'What Happened to St. John鈥檚 Class of 1941?': Chapter 2
By El’ad Nichols-Kaufman (A25)
This is the second part of a three-part series examining the history of the first class of the New Program. Part I deals with the 1937-38 school year, while Part II concerns the following three years. Part III follows six graduating members of the first class after their time at St. John’s College.
The St. John’s College yearbook chronicling the 1938-39 school year is a fascinating archival document. It paints a picture of what was essentially an institution in turmoil, split down the middle between the old and New Programs and thus between campus worlds centered around fraternities and sports or intellectual life. This particular year, 1938-1939, marked a turning point in St. John’s history—and there was no going back.
During the 1937-38 academic year, the New Program was a foreign body grafted onto the wider college. By the following year, it had become a core part of its social and academic identity. Around one-third of the old program faculty had left the school, leaving fewer course options for the majority of students, while an inaugural class of New Program students created, for the first time, a shared experience of freshman year between two consecutive classes.
As the New Program continued to grow, it was the subject of much national debate, being accused of “,” according to the St. John’s yearbook, or “anti-scientific dogmatism.” On the other extreme, prominent New York City journalist and The New Republic co-founder Walter Lippmann likened the New Program to an “American Renaissance” capable of creating a new generation of thinkers who could define American democracy. This placed much weight on the success of St. John’s tutors and students, who were essentially viewed by the national press as running a test on the future of American education. The Baltimore Sun published regular updates on St. John’s College as well, and in 1940, LIFE magazine captured students in a photo essay that is today framed on the walls of Mellon Hall’s “Power Alley” office corridor in Annapolis.
For New Program Johnnies, there was not much time to dwell on their position in the national spotlight; the Program’s heavy workload kept them busy. Like today’s contemporary sophomores, the Class of 1941 wrestled with Apollonius and Ptolemy demonstrations, but outside of math, their curriculum was fairly different. They learned Latin and translated Augustine’s Confessions, and in science lab, they meandered through various disciplines and recreated experiments. The seminar workload was high; students began the academic year reading the entirety of the Bible’s Genesis and Exodus for one seminar, and they often read complete books, or two plays, for others. This created more space for additional readings, with Icelandic sagas and French medieval epic The Song of Roland featuring alongside works by Roman orator Cicero and Italian theologian Bonaventure.
Lectures, then still mandatory for students and referred to as “courses,” continued to draw notable speakers, with that school year marking the “Adlerian invasion,” or the beginning of 40 years of lectures by University of Chicago professor and Great Books champion Mortimer J. Adler. In the 1938-39 academic year, Adler would come to St. John’s once a month and deliver two talks. Most were on Aristotle, and all were very long. A few months into said “invasion,” undergraduate attendees set up alarm clocks to ring at the designated end of the lecture period. Adler waited until they finished ringing and then went on to continue his lecture for over an hour. This was the beginning of the fabled Adler pranks, where students attempted increasingly creative ways of disrupting his lectures and continually failed at said efforts.
The college’s social life also underwent its greatest upheaval during this year. Fraternities, which emerged at St. John’s in the early 1900s, had fully supplanted debating societies as the school’s wellspring of community by the 1920s. The New Program leadership had grave concerns with this: not only were fraternities a distraction to academic life, but they also generated divisions in the student body by removing the common experience of dorm life while contributing greatly to hazing problems on campus. Likewise, the college subsidized fraternities by allowing them to use campus buildings for housing—which, for perpetually cash-strapped St. John’s College, provided another good reason to close said organizations.
In November 1938, Stringfellow Barr announced in The Collegian newspaper that fraternities would lose control of their domains, as they would become dorms under a new housing scheme. While fraternities attempted to continue their existence for a period without designated buildings, they soon fell apart; a fraternity, after all, is not much without a place to party and live together. As an alternative, the administration introduced in Fall 1938 a student union in the basement of McDowell Hall, centered around a new coffee shop. This coffee shop quickly became a true hub of campus social life for both students and faculty, forming a very different society than the fraternities had.
The week after announcing the end of fraternity houses, Barr announced the end of the intercollegiate sports programs, which at the time were still going strong. He argued that they distracted from the college’s academic mission and often overshadowed academics. St. John’s College also had an intramural sports program, and in ending intercollegiate competition, Barr called for the expansion of intramurals. This decision impacted old and New Program students alike; three out of six New Program graduates in 1941 were on intercollegiate sports teams before this decision. However, amongst old program students, this was seen as yet another way the administration had trampled over their activities and programs and ignored their needs. Inter-program relations within the Class of 1941 seem to have been at their lowest point at this time.
Campus social life suffered during these years. Most clubs struggled to survive thanks to a decrease in enrollment that came from students leaving, combined with changing tastes. Both The Collegian newspaper and the St. John’s College yearbook faced declining interest, and many campus musical groups faded into oblivion. However, the King William’s Players theater troupe flourished under the leadership of New Program student Paul Ringgold Comegys, the first New Program student to take on a leadership position in a campus club, with the club performing The Tempest outdoors as well as T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.
The following academic year, 1939-40, would see the Class of 1941’s junior year, and thus their entry into some of the most intensive work in the Program as well as their dominance over campus social life. This was the last year to have a class present of entirely old program students, and with their reduced numbers, the New Program truly ruled the college.
Junior year’s academics began with French in the language tutorial and featured Newton and Leibniz in math. Scientists like Lavoisier found their place in junior laboratory instead of freshman lab. Seminar covered a broad range of authors, from Shakespeare to 19th-century English novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock. Throughout their four years, students would have an oral exam on a seminar work at the end of each term, but at the time, there were three terms instead of two, and so students would go through three oral examinations. The requirements for writing an annual essay and the tradition of don rags have gone relatively unchanged, although it appears that upperclassmen still had don rags during this time, with no potential for conferences. This year also saw the proliferation of tutor translations of texts vital to the first two years of the Program. While the Class of 1941 did not directly benefit from this output, the first translations of certain texts by Apollonius and Ptolemy proved vital for incoming generations of Johnnies.
On the extracurricular front, student Charles Vayne took over the yearbook, and Vernon Padgett assumed editorship of The Collegian, serving for far more than the usual 10 issues that editors traditionally took on due to a lack of any clear successor. Both were New Program members of the Class of 1941, and thus the Program began to shape discourse on the character of the campus and the impact that students left behind.
Some extracurricular activities suffered during this time; the Glee Club dissolved after decades of activity, and music-related clubs in general went out of existence. So tutor Herbert Schwartz set out to revive music on campus, and besides organizing a successful concert series, he coached a group of students in choral singing in an attempt to build a musical community. The King Williams Players seems to have ebbed in strength and numbers as well, despite hosting productions of Molière’s Tartuffe and Ayn Rand’s 1934 Broadway play Night of January 16th. Campus parties also reached a nadir; gone were the “hops” of the early 1930s. Campus academic clubs, however—which included groups dedicated to science, law & public policy, and theology—flourished, hosting seminars and bringing in speakers to expand on Program topics.
Intramural sports proved to be a wild success and appear to have drawn the fractured Class of 1941 together. After the animosity of previous years, bitterness still lingered over the end of intercollegiate sports and fraternities, exacerbated due to the lack of overlap between old and New Program social circles. The intramural program brought students together, playing with and against each other, and a new social space was created that healed some wounds. Teams were organized by dorm, meaning that they were largely composed of students in the same year, leading to closer connections between classmates. Intramural blazers were already introduced at this early date, although they were for winners of games, with no system of blazer points. (Task for a more adept historian: Barr’s portrait in the Great Hall appears to me to be wearing an intramural blazer. I could not find anything to confirm he had one, but that hardly is any evidence! I would love to hear from anyone who could figure this out.)
A good picture of campus life that year can be found in the yearbook’s description of the daily cycle in the coffee shop’s so-called Tiffin Room, where food was served:
“During the course of a day the spirit of the place changes in remarkable fashion. In the morning one finds tutors seated at the little tables nervously cramming coffee and knowledge in preparation for the imminent tutorial. At noon, one finds the tutors, in an easy and jocular mood, eating their lunches; also members of the business staff. In the afternoon one finds lab students desperately drinking coffee with the hope that the rest of the afternoon will perhaps not be quite as blank. Every seminar night at about 10:30 the Tiffin Room is the scene of great excitement and feverishly dialectic. One finds students equipped with coffee and questions swarming around tutors at tables in order to get the lowdown on problems unsolved or perversely solved in the seminars. The ‘real dope’ is the center of attention and the leading question in these coffee conversations is for example, ‘Come now, Mr. Subtle, what do you really think about this angel business? &谤蝉辩耻辞;鈥嬧赌嬧赌嬧赌嬧赌�Then too there are earnest discussions among the students themselves about the essential nature of everything. In the Tiffin Room on other nights, one finds the diligent student starting a java jag in order to survive another ten pages of an undoubtedly great, but somehow soporific, book.”
At the end of junior year, students underwent the first of multiple tests to come: they had to pass enablement. This consisted of passing four written exams: one in language, which tested reading knowledge of two of the three languages students had studied up to that point; one in math examining students’ abilities in geometry, conics, trigonometry, analytic geometry, and differential calculus; two in laboratory, with one testing students’ ability to use laboratory instruments and one in scientific theory; as well as one oral exam, all provided by the college’s Instruction Committee. These exams, which covered skills acquired in tutorials, showed qualifications for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and opened the door to senior year and its final challenge: the senior thesis. On the basis of these examinations, the Instruction Committee would determine whether to let a student complete their degree, allow them to return to the college for a fourth year without receiving a degree, or expel them.
The senior year saw an even further diminished class whose members stepped back from the leadership roles they held in junior year to focus on their futures, as many senior classes have since. Academically, they remained busy with German tutorials; non-Euclidean geometry (but no Einstein); and a blend of biology, chemistry, and physics in lab. In seminar, the reading list was much heavier on the literature side, with Ibsen, Thackeray, Balzac, and Dickens all making the cut, and lighter on philosophy, as it lacked both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Much of the senior scholars’ efforts were also dedicated to their theses, which were to be the culmination of all four years of work—not “a piece of specialized work or a contribution to knowledge.” Students were not able to graduate until completion of the essay but were able to continue their studies until after the fourth year, with one New Program student, Paul Comegys, continuing his studies for a fifth year. Even at this early time, however, written essays were secondary to the St. John’s College Program; a well-known statement that had evidently grown old by 1941, was, according to the yearbook, “As we have all heard by now … this is a speaking, not a writing campus.”
A notable academic change this year was the integration of the few remaining old program students into New Program classes. The College decided it would be better for intra-class relations to unify experiences, and beneficial to old program students to experience a more liberal education. Besides, with the resignation of most of the old program faculty, it was becoming increasingly difficult to provide the type of elective system demanded by the old program. This, together with full integration of student life after the final dissolution of fraternities, meant that for the first time, there were not two different classes of 1941 in the old and New Programs but just one unified class.
Student life continued to dwindle this year in some respects, but with a newly reformatted and reinvigorated Collegian, a thriving King William Players troupe, and a bustling intramural sports schedule, students were left with plenty to do. Furthermore, a support system provided by the student-run student employment office played a key role in ensuring that students found ways to earn tuition money while at the college. The future of the above elements of student life was still uncertain, however, with the yearbook noting the potential for all future club and activity leaders to be drafted as World War II loomed over the horizon.
Indeed, discussion about political circumstances in Europe dominated much discussion at St. John’s, with conversations about the rise of fascism and the progress of war seen as vital to an institution dedicated to helping develop good citizens dedicated to liberal thought. Barr, in a report to the board shortly after the first class graduated, reflected that as the political world is inseparably intertwined with our daily lives, a vital responsibility for liberal education is to ensure freedom. Writing about the Bill of Rights, with the newly graduated class in mind, Barr stated: “Nowhere does it, can it, or should it, tell us either the list of things we ought to do or how to do them. That, in the opinion of our ancestors, was the business of liberal education. That, in their opinion, was an arduous process; for it is harder to develop in men their native powers of self-control, their native powers of thinking through, their native powers to follow up with courageous and just action than it is to tug and drive them with club and carrot. Tyrants forbid citizens to do their duty as free men. Free government permits them to do it. Liberal education enables them to do it.”
To get the best sense of how this class saw their growth over the four years at St. John’s, and what they saw in their future, I will simply present their own words, from the 1941 yearbook:
“We have gained at least beginners’ skill in the intricate and difficult art of dialectic. In fact this might very well be presented as the first of three fundamental goods we have derived from our studies. To be a good citizen and an intelligent man nothing is more important than the ability to locate a problem, reduce it to its parts and make a rational choice among the possible alternatives according to the real values involved. This is the definition of prudence, a virtue which we certainly don’t yet possess since it is based on experience as much as on understanding. Even though we don’t have the experience we do have a grasp of the principles that will make the acquisition of that experience a more vital and intelligible thing than it would be without them.
The second good might be described as the discovery of the order and unity of the arts and sciences. The relations that obtain between the demonstrative and natural sciences, between them and metaphysics and theology, and the incidence of the liberal arts on the fine arts and the useful arts—the study of these matters has given us an order and purpose in our own thinking that will be both useful and indispensable when we begin to participate actively in the chaotic and confused life that characterizes the world we live in today.
Finally, from the second good follows the third: the realization of the vastness and complexity of human thought. This feeling confirms in us the truth of the ancient Socratic thesis that the greatest wisdom is to know that one doesn’t know. We are young; we have just begun to think and live. There is much to think about—much to do.”
This article first appeared in The Gadfly, St. John’s College’s student newspaper. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.