How St. John’s College is Cutting Tuition by One-Third

It’s the kind of thing that could only happen at St. John’s. The school’s unique curriculum encourages institutional innovations unimaginable elsewhere.

Although St. John’s is the third oldest college in the United States (founded in 1696), the curriculum for which it is best known wasn’t launched until 1937. Struggling to get through the Depression, the college’s board of visitors and governors asked Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr, veterans of newly created Great Books courses at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, for help reorganizing the college. The new program Buchanan and Barr proposed required every student to take the same set of classes and made every course a great books course. The college survived, eventually opening a second campus just outside Santa Fe in 1964.

“The Program,” as it is called, continues all but unchanged to this day. Every student takes a seminar, science lab, math tutorial, language tutorial, and music class. Each course relies on a reading list of great works, and professors (or “tutors,” as they’re known at St. John’s, with the understanding that the real teachers are the authors of the books) teach every subject.

This extends beyond the humanities; science and mathematics classes at St. John’s ask students to replicate many experiments and calculations contained in the texts. Freshmen science students might sketch magnolias and sophomore math students parse Ptolemy’s calculations of planetary motion. The purpose? Cultivating close attention. As Annapolis campus president Panayiotis Kanelos says, “Forcing students to slow down and to look, or to listen, or to pay attention to things that are sometimes micro-details” applies across every discipline at St John’s and is “one of the things that are top priorities of the college.”

As Bryan Luther, who came to St. John’s in 2015 from Concordia, where he taught nuclear physics and chaired the physics department, observes, “The science and math curriculum at St. John’s is quite rigorous.”

Intense focus on the books leaves little room for discussions of context. One alumnus told me a story (likely apocryphal, he admitted) about former St. John’s dean Jacob Klein, who is said to have remarked, “If my students graduate thinking Dante wrote in Greek, I will have done my job.”

Historical and biographical background information about the texts and their authors might distract from the ideas and conversations they contain, the argument goes. Kanelos acknowledges that context can be important—“we live in context,” he says—but at St. John’s, “We really try to remove the experience from thinking about it as contextualized in particular historical moments or cultures. So even though we read chronologically, we’re really reading author-to-author, idea-to-idea.”

But of course the curriculum too “lives in context”—a context that it permeates in almost every way on campus. Intramural sports, student publications, and clubs all exist at St. John’s, but the majority of students’ social lives are bound up with the great books they read. As a tour guide who works with the admissions office told me, “The only students who struggle here socially are the ones who don’t do the work.” In the seminar-style classes at St. John’s, students quickly notice who has bought in to the St. John’s experience and who hasn’t. One alumnus reminisces about the kinds of parties he regularly attended while a student at St. John’s: “On Saturday nights we used to get together. . . . We would drink wine and try to translate Xenophon until 2, 3 a.m.”

For good or for ill, “Johnnies,” as students refer to themselves, aren’t subject to some of the habits that define others in their age cohort. Kanelos says that when he walked from his office to the student coffee shop one day, he counted 37 students, most of whom were either reading or discussing that day’s reading; only one was looking at a phone.

Another contemporary student habit conspicuously missing at St. John’s? Protest. “There are no hostile activist groups at SJC of any stripe,” says one recent graduate, explaining that the small community, the rigorous curriculum, and the ability to channel disagreement in seminar discussions left little room for political discontent. “I never saw a protest of any kind at SJC.”

Also conspicuously absent at St. John’s—and one reason it can afford to be nimble about tuition costs—is a monstrous bureaucracy. Whereas other institutions of higher learning support department-specific administrations, development offices, student life offices, multicultural affairs offices, and armies of provosts and deans, St. John’s has fewer than a dozen administrators across both of its campuses.

“We do not even speak of having an administration as such, and a number of so-called administrators actually have faculty designation,” says Robert Goldberg, a tutor at St. John’s. Luther makes a similar observation: “St. John’s has much more faculty and administration collaboration than anywhere else I have worked.” “I wear about five different hats around here,” says Joe MacFarland, dean of academic affairs and a tutor at the Annapolis campus, before launching into an explanation of how the Greeks understood mathematics.

Though administration and teaching blend at St. John’s, it’s clear that the latter is the priority. As a result, faculty members have a uniquely important role on campus, as Goldberg explains: “Governance of the program and curriculum itself is strictly in the hands of the tutors.”

The curriculum has a more complicated effect on the college’s finances. Its near-exclusive reliance on seminar classes means that the college can’t take advantage of the economies of scale that come with corralling students into regular lecture courses. The seminar structure also forces St. John’s to maintain a low student-to-faculty ratio, which requires a relatively high number of full-time faculty, and unlike most colleges and universities, St. John’s refuses to hire adjuncts to ease the teaching load.

This all adds up to a per-student cost to the college of about $60,000 per year—which makes the recent announcement about tuition all the more remarkable. Starting in 2019, the college is committing to having students each pay no more than 60 percent of their own costs, with the college making up the difference through fundraising and alumni donations. The college’s newly announced “Freeing Minds” campaign has already raised $183 million.

But the school’s recent history has also been somewhat turbulent. When Kanelos’s predecessor, Christopher Nelson, who led the Annapolis campus for over 25 years, announced his retirement, the board considered significantly restructuring the college. One proposal involved merging the leadership of the two campuses under Mark Roosevelt, president of the Santa Fe campus, which prompted several commentators, including Roger Kimball in Real Clear Politics, to express doubts about Roosevelt’s commitment to The Program.

Roosevelt also angered some Johnnie alumni when he appeared on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight program. “There was “a huge backlash against [Roosevelt] among alums and students,” a former student tells me. “Tears were shed, donations were canceled.”

But a 2017 letter from the college’s board of directors to alumni was optimistic. “We are well positioned to survive the convulsions in higher education,” the board wrote, “but we will not do so by crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. We will thrive by questioning the status quo everywhere we see it.”

For his part, Kanelos remains confident that alumni interest and vigorous fundraising efforts will carry the college to its goal and secure the future of this unique institution. If the students I talked to are any indication, Kanelos’s confidence is justified.

St. John’s is “the last real education in America,” one alumnus tells me, adding, “No one is doing [education] as deeply and as truly as St. John’s.” There’s an enduring bond Johnnies share that keeps them interested in the college’s well-being even after they graduate. “You don’t feel as if you can deeply communicate with anybody who doesn’t have that same foundation,” he says. “I think most people love St. John’s as much as I do.”