Classic Class

I venture to believe . . . that in the future men will point to St. John's College and say that there was the seedbed of the American Renaissance. So said Pundit Walter Lippmann three years ago.

The seedbed last week put up its first sprouts. St. John's (Annapolis, Md.) is the college which four years ago set out to prove that the soundest college education to train future U.S. leaders is study of 100 chosen classics. Of an original class of 20, six students were graduated. (The rest flunked or quit.) Four of the six survivors promptly announced that their ambition was to go back to St. John's to teach.

In the July Atlantic Monthly St. John's tweedy President Stringfellow ("Winkie") Barr described his "academic revolution."

St. Johnnies spend 60 hours a week in study, forego fraternities and intercollegiate sports to concentrate on the classics. They have five tutorial classes a week in mathematics, five in languages, one in a science laboratory, two seminars on the great books. The original list of books (actually 120, beginning with Homer's Iliad and ending with Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics) proved too big a bite; the graduating class finished about 100. The senior year quota was cut from 40 to 23.

Of his first graduates, President Barr said: "I think their chief characteristic ... is that when they don't know something, they know they don't. That is a rare characteristic among the young Americans who received the bachelor's degree this year." The graduates:

Thomas L. Hill (son of the executive secretary of the Prisoners' Aid Association in Baltimore), who will go back to St. John's next autumn to coach intramural athletics, tutor freshmen in math.

Charles Vayne (son of a U.S. Treasury employe), who hopes to tutor St. John's freshmen in Greek and math.

William H. Hat field (son of a retired U.S. Army officer), who wants to do graduate work in physics, teach at St. John's.

Henry M. Robert (son of an ex-Naval Academy professor), who also wants to teach physics at St. John's.

Vernon M. Padgett (smalltown Marylander), who will study medicine at Johns Hopkins.

Herbert B. Stallings (farmer's boy), who, if not drafted, will go to an auto-factory training school in Michigan.

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