STATEMENT OF EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND PROGRAM

Each year the dean who is serving as chair of the Instruction Committee of the College is charged by the Polity with writing a statement of educational policy and program. In the Preamble to the Polity we are told that St. John's College seeks "to develop the moral and intellectual powers of men" and that it is concerned, among other things, with "the moral foundations on which the conduct of men's lives can be based." The statements of educational policy that I am familiar with have addressed curricular matters almost exclusively. They have addressed that part of the College's mission that is concerned with the development of the intellectual powers of our students. The present statement addresses what according to the Polity is also part of the College's mission, and oddly enough mentioned prior, namely, the development of the moral powers of our students. Inasmuch as the above formulations occur in a preamble, the first word of which is "education" and the thrust of which is to articulate the purpose of "institutions of learning" and of St. John's College in particular, a consideration of the meaning, possibility, and appropriateness of moral education at St. John's is a proper theme for a statement of educational policy and program.

As a faculty we enjoy considerable unanimity regarding the great value of the College's dedication to liberal education, and regarding how best to initiate our students into this lifelong endeavor. Even the comparatively small number of faculty, among whom I include myself, who do not think that the development of the intellectual powers is man's most sublime vocation cannot but be impressed by the fact that liberal education, particularly as practiced here at St. John's, requires the scrutinizing of its own presuppositions and is thereby open to the questioning of its own value. In spite of what some of our critics say, the College does have an intellectual center, and one that accommodates a wide range of opinions about what the development and cultivation of the intellectual powers should entail. Liberal education is the movement from opinion towards knowledge, from intellectual servility to intellectual freedom. Such an understanding of liberal education, needless to say, presupposes that knowledge is possible, that all is not opinion. Knowledge is possible only if there is truth. This proposition, that there is truth, is a metaphysical proposition. What it presupposes and what it implies, is a matter of controversy, and there is no agreement about it at the College. Nonetheless, there is sufficient consensus about the value of liberal education that our common dedication to it gives the College an intellectual center.

The case is different regarding the development of the moral powers of our students. Here the faculty enjoys no comparable consensus regarding even what is meant by "the moral powers", much less about whether we should be helping our students to develop them and, if so, how exactly we should go about doing so. The College has a clearly defined and well understood intellectual center, but if the College has a moral center it is neither clearly defined nor well understood. Accordingly, the present statement will reflect some views on moral education that are shared by the vast majority of the faculty, and some that are shared by only a few of us.

It should be acknowledged at once that as tutors we urge our students to practice a kind of intellectual justice in their classes, in particular, to make room for the quieter students, to speak with civility, and to refrain from such things as grandstanding and caricaturing uncongenial opinions, not to mention plagiarism and cheating. We also attempt to inculcate a kind of courage by insisting that students take certain risks in their thinking. We might even be said to encourage moderation in a way, for we insist that our students not come to class drunk or under the influence of drugs. But for the most part we urge the cultivation of the moral powers merely as means to the cultivation of the intellectual powers. We know that there are certain moral vices that inhibit the development of the intellectual powers, and we are willing to inveigh against them albeit, thus far, uneasily and only up to a point. For the most part we have tended to overlook these vices except when the students' work at the College is patently compromised by them.

Of course, we are not indifferent to activities that are explicitly proscribed by law. In general the faculty recognizes that activities such as the consumption of alcohol by minors and the sale and possession of illegal drugs have to be opposed by the officers of the College inasmuch as liability is an issue. One might say, then, that the College does have a moral center insofar as we are opposed to actions that the law of the land proscribes. We let our students know, even if somewhat apologetically, that we simply cannot look the other way when they engage in illegal activity. In this way, and in dissuading them from practices that might have a deleterious effect on their work, we do, after all, help them develop their moral powers. It is not much, but it is something. Perhaps it is all we can do.

One reason that the College does not have a firm moral center is that it does not have a religious center. And the College plainly cannot have a religious center and still be St. John's College. Religious piety and liberal education have so little to do with each other, and are in some respects so inimical to each other, that it is a tribute to the civility reigning at the College that religion is tolerated and not more frequently mocked here. St. John's cannot take a stand in favor of any dogma, least of all religious dogma. We will not attempt to develop the moral powers of the students if this requires forgoing the development of their intellectual powers. And even if the Polity mentions development of the moral powers first and development of the intellectual powers second, development of the latter is emphatically of higher rank in the College's understanding of its mission. Moreover it seems that a few faculty might regard heavy drinking and recreational sex, including such things as public sexual intercourse at drunken parties, as a rite of passage, as something it is actually good for the students to indulge in so as to deflate their moral sanctimoniousness and bring them face to face with who they really are. Student party and dormitory life could be said to constitute the contemporary equivalent of a finishing school. Indeed, our current laissez faire attitude about morality might actually fulfill the aim of helping the students develop their moral powers, if the development of these powers should culminate in a recognition of the hollowness of morality. From this perspective, then, nothing much better could even be hoped for than what is already taking place. But, again, only a very small number of faculty probably see things this way. The vast majority are not so happy about what is taking place. But they think that little can or should be done about it Many are concerned that to criticize student morals would be hypocritical. "After all," they say, "we too were young once. And while our students do behave more outrageously than we did, we must not forget that we were not exactly saints." And indeed we were not. But at this point we note a curious discrepancy. When, as happens occasionally at the initiative of the College, recovering alcoholics or drug addicts talk with our students about the dangers of alcohol and drugs, and urge them to a moderation that they themselves did not live up to, they are never to my knowledge charged with hypocrisy. The reason why they are not charged with hypocrisy is that they are thought to be victims of an addictive disease. It was not their fault that they became addicts, and for them to warn others of the dangers of addiction is no more hypocritical than for someone who has mistaken poison for food to warn others not to make the same mistake. The case is different with past immorality. We were not victims, but free agents, which is what makes what we did immoral. But, whereas it may be hypocrisy to urge others not to do what one is doing oneself, or did before and would do again if only the opportunity permitted, there is no hypocrisy at all in urging others not to do something that one used to do oneself but has since come to regard as loathsome. One thing that would permit us to urge students not to follow in our footsteps is repentance. Repentance, however, makes sense only in the context of religion, and St. John's does not have a religious center. And St. John's is not going to get a religious center either. But, fortunately, we do not need to have recourse to repentance in order to urge, without hypocrisy, that students not follow in our footsteps. We can urge them not to make our past mistakes, even if we regard them as mistakes merely and not willful sins, assuming we acknowledge an ignorance leading to them that is avoidable.

At this point, if not sooner, someone will ask why we do not just drop this unpleasant topic and leave well enough alone. My answer is that the situation is not well enough. The oldest and most frequently recurring criticism students make of the College is that there is an astonishing discrepancy between what is read and talked about in class, on the one hand, and what happens outside of class in the dormitories and at parties, on the other. The fact that the social life of students bears so little relation to their academic life troubles many if not all of them, and it troubles them a lot. It certainly troubles them by and large more than it troubles the faculty, who after all do not live in their midst and are thereby able to maintain illusions about the ennobling effects of liberal education, or to shrug off what happens in the private lives of the students as none of our business.

Most of our students have made sacrifices of one sort or another to come to St. John's. Some have made extraordinary sacrifices do so. It suffices to think of the sheer cost of the education here, the indebtedness our students incur, and the unlikelihood of an immediate payoff in marketable skills acquired at St. John's. Many of our students have had great difficulty persuading their parents to pay for this education, and more than a few have had to pay for it on their own. It is remarkable with what high hopes and idealism incoming freshmen show up at the College. To be sure, they are not altogether naive or innocent in the ways of the world. High school has initiated many of them into the wasteland of contemporary mores. But this fact does not keep them from looking to St. John's for something finer than what they got at high school, and not just academically finer.

In which connection, I have heard it frequently maintained that the College cannot undo the effects of contemporary "culture" and help students acquire habits of moral virtue. But we have succeeded notably in helping students acquire habits of 'intellectual virtue, working entirely against the grain of the practices and principles that hold sway in the contemporary educational establishment. Why should helping our students acquire habits of moral virtue be impossible given our success in helping them achieve habits of intellectual virtue?

To be sure, we cannot make our students virtuous. However differently the authors of the books we read evaluate morality, they all agree that one person cannot just make another person virtuous. A person must contribute something of his own in order to acquire moral virtue, if not free choice at least a measure of effort. But, then, the case is not different regarding the acquisition of intellectual virtue. Our whole intellectual enterprise at St. John's is founded on the premise that one cannot become educated without taking an active role in one's own learning. One must make an effort, make an attempt, at knowing what one does not know. That the students must contribute, in some sense of the word, voluntarily to their own education has not daunted the faculty from making an effort of its own toward helping them develop their intellectual powers. So the incontestable fact that one person cannot make another moral can hardly count, by itself, as a sufficient reason for the faculty's reluctance to give serious consideration to the development of the moral powers of our students.

One might think that this reluctance has something to do with the word "morality" itself, which presently seems to evoke the "moral majority", "family values", the "religious right", and so forth. Perhaps it would be easier to understand ourselves as properly concerned with the "ethics" of our students rather than with their "morals". But, then, traditionally the faculty has understood character development to lie outside its proper charge. It has even been uncomfortable with the word "character". There is, however, one word that generates certain ethical overtones and has exhibited considerable staying power at the College, among faculty and students alike. It is the word "community".

It is undeniable that the concept of community has been invested with a certain surreal majesty at St. John's, but on close inspection it proves to be largely vacuous. Indeed we all read the same books, wonderful conversations about profoundly important things take place outside as well as inside the classroom, and often friendships of a high order are formed for life. But the very excellences of the College make the dreary ordinariness of student party and dormitory life all the more conspicuous and repellant. Security reports of vandalism, theft, anonymous hate notes, drunken parties that do not shut down on time, and verbal abuse of College employees have been routine over the years, though recent changes in the alcohol policy have improved things somewhat on the Santa Fe campus. Rumors persist about illegal drug use among students, though these rumors are extremely difficult for College officials to track down. Students do not want to "rat" on each other, even about potentially lethal drug abuse. Almost all of them think that doing so would violate the community ethos. It is odd to hear "the community" invoked by students with such solemnity, when most of their parties have to be accompanied by music played so loud that conversation is impossible (to say nothing of sleep down the hall, or across campus) and when so many of them have difficulty enjoying each others' company unless they are intoxicated or, to use their own telling expressions, "smashed", "bashed", "polluted", "plastered", "blotto", "ruined", and worse. According to the rape crisis center, several date rapes are reported to occur on campus every year, more often than not in circumstances in which one or both parties are intoxicated. A handful of students always leave the College mid-year, or even mid-semester, to undergo treatment for alcoholism. A larger number of students leave the College because they are disgusted with the disproportion between the academic and the social lives of their fellow students, i.e., the disproportion between a striking development of the intellectual powers and the lack of any development of the moral powers. If nothing else, the perceived nastiness of dormitory and party life contributes something to the attrition problem, though how much is not clear. And it is by no means the case that those who leave are just "up tight" and should not have come here in the first place. Some of them are among our best students. It seems that a genuine community cannot be centered around the life of the intellect alone.

Now, although in the absence of religion it is indeed difficult to establish a firm moral center, which is essential to a genuine community, it is not impossible to do so. In this connection it is worth reminding ourselves that we have, after all, "legislated morality" for our students in the history of the College. A quaint remnant of such legislation is the policy of not allowing students of the opposite sex to room together in the dormitories. Of course, we do not police the dormitories and we have no policy against students sleeping together. But we do have a policy against students of the opposite sex rooming together. And the rules of residence used to have other strictures that we have disburdened ourselves and our students of over the years. But, more to the point, it is possible to take seriously the charge of developing the moral powers of our students without being moralistic. Students need to realize that damage done to the soul by certain activities includes damage done to the mind itself, which is, after all, part of the soul. Our students give ample indication that they want to know what it might mean to try to live a fine life, even an exemplary one, and not just read and talk about doing so. Such things as respect for oneself and for others, the treating of human beings as ends rather than mere means, integrity, the discipline of achieving dominion over one's thoughts and passions, fortitude, benevolence or willing the good for others, and leisure as the space within which one defines oneself could all be promoted by the faculty without necessarily assuming the posture and presuppositions of televangelists. The faculty of St. John's College are held in enormous regard by our students, because they are rightly convinced that we have their best interests in mind. Exhortation to virtue coming from the faculty as a whole would carry much more weight than anything comparable issuing from the dean's office, which is often read as meddling or oppression, and forcing one's own "values" down other peoples' throats.

I think that there are only two honorable ways of addressing the problem of the moral education of our students. We could decide that there is nothing we can or should do other than what we are already doing, and quietly emend the Polity to reflect this fact by removing the high minded language about developing the moral powers. Or we could decide that developing the moral powers is indeed part of our charge, and proceed to undertake a sustained and concentrated study of what this might mean, and how it could be accomplished without the College's making gestures in the direction of a religious commitment that would violate its educational principles. Perhaps the coordinated faculty visits between the two campuses, which have recently been devoted to various parts of the program such as the laboratory curriculum and logic, could be devoted one year to a consideration of this issue. The two groups of visiting faculty might include the assistant deans ex officio that year. In any case, it is essential that there be some faculty reflection on this problem, even if it only happens in the discussion of the present statement, and even if all it comes to is acknowledging that an abyss is there, taking quick stock of its dimensions, and returning as soon as possible to the less controversial and more readily acknowledged duties of tutors.

Respectfully submitted,
James Carey
Dean, Santa Fe