This is the first part of a three-part series examining the history of the first class of the New Program. Part I deals with the 1937-38 school year, while Part II concerns the following three years. Part III follows six graduating members of the first class after their time at St. John’s College.

While completing my senior year, I’ve been prompted to reflect on the generations of undergraduates who came to the college before me, and the marks they left in their four short years in Annapolis. I have formed an idea of what a St. John’s education can do to an individual and what kind of future it leaves open for them after seeing three years’ worth of seniors leaving the college to chart their own courses. Participating in all-college seminars and student forums has allowed me to see freshmen and seniors interact together, and thus what it means to grow with and through the Program. However, one St. John’s class never had the opportunity to see a predecessor graduate, as the first New Program class had its curriculum built around them. 

The inaugural cohort was formed in 1937, when Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan took over the college’s administration; these students graduated in 1941. Not only were they the first class of the New Program, but they were also part of the only mixed class in college history: When these students began their time at St. John’s, they were given the choice of the new or standard curricula. Most chose the existing one, while only about 20 students chose the New Program. These sweeping changes, combined with the New Program’s intensity, meant that very few members stayed for four years; only 10 old program and seven New Program students graduated.

The idea of being the first men (St. John’s didn’t admit women until 1951) to experience the New Program intrigued me. After all, they walked in mostly blind. There was no one to talk to about what St. John’s was like, and no community of alumni to reassure them that this education would not limit their success in life. To take this risk, they would have needed a deep commitment to the idea of the Program itself: to conversation and the liberating power of education.

When I set out to learn more about these students, I was surprised to see very little information currently available. Much has already been written about the administrators and tutors who founded the New Program, but the students are missing in every account I could find. While some of this makes sense, as four short years does not define the Program itself, the picture of what we do at St. John’s is woefully incomplete without the diversity of students who make it up.

After digging through yearbooks, newspaper articles, obituaries, and alumni magazine articles, I have tried to put together a picture of what it was like to be at St. John’s in those first four tumultuous years, and how this time shaped the rest of their lives. This picture is necessarily incomplete, as I have not reached out to families of these men or anyone who knew them personally and might be able to provide a fuller understanding of their lives. However, I hope that the archival research I have done can be the starting point for a more committed historian and open the doors for a truly comprehensive understanding of the pivotal years that led to the birth of the Program as we know it.

The freshman class entering St. John’s College in 1937 hailed nearly entirely from a narrow stretch of the Eastern seaboard. The yearbook for 1937-38 shows students from Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, with a few from New York and Connecticut. One student in the freshman class, Luis Moran, came from Manati, Puerto Rico, but he does not appear to have remained at St. John’s after completing his freshman year. (It is unclear whether he was in the New Program or the old program, since I have not found lists of students in their respective programs dating back to that year.)

For this same reason, it is unclear how large the class was when it started, but the 1937-38 yearbook says there were “some twenty” students in the new program, and 38 in the old, although this number is contradicted in other sources. Among this New Program class were several upperclassmen who had begun St. John’s in the old program but decided to “turn back” and return to freshman year to experience the New Program. Of the six graduates of the New Program, two had gotten an earlier start at the college: Henry M. Robert III (who was the grandson of Henry Martyn Robert, the author of the parliamentary procedure manual Robert’s Rules of Order) and Herbert B. Stallings were both originally members of the Class of 1940.

To best give a picture of the class’s evolution, I will present annual pictures of the curriculum, student activities, and student body for each year. Their freshman year, the first class of the New Program, had the most academic changes, most of which can be tracked through course catalogs and longtime tutor J. Winfree Smith’s 1983 book A Search for the Liberal College: The Beginning of the St. John’s Program, which proved very helpful in tracking academic developments. At the beginning of the year, the New Program students would have had three tutorials: language, writing, and mathematics. The math tutorial was designed by George Comenetz, one of the New Program’s original tutors, and it ran for an hour a day and covered texts very similar to the modern freshman math tutorial. Indeed, Smith writes that the first three years of the math program at St. John’s appear to have changed the least since the birth of the New Program.

The language tutorial, however, has shifted dramatically. It initially ran for an hour, three days a week, with writing replacing it on the other two days. However, it was soon found that the writing tutorial was “impractical,” in the words of the 1941 yearbook, and it was incorporated into the language tutorial. The tutorial began with ancient Greek, as it does today, and was to be divided into three parts: six to eight weeks of learning paradigms, followed by a period of analyzing texts and then writing commentaries on them. However, it was found that this did not provide students enough time to master the language, and the structure was shifted so that the freshman Greek tutorials instead spent the first part of the year learning paradigms before translating Plato’s Meno.

Seminar also underwent changes. Although it always ran for two hours, from 8 to 10 p.m. on Monday and Thursday evenings, the 1941 yearbook says that at the beginning it was supplemented with lectures on the seminar texts. This was soon dropped in favor of purely discussion-based classes. The initial seminar list was also found to be overambitious. By the end of four years, it had been reduced by about 20 books, with authors from Roman poet Ovid to English historian Edward Gibbon being cut.

Lab was the shakiest and least well-formed part of the New Program, with its poor organization and unclear focus mentioned in almost every yearbook across its first four years. Its structure changed dramatically every year as tutors attempted to find the best way of incorporating experiments and more up-to-date scientific discoveries into a liberal arts curriculum. For this first year, the laboratory was intended to be split into three segments, including a mathematical, experimental, and combinatorial laboratory. Mathematical laboratory was where freshmen would, according to the 1937-38 catalog, “learn the mathematical principles that have been embodied in [scientific] instruments.” Sophomores and juniors would take experimental library, where they would repeat classical experiments, largely in physics, and seniors would combine scientific findings to “investigate concrete problems of central importance” in biology. This, however, would change, and only the first New Program class would take the freshman laboratory in this form, for two-and-a-half hours once a week.

Formal lectures were a crucial part of the New Program, as they were for many years after, and perhaps should still be. Lectures often took place on two nights a week at the beginning of the year, but Friday gradually became the customary sole lecture day. Lectures were, at this point, two hours long, although the yearbook from 1940 notes that they often ran for two-and-a-half hours. At some point, either in the 1937-38 academic year or the following one, their length was reduced to an hour-and-a-half. Lecturers ranged from tutors to public intellectuals, broadening the New Program’s reach beyond the walls of McDowell Hall.

Socially, the 1937-38 school year was unusual, it was the last year of total dominance of the college’s old academic program. The New Program students were somewhat of an oddity, a tiny minority in a small, largely conventional, mediocre liberal arts college. At the beginning of the year, all freshmen lived in historic Pinkney Hall. But as fraternities dominated social life, nearly all students rushed fraternities, and many joined them, including three of the six graduates of the New Program, with campus life splintering into smaller fraternal groups. Varsity sports, particularly football, were a major focus of campus life, with their annual sporting rivalry against Johns Hopkins University being the largest annual event.

Multiple other student clubs existed, including a glee club; an orchestra and a dance orchestra; a music board; a boat club; a Cotillion board; a sports auxiliary group, the Orange and Black Society; a varsity society; psychology and medicine clubs, the King William Players theatre group; a weekly newspaper, The Collegian; an intra-fraternity council; and the Student Council, which played a central role in campus governance. No freshmen were involved in running these clubs, and it thus cannot be easily ascertained how involved New Program students were in this year.

The freshmen class, unusually, resisted the regular hazing from sophomores and negotiated a milder set of “rat rules” than usual, although they were still forced to collect firewood for the bonfire before the Johns Hopkins football game. It is not clear whether the New Program had anything to do with this resistance, as hazing had already been on a slow and steady decline for years; additionally, thanks to the college’s then-poor financials, so many people had dropped out of the class above the freshmen that they outnumbered the sophomores hazing them two-to-one. Of an original class of 60, the class of 1940 had shrunk to 20 in only one year.

Relations between the old and New programs were initially favorable. Students from the prior group dominated class leadership positions, but there was no animosity between the two classes until the so-called “February purge” of 1938, when a large number of students with poor grades were expelled in order to keep the College’s accreditation. Because all but one of these students were in the old program, there grew to be a feeling that the administration had it out for them, and that the New Program students were tools of the administration for destroying the college and the lives of old program students.

Smith writes that St. John’s College dean Scott Buchanan denied that the expulsions were a purge of old program students, pointing out that the expelled parties were known to have had academic difficulties. This did not eliminate concerns, and tensions rose. The Collegian published articles decrying the neglect of the old program by the administration, with particular concerns about the increasingly limited class offerings as more and more old program faculty left St. John’s. This apprehension between old program students and the administration spilled over into student relations, with New Program student Henry M. Robert III describing the period as one of “civil war.” Old program students shut New Program students out of the college’s social world, while New Program students formed their own circles, which, according to the 1940 yearbook, often included tutors, whom they found they had more in common with than the old program students.

This conflict would only get worse the following year, a period defined by large shifts in the student social environment and the emergence of many academic customs that define St. John’s College today.

This article first appeared in the [date] edition of The Gadfly, St. John’s College’s student newspaper. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.