August 12, 2025 | By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI27)

The St. John’s College Graduate Institute has come a long way since its 1967 inception in Santa Fe as a teacher’s institute. Now replete with three graduate degrees across two college campuses, it continues to grow in leaps and bounds, with increasing enrollment, a low-residency option allowing students to partake in seminar from wherever they are in the world, and new segments under discussion for the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts degree.

Overseeing these developments in Annapolis is tutor Brendan Boyle, now entering his third year as Associate Dean for Graduate Programs. Between advocating for the liberal arts and preparing to lead a math and natural science graduate seminar this fall, it’s hard to imagine him having the bandwidth for much else—that is, until he inquires if you’d be interested in attending his weekly campus reading group.

Boyle joined the faculty in 2013. On paper, he seems like a natural product of the University of Chicago-to-St. John’s-College pipeline. The two schools share intellectual DNA thanks to a mutual Great Books heritage, and many a Johnnie educator—Boyle included—spent formative years in Hyde Park completing a PhD in the classics, philosophy, or through the university’s interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought.

Yet Boyle, who majored in classics as a Princeton undergrad before pursuing a master’s degree at Cambridge and his doctorate at the University of Chicago, recalls a less straightforward journey to Annapolis than his CV might imply. Rather than knowing right off the bat that St. John’s was the place for him, Boyle viewed himself as a misfit in academia who, after a period of wandering, finally found his home. A fitting narrative for a classics scholar, thanks to mythological figures like Odysseus and Aeneas, although not an easy one for a college educator who describes himself as more cut out for a classroom than a research silo.

Boyle, whose dissertation at the University of Chicago explored politics, ethics, and rhetoric in the Athenian courtroom, cut his teeth as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His career arc could have concluded there, but the complicating force behind most good plots—character—soon came into play.

“I just was no good at being a research professor,” Boyle recalls. “My intellectual temperament was not designed for that. So, I left that job in 2012, and I wanted to try to find a place that was compatible with my temperament, which is both voracious and wide-ranging, and maybe a bit impatient. St. John’s is one of the few—and maybe the only—places where such a person like me cannot only find a place but is positively welcomed.”

At St. John’s, Boyle settled into his new role at the seminar table, albeit with some growing pains as he adjusted to tutor life. (Johnnie tutors famously do not “profess.”) “I had a lot to learn about the ways of the St. John’s classroom,” Boyle recalls. “I do think of myself as a natural teacher, but I recognize now ways in which those gifts were somewhat overdeveloped and occupied too much space in the rooms I was teaching in. I had to learn other virtues, like restraint and listening, and I only learned those by coming to St. John’s.”

Boyle also found himself once more in the student’s seat while making his way through the famously expansive St. John’s Program. The undergraduate curriculum kicks off well within his wheelhouse, with first-year students reading Homer and other texts from antiquity, but “mathematics tutorials have given me a glimpse of a landscape of human knowledge that I had no awareness of before coming here,” Boyle reflects, “and it’s so wide, and so beautiful. I almost shudder in horror now to think that I could have gone my whole life never having had a mathematical education like the one that the college has given me. When one finds one’s way into some part of the Program, it opens up an enormously wide vista.”

When Boyle isn’t exploring new vistas in the Program, he’s attempting to keep on top of his nightstand’s ever-growing stack of non-Program books. That’s where the Associate Dean’s on-campus reading group comes in. Right now, the group is wrapping up Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher by Gregory Vlastos; after that, Boyle recently teased in one of his regular Graduate Institute email updates, “I have a big plan for the coming year’s reading, all in anticipation of a big lecture in the spring. Is everyone ready for several thousand pages on Byzantium?”

Another of Boyle’s big plans involves a potential new Graduate Institute segment. Graduate students in the MALA currently can choose from segments on literature, math and science, philosophy and theology, politics and society, and history. In Santa Fe, discussion is underway about a potential arts segment, and in Annapolis, Boyle has been developing the curricula for one focused on technology and computation, which he continues to refine with the contributions of colleagues. It’s an area Boyle has already explored through his Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series, which this past year featured the theme “Liberal Education in the Age of the LLM” and, in 2024, “The Phenomena of Modern Life and the Future of Liberal Education.”

“I think the question of what distinguishes modern technology from technology in general would be a fine one to structure a tutorial or seminar around,” Boyle says. “This emerges organically from some of the seminar readings that we do already in the undergraduate Program–Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, and so many others are deeply perplexed by and interested in the place of technology in human life. I’m also really interested in the relationship between computation and the spontaneity of human thought, which is itself a question very much alive in the undergraduate program readings. Questions of that nature are ones I would try to tackle in a technology segment.”

As the Graduate Institute expands in scope, it’s also expanding in numbers after recently experiencing record student enrollment (both low-residency and in-person) across three consecutive semesters. Boyle chalks up this rise in part to St. John’s unique community, one that unites inquiring minds in a time of increased isolation and fragmentation.

“Grounding a community in something as rich and enduring as the Program’s books is a wonderful way to do it,” Boyle says. “And I think the community that we have here, especially around the Graduate Institute, is testament to that.”

So, too, is Boyle’s own experience at St. John’s, which he says is “probably the only place I could imagine myself flourishing intellectually and professionally,” he says. “I do think of it as a sanctuary or refuge for those of a certain intellectual temperament.”