The following message was sent to students on June 2, 2020:

Dear Students,

We continue to be heartbroken by the inhumane killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many others, and by the deep pain and division we’re seeing across the country. Our sorrow is twofold. We feel sadness for our deeply divided nation, which cannot seem to find common ground upon which to move forward. And we feel sorrow for every African American who experiences the kind of fear that the rest of us could never imagine: of being harmed by those who are meant to protect us for doing the simple, everyday things that the rest of us take for granted.

At St. John’s we are guided by The Statement of the Program which speaks directly to college’s ambitions. “These liberal arts enable all human beings to know the world around them and to know themselves in this world, and to use that knowledge with wisdom. Under the guidance of these arts, they can free themselves from the constraint of prejudice and the narrowness of beaten paths. Under their discipline, they can acquire the habit of listening to reason. A genuinely conceived liberal arts curriculum cannot avoid aiming at these most far-reaching of all human goals.”

We spend enormous amounts of time asking how to create a just society and how to live lives of virtue. And then, as individuals, we struggle with how to take these ideas and actualize them in our own lives and world. Each of us will have different answers to these questions, and different ways of bringing these principles to life. Some protest and some pray, but all of us must grapple with, and address, the most difficult questions we face. This is good, and as it should be: this is the beauty of our Program and of our democracy.

For those of you who are joining in protests across the country: please be safe and peaceful; please embrace non-violent forms of protest as you work in your own individual ways to grapple with injustice and to actualize the principles that we value here at St. John’s. For those of you who are praying: please pray for all of us to find peace and understanding with one another and to heal our hurts and divisions.

And to our students, staff, and tutors of color, many of whom have raised your voices over the last few days, we want you to know that we support, hear, value, and recognize you: your lives and your voices matter deeply to us. We also know that we have more work to do: as a country, as a human race, and as a St. John’s community.

Our very best,
Mark Roosevelt and Pano Kanelos