St. John's Revival

President Robert Maynard Hutchins of big University of Chicago last week became a member of the Board of Visitors & Governors of little St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. That unconventional gesture was President Hutchins' way of showing that he is a good loser. For St. John's had just reached to take from under his nose, in the persons of President-elect Stringfellow Barr and Dean-elect Scott Buchanan, two educators whom Chicago drafted last year from the University of Virginia to help Educator Hutchins with his projected revival of the traditional liberal arts college course. Now Educator Hutchins was willing to help Educators Barr and Buchanan with their projected revival of a 241-year-old liberal arts college whose fortunes had fallen to a singularly low ebb.

Wrote St. John's new Board Member Hutchins to Board Chairman Amos F. Hutchins (no kin): "I am convinced that the plans they have in mind will make St. John's an important centre of liberal education in the U. S." No such centre today, St. John's is a small (enrollment: 250), State-subsidized school struggling unimpressively in the shadow of the Naval Academy. Its long educational decline was climaxed under the presidency of one-time (1930-33) U. S. Prohibition Administrator Amos Walter Wright Woodcock, who resigned two months ago after a squabble with the Board of Governors. Under the reign of President Woodcock, St. John's was removed from the accredited list of the Middle States Association of Colleges for graduating in 1935 a student who had failed to pass his final examinations. Writing this year in the Baltimore Sun on the history of the University of Maryland, of which St. John's was a part from 1907 to 1920, tart Tax payer Henry Louis Mencken thought the most impressive fact about St. John's was that it "receives $67,000 a year from the State, and every student on its roll costs the taxpayer $249."

To Stringfellow Barr. a stocky, redheaded, well-dressed intellectual who was long one of the University of Virginia's most popular lecturers but is best known as editor of the Virginia Quarterly, St. John's should prove a stimulating challenge. By last week President-elect Barr had rounded up four bright young faculty-men from Chicago and one from Oxford, where he once studied as a Rhodes Scholar. The Barr-Hutchins liberal arts ideal Educator Hutchins described before sailing for a European vacation last week: "St. John's is an excellent place to try out the idea of educating people to live instead of to earn a living. There will be emphasis on the classics -- not on the languages, but on great books. We want to get away from present liberal arts courses, which are dreary because they are just a mass of history and social science and badly taught language and literature. . . .

"All schools are under terrific pressure from the community to create uniform systems. The trouble with most of them is that they are overwhelmed by the professional and vocational interests of their students . . . and we don't get either good practitioners or well-educated people. The professors, feeling their jobs are undignified, are more interested in research work of their own."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.