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S T. J O H N ’ S C O L L E G E
S P R IN G 2017
VOLUME 42, ISSUE 1
Lincoln
Leading by
Teaching
�OPENING NOTE
A remarkable coincidence occurred
when Chris Nelson first announced
publicly his plans to retire this
spring: it was 25 years to the day that
he was named president of the Annapolis campus. Stumbling upon this
realization, I immediately swapped
my editor’s pen for my detective’s
magnifying glass, searching for clues
to some deeper, hidden meaning.
Alas, to no avail. But the opportunity
led me to explore Chris’s influence as
president. While the coincidental timing of his announcement may remain
a mystery, one thing which can be
said with certainty is that the pages
dedicated to him within this issue of
The College only begin to describe the
impact of his legacy and his devotion
to the St. John’s Program.
In honor of President Nelson, members of the Annapolis community
joined tutors for an afternoon of reading and discussing works by some of
his favorite authors. Among them was
Abraham Lincoln. A fascinating and
complicated figure in American history, tutor George Russell describes
Lincoln as “a man with a true moral
compass.” Lincoln inspires us today
through his eloquent speeches, and
his gift for the written word. He also
inspires by his actions as a leader,
revealing that a moral compass is capable of shifting when flawed notions
give way to enlightened thought.
Gregory Shook, editor
ii THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
THE COL L E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 1
�SPRING 2017
VOLUME 42, ISSUE 1
“� incoln appeared on the earth in the right place at the
L
right time to preserve and protect a constitution constructed
to provide against the fortuity of prudence in human affairs.”
—George Russell, tutor
FEATUR E S
P A G E 1 2��
DEPAR TM ENTS
PA G E 1 8
PA G E 2 4
LEADERSHIP IN
FACTIOUS TIMES
PROTECTOR OF
OUR PROGRAM
MODERN
GLADIATOR
In a politically and morally
divided United States,
Abraham Lincoln, our nation’s
16th president, displays
leadership through teaching.
After 26 years, Christopher
Nelson says goodbye to his
role as president of the
Annapolis campus—but not
to his love for the Program.
Ingenuity, empathy, and a
passion for learning lead to
a technological breakthrough
that may save the skulls of
athletes everywhere.
��FROM THE BELL TOWERS
BIBLIOFILE
FOR & ABOUT ALUMNI
4 �
Growing the Graduate Institute
28 �obert Wolf (Class of 1967)
R
envisions a self-reliant rural
America in Building the
Agricultural City.
30 �JCAA Elections: Cast Your Vote!
S
6 Lincoln’s Walk
8 �
Tutors Talk Books:
Krishnan Venkatesh
9 Open to Inquiry
10 Civility on the World Stage
11 �idden Talent:
H
Joan Haratani (SF79)
31 Alumni Leadership Forum
32 �hilanthropy: Ron Fielding (A70)
P
and Warren Spector (A81) pledge
their commitment to St. John’s.
29 �elson Lund (A74) aims to revive
N
the ideas of a major philosophic
critic of the Enlightenment era
in Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of
Political Philosophy.
33 Alumni Notes
38 In Memoriam
� Stickey (A04) takes readers
Sarah
on a poetic journey through life’s
big questions about love, death,
beauty, and desire in Portico.
�Brann (H89), Peter Kalkavage,
Eva
and Eric Salem (A77) offer a
new translation of Plato’s most
popular dialogue, Symposium or
Drinking Party.
ON THE COVER:
Lincoln illustration by
Sébastien Thibault
43 �rofile: Robert Morris (SF04)
P
soars above the competition.
JOHNNIE VOICES
40 �omer in China
H
42 �irst Person: Yosef Trachtenberg (A15)
F
ST. JOHN’S FOREVER
44 �orward Edge of History
F
EIDOS
45 Anyi Guo (A15) photographs the world.
ABOVE:
Chris Nelson with Arcadia,
the campus dog
2 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
THE COL L E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 3
�From the
BELL TOWERS
“� or adults out of college,
F
I don’t know of a more
vital part of that education
in necessary citizenship
than that provided by the
opportunity to participate
in true liberal education as
offered by the St. John’s GI.”
50TH ANNIVERSARY
Growing the Graduate Institute
In the summer of 1967, on the three-year-old St. John’s Santa
Fe campus, the Graduate Institute came to life as the Teachers
Institute. The GI, as we know it during this 50th anniversary,
offers a master of arts in liberal arts on both campuses year-round.
In 1994, Santa Fe established a master of arts in Eastern classics,
including two semesters of Sanskrit or classical Chinese.
“I characterized it this way,” says tutor emeritus
Elliott Zuckerman, one of a handful of tutors
in the GI pilot year: “Bringing inner city high
school teachers” from Baltimore and New Mexico “to the high desert to read Aristotle.” As GI
director that second and third year, Zuckerman
found that, for at least one student, 7,000 feet
wasn’t high enough. “I thought I had prepared
for everything that first night. But the next
morning, a number of students came to me and
said their mattresses were missing.” The mystery
was solved when “one young man claimed to
need to sleep higher than everyone else.”
Zuckerman describes how Richard Weigel,
president and founder of the Santa Fe campus,
and Robert Goldwin, first-year GI director
(from Kenyon College), “invented the institute.”
Politics and Society, designed by tutor Laurence Berns, was the only segment offered that
first summer, with Freud’s Civilization and Its
Discontents heading the list for 35 students in
two seminars.
“We lost money in the early years. We got
scholarships for the students” from the Hoffberger and Cafritz foundations, “covering tuition
and compensating for their summer salaries. But
we forgot to include the overhead. We always
planned to have it in Annapolis but,” in the first
years, as a summer institute only, “Annapolis
wasn’t air conditioned.” Segments were added
and the enrollment quickly doubled. By 1969,
Literature and Poetry, Philosophy and Theology,
and Mathematics and Natural Sciences joined
Politics and Society. “The curriculum was pretty
much the same as now,” he says.
Zuckerman remembers when he and GI student William Yannuzzi (SFGI69)—a high school
teacher who became musical director for the
Baltimore Opera—criticized the previous night’s
opera. “He and I would give an informal and
scathing review to an audience at breakfast. It
was a favorite event.”
“Weigel wanted to start something; he didn’t
know it was the GI. From the first day, it was
a success,” says Sam Kutler (Class of 1954),
retired tutor and dean emeritus. “The Carnegie
Foundation paid me six hundred dollars to formulate a math program. I would have paid that
much to be able to do it. I think it’s been very
successful. It was started for teachers; that
was Bob Goldwin’s influence.” After the initial
years as a summer-only institute in Santa Fe,
“without [tutor] Geoff Comber (H95), I don’t
know what would have happened in Annapolis,”
Kutler says.
“I had been in Santa Fe two or three summers,” says Comber, “and I was so impressed.
I thought we were doing important work and
we should do it here.” He remembers “quite
strong objections,” with some Annapolis faculty
saying: Why should we take on the risk? It
took two years to get it off the ground, and in
1977 Comber operated as Annapolis GI director
from his tutor’s office while he continued to
teach full-time. “People were saying, ‘You can’t
just do the same thing as Santa Fe,’ so I made
up the history segment.” In 1988, the history
segment was approved on both campuses as a
fifth segment.
The vice president, Burch Ault, presented
Comber with potential funding contacts around
the country. “Everyone was impressed that
we grew so fast,” Comber says. In 1980, while
Comber was on sabbatical, Ben Milner took
4 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
—David Carl, past Santa Fe associate
dean for Graduate Programs
over the directorship and hired Sharon Hensley
as full-time GI assistant. Over decades, “she
was invaluable. A wonderful person to follow up
on things,” says Comber. “It was going so well
with the five segments, there was no reason to
change anything.”
David Carl, who recently completed his term
as Santa Fe associate dean for Graduate Programs (the title replacing director), knows well
the administrative tasks “constantly going on
behind the scenes, so that when tutors and students sit down at a table to talk about a book,
it’s as if there’s nothing going on but that one
activity.” Carl found it particularly appealing
to work with “adults from amazingly diverse
backgrounds. From firefighters to retired doctors, school teachers to surgeons, international
business men and women to lawyers, bartenders, veterans, and physicists. They are giving
For the past 50 years, the GI has provided an
integral role in the SJC community.
up jobs, moving across the country, asking
enormous sacrifices of their families.”
Part of the value of the Eastern Classics
program, Carl explains, is how it exposes “the
influence of Buddhism on Hume, or Hindu
philosophy on Hegel, or Eastern thought in
general on Nietzsche.” He describes how the
EC program, developed with the help of past
GI Director Krishnan Venkatesh, keeps the
college in touch “with the deep-rooted notion of
experimentation, which inspired the founders of
the New Program.”
Carl stresses the necessity of education in
a true democracy. “For adults out of college, I
don’t know of a more vital part of that educa-
tion in necessary citizenship than that provided
by the opportunity to participate in true liberal
education as offered by the St. John’s GI.”
Tom May, who served his first term as
Annapolis GI director in 1986, reflects on the
challenges of the early year-round program.
May taught half-time, while he and assistant
Hensley shouldered recruitment, alumni relations, budgeting, class assignments, and other
student matters. They supervised high school
visits, the Continuing Education and Fine Arts
Program, and various publications. It was “truly
prodigious labor, with no down time over the
course of the year,” May recalls.
By May’s second directorship in 1995, the
ancillary programs had “migrated to other
offices. The GI was finally fully and solely itself.
In the midst of these years of expansion, the
program remained essentially the same.”
Recalling the GI in the 1970s, tutor David
Starr refers to the Barr-Buchanan vision. “The
concept of the college as a possible model for
educating citizens of all backgrounds was alive
and well in what we thought of as The Teachers
Institute.” A past Santa Fe GI director, Starr
reflects on “the resilience and range of the
program” over the years. He writes of “a shift
in demographics, from teachers funded to
strengthen their competence, toward younger
academics seeking to broaden their scope.” He
explains that “people who specialized prematurely now come here to look into alternative
philosophic, social, and spiritual studies.”
The current GI associate dean in Annapolis,
Emily Langston, announced plans for a 50th
celebration in her Commencement address last
year. A number of events throughout this year
will culminate at Homecoming on each campus.
This anniversary year will highlight “the role of
the GI as an integral part of the SJC community,” Langston says. “There’s a hunger for the
sort of thing we offer at the GI. Someone who’s
eighty and someone who’s twenty-four talk
about a text together. I think the GI is the sort
of thing that Barr and Buchanan were envisioning when they talked about how these books
could speak to anyone.”
—Robin Weiss (SFGI90)
THE COL L E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 5
�F R OM T H E B E L L T OW E R S
IN ANNAPOLIS
LEFT:
An aerial view
of the St. John’s
campus, circa 1868.
BOTTOM: Lincoln tours
the battlefield after
the Battle of Antietam
in October 1862.
Lincoln’s Walk
Members of the St. John’s community are
aware that dedications have brought two
American presidents to the Annapolis
campus: William Howard Taft took part in
the French Monument ceremony in 1911,
while Dwight Eisenhower, after landing in
a helicopter on back campus, charmed the
faculty in 1959 when the Mellon-Key complex
was dedicated.
Few are aware that several weeks before
his assassination, Abraham Lincoln walked
the width of the campus during a 45-minute
visit to Annapolis. That occurred on February 2, 1865, when Lincoln was headed for
the deep water wharf on the grounds of the
Naval Academy. From there he sailed to what
became known as the Hampton Roads Peace
Conference in Virginia, leading to the end of
the Civil War.
By then, St. John’s had been transformed
into U.S. General Hospital Division 2. Tents
for wounded and ill federal forces were
pitched on back campus. At the Naval Academy, midshipmen and professors had been
moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and that
campus was serving as a large supply depot
and hospital facility for Division 1.
Details of Lincoln’s visit, which also suggest
what St. John’s College’s environment was like
during those wartime years, are revealed in
a history written by Rockford E. Toews and
published by the Maryland State Archives:
“Lincoln in Annapolis February 1865.”
Traveling by train from Washington, Lincoln
arrived at 1 p.m. at the Annapolis & Elk Ridge
Railroad, located at the corner of Calvert and
West streets, from where Lincoln set off by
foot for the Naval Academy wharf about half
a mile away. Toews noted that the traffic was
too heavy for him to go by carriage while the
streets were unpaved and almost certainly
muddy. He thinks that the most likely route
Lincoln followed may have been along the
route of the railroad extension laid out in 1861.
A map accompanying the article shows the
route Lincoln is believed to have taken, based
upon research by the Annapolis Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the group that funded the
booklet. Lincoln’s path is shown in a red line.
“� o quiet and unobtrusive
S
was his arrival and
departure from the ancient
city that scarcely a score
knew of it until after the
steamboat sailed.”
After leaving the rail station, it is thought
that Lincoln walked over the Bloomsbury
Square area on what was then known as Tabernacle Street—today’s College Avenue. He
would have walked down Tabernacle, passing
Prince George and King George streets on his
right, and into the Naval Academy through a
gate at the end of College Avenue. St. John’s
would have been at his left. He would have
seen the Paca-Carroll House, Humphreys Hall,
McDowell Hall, Pinkney, Chase Stone, all built
by 1865, and, of course, the then flourishing
Liberty Tree.
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Lincoln’s walk took him close to the State
House, where the Maryland Senate was
considering ratification of the Thirteenth
Amendment, ending slavery. No account of his
visit from the Annapolis paper survives, but
a Baltimore American correspondent, who
signed his name “Mac,” wrote:
“[H] Excellency, the President of the
United States, arrived in Annapolis, entirely
unannounced, and without any ostentatious
ceremony whatever, but, like the Democratic
Republican that he is, he quietly proceeded to
the Naval Academy, where he embarked on
the steamer Thomas Collyer and proceeded, I
suppose, to City Point. He was accompanied
only by a servant. So quiet and unobtrusive
was his arrival and departure from the
ancient city that scarcely a score knew of
it until after the steamboat sailed. Had it
become known that he was present in the
Naval Academy’s Hospital, he would have had
a gratifying and pleasing reception from the
wounded and sick inmates of the institution.
Many of the members of the Legislature
expressed great regret at not having the
pleasure of seeing the Chief Magistrate.”
The red line on the
map illustrates the
route Lincoln is
believed to have taken
weeks before his
assassination.
News accounts differ on the number who
accompanied Lincoln. The Crutch, published
weekly by Hospital 1, reported:
“President Lincoln arrived here on Thursday by special train from Washington. No one
was aware of this distinguished arrival until
it was heralded by the Hospital Band, playing
patriotic airs of welcome as he passed from
the wharf to the boat.”
After boarding the Thomas Collyer, which
Toews described as a “fast side-wheel”
steamer, he departed from the mouth of the
Severn River into the Chesapeake Bay, leaving
Maryland for Virginia. The following day, on
February 4, after an overnight trip, he steamed
back to Annapolis to catch a 7:30 a.m. train.
Back in Washington two hours later, Lincoln
was never able to return to Annapolis.
—Rebecca Wilson (H83)
The College
is published by St. John’s
College, Annapolis, MD,
and Santa Fe, NM.
thecollegemagazine@
sjc.edu
Known office of
publication:
Communications Office
St. John’s College
60 College Avenue
Annapolis, MD 21401
Periodicals postage
paid at Annapolis, MD.
Postmaster: Send
address changes to
The College Magazine,
Communications Office,
St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue,
Annapolis, MD 21401.
Editor
Gregory Shook
gregory.shook@sjc.edu
Contributors
Anna Perleberg Andersen
(SF02)
Samantha Ardoin (SF16)
Carol Carpenter
Martha Franks (SF78)
Jonathan Llovet (A17)
Paula Novash
Tim Pratt
George Russell
Aisha Shahbaz (A19)
Yosef Trachtenberg (A15)
Robin Weiss (SFGI90)
Andrew Wice
Rebecca Wilson (H83)
Design
Skelton Design
Contributing Designer
Jennifer Behrens
THE COL L E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 7
�F R OM T H E B E L L T OW E R S
TUTORS TALK BOOKS
“Tutors Talk Books” is a new series on the St. John’s College
website that features interviews with tutors discussing a
favorite subject: books. The following is an edited excerpt from
the debut interview in which Samantha Ardoin (SF16) chats
with longtime Santa Fe tutor Krishnan Venkatesh about his
appreciation for early Buddhist texts—and Frodo. Visit sjc.edu to
read the complete interview and learn more about Venkatesh.
Have you been working on any
writing projects?
A book of essays on the Discourses of the
Buddha, and on Lord of the Rings (LOTR). I
think they are fairly unique because I’m trying
to approach them as a literate, thoughtful
human being first, and not as, say, a Buddhist
or a Tolkien scholar—which I’m not anyway.
The essays have been posted on my blog
(kappatsupatchi.wordpress.com).
What inspired you to write on the
Discourses of the Buddha?
I’ve been thinking about the Discourses for
over twenty years, studying them in the [St.
John’s Eastern Classics program] as well as by
myself—but I’ve never made time to sit down
and articulate those thoughts. I have also
practiced various forms of meditation, including
mindfulness meditation, and have always been
struck by the depth of psychological insight
in these early Buddhist texts. I’ve learned a
lot about myself through studying them, and
they have given me some necessary tools for
understanding my own experience. Sometime
last year I found myself spontaneously writing
down reflections on the passages that moved
me, and here I am.
In what ways have the Discourses
affected your life?
The Discourses have affected me deeply in
many ways. Among them: greater awareness
of body and motion as well as of my emotions,
the ability to sit still and watch feelings as they
change from moment to moment, a greater
awareness of change as it happens, and a
generally calmer state of mind. I have become
better at handling stress, but also more aware
Early Buddhist texts and Tolkien novels provide
tools for critical thinking.
8 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
of other people’s feelings than I was before.
Being by nature a dreamy person easily given
to reverie and getting lost in my own thoughts,
I had a lot of work to do in these respects, and
the Discourses have been invaluable guides.
What prompted you to start writing
critically about Lord of the Rings, and
what have been some highlights of this
process of going deep into such a story?
I’m not a big Tolkien fan and also not a big
reader of fantasy fiction, but prompted by
conversations with (tutor) Richard McCombs
I started to reflect more on whether it was
a great book or not, and if so, why. Over the
course of reading it slowly with a wonderful
community seminar, I began to form a genuine
admiration for Tolkien’s genius as a writer.
He has his weak points, but on the whole the
man can write. I found out that [in] all the
crucial moments in the book he is laconic and
suggestive, and some of the characters are
richly enigmatic: Gollum, Sam, Frodo, Eowyn.
Best of all was finding out for myself that
the Lord of the Rings is not a book meant for
children, but speaks deeply to “mature” people
who have experienced struggle. Frodo is 50
when he starts his quest. It ends up being about
what Jung calls “enantiodromia”—the “turn”
halfway in life to seek completion by developing
our incomplete halves.
Was there a particular book, poem, or
film that, in your formative years, inspired
a healthy dose of skepticism?
In my intellectually formative years, ages 14
to 16, I was a voracious reader. Reading itself
tends to loosen up inherited and congealed
opinions, because one has to take seriously
other worlds than one’s own, and other
authorities than the people around us. In
school we had a lot of history: lots of detailed
study of European wars, the fight for universal
suffrage, and the industrial revolution. I didn’t
appreciate it at the time, but I think it went in
deep—so much so that I am always shocked at
how ignorant many Americans are of subjects
like labor history. Ancient history was also
important for me—and I remember the thrill
of learning to read Caesar, Suetonius, and
Tacitus critically. I didn’t have much of a social
life. I remember reading Sartre and Camus
very passionately; I still have a file folder
full of notes from that period! And I studied
The Discourses have
affected me deeply in
many ways. Among them:
greater awareness of body
and motion as well as of
my emotions.
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov—the fathers of
modern drama—every weekend by myself for
two years. All of that changed me. I never felt
I belonged to my time and place. The seventies
and eighties mostly passed me by…
How are you involved in the St. John’s
Film Institute?
I was one of the founder-developers, along
with (tutor) David Carl. I taught both summers
with (tutor) David McDonald. I believe strongly
that in our period we can’t consider ourselves
liberally educated if we don’t have a developed
critical relationship to audio-visual media,
especially the moving photographic image.
Apparently in 1936 Scott Buchanan thought
so too, because in the blueprint for this college
he called for a four-year great books program
like ours and a fifth year called the St. John’s
College Institute for Cinematics.
What are some essential films that
Johnnies should watch and discuss?
The Passion of Joan of Arc, Tokyo Story, Early
Spring, Bicycle Thieves, Nights of Cabiria,
Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Rules of the Game—to
give you a few to start with.
Venkatesh’s blog, The Old Pearl Bed, layers
reflections on Tolkien with Tolstoy, on Chekhov
with Buddhism, and many other unexpected
connections abound. One of Venkatesh’s essays
on the Discourses was recently published in
Tricycle, a popular Buddhist magazine.
STUDY GROUP
Open to Inquiry
While the study of great books is central to
a St. John’s education, authors outside the
Western canon recently got some attention
thanks to efforts spurred by junior Emily
Krause (A18). Inspired by a preceptorial on
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, led by
tutor Rebecca Goldner (AGI02), Krause and
her classmate Nathan Dignazio (A18) formed
a study group on modern writers and issues
surrounding traditionally marginalized communities. Focusing on such authors as Warsan
Shire, Audre Lorde, and Sojourner Truth, the
study group takes aim at political and social
questions that are not usually explored in
other classes in the Program.
During this spring semester, the group met
bi-weekly for lunchtime seminars, focusing on
short readings that are taken from literary,
historical, and philosophical works. Average
attendance was about the same as a tutorial—
large enough to have significant momentum,
but also small enough that it was intimate and
conducive to sincere and productive inquiry.
The group’s readings included “Conversations about home (at a deportation centre),”
Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire’s poem
about a refugee’s troubled relationship with
her home and the alienation that vexes her
relationship to herself, her new surroundings,
and her origins; “The Master’s Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master’s House,” an address by
Audre Lorde critiquing the lack of representation of black and lesbian women at conferences
on feminist writing; and “Ain’t I a Woman?”
a speech by African American abolitionist
Sojourner Truth, who brings forward inconsistencies between professed and actual attitudes
towards women, and calls for equality of rights,
regardless of one’s intellect or race.
For the group’s fourth meeting, it returned
to its origin by reading the introduction of
The Second Sex, in which Beauvoir discusses
in Hegelian terms how woman is Other to
man and describes the relation between
woman and man that arises because of this
antithesis. She encapsulates the tension
pointedly, saying, “Woman’s drama lies in this
conflict between the fundamental claim of
every subject, which always posits itself as
essential, and the demands of a situation that
constitutes her as inessential.”
Krause and Dignazio hope that by looking
at perspectives of those whose lives and
experiences are vastly different than their
own, they can better understand the social
and political forces that are at work among us
in the world now. “Something is lost when we
don’t take into account the differences among
people,” Krause says. Goldner adds that the
study group shows something central to the
college, that the conversations that we have
in the classroom spill out and continue after
class (and from time to time find their way
back into class). “And hopefully,” Dignazio
says, “[the seminars] provide some wisdom
about the human experience.”
—Jonathan Llovet (A17)
ROSE S. PELHAM (A20)
ONLINE SERIES
The study group shows
something central to
the college, that the
conversations that we have
in the classroom spill out
and continue after class
(and from time to time find
their way back into class).
THE COL L E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 9
�F R OM T H E B E L L T OW E R S
C O N V E R S AT I O N
Civility on the
World Stage
comfort zones,” Mullen said. Several members
of the public asked questions about Trump,
immigration, and media coverage of Russia’s
purported role in the presidential election.
And when a woman asked if Democratic Sen.
Bernie Sanders, who lost the primary to Hillary
Clinton, could have won the general election,
Mullen leaned back on a lesson he learned early
on when dealing with the press: Don’t comment
on hypotheticals.
It was a strategy that suited Mullen well in
his conversations with Brokaw over the years.
The men had a longstanding professional
relationship, one that was based largely on trust
and respect. “I trusted him, he trusted me, and
we could do real business together,” Brokaw said
during a gathering before the event. “I needed
to know some things, and he knew things that
he didn’t want to tell me, and I respected that.
But that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
—Tim Pratt
TOP RIGHT:
Michael B. Mukasey, the 81st
Attorney General of the United States Judge,
opened the 2017 Dean’s Lecture Series.
BELOW:
TV journalist Tom Brokaw and former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike
Mullen spoke at an event on February 19.
NEED FOR FREE SPEECH
To a capacity crowd in Santa Fe’s Great Hall,
the 81st Attorney General of the United States
Judge Michael B. Mukasey argued passionately
against forces of political correctness and the
“concrete pressures” that these forces can exert
on speech. Mukasey’s talk opened the 2017
Dean’s Lecture Series, which hosted Supreme
Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor last spring.
Concerned that America has become a nation
whose people live in narratives rather than
facts, Mukasey, who was appointed by the
George W. Bush administration and served
from 2007 to 2009, bemoaned trends in which
“personal taste and preference have started to
impinge upon how people view reality.” He also
touched on human rights, judicial activism, and
the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, which
he was careful to define as a political ideology
and distinct from the religion of Islam. Mukasey
concluded his short talk by encouraging attendees to “hold fast,” to uphold high standards of
free speech as well as the U.S. Constitution.
In the lively question period that followed, audience members pressed Mukasey on a number
of issues, including the need for criminal justice
reform, anxieties about the current presidency,
and threats from the Supreme Court decision commonly known as Citizens United. The
Citizens United decision restricted government
from limiting the rights of corporations, labor
unions, and associations to make unlimited,
independent political expenditures. Despite a
number of differing opinions from the audience,
the discourse remained civil and Mukasey held
fast to his beliefs while also retaining a sense
of humor. When a student began his question
with, “I’m a freshman,” Mukasey laughed and
said: “Me too.”
TONY J PHOTOGRAPHY
“� he thing I love to do
T
more than anything in
life … the thing that
gives me the greatest joy
is playing the drums.”
Mukasey’s lecture is available on the SJC Digital
Archives at digitalarchives.sjc.edu.
—Joan Haratani (SF79)
CAROL CARPENTER
The Francis Scott Key Auditorium erupted into
applause as veteran TV journalist Tom Brokaw
and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Adm. Mike Mullen took the stage. Dubbed
“A Conversation with Brokaw and Mullen,” the
event held on February 19 featured a discussion between the renowned newsman and highranking military official on topics ranging from
the 2016 presidential election to America’s relationship with Russia, China, and North Korea
to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
The pair also spoke about the Trump administration and problems with the ways people
get their news. Brokaw urged those in the audience to check the veracity of stories found on
the internet. Social media has led to the easy
sharing of fake news stories, knee-jerk reactions, and heated, polarizing opinions, he said.
“You have to put as much effort into where you
get your news over a long period of time as you
do into buying a flat-screen television,” Brokaw
said. “You just can’t take it blindly off the internet because it’s there and it seems to be done
in a very sophisticated manner.”
Brokaw and Mullen later turned the conversation to issues surrounding immigration,
racism, and exposure to different cultures and
political beliefs. “We have to get out of our
H I D D E N TA L E N T
She’s Got the Beat
When Joan Haratani (SF79), visited the St.
John’s College campus in Annapolis last fall,
she made sure to visit the “rock room” in the
basement of Mellon Hall. The small, concrete
room was filled with amplifiers, guitars, a
piano, and drums. But the room had seen
better days. Graffiti was splayed on one of
the walls; stained, worn out furniture abutted
another. Equipment, some of it broken, some
of it covered in dust, cluttered the space. So
Haratani, who serves on the college’s Board
of Visitors and Governors, decided to do
something about it: She bought a new Yamaha
drum kit for the room and donated it to the
college. The donation spurred plans to spruce
up the room, an effort now under way. The only
stipulation? Haratani gets first dibs on playing
the kit when she visits campus.
While Haratani has a long and distinguished
law career—she now works for the firm Morgan
Lewis in San Francisco—she also is an avid
drummer. It’s a skill she is continuing to hone.
“The thing I love to do more than anything in
life … the thing that gives me the greatest joy
is playing the drums,” she says.
Although Haratani has always been musically inclined, she didn’t begin to play the
drums until about three years ago. She was a
violinist growing up. At the same time, she had
an admiration for musician Karen Carpenter,
not only for her “gorgeous voice,” but for her
ability to play the drums while she sang. “I
wanted to be Karen Carpenter,” Haratani says.
When she arrived at the St. John’s Santa Fe
campus in the mid-1970s, Haratani enjoyed the
two years of music theory classes she took. She
also listened to music while she studied, saying
it helped her focus on her work. Haratani went
on to law school at University of California at
Davis. Since then, her law career has spanned
more than three decades. Her practice includes
state and federal law, including the Alien Tort
Statute, California’s Unfair Competition Law,
pharmaceutical and medical device liability
doctrines, and national mortgage foreclosure
issues. In her free time, Haratani enjoys ice
climbing and other outdoor activities. But a
few years ago, while Haratani was taking voice
lessons, she had an opportunity to begin taking
drum lessons and jumped at the chance.
Haratani quickly realized regular practice
was the key to improvement. She took lessons
online and in person, and began attending
camps with drummers from all over the world.
Rudiments. Paradiddles. Stick control.
Haratani practices as often as she can. “I’m a
lawyer—that’s not easy—but I think drumming
is way harder because it’s so slow to get good,”
Haratani says.
She eventually began playing in a band with
her coworkers, many of whom had lengthy
musical backgrounds. The band won a competition last summer and will be performing again
for a charity in June, raising money for legal aid
for domestic violence victims. “I’m a big sucker
for helping people,” Haratani says. Performing
with a band also has helped Haratani improve
her drumming skills. “There is no faster way to
get good than to play live as a band,” she says.
When Haratani travels she makes efforts
to find places to practice. That’s what brought
her to the rock room in Mellon Hall last fall.
She was in town for the BVG meeting when
she learned of the room, saw the condition
of the existing drum kit—it had been pieced
together—and decided to do something about
it. She hopes Johnnies take advantage of the
new kit and the practice space. “There’s nothing like playing in a space that’s nice,” Haratani
says. “It makes you up your game.”
Music is an important part of life as a
Johnnie, with classes, singing and instrumental
opportunities abound. Those opportunities
create a more well-rounded educational experience, Haratani says. “I think music heals the
soul, I really do.”
—Tim Pratt
—Samantha Ardoin (SF16)
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�12 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
IN
FACTIOUS
TIMES:
LEADERSHIP
LEFT:
Lincoln's "Gettysburg Portrait" by Alexander Gardner, taken on November 8, 1863, two weeks before the Gettysburg Address, with photo of James Campbell, born in slavery, c.1936-38, Library of Congress
TUTOR VIEW: LINCOLN
LEADING
BY
TEACHING
by George Russell
The paradox of Abraham Lincoln’s appearance in the
United States’ sectional conflict becomes manifest if
one considers a passage written by James Madison in
Federalist No. 10. In that paper, Madison, apologizing
for the Constitution that he had authored, cautions
his reader to resist the impractical expectation that
in the clash of the interests that naturally spring up in
the republic, prudent and “enlightened statesmen” will
appear to resolve those conflicts. He explains that the
Constitution is a contrivance of sorts which will control
the effects of factions by blunting the worst tendencies
of majorities. In doing so, the Constitution will obviate
the need for the prudence of an “enlightened statesman”
to solve conflicts of interest as they arise and escalate.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 13
�TUTOR VIEW
M
adison, however, lived long
enough to see the precursor of
the sectional crisis and secession, the nullification crisis
of 1832, precipitated by John
Calhoun.1 He lived long enough
to see that factious men were
to arise in the republic who
ranked their interests above
the good of constitutional rule;
factious men who sought a
“union” in which the parts, the
states, superseded the whole,
the union of states. As those
men rejected constitutional
rule, they undermined the
implicit remedies of the Madisonian constitution, at
the same time as they speciously obfuscated what it
meant to be an American citizen.2 It was into that
turmoil that, Providence providing, the enlightened
statesman, Abraham Lincoln, entered.
Lincoln’s leadership displays itself in that wellknown political scene in which two crises intersect,
the moral crisis of possible slavery expansion and
the political crisis of secession. In the context of
those crises, Lincoln agrees with Madison that
Lincoln teaches that
government of the people
is government by majorities,
properly restrained, not
government of minorities
over majorities.
factious men are the great danger to the republic.
To counteract those factious men, Lincoln, from
the time of his earliest speeches, takes on the role
of a teacher. Indeed, leading by teaching, Lincoln,
both before he became president and during his
presidency, did his utmost to instruct the American
citizen on what it means to be an American.
14 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
Three major tenets emerge as central in Lincoln’s understanding of what it means to be an
American. First, one must be devoted to rule by
law. This tenet, he sets out in that early and precocious speech, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum,
Springfield, Illinois. Second, according to Lincoln,
the true American believes in universal freedom
and a basic equality with respect to that freedom.
The principles of the founders as they expressed
them in the Declaration of Independence were
meant to be principles of the nation going forward.
Third and last, the true American believes that the
United States is a perpetual union of states.
Lincoln’s own exemplary submission to the law
is most easily discernable in his handling of the
two great factions of the sectional crisis, namely,
the radical Southern planters who claimed rights
to be able to move their property in human beings
everywhere in the Union, and the abolitionists,
who wanted to abolish the institution immediately. Lincoln maintained against both sides that
the law had to be respected against the factious
impulses of each. While he was in agreement with
the abolitionists that slavery was wrong, Lincoln
argued against the abolitionists that the institution
enjoyed legal protection in the states in which it
existed. As the institution enjoyed the sanction of
law, it had to be respected in those states. Against
the Southern planters, Lincoln cited as precedent
the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, in which the
institution was prohibited in those territories. In
his view, the same legal spirit that protects the
institution of slavery also limits slavery to where it
exists. Particularly in the factious times in which he
lived, Lincoln believed that adherence and submission to the law was the most needful thing for the
health of the republic.
In regard to the second tenet, that the true
American believes in universal freedom, especially
regardless of race, Lincoln’s view was mightily
contested by Southerners—and not only radicals.
As evidence of that contest, here citations from
one speech must suffice, the so-called “Cornerstone
Speech” of Alexander H. Stephens, an erstwhile
“Union man” from Georgia. In a speech that he
delivers on March 21, 1861, Stephens asserts the
following regarding the principles of the Declaration of Independence: “The prevailing ideas
entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading
statesmen at the time of the formation of the old
Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature, and that
it was wrong in principle, socially,
morally, and politically…[T]he general opinion of the men of that day
was that, somehow or other in the
order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass
away…Those ideas, however, were
fundamentally wrong. They rested
upon the assumption of the equality of races…This was an error…
Our new government is founded
upon exactly the opposite idea; its
foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth,
that the negro is not equal to the
white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his
natural and normal condition.”
In opposing those views and
other similar views, Lincoln never
seems very interested in such
statements as philosophical or
abstract statements. Rather he
contents himself with pointing out
and instructing his hearers in the
American way. In teaching that the
true American is an egalitarian, he
asserts the precise way in which he
understands all men to be equal; at
the same time, he likens the situation of the enslaved people to that
of the revolutionary era Americans.
Here I cite from two speeches:
First, from the Kansas-Nebraska
Act speech, at Peoria, Illinois, we
have a statement which repeats in
slightly different versions throughout Lincoln’s speeches. “…I hold
that…there is not reason in the
world why the negro is not entitled
to all the natural rights enumerated
in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that
he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I
agree with Judge [Stephen] Douglas he is not my
equal in many respects…But in the right to eat the
bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his
own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of
Judge Douglas, and the equal of any living man.”
Arguing in favor of universal equality, equality in
respect of property-engendering labor, Lincoln
rejects Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” doctrine
Madison termed Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification, the claim
that federal law could be “nullified” within a given state,
“preposterous and anarchical.”
1�
To be sure, the states in rebellion drew up a constitution.
However, they made sure that they explicitly asserted the
sovereignty of the individual states as supreme over the
central government. In effect, they did not ultimately submit
to the constitution and the government set up therein. They
rejected that sort of constitutional rule.
2�
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 15
�TUTOR VIEW
that slavery in the territories should not be a concern of American citizens outside the territories.
Lincoln maintains that the question of slavery was
the concern of every citizen. Every American citizen
should be concerned to keep slavery, the expropriation of labor and its fruits, on the road to extinction.
Second, from his debate with Douglas in Alton,
Illinois: “It is the eternal struggle between these
two principles—right and wrong—throughout the
world. They are the principles that have stood face
to face from the beginning of time; and will ever
Lincoln was a man with a
true moral compass. Whatever
he thought about the legality
of enslavement and the
necessity of upholding the
law, he knew and over time
persistently maintained that
in itself it was wrong.
continue to struggle. The one is the common right
of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.
It is the same that says, ‘You work and toil and
earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape
it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who
seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and
live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of
men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is
the same tyrannical principle.”
Whereas Stephens understands the founders to
be misguided in their adherence to the principles of
the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln maintains
that these are the ideas and principles for the sake
of which Americans shed their blood and gave their
lives; these principles are the founders’ legacy to
the republic for all times. He sets forth the view
that the founders “meant to set up a standard
16 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
maxim for free society, which should be familiar to
all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly
attained, constantly approximated, and thereby
constantly spreading and deepening its influence,
and augmenting the happiness and value of life to
all people of all colors everywhere.” The assertion
that “‘all men are created equal’ was placed in the
Declaration…for future use. Its authors meant it to
be…a stumbling block to those who in after times
might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.” The principles, then, were
not merely to be held but to be lived by. To repeat,
the true American believes in universal freedom:
that is what Lincoln taught.
The third tenet of Lincoln’s Americanism is the
belief in the perpetuity of the union of the states
in the United States. What that amounts to, as is
known, is that there is no right of secession possessed by the citizens of the states. Lincoln saw the
secessionist view of the 19th century as a rejection
of the principle of majority rule. Lincoln agreed with
Madison that restraints needed to be imposed on
majorities in order to protect rights of minorities;
however, he also believed that once those restraints
were in place, the minority party must follow the
lead of the majority or dissolution of popular government ensues on the basis of minority secession.
Lincoln teaches that government of the people is
government by majorities, properly restrained, not
government of minorities over majorities.
There are those who might question Lincoln’s
qualifications as a teacher of what it means to be
an American. Lincoln was a man who had faults,
and because of his general candor, visible faults.
His views were at times what we would call today
“racist” views. For example, he acknowledged the
social inferiority of black people as a fact, and said
that he was not inclined to raise their status, or
change that state of affairs. Again and again, in
dealing with black Americans, he catered to the
feelings and prejudices of his white constituents
rather than treat the blacks equitably. Repeatedly,
he maintained that enslavement in the Southern states was legally sanctioned and protected
although he believed and taught that the enslavement of human beings is both wrong by nature and
un-American. In his speculations about emancipation, Lincoln for a long time favored the deportation of black Americans from the country. Charges
such as these continue to be leveled by some who
reflect on Lincoln’s career.
However, in the face of his faults and defects,
Lincoln was a man with a true moral compass.
Whatever he thought about the legality of enslavement and the necessity of upholding the law, he
knew and over time persistently maintained that in
itself it was wrong. Whatever he observed about
the social equality of blacks and whites, he knew
and repeatedly argued that politically, blacks and
whites were all fundamentally equal—that is, that
they all had rightful claims on the fruits of their
own respective labor. And Lincoln, in accord with
that true moral compass, knew that, as he put it
once when referring to Douglas, a man “may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong;” Lincoln
could and did change his mind.
If we come back to the matter of Lincoln’s attitude toward the black American, we can say the
following: Twice Lincoln gave personal audiences
to Frederick Douglass at the White House, once
in the summer of 1863 to hear Douglass’s complaint about his (Lincoln’s) tardy response to the
way in which the Confederates were treating captured black soldiers; and again a year later, when
Lincoln wanted Douglass’s opinion on the lack of
movement by the enslaved people who had been
legally freed. Lincoln came to see that these
United States were the true home of the latest
posterity of those Africans forcibly transported
here as long ago as 250 years. However tardily,
he came to see that the Americans of African
descent deserved to fight for their freedom. And
thereafter, he saw, too, that the darker-skinned
soldiers fighting to preserve the country founded
on freedom and equality did not deserve deportation to some foreign land. Rather, they deserved
citizenship in that homeland where through them
and in them a new freedom was being born. It
was in changing his mind in the ways that he did
that Lincoln really indicts those who clung so
tenaciously to what they knew to be wrong. At
the same time, in doing so, he exhibited, as he so
often did in his speeches, the kind of nobility that
his most ardent opponents wanted to claim for
themselves but could not.
In those exemplary ways discussed here, Lincoln
did all that he could to preserve Madison’s constitutional rule by trying to teach his fellow citizens
what it means to be an American. Paradoxically,
he appeared on the earth in the right place at the
right time to preserve and protect a constitution
constructed to provide against the fortuity of
prudence in human affairs.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 17
�LEADERSHIP
Protector of
Our Program
Annapolis President
Chris Nelson (SF70)
Leaves a Mighty Legacy
By Tim Pratt
When Chris Nelson was a child, he often found
himself engaged in battle. Tomato plant stakes
from the family garden were used as swords.
Trashcan lids served as shields. The rug in
the living room was the river Skamandros as
Nelson and his siblings re-enacted the Trojan
War from the Iliad, bouncing on furniture and
avoiding the water below. “I slew countless
Trojans, over and over,” Nelson says with a
smile. “My siblings were very accommodating.”
DEMETRIOS FOTOS
While as a 12-year-old Nelson immersed
himself in the Iliad and Euclid’s Elements,
his journey with the great books of Western
civilization was just beginning.
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�LEADERSHIP
It was a trek that took him to St. John’s College
as a student in the 1960s, to Chicago for a lengthy
law career, and eventually back to his alma mater to
serve as president. During that time, Nelson became
a champion for the liberal arts, played a prominent
role in higher education at the national level, and
oversaw vast improvements at the college. But now,
Nelson is preparing to step down as leader of the
place that has been a part of his life since childhood.
He will retire in June after 26 years as Annapolis
president. “Chris is kind of the rock on which the
college has operated for over a quarter of a century,”
says Mike Peters, who served as president of the St.
John’s Santa Fe campus from 2005 through January
2016. “He leaves a pretty amazing legacy.”
TONY J PHOTOGRAPHY
The Early Years
Nelson is an outspoken
advocate of the liberal arts.
Nelson’s connection to St. John’s came as a “birthright,” tutor and former Dean Michael Dink said during a recent Saturday Seminar event in Annapolis
held in Nelson’s honor. Nelson’s father graduated
from St. John’s in 1947—a decade after Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan founded the college’s great
books curriculum—and was a long-serving member
and chair of St. John’s Board of Visitors and Governors. Although Nelson’s
father didn’t talk a lot about
St. John’s at home, Nelson
says his childhood was permeated with elements of
the Program, from refighting the Trojan War with
his siblings to redrawing
the diagrams from Euclid’s
Elements, with and without
drafting instruments.
In high school, Nelson grew
tired of the lectures given by
his teachers, who would tell
students “what the answer
was and what to think,” he
says. He knew that if he
attended St. John’s, he would
be able to explore topics for
himself. Nelson arrived in
Annapolis in 1966. He never applied anywhere else. “I
was one of those people who come to St. John’s with
the attitude that the opening question only needs
to be ‘Ready, set, go.’ The desire to try to make the
books we were reading our own, and to take them in
and accept or reject the things in them as judgments
we were making for ourselves, was just thrilling.”
20 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
Nelson spent part of his time in Annapolis, where
he was an accomplished athlete and active in student government, before transferring to the Santa Fe
campus and graduating in 1970. College board chair
Ron Fielding (A70)—one of Nelson’s classmates, a fellow intramural sports captain, and officer in student
government—says he saw flashes of Nelson’s potential when they were students. “The leadership aspect
is without question,” Fielding says. “He was a natural
leader of the athletics teams and … of the polity.”
Following Nelson’s graduation, it was off to law
school at the University of Utah, where he founded
and directed the university’s student legal services
program. He graduated in 1973.
Nelson practiced law for 18 years in Chicago and
was chairman of his law firm when he was tapped
to become president of St. John’s in 1991. He had
served on the college’s Board of Visitors and Governors since 1986.
A Natural Leader
When Nelson returned to campus as president in
the summer of 1991, he faced a budget deficit and
aging facilities. Nelson immediately got to work,
coming up with a list of projects and working with
former Vice President of Development Jeff Bishop
and Treasurer Bud Billups to raise funds, make “prudent” cuts and balance the budget, he says. “Those
guys saved this college,” says Bishop’s wife, Sue.
In the two-plus decades since then, new dormitories
and other structures have been erected; every building on campus has been renovated; even the grounds
have improved. The four-year graduation rate, which
was 36 percent when Nelson arrived, has nearly
doubled. Enrollment applications also have increased
in recent years following a slight downturn after the
economic crisis of 2008—a crisis that affected enrollment at liberal arts colleges all over the country.
But some things, like the St. John’s Program, have
remained largely the same, with students now reading many of the same works as their predecessors.
That is one of the things Nelson takes most pride in
as he looks back on his career. “I think it’s protecting as much as I could the community of learning at
the college,” Nelson says. “I’d say that has been most
important to me.”
That’s not to say there haven’t been changes. Nelson is excited about the recent focuses on biology
and quantum mechanics in senior lab. A new quantum mechanics lab was recently completed in the
basement of Mellon Hall. Nelson says he has tried
to give faculty and staff the autonomy they need
to be successful. At the same time, he says he was
sure to question and discuss the recommendations
and decisions being made. “Everybody on the faculty has ideas about how to improve the work of the
academic program in the classroom,” Nelson says.
“I’ve wanted them to feel that they could continue
to work on the Program. I’ve wanted to provide as
much freedom from constraint as I could.”
Others share a similar view of Nelson’s management style. Dink, who served as dean from 20052010, said in his Saturday Seminar comments that
Nelson was friendly and supportive during his term.
Deans are drawn from the faculty for five-year terms,
which means they often come with no prior administrative experience. “But Chris well understood the
virtue, indeed the necessity of this practice, and did
everything in his power both to assist with the learning curve and to respect and support the authority of the dean,” says Dink. Leo Pickens (A78), who
served for years as athletic director before working
as alumni director and now director of Leadership
Annual Gifts, describes Nelson as “a great listener.”
“His door has always been open,” says Pickens. “He’s
very approachable, he’s extremely fair-minded … and
I think it became very clear early on that he was
dedicated to the college.”
“� t was clear when we met and has only
I
been reinforced during our time working
together that Chris’s affection for the
college is deep and fierce and abiding.
He has been a St. John’s force of nature.”
—Santa Fe President Mark Roosevelt
The Man
Like many others who have known Nelson over
the years, Pickens has stories to tell. He attended
St. John’s with Nelson’s younger brother, Ted, and
recalls hearing about Chris’s intramural sports
awards and team championships when he was a student. “I had not met Chris, but had only heard tales
of his athletic prowess,” Pickens says with a laugh.
Having witnessed Nelson’s skills on the badminton
court when he returned as president in 1991, Pickens
took note of Nelson’s resilience and coolness under
pressure. “Those kinds of qualities he demonstrated
as an athlete, even under the most difficult of circumstances … are qualities he also demonstrated as
a president here.”
Pickens got to see more of that determination
on a cross-country bike ride he took with Nelson,
Bishop, former Santa Fe Vice President for Development Jeff Morgan, and Bob Gray in 1993. Sue
Bishop saw it, too, as she drove the support van.
She and Pickens fondly recall Nelson “flying” down
steep mountain roads, a smile on his face. And while
the group had agreed not to talk about college business on the trip, Nelson would read Gilgamesh out
loud during rest stops as his colleagues relaxed in
the shade. “He demonstrated on that ride just how
strong of a human he is,” says Pickens. Through
it all, Nelson has maintained his love of the great
books, often quoting passages from works he has
read over the years. And he often invites students,
faculty, and staff to his home for special occasions.
Some who spoke of Nelson recalled lengthy conversations over a glass of wine, or of Nelson’s love
for chopping wood, or of the pleasure he gets from
working in the garden. There were stories of Nelson, while still a student, presiding over a hearing
for fellow Johnnies who were involved in a series of
food fights. And there were stories of Nelson going
out of his way to help faculty, staff, and students,
leading study groups, and teaching classes. Nelson’s
dedication to the college stands out, says Peters. “I
think Chris bleeds Johnnie black and orange,” says
Peters. “He is going to be a hard act to follow, but
he has smoothed the path for those folks who are
coming after him.”
Above: Leo Pickens,
Jeff Morgan, Bob Gray,
Chris Nelson, and Jeff
Bishop wearing bicycling
outfits, medals and
wreathes, and holding a
photo of Albert Einstein
on a bicycle, outside of
McDowell Hall in 1993.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 21
�LEADERSHIP
“� e want to have people who
W
can think for themselves rather
than being ... useful tools for
someone else’s purposes. So
that’s asking each individual to
take responsibility for the public
good. Each of us has a leadership
responsibility in that respect.”
A National Voice
Nelson has served as an ambassador for the college, traveling around the country, giving talks—he
estimates he has given more than 1,000 since he
took office—on issues like government regulation
in higher education. He has met with lawmakers,
donors, and others; the National Association of
Independent Colleges and Universities on February 1 announced Nelson as chairman of its board of
directors. And two years ago he received the Association’s highest honor, the Henry Paley Award for his
“unfailing service toward the students and faculty of
independent colleges and universities.”
Nelson is well-known as a proponent of the liberal
arts. A liberal arts education creates more thoughtful,
well-rounded people, he says. “We want to have people
who can think for themselves rather than being driven
to, or useful tools for, someone else’s purposes,” he
says. “So that’s asking each individual to take responsibility for the public good. Each of us has a leadership
responsibility in that respect. To get there, we need
to cultivate the arts of intellect and imagination, and
that’s exactly what we do at St. John’s College.”
Nelson’s 26 years of work toward reaching that
goal are commendable, Fielding says. An American
Council on Education survey found the average term
of a college president is less than 10 years. “There’s
22 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
something comforting about having a leader who
doesn’t aspire to do anything other than making
this current institution better,” Fielding says. “That
is uncommon, whether it is a politician in a political
office or a college president. It’s very special.”
Senior Alina Myer, who served as president of the
student Delegate Council in 2016, says the college
is lucky to have someone as dedicated to the liberal
arts as Nelson. “It’s kind of an incredible thing to
have such accessibility to someone who has worked
tirelessly and on such a large scale to ensure that
people understand the value of what we do here at St.
John’s,” says Myer. “He is the first person who speaks
to us as Johnnies at convocation, and for my class he
will be the last, as our commencement speaker. He is
emblematic of our St. John’s experience.”
The Future
After Nelson retires, he plans to travel, visit family,
and catch up on some reading. “There’s a book in
there somewhere too,” he says. He hopes to relax a
bit after a career which included an 18-month stint as
president of the Santa Fe campus and often found him
working seven days a week. But Nelson won’t be completely absent from campus. He has been appointed a
member of the teaching faculty and says he will make
himself available to lead seminars, preceptorials, or
anything else asked of him. “For the sake of intellectual engagement, it will be good to spend some time
with the students,” says Nelson. “I get a great deal
of satisfaction out of the study groups I have now
when I’m not teaching a regular class, which I used to
do, and I can’t imagine not having that intellectual
vibrancy in my life going forward.”
Left: Nelson on
back campus, with
College Creek in the
background.
DEMETRIOS FOTOS
DEMETRIOS FOTOS
—Chris Nelson
A toast from Eva Brann (H89),
tutor and former dean, in honor of
Chris Nelson, at Homecoming 2016:
I’ve heard it said that a proper toast begins by
making people laugh. I’m feeling a little more
like crying than laughing myself. And moreover,
those glorious six years when I worked with
Chris to make this college of ours stay itself and
be what it was meant to be, weren’t as productive of funny stories as happy solutions. Yet I do
remember an incident which, when I told it to my
fellow deans at other schools, aroused laughter—
incredulous laughter. So I’ll tell it here.
Some of you may remember Miss Beate von
Oppen, a fellow tutor, my friend, and next-door
neighbor. She always collected more books than
she had places for. So I persuaded her to get yet
another bookcase. We picked up one of those
assemble-it-yourself cheapies, and, of course, no
picture in the instruction booklet matched reality,
and no word in it was in our human vocabulary. I
was dean then, and when in major trouble, such
as over-budgeting by thousands, I looked for salvation in one direction: to our president. So what
did I do? I phoned Chris at home, and within half
an hour he and Joyce were at the door, and within
another half hour the rickety thing stood erect and
ready. This, I’m here to tell you, was not the relation I used to hear about at deanish get-togethers.
What was normal was open warfare, uneasy
peace, all the way down to cowed submission.
The thing about Chris, an unusual thing, is that
he knows how to govern. There is not a smidgen
of pretentiousness in him, which means that he
meets ready respect for his decisions. There isn’t
even a ghost of power assertion, which means that
authority accrues to him naturally. There is no taste
in him at all for cliques, which means he’s everyone’s president. There isn’t even a little bubble
of hot air in him, which means that when he says
something is so, it’s because he’s costed it out,
or remembered it correctly, or really thought about
it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if after dinner he
gently lets me know what facts I’ve got wrong.
Chris Nelson and
Eva Brann overlook
the campus, as they
did when Chris first
became president.
When I spoke of the years I was dean as glorious,
I meant it. We were known as “the four B’s and
the C”: our beloved Jeff Bishop and fondly remembered Bud Billups and me, the eternally amateurish
dean. And then Chris, who made it possible for us
so-called administrators to live up to the meaning
of the word, which is “to minister to” those in our
charge. Or better put, to be fulfilled by our offices
in Aristotle’s sense of happiness, the soul at work
in behalf of a good thing: the Program, the folks
busy here in its service, and the students who’ll
soon be our “nurslings,” alumni in Latin.
I’ll end with a vision I’ve held in my imagination
for a long time. Very near the beginning of his
presidency, Chris and I were standing on the quad
looking down from the top of the stairs onto our
irreplaceable bronze steal – the one that promises
to make free adults of children by means of books
and laboratories – and out across the back campus.
Chris heaved a deep sigh and said words to this
effect: “Here is where I want to spend my life.” And
so he has, and we cannot thank him enough for it.
So please raise your glasses in a toast to our
incomparable president, our Chris.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 23
�BY
PA
UL
A
NO
VA
SH
GL MO
AD D
ER
IA N
TO
R
LEADERSHIP
Michelle Urban (SF08) is convinced there
is major value in having to figure things out.
“When I was at St. John’s writing a paper, I
usually wouldn’t know how to prove what
I wanted to,” Urban says. “But then it would
come together—and succeeding at something
you have struggled with is a great feeling.” It
is a philosophy that translates well to Urban’s
current situation as an entrepreneur running
a tech startup. As CEO of Albuquerque-based
Pressure Analysis Company (PAC), which designs and manufactures wireless technology
to track head injuries in athletes, Urban says
that her biggest challenge is inexperience.
“We’re creating an innovative product in an
emerging field,” she says. “Every day there’s
something new we need to learn how to do.”
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 25
�A
mid increasing concerns about
sports-related head injuries
–
particularly those that affect
younger players – the company’s
idea is timely. According to
a 2016 article published on Sports Illustrated’s
website, si.com, the rate of youth concussions rose
500 percent between 2010 and 2014.
Although high school-age athletes are most
likely to suffer concussions and the highest
percentage of injuries occur playing football,
Urban says the problem spans a wide range
of ages and sports. “There are complexities
at different levels. Younger players have not
been hit over and over yet, so having cumu-
lative data can be helpful for parents and
physicians,” she says. “And coaches of older
players need to be able to see exactly where
they’ve been hit and how hard, so they know
if someone needs to be pulled out of a game
and examined.”
Urban and her partners have developed
The Duke City Gladiators put Urban’s SmackCap technology to the test.
a tool to help. Called the SmackCap, it
resembles the slightly slouchy skullcap that
is popular with hipsters and other fashionminded individuals. But inside, SmackCap
is an array of pressure sensors, connected
in a spiderweb pattern, that can track every
impact to a player’s head in real time and
send the data to a wireless device such as
a cellphone or iPad. Besides showing if and
how badly a player may be injured over time,
SmackCap technology also has potential to
change the techniques coaches recommend.
“For instance, if a kid is getting hit repeatedly
in the same spot, the coach might notice that
he’s leading with his head,” says Urban.
Urban grew up in Santa Fe and was homeschooled. Although her first job during high
school was as part of the St. John’s campus
Buildings and Grounds crew, she did not
initially consider applying there. But she
says she loved the curriculum and skills she
learned as a Johnnie—and they were a com-
plement to her graduate studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM). “In business
school I was the one who was always asking
questions and analyzing during group projects and discussions,” she says. “I think some
people found it annoying, but I was used to
thinking deeply and critically.”
It was at UNM that Urban became interested in entrepreneurship. After earning
her MBA she did contract work for the New
Mexico economic development department,
and while creating resources for businesses
she realized she had skills she wanted to
leverage. “I was writing website content on
advice about how to start a business, and
I thought, I know all of that,” Urban says.
She wanted to do something that contributes
good to people’s lives, and became aware of
the problem of head injuries in sports. “It’s an
issue that for a long time was shoved under a
rug,” she says. “It seemed logical that having
technology to track even smaller level hits,
and provide a history of all hits taken, would
be valuable to physicians and researchers as
well as parents.”
Urban met her partners in PAC at a networking event. Together she and Lori Upham,
who handles business activities, and Scott
Sibbett, a UNM research professor who created the SmackCap technology, are engaged
in a hands-on, collaborative effort.
“When we built our first prototypes, Lori
handled the fabric, Scott the electronics and
laptop software, and I assembled the sensor array,” Urban says. A pilot partnership
with the Duke City Gladiators, a professional
indoor football team based in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, had players wearing SmackCaps during their practices and games and
allowed the PAC team to conduct field tests
and collect data.
At the 2016 South by Southwest (SXSW)
technology conference held in Austin, Texas,
Urban participated in a gathering of women
entrepreneurs who were pitching to investors; with fewer than 3 percent of tech companies run by women, she is one of an elite
AY
D
Y ’S ING ED
ER RE TH NE
�EV HE E E
“ T M W N O.”
O W AR D
S E E O
N OL T
T OW
H
cadre. “It was a great
opportunity—the first
time we were able to present about the company outside of New Mexico,” she says.
SmackCap is available for preorder with the target of making the
product available to consumers in 2018;
Urban and her partners are excited about
the future of the company’s idea. “Things are
moving so fast—we’re marketing, talking to
investors, dealing with intellectual property
issues, and expanding our team. I’m not sure
how it’s all going to work, but I’m sure we’ll
be able to deal with it.”
KEVIN LANGE
LEADERSHIP
Michelle Urban (SF08) protects athletes’ heads by using hers.
26 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 27
�BIBLIOFILE
ROBERT WOLF
(CLASS OF 1967)
Building the
Agricultural City
S
ince moving to the small town of Decorah,
Iowa, in 1991, former Chicago Tribune
columnist Robert Wolf has been concerned
with the decline of rural America. The upper Midwest’s Driftless bioregion, of which
Decorah is part, once easily fed its inhabitants with its
agriculture and fishing; now, despite much of the area’s
being farmland, it must import most of its food and
other manufactured goods. “I began to think,” writes
Wolf, “about how such a region could escape
the trauma of another national depression,
and realized only a region that was self-reliant and relatively self-sufficient could do this.”
How, then, to create such a region? The
solution, Wolf believes, lies in the concept
of “the agricultural city,” coined by Chicago
architect Joe Lambke. In Lambke’s vision,
rather than viewing themselves as a series of
towns or villages separated by fields, several
rural communities would join together to
form one “city” with multiple nodes of population. Cooperating rather than competing
would allow the inhabitants of an agricultural
city to develop a self-supporting economy less
dependent on centralized corporate interests.
Wolf first put forth these ideas in a
six-part editorial for Iowa Public Radio in
1994, “Developing Regional, Rural Economies”; the piece won the Sigma Delta Chi
Award and Bronze Medal from the Society
of Professional Journalists for Best Radio
Editorial, and was reprinted in the Des
Moines Register. Now he has expanded this
work into a book, Building the Agricultural
City (Ruskin Press, 2016), whose publication costs were raised on the crowdfunding
website IndieGoGo. Crowdfunding itself is
an example of the democratic, grassroots
actions that Wolf feels “democratize our
economy” and help decentralization.
Building the Agricultural City outlines
several practical steps towards building a self-sufficient regional economy: “a
community development bank, numerous
worker-owned cooperatives, and one or two
closed-loop agricultural systems to provide
fresh [fruit] and vegetables year round. Each
municipality would have a publicly owned
utility powered by renewable sources.” Each
of these tools has been successfully implemented by communities around the world.
Writers, artists, and
musicians are vital forces
to “[foster] a regional
consciousness, by offering
dying rural towns an
alternative to bitterness
and passive acceptance
of a System that works
against them.”
28 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
Locally sourced food, trendy on upscale urban
menus, might seem easy to achieve for the agricultural
city; unfortunately, most American farmland is owned
by corporations who ship crops out of the region in
which they are grown. Wolf believes small farmers can
maximize their local impact by turning to “closedloop” agricultural systems, “in which the waste from
one part of the system [becomes] the nutrient for
another”—e.g., Chicago’s The Plant raises tilapia, and
removes their waste from the water to use as fertilizer
for edible plants. The clean water is then recirculated
into the fish tanks. Ironically, Wolf finds examples of
such projects only in cities.
Another urban innovation that Wolf recommends in
a rural context is that of the community development
bank. The first of these in the U.S. was founded in
1973 by four black friends in the South Shore area of
Chicago, which was losing capital as whites moved out
of the neighborhood. Its investors included “nonprofits,
churches, banks, insurance companies, community
organizations, and individuals,” and the bank “invested
in minority-owned businesses and financed apartment
renovation that created affordable housing.” Placing community before profit, banks like ShoreBank,
Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, and the Bank of North
Dakota, help keep small economies strong.
These economies can be further strengthened, Wolf
argues, by the creation of worker-owned cooperatives,
modeled on European examples. The Emilia Romagna
region of Italy, for instance, has approximately 8,100
cooperatives, in which businesses producing the same
product collaborate rather than compete—and it is this
power of collaboration that allows them to compete at
a global level and enjoy a high quality of life.
One last piece of the puzzle, Wolf writes in an
epilogue, is the necessary re-emergence of regional
arts and literature, “almost instinctively understood to
be the best means available for developing regionalist
sensibility.” Writers, artists, and musicians are vital
forces to “[foster] a regional consciousness, by offering
dying rural towns an alternative to bitterness and passive acceptance of a System that works against them.”
In this way, the humanities can add their persuasive
power to advances in science and technology, Wolf
hopes, in order to build “a cooperative society in which
meaningful, remunerative work is available to all…a
culture rooted in the land and created with tools that
enable a people to live harmoniously with the land.”
—Anna Perleberg Andersen (SF02)
Rousseau’s Rejuvenation
of Political Philosophy:
A New Introduction
By Nelson Lund (A74)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
How does one revive the ideas of a major philosophic
critic of the Enlightenment era, a figure both widely
misunderstood and widely influential? Nelson Lund’s
new book, Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political
Philosophy, aims to do just that by introducing
readers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thoughtful
political wisdom. In reading Rousseau authentically,
“as Rousseau read Plato,” Lund, a professor at George
Portico
By Sarah Stickney (A04)
Emrys Press, 2016
The 26 poems collected in Sarah Stickney’s new book
of poetry, Portico, are inspired, in part, by her love
for the Italian city of Bologna. With an artist’s eye
and a passionate heart, she observes the beauty and
wonder found in life’s everyday moments—young men
on Vespas buzzing in the streets, steam rising from
a bowl of pasta, cedar trees bending in the breeze—
and she takes the reader along for a soulful ride. In
“Song” Stickney writes, “From under a carved arch /
this morning Bologna brought me a woman / whose
Plato Symposium or Drinking Party:
Translation with Introduction,
Glossary, Essay, and Appendices
By Eva Brann (H89), Peter Kalkavage,
and Eric Salem (A77)
Focus Philosophical Library, 2017
A two-year labor of love, this new edition of Plato’s
most popular dialogue, Symposium or Drinking Party,
marks the fourth Plato translation by this trio of St.
John’s tutors. While grasping the mechanics of the
ancient Greek language requires a certain aptitude,
the translators delve deeply to explore the tone
and nuance of the original text, thus enhancing the
Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, helps
shed light on what Rousseau can do for mainstream
political issues, including feminism, religion in secular
society, and the behavior of the American constitutional
government. Rousseau meditated on fundamental
human issues such as the soul’s nature and the nexus
between our more primitive origins and civilization’s
achievements. Even so, the political reflections of
those meditations have not been taken seriously. Lund
endeavors to show readers that Rousseau, like his
muse Plato, is a not simply a dogmatist, and that we
ought to refrain from hastily attributing substantive
conclusions to these great authors.
—Aisha Shahbaz (A19)
hair-loss and stiff perm met / at the skeleton of a leaf
and a branch of dried coral.” The poems, several of
which first appeared under different titles in journals,
weave in and out of time and echo certain themes:
desire and loss, comfort and longing, the familiar
and the uncharted. Throughout the book there is a
subtle, universal reminder that our own shared human
experience is fleeting and meant to be embraced.
reading experience. As with the trio’s previous Plato
translations, the end result is faithful to the original
Greek vocabulary and syntax, and artfully transmits
Plato’s humor, drama, and artistry. In addition, the
trio pays careful attention when providing English
translations of the Greek rhymes, ensuring that the
text is pleasing when also read aloud. The volume is
sure to satisfy Plato scholars; however, it is friendly
to newcomers, too, offering a number of aids—an
introduction that sets the scene and introduces the
main characters; an interpretive essay; a select
bibliography of both classic and contemporary works;
and two illustrated appendices—to help readers
navigate this translation.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 29
�For & About
ALUMNI
PIRAEUS 2017
SAVE THE DATE!
Annapolis: September 8-10
Santa Fe: September 15-17
At Homecoming, new memories and
deepened friendships emerge, as the past
and present come together. Share your
love for St. John’s College by celebrating
Homecoming 2017 with the special people
in your life—family, friends, and the SJC
campus community. Registration opens on
June 2. Visit sjc.edu/homecoming to register
and view the full schedule of events.
Highlights from the weekend in both
Annapolis and Santa Fe include:
Seminars: A wide variety of seminars are
offered for all alumni. Reunite with fellow
alumni around the seminar table and
engage in great conversations.
All-College Graduate Institute 50th
Anniversary Celebration: In honor of
the 50th anniversary of the Graduate
Institute, the college community is invited
to a reception to celebrate the history of
the Graduate Institute and GI alumni.
CAST YOUR
VOTE
in the 2017 Alumni
Association Election:
May 15-June 2
This June, the SJC Alumni Association
will elect a new president, six at-large
members of the Alumni Association Board
of Directors, and one alumni-elected
member of the college’s Board of Visitors
and Governors. Alumni will also consider
an amendment to the by-laws to address
recent changes in the organization of the
Alumni Relations Office.
Pub Trivia: Form a team with your fellow
alumni to test your mettle while enjoying
some pub style fare and drinks. In addition
to bragging rights, prizes will be conferred
to the winners.
Alumni and Student Networking
Luncheon: Whether you are well into
your career or searching for a new one,
our networking luncheon has something
for everyone. Share your career guidance
with curious students and/or network with
fellow alumni over lunch. Meet our career
counselors, and learn about resources that
are available to students and alumni.
All SJC alumni are encouraged to
participate in these elections. Early voting
by fax, mail, or online ballot will open
on May 15 and continue through June 2.
The election will be held during the 2017
Alumni Leadership Forum (ALF) on June
4 at the Santa Fe campus. (See next page
for ALF details.)
Accommodations
Alumni are
encouraged to
book their accommodations early.
On-campus housing
is not available in
Annapolis or Santa
Fe, though alumni
receive special SJC
rates at the hotels
listed below. Be sure
to contact hotels directly for specific rate
information; please note that there is a
home Navy football game schedule during
Homecoming weekend in Annapolis.
Annapolis: SJC rates offered at Historic
Inns of Annapolis, O’Callaghan Hotel, and
the Westin.
Santa Fe: SJC rates offered at Sage Inn,
Hotel Santa Fe, and Drury Inn on the Plaza.
Contact
alumni@sjc.edu | 410-972-4518
At Piraeus, St. John’s College welcomes
alumni back to the seminar table. Held on
both campuses June 8-11, Piraeus’ tutorled seminars provide an opportunity to
relive the rigorous classroom experience
over the course of a leisurely weekend.
Named for the port city that served Athens,
Piraeus brings alumni from all career
paths and geographical areas back to
their educational roots. Said Thucydides
of ancient Piraeus, “From all the lands,
everything enters.” In that spirit, we invite
you to bring your voice back to the seminar
table and share in the reflection, discussion,
and community that Piraeus offers. Upcoming Piraeus offerings include:
In Annapolis:
The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, led
by Zena Hitz (A95) and Eric Salem (A77)
In Santa Fe:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by
James Joyce, led by Grant Franks (A77)
and Maggie McGuinness
Selected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, led
by Michael Wolfe (SF94)
Tuition: $655 (includes five seminars,
opening and closing receptions, breakfasts
and lunches, and Saturday night social
gathering). Recent alumni from the
classes of 2007-2016 may receive a
discounted rate of $475. On-campus
Housing: $180 for three nights, June 8, 9,
and 10. Housing available on June 7 and
11 for an additional $60 per night. Dinner
in the dining hall is included.
• Diversifying regional chapter events and attracting
new participants
• St. John’s admissions efforts, staffing college fairs,
and the Adopt-a-School program
Online and paper ballots must be
received by June 2, 2017.
Online:
http:/
/community.stjohnscollege.edu
For an online ballot, log in and select
the link under Notice of Elections and
Annual Meeting.
30 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 016
Alumni Association Mission
To strive for the continued excellence of our
college and fellow alumni by celebrating our
distinctive educational experience, connecting our community in efforts toward shared
support and benefit, and fostering a culture
of intellect, generosity, and service.
For more information and to register
online, visit http://community.stjohns
college.edu/piraeus or call 505-984-6114.
training will be provided, including sessions on:
By Mail or Fax:
Request a Paper Ballot
Contact Sarah Palacios, director of
Alumni Relations, at 505-984-6121
or sarah.palacios@sjc.edu.
• An overview of the Career Services strategic plan
for the upcoming year
HOW TO VOTE
In Person:
Alumni Leadership Forum 2017
The Association’s Annual Meeting will
be held during ALF weekend on Sunday,
June 4, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. on the
Santa Fe campus.
Two offerings in Annapolis—The Aeneid
by Virgil, led by Tom May and David
Townsend, and Persuasion by Jane Austen,
led by Eva Brann (H89) and Erica Beall
(A07)—are already fully subscribed. To
place your name on the waiting list,
please contact the Alumni Office at
alumni@sjc.edu or 505-984-6114.
This three-day program gives the college’s most active
volunteers a forum to come together, share successes and
challenges, and learn best practices from one another. It also
provides an intimate opportunity to hear from the presidents
and college leadership on the evolving strategic plan for
St. John’s, and to learn more about ways in which you can
be of significant service in these efforts. In-depth
• The capital campaign, peer-to-peer giving efforts,
and building a culture of philanthropy
In appreciation for your service to the college, the
Alumni Leadership Forum is offered at no cost.
To register and view information, visit sjc.edu/alf.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 31
�PHILANTHROPY
ALUMNI NOTES
Gifts to Inspire
1952
Ron Fielding (A70) and
Warren Spector (A81)
Seed the Ground for
a New Century of a
Flourishing St. John’s
St. John’s experienced history in the making last fall when Ron Fielding (A70) and
Warren Spector (A81) each pledged $25
million gifts to the college. The twin gifts
are each the largest individual gifts ever
donated to St. John’s. “This commitment is
our rallying cry to fellow board members,
alumni, and friends at the dawn of our
capital campaign,” Fielding said. “It’s a
signal of confidence in the college’s direction and a call to action. While $50 million
is an important foundation for the future
of St. John’s College, it is only the beginning. We are calling on fellow supporters
of the Program to come forward, and we
hope to inspire gifts both large and small.”
The gift was announced November 5 at
the college’s Board of Visitors and Governors meeting in Annapolis, where Fielding
and Spector expressed enthusiasm for the
college’s recent progress toward financial
sustainability through fiscal prudence,
strategic management of the endowment,
and attention to student revenues and philanthropy. The two said that the board and
alumni must now step forward to protect
the institution for generations to come and
acknowledged the sacrifices that have been
made by staff and tutors.
“Belt-tightening has been painful,” Spector said. “But the commitment of staff and
faculty has given supporters of the college
the confidence that we are dealing with our
challenges. Now it’s the job of the board,
alumni, and friends to take the next steps
in ensuring the integrity of the Program.
It’s an exciting moment: for me, this means
giving future generations the opportunity
to grapple with problems of great complexity, of viewing problems through the long
Pierre Grimes (A) published two
articles in 2016, “The Philosophy
of the Self” and “The Betrayal of
Philosophy: Rediscovering the
Self in Plato’s Parmenides, in
Philosophical Practice: Journal of
the APPA (American Philosophical
Practitioners Association).
1955
Helge Leeuwenburgh, husband of
Carolyn Banks Leeuwenburgh (A),
died on January 10 after a long
illness. During the 1980s, Carolyn
and Helge arranged St. John’s
tours to Europe and China.
“St. John’s is unlike any
other college in the world,
and its Program is a
precious, singular gem.”
—Santa Fe President Mark Roosevelt
lens of human history, and of understanding that seemingly new problems are
actually part of an ancient continuum. The
Program gave me comfort in addressing
challenges and finding answers where no
research was yet available. What could be
more valuable than that?”
Santa Fe President Mark Roosevelt
thanked Fielding and Spector for their
extraordinary leadership, adding, “Our
task now is to live up to their faith in the
administration and faculty—to continue
to make the hard choices that allow us to
focus on what is really important here: our
students and their success.”
True to St. John’s history and values,
Fielding’s and Spector’s support will
primarily be directed toward strengthening the Program and ensuring that all
students with a desire to attend can afford
to do so. Both gifts will be made as cash
and not estate gifts. The largest share will
be designated for the college’s endowment,
where it will provide ongoing support
32 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
Ron Fielding and Warren Spector
for academics, financial aid, and career
services. A smaller share will go towards
the Annual Fund, thereby ensuring that
donors’ gifts in the coming years will be
protected as long-term investments in the
Program.
Fielding’s and Spector’s philanthropy
has already galvanized additional support.
“Others are now working with us to match
areas of need with their giving priorities,”
Roosevelt said. “It’s so important, and so
inspiring to see people stepping forward.
St. John’s is unlike any other college in
the world, and its Program is a precious,
singular gem. It must be preserved for the
unique students who come to us, and preserved by those who came before them.”
Annapolis President Chris Nelson
(SF70) noted that the gifts acknowledge
the importance of securing the future of
the college for the sake of our country and
many generations of students to come. “St.
John’s has a long history of alumni and
friends stepping forward to safeguard the
college’s distinctive and highly regarded
program of study,” Nelson said. “These two
gifts are extraordinary in their size and in
the message they send about our future.
I dare say that Spector and Fielding have
seeded the ground for a fourth century of a
flourishing St. John’s College.”
1968
Mary (Howard) Callaway published
“Medieval Reception of the
Prophets” in The Oxford Handbook
of the Prophets, ed. Carolyn Sharp,
pp. 423-441. She still teaches a
course in ancient literature to
honors students at Fordham,
around a big table furnished with
Clore chairs. Homer and Virgil,
she says, seem more pertinent
every year.
John Farmer (A) recently closed his
family practice after 37 years. He
is currently treating patients with
heroin addiction.
Thomas G. Keens (SF) gave the
Margaret Pfrommer Memorial
Lecture on long-term mechanical
ventilation at the annual meeting
of the American College of Chest
Physicians, held on October 25 in
Los Angeles. This prestigious lectureship is given to a person anywhere in the world who has made
pioneering contributions to home
mechanical ventilation. Keens and
his interdisciplinary team have
discharged more than 600 children
on mechanical-assisted ventilation
in the home, allowing them to live
outside the hospital, attend school,
and reintegrate with their families. Keens is a professor of pediatrics, physiology, and biophysics at
the Keck School of Medicine of the
University of Southern California,
and the Division of Pediatric Pul-
Emily Langston, associate dean for the graduate program in Annapolis, Dale Mortimer (A75),
and Grant Mortimer (A17) take a tour of Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge.
monology and Sleep Medicine at
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Bart Lee (A) recently published
The Long Road from Mount Moriah
to Mount Moriah: A Meditation on
Kindness, Killing and the Voice of
God, available on Amazon.
Last summer, while at his cottage
on Lake Okoboji, Iowa, Rick
Wicks (SF) developed breathing
problems after spending time
planting prairie flowers and
grasses. He returned home to
Sweden, where he is thankful for
the excellent medical care and
universal medical insurance.
Fortunately, atrial ablation (plus
a daily cocktail of medicines) has
his heart now pumping slowly,
steadily, and strongly.
1969
Joseph Baratta (A) wrote an editorial to the Italian journal, The
Federalist Debate, entitled “The
Response of Federalists to the
Trump Election.”
1972
Melissa Kaplan Drolet (SF) writes
that she and the late Raymond
Drolet’s (SF69) daughter Megan
Josephine Drolet (SF08) is engaged
to be married to Earl Joseph
Jordan. Megan received a master’s
degree in social service from
Bryn Mawr College in 2014 and
is working as a social worker at
The People’s Emergency Center in
Philadelphia. Megan’s aunt Sharon
Kaplan Wallis (Class of 1964) and
her uncle Bart Kaplan (Class of
1965) are expected to attend the
wedding.
1976
Class co-chairs Bridget Houston
Hyde (SF), Christopher Graver (SF),
and Christian Burks (SF) report
that the Santa Fe Class of 1976
came together to celebrate their
40th reunion. Members became
reacquainted nine months earlier
by e-mail, on a private Facebook
group, and by videoconferences. Of
the 145 graduates, many reconnections were established, and more
than 30 showed up in Santa Fe for
official and unofficial, registered
and unregistered “reunioning.”
1975
Dale Mortimer (A75) welcomes St.
John’s tutors to visit the Mortimer
family in Vancouver, Wash., where
they can enjoy the magnificence of
the Pacific Northwest.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 33
�ALUMNI NOTES
1984
David Simpson (SF)
recently won an Emmy
for Editing on Life Itself,
the biopic documentary
about Roger Ebert. Other
recent editing credits
include Abacus: Too
Small to Jail, which will
be in selected theaters
in May and will air on
Frontline in September,
David Simpson (SF84) and a colleague
and Maya Angelou: And
pose with their Emmys.
Still I Rise, which premiered on the PBS series
American Masters in February. Last year saw the release
of Hard Earned, a series on getting by in America, which
Simpson co-directed and edited, and which aired on
Al Jazeera America. When he can escape from the edit room,
the father of two looks for chances to travel and be in nature.
1977
Marlene Benjamin’s (SF) new book,
The Catastrophic Self: Essays in
Philosophy, Memoir and Medical
Trauma, was published by InterDisciplinary Press in 2016.
1982
Peter Griggs’s (A) novel No Pink
Concept is now an ebook. He has
also finished a second, currently
unpublished novel, Paisley Jubilee,
about a middle-aged man with
diabetes and his life in the mental
health system. He welcomes suggestions for a publisher.
1984
Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s (SF) new
book, Geontologies: A Requiem to
Late Liberalism,was published by
Duke University Press in 2016.
Monika V. Schiavo (A) recently
joined The Potomack Company,
an auction gallery based in
Alexandria, Va., as the director
of books and manuscripts and
manager of consignor relations
and systems. She invites Johnnies
to contact her to help determine
the value of the company’s
rare books, maps, autographs,
34 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
antiques, and collectibles. Or just
call to chat. She is still married
to John Schiavo (A82) and still
the mother of Hellena (SF11) and
Anthony.
1985
Lora Keenan (SF) writes, “After
twenty years
working as a
lawyer for the
Oregon appellate courts,
I recently
launched my
own business
as a writing consultant and freelance attorney. As the ‘brief doctor,’
I offer writing improvement
seminars and coaching, appellate
advice, and complex legal drafting
in the litigation context. I live in
southwest Portland (not the cool
Portlandia part), surrounded by
fir trees. I recently visited Palm
Springs with Maya (Bajema)
Butterfield (SF), Judy Houck (SF),
Caryn Hunt (SF), Mary-Irene Kinsley
(SF), and Terri Luckett (SF). We all
still dance like glorious maniacs.”
L. Jagi Lamplighter (A) is writing a
young adult fantasy series titled
The Unexpected Enlightenment of
Rachel Griffen, which takes place
in a magic school that is based, in
part, on St. John’s. The story idea
and overarching plot were made
up by Mark Whipple (A96); John C.
Wright (A84) and Bill Burns (A94)
also helped with the project.
1988
Síofra Rucker (SF) moved six
years ago from San Diego back
to Louisville, Ky., with her two
daughters. She is the director
of Advancement at St. Francis
School, a progressive independent
PK-12 school, where she herself
attended. Rucker oversees the
school’s fundraising, marketing,
and communications. Her youngest is now in eighth grade there,
and her eldest is an alumnus.
1990
Elaine Reiss Perea (SF) was
recently named director of the
College and Career Readiness
Bureau for New Mexico’s Public
Education Department. In this
position, she oversees Career
Technical Education and Accelerated Learning programs (such
as dual credit and advanced
placement). “We have several
innovative programs to encourage student engagement and are
making a push for more student
internships. Although a tight fiscal
environment can make challenging the day-to-day work of
managing costs, the policy work is
rewarding, and I’m grateful for a
dedicated and effective staff.”
Julie Rehmeyer (SF) has a book
coming out in May, Through the
Shadowlands: A Science Writer’s
Odyssey into an Illness Science
Doesn’t Understand. It chronicles
her experience with chronic
fatigue syndrome and describes
the science, politics, and history
of poorly understood diseases.
She’s currently living in Santa
Fe in a straw bale house that she
built herself.
1993
Christopher D. Denny’s (A) new
book, A Generous Symphony:
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Literary
Revelations, was published by
Fortress Press in 2016.
Chris Dunlap (A) works in sales
and marketing for San Francisco’s Arion Press, whose catalog
includes several books on the
1996
1991
After two years of hard work
building a free app designed
to help homeowners manage
their homes and everything in
them, Shubber Ali’s (SF) startup
company Centriq won the firstever Platinum “Game Changer”
award from the National Association of Home Builders in January.
Kemmer Anderson (AGI) published
Palamedes: The Lost Muse of
Justice, a cycle of poems begun
after discovering the rhetoric
of Palamedes while reading
Phaedrus at Annapolis in 1991.
1992
Thomas Cogdell (SF) and his wife
Amy look forward to celebrating
the 500th anniversary of the
Protestant Reformation on
October 31 in Wittenberg,
Germany.
Alice Mangum Perry (SFGI) misses
her fellow Johnnies in Santa
Fe. Having returned to the East
Coast, she’s been an editor, writer,
proofreader, and “word-nerd-forhire” for books, magazines, newsletters, websites, and blogsites.
She keeps busy and appreciates
having a flexible schedule.
St. John’s Program. Arion Press
continues the tradition of fine
presswork, hand-binding, and
artful typesetting rejuvenated by
William Morris and the Arts and
Crafts movement. The company
fabricates its own metal type
through its on-site sister business,
M&H Type—the last remaining commercial type foundry
in America. Anthony Bourdain
featured Arion Press in his series
Raw Craft, available on YouTube.
1996
Stephen Conn (SF) writes, “For
Johnnies interested in working as
an extra in films, the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area is booming.
This year alone I’ve been in scenes
with Paul Rudd, Jeff Bridges,
and Jessica Chastain. Just go to
the New Mexico Actors & Extras
Forum on Facebook and look for
listings that fit your description.
It’s a fun way to make some extra
money and learn the mechanics of
big-time filmmaking.”
be offered through Western State
Colorado University’s Honors
Program, for which she also serves
as director.
2001
Congratulations to Talley Kovacs
(A01), an associate with the
Baltimore area law firm PK Law,
on being named one of the Daily
Record’s Leading Women.
Luke Mitcheson (SF) and his wife
Daphne are overjoyed to announce
the birth of their first child Henry
Michael. Little Henry arrived on
November 14, and he’s been filling
the Mitcheson home with wonder
and excitement ever since.
1999
Michael Barth (AGI) and Elizabeth Norwood (AGI10) founded
and recently launched the Bhutan Fund. Barth notes that the
Bhutan Fund is the first private equity fund for the country of
Bhutan, and the only one in the world that applies the country’s core principles of Gross National Happiness to its investment criteria and investment monitoring framework. According
to Barth, the Bhutan Fund will establish a committed pool of
capital for growth equity investments in areas that capitalize
on Bhutan’s natural, sustainable competitive advantages which
include abundant clean power resources; a well educated, English-speaking workforce; unique culture; pristine environment;
stable political climate; and firm emphasis on strengthening
the private sector. The Fund’s pipeline has more than 15 deals
covering over $200 million, with opportunities for co-investment
and debt finance. Barth and Norwood believe it has the potential to set an ethical example for other markets.
“Hello from Pittsburgh to all
Annapolis and Santa Fe former
classmates!” writes Maureen
Gallagher (SF), who is currently a
visiting assistant professor in the
English Department at Duquesne
University. “Teaching a full course
load of composition, literature,
and research literacy skills, all
while raising two young daughters Molly (4) and Jane (1) with
my husband, Laurence Ales, is
keeping me busy indeed.”
2000
Kelsey L. Bennett (SF) is the
recipient of a two-year National
Endowment for the Humanities
Enduring Questions grant. The
grant supports the development of
a new university honors course to
investigate several among many
questions she first confronted
during her time at St. John’s. The
guiding question of the course is:
What is Art For? The course will
2002
James Marshall Crotty (SFGI) is
the director of communications for
U.S. Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE).
2003
Johanna Omelia (SFGI) is delighted
to report that Come Fly With Us
Magazine is celebrating its third
anniversary this spring. The
publication is now read in 128
countries, across every ocean and
across every continent.
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 35
�ALUMNI NOTES
2005
Jared Ortiz (AGI) and Rhonda
(Franklin) Ortiz (A04) are awaiting
their fourth child in March 2017.
Jared teaches Catholic theology at Hope College in Holland,
Mich., and recently published
his first book, You Made Us for
Yourself: Creation in St. Augustine’s
Confessions (Fortress, 2016). He
is also the executive director and
co-founder of the Saint Benedict
Institute for Catholic Thought,
Culture, and Evangelization
(www.saintbenedictinstitute.org).
Rhonda writes fiction and does
freelance graphic design work.
2006
Michael Bales (SF) recently started
at the Mitre Corporation as a
senior data scientist, a nonprofit
that runs federal research centers.
He is also finishing his master’s
in government analytics at Johns
Hopkins University.
Alumni interested in
careers in data and
public service may
contact him at mike.
bales@gmail.com.
2016 was a good year
for Jacqueline KennedyDvorak (AGI). She and
her husband had a baby
in April, he got a new job
in November, and she got
a new job in December.
In January she saw great friends,
Melody (AGI07) and Everett Reed
(AGI07), and their three children.
She looks forward to seeing them
again, as well as Camille Stallings
(AGI07) in May.
Sarah Rera (A) was named to the
2016 New York Super Lawyers
Upstate list. She is an attorney,
and recently became a shareholder, with the law firm Gross
Shuman Brizdle & Gilfillan, P.C.
She is admitted to practice in New
York State and Federal Courts, as
well as before the U.S. Supreme
Court and Bankruptcy Court,
Western District of New York.
Russell Max Simon (SFGI) recently
wrote and directed his first feature
film, titled #humbled, about an
idealistic young theatre director who leads her vagabond cast
and crew through the pitfalls of
a fledgling indie theatre production. The “play within the film”
is a modern-day adaptation of
Aristophanes’s The Frogs, which
Simon read while at the Graduate
Institute in Santa Fe. He writes,
“The film explores relationships,
egos, and competing perspectives
on the true meaning of art and
mediocrity. You can get updates on
the film by going to 7kfilms.com/
humbled and signing up for the
newsletter there, or liking the 7k
Films Facebook page: facebook.
com/7kfilms.”
For the past five years, Susan
Swier (AGI) lived in Taiwan and
visited more than 80 cat cafes. Her
new book, published in Taiwan in
both Chinese and English under
2006
Caelan MacTavish Huntress (SF)
has returned to Portland, Ore.,
after living for three years in Costa Rica,
where he and his wife Johanna homeschooled their three children— two sons
and a daughter. Huntress took his wife’s
last name, noting that the Huntress Clan
ruled the Isle of Mann as a matriarchy for
300 years, and their male descendants
have had mostly daughters for five generations. The couple’s
youngest child Taos was born in Costa Rica in an unassisted
water birth. They made their living in the jungle with his
website design business, which was recently absorbed into
the consulting agency Stellar Platforms. This branding and
strategy firm works with authors, coaches, and teachers on
their digital marketing, and packages their teachings into a
curriculum that can be sold as a course on their website. He is
also active in the local Parkour community, teaching and training in the new sport that has its philosophical underpinnings
in Stoic philosophy. This connection is revealed in Ryan Holiday’s book The Obstacle Is the Way, which Huntress suggests
every Johnnie should read. You can follow his adventures at
http://caelanhuntress.com.
notes the timing with the election
was only coincidental.
the title Come in and See the Cats,
introduces 62 of them. The book
is available on www.kinokuniya.
com and is only searchable by the
Chinese title, 這裡有貓, 歡迎光臨.
Swier works as a freelance writer
and recently moved to Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia.
2007
Lucas Smith (SF) and his wife
Miriam had their first baby,
Verity Linnéa Sihn-Sze Smith,
born May 13. The provenance of
their daughter’s middle name is
from Linnaeus. In early 2017 he
immigrated to Canada, though he
36 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
Michael Wu (SF) recently completed an appointment in the
Obama administration, leading
renewable energy and energy
resilience efforts for the U.S.
Air Force. He is now starting an
energy consulting company and
beginning work on a book on the
history of energy in warfare.
2008
In August, Tammie Kahnhauser
(A) accepted a job as a software
engineer at Uber. She is currently
working on tracing tools that will
help other engineers make their
code more efficient.
Nate Okhuysen (A) has been
promoted to the rank of captain
in the U.S. Air Force. Okhuysen graduated from his Judge
Advocate Staff Officer Course in
September of 2016 and currently
serves as chief of Administrative
Investigations for the 86th Airlift
Wing’s legal office at Ramstein Air
Base, Germany. He loves the work
but misses the robust seminar
schedule of the Boston Alumni
Chapter.
children, Meir (2) and Adele, (two
months).
2014
2011
2009
2012
Kyle Lebell (SF) (pictured right) is
completing her final year of rabbinical school and will be ordained
at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic
Studies in May 2018. She and
her husband Sam, who is also
studying to be a rabbi, have two
Chloé Annick Ginsburg (SF)
writes, “When I was studying at St. John’s College never
in my wildest dreams did I think
that a Great Books Program could
ever prepare me for a Hollywood
creative life. When I moved back
to Los Angeles, I pursued accounting in a law firm, but I found that
Ryan Burnett (AGI) shares the following: “Seminar at St.
John’s College has gravity. This comes from the genius of the
writer, the skill of the tutor and the openness of the student.
What we feel is a spirit of shared urgency to get things right.
It is no surprise, then, that my new-found career in water
conservation in California reminds me of my alma mater. Both
St. John’s and my career share the need to get to the heart of
essential things. Clearly,
state-wide drought and
a set of Great Books are
different. However, what
they share is a life-giving
focus on what matters
most. That tenor guides
me every day and has
helped me focus studies,
earn certifications and
Ryan Burnett (AGI14) with his wife
gain a footing on a body
Kate and son Teddy.
of knowledge as big as
you can imagine.”
Virginia Harness (A) left her corporate gig in Los Angeles for a life in
public service as the architectural
historian for the South Carolina
State Historic Preservation Office
in April 2016. She is enjoying a
return to life with four seasons
and a traffic-free commute.
In January Brittany French
(SF) received her master’s
degree in philosophy from
Simon Fraser University
in Vancouver, Canada,
where she is also a teaching
assistant. She plans to study
medicine somewhere in the
U.S. starting this summer.
Nicholas H. Loya (A15) visited the cloisters under renovation at Canterbury
Cathedral while touring with Sidharth Shah (A). Presumably, Anselm saw a
similar scene.
life was not fulfilling enough. So
I reevaluated and discovered my
true passion: costume design. I
then enrolled in a Theatre Conservatory last year where I have had
opportunities to costume design
AFI short films and school plays.
The biggest news I have is that
I was nominated for my costume
designs by the Kennedy Center for
the Performing Arts for Waiting for
Lefty by Clifford Odets. Little did I
know that a liberal arts education
would be the perfect education to
prepare me for such a task. I was
able to analyze the script in such
detail that I think only a liberal
arts major could possibly do. With
these tools I was able to translate
the author’s intent and words into
physical embodiment through
the costumes. I have always been
interested in history, literature,
and fashion, but St. John’s honed
my interests and led me to a
rewarding profession.”
2014
Micaela MacDougall (A) thanks
everyone who donated to her fundraiser to attend the University
of St Andrews in Scotland. She
graduated in November 2016 with
a master’s in theology, imagination, and the arts. Now back in
Annapolis, she is planning her
next steps.
Do you have news to share
with The College? Send your
note, along with your name,
class year, and photo(s), to
thecollegemagazine@sjc.edu
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 37
�IN MEMORIAM
Leroy Edward Hoffberger
Office of Personnel Management,
and several conservation
organizations.
Most of Dobert’s clients
worked with him for years and
often decades. And many of
those same clients became dear
friends. He won more than 50
CINE Golden Eagle Awards as
well as numerous other video
and film recognitions. Today his
films are viewed and used in
national parks throughout the
U.S. and have become part of the
nation’s environmental legacy.
He is survived by his wife,
Claire Guimond Dobert; brother,
Peter; daughter, Sabrina; sons,
Pascal and Alexander; and
numerous grandchildren.
Stefan Sebastian Dobert
Class of 1962
October 22, 2016
Stefan Sebastian Dobert
(1938-2016), photographer,
documentary film maker, and
video producer, died peacefully
at his Maryland home. He
was 78 years old. Born in
Geneva, Switzerland, Dobert
spent his formative years in
Bethesda, Maryland. After St.
The Shining Youth/Shining Walls
mosaics at the American Visionary Art
Museum bears Hoffberger’s name.
John’s, Dobert enlisted in the
U.S. Army. While stationed
in Germany he discovered
his passion for filming and
photography. After completing
his military service, he returned
to Germany to work for Screen
Gems at Studio Hamburg.
There, he met his first wife,
Urte Petersen, the mother of his
three children.
For a decade Dobert produced
and directed more than 50
38 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
award-winning films on a
variety of subjects for the U.S.
Department of Agriculture
and for the Federal Aviation
Administration. In 1976, he
started his own film production
company, Stefan Dobert
Productions, Inc. He became
renowned in the industry for
his well-researched and scripted
nature films, educating and
informing the public about
numerous environmental issues.
Over the years, he traveled
the Americas with his second
wife and production partner
Claire, meeting, interviewing,
and filming such subjects as
the Annual Spring Waterfowl
Population Survey, the National
Wildlife Refuge Systems, the
Federal Duck Stamp Program,
all for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service. In addition, he produced
numerous stories for the U.S.
Information Agency, the U.S.
November 24, 2016
August 27, 2016
DAN MEYERS
A strong believer in helping his fellow man, Leroy
“Roy” Edward Hoffberger (1925-2016), former
member of the Board of Visitors and Governors
of St. John’s College, may be best known for his
philanthropic activities. The Baltimore lawyer and
businessman served as president and chairman
of the Hoffberger Brothers Fund (renamed the
Hoffberger Foundation in 1963 and known today
as the Hoffberger Family Philanthropies). The
foundation—one of Maryland’s largest philanthropic
funds and one of Baltimore’s greatest benefactors—
supports hospitals, health care services, Jewish
scholarships, artists and various cultural
institutions, and medical research, especially in the
areas of Alzheimer’s and aging. Hoffberger was also
one of the earliest leaders in the effort to create the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A great supporter of the arts, Hoffberger was an
avid art collector and a co-founder of the American
Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. He also
endowed the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Graduate School
of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of
Art. On the cover of his 2014 memoir Measure of a
Life, Hoffberger wrote, “What we leave behind is
far more important than how far we get ahead.” He
is survived by his wife, Paula; his two sons, Jack
and Douglas; his two stepdaughters, Athena Alban
Hoffberger and Belina Rafy; his brother, Stanley;
and three grandchildren.
Annapolis campus for 18 years.
“I first met her when I came
as a newly appointed tutor to
St. John’s College, in 1979,”
writes Tom May. “… Jan was
the soul of graciousness and
discretion, dealing routinely
with all manner of student and
faculty concerns. Her ability
to listen, her wonderful smile
and genuine laugh, and her
readiness to be helpful are all
lasting impressions I fondly
remember and cherish.” She is
survived by her husband of 64
years, Julian Easterday, Jr., her
son, Julian “Ralph” Easterday
III, and her beloved grandson,
Tyler.
Janice Easterday
August 3, 2016
Board member
After a one-year battle with
cancer, Curran G. Engel (19632016) died on Thanksgiving
Day. Soon after graduating
from St. John’s in 1986, Engel
began his career in the motion
picture industry. He worked
on hundreds of productions,
including independent and
studio films, commercials,
documentary, corporate image
films, and music videos. His
Janice “Jan” Easterday (19342016) passed away after a short
battle with lung cancer at the
Hospice of the Chesapeake
with her loving husband,
Julian, by her side. Many
from the St. John’s community
will remember Easterday
through her work as secretary
to the assistant dean on the
Curran Engel (SF86)
screen credits include The
Sculptress, Heartwood, The Net,
and James and the Giant Peach,
among others. Engel frequently
served as a guest lecturer on
film industry topics and was a
member of the faculty at The
Academy of Art University in
San Francisco, where he taught
courses in producing, production
management, and creating
demo reels. In his final months,
despite his physical pain,
he returned to St. John’s for
Homecoming in Santa Fe, where
he celebrated a 30-year reunion
with friends. He is survived by
his wife, Annalisa Chamberlain
Engel; his sons; and brother
Brandon Engel (SF91).
Thomas Rea
Class of 1951
February 7, 2016
Thomas Herald Rea’s (19292016) groundbreaking
discoveries in the field of
dermatology led to treatments
that allowed patients with
Hansen’s disease, better known
as leprosy, to live without
stigma. Rea and his University
of Southern California colleague
Robert Modlin identified the
exact role played by the immune
system in Hansen’s disease
symptoms; their research paved
the way for new treatments
that rendered the disease
non-contagious and allowed
patients to live normal lives.
Rea served as head of the USC’s
dermatology division between
1981 and 1996, and kept
working at the Hansen’s disease
clinic at Los Angeles CountyUSC Medical Center in Boyle
Heights until a few months
before he died. The clinic was
renamed for Rea in 2015.
After St. John’s, Rea attended
Oberlin College and medical
school at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. He
completed his dermatology
residency at University Hospital
in Ann Arbor. Rea worked in
the Medical Corps of the U.S.
Army in Korea and in the
dermatology department at New
York University, where he first
began treating Hansen’s disease
patients. He had an appreciation
for books, film, classical music,
and Japanese art. Rea is
survived by his wife of 51 years,
Mary; his sons, Andrew and
Steven; and four grandchildren.
Also Deceased:
Paul C. Cochran, Class of 1963
October 14, 2016
Virginia A. McConnell, AGI84
August 21, 2016
Jesse Faulkner Sherman, A06
January 27, 2015
Robert Alexander, Class of 1942
August 23, 2016
Christian “CJ” Dallett, SF88
February 23, 2017
Veronica Nicholas, Class of 1963
November 29, 2016
David F. Simpson, A97
August 28, 2016
Burton Armstrong, Class of 1943
January 4, 2017
John S. DesJardins,
Class of 1947
November 7, 2016
Jacob C. Perring, SF06
October 29, 2016
George F. Smith, Class of 1947
October 19, 2016
Devin J. Ayers, EC05
January 26, 2017
Donald A. Phillips, Class of 1955
Carol J. Dockham, SF76 August 24, 2016
Margaret J. Bair, AGI13 September 8, 2016
Paul A. Sachs, Class of 1941
September 25, 2016
Margaret Jean Mattson, AGI90
November 18, 2016
June 21, 2016
John W. Burke, A79
Michael A. Smith, A87
August 28, 2016
Mary Storm, Class of 1962
November 29, 2016
February 5, 2017
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 39
�JOHNNIE VOICES
HOMER IN CHINA
By Martha Franks (SF78)
C
hinese high school is a warrior culture. The students in my
classes in Beijing were engaged
in constant battle, which became
clear when I took them slowly
through Homer’s Iliad. The Greek society
sung by Homer is based on competition for
excellence in battle, which was rewarded by
glory, honor, and prizes. My Chinese students, fighting their way through the literal
and figurative tests of a competitive high
school, understood that down to their bones.
Everyone attending Bei Da Fu Zhong, the
high school where I taught for two years from
2012-2014, were high achievers, having fought
to excel all their lives. They spent enormous
time and money on test preparation. I disliked
their preoccupation with tests, so I never gave
them any, which mystified them. As far as they
knew, doing well on tests was the only point of
school. How could they win glory if they did not
take tests?
My argument—that a person might genuinely
be interested in learning—seemed to them a
quaint, if charming, frivolity. They could not
afford to indulge in it.
I pushed the argument anyway; it was part
of my job. Dalton Academy was geared toward
students who intended to go to the United
States for college. It was also an experimental program that tried to get away from a
deadening focus on tests, in order to encourage
creativity in students.
We plunged into both tasks on the first day
of class. Beginnings are always challenging,
and starting a discussion class was especially
difficult for these kids. After years in the classroom, their voices had only been raised when
they were sure of the answer.
“Was Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek
armies, a good king?” I asked. Silence. I wrote
the question on the whiteboard. “What do you
think? Was Agamemnon a good king?” More
silence. People looked down and fiddled with
pens. The silence became so uncomfortable
that one student, Janie, restively broke it.
“No,” she said with an angry air, as if it
made her mad that she had been driven to
speak. “He should not have take away prizes
from best warrior Achilles and humiliate him.
That is stupid. Good king isn’t stupid.”
We had started. It took time and lots of
encouragement, but discussion has an almost
physical momentum, especially among competitive people. Each expressed opinion calls forth
an equal and opposite opinion. I asked Janie a
few questions: “Why do you think Agamemnon
did such a stupid thing? What might worry him
about Achilles?”
Sam reacted with the opposite opinion to
hers: “Good king should control powerful warrior or his authority is attack. Agamemnon is
smart. Think Achilles problem.”
Anne agreed. “Achilles acting like child
weakens. Good king must be strong.”
(My students understood English very well, but
when it came to speaking it, they often ignored
the parts they found strange, unnecessary, or
confusing, such as articles, plurals, and tenses.)
Seeing Sam’s and Anne’s disagreement
as a challenge to her, Janie turned on them
combatively, saying with scorn that Agamemnon could have found a less stupid and greedy
way to control Achilles if he was afraid of him.
Sam swelled a little. Other voices came quickly
forward to soothe the waters. Chinese students
dislike disharmony in the classroom, and will
try to heal it.
In the classes that followed, we spent some
time with Achilles sitting in his tent, trying to
decide which is the best life, short but glorious or long but obscure. I asked my students,
“What do you think is the best life?”
A pause, and then someone, nearly whispering, ventured: “The best life has lots of money.”
There were suppressed giggles.
“Okay, good,” I said. “Suppose you have lots
of money. What do you do with money?”
“Buy things,” someone else said boldly, and
got a laugh.
“All right. Obviously, you don’t want money
itself, you want the things money can buy.
What things?” I wanted to know.
Lots of ideas poured out at that: “Clothes,
jewels, travel, a big house….”
“Why do you want these things?” I asked.
They thought that was a ridiculous question.
There was no why about wanting things. You
just wanted them.
Tom joked: “I want because my friends don’t
have!”
“So,” I replied, “you want your friends to envy
you, or to be impressed by you?” They looked
at me with an “of course!” expression, which
was tinged with a little surprised embarrassment—I gathered that people rarely said that
aloud. “Why do you want that?” I pressed.
“I feel proud,” Tom answered, after a moment.
“You want glory and honor, like a Greek warrior?” He agreed, relieved that we were talking
about the book again. Yes, he was like a Greek
warrior that way.
Allen jumped into the silence and announced: “I want to be rock star.”
“Why do you want that?” I asked.
He grinned, sure he had figured out the
answer: “Glory and honor!”
“We spent some time with
Achilles sitting in his tent,
trying to decide which is the
best life, short but glorious
or long but obscure.”
“Really?” I teased him back. “You don’t actually like music? It’s just a way to get money,
glory, and honor?” Allen’s music was a byword
around the campus. He played in a band every
extra moment he had. He admitted that he
loved music for its own sake.
I asked: “If you had to choose between
money and music, which would you choose?”
This question seemed to hit a sore place.
Faces turned downwards. Perhaps it named
something that many of them hid within. They
might like music, or art, or anything, but they
had obligations to their families. All of them
were only children, their family’s best hope for
wealth.
“I won’t choose,” said Allen, bravely. “I want
both.” The circle lightened, and I thought they
would applaud.
Class ended and students stood up, chattering
excitedly in Chinese. I took this as a good sign.
As the book and the semester progressed,
there were a variety of reactions to how we
were reading and talking. A few wrote the
whole thing off as an easy credit because there
were no tests and no one was forced to join the
conversation. I believe they had spent so much
of their lives looking at school as a source of
glory, honor, and prizes—separate from the
private personal places where their real interests lay—that they did not know how to treat it
otherwise.
Lots of students, though, loved what went
on in our class, even though they still thought
it a charming luxury that they could not afford
to indulge in very much. If an SAT loomed,
work for my class was likely to be the first
thing shorted. And yet the figure of Achilles
became vivid in their minds. Living in their
own warrior educational culture, they felt how
angry he was when the glory, honor, and prizes
he had worked for were taken from him. They
understood, too, why his reaction to that was
to wonder whether these things had ever been
worth his life.
Homer’s answer to that question is not obvious, but perhaps it has to do with the scene at
the end, one of the greatest moments in Western literature. King Priam of Troy comes into
the Greek camp by night, alone, to beg Achilles
to give him his son Hector’s corpse for burial.
Achilles and Priam, Greek and Trojan, victor
and vanquished, magnificent and broken, have
both lost people they loved. And they know they
will die soon. Achilles shares this mortal sorrow with the king of the enemy city. As one of
my students put it, in a lovely English sentence:
“Achilles and Priam weep together, in the dark,
in the quiet of Achilles’ tent, with the army
sleeping around them.”
My Chinese students and I concluded that
Achilles’ lasting glory was not won on the
battlefield. His greatest glory is that he grew
great enough to feel for all human loss and
sorrow, even those of his enemy. Possibly Confucius meant something like this when he put
the quality of “ren (仁),” or “humaneness,” at
the center of his answer to the question of what
is the best life. If so—and it will be the job of
people like my students, with learning in both
traditions, to decide—then the insight is neither
Eastern nor Western, but belongs to us all.
Martha Franks (second row, fourth from the left) with students from her high school in China.
40 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 41
�FIRST PERSON
ALUMNI PROFILE
VIEW FROM THE TOP
GUIDED BY INTUITION AND REASON
By Andrew Wice
By Yosef Trachtenberg (A15)
“Every rule has an exception, Mr.
Trachtenberg,” Mr. May whispered to
me as I mounted the stage to receive
my diploma. As my Freshman Language
tutor, he argued with patience and humor
against my insistence for unequivocal rules
of translation. This was my main approach
to life—everything had to be logical,
definite, and precise.
In many ways, that class set the tone
for my time at St. John’s. What began
concerning translation spread to my
ethical beliefs. I wanted there to be
definite, logical, and universal ethical
rules so I wouldn’t need to rely on my
intuitions. I didn’t understand them, so
I didn’t trust them. Many philosophers
we read attempted to provide a rigorous
ethical system, but none were convincing. I
concluded I must (for now) base my ethics
on the particulars of each situation, guided
by my intuition and reason.
Even as I was becoming disenchanted
with logical rules for life, St. John’s
was sharpening my logic. If my ideas
weren’t logically sound, they would likely
be challenged (they were often challenged
even when they were logically sound, but on
other grounds). I became skilled at spotting
flaws in arguments, and my standards for
accepting something as true increased
significantly. If anything, I took this too far.
I would find a flaw and use it to dismiss the
entire argument. But a flaw doesn’t mean
the conclusion is false or the argument
contains nothing useful, so I learned to find
value in arguments despite their flaws.
Beyond logical skills, conversations at St.
John’s (both in and out of class) improved
my ability to communicate. I learned when
to interrupt and when to listen, how to deal
with lecturing, and how to disagree without
alienating. Of course, knowing what I should
“I learned to find
value in arguments
despite their flaws.”
do doesn’t mean I always succeed at doing it.
This next change seems trivial, but may
turn out to be the longest lasting effect of
my education. Before St. John’s, I hadn’t
sung (outside the shower) for 15 years.
Freshman Chorus required me to sing, while
giving me a comforting crowd to lose myself
in. I came to love singing; I still sing our
chorus songs. In addition to the pleasure
their beauty brings me, singing these songs
recall the community I found at St John’s.
I hadn’t expected to experience a
sense of community. During high school, I
withdrew from people and learned how to
be happy alone. I expected to live the rest
of my life with only superficial connections.
At St. John’s, I met people who shared
my interests, who I could have engaging
conversations with, and who could inform
42 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
and challenge my thinking. Moreover, I
came to respect their intellectual and moral
character. For the first time, I saw potential
for friendships based not just on utility or
pleasure, but on a shared desire to figure
out how the world works, what a good life is,
and how to live it.
Not everything at St. John’s was new.
Sometimes, I found words for ideas I already
lived by. In Epictetus’s Discourses, the
statements “At first, distance yourself from
what is stronger than you” and “It is not the
things themselves that disturb people but
their judgments about those things” perfectly
described my choices during my withdrawal.
I found a name for what I had become.
Reading and discussing Stoic philosophy
also showed me the potential for moving
beyond Stoicism. While it helped me
approach the world with equanimity, I found
Stoicism’s limits. As a Stoic, maintaining my
equanimity requires keeping a part of me
isolated from people. I still want to act in a
level-headed way, but I now think it possible
to experience the strong emotions that
arise from wholehearted connection with
other people without letting them cloud my
judgment. I believe such a life is nobler than
a Stoic one, and while I’m just beginning to
explore its possibilities, I would never have
considered it before my time at St. John’s.
St. John’s enriched my life beyond
measure by helping me break through many
barriers I created for myself. It softened my
rigid worldview, led me to like people again,
and left me with a deep love of singing.
Infrared technology provides valuable data for wine growers.
Robert Morris (SF04)
Soars above the Competition
In the world of
agribusiness, the
use of commercial
drones has become
increasingly popular
among farmers
seeking aerial
imagery of their land.
Robert Morris (SF04),
CEO of San Francisco Bay-area company
TerrAvion, which produces the highest
volume of aerial imagery for agriculture in
the nation, is bucking that trend.
The company has reached the pinnacle of
the industry by using airplanes instead of
drones. By applying first principles to the
economics of the aerial imagery industry,
Morris realized that properly employed
airplanes would be far more efficient than
drones. Flying at a higher altitude, staying
in the air longer, and stringing together
multiple flight paths are accumulative
advantages which drone-based services
cannot match. “Dynamics that favor high
volume and customer density in imagery
production mean that we can keep offering
a better product for less cost per unit—just
like computer chips or network links have
been doing for decades,” Morris says. “Soon,
this will allow us to give tools to farmers for
a few bucks that were not even available to
the highest generals for billions (of dollars) a
decade ago.”
TerrAvion uses the latest innovations in
information technologies to electronically
deliver detailed maps of farmland with
overnight data analysis. That analysis can
be rapidly used to optimize irrigation, see
disease before it spreads, or maximize
the return on investment of fertilizers and
herbicides. The company allows agribusiness
to “farm more land more efficiently, more
sustainably, more profitably, and more
comfortably,” Morris says, which agricultural
companies have been quick to adopt.
After graduating from St. John’s, Morris
served as an officer in the U.S. Army, leading
a drone platoon in Afghanistan. He was
properly skeptical of the so-called “disruptive”
drone technology, and remained stoic when
drone-based aerial imagery companies took
an early lead. TerrAvion’s use of planes
was first able to gain traction among wine
growers on the California coast. “TerrAvion
started operating in vineyards because their
early adopters were especially receptive to our
service,” Morris says. “Vineyards intentionally
stress the vines to create flavor and sugar
in the grapes—this gives off a really clear
signal in the infrared to monitor from the air
and also means grape growers are farming a
valuable crop at the edge of control—making
the stress data especially valuable.”
Today, the company’s success has crested
the tipping point. The economy of scale means
that TerrAvion has been able to expand at an
exponential rate into the nation’s agricultural
heartland. “The majority of our acreage
is now east of the Rockies, mostly in corn
and soy,” Morris says. “Growers of traded
commodities are really focused on efficiency
of production and scale, so they are also
growing at the absolute limit of what plant
science allows. We actually expect Nebraska
to be our best market next year because the
irrigation practices and crop mix make it
super-receptive to what we’re doing.”
In Silicon Valley’s hyperbolic scramble for
the next paradigm shift—a concept now often
called the next “disruptive technology”—
Morris believes that innovators with a
foundation in the classics possess a deeper
insight and a broader overview. “Is the
automobile, or telephone, or internet-based
retailer more disruptive than geometry,
optics, or Christianity?” says Amariah Fuller
(SF11), one of several Johnnies working
at TerrAvion. “The type of collaborative
inquiry we undertake at St. John’s is the
best preparation for vague vagaries of the
business world. … Getting to the root of what
someone is talking about in a collaborative
way is where Johnnies shine,” Fuller says.
“The most intimidating business concepts
fall to pieces when you ask a few simple
questions.” In the coming years, Morris
expects to “continue to hire more Johnnies as
we grow, since they are so adaptable and can
work so effectively across disciplines. …We
want the ones that love action.”
THE COLL E GE | ST. J OH N’ S C OL L E G E | SPR I NG 2 017 43
�EIDOS
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE GREENFIELD LIBRARY / COURTESY OF HENRY HIGUERA
S T. J O H N ’ S F O R E V E R
FORWARD
EDGE OF
HISTORY
The year was 1959. Dwight D. Eisenhower
was our country’s president. And St. John’s
College was expanding. On May 22, Eisenhower paid a special visit to St. John’s to
dedicate three new buildings on campus: Mellon Hall, McKeldin Planetarium, and Francis
Scott Key Auditorium. Before a crowd that
included 25 descendants of Francis Scott Key,
Eisenhower delivered remarks tinged with his
trademark humor and wit—and admiration for
the Program.
“The colleges of civilization remind us that the
affairs of the human community are continuous and indivisible,” Eisenhower said in his
speech. “Your own Great Books program,
organized around the masters of thought for
thirty centuries, convincingly demonstrates
the interdependence of human activities.
President Eisenhower, left, and St. John’s
President Richard Weigle stroll past the
McKeldin Planetarium.
Today is merely the forward edge of history.
From Homer to Einstein, through politics to
philosophy and physics, the past instructs the
present, ever revealing the continuity of the
human adventure.”
After touching on the U.S.’s position in world
affairs, Eisenhower concluded with comments
on the importance of “the educated citizen”
that a St. John’s education produces. “It cannot be too often repeated that there is urgent
need for the citizen to grasp the relationship
between his own actions and attitudes and
those of the nation of which he is a participating member.”
One of Anyi Guo’s (A15) greatest gifts
as a photographer is her ability to make
an instant connection with her subjects.
Whether focusing her lens on St. John’s
students and tutors engaged in conversation,
hot air balloons drifting across a Turkish sky,
or art lovers taking in the British Museum,
Guo captures the spirit of her subject with
an artist’s eye and a click of her camera.
While a student at St. John’s, Guo’s photography skills were in high demand. Using an
actual film camera (the Olympus mju II and
Kodak Portra 400 film is her favorite combo),
she provided photos for student publications
as well as The College magazine, covering everything from Croquet to basketball
games to Freshman Chorus to lunchtime
reading groups. Guo now works for a finance
firm in London, where she has embraced
European culture and new experiences—and
continues to follow her bliss. “I’ve learned
a lot about the world since my move,” says
Guo. “I’ve learned to have a dry sense of
humor from Brits, to speak with gestures
from the three Italians that I live with, to
greet continental Europeans with cheek
kisses, and to make authentic Indian food.”
View more of Guo’s photography at anyiguo.com.
44 THE C OL L E GE | ST. JOH N ’ S C OL L E G E | S PR I N G 2 017
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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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46 pages
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The College, Spring 2017
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Volume 42, Issue 1 of the The College Magazine. Published in Spring 2017.
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The College Vol 42, Issue 1 Spring 2017
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Shook, Gregory (editor)
Venkatesh, Krishnan
Haratani, Joan
Wolf, Robert
Lund, Nelson
Stickey, Sarah
Brann, Eva
Kalkavage, Peter
Salem, Eric
Russell, George
Franks, Martha
The College
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