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Higher Education: The Case of St. John's College

In the 1930s, tiny St. John's College was an institution on the ropes. Founded way back in 1696—only Harvard and William and Mary are older—by the middle of the Great Depression the College saw its enrollment declining, its small endowment rapidly disappearing, and its ancient physical plant crumbling. The College certainly would have disappeared altogether had not a group of radical educators, led by Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr, arrived at St. John's and instituted an entirely new educational program. This program eliminated faculty departments, instituted an all-required curriculum heavy on math and science, built its courses around the classic works of Western civilization, and taught its students in seminars, not lecture halls.

The intellectual seriousness of the St. John's approach landed like a mortar round in the increasingly feeble American university world. The new program, launched in 1937, very quickly challenged other colleges and universities to examine what they were about. Though few institutions were likely to institute as rigorous a program of liberal education as St. John's, the College nonetheless established itself as the conscience of American higher education. Other institutions measured themselves against St. John's, almost always to their acute embarrassment.

But powerful and important as the idea of St. John's was, the College had a serious problem. Alumni of the “old” St. John's had little interest ...