College Spawns College

Though U.S. big-name colleges are deluged with applicants, most of them, fearing loss of quality in size, refuse to expand. Yet all are sure that more Americans need their special academic virtues. One alternative is to start affiliates in distant places--a Yale-in-Denver or a Harvard-in-Dallas.

Last week St. John's College, which is just across the street from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., showed the way. President Richard D. Weigle invaded Manhattan to find foundation cash for his venture. St. John's aims to reproduce itself in as many as six affiliates across the country, starting with a new St. John's-in-California. Says Weigle: "No college has ever before tried to expand in this fashion."

One of the nation's oldest colleges (founded 1696), tiny, coeducational St. John's last year got 1,400 inquiries, could admit only 120 freshmen. It now has 277 students, next year will hit its avowed limit of 300. The obvious demand tempts St. John's to colonize the rest of the U.S.: "We think our kind of education should be offered to more people," Weigle says.

Homer to Einstein. St. John's was itself colonized in 1937 by explorers from the University of Chicago, who set out to prove that the soundest modern education is immersion in the classics. To combat specialization, all St. Johnnies take the same nonelective diet. Instead of training for jobs, they mull the perennial principles in the "100 Great Books" (now actually 168). In four years, they span more than 2,000 years of "the substance of human experience," from Homer's Iliad to Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

St. Johnnies study 60 hours a week, forgo fraternities and all intercollegiate sports except boating. They have three or four Socratic-style tutorials a week in mathematics and in languages, two in a science laboratory, two in music (for the first three semesters), plus two weekly seminars on the great books. Friday nights they hear a lecture or concert by such visitors as Mortimer Adler and the Juilliard String Quartet. Lest all of this seem medieval, St. John's boasts "more required mathematics and laboratory work than any other liberal arts college in the country."

Banned: Books about Books. The St. John's approach was begun by President Weigle's predecessor, onetime Chicago Professor Stringfellow ("Winkie") Barr, who abolished survey courses and books about books. Once a school for Maryland's landed gentry, St. John's became one of the most talked about experiments in U.S. education. It has yet to produce alumni with reputations to match the school's promise (its first "name" graduate: TV Quizling Charles Van Doren).

Under President Weigle, a Yaleman, the college has flourished. Endowment has shot from virtually nothing to $6,000,000 in one decade. This month the trustees approved President Weigle's plan to start colonizing. He has three prospective sites in California: on the Monterey Peninsula near Carmel, where local citizens have already invited St. John's to open a campus; Claremont, where a new St. John's would become the sixth of the respected Associated Colleges of Claremont (Claremont Men's, Claremont Graduate School. Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Scripps); and Riverside, where St. John's might buy the 260-room Mission Inn.

Weigle hopes to launch a new campus for little more than $3,000,000. Heading the faculty will be five veteran St. John's tutors (professors), plus ten new ones to be trained over the next three years. The California affiliate will probably open in 1964. will eventually become independent. Long before then, St. John's hopes to be spawning other affiliates in other parts of the U.S.

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