Give Sample Performance

For our benefit the group staged an impromptu seminar. The onces scheduled for that evening had been canceled because Harvard's Heinrich Bruening, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Government was giving one of the weekly lectures in the stately Colonial ballroom of the college's main building.

They joked about our request to make them perform like trained animals, and said they were thinking of writing a play to present the seminar to curious visitors without any trouble to themselves. An informal discussion of Plato's Republic did start, however, with Neal putting in the occasional oar of the "specialist" in Government.

Unpedantic In Practice

Perhaps it is characteristic that one of them applied Aristotle's rules for tragedy to his criticism of "The Grapes of Wrath'. If may have been a little farfetched to say that Steinbeck's book did not fit the mold because it had neither the required beginning, middle, or end but it did not sound pedantic when he said it.

We were told that the most discussed topic of current events was Clarence K. Streft's "Union Now", a proposal that the democracies of Europe join in a federation.

President Barr Describes Ideal

Here is President Stringfellow Barr's statement of what the St. John's graduate should be; "He will be able to think clearly and imaginatively, to read even difficult material with understanding and delight, to write well and to the purpose. For four years he will have consorted with great minds and shared their problems with growing understanding. He will be able to distinguish sharply between what he knows and what is merely his opinion. From his constant association with the first-rate, he will have acquired a distaste for the intellectually cheap and tawdry; but he will have learned to discover meaning in things that most people write off as vulgar. He will get genuine pleasure from using his mind on difficult problems. He is likely to be humorous: he will certainly not be literal-minded . . . He will be eminently practical, not because he "took" practical courses in college, but because he will have acquired the rare intellectual capacity to distinguish means from ends. He will have learned to locate the problem, resolve it into its parts, and find a relevant solution. He will, in short, be resourceful."

Although Chicago's President Robert M. Hutchins is chairman of St. John's Board of Visitors and Governors, St. John's is not his creature to do with as he wishes. It was pointed out to us that there is less of Hutchins' Aristotelian-Thomist bias than he would probably like to have in the curriculum, and that he probably disapproved of the laboratory repetition of scientific experiments from Eucltd to Mendel. The 25 teachers at St. John's who guide the destinies of 125 students (half the college's capacity) have their own ideas.

Favor Proselyting

One odd fact about this aggressive little college is that it openly boasts athletic scholarships. This follows from the abolition of intercollegiate competition last year and the attempt to set up a vigorous intra-mural system. Trained athletes are necessary to this plan, and St. John's doesn't see why they can't be educated too, now that the taint of big-time sport is removed.

A defect in imagination was one of the first faults the St. John's planners noticed in the students, and to correct it they have encouraged dramatics music, and the reading of poetry. They feel this should supplement the "sharp and orderly thinking" provided by their disciplines.

One argument advanced by the died-in-the-wool elective systematizers to combat attempts to restore a content to liberal education, namely that some people are constitutionally unable to study sciences, seems to be refuted by the experience of St. John's. The students were surprised that we thought some might have been caught on this snag of their all-required curriculum, and blamed "dead" text-books and teaching methods for it.

Faculty and students at St. John's are excited by their work and by the revival of the debt-ridden little college that almost died. They sharply reject the adjective "experimental" as applied to them, and consider the New Program as "the re-establishment of the original college with its original function of intellectual freedom and discipline."