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 in the new program—as far as they were concerned, St. John's was now a completely different place. And alumni of the “new” St. John's were few, young, and generally impecunious. In fact, when a new college is started, it takes roughly half a century for its alumni base to mature to the point where the college can count on support from that quarter. How was St. John's to bridge that 50-year gap?

The answer, of course, was creative capital; in this case largely in the person of Paul Mellon. Mellon had matriculated at St. John's after having already graduated from college, starting over as a freshman “to get the education I should have gotten at Yale.” His new education was interrupted by World War II, but Mellon never lost interest in St. John's—or, more precisely, in the College's vision of what a liberal education could be. For three decades Mellon's financial support allowed the College to survive, and in several cases saved it from almost certain ruin.¹⁷ And when Mellon finally handed the reins to younger patrons of the College—led by people like Stewart H. Greenfield¹⁸—the job of these younger supporters was not to save the College but to help it to flourish.

The ideas behind St. John's were not created by Mellon, Greenfield, and the other patrons of the College, nor did they do the hard work of teaching and running the College. And yet, the idea that is St. John's—the idea that a serious liberal education can and should be offered to American young people—survived and flourished only because creative capital was available to support it.