The St. John’s College yearbook chronicling the 1938-39 school year is a fascinating archival document. It paints a picture of what is essentially a college in turmoil, split halfway down the middle between the old and New Programs and thus between social worlds centered around fraternities and sports or academic life. This particular year, 1938-1939, marked a turning point in the history of the college—and there was no going back.

During the 1937-38 academic year, the New Program had been a foreign body grafted onto the wider college. By the following year, it had become the core part of its social and academic identity. Around one-third of the old program faculty had left, leaving fewer course options for the majority of students, while an inaugural class of New Program students created, for the first time, a shared experience of freshman year between two classes.

As the New Program continued to grow, it was the subject of much national debate, being accused of “neo-Thomism,” according to the yearbook, or “anti-scientific dogmatism,” according to Smith, or on the other extreme being proclaimed as the heart of an “American Renaissance,” by Walter Lippman, being raised as a way to create a new generation of thinkers who could define American democracy. This put much weight on the success of the tutors and students who essentially were seen, in national press, to be running a test on the future of American education. The Baltimore Sun published regular updates on the College, and in 1940, Life Magazine published a feature on the College, pages of which can be found on the walls in “Power Alley.”

For students in the New Program, however, there was not much time to focus on this national spotlight, the heavy workload of the program kept them busy. Like our contemporary Sophomores, the class of 1941 wrestled with Apollonius and Ptolemy demonstrations, but outside of math their curriculum was fairly different. In language, they learned Latin and translated the Confessions in language, and in the laboratory, they apparently still meandered through various subjects, and mostly recreated previous experiments. The seminar workload was very high; they started the year reading the entirety of Genesis and Exodus for one seminar, and would often read complete books, or two plays, for one seminar. This created more space for readings, with Icelandic sagas and the Song of Roland featuring alongside Cicero and Bonaventura. Lectures, then still mandatory for students, and referred to as courses, continued to draw notable speakers, with the year marking the “Adlerian invasion,” the start of forty years of lectures by Mortimer Adler. In the 1938-39 academic year, he would come once a month to deliver two lectures, most of which were on Aristotle, and all of which were very long. A few months into this invasion, students set up alarm clocks to ring at the designated end of the lecture period. Adler waited until they finished ringing and then went on to continue his lecture for over an hour afterwards. This was the start of the fabled Adler pranks, where students tried increasingly creative ways of disrupting his lectures, and continually failed.

The social life of the College underwent its greatest upheaval in this year. Fraternities, which had been introduced to the College in the early 1900s, and by the 20s fully supplanted the debating societies that were previously the centers of campus life. The new program leadership saw grave problems with this: not only were fraternities a distraction to academic life, they also generated divisions in the student body by removing the common experience of a class in dorm buildings, and contributed greatly to the hazing problem on campus. Likewise, the fact that the College subsidized them by letting the fraternities use campus buildings as their houses meant that, for perpetually cash-strapped St. John’s, there was another good reason to close the fraternities. In November of 1938, Barr announced in the Collegian that fraternities would lose control of their houses, which would become dorms under a new housing scheme. While the fraternities attempted to continue their existence for a while without designated buildings, they soon fell apart; a fraternity is not much without a place to party and live together. As an alternative to the fraternities and the social spaces they provided, the administration introduced in the fall of 1938 a student union in the basement of McDowell, centered around a new coffee shop. This coffee shop quickly became the true hub of campus social life, for both students and faculty, and formed the heart of a very different society than the fraternities did.

The week after announcing the end of the fraternities’ use of their houses, Barr announced the end of the intercollegiate sports programs, which were still going strong. Arguing that they distracted from the true academic mission of the College, and often overshadowed academics in view of campus life. The College had already possessed an intramural program before this decision, and in ending the intercollegiate sports, Barr called for the expansion of this program. This decision affected old and new program students; three of the six new program graduates in 1941 were on intercollegiate sports teams before this decision. However, amongst old program students, it was seen as yet another place in which the administration trampled over their activities and programs and ignored their social and academic needs. Inter-program relations within the class of 1941 seem to have been at their lowest points.

Campus social life as a whole suffered during these years, with most clubs struggling to survive the decrease in enrollment coming from students leaving, and the change in campus interests. The Collegian and Yearbook suffered from lowered interest, and many of the campus musical groups faded into oblivion. However, the King William’s Players flourished, under the leadership of New Program Student Paul Ringgold Comegys, the first New Program students to take on a leadership position in a campus club, with the club putting on the Tempest outdoors and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

The following academic year, 1939-40, would see the class of 1941’s junior year, and thus their entry into some of the most intensive work on the program, as well as dominance of campus social life. This was the last year to have a class present of entirely old program students, and with their reduced numbers, the new program truly dominated the College.

Academically, junior year began with French in the language tutorial, and featured Newton and Leibniz in math, although authors like Lavoisier and Dalton found their place in the junior laboratory instead of in the freshman year. Seminar covered a much broader range, featuring works by authors from Shakespeare to Thomas Love Peacock.  Throughout their four years, students would have an oral at the end of each term on a seminar work, but at the time, there were three terms instead of two, and so students would go through three oral examinations. The requirements for writing an annual essay, and the tradition of don rags have gone relatively unchanged, although it appears that upperclassmen still had don rags at the time, with no potential for conferences. This year also saw the proliferation of translations by tutors of texts vital particularly for the first two years of the program. Although the class of 1941 did not directly benefit from this, the first translations of certain books of Apollonius and Ptolemy proved vital for the incoming generations of Johnnies.

On the extra-curricular front, Charles Vayne took over the yearbook, and Vernon Padgett took the editorship of the Collegian, serving for far more than the usual 10 issues that editors traditionally took on, due to a lack of any clear successor. Both were New Program members of the class of 1941, and thus the program began to shape the discourse on the character of campus, and on the impact that students left behind. Some extracurricular activities suffered during this time; the Glee Club dissolved after decades of activity, and music related clubs in general went out of existence. Tutor Herbert Schwartz set out to revive music on campus, and besides organizing a successful concert series, he coached a group of students in choral singing in an attempt to build a musical community. The King Williams Players seems to have reached an ebb in its strength as well, with less student involvement, despite productions of Tartuffe and The Night of January 16^th. Campus parties also reached what may be an all-time low; gone were the “hops” of the early 30s. Campus academic clubs, however, including the science club, law and public policy club, and the theology club, flourished, hosting seminars and brining in speakers to expand on what was already present on the program.

Intramural sports proved to be a wild success and appear to have drawn the fractured class of 1941 together. After the animosity of previous years, bitterness was still left over the end of intercollegiate sports and fraternities, exacerbated due to the lack of overlap between old and new program social worlds. With the intramural program, students were brought together, playing with and against each other, and a new social space was created that healed some of the wounds the previous year had left. Teams were organized by dorm, meaning that they largely were composed of students in the same year, leading to closer connections between classmates. Intramural blazers were already introduced at this early date, although they were for winners of games, with no system of blazer points. (Task for a more adept historian: Stringfellow Barr’s portrait in the Great Hall appears to me to be wearing an intramural blazer. I could not find anything to confirm he had one, but that hardly is any evidence! I would love to hear from anyone who could figure this out.)

A good picture of campus life that year can be found in the yearbook description of the cycle of the day in the coffee shop’s tiffin room, where food was served:

During the course of a day the spirit of the place changes in remarkable fashion. In the morning one finds tutors seated at the little tables nervously cramming coffee and knowledge in preparation for the imminent tutorial. At noon, one finds the tutors, in an easy and jocular mood, eating their lunches; also members of the business staff. In the afternoon one finds lab students desperately drinking coffee with the hope that the rest of the afternoon will perhaps not be quite as blank. Every seminar night at about 10:30 the Tiffin Room is the scene of great excitement and feverishly dialectic. One finds students equipped with coffee and questions swarming around tutors at tables in order to get the lowdown on problems unsolved or perversely solved in the seminars. The "real dope" is the center of attention and the leading question in these coffee conversations is for example, "Come now, Mr. Subtle, what do you really think about this angel business?' Then too there are earnest discussions among the students themselves about the essential nature of everything. In the Tiffin Room on other nights, one finds the diligent student starting a java jag in order to survive another ten pages of an undoubtedly great, but somehow soporific, book.

At the end of the junior year, students underwent the first of their great test: they had to pass enablement. This consisted of passing four written exams, one in language, testing reading knowledge of two of the three languages students had studied up to that point; one in math, examining students abilities in geometry, conics, trigonometry, analytic geometry, and in the differential calculus; and two in laboratory, one testing students’ ability to use laboratory instruments and one in scientific theory; as well as one oral exam, all provided by the Instruction Committee. These exams, which covered skills acquired in tutorials, showed qualifications for the degree of bachelor of liberal arts, and opened the door to senior year and its final challenge, the senior thesis. On the basis of these examinations, the Instruction Committee would determine whether to let a student complete their degree, allow them to return to the College for a fourth year without receiving a degree, or to expel them from the Collee.

The senior year saw an even further diminished class, which stepped back from any of the leadership roles held in their junior year, and started to focus on the future, as many senior classes have since. Academically, they remained busy, with German tutorials, non-Euclidean geometry (but no Einstein) and a blend of biology, chemistry and physics in lab. In seminar, the reading list was much heavier on literature, with Ibsen, Thackery, Balzac and Dickens on the list, and lighter on philosophy, with no Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Much of the senior’s efforts were also dedicated to their theses, which were to be the culmination of all four years of work, and not “a piece of specialized work or a contribution to knowledge.” Students were not able to graduate until completion of the essay but were able to continue their studies until after the fourth year, with one new program student, Paul Comegys, continuing his studies for a fifth. Even at this early time, however, essays as a whole were secondary in a St. John’s education, the well-known statement was already old in 1941, according to the yearbook: “as we have all heard by now… this is a speaking, not a writing campus.”

A notable academic change this year was the integration of the few remaining old program students into new program classes. The College decided it would be better for intra-class relations to unify experiences, and beneficial to old program students to experience a more liberal education. Besides, with the resignation of most of the old program faculty, it was becoming increasingly difficult to provide the kind of elective system the old program demanded. This, together with full integration of student life after the final dissolution of fraternities, meant that for the first time, there were not two different classes of 1941 in the old and new programs, but only one unified class.

Student life continued to dwindle this year in some respects, but with a newly reformatted and reinvigorated Collegian, a thriving KWP, and busy intramural sports, students were left with plenty to do. Further, support from the student-run student employment office was key to ensuring students found ways to earn their tuition while at the College, providing a central location for students seeking employment during their study. The future of all these elements of student life was uncertain, however, with the yearbook noting the potential for all future club and activity leaders to be drafted, as war loomed over the horizon.

Indeed, discussion about political circumstances in Europe dominated much discussion at the College, with conversations about the rise of fascism and the progress of the war seen as vital in a College dedicated to helping develop good citizens dedicated to liberal thought. President Barr, in a report to the board shortly after the first class graduated, wrote that as the political world is inseparably intertwined with our day to day lives, there is a vital responsibility that liberal education has to ensuring freedom. Writing about the Bill of Rights, with the newly graduated class in mind, he said that “Nowhere does it, can it, or should it, tell us either the list of things we ought to do or how to do them. That, in the opinion of our ancestors, was the business of liberal education. That, in their opinion, was an arduous process; for it is harder to develop in men their native powers of self-control, their native powers of thinking through, their native powers to follow up with courageous and just action than it is to tug and drive them with club and carrot. Tyrants forbid citizens to do their duty as free men. Free government permits them to do it. Liberal education enables them to do it.”

To get the best sense of how the class saw their growth over the four years at St. John’s, and what they saw in their future, I will simply present their own words, from the 1941 yearbook:

“We have gained at least beginners' skill in the intricate and difficult art of dialectic. In fact this might very well be presented as the first of three fundamental goods we have derived from our studies. To be a good citizen and an intelligent man nothing is more important than the ability to locate a problem, reduce it to its parts and make a rational choice among the possible alternatives according to the real values involved. This is the definition of prudence, a virtue which we certainly don't yet possess since it is based on experience as much as on understanding. Even though we don't have the experience we do have a grasp of the principles that will make the acquisition of that experience a more vital and intelligible thing than it would be without them.

The second good might be described as the discovery of the order and unity of the arts and sciences. The relations that obtain between the demonstrative and natural sciences, between them and metaphysics and theology, and the incidence of the liberal arts on the fine arts and the useful arts—the study of these matters has given us an order and purpose in our own thinking that will be both useful and indispensable when we begin to participate actively in the chaotic and confused life that characterizes the world we live in today.

Finally, from the second good follows the third: the realization of the vastness and complexity of human thought. This feeling confirms in us the truth of the ancient Socratic thesis that the greatest wisdom is to know that one doesn't know. We are young; we have just begun to think and live. There is much to think about—much to do.

Stay tuned for the third and final installment of this series, covering the lives of members of the Class of 1941 after their graduation.