours over the Hoover Dam
and the Grand Ganyon. Along the way,
she gained the flight hours she needed
and made connections in the aviation
community.
Earlier this year, Zielinski began
studying for a master’s degree in aviation.
Within a few years, she’d like to volunteer
for an organization like Doctors Without
Borders. As someone who has always
sought to be like Tomb Raider’s Lara Groft,
she wants to apply her technical skill, sense
of adventure, and passion for languages
and learning-always keeping in mind both
sides of the Greek Ideal.
�{AlumniNotes}
father, Rodd, and I are happy
and grateful. Our holistic medi
cine practice is growing,
although I will be at home work
ing on the domestic arts as best I
can for an undetermined (long)
time.”
bi-gay, reproductive, and other
civil rights and liberties, Nancy
will be going on the market next
year as a constitutional law
professor.
1994
1991
Akiba Covitz and Miriam
Spectre (both A) announce the
birth of their daughter, Lilah
Spectre-Covitz, born in May
2004. She joins her brother,
Abe, who turned four in May
2005. Look for us in Virginia
cars with the plates “SJC91”
and “FERRIES.”
1992
Brad Hodge (SF) was married
in November 2003. “My wife and
I are in the process of adopting a
child from Guatemala. We are
very excited! I see Luke Warren
(SF) often, since he also lives in
the D.C. area.”
1993
Nancy Marcus (A) has received
her LL.M, (second law degree)
from the LFniversity of Wisconsin
Law School and is now pursuing
her SJD (third law degree) as a
dissertator at UW. Her thesis
article, entitled “Reyond Romer
and Lawrence: The Right to
Privacy Comes out of the
Closet,” is due to be published
by the Columbia Journal of
Gender and Law in the Winter
2005/2006 issue. Aboard
member of the National Lesbian
and Gay Law Foundation and an
activist and lecturer on lesbian-
39
1996
Marybeth Guerrieri (A)
Brian and Lea Brock (Brian,
completed her master’s degree
in Transpersonal Studies at the
Institute of Transpersonal
Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif.
SF, ECoi, and Lea, A98, ECoi)
write: “We are conducting an
experiment. Can one exist in the
world with his notions of the
Good, True, and Beautiful?
We are renting a farm near
Madison, where Brian is starting
Sawhorse Recording Studio and
playing with a band called
Goodbye Kitty. Lea is training
her new horse and exploring
equestrian and Socratic summer
possibilities. The fact that she
received a teaching license
having admitted to exclusively
engaging in Socratic Seminar
with students and to never
teaching to the standards-is a
bit of evidence suggesting an
affirmative answer to the
aforementioned question.
David M. Brooks (SF) has
Hanan Mikuasz (AGI) writes of
relocated to Florida and has
successfully opened his own
private practice specializing in
adult mental health. He is
looking forward to start training
to become a psychoanalyst in the
next year.
a recent homecoming: “I took
my live-year-old son in July to see
the Pyramids and the land where
I grew up. The Pyramids haven’t
changed much, but just about
everything else did. Congestion,
people, and noise are every
where. Still, I was comforted by
the defiance of some aspects of
Egyptian culture to change and
by my son’s smiles.”
“I just wanted to share the news
of my second baby boy, Owen
Louis, born April 29, 2005,”
writes Phoebe Merrin Carter
(SF). “Brother Dylan has just
turned 4.1 am (still) the Youth
Services Manager for the Weber
County Library System in
Ogden, Utah. My husband is an
adjunct professor of history at
the university here, and we have
this great old house, 86 years
old! Greetings to everyone with
whom I have lost touch! ”
1995
1997
J. Stephen Pearson (A) recently
completed required coursework
for a Ph.D. in comparative
literature: “My main foci are
American minority literature
and the history of Christian
devotional literature,” he writes.
“For my dissertation, I plan to
explore the similarities between
minority experiences and
religious experiences.”
Cameron T. Graham (SF) is a
specialist with Army Intelligence
at the Defense Language
Institute, Monterey, Calif. While
stationed at Fort Jackson, S.C.,
earlier, he won the award for a
perfect score in the physical
program. He’s been serving with
the Army for about 15 months.
Nice to Reminisce
Jennifer Swaim (A) is pleased to
announce the receipt of her doc
toral degree in psychology. She
specializes in health psychology
and is currently a research fellow
at a private hospital in north
eastern Ohio. She would enjoy
hearing from old friends at
jcswaim@gmail.com.
ara Giles (SF95) writes: “My husband, John,
and I are enjoying Nebraska’s good life and all
it has to offer. He continues to be a biology
professor and conduct research in parasitology
at one of the colleges, while I am finishing up
a master’s degree at the university in anthropol
ogy, specifically on Mexican immigration and cultural divers
I work with numerous people with connections to St. John’s
all have wonderful things to say about SJC, so it is nice to
reminisce with them. In other news, our daughter, Sofia, turned
10 this year and won top honors at the Nebraska Summer Music
Olympics in piano, and her fourth-grade standardized testing
demonstrated that her academic and scholastic skills are at an
advanced high school level. We have a lot to be proud of in her,
but mostly that she is a wonderful person. If anyone is in
Nebraska and wants to meet at the Coffee House in Lincoln,
drop me a line atyehkatah@yahoo.com.”
M
{The College. 5t. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
�{Alumni Notes}
40
Heidi Jacot (A) is starting
Yale Divinity’s School’s Master
of Arts in Religion program
this fall.
1998
Alexandra D.E. Boozer (A)
married Daniel Giguere of
Windham, Maine, on September
19, 2004. She has even more
news: “Last year I received my
doctorate in clinical psychology
from George Washington
University, with a specialization
in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
We are currently living in
Holmes Beach, Fla., where I am
working toward obtaining
Florida psychology licensure. I
would love to hear from any old
friends or to link with other
students/alumni with an interest
in practicing psychology. I can
be reached by email at: alexandra
_FL@hotmail.com”
writes Brendan Bullock (A).
“Currently I’m putting work
together for my first solo show at
Santa Fe’s Price Dewey Gallery
ATHY GarcIa (SF03) was pleased to be accepted
in
November. I’ve also launched
to the Graduate School of Education and Infor
my
own Web site, which I hope
mation Sciences at UCLA. This program will,
people will visit: www.brendanat the end of two years, award her a master’s in
bullock.com. I would love to
education and full credentialing so that she will
hear from any and all by e-mail. I
be able to teach mathematics to high-schoolers
can
be contacted through my
in L.A.’s inner city. (“In the city, city of Compton.”) If
anyone
Webtosite or at brendanbullock@
is strolling through Southern California, please feel free
hotmail.com.”
contact her at PHI_PI_E@hotmail.com.
Straight Into Compton
C
her husband, Rob, are excited to
announce the arrival of their hrst
child, Evangeline Jane, on
November 16 at 5:33 a.m. “At
birth she weighed 7 pounds,
3.5 ounces, and was 19 inches
long. Her name means ‘Good
news, God is gracious,’ and
that’s exactly how we feel about
her; she is good news and God
was so gracious to give us this
precious baby. She really is the
perfect baby. She has always
slept for at least four hours
straight at night, and she hardly
ever fusses.”
Lorna Johnson (SF) has
recently started her own
business in executive IT
recruitment. She has also been
accepted as an associate director
at The Artistic Home, an equity
theater in Chicago, and as a
faculty member at the Artistic
Home’s training studio, which
teaches Meisner method acting
to professional actors. She also
recently became a member of
the Board of Directors. Her
husband, Aaron Johnson,
continues to play piano and
organ professionally.
Nathan August Scheifer (SF)
reports: “Computer engineering
degree completed in December
2004; new house closed in April
3005; my son was born on June
3, 3005; and I passed the Patent
Bar Exam on July 18, 3005.”
Justin Kray (SF) writes:
Jackie (Cavim) Travis (A) and
1999
HonorMoody (SF) writes,
“I finally graduated from library
school and am currently
cataloging 17th-, i8th- and 19thcentury culinary works at the
Schlesinger Library and looking
for an archival processing gig.”
2000
John M Hunter (AGI) and his
wife, Lisa, announce the birth of
George Brooks Hunter on March
30, 3005. Baby Brooks joins his
brother, Jeb, 18 months.
Andre Rodriguez (SFGI)
earned his law degree in May
3004. He became a licensed
attorney in Texas in November
3004. He is currently teaching
nth-grade U.S. history and
coaching soccer while working
part time as a lawyer.
Flame Schoeder (SF) and
Jeremiah Roper are intensely
proud to announce the birth of
their daughter, Sasha Ryan
Roper. She was born on May 38,
3005, at 11:59 a ™., after 58
hours of labor. She weighed in at
6 pounds, 7.7 ounces, and was
30 inches long. Writes Flame,
“She brings new meaning to the
word ‘wonderful.’ ”
“Shortly after arriving in
Brooklyn, N.Y., it came to my
attention that Mike DiMezza
(SFGI98) was living in the
neighborhood. Although
reminiscing about books is great
fun, the new bond between our
lives has been restoring his
beautiful brownstone and
discussing urban planning.
Thom Barry (SF03), a mutual
friend of ours, is also an integral
part of our new bond. Tom and I
worked together doing carpentry
in Marblehead, Mass,, and in
exchange he introduced me to
some great urban thinkers and
new wave music. Now, I am in
graduate school at the Pratt
Institute for urban design while
he has become a foreman in
Northampton, Mass. Synergies
abound!”
Suzannah Simmons (SF) is
entering her second year of law
school at Florida Coastal School
of Law in Jacksonville, Fla., with
an eye toward practicing real
estate and animal law. “My best
to SJC!” she writes.
Patrick B. Reed (AGI)
celebrated the birth of his first
child, daughter Lucille (Lucy),
on his 36th birthday in June.
2001
“Though I never attended the
campus here, I ended up finding
my way out to Santa Fe, where
I’ve been working in the art
world and pursuing my photog
raphy for the past three years,”
{The Colleges?. John's College ■ Fall 2005 }
Floye Heather Wells (A)
writes, “Just finished my
master’s degree in ecology at
Colorado State University in
Fort Collins and got a job teach
ing middle-school and high
school science out on the plains
of Colorado at the Prairie
School. Drop me a line if you
ever find yourself out this way:
floyewells@yahoo.com
�{Alumni Notes}
What’s Keeping You?
T
here’s an online community waiting for you to join.
About 2,300 alumni have registered to join the
St. John’s College Online Community since the
college launched the site last year. That leaves a
lot of Johnnies out there who have yet to register
and update their information (name, address.
occupation, e-mail). Your information can only be viewed by
other registered alumni, registration is fast and easy, and you
can choose which information you want available for other
alumni to view. To register, go to vww.stjohnscollege.edu and
click on Alumni.
Beyond the usual directory information, the site offers you a
place to show off pictures, set up buddy lists for friends you
frequently e-mail, and do
some online networking.
Later this fall, the college’s
Career Services offices plan
to begin building an online
resource for career net
working, connecting men
tors, and posting resumes.
Registered or not,
alumni can use the site to
learn about chapter
happenings, college events,
and St. John’s news.
Questions or suggestions?
Contact the Web master in
Annapolis: victoria. smith@
sjca.edu.
Classics in Santa Fe. It was
Oedipal, except I wanted to kill
my brothers and they wanted to
sleep with the tutor. One
brother, as well as Martha and
Ray Wallace, asked about the
lovely Ms. Schoux. Where are
you Ms. Schoux?
I spend my time between
live/work offices in NYC’s
Gramercy Park (where I lead a
Johnnie-style great books group)
and L.A.’s Hancock Park (where
I lead a great films group-you
have to go slow with Angelenos).
I can be reached at
Jim@Monk.com.”
2003
Meg Eisenhauer Barry and
Thom Barry (both SF) are
thrilled to welcome a daughter.
Aviva Thomas Barry was born at
home June 4 in Northampton,
Mass. “We can be reached at
m_eisenhauer@mac.com in case
you find yourself in western
Massachusetts!”
infantry platoon leader,” writes
Robert Morris (SF). “As an
infantry officer, I am being
afforded the opportunity to
attend some additional schooling
before I report to my unit. Right
now I am in Ranger School. It is
very challenging and extremely
arduous. I am about to begin my
third attempt to pass. The army
has taught me a lot. The army’s
lessons are not always fun, but
they are lessons that I never
would have learned from reading
and reflection. Later this year I
go to 2nd Brigade of the loth
Mountain Division at Fort
Drum, N.Y. I have a lot of
difficult work ahead of me, but it
ought to be rewarding in propor
tion to the challenge.”
Last summer Justine Stewart
(SF) finished up a year in
St. Cloud, Minn., where she has
been working as an EKG
technician. She was next off to
California for a two-month stint
as an outdoor instructor“leading groups of students on
camping trips and living out of
my car and a tent. I am nervous
and very excited.”
Rebecca A. Dwyer (SF) kept it
Jim Crotty (SFGI), is still
2002
Amelia Adams (A) writes,
“After returning from a year in
Zambia working with an NGO on
HIV prevention and treatment, I
have started at the School of
Medicine at Washington
University in St. Louis.”
John Cottrell (A) completed
law school at the University of
Richmond in December 2004
and passed the bar exam in April
2005. He is practicing law in
Alexandria, Va.
co-president of MONK, “the
company I co-founded several
kalpas ago with fellow “Monk,”
Michael Lane, as the publishing
arm of our travel quarterly
Monk: The Mobile Magazine,
www.Monk.com. MONK has
since birthed several offspring,
including seven-year-old Monk
Media, www.MonkMedia.net, a
cute and bubbly web and graphic
design firm; four-year-old Monk
Host, www.MonkHost.net, a hitech tomboy; and recent addition
Monk TV, which produces and
distributes the inflammatory
Crotty Farm Report, www.crottyfarmreport.com, among other
channels.
This past July I attended a
Freud seminar with my two older
brothers at St. John’s Summer
short: “I’m in China!”
What’s Up?
Michael Kopp (EC) and Jana
Phillips (SFGI) were married
May 22, 2005, in Sedona, Ariz.
After teaching in France for a
year, they are now living in
Denver, where Michael edits
children’s textbooks, and Jana is
a prison librarian. Michael has
also been accepted for graduate
study in an English Ph.D.
program to begin fall 2006.
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you’re doing. The next issue
will be published in January;
deadline for the alumni notes
section is November 30.
Classnotes posted to the col
lege’s online community will
also be included in The College.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404;
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
2004
“Since graduation, I have been
commissioned in the Army as a
2nd lieutenant and trained as an
{The College -Sf. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
In Santa Fe:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
�{AlumniProfile}
Just a Good Ol’ Boy
Chris Nelson, SFgg, Gives Dukes Fans the Scoop
Wi Jason A. Bielagus, SF98
t sounds like a prank,
but it’s the God-honest
truth: Chris Nelson
(SF99), entered a
competition to become
the vice president of
the CMT Dukes of Hazzard
Institute. To get the job, he
had to demonstrate fanatical
devotion to the 1980s televi
sion series and draw up a
marketing plan. (One idea:
sponsor a General Lee dog
sled in the Iditarod). He beat
out 1,900 other applicants,
debuting as the new VP at the
DukesFest in Bristol, Tenn.,
last June.
And-this is the part that
really sounds made-up-he will
earn $100,000 for a year of
watching Dukes ofHazzard
re-runs, writing a daily blog
about the episodes, and making periodic
public appearances in his official Dukes of
Hazzard Institute orange blazer.
The “Institute” is funded by CMT, a
country-music cable television channel
that airs reruns of the Dukes ofHazzard.
For those who missed it the first time
around, the show featured cousins Bo and
Luke Duke driving down the dirt roads of
Hazzard County in an orange ’69 Dodge
Charger, the General Lee. Their fetching
cousin, Daisy Duke, inspired a new fashion
trend in her cutoff jeans, and bumbling
sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane-firmly under the
wing of corrupt Boss Hog-was regularly
foiled by the clever Dukes.
To promote the series and the network,
CMT announced a nationwide search for a
vice president. Nelson, an aspiring
singer/songwriter who was then working
as a part-time temp, caught an ad for the
job on CMT and went after it wholeheart
edly, creating a Web site outlining his
campaign platform, sending telegrams to
the network’s executives, and writing
reams of Duke-inspired musings.
In his application. Nelson wrote: “The
Dukes ofHazzard is a wonderful program
because it delivers comedy, action, and a
Chris Nelson (SFgg) meets
THE FAMOUS GENERAL LeE.
I
positive message wrapped up in lovable
characters in a mythical place. It brings
joy to people’s lives one hour at a time. It is
my thought that the Dukes of Hazzard
Institute should mirror the series in this
way and strive to bring fun and enjoyment
to the legions of fans all over the world and
make some new ones in the process.”
Nelson was one of three people chosen
to be flown down to Nashville for intensive
interviews, round-table discussions, oncamera interviews, and a photo shoot with
the General Lee.
As VP of the Dukes of Hazzard Institute,
Nelson is tasked with watching the Dukes
ofHazzard on CMT and summarizing
each episode in his blog. In addition to
publishing a blog. Nelson also makes media
appearances promoting the institute.
For one such appearance. Nelson
appeared on the nationally broadcast Fox
and Friends in the Morning. Nelson came
on just after Ken Mehlman, chairman for
the Republican National Committee, and
just before singer Harry Connick, Jr. “That
gives you an idea of where my celebrity is
in the pecking order,” Nelson says.
On a day free from media appearances.
Nelson awakes in his Manhattan apartment
sometime before noon. After having some
{The College- St. John's College ■ Fall 2005 }
Nescafe while reading the
papers. Nelson does his
calisthenics, then settles
down to work on his blog.
Next, he might give a few
phone interviews and write
treatments extolling the
virtue of the Dukes. Evenings
are free for socializing.
Asked about the contribu
tion that the Dukes have
made to Western thought.
Nelson offers, “Part of the
reason why the show’s so
popular, why it’s so great, is
that you have muscle cars
driving around on dirt roads
crashing into each other, foxy
ladies in skimpy outfits, lots of explosions,
good fighting, great slapstick comedy, and
justice delivered in just under an hour.
That’s good, old-fashioned American
escapism.”
A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Nelson
was “pretty directionless” after graduating
from St. John’s. “I had heard some people
were making money in this thing called
‘the Internet.’ So I moved to Austin, Texas,
began selling bandwidth for an Internet
company, and eventually ended up in
investor relations.”
After the tech bubble burst. Nelson
spent many lost months in Mexico, Cuba,
South America, and Colorado. The next
few years found him working a string of
jobs including hotel clerk, graphic
designer, and food writer.
Although his contract with CMT is only
for a year. Nelson hopes his experience will
open doors for him. “I’ve been talking a
little bit about being the president of the
My Two Dads Institute or the chief
financial officer of the Starsky & Hutch
Foundation,” he says,
Lookfor Nelson’s blog at
WWW. cmtdukesinstitute. com
�{Obituaries}
Santa Fe tutor Ralph
SwENTZEL, CIRCA 1969.
Rai,I’ll SwEMZELL, HA95
Santa Fe Tutor
Retired Santa Fe tutor Ralph Swentzell died
on June 16, 3005, following a lengthy strug
gle with prostate cancer.
Mr. Swentzell was born in East Paterson,
N.J., and attended Highlands University in
Las Vegas, N.M., where he earned his
degree in psychology in 1963. He joined the
faculty in Santa Fe in 1966 and retired in
3003. He was one of the most innovative
members of the faculty, having a profound
impact on the laboratory and music
tutorials, and contributing to an ongoing
dialogue concerning the language tutorials.
His extensive handwritten notes on all
subjects of the laboratory, mathematics,
and music tutorials were his means of
making the subjects completely his own,
including, for instance, a resolution of the
rod-and-slot paradox of special relativity.
He created a computer-based Chinese
language lexicon for the college’s Eastern
Classics program, and his computer
modeling of non-Euclidean geometry
yielded fascinating insights.
He was also adept in class discussions.
Above all, his persistent curiosity, spirit of
inquiry, and good-willed enthusiasm
inspired colleagues and students alike.
A memorial service for Mr. Swentzell is
planned for early fall in Santa Fe. The
College will publish selections from the
memorial service in an upcoming edition.
John Sarkissian, HA03
Annapolis Tutor
by Gerald Bunker
John Ludwig Sarkissian, a long-time tutor
at St. John’s College, died July ii, 3005, at
his home in Annapolis. He was born in
Chicago, eldest son of Eleisha and Araxie,
both natives of Istanbul
who fled the TurkishArmenian troubles. In
1939, he began his studies
in biology at the University
of Chicago, hut left the uni
versity in 1943 to enlist in
the Army. For the rest of his
life he delighted in regaling
his friends and family with
war stories, which may have
improved in the retelling.
Some facts are that he
initially trained at Princeton as a military
administrator in Italy. After the fall of Italy,
he shipped out to the Pacific as an
intelligence operative, was stationed in
New Guinea, and was part of the retaking
of Manila.
Resuming his academic career, he
received his B.S. from the University of
Illinois in 1946 and his M.A. in 1948, He
was an instructor in biological and physical
sciences at the University of Chicago, the
Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, the
University of Indiana, and the University
of Illinois.
The high point of his career as a research
biologist came when he was awarded a
Fulbright Scholarship to the Institute of
Human Heredity at the University of
Bologna, Italy. In 1963, he came to
St. John’s, where he established a
sophomore program that taught biological
evolution through dissection.
Mr. Sarkissian was an ardent traveler and
naturalist. To the end of his life he remained
a voracious reader. After his retirement in
1984 he kept active in all his favorite activi
ties, becoming a docent at the Smithsonian
Institution and a lifelong student of world
history, Russian, French, Greek, and Latin.
He is survived by a daughter, Julia Oaten;
his former wife, Flor Bunker; and a brother,
Vincent.
Jerome LaPides, HA91
Board of Visitors and Governors
Jerome LaPides, who served on the
college’s Board of Visitors and Governors
for nearly two decades, died on May ii,
3005, at his home in Santa Fe. As a board
member from 1973-1991, LaPides was a
generous supporter of the college, having
{The College. St. /oZira’5 College ■ Fall 2005 }
43
established with his father, Joseph, the
LaPides Scholarship Fund in 1979. He also
played a key role in overseeing construction
of Santa Fe’s Meem Library.
Born in Baltimore, Mr. LaPides graduated
from the Naval Academy in 1951 and later
served as an Air Force captain stationed in
Japan. In 1956 he entered the corporate
world, joining the Pepsi-Cola Bottling
Company in Baltimore and opening the
company’s Annapolis location.
His extensive community service included
serving on the board of the Anne Arundel
Medical Center, and as a trustee of Key
School and Severn School. He was president
of the LaPides Foundation, which has
supported many different causes over
the years, including animal welfare,
community development, environment and
conservation, fine arts, higher education,
women’s issues, and child welfare.
In 1988, Mr. LaPides retired as the
president and owner of Pepsi-Cola Bottling
Company in Annapolis. After moving to
New Mexico, he and his wife. Allene,
opened the LaPides Gallery.
In addition to his wife, his survivors
include his son, John M. LaPides; his
daughters Ann L. Misenheimer and Jane R.
LaPides; and five grandchildren.
Admiral James Stockdale
Board of Visitors and Governors
Retired Vice Admiral James Stockdale,
who died in July at his home in California,
served on the college’s Board of Visitors
and Governors from 1981 to 1987. Admiral
Stockdale, a Navy pilot who endured seven
years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam,
became one of the most highly decorated
officers in the history of the Navy. He
received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s
highest tribute for valor in action.
Admiral Stockdale was born in Illinois and
graduated from the Naval Academy in 1947.
The Navy sent him to Stanford University
for a master’s degree, and there he became
enamored of the Greek stoic philosophers.
Admiral Stockdale served on the USS
Oriskany and flew 301 missions before he
was shot down in September 1965. Shackled
in leg irons for two years, and in solitary
confinement for four, he endured torture
and degradation at the Hoa Lo Prison, but
would not give in to his captors.
continued on nextpage
�44
continuedfromp. 40
Admiral Stockdale and his fellow prisoners
were freed in 1973. He served as president of
the Naval War College, where he also taught
philosophy and developed an ethics course,
and later was president of The Citadel in
South Carolina. In 1981, he joined the
Hoover Institution, where he was a senior
research fellow.
Erik S. Kristensen, AGI99
Navy Seal
by Andrew Ranson, AGIoo
Erik Kristensen, 33, a lieutenant command
er in the Navy SEALs, died June 18, 2005,
in Afghanistan. He was leading a rescue
mission when his Chinook helicopter was
shot down by Afghan insurgents.
Erik and I were fast friends the minute we
met as classmates in the Graduate Institute
in January 2000.1 had just moved to
Annapolis from San Diego; Erik, a 1995
graduate of the Naval Academy, had lived
there off and on for years and was teaching
English at the academy. We spent hours
upon hours talking about everything we
could think of that winter, and during the
spring, our conversations continued as we
played Frisbee on front campus. Erik lived
the examined life that Socrates spoke of; he
was the best example of self-reflection
I’ve known.
Now that he’s gone, those of us who were
close to him have been examining our own
lives, noting how he influenced us. He had
many gifts; he was a terrific writer and had a
fantastic sense of humor. Always the life of
the party, Erik stuffed a centerpiece into his
shirt pocket and then hammed it up for the
camera at my wedding. He was smart and
creative, laid-back and intense, curious
and fearless.
Since he had grown up a Navy brat and
lived all over the world, he was great at
staying in touch with people over great
distances and long stretches of time. He had
a keen appreciation for the little things in
Ufe: the perfect fish taco, good music from
all genres, a well-made movie. He was a
wonderful listener, making you feel that
what you said really mattered. Erik rarely
complained about anything; he seemed to
see the bright side of life at every moment.
One of his most endearing qualities was that
he was such a dependable and supportive
friend. His generosity, selflessness, and
compassion for others were unparalleled.
{Obituaries}
Erik was sent to SEAL training midway
through his studies and had planned to
return in a few years, when his Navy
commitment was finished. He loved the
contemplative life and discussing the
Program so much, I had difficulty under
standing how he could join a Special Forces
team where action and danger dominated
over contemplation. I realized only after he
died that he truly believed that his duty was
''Those who delivered
his eulogies spoke ofhis
insatiable thirstfor life,
his compassion, and his
desire to connect with
those he loved.
Andrew Ranson (AGIoo)
to make sure that in potentially volatile
situations, there was someone in a position
to make decisions who had contemplated
the larger truths in life. He knew that others
depended on him for just this.
At his funeral, more than 2,000 friends
and family members filled the Naval
Academy Chapel. Those who delivered his
eulogies spoke of his insatiable thirst for
life, his compassion, and his desire to
connect with those he loved. He was laid to
rest with full honors on Hospital Point at the
Naval Academy.
Since Socrates often came up in our
conversations, I thought it fitting that this
passage from The Republic leapt off the page
at me recently. I picked the book up, think
ing of Erik and how our friendship was
cemented over discussions of it. Erik would
blush at being compared to Socrates’
description of a philosopher, but I think
those who knew Erik will find it quite appro
priate. Socrates asks Glaucon, “But the one
who is willing to taste every kind of learning
with gusto, and who approaches learning
with delight, and is insatiable, we shall justly
assert to be a philosopher, won’t we?”
(475d).
Farewell to a great man, a true Johnnie,
and a wonderful friend.
{The College. 5f. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
John David Hindle-Hardt
AGI96
A generous nature and giving spirit is
reflected in an essay John David HindleHardt (AGI96) wrote on hospitality: “The
Greek word Philoxenia means love of
strangers. We are apt to forget in our culture
that hospitality is not something we extend
to friends or neighbors, but rather to the
stranger, the outcast.. .The Latin word
(hospes, hospitis) specifies the particular
shape this love takes: the offering of a place
to those who have none. . .”
Mr. Hindle-Hardt, who was killed in an
automobile accident on September 9, 2004,
in Portland, Maine, had dedicated much of
his life to helping those who might be
considered outcasts of society. He believed
that all people deserve to be treated with
dignity and respect, and this shone through
in his life’s work and in his friendships.
At the time of his death, he was employed
by Creative Work Systems, an organization
that sought to enable persons with cogni
tive, physical, and psychiatric handicaps to
gain self-sufficiency. Prior to working in
Maine, Mr. Hindle-Hardt had worked as a
volunteer for a residential community for
the handicapped in Toronto. For three
years, he was residential director of a men’s
home in Richmond, Va. In addition to
working as a teacher for several years, he
also tutored Asian immigrants at a refugee
and resettlement center and taught adults
how to read in Annapolis. In these settings,
“his compassion and kindness and giving
nature found true expression,” according to
his friend Joel Werkema.
Those who knew him describe Mr. HindleHardt as someone with a great sense of
humor and a serious purpose in fife. “When
you were with him, he made you feel as
though you were the center of attention,”
said Paula Swann (AGI97). “And if he wasn’t
making you laugh, he would involve you in
deep and meaningful conversations about
academics, friendship, and life.”
“It was common knowledge that amidst all
of J.D.’s hilarious stories and jokes there
would be these sensitive and supportive
words of encouragement right when
someone needed them most,” said Jennifer
Stanbro (AGI96).
Hardt is survived by his mother, Martha
Hindle-Hardt Rice; his stepfather, Donald
N. Rice; and his sister, Meg Hardt.
�{Obituaries}
Tevtna Benedict, SF73
Tevina Benedict, 54, was killed in a fall on
May 7, aoof), while hiking on the Oregon
coast. Born Decemher a, 1950, in Chicago,
Ill., she became a passionate advocate for
social justice after graduating from
St. John’s. She worked on the New Mexico
Review and participated in the founding of
La Clinica de la Gente.
After moving to Portland in 1980,
Ms. Benedict served on the staff of the
Governor’s Commission of the Uninsured,
on the board of Neighborcare Health Clinic,
and for Oregon Health Decisions. She
staffed the group that created the first
Oregon Advance Directive/living will.
After moving to Eugene in 1989 she worked
at the Oregon Department of Health Policy
and with the Oregon Health Action
Campaign to support and expand the found
ing of what is now the Oregon Health Plan.
She later earned a master’s degree in public
health policy from the University of Oregon.
Her survivors include her husband, Dave
Barta, and daughter. Erica Benedict-Barta.
45
Ellen Becker, SFGI87
Ellen “Ellie” Becker died at her home in
Santa Fe on June ii, 2005, at age 54, from
cancer. She leaves behind her husband, Ron
Hale, former director of Career Planning
and part-time tutor on the Santa Fe cam
pus; sons Jesse, 27, and Luke, 24; and two
grandchildren. Ms. Becker worked as an
editor, journalist, and writer, including
stints at Mothering Magazine, the Museum
of New Mexico, and at newspapers in Santa
Fe and Albuquerque. In addition to her
master’s degree from St. John’s, she had
received a bachelor’s degree from Goddard
College in Plainfield, Vt.
internship and residency in internal
medicine at Union Memorial Hospital.
From 1966 to 1968, he served in the Navy.
He joined Anne Arundel Medical Center in
Annapolis in 1970 and maintained a
private practice.
“He was one of the most eminent cardiol
ogists in the area, a Vietnam war veteran,
and a wonderful person all around,” said
Annapolis tutor Tom May.
Dr. Brimhall is survived by his wife, two
children, and two grandchildren.
Also noted:
Robert Gamble, AGI97, April 2005
Rodney Brimhall, AGI89
William C. Hill, class of 1946, December
Dr. Rodney Lee Brimhall, an internist and
director of a cardiac rehabilitation program
at, died July 30 in Annapolis. He was 69.
In the midst of his successful medical
career. Dr. Brimhall enrolled in the
Graduate Institute program at St. John’s.
Dr. Brimhall was born and raised in
Jacksonville, Fla. He earned his medical
degree from the University of Florida
College of Medicine and completed an
2004
George Lyon, Jr. class of 1940, January
2005
Robert Scott Massey, SF70, July 2004
Henry Clay Smith, class of 1934, July 15,
2005
John B. Traci y III, A83, May 2005
A Poem for Michael Slakey
An obituary for Michael Slakey
(A85), who died of cancer
earlier this year in France, ran
in the Spring 2005 edition of
The College magazine. We add
this remembrance of Mr. Slakey,
taken from the many tributes
from the classmates who spoke
at a memorial service for him
earlier this year. It was written
by Eric Vesper (A86).
The Old Rooms
— For Fred and Lesley Israel
When Slakey and I correspond
in the high language, I address
him as S. Croft and he calls me Leopold.
Shut off from one another like rooms,
passing letters as if through cracks
under doors - we take them like wafers,
transubstantiate tokens of the land
near St. Michael’s where we learned to
laugh
at ourselves. Once I found Slakey in town
Michael Slakey with his
CHILDREN
slowly rising to meet the swift
tide.
Perhaps the fabric of old
novels weaves
into the present in ways we
don’t see yet,
asleep in a graveyard on the long stone
of S. Croft Register. We know a priest
who hunts. He curses us for driving in the
fields
because geese won’t land when they see
signs
of humans. It is easier to ignore the
clergy,
for geese and humans, when they don’t
have guns.
the turn of the binding
opening a place
where we see ourselves folded into the
page.
We no longer have need of prophecy.
We have given names to the friends in our
story,
poured late libations on still embers
and watched the sun rise through the
shelves
By day, we plug our ears with electric
guitars.
At night we open them to the music
in the fire, the slow burn a symphony
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
of old rooms where we rest, where even
dust,
floating in the light, or pulled into
corners,
proves forces are at work against us.
�46
{Alumni Association News}
From the Alumni
Association
President
Dear Alumni,
As a student, I
didn’t want to be
bothered with the
administrative life
of the college. I
cared whether
tutors were focused
on their work, facili
ties were clean and
safe, lab equipment maintained, and food
and mail were delivered on time. Like most
adolescents, I missed the connections
between these concerns and the focus on
truth and beauty that filled my time with
friends and books in conversation. My
mother’s checkbook and the college’s
income statement seemed irrelevant then.
Today I understand-for myself and my
clients-how administrative decisions
directly affect real experience every day.
Today, alumni are engaged in all facets
of the administrative life of the college.
Chris Nelson (SF70) is president of the
Annapolis campus. Both deans are alumni:
Michael Dink (A75) in Annapolis and
David Levine (A67) in Santa Fe. Each of
these alumni and many other faculty and
staff have committed their professional
lives to the college’s academic and institu
tional well-being.
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowforinformation
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Bob & Vicki Morgan
505-275-9012
BALTIMORE
Deborah Cohen
410-472-9158
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon
410-280-0958
BOSTON
Diane Cowan
617-666-4381
dianecowan@rcn.com
AUSTIN
John Strange
210-392-5506
Bev Angel
512-926-7808
CHICAGO
Rick Lightburn
lightburn@
earthlink.net
Others integrate concerns for the col
lege with their diverse professional and
personal lives as volunteers in a variety of
college programs. Philanthropia is an all
alumni organization that supports the
fund-raising activities of the college. The
Alumni Association Board of Directors,
though an independently chartered organi
zation, works with the college to connect
more alumni, more often, and more richly.
Local Alumni Association chapters, hosts
for prospective receptions, active network
ers, and class leaders for homecomings and
special events-all make significant contri
butions of time and attention to be sure the
college is well cared for and healthy.
Another important role for alumni in
the college is on the Board of Visitors and
Governors (BVG). This body is responsible
for governance and oversight of all aspects
of the college. As you can imagine, alumni
are engaged in many ways in leadership of
this body. The chair of the board is an
alumna, Sharon Bishop (A65). Of the total
60 members of the BVG, currently 36 are
alumni of the graduate or undergraduate
programs, and seven are honorary alumni
who have been recognized by the Alumni
Association for their contributions to the
St. John’s community.
Nine of these BVG members are
nominated and elected by the Alumni
Association to serve as contributing
participants in decisions that affect the
good of the college and its broader
community of alumni. In July, three new
Alumni Association members joined the
board. Michael MacDonald (SF76) has a
professional life in the record production
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
Suzanne Lexy
Bartlette
817-721-9112
DENVER/BOULDER
Lee Katherine
Goldstein
720-746-1496
MINNEAPOLIS/
ST. PAUL
Carol Freeman
612-822-3216
business. He lives in New York City. Sanjay
Poovadan (SF83) lives in El Prado, N. M.,
where he farms and maintains a business
consulting practice. Joel Ard (Ag5) is an
attorney in Washington, D.C. These three
join Susan Allen (SFGI89), Robert Bienenfeld (SF80), Evan Dudik (A72), Bill Fant
(A7g), Thomas Stern (SF68), and Steve
Thomas (SF74) as Alumni Association
representatives to the Board of Visitors
and Governors. Our thanks to each of
them and thanks to all alumni who commit
portions of their busy lives to build and
maintain the institutional strength of
St. John’s College.
If you are interested in exploring ways
you can be more involved, please contact
me (geoyang@hsdinstitute.org or 763-7837206) or Annapolis alumni director Jo Ann
Mattson (jamattson@sjca.edu, or 410-2956ga6).
Don’t forget the wonderful online com
munity that keeps you in touch with the
college and with alumni around the globe.
As of today, 2,295 alumni have joined the
community. That is almost a third of our
goal-the 9,000 alumni of St. John’s
College. To register, to encourage others,
or to use the community to contact your
friends, go to; www.stjohnscollege.edu
and click on Alumni.
I look forward to seeing you online or at
our next homecoming celebration!
Sincerely,
Glenda H. Eoyang (SF76)
President
St. John’s College Alumni Association
NEW YORK
Daniel Van Doren
914-949-6811
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico
619-423-4972
NORTHERN CALIF.
Deborah Farrell
415-731-8804
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles
505-986-1814
PHILADELPHIA
Bart Kaplan
5^15-465-0^44
SEATTLE
Amina Brandt
206-465^781
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray
724-325-4151
SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Elizabeth Eastman
562-426-1934
PORTLAND
Lake Perriguey
lake@law-works .com
{The College -Sf. John’s College ■ Fall aooj }
TRIANGLE CIRCLE
(NC)
Susan Eversole
919-968-4856
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Deborah Papier
202-387-4520
drpapier®
starpower.net
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Julia Ward
413-648-0064
�{Alumni Association News}
In South Florida, a Multicultural
Group Savors Conversation
A certain half-truth makes
it easy for Pedro J. Mar
tinez-Fraga (A84) to get a
table at a favorite Miami
restaurant. “If I call and
use the name Pedro Mar
tinez, they think it’s the
pro baseball player, and I
always get a table,’” he
says. But a thirst for deep
er truths inspired Mar
tinez-Fraga, a partner with
an international law firm,
to form the South Florida
alumni group last year.
The South Florida
group is one of several
informal groups around
the country bringing
Johnnies together for sem
inars and social gather
ings. Some just want to
keep the conversations
going; others hope to eventually form an
official Alumni Association chapter. A little
more than a year ago, Pittsburgh Johnnies
gained their charter as an official chapter.
In Miami, the group has been united by
its “collective love of conversation,” says
Martinez-Fraga. Jon Sackson (A69) co
founded the group and helps coordinate
events, which so far have focused on revisit
ing Program books. At one of their meetings
last spring, Annapolis tutor Nick Maistrellis
and his wife, Judy (A71), joined the chapter
for a seminar on the last four books of
Plato’s Republic.
“We savor the process of getting
together, talking, laughing, and sharing a
time and space where our only concerns
are limited to questioning and discussing
those issues that have long fascinated the
authors of the great and greatest books
written in our Western tradition,” says
Martinez-Fraga.
He describes the group as a “vivid multi
cultural, professional tapestry” including
lawyers, bankers, teachers, an architect,
and a self-employed information processor.
Some travel from as far as 50 miles away to
attend gatherings. The group votes on what
to read, when to meet, which tutors to
invite to visit.“That the books can bring us
together despite the assaults of everyday
life, domestic demands, professional
47
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
All alumni have automatic membership in
the St. John’s College Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is an independent
organization, with a Board of Directors elect
ed by and from the alumni body. The board
meets four times a year, twice on each campus,
to plan programs and coordinate the affairs of
the association. This newsletter within
The College magazine is sponsored by the
Alumni Association and communicates
association news and events of interest.
President - Glenda Eoyang, SF76
Vice President - Jason Walsh, A85
Secretary -Barbara Lauer, SF76
Treasurer - Bill Fant, A79
Getting-the-Word-Out Action Team Chair-
Linda Stabler-Talty, SFGI76
Mailing address - Alumni Association,
St. John’s College, P.O Box 2800, Annapolis,
MD 21404, or tt6o Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
The Miami alumni reading Group stemmed
FROM Pedro Martinez-Fraga’s Dedication
TO St. John’s.
exigencies, and personal preferences, in
itself is a source of marvelous wonder,” says
Martinez-Fraga.
These Johnnies’ devotion to the college
extends to the famous St. John’s seminar
chair. At their initiative, the bookstore in
Annapolis worked with the chair’s manufac
turer, E.A. Clore and Sons, to make a chair
with the St. John’s logo available for pur
chase. “Like the Johnnies themselves, these
chairs are so similar, yet so individual and
unique,” Martinez-Fraga says.
Here’s a look at two other alumni reading
groups and what brings them together:
Western New England
Peter Weis (SF84), a librarian at Northfield
Mount Hermon School, hosts conversations
at a seminar-style table in his home in
Montague, Mass.:
“We’re low key, yet serious at the same
time. We meet on Sunday afternoons every
two months. There has always been convivi
ality and food but we focus on the discus
sion. Speaking for myself, it’s nice to get
together for a serious conversation about
what on the surface is a neutral topic, not
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall aooj }
politics, not current events. When we dis
cussed the Constitution it was amazing how
long the conversations stayed away from
current events-it was really about the
document. We don’t stick exclusively to
Program readings. The first seminar, about
two years ago, was on Flannery O’Connor.”
Salt Lake City
Erin Hanlon (SF03), a graduate student in
biology at the University of Utah, launched
the Salt Lake City alumni group last year:
“I formed the alumni group because I
really missed St. John’s and my fellow John
nies. It was a year since I had graduated and
I had just started graduate school at a large
research university. The difference between
the university and St. John’s was so great
that I felt a great deal of culture shock. I
missed being more active about my educa
tion. . .Our first seminar was on Martin
Luther Kings Jr.’s birthday, and so we read
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Some
thing in that made us think of the funeral
oration of Pericles. From there we went to
Job, then the Myth ofSisyphus by Camus.
Our next seminar is going to be
on The Dream ofa Ridiculous Man by
Dostoevski. Occasionally the readings and
seminars are more social. Robert Sacks led
our last seminar and his visit inspired a bit
more socializing.
�48
{St. John’sForever}
Room for
Improvement
he college issues
no formal grade
report today
(students can ask
the Registrar for
their grades), but
in 1873, the parents of prep
students at St. John’s received a
bi-monthly grade report. This
featured a “Scale of Merit as
applied to Conduct and Studies”
that started with “excellent” (5)
and went to “blameworthy” (o).
On the back was this printed
exhortation from James M. Gar
nett, principal; “I beg leave to
call attention to the accompany
ing Tabular Statement, in which
you will find a Report of the sev
eral studies pursued by your Son
(or Ward) during the last two
months in this institution and
also of his proficiency and stand
ing in each separate study. The
Scale of Merit explains the nota
tion employed. All marks falling
below 21/2 are meant to signify
that his deficiency is so serious
as to call for animadversion,
deserving to be more or less
emphatic in proportion as his
grade approximates more or less
nearly to o.”
Grades were earned through a
student’s “daily recitations”
along with written examinations
held at the end of the term. A
student whose recitations and
examinations “evince an inca
pacity on his part” to pursue the
studies of his class could face being
knocked back a grade.
This report issued to Hopewell H. Bar
roll of the second prep class on April 26,
1873, shows good grades for arithmetic,
history, English grammar, and modern
geography. Garnett added a personal
remark: “Doing well, but room for
improvement in Latin.” It’s possible that
T
Barroll-later to become a prominent
Chestertown, M<L, lawyer-received a
similar report for his son, L. Wethered
Barroll, a member of the class of 1907.
Garnett was president of St. John’s from
1870-1880; he later went on to become a
professor at the University of Virginia.
{The College- St. John’s College . Fall 2005 }
H.H. Barroll’s report card shows no
“Blameworthy” grade.
�{Alumni Events Calendar}
Windy City Shindig
umni in
Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco
have had the opportunity to attend a
special alumni gathering featuring
Christopher Nelson, president of the
Annapolis campus, and Michael Peters,
president in Santa Fe. Now it’s
Chicago’s turn.
Chicago-area alumni are invited to the
“Evening of Conversation” on Tuesday,
Nov. 15, at the Standard Cluh, 320 South
Plymouth Court. The event has a simple
format: socializing begins at 6 p.m. with
beer, wine, and hors d’oeuvres. At 7:15,
i
the presidents provide an overview of the 9
college’s academic and financial status,
talk about plans for the future Capital
Campaign at the college, answer questions,
and visit with alumni. The event ends at
about 9 p.m., but Johnnies have been
known to gather in small groups and keep
the conversation going.
The event is free of charge. For more
information, or to RSVP, call Gina Lee
in the Annapolis Advancement office at
410-295-5557 or e-mail gina.lee@sjca.edu.
More events are planned in other
for 2006.
Matthew Reiter (sFoa) and
Katherine Greco (sFoa) were among
THE ALUMNI WHO TURNED OUT FOR A
GATHERING IN PHILADELPHIA.
Santa Fe Summer Alumni Week
July
aoo6
Santa Fe Homecoming
Julya8-3O, aoo6
nd
Homecoming in Santa Fe. This year,
a special dinner for all alumni, part of the
college’s upcoming Capital Campaign,
launches the weekend, with picnics,
seminars, and parties continuing through
the weekend.
Annapolis Homecoming
Sept. 29-Oct.i, 2006.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Fall 2005 }
For information on events, contact:
Jo Ann Mattson
Office of Alumni Activities, Annapolis
410-626-2531
alumni@sjca.edu
Marnelli Hamilton
Office of Alumni and Parent Activities,
Santa Fe
505-984-6103
alumni@sicsf.edu
�Periodicals
SIJOHN’S COLLEGE
Postage Paid
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
Published
by the
Communications Office
P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
address service requested
»»«»«*»»»«»» DI GIT Q7529
S2SO Pl 15976
ANNl
MS. AMV MCCOHHELL FBftHKLlH
HC 74 BOX 24512
BL PBftBO HM 87529-9540
�
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<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
Description
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The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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thecollege2001
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48
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The College, Fall 2005
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Volume 31, Issue 3 of The College Magazine. Published in Fall 2005.
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St. John's College
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, MD
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2005-09
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The College Vol. 31, Issue Fall 2005
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Dempsey, Patricia
Hartnett, John
Behrens, Jennifer
Bielagus, Jason
Goyette, Barbara
Maguran, Andra
Mattson, Jo Ann
Naone, Erica
Vega, Libby
White, Roseanna
Johnson, David
Pattenroth, Kim
Marmion, Simon
Sullivan, Ezra
Stone, Donald
Eoyang, Glenda H.
The College
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b6b50290f2bf08b23c0b09a5067e5e85.pdf
74038a96af953c82c5fe4e22a60cafa5
PDF Text
Text
�On O’Connor
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time andplace
and eternity somehow meet. His problem is tofind that location. ”
STJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
lannery O’Connor’s fiction tends to elicit strong reactions from her
F
readers. Some object to the mixture of comedy and pathos (country girl
wooed for her wooden leg) and the blend of the mundane and shocking
(senseless violence emerges from a clear blue day on a lonely country
The College (usps 018-750)
is published quarterly by
St. John’s College, Annapohs, MD
and Santa Fe, NM
readers was
uncomfortable.
OthersCeorgia,
are entirely
devoted
toon
hertoand
will
Mary Flannery O’Connor
born in Savannah,
in 1925,
went
earn
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fiction,
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and
letters,
even
as
they
feel
the
discomfort
sociology degree at the Georgia State College for Women, and studied at the Iowa Writer’s
Known office of publication:
Communications Office
St. John’s College
Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800
and
discordance
witnesses
to anfirst
accident
to beLiterary
lookingconnections
so closely. In
the interest
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whereofshe
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road). The freaks, misfits, and fools who populate her world make many
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’Connor on the
cover for
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and here
is in her
rightful
corresponded
regularly
witha while
Thomas
Merton,
theshe
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monk
who place.
shared her love of writing
along with her deep faith. She suffered from lupus, the wasting disease that killed her father
when she was 15. (It left her near death in 1950.) She was proud of being a Southerner and loved
many aspects of the quiet rural life she was forced to live in Milledgeville because her illness left
her dependent on her mother’s care. On the family’s dairy farm, she raised peafowl that dined on
her mother’s Herbert Hoover roses. She wrote, she explained, because she had a gift lor it.
O’Connor wa.s often amused by those critics who tried to label her. She argued eloquently
with those who insisted that something “socially uplifting’’ must come from fiction: “The
novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision, and we must remember that
his vision has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of his audience will very
definitely affect the way he is able to show what he sees” {Mystery and Manners}.
The focus of this issue, “Revelation,” was one of her last stories, published a few months
before she died on Aug. 3,196/,. We know from her letters that the story was inspired by a visit
to the doctor’s office and that she wasn’t making fun of her protagonist or offering her up for
scorn: “I like Mrs. Turpin as well as Mary Grace. You got to be a very big woman to shout at the
Lord across a hogjten” {The Habit ofBeingY O’Connor made her first appearance on the Read
ing List of St. John’s College in 1989 with “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Throughout
the years, the standard reading has been “Parker’s Back.”
In addition to paying homage to a favorite Program author. The College accomplishes
another important goal in this issue by showing off the tutors and the interesting things they
have to say when we give them a chance. We posed a question about the short story “Revela
tion” to a group of tutors from both campuses, and they approached it with zeal. (Advancement
vice president Barbara Goyette, A73, wa.s inspired by a church sermon to contribute an essay.)
To get the most from this feature, read or revisit “Revelation” before exploring these essays.
-RH
Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John’s College,
Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404-2800.
postmaster:
Annapolis
410-626-2539
reharty@sjca.edu
Rosemary Harty, editor
Sussan Borden, managing editor
Jennifer Behrens, art director
Advisory Board
John Christensen
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Roberta Gable
Barbara Goyette
Kathryn Heines
Pamela Kraus
Joseph Macfarland
Jo Ann Mattson
Eric Salem
Brother Robert Smith
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
alumni@sjcsf.edu
John Hartnett, Santa Fe editor
Advisory Board
Michael Franco
David Levine
Andra Maguran
Margaret Odell
Roxanne Seagraves
Mark St. John
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
�"I “I v„.
College
The
ZINE
FOR
Alumni
of
t
St. John’s College
Annapolis •
{Contents}
PAGE
JO
DEPARTMENTS
Revelations
a
FROM THE BELL TOWERS
A routine visit to a doctor’s office ends in
a painful revelation for a self-satisfied
farmer’s wife. But what is really being
revealed? Pondering Flannery
O’Connor’s “Revelation.”
•
•
•
•
•
•
Santa Fe Initiative invests in student life.
A new Web site debuts.
Johnnies and Journalism
Mids and Johnnies on Thoreau
Middle States affirms accreditation.
Wine, art, and conversation
PAGE 2izj.
9
LETTERS
The Habit oe Writing
PAGE la
Chris Lynch (A87) on Machiavelli’s
Art of War
A GI alumna considers the lost art and
missed opportunities of letter writing.
PAGE
30 BIBLIOFILE
35 ALUMNI NOTES
2i6
PROFILES
31 Tias Little (EC98) brings Eastern
classics to yoga.
34 Ben Bloom (A97) finds fame.
38 Owen Kelley (A93) pursues monster
hurricanes.
The Mind in Winter
The challenges of the examined life keep
Johnnies young.
PAGE
Zj.6
41 STUDENT VOICES
Summer at Stag’s Leap
Is wanting good grades a bad thing for
Johnnies?
Fine wine, good company, and seminars
make a traditional Northern Cahfornia
chapter event a popular summer
tradition.
44 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
48 ST. John’s forever
PAGE 46
ON THE COVER
Flannery O 'Connor
Illustration by David Johnson
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
The Santa Fe Initiative
Concerned by the toll deferred
maintenance was beginning to
take on the Santa Fe campus,
the college’s Management
Committee came up with a
comprehensive plan: the
Santa Fe Initiative, a $4.5
miUion investment in buildings
and grounds, improved staffing
in the areas of student life, and
immediate upgrades to two of
the campus’ six laboratories.
When he unveiled the commit
tee’s initiative to the college’s
Board of Visitors and Gover
nors, Annapolis President
Christopher Nelson, interim
president in Santa Fe, received
a standing ovation from the
board. The reception from
tutors at a Santa Fe faculty
meeting was equally
enthusiastic.
For Nelson, serving as
interim president of the Santa
Fe campus in addition to his
regular duties in Annapolis, the
need for an immediate injection
of capital to the Western cam
pus was apparent. Even as the
college plans a Capital Cam
paign to fund a strategic plan of
long-needed initiatives such as
raising faculty salaries, Santa
Fe’s needs couldn’t wait. Nelson
had already seen what could
happen to a campus during lean
years: the Annapolis campus
found it expensive and time
consuming to catch up on main
tenance deferred when funding
for improvements was unavail
able in the early 1990s.
“With the Santa Fe initiative
we are jump-starting a program
of improving opportunities for
students outside the classroom
and for the improvement of
buildings and grounds,” says
Nelson. “This is just the start of
what we need to do over an
annual or intermittent basis
over a period of a decade or
more. We’ve invested about $35
million in the Annapolis physi
cal plant over the last 13 years.
We don’t want to see Santa Fe’s
physical plant deteriorate to the
level that Annapolis was.”
The purpose of the plan is
to make the kind of improve
ments that will encourage
student retention and enable
the admissions office to attract
a larger pool of qualified appli
cants to Santa Fe. Thus the
initiative focuses on areas that
affect student life, the appear
ance of the campus, and the
operation of the admissions and
financial aid offices.
At the same time, the college
will provide funding for an
internship program similar to
the Annapolis program funded
by The Hodson Trust while the
college seeks long-term grant
support for internships.
Costs for the Santa Fe Initia
tive will represent a a percent
''This isjust the
start ofwhat we
need to do over
an annual or
intermittent
basis... ”
Christopher Nelson,
Annapolis President
increase in the operating budg
et each year. The funds for the
initiative will come from unre
stricted endowment funds and
early unrestricted gifts to the
college’s Capital Campaign,
expected to officially begin in
June 2005,
Improvements that affect stu
dent life include funding for
additional staff in the Assistant
Dean’s office.
Career Services
office. Security,
and Student
Activities office.
Facilities
improvements
include renovat
ing the laborato
ries; resurfacing
all roadways and
parking lots,
curbs, and cen
trally located
walkways; adding
a new parking
lot; replacing
After 40 years,
THE Santa Fe
CAMPUS IS SHOW
ING SIGNS OF AGE.
{The College-
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
hardscape between the upper
dorms and Peterson Student
Center; repairing concrete
walls and steps; installing
uniform campus lighting;
installing patios for outdoor
study and social fife; and adding
attractive signs and a security
kiosk at a more formal campus
entrance. Some funding for a
director of buildings and
grounds and an additional
maintenance staff member is
also included.
While it will mean significant
short-term improvements in
Santa Fe, Nelson emphasizes
that the initiative is just a start
ing point: “The campus needs
an investment of about $30
million over time: new dormi
tories, a home for the Graduate
Institute and a new lecture hall,
renovations of the Evans
Science Laboratory, plus
additional renovations
campus-wide. For so many
years, we’ve sacrificed every
thing else to the Program.
We’re on a slow, steady plan of
improvement that requires
investments to make up for
deferred maintenance, for
poor salaries, and insufficient
student services-it’s time to
turn our attention to them with
out taking anything away from
the Program.”
To oversee the implementa
tion of the initiative, Annapolis
treasurer H. Fred “Bud” Billups
(HA03) will assume a new
college-wide position as special
assistant to the chair of the
Management Committee
(a position that alternates
between the two campus presi
dents). Billups will split his time
between the Annapolis and
Santa Fe campuses, providing
oversight over the two admis
sions offices, the two financial
aid offices, and the college-wide
Information Technology office.
He will prepare a college-wide
budget that will allocate annual
operating funds between the
campuses. 4^-Rosemary Harty
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
3
One College, One Web
Ifyou can make the time to
search all of the 4,285,199,774
Web pages available through the
search engine Google, let us
know ifyou find another college
with a Web site like St. John’swhere the dominant image is of a
chair and the valuable center real
estate is not a shot of smihng stu
dents or the beautiful campus,
but ofwords: the names of great
book authors.
On March i, after two years
of planning and gathering
comments from as wide a sector
of the St. John’s community as
possible, the college launched
the new site: www.stjohnscollege.edu. Previously, the col
lege’s student-designed site
diverged into two separate
paths for the Santa Fe and
Annapolis campuses right after
the home page. This new site
was designed from the start to
present St. John’s as one college
with two campuses. Thus what
is emphasized is the common
curriculum and the prevailing
Johnnie culture.
The front-page tour is also a
departure. The links in this
Web tour introduce Johnnies
and their wide range of reasons
for attending the college, the
unique and lively community of
learners, the Santa Fe and
Annapolis communities, and
the chair thing. Alert visitors
will also find surprises-“Easter
eggs” in Web lingo-on the
front page.
The new Web site was
designed to introduce the college
to prospective students and to
better serve alumni, current stu
dents, parents, faculty and staff,
and the communities of Annapo
lis and Santa Fe. The alumni sec
tion, developed with extensive
input from Alumni Association
president Glenda Eoyang and a
team of alumni testers, offers
something particularly useful: a
secure, password-protected
online Alumni Register.
Previously, the college issued
a printed directory of alumni
every five years. With support
and guidance from the associa
tion, the college now offers this
directory online. The search for
mat allows alumni to look up
classmates, find alumni in a new
city, or identify a group of alum
ni working in a particular field.
Like many areas of the Web site,
the directory is a work in
progress. Information in the
Register is drawn from two
separate databases, and the
program the college uses to
“marry” the data often falls
short of the ideal. The college’s
Information Technology and
advancement staffs are working
to remedy this. The more alumni
who use the database to update
their records, the more accurate
the register will be.
A few caveats: to protect
alumni privacy and restrict the
directory to alumni, the system
currently requires the college to
authenticate each user who
attempts to log
in. Once an
alumnus regis
ters, it will take
college staff
about two busi
ness days to pro
vide a password
that will grant
access. Similarly,
any changes
made to an indi
vidual record will
take a few days to
appear. Alumni
can choose at any
time to restrict
their information
to “name only”
or to not appear
in the Register.
If you encounter any
difficulty with the Register or
the Alumni section, or have
thoughts about how the Web
site can better serve alumni,
contact either of the alumni
directors: in Annapolis, Jo Ann
Mattson at 410-626-2531; in
Santa Fe, Roxanne Seagraves at
505-984-6103.
Diving with Sharks in South Africa
OR Wrestling with Plato in Santa Fe?
Along with articles about
pumping iron and healthy eat
ing, the April edition of Men’s
Health listed Santa Fe’s Sum
mer Classics among its “25
Greatest Getaways for Men.”
“We’ve found the best places
you’ve never been,” the article
begins-“high-point adventures
you can plan right now and
brag about for years.” The fea
ture lists opportunities such as
climbing the sand dunes of
Namibia, cage-diving with
Great White sharks in South
Africa, and piloting a subma
rine in Mexico. Studying the
classics at St. John’s sounds
pretty cool, too: “Do you really
want to check out of this life
without having known what
Shakespeare, Mozart, and Tol
stoy were going on about? Take
{The College-
a crash course in the human
experience-and spend a sab
batical summer to rememberby registering at St. John’s Col
lege, where laymen are invited
to delve into the great works of
man in small classes....”
This year’s Summer Classics
offerings are luxuriously eclec
tic, combining classics of the
East and West with modern
fiction and a generous serving
of music.
The first week, July rr-i6,
features Joseph Conrad and
Henry James, Xenophon, and
Freud in the morning; in the
afternoon participants take on
the stories and short novels of
Dostoevsky and Gregorian
Chant,
During week two, July 18-23,
morning session participants
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
can choose from Mozart or Lao
Tzu, or Jane Austen paired with
Shakespeare. Afternoon partic
ipants can take on Copernican
meditations, the short stories
of Thomas Mann, or the
Platonic dialogues Laches,
Charminides, otEuthyphro.
The third week, July 25-30,
features a.m, offerings of
Mahler, the Yoga Visitha, and
Spinoza. In the afternoon par
ticipants can study Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenolo
gy ofPerception, Montaigne
essays, or Faulkner’s Absalom!
Absalom!
The full schedule of seminars
and tutors are available on the
college Web site: www.sqohnscollege.edu.
�{From the Bell Towers}
Journalistic Johnnies
The
Gadfly
What Dfcl You Do During the Hurricane?
The Moon ^z/z^/The Gadfly/
Politics, Poetry, Punditry
Of the four individuals who
edited the student newspapers in
Annapolis and Santa Fe this past
academic year, not one has the
shghtest interest in pursuing a
journahsm career. Yes, it had
crossed their minds at one point
or another, hut they have all
talked themselves out of it.
Cathy Keene, a rising junior
in Annapolis who helped edit
The Gadfly for two years, admits
to being a deadhne junkie and
loves being in the know on
controversies or breaking news.
But one summer spent working
at a magazine convinced her
she should consider another
way to make a living. “Too
much stress,” she explains.
Ian McCracken, her co-editor
this year, is graduating and head
ing to law school. Santa Fe Moon
co-editor Jonathan Morgan,
a senior, is more interested in
biotechnology; senior Margaret
Garry is now leaning toward law
school and politics.
So, if it’s not a career goal that
tethers these individuals to to to
12 hours a week of writing, edit
ing, and production headacheson top ofwork-study jobs and
all the regular rigors of the
Program- what is it?
“1 have no idea why 1 do it,”
Keene admits. “We’re all
friends at The Gadfly, and it’s
really fun getting it out every
week. It gives me a real connec
tion to the Polity.”
“We get to produce this little
snapshot of St. John’s,” says
Garry. “And it’s really cool
seeing the Moon come together,
from somebody’s idea to
publication.”
The two periodicals differ
significantly in graphic style,
content, and tone. The Gadfly is
heavy on politics and Polity
issues; fiction and poetry are
more hkely to turn up in the
Moon (though it doesn’t shy
away from hard news either).
The Gadfly savors the backand-forth of intellectual argu
ments between two people
j
that can span several issues.
In the Moon, the “campus
moralist” expounds on issues
of student conduct; The Gad
fly has “You Make the Gall,”
athletic director Leo Pickens’
regular sports rules quiz.
Consider some of the offer
ings in Volume 8, Issue 4, of the
Moon', an opinion piece honor
ing military veterans; a feature
on the Web site bartcop.com, a
first-person parody of a seminar
on The Runaway Bunny, an
explanation of the Student
Review Board, a think piece
about the value of studying clas
sical languages, an investigative
report on problems concerning a
Common Room, and a science
fiction fantasy offering on
“Poster Wars.”
And Volume 25, Issue 20, of
The Gadfly: of review of tutors’
performance of The Birds', an
extensive piece on a cover-up by
the liberal media, three-and-ahalf pages of letters to the edi
tors, a review of Mr. Grenke’s
Friday-night lecture on Kant,
and “Why 1 Hate George W.
Bush, the Final Installment,”
including the author’s offer of a
cup of coffee for those who
would sit down and talk with him
about their opposing views.
Both publications attracted
controversy this year. The Gad
fly was delayed when assistant
dean Judith Seeger and student
services director Joy Kaplan
decided two stories should not
run. One included potentially
libelous material, the other con
fidential college information.
Seeger doesn’t see her role as
a watchdog; she reviews the
publication with an eye to
{The College-
protecting the college from law
suits. “We have occasionally
seen things that we think are
sometimes cruel, and we’ll
say ‘do you really want to put
that in your paper?’ And some
times they have listened and
reconsidered.”
The Gadfly was also blasted
for running a sham review
submitted by two students on a
movie they called “Tough Jew.”
“What really got people mad was
the photo we ran with it-Leo
Strauss. The cutline was: ‘Leo
Strauss: tough?’ One tutor wrote
in and said, basically, ‘how dare
you?’ We were totally blown
away by the response. We
defended ourselves, and then
we learned the movie was a
fake-we looked even stupider.
It was a learning experience,”
Keene says.
The Moon editors also had a
learning experience in the
Santa Fe campus response to
the newspaper’s “2003 Dirty
Poetry Contest” issue last fall.
The issue included photographs
of female students that some in
the campus community consid
ered racy; others considered
them degrading.
“There were several different
objections to the issue from
faculty members, the administra
tion, even a couple of students,”
Morgan says. “I think the most
valid point is that showing
certain students in that frame
work contributed to kind of an
uncomfortable classroom
environment. I hadn’t really
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
thought it was that immense of a
deal. People have bodies.”
After Morgan and Garry sent a
letter to the faculty apologizing
for the issue, and promising to
be more responsive in the
future, a proposed resolution
condemning the Moon turned
into a resolution supporting the
newspaper. “I regret that we
offended some people, but I
still think it was a great issue
because it got people’s atten
tion,” he says.
While both publications
accept advertisements, they’re
not self-supporting and, like
other student groups, get fund
ing allocated by the college.
McCracken believes the publica
tions might be better if they were
independent and funded by ad
revenue. “Given all the guidefines, I sometimes think it would
be easier if we weren’t affiliated
with the school. I know of people
who would write more things if
they knew their copy wasn’t
going to be reviewed by the
administration first,” he says.
Morgan hopes future Moon
editors work to maintain the
publication as a voice for
students. “I like that the Moon
doesn’t have a strict focus,
that we can have poetry and
artwork, a commentary on
Dante’s Inferno or the Iliad,
philosophical pieces and funny
pieces,” he says. “I like the
creativity. ”4-Rosemary Harty
�{From the Bell Towers}
5
A Meeting of Mids: Students Launch
Joint Seminars with the Naval Academy
The Johnnies wore
jeans and t-shirts
and lounged
comfortably at the
seminar table. Bolt
upright in their
chairs, white caps
set neatly in front of
them on the table,
the midshipmen
were clad in their
dark uniforms and
polished shoes.
As they spoke, they
looked to the semi
nar leaders, tutor
Louis Miller and
Naval Academy
Professor Lt. David
Bonfili, and resisted
the urge to raise
their hands.
The text before
the group of to students was
Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedi
ence.” Miller’s opening ques
tion drew from Thoreau’s
words: “Can there not be a
government in which
majorities do not virtually
decide right and wrong,
but conscience?-in which
majorities decide only those
questions to which the rule of
expediency is applicable?”
For two hours, students
grappled with the text not as
students from a military
academy or liberal arts
college, but as intelligent,
self-directed individuals eager
to grasp the heart of an idea.
The discussion quickly drew
out strong responses, but it
didn’t evolve into a debate
between students from the two
institutions. Thoreau’s stance
on not paying taxes and his
views about resisting an unjust
government were seen by
some of the midshipmen as
ideological luxuries. One
midshipman was distinctly
annoyed by what he described
as Thoreau’s “arrogant” ideal
Junior Rachel Hall
AND Midshipman
David Buck
ism. “He’d like to be a martyr,
but he’s not,” said a midship
man who pointed out that
Thoreau did not resist when
his friends bailed him out of
jail. And several studentsJohnnies and mids alikedisagreed with Thoreau’s
stance that it was not his
“business” to petition the
government to remedy what
he viewed as unjust laws.
Saida Johnnie, “Thoreau
believes that we won’t need gov
ernment if we’re enlightened.”
Enlightenment is a fine
thing, a midshipman coun
tered. But who will build the
roads? Can we convene a
government just when we need
one to accomplish some
particular goal? Can we call
up a military force only when
under attack?
One of the midshipmen said
that governments do make bad
decisions and meddle in per
sonal liberty; citizens should
protest when a government’s
actions are unjust. “There are
people who don’t have any
thing to do with me making
{The College.
decisions about how I live my
life,” she said.
“Not all of us,” said another
midshipman, “can be Martin
Luther King or Gandhi. If
everyone stopped supporting
the government, I don’t know
where we’d be today.”
After the seminar, the
group gathered in the Great
Hall with the participants of
the five other seminars, about
70 in total. Midshipman David
Buck attended all three semi
nars, partly out of interest in
the readings, but also because
his girlfriend, St. John’s junior
Rachel Hall, helped to organ
ize them. Hall hit on the idea
when she began reading Sun
Tsu’s The Art of War last year
and found she wanted to dis
cuss it with a group of people.
She brought the idea to Navy
Professor David Garren, and
Garren helped recruit Navy
co-leaders and organize the
seminars. “He was very enthu
siastic about it,” said Hall,
who found St. John’s tutors
were also pleased to partici
pate. The first seminar, in
St. Jo hn’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
January 2003, was
on Sun Tsu’s The Art
of War. Johnnies
went to the Naval
Academy to discuss
Plato’s Crito last fall.
Jacob Thomas,
a junior, found the
Thoreau seminar the
best of the three so
far, because mid
shipmen had caught
on to the dynamic of
seminar. In discus
sion of Sun Tsu,
their superior
military knowledge
tended to lead them
to dominate the conversations,
he said.
“But this time, they really
became involved in the discus
sion and in Thoreau’s ideas,
which was wonderful,” said
Thomas.
“It’s good for our students to
be exposed to each other,” said
Lt. Bonfili, a political science
professor. “I see the diversity
of opinions coming out.”
Having encountered John
nies during waltz parties,
croquet, and Reality, Buck
has been impressed with the
intellectual side of St. John’s.
Still, he added, “Johnnies are
crazier than mids.”
Like croquet, the joint
seminars seem to have become
another tradition, says junior
Mark Ingham, who helped
organize the seminars. “The
more you talk with the mid
shipmen, the less intimidated
you are by the uniform,”
he said.
-Rosemary Harty
�{From the Bell Towers}
6
News and
Announce
and in Santa Fe from 1989-96
before she came to Annapolis
in 1997-
ments
Steve Linhard, assistant
Appointments
In the Graduate Institutes,
effective June i: Tutor
Krishnan Venkatesh
becomes director in Santa Fe;
tutor Joan Silver the director
in Annapolis. Venkatesh has
been a tutor since 1989. He
earned a bachelor’s in English
from Magdalene College,
Cambridge. He spent more
than three years conducting
postdoctoral research in
Shakespeare and Renaissance
English at the University of
Muenster, West Germany, and
later taught at Shanxi Universi
ty, People’s Republic of China,
where he helped develop an
ESL curriculum.
Silver earned her bachelor’s
degree from the State Univer
sity of New York, College at
Old Westbury, a master’s from
St. John’s, and a doctorate in
Theology and the Arts from
Graduate Theological Union.
She was a tutor in Annapolis
from 1974-77, a tutor for several
summers beginning in 1985,
Middle States Review
Annapolis Appointment
St. John’s in Annapolis has earned a lo-year reaccreditation
from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
The college’s accreditation was reaffirmed at the March
meeting of the commission and followed a review of the
college’s extensive self-study.
A report from the evaluation team affirmed that St. John’s
is carrying out its educational objectives. The college
community found its opening words most gratifying:
“St. John’s College (SJC) deserves its reputation as one of
the best and most distinctive institutions in the United States,
indeed the world. The College has a long and unswerving
history of commitment to a single ideal: the life of the mind
as principally represented in the great books of the Western
tradition. Everything in the educational program evolves from
this ideal and it has worn well over many years. By design,
change occurs slowly at SJC and this deliberateness buffers the
College from the swings of fad and momentary diversions that
often plague other sectors of higher education.”
The college this year also sought accreditation from the
American Academy for Liberal Education; a decision from the
AALE is pending.
treasurer in Annapolis, will fill
the position of treasurer on the
recommendation of St. John’s
President Christopher Nelson
and the campus faculty. The
college’s board approved the
appointment. Linhard came
to the college in 1997 as con
troller. Prior, he was the
accounting manager/
controller for the Chesapeake
Bay Foundation.
New Staff
in
Santa Fe
Doug Single joins the college
as director for college-wide
major gifts. He brings
extensive fund-raising and
management experience to
the new position. After earn
ing bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in political science
from Stanford University,
Single became associate
director of athletics and
assistant football coach at
Stanford; he also served as
athletic director at Southern
Methodist and Northwestern
universities. Single recently
served as chief executive
officer of the David Douglas
Marketing Group in San
Francisco.
John Hartnett (SF83) has
been named communications
director. Hartnett attended
the Santa Fe campus before
going on to earn undergradu
ate degrees in philosophy and
economics from the University
of Illinois. He also holds a
master’s degree in writing
from Hamline University in
St. Paul, Minn. Most recently,
he was the president of his
own marketing communica
tions company. 4"
Consider Consolidating
Alumni with student loans may
want to look into consolidating
them into one fixed-rate loan,
the college’s Financial Aid
offices advise. Student-loan
consolidation involves paying
off current federal education
loans in full and creating a new
loan with a new interest rate
and repayment term up to 30
years. Federal Stafford and
PLUS loans charge variable
rates that are set by formulas
based on the last auction of 91day U.S. Treasury bills in May.
Federal consolidation loans,
however, carry fixed rates that
are based on the rates of the
loans being consolidated.
In recent years, the variable
student loan rate, determined
by the government, has been
at record lows (3.4 percent
on Stafford loans in May), but
interest rates are expected to
rise this year. Parents of college
students who have taken out
PLUS loans may also consoli
date these loans at current
rates.
There’s another reason to act
quickly, says Caroline Chris
tensen, financial aid director in
Annapolis. Legislation expected
{The College -Sf.
to come before Congress as part
of its renewal of the Higher
Education Act this year could
turn that low fixed rate into a
variable rate in the future.
Proponents of the bill say the
government is losing millions
in subsidies it pays to lenders
and want the savings directed
to other aid programs for
currently-enrolled students.
However, new alumni face
complications. “Ifyou consoli
date during your six-month
grace period, you lock in at the
in-school rate, currently 2.82
percent,” Christensen says.
John ’5 College ■ Spring 2004 }
“What ifyou lock in at 2.82 per
cent, then rates drop on June
30? You’ll have a higher rate for
the fife of your loan, in addition
to losing remaining months of
interest-free grace period when
you consolidate. So you want to
wait until very close to the end
of your grace period.”
Contact your lender or the
Financial Aid office on either
campus: in Annapolis,
410-626-2503; in Santa Fe,
505-984-6058. Information on
researching and comparing
loan programs is available at
www.estudent.com.
�{From
the
Bell Towers}
Board Approves Polity Amendments
Among the many actions it took
at its quarterly meeting in April,
the college’s Board of Visitors
and Governors approved a
change to the college Polity,
the governing document for
St. John’s College.
The Management Committee-which oversees non-aca
demic policy and coordinates
administration of the two campuses-was made a permanent
part of the St. John’s governing
structure. The Management
Committee was established in
3000 and included as an addi
tion to the Polity with a five-year
sunset clause. The board voted
to delete the sunset clause, thus
continuing the committee.
This action represents the
culmination of a several-year
review of the Pohty, which also
resulted in a rewording to reflect
gender-neutral language and
10 amendments being passed in
April 3003. One of these amendments-the addition of sexual
orientation to the college’s
non-discrimination poUcy-had
been controversial a decade ago.
During a review of the Polity in
r993, the board failed to adopt
an amendment that specifically
prohibited discrimination on
the basis of sexual orientation.
Five years later, in 1998, the
issue was not even raised.
“The first time it came up, it
was so bitter, so divisive, that
people were afraid to bring it
up again,” said Jean FitzSimon
(A73), a lawyer who served on
the board committee that took
up the most recent review of
the document. Original resist
ance to adding to the document
was centered on the belief that
discrimination based on sexual
orientation was covered by
other laws, and therefore did
not need to be spelled out,
FitzSimon said.
FitzSimon and other commit
tee members believed other
wise: “Even if it [discrimination]
isn’t happening at the college,
the Pohty is the Polity. We talked
about the public nature of this
document, and we felt that this
was something that had to be
speUed out,” FitzSimon said.
This time around the Polity
Review Committee, led by Greg
Curtis, did bring up the issue as
it began to work through possi
ble revisions in 3003. This com
mittee recommended, and the
Board adopted, a revised
non-discrimination clause:
“There shall be no discrimi
nation at St. John’s College in
appointments, conditions of
employment, admissions,
educational policy, financial aid
programs, athletics, or other
activities, on the basis of race,
religion, age, sex, national
origin, color, disabiUty and/or
physical handicap, sexual orien
tation, or other characteristic
protected by any applicable
federal, state or local law.”
In the Nick of Time
A TRAFFIC STOP ON THEIR WAY TO THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE NEARLY MADE THIS GROUP OF AnNAPOLIS SENIORS
MISS THE MIDNIGHT DEADLINE FOR TURNING IN THEIR SENIOR ESSAYS. (ThE POLICE OFFICER WAS UNIMPRESSED
WITH THE students’ PLEAS TO LET THEM GO ON THEIR WAY.) FrOM LEFT TO RIGHT ARE DeAN HaRVEY
Flaumenhaft, Justin Berrier, Hayden Brockett, Melissa Thomas, and Joseph Method. A rattled
Thomas is more than ready to hand over copies of her essay, “Reconciling Faith with Action.”
{The College
■ St. Jo hn ’5 College ■ Spring 2004 }
7
Taxing
Bachelors
As Maryland’s legislators grap
pled this spring with measures
to raise money for the state’s
coffers, word of an innovative
approach from the past-a tax on
bachelors-reached The College,
thanks to Richard Israel, retired
Maryland assistant attorney
general.
While browsing through pages
of General Assembly proceed
ings, Israel found that in 1761
legislators issued a series of
proposals for funding a college
that eventually resulted in
St. John’s. The “batchelor’s tax”
was expected to have a value of
500 pounds or more, according
to a bill aimed at acquiring
Bladen’s Folly, now McDowell
Hall. Listed also were 600
pounds to be raised through
licenses for public ordinaries
(pubs), 150 pounds from taxes
on wheel carriages, and 90
pounds through fees on card
and billiard tables.
The idea wasn’t just to raise
money, but also to encourage
single men to settle down, as
Israel found in the Acts of the
General Assembly, 1755-56:
“Forasmuch as Divine Institu
tions ought to be strictly
observed in every well-regulated
Government, and as that in
Regard to the entering into the
holy Estate of Matrimony may
tend to the more orderly Propa
gation of Mankind, it ought, not
only in a rehgious, but pohtical
View, to be promoted, and the
continuing in a State of Gehbacy
discountenanced, especially in
every Infant Country.”
The measure, however, was
never signed into law. After
several subsequent attempts,
St. John’s was chartered as a
college in 1784, soon after the
end of the Revolutionary War.
The charter provided that the
college would be financed by the
revenue from several different
taxes.
— Rebecca Wilson
(AGI82)
�{From the Bell Towers}
8
Fun-Raising, East and West
Art, Wine, and Good Conversation Brighten Winter's Dark Nights
Two events in January show that alumni and other college support
ers won’t pass up a chance for self-improvement along with the
opportunity to stay connected to St. John’s. Fine wine and good
food can’t hurt, either.
In Santa Fe, Larry Turley (SF69) brought the extraordinary
wines of Turley Wine Cellars to a benefit hosted by the Philos
Society-a group of local patrons of the college. The event had
wine-lovers buzzing over Turley’s hard-to-find wines, paired with
gourmet food.
Philos Society Event
Features Turley Wines
“Wine is the glass ofthe mind. ’’-Erasmus
A wine dinner hosted by the
Philos Society of St. John’s
College brought too people
from the Santa Fe community
to the rooftop garden room of
La Fonda Hotel in January.
While the opportunity to learn
more about St. John’s College
and fine wines attracted many,
it was clear that the main
attractions were the Napa
Valley wines provided by Larry
Turley (SF69). After all,
there’s a two-year waiting list
for Turley’s coveted wines,
such as a aooi bottle of The
White Coat. The event was
limited to 100, and the tickets,
at $125 apiece, sold out well in
advance.
Now the owner of Turley
Wine Cellars, Turley earned a
medical degree and became an
emergency-room physician
after leaving St. John’s.
He co-founded the Frog’s Leap
Winery in 1981, and then
moved on to open Turley Wine
In Baltimore, Philanthropia (the Alumni Development
Council) and President Christopher Nelson hosted a “Conversa
tion About the State of the College’’ at the Baltimore Museum of
Art. Wintry weather in December cancelled the first attempt at
the BMA event, but the rescheduled event was well-attendedencouraging Philanthropia to plan future stimulating occasions
to keep Johnnies informed and involved in the college.
Cellars with his sister,
Helen (A67).
The hotel’s wine
experts and chefs
worked to create the
night’s dinner menu.
The White Coat was
paired with appetizers;
langostino and goat
cheese empanadas with
toasted pinon-green
apple slaw. Next came
the duck confit on
greens tossed with chile
cascabel-basil vinai
grette, served with a
aooi Pesenti Vineyard
Zinfandel. Paired with
the third course
(pan-roasted chicken
breast with white truffle
demi-roasted garlic
mashed potatoes and sauteed
spaghetti squash) was a aooi
Hayne Vineyard Zinfandel.
A aooi Library Vineyard
Petite Syrah accompanied
cheese and fruit.
The event raised $6,500 for
the college’s Annual Fund.
Left: Philos board member
Charmay Allred shares her
APPRECIATION FOR LaRRY
Turley’s wine.
Above: Richard Morris,
A PAST BOARD MEMBER OF THE
COLLEGE, AND
JeFF BiSHOP
(HA96), VICE PRESIDENT FOR
COLLEGEWIDE ADVANCEMENT,
PERUSE SILENT AUCTION
OFFERINGS.
{The College.
John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
Turley donated some of the
wine for the event and provided
the rest at cost. In his holo tie
and denim shirt, he circulated
among the guests, talking
about wine and wine-making
and graciously accepting
compliments from wine lovers
grateful for a chance to experi
ence something extraordinary.
The Philos Society of
St. John’s College was founded
to foster and enhance commu
nication, understanding, and
joint activities between the
college and its community.
Co-chairs of the board are
Donn Duncan, M.D., and
Robert Zone, M.D.
�{From the Bell Towers}
9
Friday at the BMA
WITH Chris
Thanks to Philanthropia (the Alumni Development Council)
and Annapolis President Christopher Nelson, BaltimoreWashington alumni had an opportunity to enjoy a private viewing
of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Cone Collection. Afterwards,
the 82 alumni gathered for conversation, refreshments catered by
The Classic Catering People, owned by Harriet Dopkin (A77), and
an update on the college by the president.
The sights and sounds of the evening echoed the style of the
Cone Collection, creating an impressionistic tableau of delights
for the eyes, treats for the tongue, fellowship for the soul, and
ample food for thought. Thus, as an homage to the Cone
Collection, The College offers its report in the style of the
impressionists.
The Art
time in Paris among the expatriates. It was as though he had memo
rized all the accompanying notes on the walls. It was great fun hstening to him-he completed the experience for me. I’m not sure going
through the Cone Collection will ever be the same.
“Although I didn’t ask a question of Chris Nelson, I liked hear
ing what he had to say, and I know that people felt free to ask him
anything about the college. I was reminded that I still don’t know
very much about the Santa Fe campus and what its financial needs
are, or what those needs grow out of.”
Matisse, Purple Robe and Anemones, Interior, Flowers, and
Parakeets
Picasso, Mother and Child
Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seenfrom theBibemus Quarry
Monet, Waterloo Bridge
Van Gogh, Landscape With Figures
Fete avec Biere et Vin
Caprese skewers of pesto-rubbed grape tomatoes, baby mozzarella,
and kalamata olives
Dried fig, walnut, and goat cheese tapenade
Tenderloin roulades with spinach and portobello mushrooms
Jumbo lump crab fondue with a hint of dry sherry and old bay
Miniature fruit tarts, petite brownies, raspberry almond bars, and
fresh strawberries
DeGroen’s micro brew. Banrock Station wine, coffee, tea
Report of the President
Applicant pool up, attrition down.
Graduate Institute-healthy.
A new dormitory with water view is being built for 48 students.
The Santa Fe Initiative invests $4.5 million in the campus and
student life.
Gratitude for The Hodson Trust’s
$10 million grant, which funded
the Mellon renovation and new
dormitory.
Two or three additional major gifts
this year: a possibility.
The help and support of aU alumni
at all levels of giving: priceless.
President Christopher Nelson with Mark Lindley (A67).
Stacey Andersen (AGI93): “While we were wandering through the
Cone Collection, we noticed it was noisy: not normal museum
behavior. Yet we were expected to talk. There’s a commonality
we’ve run into with people who’ve gone to St. John’s. There’s a
shared dialogue. It’s a tone that was set and carried throughout
the evening. I think that’s what led to the discussion that contin
ued after Chris Nelson gave his introductory talk. We thought the
venue for an alumni function was fantastic. Is there abetter place
to unleash a group of Johnnies than in a museum? Thank you for
giving us the text! ”
- SUS3AN Borden, A87
The Reviews
Sara Stuart (Ago): “Mark Lindley
(A67) must have gone through the
Cone Collection before Brad (A89)
and I arrived. He was able to teU us
about all of the paintings and art
objects, and about the Cone sisters’
Above: The feast
Right: Sara Larson Stuart (Ago),
Brad Stuart (A89), and Philanthropia
EVENT CHAIR Steph Takacs (A8g)
{The College.
5t. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�{Letters}
Febbie Question Answered
Wendell Finner’s account of his query
concerning SJC’s lack of Eastern authors
(Winter 2004) brought back a memory of
Douglas Allenbrook that 1 cherish more as
political correctness continues to elimi
nate free speech.
During convocation for the Febbie 1980
class, one student asked about the lack of
Eastern authors. Without hesitation, and
with a charming smile, Mr. Alienbrook
replied “...the only thing good that has
come out of the East was the Sun.” Memo
ries like these convince me that St. John’s
College is more important than ever to
liberal education and free thought.
Steven D. Brower
(A83)
The Lost Languages
It was a joy and consolation to read the
article about the intensive Latin summer
classes in the Fall 2003 issue of
The College. It made up for the allegation
by a recent commencement speaker that
the students in front of him were lucky to
have the best education: liberal arts,
i.e. trivium and quadrivium-or, as my
Munich editor explained to colleagues at
the Beck publishing house, the “Septem
Artes”'we did at this interesting college in
America. Yes, the liberal arts, all seven of
them, and four foreign languages, the
commencement speaker said: Greek
and Latin and German and French.
The graduates kept a straight face.
Latin had already been dropped from the
curriculum when I joined St. John’s in
i960. German survived another couple of
years; then it, too, was gone. I taught one
of the last classes. It was a pleasure, and a
profitable one. We read bits of the Luther
translation of the Bible, the beginning of
Genesis and the opening of the Gospel of
John, and the juniors recalled some of the
Greek New Testament. We read Lessing
and a little Kant (with the surprising
earthiness of his vocabulary); we read
some Goethe; some of the rhymed caution
ary tales of Heinrich Hoffmann...and stuck
to texts that seemed more memorable and
discussable.
There was a young man in that class, Jim
Forrester (A62). He took the very first
[translation], six weeks into the first
semester. I was amazed at the result, which
included a perfect translation of a page
from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. He
translated it into real English, not translaterese, and showed an astonishing feel
''Yes, sing ye and
chant id andyou il learn to
speak and read it.. ”
Beate Ruh m von Oppen
for nuances. Next time the class met I
asked Mr. Forrester if he had been a begin
ner when we began six weeks ago. He said:
“Yes”-and after a moment’s reflection he
added: “I’d sung some Bach.”
Bach makes the language, especially
the biblical language, Luther’s German,
memorable. It sticks in the mind-even
as some of Picander’s poetry in the
St. Matthew Passion does, or perhaps just
first words like “Buss undReuf though
the Gospel of Matthew itself is more
memorable, e.g., “Der Geist ist willig,
aber das Fletsch ist schwach ” quotable
and even usable in daily life...
That remark by Jim Forrester taught me
that singing is the best way to learn a
language. Perhaps poetry, anything that
scans is the next best. So we now leave
German (and Latin) to the freshman
chorus and the other, voluntary singing
groups. Yes, sing ye and chant it! - and
you’ll learn to speak and read it...
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Tutor Emerita
Thailand’s War on Drugs
I wanted to address something that [Tiitor
Linda] Weiner said in describing her
summer in Thailand (Winter 2004).
Ms. Weiner suggested that Thailand
benefits from an “enlightened monarch”
and described the king’s policy of replac
ing opium farms with organic farms.
While the king may be enlightened, Thai
land’s Prime Minister and police force are
not. In Thailand’s own war on drugs, 2,245
people were killed in an anti-drug cam
paign from February to April 2003. The
police admitted to killing 50 themselves,
and many others were killed as they
returned from police stations. Thai
officials have neglected to investigate or
prosecute the killings. In August Prime
Minister Thaksin said, in reference to drug
smugglers crossing from Myanmar to
Thailand, “From now on if their trafficking
{The College-
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
caravans enter our soil, we won’t waste our
time arresting them, but we will simply kill
them.” This and other policy statements of
the Prime Minister suggest that more extra
judicial killings will come.
The international community, including
the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudi
cial, summary or arbitrary executions;
Amnesty International; and the Drug
Policy Alliance, have expressed outrage
over the human rights abuses stemming
from Thailand’s war on drugs. I would hate
for Johnnies to get the impression that the
program described by Ms. Wiener is
indicative of Thai drug policy. More
information can be found in the Amnesty
International report “Thailand-Grave
Developments-Killings and Other
Abuses” available atwww.amnesty.org
Renate Lunn
Room
for
(A96)
Gauss
Doing year-end cleaning I chanced upon
Sheri McMahon’s letter in the Spring 2003
issue of The College. I guess it’s a recurring
topic among alumni who reflect upon the
mathematics tutorial.
I personally have often thought it a pity
not to pursue geometry a little further.
I always felt a historical approach to
Gauss’s Theorema Eregiurn on curved sur
faces or something like that might be pos
sible. Michael Spivak does something
along these lines in his Comprehensive
Introduction to Differential Geometry.
I always felt there was no greater figure left
out of the program than Gauss, that there
was a route to some of his work in geome
try that would be accessible to seniors, that
it was the perfect context for glimpses of
non-Euclidean geometry and general
relativity that were offered in the tutorial
(nearly three decades ago!), that it has a
perfect antecedent in the spherical
geometry of Ptolemy.
Mark Copper
(SF76)
Words and Deeds
Thank you for the article in the Winter
2004 issue on Santa Fe’s martial artists.
The Annapolis campus has also enjoyed the
Asian martial traditions over the years.
In 1977 tutor David Starr persuaded one of
his former philosophy students from the
University of Rhode Island, a prodigiously
talented gentleman named Robert Galeone, to move to Annapolis to teach the
Okinawan system of Uechi-ryu karatedo.
continued on nextpage
�{Letters}
I was Mr, Galeone’s first student at the col
lege club, which met in one of the handball
courts in Iglehart Hall on Tuesday and
Wednesday evenings, and Saturday morn
ings. Mr. Galeone, a 5th-degree black belt,
produced quite a few serious students over
the seven years that he led the dojo....
Today, Annapolis students interested in
aikido may join the U.S. Naval Academy’s
Aikido Club, which holds classes on both
the Naval Academy campus and in Iglehart
Hall. (For more information, see
http://www.geocities.com/navyaikido/.)
It seems to me that study and practice of
the martial arts, whether from Asia or the
West, is essential to the development of a
free citizen. Whether the pen is mightier
than the sword is not the right question.
Rather, why should the study of one pre
clude the study of the other? To paraphrase
a Japanese proverb, in the hands of an
educated individual, the sword and the pen
are one. Unfortunately, it is too easy for a
student of the liberal arts to acquire a great
and unjustified faith in the power of speech,
along with an all-too-ready skepticism
concerning action. Words need the support
of deeds. As Mr. Galeone once said, “The
body remembers what it does, and not what
you tell it.” Martial arts training provides
the student with the framework to become
as proficient in the world of action as he or
she is in the world of reason, by teaching
balance, grace, and poise, all while facing
an adversary. I hope that students on both
campuses will take advantage of the
opportunities to pursue these disciplines.
Jim Sorrentino (A8o)
Calendar Mysteries Revealed
I was quite amazed to open the 2004
calendar and find a photo of my high
school math teacher (February 2004).
He is Thomas Yoon (A58), and he taught
me trigonometry and led a philosophy
seminar at Scarborough School, in
Scarborough, N.Y. My guess is that it
was 1967. He was an inspiring teacher with
a great sense of humor, and was the one
who told me about St. John’s College.
Pippi Ellison
few lists I have. The whole scene was
contrived, which is why there is a smirk on
the face of the guy front center and guy
left. Girl center was trying to look serious
and guy rear was told to pose in an
awkward position. The people at the end of
the table were told to look at each other.
No one has the same book. The photos
were intended for a catalog redesign, or a
flyer for the admissions office.
I was the student aide for Marsha Drennon, then admissions director, and helped
find the students and arrange the furni
ture. Notice how there aren’t any empty
chairs? We did have a blast doing the series
of pictures around the campus.
Michael David
(SF87)
Dumping Concerns
While I found the “Night Crawlers” letter
(Winter 2004) somewhat amusing as a
piece of black humor, I was taken aback
that there was no editorial note as to the
state of affairs since the dumping
occurred. Has all that stuff been leaching
into the ground and water and possibly the
creek ever since with nothing being done,
or was it cleaned up at some later date?
If not, I think [the college] is morally, and
perhaps legally, bound to address the prob
lem. Surely, SJC is not so philosophically
preoccupied that it doesn’t care what it
does to our environment?
Natalie Chambliss (class
of
1964)
Editor’s Note:
Steve Linhard, treasurer on the Annapolis
campus, says thatfor an undetermined
period oftime, a dumping ground was sited
on the college’s back campus. When the
college investigated severalyears ago, it
uncovered bricks, broken china, bottles.
(Aya)
The May 2004 photo of students at a table
on the dining hall balcony was taken in
June or July 1985. It was a PR photo from a
whole set of photos taken that day all over
the campus. The students in the photo are
mostly January freshmen, though I can’t
remember or find their names in any of the
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
cans, kitchen utensils, and similar domestic
refuse. “'Testpits were dug by an outside
survey company three summers ago, and
nothing ofany chemical nature was
found,” Linhard says. “In addition, core
samples were taken by a geological testing
firm to examine the soil contentforfeasibil
ityfor thermal conductivityfor the geother
mal heating systemfor the new dormitory.
These samples were examined and nothing
hazardous was discovered. ”
Errata
An article in the Fall 2003 issue stated that
Hans von Briesen attended and taught at
Stanford and the University of Rochester.
He attended the universities, but did not
teach at them.
The reading list on St. John’s history that
accompanied an article on the attempted
Navy takeover of St. John’s (Winter 2003)
should have included these works by
Charlotte Fletcher (HA69), former
librarian at the Annapolis campus: Cato's
Mirania: A Life ofProvost Smith, and
“St. John’s ‘For Ever’: Five Essays on the
History of King William’s School and
St. John’s College,” published in the
St. John'sReview (1990-91).
The College welcomes letters on issues of
interest to readers. Letters maybe edited
for clarity and/or length. Those under
500 words have a better chance of being
printed in their entirety.
Please address letters to: The College
Magazine, St. John’s College, Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404 or The College
Magazine, Public Relations Office,
St. John’s College, 1160 Camino Cruz
Blanca, Santa Fe, NM
87505-4599Letters can also be
sent via e-mail to:
rosemary.harty
@sjca.edu.
�{Revelation}
la
REVELATION
and
REDEMPTION
hat is the revelation in Flannery
O’Connor’s “Revelation”?
That was the question
The College asked of a group of
tutors and others in the St. John’s
College community. The short
essays that follow are presented as thoughtful responses to
a question posed in search of gaining more insight into a
puzzling and multi-layered short story. If you have not read
“Revelation,” or read it long ago, put this feature aside
until you can.
W
Ripe for Revelation
by Joan Silver
Lastfall I received a letter from a stu
dent who said she would be “graciously
appreciative” if I would tell her “just
what enlightenment” I expected her to
getfrom each ofmy stories. Isuspect she
had apaper to write. I wrote her back to
forget about the enlightenment andjust
try to enjoy them. I knew that was the
most unsatisfactory answer I could
have givenbecause, ofcourse, shedidnt
want to enjoy them, shejust wanted to
figure them out.
In most English classes the short story
has become a kind of literary specimen
{The College -John’s
College ■ Spring 2004 }
to be dissected. Every time a story of
mine appears in a Ereshman anthology,
I have a vision ofit, with its little organs
laid open, like afrog in a bottle.
I realize that a certain amount ofthis
what-is-the-significance has to go on,
but I think somethinghas gone wrong in
theprocess when, for so many students,
the story becomes simply a problem to
be solved, something which you evapo
rate to get Instant Enlightenment.
A story isn I really very good unless it
successfully resistsparaphrase, unless it
hangs on and expands in the mind.
Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but ids
equally true that to analyze with any
discrimination, you have to have
enjoyed already.. ..”
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners.
I will assume that all who have read
Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Revela
tion,” have enjoyed it. We enjoy the
story, and her remarks above, somehow
as wholes, and also in their humorous
and penetrating details. In the spirit of
the above remarks, I would like to notice
numerous revelations which spring from
�{The Colleges?.
John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�14
{Revelation}
''In a crucial moment
ofthat vision, she
finds her own kind
bringing up the rear... ’
this story, which calls itself “Revelation” in
the singular. I hope that together they may
“hang on and expand in the mind.”
Perhaps the key revelation in the story is
the return to Mrs. Turpin of the enraged
question she asks of God, “‘Who do you
think you are?’”: “The question carried
over the pasture and across the highway
and the cotton field and returned to her
clearly like an answer from heyond the
wood.” This answer is a distillation of the
revelation already embedded in her earlier
questions: “‘How am I a hog and me both?
How am I saved and from hell too?’” At this
reply, Mrs. Turpin’s mouth opens (is it in
wonder or in understanding?), and she
does not speak. But this revelation is not
the end of the story.
Other revelations follow, mediated by a moment in which
she imagines the death of her husband, his truck hit by anoth
er, his “brains all over the road.” Seeing his truck return, she
herself begins to move, “hke a monumental statue coming to
life.” Only now do initial events of the story receive their
answering revelations.
An early revelation in the story is that “living demonstra
tions” are present in the world. When the story begins Mrs.
Turpin (who is “very large”) is entering the “very small”
waiting room of a doctor’s office; she is said to be a “living
demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridicu
lous.” As the story goes on, of course, we see that the waiting
room is exactly the right size for the events which take place
in it. A later echo which replies to this apparent “living
demonstration” immediately follows Mrs. Turpin’s “coming
to hfe.” The “old sow” and young hogs, above whose “pig
parlor” she confronts God, find their places in their “waiting
room” with ease: “They had settled all in one corner around
the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused
them. They appeared to pant with a secret hfe.” It is the sow
and the other pigs who become a real “living demonstra
tion” for Mrs. Turpin and for the reader. Her earher “glow
ering down” at the hogs and disdaining of others has become
a “gazing down”; she “remained there with her gaze bent to
them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving
knowledge.”
{The College -
Two more echoes follow. The first is a
revelation and echo for Mrs. Turpin and
the reader alike; the second, for the read
er alone. Early on, Mrs. Turpin’s charac
ter is revealed by one of her inner
“games.” In one, she lies awake at night
“naming the classes of people.” She sep
arates and tries to rank human beings by
certain combinations of race and proper
ty, but the real people of her acquain
tance will not stay put in the places that
she gives them: “Usually by the time she
had fallen asleep all the classes of people
were moiling and roiling around in her
head, and she would dream they were all
crammed in together in a box car, being
ridden off to be put in a gas oven.” The
impulse from which such grading and judging spring leads
ultimately to the gas chamber-to spiritual and physical
death for all. This dream is echoed and transformed at the
end by Mrs. Turpin’s vision of the “vast horde of souls
rumbling toward heaven” in which all classes and kinds
are present. In a crucial moment of that vision, she finds
her own kind bringing up the rear: “she could see by their
shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were
being burned away.” Not the fire which makes the gas
chamber, but the fire of purgatory is needed. Note, too,
that hogs are easier to clean than humans; for pigs, only
water is needed.
The final echo is concerned with seeing (and with size).
Mrs. Turpin’s eyes were initially described as “little
bright black eyes . . . [that] sized up the seating situation”
and all else around her. After the vision just mentioned,
O’Connor tells us that her eyes are “small but fixed
unbfinkingiy on what lay ahead.” We may need to ask just
what is intended by “what lay ahead,” but, in this changed
description, we receive the revelation both that a kind of
steadfast looking is necessary for us, and that a transfor
mation of one’s manner of seeing in the world is possible,
(and that size-at least relative human size-does not
matter).
Among the many other revelations in the story, two
seem worthy of note in the context of the ones mentioned
above. The first concerns the catalyst for revelation, the
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
�{Revelation}
second the capacity to receive it. The story shows revelation-or the beginning of it-coming from the strangest
source: Mary Grace. The suffering of one human being,
her anger and anguish, gives birth to grace for another.
And in Ruby Turpin the story shows inquiry, linked with
sin, as a potential path to revelation and grace. Mrs.
Turpin’s inner “games” embody inquiry in a strange form:
who might I have been if not myself; what is my place with
in all of humanity? They also, of course, reveal pride mas
querading as gratitude. This picture remains a revelation,
if a comic one, of what can make one ripe for revelation.
Joan Silver is a tutor and incoming director ofthe Graduate
Institute in Annapolis.
In the Eye
of
15
Judgment Day
by Pamela Kraus
Ruby Turpin knows what should be and does her part to
make it so. She notices every instance of the messy, dirty,
unregulated world. She has her faults, she knows that, but
she’s a respectable, church-going woman who always tries to
make things right. She keeps pigs-just a few of the preemi
nent unclean animal-but she’s built them a concrete pen, a
“pig-parlor,” to keep them from wallowing in mud and slop,
and she hoses them down regularly. On the day of this story
Ruby accompanies her husband Claud to the doctor and sizes
up the waiting room: it’s small and dirty and filled with
slovenly, careless people. To counter the disorder she exer
cises the best force she can, her good disposition generously
Since the emergency, a wrathful Mrs. Turpin has been
demanding why Mary Grace called her an old wart hog from
hell. Mrs. Turpin is convinced that Jesus sent her the mes
sage and, though she has negotiated with him before, for
once, she finds that defense is futile. She has no one to turn
to. She doesn’t trust the cotton-pickers, whose comments
she finds intolerable and full of flattery. She can’t confide in
Claud (whose name sounds like “clod,” and who can’t shore
up her failing faith). She shouts defiantly to Jesus, “Who do
you think you are?”
The sight of the sun setting in the back pasture, “looking
over the paling of trees like a farmer inspecting his own
hogs,” triggers the collapse of her carefully-tended beliefs.
She inspects her own hogs, who are glowing rosy in the cor
ner of the pig parlor, and takes in the “abysmal life-giving
knowledge” from them-sees, I think, that though there is
no one out there measuring each person for a future crown,
yet we have the present life. There is no doctor behind the
waiting-room door, about to call our names. Mrs. Turpin
sees the vast parade of people, carried to heaven on the pur
ple bridge shouting hallelujah. She knows, for the moment
at least, that this is nothing but a dream.
Heaven
by Basia Miller
Mrs. Turpin’s revelation is pretty dark. She has experienced
the dark before-at the end of her dreams, everyone is
crammed in a boxcar and sent off to a gas oven. Today when
she and Claud enter their own dirt road on the way back from
the doctor’s, she is ready to see her home destroyed, “a burnt
wound between two blackened chimneys.” A few moments
before the end, she imagines the pickup truck being crushed
and her husband’s and the fieldhands’ brains oozing out on the
road. Her final revelation seems, too, to be of a world
destroyed, a kind of apocalypse that nevertheless offers “life
giving knowledge.”
First, Mrs. Turpin’s vision was affected in the waiting room.
When Mary Grace sent the book flying at her head, Mrs.
Turpin saw things smaller first, then she saw everything larg
er. The impact was particularly powerful because Mrs. Turpin
sensed that the girl had a deep, timeless knowledge of her,
perhaps of her soul. We who have heard Mrs. Turpin talking
incessantly, all afternoon, about her own goodness have to
ask if much of this talk isn’t inspired by self-doubt. She’s con
verted everyone’s gestures, everyone’s shoes, green stamps, Basia Miller is a Santa Fe tutor.
and traces of snuff into material for affirming her worth in the
eye of heaven, like a person feeding an insatiable hunger.
{The College-
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
�i6
{Revelation}
''Thepurgatorial
vision reveals
all manner of
sinners lined up
ingroups...
bestowed, a veneer of nice manners and char
•
itable platitudes barely covering harsh judg
ments. This is her way of following the com
mandment Love Thy Neighbor. Both her
justice and her mercy are superficial rather
than utterly misplaced. They are poor imita
tions of the divine, not complete aberrations.
Yet they are not harmless: they hold her fast
in easygoing self-righteousness and could
forever blind her to herself.
Mary Grace is the only occupant of the wait
ing room who won’t submit to Ruby’s intru
sive geniality. An ugly, cranky, even mean
young woman, Mary Grace sees a deeper dis
order than Ruby sees, and her penetrating
eye is right on Ruby Thrpin. Mary Grace
waits in the waiting room but is sickened by
the world that surrounds her, as if she has
taken in its ugliness. She is most revolted at
Ruby, its banal and self-satisfied leading citi
zen. Seemingly lost to charity, or too bur
dened for it, she freely offers this world
her scorn.
Each of these judges is drawn to the other
from the first as to a perfect enemy. Mary
Grace rebuffs Ruby’s attempts at cordial
small talk, even when not directed to her, by making
grotesque faces. The affronts enliven Ruby’s insistence on
the virtue of good-naturedness. The garrulous, prettied-up
world of Ruby’s waiting room advances upon the stark,
friendless one defended by Mary Grace. When Ruby’s enthu
siasm reaches its peak, she bursts out in praise: “Thank you,
Jesus, for making everything the way it is! ” Mary Grace retal
iates. She launches her book at Ruby and goes for her throat.
Both fall in this battle. Mary Grace inflicts the blows, yet
she is the one sedated and removed to a hospital. The purple
swelling above Ruby’s eye and the marks on her throat are on
the surface; deeper is a more grievous wound. Not the book,
not the hands clenched around her throat, but the words
Mary Grace whispers as the two lock eyes hit home: “Go back
to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” These words
“brooked no repudiation.” They strike Ruby’s center of grav
ity, confusing her sight and toppling her confidence. Ruby is
turned, readied for revelation; Mary Grace, an inadvertent
{The College-
cause of grace, goes to a fate we do not know.
The vision of an ugly wart hog besets Ruby
all afternoon. Driven by anger, confusion,
and need, she spills her story almost in spite
of herself to the Black cotton workers in her
employ. This veiled plea for compassion is
met with highly spirited but superficial concern-the kind of concern Ruby has been so
proud of and good at herself, especially with
the Blacks-and it angers her to receive it
from those she has considered so far beneath
her. She goes to her pig-parlor seething as
intensely as Mary Grace in the waiting room,
turns the hose on the pigs, and, like a comic
Job, thrusts question after question at God.
The questions begin in a forceful whisper,
“How am 1 a hog and me both?”, and reach a
summit of fury: “Who do you think you
are?”, the fundamental question to which a
vision is the mysterious answer.
The purgatorial vision reveals all manner
of sinners hned up in groups, each rejoicing
in its distinctive way, and puts Ruby in
her place. Ahead in line are the leapers
and rollickers; she, Claud, and the other
respectable people are last in the procession,
their virtues the sins being burned away. The vision is a
reminder of our essential unfitness to understand and follow
the commandment to love even when we desire to and a reve
lation of God’s inscrutable, comic ways. As Ruby stands gaz
ing upon “what lay ahead” and hearing at the crickets’ chirps
hallelujahs of praise, we wonder in what world Ruby now
is and whether it may embrace the edge that Mary Grace
inhabits.
99
Pamela Kraus, a tutor in Annapolis, also serves as editor of
the St. John’s Review.
The Private Hell
of
Ruby Turpin
by Cary Stickney
Without rereading the story, 1 want to say that the primary
revelation is what the girl in the doctor’s office says that
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�{Revelation}
wounds Mrs. Turpin so: “You are a warthog from Hell!”
Ruby Turpin cannot forget it, and it brings on a kind of crisis
of faith, I presume because on some level Mrs. Turpin
acknowledges its truth. It is at least in part-the warthog
part-an inevitable consequence of existing as a creature in
the same cosmos with an infinitely good Creator. In this
sense I suppose even archangels are warthogs, compared to
the beauty of God. That the warthog is from Hell seems to me
to say that we have each taken the finite beauty and goodness
we might have had and thrown it away. That is, we are sin
ners, and we make a kind of hell for ourselves.
Looking back at the story I see that the girl in the waiting
room says, “Go back to Hell where you came from, you old
warthog!” Mrs. Thrpin had been revealing by her conversa
tion with the girl’s mother that she lives in a world of careful
ly maintained distinctions, and that she compensates herself
for the efforts she makes to be good by looking down on all
those who seem not to try as hard. She would not describe her
own world as a hell. But I see something hellish in the dream
we are told she sometimes has, in which her struggles to
17
maintain the picture of a well-ordered hierarchy of human
virtue and vice correlated with property ownership and
worth ancestry, to say nothing of skin color, give way to a
vision of a cattle-car crowded with every kind of human on
the way to a gas oven. In her waking hours, she sees a world
in which good people are the exception and things are get
tingworse. To be “saved,” as she believes she is, requires that
she think better of things than that, at least in an ultimate
sense, but it looks as if she has reduced God to a scorekeeper
and that her gratitude to have been created as the one we see
is dependent at least on her fear of and contempt for others.
The Wellesley girl, Mary Grace, may see that, and may mean
that she is far from heaven and fairly close to hell, so that it
would be easy to just go back. Of course being an effective
messenger may not require that the aptly named Mary Grace
fully understand the message she delivers.
Both the aspects of the revelation, that she is a warthog and
that she came from Hell, carry with them a redeeming and
mysterious grace: namely that in spite of our vanishingly
small claim to significance or beauty or even to being at all.
{The College -St John’s
College • Spring 2004 }
�i8
{Revelation}
we somehow do exist in the same cosmos with infinite beauty
and heing-God has made room for us and wants us to be.
That turns out to involve, in the Christian understanding,
that He has moreover forgiven us the waste of our time and
gifts, the pettiness and cruelty we might have avoided, and
that He offers us His love. What Mrs. Turpin demands to
know, namely how she can be herself and a hog too, or saved
and at the same time from hell, is the mystery that requires a
further revelation, or a deeper view of the one she has been
given.
In the story, Mrs. Turpin is hosing out the hog pen and
shaking her fist at God when the shape of the stream of water
momentarily comes to resemble a snake. She is at that
moment complaining to God that she might as well have
never tried to lead a good life at all, if she can be so insulted
and feel it so deeply; if, in a word, she is still just a warthog: in
spite of all her efforts still essentially no better than the worst
of sinners, the most lazy and wicked. This is a form of the
temptation to think that she should. Godlike, be able to make
herself, to accomphsh her own goodness and merit by her
unaided efforts, and thus, implicitly, to know good and evil:
to have the right to judge and condemn others presumably
less industrious or tasteful than herself. For if it does not ulti
mately matter what she does, and all saving power remains
with God, why has she troubled herself all these years? “Why
should we not sin the more, that Grace may abound?” asks
Paul, before repudiating the question.
The mystery and the final aspect of the revelation, granted
in her sunset vision, is that it does and does not matter. It
does: before she sees the highway into heaven she has seen
the setting sun like a farmer looking over the fence of the
treetops at his hogs, and she has seen her own hogs, clean
now and gathered around the old sow, the source of their
hves, and one kind of image of herself. She gazes “as if
through the very heart ofmystery,” and again, “as if she were
absorbing some abysmal, life-giving knowledge.” It is a
knowledge set off both by the previous sight of her husband’s
truck going down the road no bigger than a toy, liable at any
moment to be smashed, and by the fact of sunset itself. Even
without accident we are not here long. From the abyss, the
depths at greatest distance from God, she absorbs the knowl
edge that life-finite, particular, hog-ugly hfe-precisely in its
finitude, is beautiful, is full of God, its secret source. If those
hogs are beautiful, then so is she; it is right that she is who she
{The College-
is. But then it is equally right that others are who they are.
Her struggles to do right have not made her superior. When
she sees the horde of ascending souls, led by the crazy, lazy,
crippled, and off-key, she sees she had to make the efforts she
made to be who she is, not because God would not love her
otherwise, but because there must be all kinds of saved sin
ners, and it is a divine gift to be whatever kind you are.
It does not matter: the very virtues of the decent and
upright like herself are being burned away in the purging
fires of the ascent; that is, even their virtues are small and
small-minded in the hght of God’s love. That God’s love is not
hmited by human wickedness and yet does not annihilate the
significance of an individual life is part of the same revelation
as that an infinite being should make room for finitude to
begin with. Greation and redemption are revealed to be at
one.
Carey Stickney (A75) is a tutor in Santa Fe.
The Presence
of
Evil
by George Russell
Flannery O’Gonnor did not write about the lives of the
great, but the lives of the ordinary and the lowly. By conse
quence, the situations and actions of her characters are
most often the stuff of comic and not tragic report. One
finds himself laughing spontaneously at the human beings
in her stories. Nevertheless, she is not condescending to
her characters. She takes them seriously, holding them
accountable for their weaknesses and transgressions. They
may be ridiculous in the smallness of their views and
desires, but they suffer nonetheless for their sins, and one
is brought to feel for them in their sufferings and in the
realizations that their sufferings allow.
“Revelation” is a story about a day in the life of Ruby
Turpin, a farming woman who, as far as she knows, is
“saved” (“And wona these days I know I’ll we-era a
crown.”) and who, in her own words is “a respectable, hard
working, church-going woman.” From the first we are told
that Ruby Turpin is a woman, big in size (“I wish I could
reduce...”), blessed with a “good disposition” and “a little
of everything,” with the emphasis on “everything.” In the
story, we see her settled conclusions about the world
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
�{Revelation}
around her and her place and identity in that world and in
the divine plan come under an unexpected and jarring
attack during a visit with her husband to the doctor’s
office; and we witness a recovery which is as remarkable as
the fall.
A story with two distinct parts, “Revelation” in its first
part takes place in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.
The waiting room is emblematic of the shared human
condition. Human beings are susceptible to injury and
sickness. And their susceptibility is real; they get injured;
they get sick. However that maybe the case, the story is less
about bodily injury and illness than it is about another abo
riginal susceptibility, the proneness to sin and especially to
pride. It reminds one of the passage in the Bible from
On
the
Road to Damascus
by Michael Dink
The revelation that comes to Ruby, in the form of a book
thrown by Mary Grace that knocks her off her chair in the
doctor’s office, is in essence identical to that which came
to Saul, in the form of a flash of light that knocked him to
the ground on the road to Damascus. Prior to the revela
tion, Ruby and Saul shared a sense of their superiority to
certain other human beings, a superiority achieved by reg
ulating their conduct according to certain precepts and
recognized in the eyes of God. In Ruby this sense takes the
form of a self-congratulating condescension, in which she
sees herself as kind and tolerant to those inferiors, while
in Saul it took the more aggressive form of trying to pun
ish or reform those who had strayed from the right path.
When Ruby is called “a wart hog from hell” and Saul is
asked, “Why do you persecute me?” they are confronted
with the claim that they are sinners, certainly no better
than those they had despised, and perhaps even worse,
precisely because of the claim to righteousness implicit in
their despising, a claim that Saul, reborn as Paul, denies
that any human being can truthfully make.
Ruby struggles valiantly to deny this message, “But the
denial had no force.” She resents its being directed to her,
“a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman,”
19
Proverbs, “Pride goeth before destruction, and haughty
spirit before a fall.” The central dramatic incident that
takes place in the first part of the story occurs in the con
text of a conversation between three women, Mrs. Turpin,
a poor white woman, and the mother of a college student
named Mary Grace. The conversation of the women, taken
together with the reports of the narrator, reveals the pride
of the three women and of Mary Grace, but especially that
of Ruby Turpin.
About Mrs. Turpin we learn early on, that when she is
restless and unable to sleep, she has two nocturnal occupa
tions. In one, she seems to be acutely aware of the contin
gent character of her present life. Like Eve, who is tempted
by an alternative vision of the world, Mrs. Turpin’s imagi-
“though there was trash in the room to whom it might
justly have been applied.” A kiss from her husband and
flattery from the black womenfolk of their hired help fail
to assuage her resentment.
When she goes to the pig parlor and tries to cleanse the
pigs, she speaks out her resentment, evidently to God,
indicating that she does recognize the source of the reve
lation, despite her resistance to it. She continues to justify
herself, to defend her innocence, her charity, her superi
ority to lower orders of people. Her fury bursts forth in a
defiant challenge, “Gall me a hog again. From hell. Gall
me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top.
There’ll still be a top and bottom.”
After seeing her husband’s truck in the distance as tiny
and vulnerable, she gazes at the hogs for a long time, “as if
she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.”
Then she has a vision of a procession of souls marching
toward heaven. Leading the way are “the bottom rail,” all
the kinds of people she despised, “shouting and clapping
and leaping like frogs.” Behind them, with “great dignity”
but with “shocked and altered faces,” come people like
herself and Glaude, and she sees that “even their virtues
are being burned away.” In this final vision, she at last sees
how she is “saved and from hell too.”
Michael Dink fAyjJ is an Annapolis tutor.
{The College -5f. John ’5
College ■ Spring 2004 }
�ao
{Revelation}
Priestess and Visionary
by Elizabeth Engel
Mrs. Turpin’s revelation builds from the first face the girl
makes at her through Mrs. Turpin’s wonderful defiant
questions to God as she stands at the pig parlor; “What
do you send me a message like that for?” “How am I a hog
and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” The set
ting sun, now far more mysterious than when Mrs. Turpin
saw it, hke her, “looking over the paling of trees like a
farmer inspecting his own hogs,” transforms everything.
Mrs. Turpin, ignoring the transformation, dares God again
and ends with roaring “who do you think you are?” An
echo comes back at her “like an answer from beyond the
wood.” God answers her by questioning her and her pride,
with far more right than she had to question him.
Mrs. Turpin begins to see who she really is as she sees the
fragility of human life in Claud’s tiny truck, which from her
position looks like a child’s toy: “At any moment a bigger
truck might smash into it and scatter Claud’s and the nig
gers’ brains all over the road.” When she has seen the truck
home safe, she turns to the pig parlor: “Then, hke a monu
mental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and
gazed as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the
pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner
nation brings her to envision the world other than it is. She
wonders how things would have gone “If Jesus had said to
her before he made her...You can either be a nigger or
white-trash.” Her preference, she decides, is for Jesus to
have made her “a neat clean respectable Negro woman,
herself but black,” changed but still saved, sidestepping the
lowly. In her other nocturnal activity, Mrs. Turpin is said to
have “occupied herself at night naming the classes of peo
ple.” She lies awake at night trying to sort out the people in
her world into classes, in accordance with their material
and social standing in the world. She assumes blindly that
she possesses the standard and judgment for the task of sav
ing and condemning. However, the fluctuations in the for
tunes of the human beings that she would rank make such a
jumble of her very attempts to rank them, that she finally
falls off to sleep, imagining them all condemned, (“she
would dream they were all crammed together in a box car,
being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”). Her virtues
notwithstanding, Mrs. Turpin remains prey to these temp
tations, and we see her assailed by them too in the light of
{The College.
around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suf
fused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.” The
hogs have become beautiful gathered around the maternal
and musical old sow, a vision of animal life filled by grace.
This is how we can be both hogs and ourselves too.
Mrs. Turpin is herself transformed by gazing at the hogs;
she becomes a sort of priestess, raising her hands “in a ges
ture hieratic and profound.” Her transformation allows her
final vision, the bridge over which souls are marching
towards Paradise. The most respectable, the group she
thinks she belongs to, come last, and “even their virtues
were beings burned away.” In relation to salvation, virtue
doesn’t matter, nor does top and bottom, dignity and luna
cy, white and black. This, I think, completes Mrs. Turpin’s
revelation. O’Connor says, “she lowered her hands and
gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed
unbhnkingly on what lay ahead.” We see what she sees, and
we see her seeing it, pig-like, with her small eyes, and still
as priestess and visionary. Is this our revelation? Our judg
ment of her has become irrelevant, just as have her judg
ments of other people. We turn with Mrs. Ihrpin back onto
the darkening path-surely O’Connor intends us to think of
Dante-and with her we hear “the voices of the souls climb
ing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”
Elizabeth (Litzi) Engel is a tutor in Santa Fe.
day. Mrs. Turpin feeds her false pride by imagining the infe
rior world or worlds that might have been. Those imagina
tions of worlds inferior to her world feature the lowly ones
of the here and now whom she judges so severely.
As Mrs. Turpin’s prideful attitudes leak out in the waiting
room conversation, they become contagious. In the chief
exchange in the waiting room, an exchange about the
Turpin farm, Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace’s mother silent
ly join together against the opinions of the “white-trash
woman.” The two women form an alliance inasmuch as
“...both understood that you had to have certain things
before you could know certain things.” An antagonism
erupts between the poor white woman and Mrs. Turpin
regarding their differing opinions about the possessions
and associations that Mrs. Turpin has; Mrs. Turpin raises
pigs and associates with black people. According to
Mrs. Turpin, the Turpins have “a couple acres of cotton and
a few hogs and chickens and just enough white-face that
Gland can look after them himself.” That report elicits a
retort from the white-trash woman that she doesn’t want
St. John ’5 College ■ Spring 2004 }
�{Revelation}
''The corruptive
power ofpride takes
its toll once more.''
anything to do with hogs: “Hogs. Nasty
stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all
over the place.” It does not matter to her
that the Turpins have a “pig-parlor” a con
crete-floored pen where the pigs are raised
and where “Claud scoots them down with
the hose every afternoon and washes off
the floor.”
The poor woman wouldn’t stoop to
“scoot down no hog with no hose.” And as
to the black people that the Turpins hire
(“butter up”) to pick their cotton, the
“white-trash woman” is equally as
adamant: “Two thangs I ain’t going to do:
love no niggers or scoot down no hog with
no hose.” As far above the “white-trash
woman” as Mrs. Turpin seems to place
herself, the “white-trash woman” places
herself above hogs and “niggers.” The
corruptive power of pride takes its toll
once more.
In the doctor’s office, then, we witness
Mrs. Turpin’s awareness of the contingent
character of her life (“When I think who
all I could have been besides myself and
what all I got...It could have been different!”) and how that
awareness contributes to her false pride and a lack of
understanding both of who she is and of the true character
of her world. Behind her “good disposition,” we see her
judgment on the world as it is given to her. Despite the fact
that her virtue has no positive ground, she imagines that
her goodness is sufficient both to judge and re-order the
world and to do that without any assistance: “It’s no use in
having more than you can handle yourself with help like it
is.” Hers is not a position where she needs help, and she
doesn’t ask for any. She divides her world into those like
herself and Mary Grace’s mother, who don’t need help, and
those like the poor white woman. Of the latter, she thinks,
“Help them you must, but help them you couldn’t,” even
though, “To help anybody out that needed it was her philos
ophy of life.” Mrs. Turpin is saved and she is a would-be sav
ior. From that vantage point of self-sufficiency, hers is a posi
tion of gratitude. (“Oh, thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!”)
But she is more grateful for what she is not than for what she
is, perhaps grateful even that she is child
less. What she does not seem to acknowl
edge is that bad things and evil itself can
not be relegated to what is not or to
absence, and for that reason in part, no one
is completely “saved” in this world, cer
tainly not by dint of one’s own efforts
alone, from the power of temptation and
malevolence.
It is in the context of her ignorance of
the forces of evil in the world that Mrs.
Turpin comes to consider Mary Grace
(“Why, girl, I don’t even know you...”),
who gives up her reading and bears wit
ness to the display of pride. She takes up
her station, staring relentlessly at Mrs.
Turpin and making ugly faces at her until
she feels the need to defend herself. But
most importantly, at the point where Mrs.
Turpin claims not to know Mary Grace,
she thinks that Mary Grace, “was looking
at her as if she had known and disliked her
all her life-all of Mrs. Turpin’s hfe, it
seemed too, not just the girl’s life.” What
there was to be known all of her hfe is
nothing but the susceptibility to temptation and the
depredations of evil which are coeval with the garden and
human existence.
Mary Grace, possessed of money, family, education, is a
real puzzle for Mrs. Turpin. So obviously lacking in grace,
she is loaded with the worldly goods by which Mrs. Turpin
partially takes her bearings. It does not make sense to her
that Mary Grace with all of her books could be possessed of a
false pride dwarfing that of her and the others. (“The girl
looked as if she would like to hurl them all through the plate
glass window.”) It does not make sense to her that Mary
Grace as Mary Grace could be a source of evil. Mary Grace
would open her eyes though, and so she throws the book at
her. The incongruity of first being silently intimidated, and
then being assaulted with a book by someone such as Mary
Grace, convinces Mrs. Turpin that there is more to the situa
tion than meets the eye. And so she seeks out Mary Grace,
“What you got to say to me?” And she receives the retorted
command, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old
{The Colleges?. John’s
College ■ Spring 2004 }
�aa
{Revelation}
wart hog.” When Mary Grace tells Mrs. Turpin to go to heU,
Mrs. Turpin does not understand what she means, does not
accept the evil that confronts her. She thinks that God is
telhng her that she is not saved. The second part of the story
addresses that mistake and achieves in a way a resolution to
the story.
The shift in the story from the doctor’s office to the farm
marks a shift from pride to humility, the doctor’s office hav
ing pride of place. Mrs. Turpin is so convinced that God has
abandoned her, that when she and Claud drive home, and she
looks for their house, “She would not have been startled to
see a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys.” She
and Claud he down, but she cannot escape what had hap
pened or the image of her that had been deposited in her
soul. “She had been singled out for the message.” In her feel
ing of sohtude, she cries, but when her tears dry, “Her eyes
began to burn with wrath”: she is “a respectable, hard-work
ing, church-going woman.”
When her self-pity turns to anger, Mrs. Turpin turns to
the farm community, which she rules for affirmation and
assurance of who she is. In a sense, she wants the message
to be overruled by her loved ones, her husband, her black
field hands, and her hogs. But the fact of her rule presents
a problem for her, because now she needs help. She turns to
Claud for solace-(“‘Listen here,’ she said.” ‘“What?”’
“‘Kiss me.’”)-and Claud obliges her, as he does through
out the story, “as if he was accustomed to doing what she
told him to,” but nothing happens. She turns to the black
workers, but the workers think that Mrs. Turpin is beyond
anything bad happening to her, as if “she were protected in
some special way by Divine Providence.” When Mrs.
Turpin leaves the black workers, she goes down to the pig
parlor and takes the hose from Claud; on the farm, she is
“the right size woman to command the arena before her.”
When he goes off, Mrs. Turpin begins speaking to God,
raising her questions, wanting to know how she is herself
and a hog both and how she is “saved and from hell too.” In
a final display of pride, hosing down her hogs, she rants and
raves at God until she comes to the more general form of
her question, “Who do you think you are?” the question
echoing back to her.
The humihty on the farm appears to be the antidote to the
diseased pride infesting the doctor’s office. There Mrs.
Turpin comes face to face with someone “above” her, who is
{The College.
not thankful to Jesus, who does not “read from the same
book” as she does and who takes her bearings from what
Mrs. Turpin ostensibly is, a fat, indulgent, prideful woman,
who, just like Mary Grace, “complains and criticizes all day
long.” The evil in Mary Grace would claim Mrs. Turpin for
itself; hence, the condemnation. But because Mrs. Turpin
thinks that she is saved, she thinks that evil is somehow
warded off, existing in some imaginary alternative world;
and so, she mistakenly interprets what Mary Grace says.
Mrs. Turpin mistakenly thinks that God is turning away
from her because evil makes its presence known to her and
even as having a root in her; she thinks that she is no longer
one of the saved.
But to say that God is not turning away from Mrs. Turpin
is not to say that God was not working through the force of
evil. O’Connor clearly beheves that God does work through
evil, and that He is able to do such work just because of the
inroads that evil has made in the souls of human beings. God
was not turning away from her, but turning her so that she
might face the reality of her continual need for salvation. On
the farm, in her rant, Mrs. Turpin would fight God with her
pride-until she hears herself. Then it is that the day’s lesson
begins to come clear to her, the lesson about the world and
the serpent and the lesson of Job and God and the Adver
sary. Then she sees Claud’s truck, looking “like a toy,” and
sees the downside of that technological marvel, that it could
be smashed by a bigger truck and everyone in it destroyed.
Then Ruby turns to her hogs gathered around the sow,
where “A red glow suffused them;” they were God’s crea
tures, panting “with a secret life.” Her acknowledgement of
the presence of evil in this world and of the goodness of
God’s creation even in the lowly allows her to have a vision
of a new order marching to salvation; in that order the lowly
are entering first.
It is hardly accidental that the setting of the first part of
the story is in a doctor’s office, that there is even a black den
tist in town, or that the book that Mary Grace throws at Mrs.
Turpin was titled Human Development. Today, many people
have a difficult time talking about good and evil, preferring
instead to talking about health and sickness. But O’Connor’s
character, Mrs. Turpin, when she is in need of help, does not
want the doctor’s help. What is aihng her is a matter of the
spirit. Of course, the terms in which she understands the
“classes of people” and herself belong to the contemporary
John’s College • Spring 2004 }
�{Revelation}
^3
revelation is not a
quiet Inull...
•
United States South, where the old
notions of rank based on land owner
ship and breeding issue in such cate
gories as “good blood” and “white
trash” and “niggers.” She is a stock
character in O’Connor’s repertoire of
stories, each one having its place as in
a series of echoes originating in and
echoing from a single homeland,
O’Connor’s powerful imaginative
intellect. O’Connor is a Catholic
writer from the South, for her, the
land of the humble and the humbled.
Persisting in her faith and her South
ern roots and in allusions to the Holo
caust and the dark sides of technolog
ical life, O’Connor helps us navigate
our own darkness and locate the beau
tiful in lowly and humble lives. On
that account, in the aist century, she
is a writer whose meanings are not
only important but urgently needed.
George Russell is a tutor in Annapolis.
The Message-Bearers
by Barbara Goyette
Perhaps this story is not only about a revelation but about
revelation itself, the nature of a mysterious occurrence
that serves as a link between our everyday world (or the
somewhat off-kilter but nevertheless recognizably every
day world of Flannery O’Connor’s South) and some deeper
reality.
Revelation involves drama and it involves some kind of
truth or disclosure about something that wasn’t realized or
known before. In a theological sense, revelation involves a
manifestation of the divine will. A revelation is not a quiet
truth: Mary Grace hurls a textbook at Mrs. Turpin and then
pronounces her verdict, “You are a wart hog from Hell.”
The black field-hand ladies also tell her the truth: “ ‘Ain’t
nothing bad happen to you! ’ the old woman said. She said
it as if they all knew that Mrs. Turpin was protected in some
{The College.
7
99
special way by Divine Providence.”
This truth infuriates Mrs. Turpin; she
fervently hopes that it is as false as
Mary Grace’s revelation. And then
there’s the wild and wooly vision of the
souls marching up to heaven, violent
in its intensity and in its absolute nega
tion of all that Mrs. Turpin thinks she
believes to be right and just.
Revelation does not need proof. It
can’t be arrived at by logic, and one
can’t be persuaded to it. Revelation
suggests someone or something as the
medium of higher truth or another
level of reality. In this story, the irony
of the message-bearers-a disaffected,
angry, acne-scarred intellectual; a
troop of respectable, sycophantic field
workers; and the pigs, hosed off to spot
lessness from their naturally filthy
state-reinforces the disjunction that is
at the root of Mrs. Turpin’s sinful view.
Her sin is that of not seeing, not understanding the most
fundamental fact of grace-that it applies to everyone at all
times, no matter what their level of receptiveness or worthi
ness. Mrs. Turpin fails just as we aU fail, by virtue of being
human. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. In the
beatitudes, the unhappy are blessed and the happy are
cursed (this complementary “woe to...” set of pronounce
ments is often ignored in our recollection of the beatitudes—
it’s not only that the downtrodden have a special place in
God’s consideration, it’s that those who are successful do
not, at least not insofar as they are successful). Our measures
of success, those that Mrs. Turpin admires and with which
she measures the worthiness of others, are worse than mean
ingless. They get in the way of our understanding that we are
all in need of grace. Revelation is a gift, presented to
Mrs. Turpin and to us. It’s there every day for all of us, and
everyone around us is a messenger.
Barbara Goyette (A’^g) is vice presidentfor advancement in
Annapolis.
John’s College • Spring 2004 }
�24
{Alumni Voices}
THE HABIT OF
WRITING
BY Brigid K. Byrne, AGI03
hen I open my mailbox to find an
ingly [reflects] the object, the being, which [specifies] it.”
envelope addressed in a bold, careful
Studying O’Connor’s letters, I decided that Fitzgerald had
script and bearing an Iowa City post
given the collection the perfect name. O’Connor offered
mark, mixed in among bills and cata
her correspondents thoughts about everything: her pet
logs, I feel a small thrill, an excite
peacocks, her writing habits, and her peculiar interpreta
ment that there is something meant especially
It
tion offor
theme.
Catholic
faith. Her letters to friends, fans, pub
seems strange that finding a personal letterlishers,
in my mailbox
and fellow writers reveal a woman who wrote them
gives me so much joy. Yet, how often do we get a letter from
not only to maintain her connection to those she loved, but
someone we know and love? How often do we take the time
also to explore and reveal the parts of herself which the
to write to others? Most of the written communication we
intended recipient had the power to bring out.
send and receive are hasty e-mails, typed quickly, in lan
I was most struck by O’Connor’s correspondence with
guage created to speed up the time spent composing mes
Cecil Dawkins, a college professor who introduced herself
sages. While e-mail has perhaps kept us closer to those we
to O’Connor in a letter. Dawkins challenged O’Connor by
may otherwise have drifted apart from, our brief electron
asking her advice in matters concerning her career, her
ic conversations lack the richness and intimacy that are
desire to write, and her faith. In a response to a question
vital parts of human relationships. We compose our mes
Dawkins raised about the effectiveness of the Catholic
sages so quickly that we forfeit the benefits of self-reflec
Church, O’Connor wrote, “You don’t serve God by saying:
tion and personal growth that we can gain when we write
the Church is ineffective. I’ll have none of it. Your pain at
letters to others. The flow of thoughts seems better suited
its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God.
to the flow of ink from the pen than to the pecking of
We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suf
fingers on a plastic keyboard, and the act of sealing an enve
fering on account of it.” Reading this unusually lengthy
lope much more satisfying than hitting the “send” button.
response, I realized that Dawkins had asked a question that
I felt the loss of the art of letter writing poignantly as I
O’Connor herself struggled with and wondered if O’Con
recently revisited The Habit ofBeing, Sally Fitzgerald’s col
nor was speaking more to Dawkins or to herself.
lection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters. Fitzgerald titled
In her introduction to the book, Fitzgerald notes that “on
her collection The Habit ofBeing because she saw that the
the whole, [O’Connor’s] correspondence was an enrichment
writer’s correspondence reflected the attainment of that
of her life, to say nothing of the lives of her correspondents”
habit, which she defines as “an excellence not only of
and that “almost all of her close friendships were sustained
action but of interior disposition and activity that increas
through the post.”
W
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�{Alumni Voices}
As I reread
O’Connor’s let
ters, I realized
that my own
habit of letter
writing
has
enriched my life.
1 was not much
of a letter writer
until about five
years ago when
I began corre
sponding with
Sandra, an honors student from Iowa, whom I met while
interning at the U.S. Department of Education. After rais
ing her children, Sandra enrolled in a community college
near her home and was so successful in her studies that she
gained an internship through Phi Theta Kappa. Over that
summer, Sandra and I had many conversations, and I
learned much from her about courage and faith. When our
internships ended, Sandra and I exchanged addresses in the
way parting people do, intending to keep in touch, but
doubtful whether such a brief acquaintance would with
stand time and distance.
I returned to college that fall, but I could not forget San
dra. I pulled out the scrap of paper on which she had care
fully printed her address and wrote her a letter. Thus began
years of correspondence that have led me to question and
contemplate many of my ideas, choices, and beliefs. When I
first began writing to Sandra, I was feeling uncertain about
my faith. Having been raised Catholic and force-marched to
Mass, I purposefully spent each Sunday of my first few years
away at college lingering over breakfast in the dining hall,
ignoring the bells chiming at St. Paul’s, just a few hundred
yards away. I was torn between rebelling against my parents
and discovering my own sense of faith. In writing to Sandra,
I found that I could wrestle with my doubts and hesitations.
Through my letters to her, I came to recognize my struggle
was not between me and God, but one of becoming an adult.
{The College-
25
learning to make
choices for my
self. Sandra’s res
ponses, resonat
ing with her faith
in God, even in
the face of hard
ship and sorrow,
gave me the
strength to travel
my own spiritual
road. Without
Sandra as my
audience, I am not sure that I would have found that part
of myself.
While my relationship with Sandra has led me to a deeper
sense of faith, having a variety of correspondents challenges
me to look at many sides of myself. One of my favorite audi
ences is my friend Sally, who lives in Atlanta. Although Sally
and I talk on the phone frequently and see each other occa
sionally, letter writing is still an important part of our
friendship. We enjoy what Shakespeare might term “a mar
riage of true minds,” as our thoughts, interests, and experi
ences run uncannily parallel. Writing to Sally is almost like
writing to myself, except that I wait in anticipation for her
honest replies, replies that demand that I look into myself
more alertly.
In my day-to-day habit of living, running from job to job,
eating in my car, I have little time for reflection and clarity.
I have come to see this habit of living, which requires me to
direct so much energy away from myself, as distinctly differ
ent from the habit of being, which allows me to spend time
inside, listening only to myself. Like O’Connor, I have
found that I can practice my habit of being most effectively
as I sit down to write. So I will find time today to retreat
from the habit of living and write to my friend and fellow
St. John’s alumna, Sarah. I can’t wait to see what my letter
will reveal.
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�{Johnnies
2,6
on
Aging}
THE MIND IN
WINTER
Living an ExaminedLife in Later Years
wi Sus3AN Borden, A87
would lose meaning and she knew that there have even
been suicides [among older people]. To provide meaning
to their lives, she endowed the institute, which provides
high-quality, exciting courses for seniors. The faculty,
illiam Butler Yeats
Institute, where he explores the world -W
from
a classroom.
from neighborhood universities and the U.C. Medical
“Hannah Fromm was worried that the life of retired people
Center, are also mostly seniors,” explains Brunn, who has
ohn Brunn (class of 1947) is no Magellan, no
studied history, literature, science, and music at the insti
Columbus, no Ernest Shackleford or Neil
tute since his retirement.
Armstrong, but in an important way, he has
Brunn’s explorations are important to an aging mind,
remained true to his childhood ambition to
says Helen Hobart (class of 1964). Hobart works with
become an explorer. “I thought of it then as
older people who are experiencing dementia, and she’s a
physical exploration,” he says of the ambition
true believer in the adage “use it or lose it.” “The more
that has become increasingly intellectual as he
we exercise our minds, the more protection we have from
has aged. “When I first came to California,
the effects of dementia,” says Hobart. “People who com
I fell in love with the Sierra and have spent
plete loth grade have five more years of protection from
vacations exploring the mountains, at first with friends
theand
effects of Alzheimer’s than those who don’t. You may
later with my wife. With increasing age-I have turned
be 77showing signs of the disease neurologically, but symp
that has become difficult. Most of my learning istomatically,
now
you’ve got enough other brain connections
indoors, but I am still curious about the world.”
that function because you’ve stimulated their growth, so
the assault of Alzheimer’s won’t show up.”
While keeping the mind active slows the effects of
aging, Hobart encourages us to recognize that, with the
loss of cognitive ability, other strengths can come into
Life moves out ofa redflare ofdreams
Into a common light ofcommon hours.
Brunn is fortunate to live in San Francisco, not just for
Until
old age and
brings
the but
redflare
the mountains
the city,
also foragain.
the Hannah Fromm
J
{The College -Sr. John’s
College ■ Spring 2004 }
�27
{Johnnies on Aging}
play. “Roughly half
of people over 85
have Alzheimer’s
and we’re aU hving
longer,” she says.
“So it behooves
us to consider
what it means to
be human in addi
tion to our cogni
tive functions. I’ve
seen a lot of suffer
ing because people
feel they’re no
longer worthwhile
because their memoryis failing or they can’t figure out how to do something
that they used to do. But there are so many wonderful
ways of being in relationship with the world and other
people. The epidemic of dementia as we grow older really
invites us to consider our humanity, our affections, our
spirituality, our art, our love of music. All these things
can thrive, even flourish, if our cognitive functioning
{The College -St
Playing the piano is
JUST ONE RETIREMENT
PURSUIT FOR
Carolyn Banks
Leeuwenburgh .
gets out of our way
a little.”
Carolyn Banks
Leeuwenburgh
(class of 1955) has
yet to notice a drop
in her cognitive
abilities. She’s an
avid reader, an
insightful conversationalist, and a freelance teacher of
English as a foreign language. She also pursues a number
of interests that will serve her well if cognition begins to
fail. A retired opera singer, she is still involved with the
arts, maintaining subscriptions at the McCarter Theater
in Princeton in drama, dance, and music. She’s also an
avid movie-goer and a fairly active practitioner of several
John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�2,8
{JohnniesonAging}
experiences mostly loss. Although
arts: “I paint, very poorly, but I
only 46, Nick Giacona (SFGI98) is
paint,” she says. “I play the piano
now facing the physical effects of
poorly. I still can sing and I still sing
'Tve always believed
age as he cares for his 8i-year-old
publicly.” Leeuwenburg performs in a
thatpeople older than
mother, Betty, who moved in with
small cafe just outside of Princeton,
him and his family last spring. “My
singing mainly popular music, blues,
mepossessed some
mom is a retired schoolteacher with
and torch songs.
wisdom.
Pre
always
an alert mind and a body that’s fail
Music has been the saving grace for
ing.
She has very bad arthritis and is
many older people, even those whose
felt they were worth
pretty much confined to an electric
other faculties are deteriorating, says
working with and
wheelchair. Yet her mind is still very
Hobart. “It’s fantastic to watch people
active. She goes on the computer,
start playing the piano again. The
learninp^from, worth
does e-mail. She’s a voracious read
parts of the brain formed when we’re
sharing with.
er and we have great theological,
younger last the longest, so the capac
spiritual, and political discus
ity to play the piano can come back,”
sions,” he says.
she says. There may be no ability to
Philip Valley (SFGI75)
Giacona sees first-hand the trials
make a coherent sentence, but the
of life in an aging body. “I’m learn
reward and beauty of making music
ing day by day with her and I really
can persist for a long time.”
admire how she’s handling it,” he says. “It’s hard and
There are other compensations to counter deteriorat
frustrating for her to do the little things we take for grant
ing cognitive ability, according to Virginia Seegers Harri
ed, even something as simple as making herself a meal.
son (class of 1964), a geriatric case manager. “Over time
Yet
she’s handling that with grace and courage.”
you learn to tune out nonsense more quickly,” she says.
A discussion on aging that former Santa Fe campus
“The experience you’ve had in life makes it easier to say,
president John Agresto gave years ago left an impression
‘uh-huh, right.’ From observation and personal experi
on Giacona. “He said that our culture doesn’t really pre
ence, I would consider that a real advantage.”
pare
us for aging and death. I thought he was so wise. He
She describes the benefits that come in later years as we
said that death and aging should be the culmination of a
grow to accept our lives. “You can bring your mind to
well-lived life, an examined life,” recalls Giacona. “While
bear more easily on what is actually accessible, doable.
my mom didn’t have a St. John’s education, I’ve turned
You learn to pick your battles. You learn to pare down and
her on to the Apology and the Crito and the Tibetan Book
be satisfied. There’s a feeling in youth and middle age,
of the Dead."
‘this world is out there-where do I start?’ When some
Giacona says that his mother seems prepared for her
options have closed behind you, there can be a sense of
own death: “We’ve already discussed the whole memorial
liberation. That may be what makes working with elders
service. She wants to be cremated and have her ashes
so sweet, so affirming, for people in middle age who are
scattered where my father’s ashes were scattered. She’s
still struggling to be greater than they ever will be. When
even decided what songs we’re going to sing. If she died
people accept themselves and their lives, that in a sense is
tomorrow, she would feel that she had a good life.”
where life really begins.”
When his mother’s life does end, Giacona will consider
Harrison underscores her point with a joke: “A retired
himself lucky for the time that he and his family spent
woman is listening to several young mothers talking
with her. “My wife, Keiko, is so great and supportive. She
about when life begins. One says at conception. Another
helped convince my mom to stay with us. My mom had
says, no, it begins when the fetus quickens. A third says,
concerns about moving in and invading the family, but
‘I think life begins at birth.’ Finally, the retired woman
Keiko told her that when she was a kid her grandfather
leans over and says, ‘Listen, I’ll tell you when life begins.
lived with her family and she appreciated the time she
Life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies.’”
spent with him.”
While it’s comforting to know that the mind enjoys
gains to offset its losses, a sad fact of aging is that the body
{The College -Sf. John’s
College - Spring 2004 }
�{JohnniesonAging}
ag
Although she’s a young
Giacona’s own chil7a, Leeuwenburg knows
dren-Sarah, 13, and
Kyle, ii-respond to his
she has some tough times
mother in different
ahead. “Many years ago I
ways. “My son is outgo
heard Bette Davis say
that getting older is not
ing and loves to hug
her and sit and talk to
for sissies,” she says. “As
her. My daughter’s really
you get older you aren’t
shy, so it’s harder for
really aware of getting
her. She appreciates hav
older, but you are aware
ing her there, but she
that you don’t do the
shows it in a different
same things you used to
way. It’s so rewarding to
do physically. There are
have three generations
times when I get out of
in one house.”
bed in the morning and I
don’t think I can move
Philip Valley (SFGI75)
runs day programs in
and other times I’m
New Hampshire for
fine.”
Leeuwenburg swims
adults over 55 with
nearly every day, but a
developmental disabili
recent cancer scare
ties. He says that sharing
revealed
her true attitude
time across the genera
Nick Giacona and his mother, Betty, are
tions is rewarding even for people LEARNING TOGETHER ABOUT AGING.
about exercise. “I was thinking, ‘hell,
who are not related. “Maggie Kuhn,
if I’m going to die. I’m certainly not
going to swim,”’ she says. “This is
head of the Gray Panthers, once
not something I’m doing for the
gave a talk where she told the audi
'She s a voracious reader sheer pleasure of it. At my age your
ence, ‘We are not wrinkled babies,
metabolism gets so slow that, even if
we are elders of the tribe.’ I’ve
and we have great
you do all your cleaning, all your gar
always believed that people older
theological, spiritual,
dening, you still have to exercise.”
than me possessed some wisdom.
Leeuwenburgh has not reached
I’ve always felt they were worth
andpolitical
working with and learning from,
the point where she feels encum
worth sharing with.”
bered by aging, but she has begun to
discussions.
ponder her own mortality. “I don’t
Harrison, the case manager, has
NickGiacona (SFGI98)
think anyone ever really comes to
nothing but scorn for those who
grips with the reality of their own
subscribe to the “wrinkled babies”
death. When we view ourselves, we
view of seniors. “Many people who
work in nursing facilities call the elderly ‘baby.’ That’s
view a disembodied creature. Chronologically, I’m 7a
absolutely not right,” she says. But she’s also disturbed by
years old. I’m at the point where I know I’m not going to
a subtler form of infantilizing. “Even older people who
be here in 20 years. Yet there’s a part of me that you could
are quite cogent are pretty much treated like they have to
stand up and say, ‘Caroline, you’re getting old,’ and I
be fed, clothed, and then amused. I really have trouble
would say, ‘I am?’”
with that. Yes, it takes time to go at the slower pace and
hear someone tell his story, but it’s usually extremely
worthwhile. I would encourage anybody to start to talk to
people over 75. Ask them about their lives. Ask them what
they remember.”
{The College* St. John ’5 College ■ Spring 2004 }
�30
{Bibliofile}
Approaching
Machiavelli’s
Art OF War
Art of War
Niccolo Machiavelli, translated, edited,
and with a commentary by
Christopher Lynch
University of Chicago Press, 2004
hris Lynch (A87) traces the
origins of his newlypubhshed translation of
Machiavelli’s Art of War to
the questions posed hy what
is known in the academic
throats. As I studied him more, I realized that
world as the ancient/modern split.
Lynch says
Machiavelli
’s emphasis on the bellicose
that Johnnies have a more intimate
relation
aspect
of human
beings, an aspect acknowl
ship with the split, and rephrases its essence
edged but not emphasized by the ancient
for the SJC crowd: “Why was everything so
philsophers, was part of his overall goal to
much fun sophomore year and why did
transform the terms in which human life is
everyone get so depressed junior year?”
generally understood.”
Lynch arrived at the University of
Fortunately for Lynch, his academic inter
Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought in
ests dovetailed with a hole in Machiavelli
the fall of 1988 with this question (in its grad
scholarship. Of Machiavelli’s four major
school expression) very much on his mind:
vtorks—Prince, Discourses on Livy, Florentine
What is the end of human hfe? Is man natu
Histories, and Art q/' UAr-almost no one had
rally social or essentially alone? What is the
seriously studied Art of War. Lynch threw
purpose of philosophy? As he pursued these
himself into that text and, seven years (and a
questions, Lynch came to see Machiavelli as
Ph.D.) later, emerged with an impressive
the pivotal writer in the transformation
between the ancient and modern worlds.
“The most sahent aspects of the transfor
mation that Machiavelli tried to affect were,
first, to change the general climate of opinion
“Controversy abounds as to what caused
and discourse such that human hfe would no
the dizzying military changes during
longer be understood in terms of its ultimate
Machiavelli’s day. Also debated is
goal or purpose but instead in terms of its
whether these changes constituted a
origins and roots,” says Lynch. “The second
full-blown military revolution or instead
is the attempt to bring about in this world the
represented a particular moment in a
best regime human beings can come up with,
long-term evolution. In considering
the best way of living together, instead of
these questions, it is important to
leaving it to chance hke Plato. And the third
remember that the sense at the time was
is really a corollary of the first, to get subse
that tumultuous change was indeed
quent thinkers to be primarily concerned
afoot, but not rapid change in a single
with human freedom and independence as
direction driven by gunpowder technol
opposed to virtue as understood as obhgation
ogy. On the tactical level especially,
and duty to something higher.”
each of the battles that occurred on the
These issues gave Lynch a clear direction
Italian peninsula, from the battle of
for his graduate work. “The more I saw
Fornovo in 1495 to that of Pavia in 1525,
Machiavelli as the key figure in the
seemed to offer a new lesson to be
ancient/modern spht, the more I wanted to
learned, a new innovation that trans
figure out what was on his mind,” Lynch says.
formed the ways armies ought to be
“I started to see war as central to his thought,
armed, ordered, led and used.”
to understand that for Machiavelli, humans
- Christopher Lynch
are not social beings, but at each others’
C
Excerpt:
{The College -Sf.
John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
pubheation to his credit: a translation of the
text with an introduction, interpretive essay,
and (he points out with the pride of a Johnnie
who’s successfully negotiated secondary
sources) more than 600 notes.
Lynch originally wrote the translation for
himself, “blasting through it” in just a few
months, he says. “I wrote the initial transla
tion as a way to study it carefully. I translated
it as literally as I could so I could think about
it the way we do with readings in language
class, as a tool for closer reading,” he says.
Over several years. Lynch returned to the
translation, making changes after improving
his Italian by translating works by Machiavelh’s predecessors, including Dante and
Boccaccio. Later, when he decided to submit
a proposal to the University of Chicago Press
to turn his translation into a book, he first
reworked a portion of the text to see if he
could make it valuable to other readers.
Once the proposal was accepted. Lynch
had to rewrite the entire translation several
times. In the process, he discovered a practi
cal approach to translation that satisfactorily
answered for him the issues that arise in
discussions about translation in St. John’s
language tutorials: “You start off as literal
and as consistent as you can, then you puU the
translation back toward understandabihty,
readability and accuracy,” he says, “In the
next phase, you forget about the Italian and
ask what the passages mean in Enghsh and
how they sound. If it’s not in readable
English, you pull the Itahan out again and
start thinking about changes.”
Lynch notes that this is not the process for
most non-Johnnie or non-Strauss-influenced
translators. “They think about how it sounds
right away,” he explains. “But I think that
puts too much emphasis on the translator and
makes him think he is a sort of god mediating
between two languages with full omniscience
of what the author intended. I think it’s better
to approach it humbly, to cleave to the hteral
andonlybepushed toward readabi 1 i ty when
it’s clearly necessary.”
With the time and energy Lynch lavished
on Art of War, you’d think he’d be a fierce
Machiavellian, but that’s hardly the case.
“Machiavelli presents himself as the
ultimate antagonist to the basic understand
ings that I’m inclined to-ancient, philosoph
ic, and religious,” Lynch says. “However, I
think he’s also the most trenchant critic of
ancient thought, both philosophic and rehgious, and therefore I see him as the person
to understand if I’m going to understand the
truth about the big questions at stake in the
quarrel between ancients and moderns.”
-SUS3AN Borden
�{Alumni Profile}
31
Tias Little, EC98
Santa Fe Yogi Combines Wisdom with Practice
BY Andra Maguran
such as the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutra and
he word “yoga” once con
Bhagavad-Gita, along with studying San
jured images of health nuts
skrit or ancient Chinese in order to read
contorting their bodies in
works in their original language.
impossible, seemingly
Reared in Amherst, Mass., Little attend
painful positions. Now
ed Amherst College, where he earned a
women, men, even children
bachelor
are flocking in droves to yoga. An
estimat’s degree in English. Inspired by
mother,
who also taught yoga. Little
ed 15 million Americans say theyhis
have
a
began his studies in the Iyengar system in
regular practice; more than double that
the early 1980s, and continued his study in
number say they expect to try yoga in the
Mysore, India. Frequent trips to visit his
next year, according to a Harris poll. The
grandfather, a Presbyterian minister who
reasons for yoga’s newfound popularity are
served on the board of directors at
many: stress reduction, improved strength
Abiquiu’s Ghost Ranch, fed Little’s love for
and flexibility, and heightened concentra
New Mexico. He moved to Santa Fe in 1991
tion are among the many benefits linked to
to teach yoga, and in January aooo, he
this 5,ooo-year-old practice.
opened Yoga Source with his wife, Surya.
Inside Yoga Source, a small studio
Little began hearing about the Eastern
tucked into a Santa Fe shopping center,
Classics program at Santa Fe, established
studio founder Tias Little {EC98) walks
in 1994, from others in the Santa Fe yoga
among the students after his morning
community. Friend and fellow yoga teacher
class, preternaturally serene, his voice as
Nicolai Bachman (EC96) persuaded him
soft as a temple bell. Like yoga teachers
that the fledgling program was worth
everywhere. Little is benefiting from the
pursuing. “I was very enthusiastic [about
wave of yoga popularity-his studio sched
Eastern Classics] from the first day,” says
ules more than 40 classes every week,
Bachman, who now leads workshops across
many of them packed. The Santa Fe
the country in Sanskrit, Ayurveda (healing
New Mexican recently described Little
as “one of the emerging stars
of the yoga phenomenon.” He
leads classes for yoga teachers,
writes articles and serves as an
expert for a leading yoga
magazine, holds clinics all over
the country, and offers yoga
retreats in venues such as
Costa Rica.
But even if the craze wanes
and the numbers drop. Little
believes that people will con
tinue to seek out something
beyond yoga’s physical
benefits. His own devotion to
the practice, he says, was
informed and deepened by
intense study of the works in
the St. John’s Eastern Classics
program, a yearlong program
in which students read works
T
Tias Little’s yoga practice is
INFORMED BY HIS STUDY OF
Eastern classics.
{The College.
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
arts), and the Yoga Sutra. “I knew it would
be a great chance for Tias to deepen his
understanding of the Indian, as well as
Chinese and Japanese, traditions.”
Little began by auditing a seminar on the
Upanishads, after which he applied to the
program in full. After 15 years of practice.
Little hoped to find a solid foundation in
the original texts for his own philosophy
toward yoga, the Mahayana Buddhist
“middle way” teachings that are pertinent
to living in the world today. He had previ
ously read the Bhagavad-Gita and Yoga
Sutra on his own, but the formalism and
structure of a discussion-based graduate
program offered a key to deeper learning,
he says.
“The texts are complex and philosophi
cal,” Little says. “It would have required
an intense practice and austerity to have
read the works on my own and gained as
much insight and understanding of them.
The dialogue that the classroom setting
encourages is far superior to simply
reading alone.”
For Little, the Eastern Classics program
afforded a marriage oiprajna (wisdom)
andsadhana (practice).
Wisdom training comes
through study of scriptures
that are the historical backdrop of the practice. “Just as
scholarship feeds the practice
of yoga, so the practice feeds
the scholarship. To me, just
reading can become very eso
teric if one tries to cognitively
grasp the teachings one needs
to embody, or engage through
psycho-spiritual discipline.
The two modes of understand
ing are cooperative, but not
interchangeable. ”
Little encourages yoga
teachers-in-training to enroll
in Eastern Classics; already,
two Yoga Source instructors,
Wendelin Scott (EC03) and
Lynsey Rubin (ECoa), have
completed the graduate
program.
�{AlumniNotes}
3^
1935
and dance to a caUer. Will any of
the class of 1944 be at our 60th
anniversary?”
“I’m in my goth year,” writes
Melville L. Bisgyer. “My beloved
wife, Pauline, passed away a few
years ago. I now make my home
comfortably in a retirement home
named Signature Pointe. Many of
my children, including the normal,
the grand, and the great, live near
by. I shall never forget St. John’s.
I spent four very happy years there.
I wish good luck and much happi
ness to all my fellow Johnnies.”
1937
“Just a word from the Class of’37Bob Snibbe alive and well-will be
91 in April. Still playing golf and
still publishing small shirt-pocket
handbooks. One on ‘Our Flag,’ the
story of Old Glory... sold in large
quantities to big companies for
sales promotion purposes. I call
Harry Fahrig (Class of ’37) from
time to time. He is very sick and in
a nursing assisted living facility.
His wife, Frannie, was a former
model for Ponds-‘she’s lovely, she
uses Ponds’- ads in the ’30s and
’40s. They live in Jupiter, Fla. Also
call Alan Pike (’37 too). He’s also
in an assisted living facility with
his wife in Deland, Fla. And my
brother Dick, class of’39, lives in
Arlington, Mass. He’s also in an
assisted living facility recuperating
from a stroke. Have fond memories
of days in Crabtown. Football and
lacrosse. B.C. great books.”
1944
John Davis Hill writes that he and
his wife, Dorothy Murdock Hill,
spent the winter in Southern
California attending four Elder
hostel programs sponsored by the
University of Judaism at Camp
Ramah in Ojai and at their Bel Air
campus. “We like to sing folk songs
1947
Changes for Stephen Benedict:
“Three years ago, I pulled up
stakes in New York City after
40 years and moved 125 miles north
to the hamlet of Spencertown in
Columbia County. After prowling
the area, I bought an old farmhouse-type structure, whose earli
est segment dates to about 1750.
It’s said to be the second- or thirdoldest house in the area. The
transition from city life turned out
to be seamless. Time, of which
there’s never enough, is variously
allocated to work on family and
personal archives, the nearby cul
tural center, the local Democratic
Party, and play—the piano, tennis,
and cats. Then there’s always fixery
to be done on my ancient structure.
I do maintain one interest in NYC,
the Theatre Development Fund,
which I helped found 37 years ago.
Watch for the new half-price booth
in Times Square. Drop by if you’re
up this way: 518-392-0487;
stevebenedict@taconic.net.”
1949
Frederick P. Davis sends news
from California: “Since last report
ing from this always sunny and
warm southwest corner of the
‘lower 48,’ we ‘3-Ds’ (Fred, Rita,
and son David) are still holding
the line as ‘Mr. Outside’ and
‘Mrs. Inside’ (the house). David
recovers from infections of both
legs and feet resulting from badly
broken legs of late aooo. But
things are looking up. David, after
over a year at a Riverside City Con
valescent home, should soon come
home. He is now equipped with a
motorized wheelchair, enabling
him to be on his own to go out to
see docs.”
David B. Weinstein has retired
from the practice of medicine and
is living with his wife, Stella, in
Atlanta to be near his daughter and
her family. “Attending senior class
es at Mercer University and learn
ing to play the recorder to keep the
gray cells and fingers limber.”
do’s top was the thrill of a lifetime,
along with riding through a city
rainforest to get there. Anticipat
ing my trip to Alaska in July.”
i960
Peter J. Ruel sends in a book
1955
With a July production of
La Traviata, Harold Bauer will
conclude a 27-year tenure as music
director of New Philharmonic and
DuPage Opera in Chicago’s west
suburban region. His 42 years as a
conductor include the music
directorship of six orchestras in
the U.S. and numerous guest
concerts in this country, Canada,
and Europe. What’s next? More
reading, traveling, painting (oil
and watercolor), golf, composing,
and, of course, some guest con
ducting. He looks forward to the
50th reunion of his class in 2005.
1957
News from Joan Cole: “I am
continuing to enjoy my retirement.
With friends, I attend the Metro
politan Opera and work with the
New York Black Librarians Cau
cus, raising funds for scholarships.
Am also enjoying my vacations-in
September 2003,1 went to Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil. Viewing the Christ
the Redeemer statue on Corcova
recommendation: “Thomas Cahill
has written an insightful history of
the ancient Greeks, printed 11/03:
Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why
the Greeks Matter.”
1961
Harrison Sheppard has been a
regular columnist for San
Francisco Attorney Magazine.
the quarterly journal of the Bar
Association of San Francisco.
“The regular title of the column is
‘Law and Justice,’ with a subtitle
relating to the particular column
subject. For the most recent col
umn (Winter 2004), the subtitle is
‘Law and Privacy: The Right To Be
Let Alone.’”
1962
JusTiNA Davis Hayden sends in
good news: Justina and Luci, her
partner of ig years, were married
in San Francisco on February 19.
A magical day! They are living in
San Diego now, having sold their
Startup to Success
(class of 1956) is now
general manager of Word Web Vocabulary, a new
curriculum for grades 5-10. “From a startup last
year we are now in 55 school districts in 16 states
plus Barbados. Word Web is a paperworkbook
system based on root words, prefixes, and suffixes,
all of which are Greek and Latin in origin. Grant Wiggins
{A72) thinks it’s an excellent way to approach vocabulary.”
ASQUALE L. POLILLO
P
{The College -St John’s
College • Spring 2004 }
�{Alumni Notes}
33
Mark Bernstein (A) writes; “Linda
(Bernstein, nee Torcaso, A69) and
I are looking forward to our last
child graduating high school and
going off to college. I’m a judge in
Philadelphia court doing class
actions and about to finish a book
on Pennsylvania evidence. Linda is
also a judge of the Social Security
Administration.”
Courtesy of The Moon, Santa Fe students and hobbes
house in Berkeley. Luci is an artist
whose work from recycled materi
als may be seen at CorrugatedArt.
com. Justina designed and main
tains the web site. She is enrolled
in a certificate program in Finan
cial Planning and is having fun
with investing.
practicing law in Washington,
D.C., and is writing for the local
newspaper in her spare time.
“Am looking forward to the next
reunion of the Class of’65.”
“Niece Megan Drolet, daughter of
Melissa Kaplan (SF72) and Ray
Drolet (SF69) will be coming to
Annapolis this fall, continuing the
Kaplan/Drolet tradition,” writes
1963
Bart L. Kaplan.
Charles B. Watson (A) writes that
Madeline Rui Koster writes:
“I was very much looking forward
to attending the 2003 40th class
reunion, since as a Californian I
have not been back to Annapolis in
40 years. A sudden change in my
teaching assignment (high school)
from all algebra to algebra and
ceramics, in September, led me to
change my plans. I was a potter and
ceramic sculptor for 20 years
before becoming a full-time
teacher in the Bos. I look forward
to another Homecoming. As time
goes on, I value the St. John’s edu
cation more than ever, and greatly
enjoy reading The College.'"
Michael Trusty attended
Homecoming 2003 in Annapolis
and had a great time: “I’m
married, living in New Mexico, and
ride horses with my 12-year-olddaughter.”
1965
Grace Logerfo Bateman is
married, is the mother of four chil
dren (mostly out of college), is
Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Fran
cisco, the inaugural Distinguished
Alumni Award for “unique and
distinguished ministry in the
church and especially pioneering
contributions to liturgical
practice.” The church’s Web site,
www.saintgregorys.org, docu
ments this practice (and theory)
with extensive photos and articles.
Rev. Schell is a 1971 graduate of
General Seminary; his co-rector, a
1970 graduate.
1968
“Finally finished my B.A. in 1999only 30 years late-at Thomas
Edison State College,” writes
Megan Beaumont (A, formerly
Anne Beaumont Reid). “Received
an M.A. in Spiritual Psychology
2001. Nowadays I am an ordained
non-denominational clergy person
and spend my time leading person
al growth workshops, teaching
manifestation and self-forgiveness,
and officiating at marriages,
memorial services, and most
recently at an un-handfasting-a
spiritual ceremony to honor and
complete the severing of ties after
a civil divorce. My husband has
retired, and we are enjoying the
blessings of good health and happy
travel.”
“I’m somehow still in Britian!”
writes Deborah Rodman
Lawther (SF).
The General Theological Seminary
Alumni Association awarded
Donald Schell (SF) and Richard
Fabian, co-rectors of St. Gregory of
{The College.
he was sorry to miss the 35th
reunion of the Class of 1968 last
year, but he enjoyed e-mail and
pictures. “Spring has finally come
and our family looks forward to
visiting our Martha’s Vineyard
home again. Happy to say that we
are all well and enjoying diverse
pursuits. Would come to SJC more
often but we are far away...”
News from Bob Wycoff (A) and
Maya Hasegawa (A), first from
Bob: “Bob’s computer system
support job is going to India and
Bob has enrolled in Berklee College
of Music as a full-time undergradu
ate to pursue a B.A. in music,
starting in September. Four
grandchildren and still counting;
number five is due in August.
See you in October! ” And from
Maya: “Maya is now working as
compliance manager for the City of
Boston’s Department of Neighbor
hood Development. DND builds
affordable housing, finances
rehabs, and helps small businesses.
The satisfaction comes from seeing
formerly vacant lots with houses on
them. Spare time is spent practic
ing tai chi and researching a
Methodist deaconess named
Hattie B. Cooper.”
1970
Isaac Block (SFGI) writes:
1969
High praise for tutor Steve Van
Luchene’s second Tecolote
colloquium for K-12 teachers from
Elizabeth Aiello (SFGI), who
found it “even more gratifying and
professionally stimulating than the
first one. It inspired me to expand
my Great Books class by offering
two more sections. Each section
has 12 students, all enthusiastically
participating in meaningful
dialogue related to meaningful
text. I have been honored as a ‘Los
Alamos Living Treasure’ in recog
nition of my 14 continuous years as
‘the Great Books Instructor.’”
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
“My wife, Mamerza Delos Reyes
Block, has published her book.
The Price ofFreedom: The Story of
a Courageous Manila JournaHst."
Last fall, Theda Braddock Fowler
(A) published her second book.
Wetland Regulation: Case Law,
Interpretation, and Commentary.
After an illustrious career with the
Postal Service and World Bank
(over 30 years and 83 foreign coun
tries), Juan Ianni (A) has decided
that it’s time to hang up his spurs.
classnotes continued on page 36
�{Alumni Profile}
34
Rich and Famous
Ben Bloom, Aq7, Finds Fame, Fortune—and Something Even More Important.
vi Sus3Aw Borden, A87
embers of the
Annapolis class of
1997 may not be
surprised to learn
that classmate
Ben Bloom (A97)
has achieved a degree of celebrity. He was
certainly well known as a student, and his
jump-head-hrst approach to life revealed a
boom-or-bust attitude that leads those who
meet him to believe that he is not destined
for an ordinary life.
Indeed, he is not. Today, seven years
after graduation, he has won a measure of
fame in three categories: Scrabble, poetry,
and table tennis.
Bloom was already a skilled Scrabble
player when he arrived at St. John’s, but
since graduating, he has played in tourna
ments in Italy, Israel (his home for much of
his life), Turkey, Norway, Reno, San Diego,
Tennessee, and Florida. Although his cur
rent rating is 1428, at the height of his play
in March 2003, he was rated 1649 (a rating
over 1600 is considered expert).
Bloom learned of his Scrabble-world
celebrity in 2003 when he was flying to
Reno for the National Scrabble Champi
onships. “I had to fly via O’Hare airport in
Chicago. There were several players there,
wearing their typical Scrabble t-shirts,” he
recalls. “In the airport lounge, I saw a bald
guy in his early 4os-black pants, white
t-shirt, and two red braces with which he
was continually fiddling. I recognized him
as Joel Sherman, the 2002 National Cham
pion and one of the top three players in the
world. I got up the courage to ask him if I
was correct in identifying him. He said,
‘Yes, and you are Ben Bloom.’”
Stefan Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal
reporter and author of Word Freak, a New
York Times bestseller about Scrabble, also
knew who Bloom was before the two were
paired in an expert match in the 2002
he read from his thesis at Books & Books, a
finals in San Diego. Bloom beat him and
prominent Miami bookstore.
walked away from the match with a signed
As for table tennis. Bloom has been prac
copy of his book.
In the world of poetry. Bloom is complet ticing for years. He was an aggressive play
er at St. John’s and shared the Annapolis
ing his final semester at the University of
campus titles in men’s doubles and mixed
Miami, where he received his master’s
doubles in 1996. When he lived in Israel,
degree in poetry in May. His 15 minutes of
he played in the National League for the
poetry fame took place on March 31, when
M
{The College -St. John’s
College ■ Spring 2004 }
For the poet in Ben Bloom, words have
GREAT MEANING. FoR THE SCRABBLE PLAYER,
they’re just part of the game.
�{Alumni profile}
suggestion: “During my late teens I was
disabled (he has cerebral palsy). After
graduation, he took his game on the road,
still in denial with regards to my CP. I
wanted to fit in with other students and
coming in third at the European Disabled
was ashamed of being different. This feel
Championships in Budapest in 1998 and
winning the silver medal at the World
ing turned into anger and resentment. I
Games for CP athletes in 2001.
wanted nothing to do with other people
Thus accounts for the fame. The fortune
with CP as I felt this would be letting go of
my aspirations, a stupid concept which I
is a different matter. It stems from the con
look back on and thank God I have come so
ditions of Bloom’s birth, which are both
far in the last decade.”
tragic and miraculous. The short version is
Bloom has indeed come far. He is calm
this: Ben was born brain dead. The attend
ing nurses thought he
and relaxed, accepting
was stillborn. His par
and tolerant. He has
grown into a man with a
ents asked the hospital
strong, healthy sense of
staff to do all they
himself. It would be
could so they put him
in an incubator. After
impossible to recount
all that went into that
72 hours, he came to
growth, but Bloom cites
life. The staff said that
a particularly transfor
if he survived a week it
mative experience he
would be a miracle.
had during the World
The price of that
Games for CP athletes.
miracle is cerebral
“While there I felt
palsy, the condition
like never before,” he
that Bloom has lived
says. “I made friends
with-and struggled
with other CP athletes
against-his entire life.
from Russia and France.
In 1999, after a nineI speak French well, so
year legal battle.
-Ben Bloom
it was easy to break the
Bloom settled out of
ice with them. Many
court with the hospi
athletes had more
tal. A profile of Bloom
severe CP than me, and were very hard to
by Sam Orbaum, Web-published in 2000,
understand. We communicated through
sums up his situation: “He is now, in the
other means; the bond that we shared, of
most grotesquely literal sense, a self-made
being equal, made for a wonderful feeling.
millionaire.”
At the end of the Games, we had a party
Bloom’s cerebral palsy makes him hard
to understand, contorts his face, and gives
with Karaoke. All of us moved the same
him a peculiar, dragging walk. But it’s not
way. All of us had the same unclear voice.
just his speech, gait, and appearance that
There was an intense feeling of cama
raderie and equality.”
CP has disfigured. His condition has also
Bloom is now finishing his thesis-a col
affected his sense of self.
lection of 50 poems that reveal much about
Bloom has a history of buoying up his
him and the way his world is shaped by
challenged sense of self with humor. The
cerebral palsy. His poem, “Jane Fonda’s
Orbaum article quoted some of his witti
(pain in the) Neck Workout” describes the
cisms: “Hey, you know what happens when
mechanics of dealing with a stranger’s
I have a few beers?” Bloom asks. “I talk
insults. “Special Olympics” describes a
clear and walk straight.” He describes giv
night out for eight people with CP. In the
ing his own brand of speech therapy to a
crowd: “I make them repeat the alphabet
poem, the group tries to order drinks:
“Two Heinekens, two Carlsbergs, two
after me, with all 26 letters sounding
Guinness and two Everclears./Five min
exactly the same.”
utes trying to communicate, then we settle
Humor, of course, does not heal all
for eight domestic beers.”
wounds, and Bloom has not always known
In “The Extremities Of A Line Are
how to salve them. When he first arrived at
Points,” Bloom describes the obstacles,
St. John’s, several people unwittingly
both interior and exterior, of everyday
found themselves on his bad side by sug
events. The poem reveals Bloom’s writing
gesting he get to know Santa Fe tutor
for all it is: story, insight, therapy, balm,
Robert Sacks, who also has CP. An older
and wiser Bloom recalls why he hated that
''All ofus moved the
same way. All ofus
had the same
unclear voice.
There was an
intensefeeling of
camaraderie and
equality.
{The College -St John’s
College • Spring 2004 }
35
The Extremities Oe
A Line Are Points
-Euclid, Elements., Book i. Definition
3
Standing in line
Motionless
Passing glances from strangers
Maybe three-quarters of a second
longer than normal
Nothing to get upset about.
“Next!”
Four steps to reach the desk
One-two-three-four
People have other things on their
minds
They’re here for a reason
They’re all adults
They’re not going to stare.
“Next!”
They want to rush me
No, it’s not me
Don’t be oversensitive
Do other people have these inner
dialogs?
Am I Socrates or his interlocutor?
“Hi. I'm here to... ”
Said too much
She’s been working all day
No patience for me
No patience for my voice
Fuck it
Can’t stop now.
“For my appointment. ”
Confusion. Disappointment. Disgust.
Pity.
The myriad of facial expressions tell a
familiar story
The patented neck strain won’t be too
far away
Yup, here it comes
In answer to your next question, “I’m
here alone.”
“Is anyone responsiblefor
this... guy?”
Should I look around?
Should I glare at the people behind
me?
No point. One day they’ll read about it.
In a poem.
They can wait.
“Next!”
�{AlumniNotes}
36
et al.), ‘What constitutes scientific
proof?’ Very fun.”
1971
In April, pediatrician Linda
Belgrade Friehling (SF71)
embarked on a trek to Everest Base
Camp to raise funds for Himalayan
Health Care, serving the people of
rural Nepal. In a fund-raising letter
she sent along, she described the
trek and its mission: “We will cover
lao miles on foot and attain an
elevation of 18,500 feet. The funds
raised will support the completion
of a project sponsored by
Himalayan Health Care. Himalayan
Health Care is a small non-govern
mental organization founded
approximately a decade ago by a
Nepalese and an American to
promote better health and life in
remote rural areas of Nepal. With a
dedicated group of volunteers,
including physicians, dentists,
nurses, and other professionals,
this small organization has facilitat
ed impressive improvements in pre
natal care, infant mortality, dental
hygiene, and overall health for over
40,000 people. Learn more by
visiting the Web site: (Himalayanhealthcare.org)...One of the things
that has impressed me most about
Himalayan Health Care, is the
forward-looking approach that
emphasizes educating the Nepalese
team to carry out on a day-to-day
basis vastly improved health prac
tices. In a country that currently
has one doctor to 32,000 people,
I feel this is the only way to make a
substantive difference.” For more
information, e-mail her at:
tlofftrax@aol.com.
From Colorado, Michael
ViCTOROFF (A) writes: “After
nearly five years as medical
director for Aetna, I left to work
as an investigator for the Depart
ment of Toxicology at the Universi
ty of Colorado Medical School.
Officially, I’m a private detective.
Our group has M.D.s and Ph.D.
toxicologists. We investigate
medical claims of inquiry from
environmental chemicals. Sort of
like Erin Brockovich-only we use
science. Much of the most difficult
work is philosophical (Karl Popper
1972
Wesley Sasaki-Uemura (A) writes,
“On December i, 2003, we
finalized the adoption of Melina
Mei (Xin Yi) Sasaki-Uemura. She
was born October of 2002 in
Jiangxi province, China. She has
‘smiling eyes.’”
IleneLee (A) reports: “McKee
(A72) and Ilene’s daughter, Mollie,
now 25, is completing her first year
at Yale Law School after a summer
South American tour that ended
with sailing from Galapagos to
Tahiti on a 37-foot catamaran. Ilene
has a busy play therapy practice in
the San Francisco area, specializing
in autism and consulting with
schools.”
1973
Jose F. Grave de Peralta (A) is
taking a group of art and architec
ture students from the University of
Miami to Florence, Italy, for six
weeks to learn fresco painting and
restoration. Side trips include
Assisi, Rome, and Pompeii to view
fresco sites in those places as well.
1976
Jonathan Mark (A) was a recent
William Malloy (SF) writes that
he took early retirement in Decem
ber 2003 for health reasons. “Now
I have the opportunity to work four
mornings a week holding prema
ture babies and to concentrate on
improving my health. Additionally,
I am a volunteer reporter for KPFT
(Keep People Free, Thinking), the
local Pacifica station in Houston.
Not only can I put up a couple of
alumni who may be passing
through Houston, I am also accept
ing invitations to visit alumni.
Particular consideration will he
given to those invitations that are
accompanied by a prepaid airhne
ticket. Kidding? No, really, I mean
it!”
David Pex (SF) is “working hard as
contributor to Popular Science
magazine and built an off-road
course for Toyota in San Antonio.
From Steven and Melissa Sedlis
(both A): “Our daughter Elizabeth
is a first-year medical student at
Columbia College of Physicians
and Surgeons. Our daughter
Jennifer will graduate in May from
Scripps College, Claremont, Calif.”
1974
From California, Gerard (A) and
Daphne Kapolka write: “Daphne
(nee Greene, A76) retired from the
Navy in July. She is now a senior
lecturer in physics at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey.
Gerry continues to teach English at
Santa Catalina School in Monterey.
Basia Kapolka (Aoi) is studying
acting in New York City.”
John Rees (A) is working hard as a
tele-neuroradiologist: “I live for my
work and my family. I greatly enjoy
participating in a small seminar
group of old SJC friends!”
{The College.
1975
is not yet completely comfortable
with the “Transgender Club” and
similar organizations constituting
student life today-but he’s trying.
He is feehng very old these days.
A career change for Idell KesselMAN (AGI): “After more than 20
years of teaching college composi
tion, literature, and other related
courses, followed by two years as a
vocational rehabilitation counselor,
I am working as a psychotherapist
at a nonprofit agency in Phoenix
operating under a managed care
system. In July I begin a one-year
residency in Dialectical Behavior
Therapy, a cognitive approach to
helping individuals with Borderline
Personality Disorder. My daughter
Bisa, nearly 25, is completing her
master’s in education this June,
with several years of elementary
teaching already completed. We
live in our separate apartments in
Phoenix, with our own cats and
habits. It helps us to keep our
friendship strong. I’d enjoy hearing
from old friends and tutors:
ideleyz@earthlink.net.”
1977
Brad Davidson (A) still lives in
Annapolis with his wife, Lynne, and
children Teddy and Lucy. He’s been
taking Teddy on college visits and
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
the finance director at Ecos Con
sulting, which implements energy
efficiency programs for electric and
gas utility companies. Write me at
dpcx@qwest.net.”
Carla S. Schick (A) won an
honorable mention in the Barbara
Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award.
The poem, “The End of the
Words,” can be found at www.
wagingpeace.org.
Marlene Strong (A) has news:
“After a year of being a lady of
leisure, which I spent fixing up my
new house and garden in Boise, I’m
starting work at a therapy center,
so I’ll finally get to use my hardearned MET (Marriage and Family
Therapist) license. Life in Idaho is
calmer; Boise is small enough that
you know your neighbors, but large
enough to have plenty of culture,
and the mountains are beautiful.
Any classmates are invited to stop
by if you’re in the neighborhood-if
not, see you for our 30th reunion.”
�{Alumni Notes}
1978
Robert McMahan (SFGI) reports
that he is now full professor at The
College of New Jersey and has given
many recent concerts both as per
former and composer. His wife,
Anne, continues to teach at the
Pennington School, working with
West African drumming. Renais
sance recorder, and Native
American music.
An invitation from Lawrence
Ostrovsky (A); “I see a lot of gray
haired people in the summer who
come up here to visit Alaska. So
I’m sure there must be someone
from the class of ’78. If you find
yourself up this way, please give me
a ring.”
1980
Leanne J. Pembvrn (A) writes:
“After five years of planning and
hard work, Mark and I have com
pleted phase I of home building in
our woods. Next phase will be straw
bale-all help is very welcome for
the bale raising. Contact me via
e-mail: leanne@pemburn.com.”
Tom G. Palmer (A) sends a quick
update: “I was in Iraq in February
under the auspices of the Ministry
of Education and the American
Federation of Teachers for a
conference for educators on civic
education and have been working
to get a lot of important books
translated into Arabic and pub
lished. In addition. I’m helping
Iraqi libertarian friends to set up a
think tank there, for the purposes
of educating people in the princi
ples of classical liberalism and
producing policy studies for the
new Iraqi government on how to
reform the judiciary to secure the
rule of law and the protection of
the rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, how to priva
tize state-owned industries, and so
forth. I’m leaving this Wednesday
for the European meeting of the
Mont Pelerin Society in Hamburg
(Free Trade from the Hanseatic
League to the EU) and from there
to Moscow to give a paper, ‘The
Role of Law and Institutions in
Economic Development’ at a
conference, ‘A Liberal Agenda for
the New Century: A Global
Perspective.’ I hope to be back in
Iraq in May and July to set up a
series of seminars for students,
some of which will involve SJC-like
seminars and discussions, as well as
lectures.
I’ve recently published a few
items, including a monograph,
‘Globalization and Culture:
Homogeneity, Diversity, Identity,
Liberty’ (published by the Liberales
Institut in Berlin for worldwide
distribution through the many
offices of the Friedrich-Naumann
Stiftung) and a paper, ‘Globaliza
tion, Cosmopolitanism, and
Personal Identity in the Italian
journal Etica e Politica. ’ I’ve got
a few other items in the works,
as well.
All in all. I’m keeping busy and
off the streets.”
37
Susan Read (SFGI) writes that her
1986
“Greetings, SJC,” writes Clayton
DeKorne (A). “I live now half time
in Burlington, Vermont, with my
daughters, Cecilia (16) and Helen
(14), and halftime in Brooklyn,
N.Y., with my new wife, Robin
Michals. I work as a full-time free
lance writer with regular assign
ments at The New York Times
Learning Network and a steady
stream of multi-media production
work from a handful of education
media companies. I would love to
hear from old friends and any John
nies interested in the brave new
world of online learning:
cdekorne@verizon.net. ”
son, Harry, is a thriving 8-year-old.
“We have just bought the house of
our dreams. I continue to enjoy
teaching English at Wooster
School.”
1988
Juliet Burch (A) writes from
Boston: “David (Vermette, A85)
and I are still happily impoverished
in Boston. I am apprenticing to be a
film projectionist and he is
researching Franco-American and
Quebec history alongside an edito
rial job. We continue to use our
St. John’s education for good
instead of evil, vigilantly keeping
cocktail party conversations away
from portfolio talk and on track
with suitable topics like ‘what is
color, anyway?’”
About the Tattoos
1982
Geoffrey Henebry (SF) writes:
“Ana and I and our brood of seven
(Patrick, Claudia, Gus, Thomas,
Isabel, Maria, and Tessie) continue
to enjoy the Good Life here in
Lincoln, Neb. My research over the
past five years has been diverse:
from modeling the ranges of native
vertebrate species in Nebraska to
analyzing the consequences of the
collapse of the Soviet Union on the
annual cycle of greenness in
Kazakhstan.”
1983
Theodore Zenzinger (A) just had a
daughter: Sophia Anne Zenzinger,
born in April.
{The College-
to have passed in a flash. Sophia is a fearless, joyful, lively
child, and she infinitely enriches our lives. She doesn’t have
any tattoos yet, but I was able to locate some black clothing in
her size. Our families and friends helped us adjust to parent
hood, but we are especially grateful to my classmate Ken Hom
(A80). Ken has logged thousands of hours in Babylon with us.
If Sophia develops a taste for good music and a knack for pool,
she will owe it all to him. I continue to practice the Japanese
martial art of aikido, in which I currently hold the rank of 4thdegree black belt. Since 1999,1 have been the chief instructor
at Aikido of Northern Virginia. I have about 75 students, any
30 of whom may show up for a given class. You may visit the
dojo’s website at http://www.aikido-nova.org. I’m still a
bureaucrat in the Department of Housing and Urban Develop
ment. For the past two years. I’ve been working as a housing
program policy specialist in the Office of Lender Activities and
Program Compliance. We spank mortgage lenders when
they’ve been bad. People may reach me at
Jim_Sorrentino@hud.gov.”
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�38
{Alumni Profile}
Looking for the “Monster”
Owen Kelley, Agg, Finds a Clue to Why Hurricanes Intensify
BY
Rosemary Harty
Before investigating hurri
omputer models can often
canes, Kelley had entered a
make accurate predictions
doctoral program in compu
of where a hurricane will
tational science immediately
wander. But no one has yet
found an accurate method to after graduating from
predict how intense a hurri
St. John’s. He ended up
cashing
out his credits for a
cane’s damaging winds win hecome.
Grapmaster(A93)
’s degree in physics
pling with this question, Owen Kelley
because he worried that he
asks, “Why does one hurricane become a
“wasn’t smart enough to be a
monster and another one doesn’t?”
As a scientist with George Mason Univer
Ph.D. scientist.” After honing
sity, Kelley is part of a team that works at
his skills at NASA for six years
NASA’s Goddard Space Fhght Center to
and feeling a growing desire to
study satellite data gathered by the Tropical
“ask the big questions,” he
Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). The
decided last year to continue
TRMM satelhte is a joint effort between
where he left off with his
NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration
doctoral studies.
Agency, and its data are being analyzed by
When Kelley began his
scientists around the world. For most of the
hurricane research last year,
past six years, Kelley created graphics and
he did not immediately think
software for other researchers. Through this
to look for hot towers. “Erich Stocker, my
work, Kelley met Joanne Simpson and
project manager at NASA, came in my
learned of her pioneering hurricane
office one day and saw me poring over my
research. Back in the 1950s, Simpson
hurricanes pictures, getting nowhere. He
proposed that short-hved “hot towers”
told me to pick one thing to study, and that
sustain a tropical cyclone, allowing it to
made all the difference. I had in the back of
travel a thousand miles in a week. But with
my mind how Joanne Simpson would talk
out computers or satellites, Simpson’s hot
passionately about hot towers, so I looked
tower hypothesis was difficult to prove.
up one of her articles and then taught my
Hot towers are rain clouds that reach at
computer how to find towers. It turns out
least to the top of the troposphere, which is
that the only instrument in space that can
nine miles above the earth and four miles
clearly see hot towers is the radar that’s
higher than the rest of a hurricane. The tow
onboard the TRMM satellite. This radar
ers are called “hot” because heat released by gives us ‘x-ray’ vision. It doesn’t look at just
water condensing allows these towers to rise
the upper surface of a hurricane-it sees into
higher.
the heart of the storm.”
Once Kelley began pondering the myster
ies of hot towers, his training at St. John’sparticularly his fondness for a question that
begins with “what is?”-began to pay off.
“Freshman year, I was horrified when we
started Euchd and my class argued for an
hour about the definition of a point. By the
time I graduated, I appreciated the power of
simple questions. Instead of becoming lost
in the data, I repeatedly asked the simple
question, ‘What is a hot tower?’ Every paper
I found seemed to use a slightly different
definition of hot tower. Eventually, I settled
on a precise definition and my persistence
C
Kelley’s computer models show hot towers
RISING FROM HURRICANES.
{The Colleges;, John’s
College ■ Spring 2004 }
As A SCIENTIST,
Owen Kelley appreciates
THE POWER OF SIMPLE QUESTIONS.
led me to patterns that other scientists failed
to notice in this same dataset.
“It took my breath away when I first
examined my statistical summary and I saw
that hot towers appear often in the intensify
ing hurricanes, but rarely in the ones that
are not intensifying,” says Kelley. A good
example of an intensifying hurricane with a
hot tower is Hurricane Bonnie in August
1998, as the storm intensified a few days
before striking North Carohna.
Kelley cautions, “We still can’t predict
which hurricanes will become monsters,
but perhaps we are now one step closer to
an answer.” Kelley’s results suggest that
seeing a hot tower near the hurricane’s eye
is a clue that the hurricane is twice as likely
to intensify than it would be otherwise.
In January, Kelley flew to Seattle to
present his findings at the annual meeting
of the American Meteorological Society.
He was not prepared for the media atten
tion that resulted when NASA issued a press
release about his findings on the day that he
presented them. While answering journal
ists’ questions, he had to learn how to
describe his research in a few words. In the
end, more than 80 Web sites, newspapers,
continued on nextpage
�{Alumni Notes}
Shannon May Lavery (A) and her
husband, JOHN (A87), celebrated
the eight-month birthday of daugh
ter Aurora (A2025) in Healdsburg,
Calif., where they recently relocat
ed with their first-born dog, (Vizla)
Lucius. All are well and peaceful.
“Fellow Oenophiles and Tahoebound schussers and ski rats pass
ing through should get in touch.
We are local and down to the
ground. Hookenzababy!”
Kim Paffenroth (A) has published
another book. In Praise of Wisdom:
Literary and Theological Reflec
tions on Faith and Reason (New
York and London: Continuum
International Publishing, 2004). In
it he traces the Biblical image of
wisdom as it unfolds in Dostoevsky,
Shakespeare, Augustine, Goethe,
Pascal, and Melville.
1990
Rebecca Ashe (SF) writes:
“I’m turning 40 this year and going
back to the UK for my high school
class reunion in June. Still happily
married to Steve Simmer with three
gorgeous and interesting daughters
(10, 8, and 4-all avid readers).
My beloved Faraday died at age 13.
Lee Whiting (SF89) and I got him
in Santa Fe. I still run daily and am
training for a half-marathon in May.
Also starting a private practice in
West Springfield. Would love to
hear from classmates again:
Rebecca.ashe@the-spa.com.”
“Greetings to all. I hope you are
well. Zip bang,” writes William
Culley (SF).
James Clinton Pittman (SF) writes
1989
After a year in Thailand, Elizabeth
Powers (A) and her husband
returned to Brooklyn in late 2002.
They gave birth to a daughter,
Madehne Josephine Wagner, in
October of 2003.
that younger son Sam just turned
two. “Hope everyone is well. I
need to write a book-anyone know
how to get political commentary
published when you hate Democ
rats and Republicans alike?”
1991
Brad Stuart (A) and Sara Larson
(Ago) are delighted to announce the
birth of their second daughter,
Phoebe. Brad is a software engineer
for General Dynamics in
Westminster, Md.
RonalieMoss (SFGI, EC95) is still
a teacher at Los Alamos High
School, but she looks forward to
retiring soon. “I have had a reward
ing career, but now I am looking
forward to reading great books
again instead of student papers.”
News from Megan Smith (A):
My husband, David Dougherty
(AGI98), and I welcomed our baby
television stations, and radio stations picked
up the story. His hurricane results appeared
in the media from Texas to Canada, Switzer
land, Colombia, Australia, and Japan.
A European Web site has even posted an
Italian translation of the story.
Perhaps the most gratifying attention
came from Simpson, who sent Kelley an
girl. Harper Claret, into our world
on September 2, 2003. She is a
bright and smiling baby with a full
head of spiky hair, just like her
mother’s. We are still living in
Annapolis, and I am working part
time as an optician and trying to
start a career in freelance ad design
for small businesses. David is a Java
programmer with Anne Arundel
County government. We’d love to
hear from any of our old friends.
My e-mail is peanutmom®
comcast.net and David’s is
dsmithdi@comcast.net.”
1992
From London, Victoria Burgess
(SF) writes: “I wish to thank every
one for their kind wishes following
the death of my father. They mean a
great deal to me. I would love to see
any Johnnies passing through the
London area.”
“After almost eightyears at the
Consortium for Oceanographic
Research and Education (CORE),
I will start a new job in April with
the Office of Education and
Sustainable Development at NOAA’s
headquarters in DC,” writes Sarah
ScHOEDiNGER (A). “While this job
won’t shorten my commute from
Annapolis, I am looking forward to
the new professional opportunities
it presents.”
Michael Zinanti (SF) tells us:
“I am an antenna design engineer
for Centurion Wireless Technologies
and have contributed to three anten
na patents with one more pending.
Susan (formerly Switich, SF93) and
I are raising and home-schooling one
e-mail that pointed out weaknesses in his
research, but closed with the statement:
“An old person feels that his/her life has not
been in vain when we see young people
grabbing the ball and running with it.”
This year, Kelley plans to revise the
material he presented at the conference
and submit it to a scholarly journal. Once
(The College.
39
daughter, Anna. We would love to
hear from any Johnnies passing
through the Denver area.”
1993
“Hello, all!”AMYFlack (A) writes.
“Things in South Dakota are going
well. Ministry is an adventure,
harrowing, wonderful, blissful,
wacky, and so many other adjectives
both good and bad.” E-mail:
thiers55@yahoo.com .
1994
Natalie Arnold and William Blais
(both SF) were married in July 2001
and celebrated with a 30-day cross
country train trip. Currently, they
“five in Pittsburgh and are the proud
owners of a happy house in need of a
little TLC. We are happy to provide
bed and breakfast, good conversa
tion, and a warm welcome to any
Johnnie traveling through Pitts
burgh. We are best reached through
e-mail at bill.blais@pobox.eom.”
Larissa Engelman (A) is currently
living in New York after moving
from Washington, D.C., in 2002.
“Working as marketing manager of
the New York office of Covington &
Burhng. As a side project, am look
ing to raise money for an independ
ent film project and would love to be
connected to others who have expe
rience or contacts in that world. My
hellos to the class. Hope to see you
at our lo-year reunion.”
he finishes his doctoral studies, Kelley is
not sure what the future holds. “The
ultimate goal is supposed to be teaching at
a research university and doing ground
breaking research between classes. I just
want to look at data and see things other
people haven’t seen before. I’m not sure
how to make that happen.” -*■
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
�{Alumni Notes}
40
1995
Joel Ard (A) and his wife Hannah
(A92), announce the birth of their
son, David Frederick Ard, on
September 4, 2003. David made his
first appearance at St. John’s at
Homecoming a week after his birth.
“Remember kids,” writes Chris
Davis (SF), “funk is its own
reward.”
Benjamin “Alex” Ruschell (SF)
has a new baby. George Alexis
Ruschell (8 lbs., 20 in.) was born in
Schweinfurt, Germany, in
December 2003.
Jessica VanDriesen (A) is about to
complete a master’s in education as
part of the New York City Teaching
Fellows. “I have been teaching
math at Wadleigh Secondary School
since 2002. It is a far cry from
explorations of the conic sections or
Minkowskian space-time, but there
are moments. I plan to travel abroad
next year, teaching in an interna
tional school or possibly switching
to ESL. Anyone with suggestions,
please contact me via e-mail:
jvandriesen@hotmail.com.”
Tracy Whitcomb (A) is still in
Vermont and now back in school for
a second bachelor’s degree: in nurs
ing. “I hope everyone else is well! ”
An invitation to adventure from
KiraK. Zielinski (SF). “Anyone
in or passing through Las Vegas,
Nev., I’m now flying the Dam
Helicopter Tours out of a Bell 206
at the Hoover Dam-the tours are
quick, but a ton of fun, so drop by
and fly with me! I just bought a
house and I’ll be here for a year.
Because it’s Vegas, I think I need
to consider modifying my uniform
to sparkly midriff-baring nomex
with rhinestones! My callsign is
Dam Helicopter...too cool...
I’m obviously having a blast with
my new life. Also need to design
more bookshelves to go in the
helicopter...”
business journalism, I moved on to
Moscow. As of March, I have been
here for two years and I’m now writ
ing for a Dutch AIDS charity. I got
aggie Roberts Arnold (A95) writes:
married last summer to Elena
“Late as usual, I am announcing the
Rudykh, a Siberian intellectual
arrival of our son Augustus Bullock
beauty queen. We see ourselves
Roberts (Gus), born on September 16,
moving back to the homeland
2002. Parenthood is a blast! Thanks to Gus
eventually, but in the meantime,
we are frequent visitors to the San Antonio
I hope to see the day when one of
Zoo. (I am expecting the bears to wave to us out of
therecognition
many Marx readings on the
any day now.) We are also frequent visitors to theProgram
McNay isArt
replaced by Bulgakov’s
Museum. As parents we love this enthusiastic rediscovery of
‘Heart of a Dog’ for a modest
the basics: the naming of and conversational focus on ani
injection of reality.”
Rediscovering the Basics
M
mals, shapes, colors, vehicles, body parts, foods, nature (you
name it). I think fondly and frequently of the time I spent on
each campus and wish my contemporaries great happiness
and fulfillment! (And the courage to send in a note!)”
1996
1997
Maya Brennan (SF), formerly
J. Maya Johnson, is in New Jersey:
“I’ve recently moved from Baltimore
to central New Jersey where my
husband. Grandpa of evihobots
.com, found a paying job after his
election-induced unemployment.
I’m working at Princeton University,
compiling and coding data for the
Cultural Policy and the Arts National
Data Archive (CPANDA). Anyone
interested in the cultural pohcy field
will want to check out our free online
data archive atwww.cpanda.org. I’d
love to hear from former classmates,
especially anyone passing through
the central New Jersey to New York
City area. My e-mail address is
mahimsab@yahoo.com. Snail-mail:
501 Raritan Ave., D6,
Highland Park, NJ 08904
Erin N.H. Furby (A) is working as a
massage therapist in Anchorage.
“My husband and I are enjoying our
attempts at balancing middle-class
American fife with the fife of the
mind, and we still love Alaska, even
if it snows five days before April.”
{The College.
Michael Chiantella (A) married
Karen Burgess in Buffalo, N.Y., on
August 2, 2003. “Taffeta Elliott
(SF) gave a reading at the wedding.
Currently almost completed an
LL.M, in Trust and Estate law at
the University of Miami.”
1998
In September 2003, Julie Bayon
(AGI) graduated from Claremont
Graduate University with a Ph.D. in
education. The title of her disserta
tion is “The Neo-Classical Ideal:
Liberal Arts Education for the
Twenty-First Century.” She is
currently assistant professor of
English and chair of General
Education at Washington Bible
College in Lanham, Md.
Jacqueline Camm (A) announces
Shannon Stirman (SF) writes:
“We’re moving from Philadelphia,
where I’ve been studying at Penn,
to San Francisco, where Kelly will
begin working for a new software
company. Henry turned 2 in August
and we’re trying to keep up with
him. I’m finishing up my disserta
tion in psychology and will plan to
start an internship in the fall.
As soon as we figure out exactly
where we’ll be hving, visitors wifi
be welcome!”
“I think the last time I appeared
here, just after graduation, I was
rather optimistic about saving the
world through economics,” writes
David Veazey (A). “Well, since then,
I got my M.A. at Fordham but
stopped just before I had to start on
my dissertation. Over the years I had
become disenchanted with the
inherent inabihty of economics to
solve any meaningful problems.
Then later, after becoming an expert
in maximizing my unemployment
checks and dabbhng in health and
St. John’s College . Spring 2004 }
her marriage to Robert Travis
(a 1998 graduate of Columbia
University) on February 8, 2003, in
the Cathedral Church of St. Luke,
Orlando, Fla. The Rt. Rev. John
Howe, bishop of the Episcopal
Diocese of Central Florida,
presided. Amy (Norman) Morgan
(A96) and her husband Bill provided
music for the ceremony. Writes
Jacquehne: “We moved to
Tennessee in August for Rob to
attend seminary. We also purchased
our first home with the help of
Milk Klim (A02) of Columbia
National Mortgage. If anyone
would like to reach us, or is passing
through Tennessee, please send us
an e-mail: jacquelinecamm@
hotmail.com.”
Method-acting studies for Stephen
Conn (SF) finally hit Hollywood
gold! Look for him this summer in
Troy, he plays the third spear from
the left in that big battle scene
towards the middle. “Brad was a
dream to work with,” Steve adds.
�{Alumni Notes}
Christopher Pagan Nelson (SF)
Grateful for Phlogiston
reports: “Right now. I’m living in
Texas and concentrating on my
turbo-gangster country band. The
drian Lucia (SFoo) writes: “After living in
Foggy Mountain Cop Killin’ Boys.
Philadelphia and Chicago for three years. I’m
College didn’t really prepare me for
pursuing a master’s degree in library and infor
the scads of fame and money I’m
mation science at the University of Illinois,
receiving, but it was cool anyway. I
Familiarity with the theory of phlogiston has
would love to hear what other John
never been so helpful. I plan to flee the Mid
nies are doing, so please e-mail me
west in basically any direction when I finish this program.
Any
at donkeytown@hotmail.com
.
A
Johnnie librarians out there?”
James Petcoff (SFGI) is teaching:
a college administrator for the
University of Chicago’s economics
department, serves as president of
the Chicago chapter of the Society
of Architectural Historians, and is a
member of Chicago’s Caxton Club
(for bibliofiles): “I collect 16thcentury Aristotle texts.”
“I recently left my job as a mental
health counselor in Hyannis, Mass.,
and now work for The May Center
for Child Development at The May
School in Chatham, Mass., teach
ing children with developmental
disabilities. I recently moved to
Wellfleet, Cape Cod, from
Yarmouthport. When I am not
involved in the above, I play with
my jazz, folk, blues rocka-billy band: Skeeter and the Buz
ztones. I would love to communi
cate with fellow Johnnies in the
area.”
1999
Benjamin Closs (A) is serving at
the Marine Corps Air Station in
Miramar, Calif. “I may go overseas
for a while this fall, but Pacific
Beach isn’t bad until then.”
from Philadelphia to Frederick,
Md., a year and a half ago to live
with Vince Baker (AgsJ-yes, that
Vince Baker. We’re now engaged,
we’ve just bought a house and are
planning an October wedding. I’m
working for a biotech company,
while Vince is an editor. We have a
bit of a menagerie with the cats
Apollo & Artemis, and our recently
acquired blue-fronted Amazon par
rot, Pancho, the Bird of Mass
Destruction. We’d love to hear
from anyone in the D.G. metro
area: cinderlou@peoplepc.com and
oldmarley@hotmail.com.”
announce the birth of their son.
Mason, on February 14, 2003.
“We’d love to hear from our former
classmates at ShannonandKerry@
earthlink.net.”
Mike and Abby Soejoto (both A)
are pleased to announce the birth
of their first child, Lucila Adele.
Lucy was born on September 30 in
Los Angeles, where Mike is begin
ning his second year as an attorney
in the tax department of O’Melveny
& Myers. Abby recently finished the
post-baccalaureate program in
classics at UCLA. They’d love to
hear from anyone, especially those
in or passing through Southern
California (asoejoto@cs.com or
323-572-0343).
Nevin Young (A) writes: “I am now
Mauricio Rojas in August. “Also I
am currently teaching in Prince
George’s County. I got my certifica
tion through their Resident
Teacher Program and would be
happy to talk to any seniors or
graduates who are looking into
doing the same.”
“Hey all,” writes Jessica Sprout
Morgenstern (A). “Still busy out
here, loving my job, loving the
weather-sunny Santa Barbara. Feel
free to e-mail anytime...anyone
looking for a fun way to get paid to
learn (and teach) dance (ballroom
and social) give me a call!”
{The College.
Christopher “Casey” Vaughan
(A) is living in St. Augustine, Fla.
“Anyone who wants to come surfing
feel free to contact me at cvaughan@flagler.edu.
2001
Katharine Christopher (SF) and
Billy Davis (SF) were married on
December 20, 2003, in a beautiful
traditional ceremony at the Church
of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe.
Katharine reports: “We were
attended by our five sisters as
bridesmaids, and Jackson FrishMAN (SFoi) and Chris Carlisle
(SFoi) as groomsmen. Nikki
Mazzia (SFoi) sang two lovely
solos, and Juliana Corona
Kirmeyer (SF02) read a Scripture
passage. A number of other John
nies also came to celebrate with us,
as well as family and friends from
all over. It was a wonderful day, as
well as the beginning, God willing,
of a long and joyful marriage.”
2000
Lori Beth Kurtyka (AGI) married
Cindy Lutz (A) writes: “I moved
married in Rocky Mount, N.C., and
now live in Indianola, Miss., which
has been my home since gradua
tion. I will be ordained in May and
we are expecting our first child in
November.”
Shannon Rohde and Kerry
O’Boyle (Both AGI) would like to
Robert Herbst (SF) is employed as
A report from Andrew B. Hill (A):
“I’m getting married sometime in
2004 to a tremendous woman who
did not, sadly, attend St. John’s.
I reside in Fort Worth, Texas.
I recently completed an unsuccess
ful bid for the mayorship of my
lovely city, for which I was reward
ed with a whopping 206 votes, as
well as about 60 hours of Digital
Beta footage, which I intend to
convert into something remotely
saleable. Thus, no matter how
vague my connection to the school
may be, I am following in a
tradition of Maverick Johnnie
filmmakers, or at least I think I
am.”
41
finishing my third year in the
evening division at the George
Washington University Law School,
and am working for a lawyer in the
District of Columbia. (I cannot
understand why anyone would not
want to be a lawyer.) I would be
happy to answer any questions from
Johnnies who want to know about
law school in general, or GW.”
“Greetings from the Mississippi
Delta!” writes Paul Spradley (A).
“This past January 1 got married to
Caroline Taylor of Rocky Mount,
N.C. In the wedding party were
Derek Alexander (A99), David
Bohannon (A99), Adam Dawson
(A03), Alan Hudson (A03), and
George O’Keefe (A03). We were
John ’5 College . Spring 2004 }
What’s Up?
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail
us. Let your classmates know
what you’re doing. The next
issue will be published in
September; deadline for the
alumni notes section is July 15.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404;
rosemary.harty@sjca.edu
In Santa Fe:
The College Magazine
St. John’s College
Public Relations Office
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599;
alumni@sjcsf.edu
�4a
Katrina Costedio (SF) has finally
decided to use her powers for good
and is heading for law school,
although she isn’t sure which one.
“Also shaping the young minds of
California in various volunteer
positions and as a sub. And on the
weekends I work with an adult who
is learning to read. I’m struggling
with the demands of being a good
citizen. Most of the time I still feel
like I’m pretending, but what’s the
difference really?”
Terence Duvall (A) writes: “I just
returned from my first major trip
since graduating college so I
decided it was about time to send
an update. My lomo and I spent six
stupendous weeks in Slovenia
taking pictures of castles by lakes
for my upcoming art exhibit
‘Reflected Castles.’ In Ljubljana I
met a producer who has offered to
put out a split seven-inch of my
{Alumni Notes}
band. Big Brother, and the Sloven
ian underground rock quartet
Sister City. I think I finally under
stand why you can’t spell Slovenia
without the word ‘love.’ And so in
the immortal words of the poet
Jerry Garcia, ‘What a long strange
trip it’s been.’”
Talley Scroggs (A) moved to
Bennington, Vt., after a half year in
Agen, France, where she assisted
in running The French Kitchen at
Gamont, a 1720s inn. Her friend
Louis Kovacs (A), is in the post
baccalaureate program at
Bennington College. Talley works
at North Shire Booksellers and
plans to start an MBA program
next fall.
An intriguing “heads up” from
Peter Speer (A): “You’re the king
of hearts for four years and then
you come out into the real world
and you’re the two of spades. And
there’s no don rags in your new
office, and no one wants to read
your senior essay. But that girl by
the water cooler is awfully cute,
and she blushes when I quote
Dante, and though she’s never
heard of Virgil she swears it sounds
familiar. So all’s well and I’m
going to Vegas. Feel free to contact
me with lucky numbers.”
2002
Margaret Tobias (A) will be
attending graduate school this fall
at the University of Chicago,
enrolling in the Master of Arts in
Humanities program.
2003
“I am enjoying Eastern Classics
and highly recommend the pro
gram,” writes Allison Webster
(SF).4-
Alek Chance (A) and Iva Ziza
(Aoi) had a daughter, Emma
Katherine Chance. Emma was
born on August 10, 2003, in
St. Johnsburry, Vermont.
{Obituaries}
Diana “Danny” Bell
Herbert Brent Stallings
Diana “Danny” Bell, the wife of Santa Fe
tutor emeritus Charles Bell, died March 24
of pancreatic cancer. She was 80.
She was born and raised in Darlington,
Md., trained as a teacher, and after marry
ing Charles Bell in 1949, lived with her
family in Chicago and Annapolis. She
taught first grade in Annapolis until mov
ing to Santa Fe in 1967. Along with her
husband, she was named one of the city’s
“Living Treasures” in 1996 for contribu
tions to the Santa Fe community.
“Everything she did was in proportion
and infused with order, kindness, and
delight,” her family wrote in her newspa
per obituary. “Whether it was a picnic, or
the peaceful sharing of tea, Danny filled all
with joy and the sense of her unconditional
acceptance of our human foibles.”
The family has arranged for two ways for
friends to remember her: contributions
can be made for the publication of Charles
Bell’s poems through the non-profit
Lumen Books (40 Camino Cielo, Santa Fe,
New Mexico 87506) and also to one of
Danny’s charities. La Luz de Santa Fe Fam
ily Shelter, (2325 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe,
NM 87505).
Herbert Brent Stallings, class of 1941, died
January 8, 2004, in Cary, N.C. He was 84.
A native of Baltimore, Stallings played on
the college’s football team (nicknamed the
“gallopinggoose-eggs”) before intercolle
giate sports were dropped. His pastor, the
Rev. William Green, remembers Stallings
bringing his family back to the St. John’s
campus several years ago, videotaping his
old dormitory room, and fondly revisiting
his days at St. John’s. When the college
adopted the New Program in r937, Stallings
had the option of sticking with the old pro
gram or starting in the new and spending an
extra year at the college; he chose the New
Program, Green said.
“He has always said that St. John’s really
formed who he was,” said Rev. Green. “He
really loved talking about the college.”
Stallings went on to serve as a lieutenant
in the Navy during World War IL After the
war, he launched a 30-year career in adver
tising with the Baltimore News-American.
He met his wife, Ruth, on a Chesapeake
Bay Cruise. Married for nearly 60 years,
the couple had two children who live in
North Carolina.
{The College-
St. John ’5 College ■ Spring 2004 }
“He was a wonderful man who loved
books,” Green said.
Medora Cockey
Medora Cockey (A03) died January 3, 2003,
after a brief illness. She was 23.
Miss Cockey was born in Baltimore and
moved to Salisbury with her family in 1983.
She attended St. John’s College for two
years, then transferred to Warren Wilson
College in Asheville, N.C., to finish her
studies. She was to have graduated with a
fine arts degree in May.
Miss Cockey was a talented artist. She
loved hard physical farm work, and her
favorite summer job in recent years was
working on organic farms in Virginia and
Georgia. Her sister, Mary, is a member of
the Annapolis class of 2004.
Also noted:
Clayton Davis, class of r938, died Feb. 9,
2004.
John Falencki, (A68), died Dec. 30, 2003.
Merrill Turner (SF79) died March 16,
2004.
Charles T. Westcott, class of 1936, died in
July 2002.
�{Student Voices}
43
On Grades: How Can Genuine
Learning be Measured at St. John’s?
BY loHN Peterson, A05
grades? Do any students complain about
y grades were never
their grades? One can respond to a tutor in
something I worried
a don rag because he is stating observations
too much about. In
and offering suggestions, but how does one
middle school I earned
respond to a B on a piece of paper?
As, but in high schoolThe college’s recent self-study, “Liberal
where I didn’t always
Education
in a Community of Learners,”
do homework or attend class-I
maintained
states
that the college wants students to
a consistent B+, or 90 percent
average.
“work for understanding and not for
These grades were meaningless, I thought,
grades,” but acknowledges that students
because the work that the A-kids were
need transcripts, and therefore grades, for
doing to get their grades was out of propor
life after St. John’s. Grades interfere with
tion to a grade’s value. I scoffed at the arti
the college’s goals of fostering genuine
ficial scale of greatness that accompanied
learning and cultivating freedom, they
the grades: “High Honor Roll,” “Honor
distract students, encourage competition,
Roll,” etc. I beheved that I was wiser than
and are “inadequate as means of evaluating
these students, because while they were
working hard to slave for top grades at their a student’s success in liberal learning,” the
report states. Nevertheless, it says, tutors
college choices, I was heading to a place
take the “fair determination of grades very
where grades didn’t matter and where what
seriously.”
would really be measured after four years
The “Grades and Grading Poficies” sec
would be the true worth of an individual.
tion of the student handbook says that the
When I came to St. John’s College, I
college “does require all tutors to award let
found classes to be radically different from
ter grades to their students at the end of
high school, the teachers much more alive,
each semester...and authorizes them to
the students more interested and interest
decide what elements they will take into
ing. There were no tests and no homeconsideration and in what proportion.”
work-at least not in the high school sense
As opposed to the pre-determined system
of busywork from a textbook. Why, then,
of my high school days, this process is mys
were there still grades?
terious and vague, perhaps even arbitrary.
St. John’s is an egalitarian institution
What are these “elements” that a tutor may
that loves truth and rewards hard work not
or may not take into consideration? Class
with good grades, but with understanding,
room participation, attendance, attitude,
good conversation, and good judgment.
papers, and demonstrations all seem like
Could it possibly be true that with all these
candidates. However, different tutors may
riches around them, students here would
be more interested in different things, and
be worried about their grades, look them
this is something that a proportional grad
up every semester, and work for them, even
ing pohcy, in which various assignments
to the detriment of learning itself?
are given certain weight in a total grade,
During my first semester, I don’t think
is designed to alleviate.
grades ever crossed my mind-I was having
It is unhkely that St. John’s will implement
too much fun. I was worried that I did not
any pohcy such as this in the near future.
talk as much as some of my classmates and
One reason is that the more specific we get
that maybe I did not study enough. In my
about grades, the more it will appear that we
don rag, my tutors were nice to me and
care about them, and as a result, we will care
said some helpful things. This was enough
about them more. If tutors needed to discuss
for me.
grades, they would have to think more about
This year, however, I began to think
grade-giving and less about teaching.
about life after St. John’s and checked my
Students would consequently worry more
grades. This raised a series of troubling
about grade-getting than about learning.
questions about grades and the learning
Competition would inevitably result.
environment at St. John’s: How many other
“It’s a weird situation,” acknowledges
students check their grades? Students dis
Dean Harvey Flaumenhaft. “On the one
cuss don rags all the time-what about
M
{The College.
St. John’s College Spring 2004 }
John Peterson
hand we give [grades], and we don’t want
them to be some kind of secret document
that a student can’t look at, but on the other
hand we don’t report them to the student,
and we try to play it down. I don’t think it’s
hypocritical...It’s trying to foster a commu
nity where people are really concerned
about the depth of each individual student’s
self-education-and it really works.”
With all the debate about how much to
talk about grades, by which standards they
are given, and how much they matter to
students as opposed to how much consider
ation tutors have in giving them, my
inclination is to revert to my old high
school attitude. I begin to suspect that the
behavior of the students around me is
geared toward getting better grades.
I wonder if this or that student has better
grades than I, and if so, why. I become
taken with the feeling that we are all here
to go somewhere else, to get our tickets to
graduate school. I begin to resent my fellow
students and to think only of myself. Worst
of all, I stop all learning and introspection,
adopt an air of superiority, and start to
think about my future.
Only at this point do I realize that the
school knows what it is doing: it has foreseen
these problems, and in its grading pohcy has
tried to circumvent them. It recognizes that
grades can be a potential threat to learning,
but that they are necessary. If a Johnnie is
still worried about the arbitrariness of
grades, he only needs to ask himself,
“Do my grades reflect anything real?” and
he will answer, “More than they did in high
school.” That should be enough, and he
should go back to his studies.
�44
{Alumni Association News}
From the Alumni
Association
President
Greetings!
Your Alumni
Association and
the staff of SJC
have heen hard at
work supporting
the network of
Johnnies. I wish I
could share in
one letter all the
projects and possibilities that are emerging
from our shared work, but we only have
room for three this time. Watch this space
for more in the coming issues.
Part 1 - Reconnect
What ever happened to that interesting
woman in my freshman seminar?
WTio are the Johnnies living in my state?
Is there someone from St. John’s practicing
law in my city?
How many people were in my class?
What is Glenda Holladay’s last name now?
Does my favorite waltz partner have an
e-mail address?
How can I be sure the college has my
correct address and phone number?
Soon you can answer these and many other
questions about alumni around the world.
The Alumni Association and the college
joined forces to put the St. John’s College
Alumni Register online. It will be a great
new tool for you to stay in touch with the
rest of the college community. To use the
Register1. Go towww.stjohnscollege.edu.
2. Select alumni.
3. Select Online Register.
4. Apply for access to the Register.
5. Within a week, you will receive an
e-mail with your username and password
that will give you access.
Then you’ll be searching to your heart’s
content. As you use the new Register, we
strongly urge you to:
• Send your feedback about the Register
and the rest of the Web site to Jo Ann
Mattson (A87) joanne.mattson@sjca.edu
or Roxanne Seagraves (SF83)
roxanne.seagraves@mail.sjcsf.edu.
• Update and/or complete your own
information. The Register is only as
good as the information it holds. Please
make it most useful by keeping your own
data up to date!
• Let the college know if you prefer not
to have your information appear in the
Register. You should have received a
postcard asking if you wanted to opt out.
There are also places online that you can
choose not to have your information
appear.
• Use the Register as a tool to stay in
touch with Johnnies from your era, your
campus, your profession, or your locale.
Part 2 - Come Home
Are you going to Homecoming this year?
Please consider making the trip to Santa Fe
in the summer or Annapolis in the fall. You
will have many reasons to be glad you did.
• Seeing old friends and making new
ones.
• Thanking that tutor who opened your
mind to the books (or the books to your
mind).
• Seeing a rejuvenated campus whether
you’re in the East or the West.
• Watching a Santa Fe sunset over the
mountain or an Annapolis sunset over
the creek.
• Sharing the unique conversational
experience of seminar.
• Dancing as if you were ao again.
• Munching on burritos or crab cakes.
• Welcoming new honorary alumni.
• Gongratulating fellow alumni with
Awards of Merit for their remarkable
lives and work.
• Learning about the current state of
student hfe and the Program.
• Exhibiting and/or observing work of
creative and industrious Johnnies who
have books to sign (Annapolis) or art to
show (Santa Fe).
You will be receiving information and
invitations from classmates, the Alumni
Association, and the college. We look
forward to seeing you!
Partg - Reach Out
The Next Steps Action Team of the Alumni
Association and the Career Services offices
on both campuses support new alumni as
{The College .
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
they venture out into the world. If you’re
interested in providing support or in get
ting a boost yourself, consider reaching
out. Among the many opportunities and
services:
Virgil Initiative: Juniors who volunteer
are matched with an alumnus mentor.
The two meet periodically and stay in
touch through senior year and beyond.
The purpose of the relationship is to share
experiences and insights about the transi
tions after St. John’s. Career counseling is
not part of the plan, but mentors may have
helpful suggestions and resources for the
job or educational market as well. (Thanks
to Lee Zlotoff (A74) and Tom Krause
(SFGIoo) for conceiving and launching
this program!)
Networking receptions: Several Alumni
Association chapters host receptions that
bring new alumni and older ones together
to share career and grad school informa
tion. As you might imagine, many other
topics come up for conversation and a
lively time is had by all.
Communities of Interest: Clusters of
alumni have shared interests such as
psychology, dance, quilting, art, academic
research in various fields, law, or educa
tion. Often these Johnnies don’t have ways
to be in touch with each other even when
they know they’re not alone. The Next
Steps Action Team is planning to launch
a network across time and space to get
like-minded alumni connected.
Internships: A generous grant from the
Hodson Trust inspired summer internships
for students on the Annapolis campus.
Recipients have pursued a variety of
activities from arts to sciences to services
to professions. The project has been very
successful, and plans are afoot to begin a
similar program in Santa Fe.
We all have transitions to make as we
leave the college. These programs and
others help make the transition a time for
extended learning about how the great
ideas are the foundation for happy and
productive lives. If you’re interested in
participating in any of these programs,
either as supporter or supported, please
be in touch with Jo Ann or Roxanne.
They’ll help you make the connections.
For the past, present, and future,
Glenda Holladay Eoyang, SF76
�{Alumni Association News}
Chapter Update
With i8 active chapters meeting on a regu
lar basis throughout the country, including
a new chapter in Pittsburgh, St. John’s
alumni have plenty of opportunities for
seminars, social events, and cultural out
ings with other Johnnies. Efforts are also
under way in six new areas to develop
chapters from reading groups or nurture
budding interest in the formation of new
chapters and alumni groups.
In her annual report on chapter activity
to the association board, Carol Freeman
(AGI94), reported on an encouraging year
marked by active chapters planning innova
tive events and emerging interest in areas
yet to establish chapters.
Here are some highlights:
• The Santa Fe chapter is now meeting
bimonthly, and has formed a steering
committee to select topics and plan
meetings.
• The Boston chapter is thrilled to have
read Marcel Proust’s In Search ofLost
Time. This inspiring endeavor (5,000
pages) was a project embraced enthusias
tically by chapter members.
• The Annapolis chapter has decided to
develop a reading list for several months
in a row to attract more of the 500
alumni in the area to seminars.
• Inquiries about starting a chapter or
reading group are being pursued in
Ithaca, N.Y., and the Greater Miami area.
In Miami, Johnnies traveled up to three
hours to attend recent alumni gettogethers in Miami and West Palm
Beach, hosted by Annapolis staff
members Barbara Goyette (A73),
vice president for advancement, and
Jo Ann Mattson (A87), director of
alumni activities.
• Russ Dibble (SF97) and Kira Heater
organized the first seminar, on February
II, for alumni in the Missoula, Montana,
area.
In addition to seminars, Johnnies are
demonstrating their interest in socializing
with other alumni by turning out in large
numbers for crab feasts (Baltimore),
picnics (New York), and an annual
alumni dinner (Greater Puget Sound),
Check the Web
FOR Election
News
The Alumni Association nominations for
alumni representatives to the St. John’s
Board of Visitors and Governors and for
directors-at-large for the Alumni Associa
tion Board for 2005 will be posted on the
college Web site atwww.stjohnscollege.edu.
Select “Alumni” from the left-hand menu
(under the SJC seal), then click on the
Alumni Association homepage. A special
nominations page will appear among the
left-hand menu options
that are now highlighted in
red. Names, photos (when
available) and biographical
information about the
nominees, as well as infor
mation on the election
process, will be available
online on or before
August I, 2004.
45
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
Whether from Annapolis or Santa Fe, under
graduate or Graduate Institute, Old Program
or New, graduated or not, all alumni have
automatic membership in the St. John’s
College Alumni Association. The Alumni
Association is an independent organization,
with a Board of Directors elected by and from
the alumni body. The Board meets four times
a year, twice on each campus, to plan pro
grams and coordinate the affairs of the Associ
ation. This newsletter within The College mag
azine is sponsored by the Alumni Association
and communicates Alumni Association news
and events of interest.
President - Glenda Eoyang, SF76
Vice President - Jason Walsh, A85
Secretary -Barbara Lauer, SF76
Treasurer - Bill Fant, A79
Getting-the-Word-OutAction Team Chair Linda Stabler-Talty, SFGI76
Web site - www.sjca.edu/aassoc/main.phtml
Mailing address - Alumni Association,
St. John’s College, P.O Box 2800, Annapolis,
MD 21404, or 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca,
Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599.
Brett Heavner (A89) and
Nancy Lindley (A58) at an
Annapolis networking
reception for students and
ALUMNI.
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowfor information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Bob & Vicki Morgan
505-275-9012
BALTIMORE
Deborah Cohen
410-472-9158
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin Gammon
410-280-0958
BOSTON
Ginger Kenney
617-964-4794
AUSTIN
Jennifer Chenoweth
512-482-0747
Bev Angel
512-926-7808
CHICAGO
Amanda Richards
847-705-1143
DALLAS/FORT
WORTH
Suzanne Gill Doremus
817-927-2390
DENVER/BOULDER
Lee Goldstein
720-746-1496
MINNEAPOLIS/
ST. PAUL
Carol Freeman
612-822-3216
NEW YORK
Daniel Van Doren
914-949-6811
{The College-
NORTHERN CALIF.
Suzanne Vito
510-527-4309
SANTA FE
Richard Cowles
505-986-1814
WASHINGTON DC
Jean Dickason
301-699-6207
PHILADELPHIA
Bart Kaplan
215-465-0244
SEATTLE
Amina Brandt
206-465-7781
PITTSBURGH
Joanne Murray
724-325-4151
SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Elizabeth Eastman
562-426-1934
WESTERN NEW
ENGLAND
Julia Ward
413-648-0064
PORTLAND
Dale Mortimer
360-882-9058
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico
619-423-4972
St. John’s College • Spring 2004 }
TRIANGLE CIRCLE
(NO
Susan Eversole
919-968-4856
ISRAEL
Emi Geiger Leslau
15 Aminadav Street
Jerusalem 93549
Israel
9-722-671-7608
boazl@cc.huji.ac.il
�{AlumniAssociationNews}
46
“A LOAF OF BREAD,
A GLASS OF WINE, AND ... I AND
ThOU.”
Sn^ng, Swirling, and Seminar at
Stags Leap Wine Cellars
BY Mark Middlebrook, A83
Here with a LoafofBread beneath the
Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and
Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
- FROM Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat^ c. iioo.
Nine centuries later, the sentiments
expressed in Khayyam’s verse echo each
summer in a vine-rich valley watched over
by a rocky palisade known as Stag’s Leap.
Alumni from around Northern Californiaand perhaps an eagerly welcomed visitor
from Santa Fe or Annapolis-rise early on a
sunny Sunday morning to prepare our pic
nic lunches and finish our seminar reading.
And then we’re off to the annual Stag’s
Leap Wine Cellars picnic and seminars,
where we’ll once again be the blessed
beneficiaries of St. John’s alumni Warren
(A52) and Barbara (A55) Winiarski’s
hospitality.
The drive from the San Francisco Bay
area takes about an hour, and many of us
carpool-if only for the pleasure of packing
in extra hours of conversation with fellow
alumni whom we may not have seen since
last year’s pilgrimage. As we head north,
fog often lingers on the Bay and even in the
lower reaches of Napa Valley, but its cool
ness provides a lovely contrast to the
intense valley heat that will come in the
afternoon.
We pass through the town of Napa and
head north on the Silverado Trail, a road
threading up the eastern side of Napa
Valley that’s traveled mostly by winery
hopping tourists and bicyclists. Vines
appear-lots of them-as we speed past the
now-familiar litany of wineries: Luna
(where former tutor Abe Schoener, A82, is
now winemaker), Altamura, White Rock,
Clos du Vai, Chimney Rock. After a few
miles, we see the distinctive notch in the
craggy ridge to the east. That’s the Stag’s
Leap. Just before the road begins to climb
out of the Stags Leap District and the
bicyclists start to down-shift, we pull into
the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars driveway.
To keep track of all the stags in these
parts, you need a scorecard-or maybe a
punctuation handbook. The “Stags Leap
District” (multiple stags) is the name of
the small wine-growing region that sits
just below the notch in the ridge called
Above: Alex Poulsen (SF74) and Daniel
Cohen(SF90)
Left: Former Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars
events coordinator Gabriele Ondine and
PICNIC GUEST
{The College-
St. John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
“Stag’s Leap” (singular possessive stag).
“Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars” (ditto) is the
Winiarskis’ winery and home of our annual
picnic and seminars. “Stags’ Leap Winery”
(plural possessive stags) is an unrelated
winery in the district.
We bypass the tasting room parking lot
and instead take the road that skirts below
the white wine fermentation building and
around a wooded hill to the small lake
tucked behind. There we unload our picnic
baskets and coolers, carry them up to the
lake’s grassy banks, and spread a blanket
on a spot to our Uking-full sun, full shade,
or dappled with some of each. It’s a little
more civilized than Khayyam’s Wilderness,
but with boughs, wine, and books-not to
mention a refreshing lake to jump into-it
will be Paradise enow for us.
Despite the claims of some that our
palates are most discerning in the morn
ing, we defer to the scruples of those who
might find earnest wine tasting at 10 a.m.
a bit unusual, and instead we sally forth on
a vineyard walk and winery tour. We stroll
past FAY-a storied vineyard where Stags
Leap District pioneer Nathan Fay planted
the region’s first Cabernet Sauvignon
grapes in 1961-and then into S.L.V. (Stag’s
Leap Vineyard), whose grapes catapulted
Warren Winiarski to fame when his 1973
S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon won the 1976
Paris tasting. We taste some of the grapes
and wonder at the winemaker’s techne that
�{AlumniAssociationNews}
reveals supple, prize-winning
wines from these juicy but still
tart berries.
From the luxuriant but care
fully-coifed wilderness of
grapevine tendrils, we return to
paved road and make our way to
the civilization of a modern
winery: crusher-destemmer
machines, fermentation tanks,
oak barrels, and bottling lines.
Our tour culminates in the
spectacular caves, which are
home to hundreds of barrels of
aging wine, a bronze bear and
cub nestled among several of
those barrels, a Foucault pen
dulum, a dramatically lit,
chapel-like room designed by
Catalan architect Javier Barba.
An hour of walking, plus the
heady, deep aromas of ferment
ing wine, have eliminated any
remaining scruples, so we make
a beeline for the lake. At a table
nearby, our host begins pulling
corks and pouring tastes.
The diligent among us work
methodically through the full
lineup, sniffing, swirling, and
then either swallowing or spit
ting-depending on one’s
lunchtime drinking plans and
desired degree of lucidity
during the afternoon seminars.
We start with Sauvignon
Blanc, several Chardonnays, and a pair of
Merlots. The simpler wines bear the Hawk
Crest name-Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars’
second label-while the grander ones
display the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars
name and distinctive “standing stag and
tree” logo. We finish with an impressive
phalanx of Cabernet Sauvignons,
including the FAY Estate, S.L.V. Estate,
and occasionally, if we’ve been very, very
good, a precious taste of the CASK 33
(a blend of particularly excellent lots from
FAY and S.L.V.).
Tasting wine is all well and good, but
drinking wine is better, so we pour a glass
of our favorite and bear it gingerly back to
our chosen picnic spot. There we fling
open picnic baskets, unwrap deli sand
wiches or flip open cardboard carry-out
containers, and begin to enjoy the happy
union of good food, good wine, and good
company. Congenial swapping ensues-of
victuals, opinions about the wines, opin
ions about the seminar readings, stories of
Liz Travis
(SF83)
our lives during the preceding year (many
of them true), stories of our times at
St. John’s (some of them true).
All of this eating, bibbing, and creative
embroidery under the hot summer sun is
arduous work, and some of us reinvigorate
with a jump into the lake. At the stentorian
bellow of the ceremonial conk shell, we
commence the annual chapter meeting.
This short but raucous affair typically com
prises effusive thanks to the Winiarskis
and the hard-working winery staff,
announcements of upcoming events, a
desperate plea by the current chapter
president for a successor, and directions to
the various seminar rooms scattered about
the winery.
Despite the unquestioned zeal of
St. John’s alumni for seminars, the next
{The College.
5£. John’s College Spring 2004 }
47
half hour offers irrefutable proof
of the validity of Newton’s first
law. Every body assembled there,
in its tranquil, well-fed state of
rest, does indeed continue in
that state of rest unless com
pelled to change its state by
powerful forces impressed upon
it. Several of us cajole, plead,
and eventually threaten in order
to get these bodies rolling
towards their seminar rooms.
We typically run five simultane
ous seminars on readings
ranging from Plato to the Lotus
Sutra to Wallace Stevens to a
contemporary political essay,
plus one film.
An hour and a half later, the
seminars disband and we
regroup at the Arcade outside
the caves for a reception with
scrumptious desserts and
cheeses, perhaps a sip of dessert
wine, and coffee. “How was
your seminar?” mingles with
other typical post-seminar chat.
There is more catching up on
the previous year, expressions
of wonder that we’re able to
enjoy a day like this each year,
and the wistful sense that this
year’s day is almost done.
One more slice of cake or
piece of cheese, another round
of grateful thanks to our hosts,
perhaps a stop in the tasting room to buy
a few bottles, and then we’re heading
south on the Silverado Trail, back towards
the Bay Area. The day’s heat is starting to
wane, and sun slanting off the vines
makes the early evening sky glow. 1 roll
down the window, and the air rushing by
seems to sing.
This year’s Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars
picnic and seminars have not yet
been scheduled at the time of this
writing. Please note that reserva
tions are required, and that we some
times must limit attendance in order
not to exceed the winery’s capacity.
See the St. John’s College Alumni
Association of Northern California’s
Web page for more information and
reservations instructions:
http://teamrioja.org/sjcaanc/
�48
{St. John’s Forever}
Initiating the
Young into the
Tribe
‘!i4s well you know there is only one com
mencementspeech. It has been delivered
many times and it has many superficial
variations, but it always says the same
thing. An old man ofthe tribe tells the
young men that they are beautiful and
strong, that the world isfull ofevils, and
that they must go out into the world tofight
its evils and keep the vision ofits highest
good. ”
—Scott Buchanan, Commencement 1952,
he commencement rite
calls for a memorable
speech filled with sage
advice on how to go on
with the business of life.
Scott Buchanan called
commencement “the great rite of initiation
of the young into the tribe.” Some speech
es are memorable; some are not. Some
focus on history, some on urgent current
events. But at St. John’s College the selec
tion of the commencement speaker always
falls to those to whom it is primarily
directed, and throughout the years tutors
have been heavy favorites in the selection
process.
Scofield said in his 1950 speech that a
Tutors Richard Scofield and the Rev.
possible interpretation of the custom of
J. Winfree Smith became commencement
choosing a speaker from within the
traditions themselves. Scofield delivered
the commencement speech four times;
college is that students “think of the
Smith was selected by the graduating class
occasion, in spite of its name, as not only
looking forward. Since the life that lies
five times. Tutor Nancy Buchenauer was
ahead of you. . .is more complicated, more
selected by the students in Santa Fe in
serious, and more precarious than the life
1997, and after transferring to the
you are leaving, you could hardly go
Annapolis faculty, was asked to deliver the
without a backward glance.” dtp
2000 address.
T
{The College.
St. John’s College . Spring 2004 }
Tutor Richard Scofield, shown here in
1950, DELIVERED THE COMMENCEMENT
SPEECH FOUR TIMES.
�{Alumni Events Calendar}
Santa Fe
Homecoming: July a-4,2004
classes
are: ’69, ’74, ’79, ’84, ’89, ’94, ’99.
Childcare is available.
Friday, July 2
Picnic on the Placita, 5 p.m.
Reunion class parties
Movie: The Tao ofSteve
Saturday, July 3
Homecoming Seminars, 10 a.m. to noon
Barbecue, 12-2 p.m.
Alumni Art Show opening, 5 p.m.
Banquet, 7 p.m.
Members of the Denver-Boulder chapter
Sunday, July 4
Annapolis
GATHERED FOR A SEMINAR LAST WINTER.
President’s Brunch, 10:30 a.m
Homecoming: October 1-3, 2004
L2I2EEZ1liunni
____
Week i; June 28-July a, 0004
Kierkegaard’s Meditation on Abraham and
Isaac
Led by David Starr
Hegel, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,
and excerpts from the book of Genesis.
Painting & Reflection
Led by Phil Le Cuyer &
Elizabeth Pollard Jenny (SF80)
On-campus and off-site painting experi
ences, gallery tours, seminars.
Week2: July 5-9, 2004
Plato’s Republic
Led by Eva Brann & David Carl
Revisit one of the seminal texts of Western
political theory.
Don Giovanni & the Operas of Mozart
Led by Peter Pesic & George Stamos
Once again, Don Giovanni is dragged alive
through the gates of Hell.
Call the Office of Alumni and Parent
Activities, 505-984-6103
Registration, 4 to 8
Career Panel, 6:30 p.m.
Homecoming Lecture, 8:15 p.m.
After lecture: Wine and Cheese with the
class of 2005, Rock Party in the Boathouse
Saturday, October a
Seminars, 10 a.m.
Homecoming Picnic, noon
Class Luncheons, 11:45 P ®Afternoon: Autograph Party, Soccer,
Gathering of All Alumni, Dance
performance in memory of Harry Golding
Hors d’oeuvres & wine, 6 p.m.
Homecoming Banquet, 7:30 p.m.
Waltz/Swing Party, to p.m.
Sunday, October 3
President’s Brunch, ii a.m.
* Tentative schedule.
All alumni are welcome. Reunion classes:
’39, ’44, ’49, ’54, ’59, ’64, ’69, ’74, ’79,
’84, ’89, ’94, ’99.
Contact Planit Meetings for special rates at
Annapolis hotels. Space is limited for dis
counted rates; mention St. John’s College
when you call for reservations.
Phone: 301-261-8284; fax: 919-642-0062.
E-mail: kelder@planitmeetings.com.
For more information, call the Alumni
office: 410-626-2531.
{The College -St.
John’s College ■ Spring 2004 }
Back cover: Reality observers in Annapolis
�STJOHN’S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
Published by the
Communications Office
P.O. Box aSoo
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
D A N IE L H O U C K
( ao 6)
ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED
Periodicals
Postage Paid
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
Description
An account of the resource
The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
thecollege2001
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
48
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The College, Spring 2004
Description
An account of the resource
Volume 30, Issue 2 of The College Magazine. Published in Spring 2004.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2004
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Contributor
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Harty, Rosemary (editor)
Borden, Sus3an (managing editor)
Behrens, Jennifer (art director)
Hartnett, John (Santa Fe editor)
Wilson, Rebecca
Silver, Joan
Kraus, Pamela
Miller, Basia
Stickney, Carey
Russell, George
Dink, Michael
Engel, Elizabeth
Goyette, Barbara
Byrne, Brigid K.
Maguran, Andra
Peterson, John
Eoyang, Glenda H.
Middlebrook, Mark
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
The College Vol. 30. Issue 2 Spring 2004
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