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Sunday, March 13, 2005
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UD'S SUMMER SUGGESTIONS A Series I From The San Francisco Chronicle ' RIGOROUS ACADEMIA, AT LEAST FOR A WEEK Budget Travel Sunday, March 13, 2005 Now is the time to apply for the "Summer Classics" program of St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M. One of the most intense and rewarding of all summer learning opportunities, it offers one-week and longer vacations to an audience of intellectually curious Americans that grows larger each year. St. John's in Santa Fe, and its sister campus at St. John's in Annapolis, Md., are the "great books" schools of the United States, colleges in which the four-year undergraduate curriculum consists entirely of reading every word and discussing some of the greatest works of the Western tradition, in sequence. You start with Homer, end with Freud, Darwin and Conrad, and pick up Euclid and Descartes along the way. Brainy students discussing these weighty works with "tutors" (faculty) seated at both ends of a long seminar table. And that's exactly what you the intense, serious vacationer does, but for only a week, in most cases, in the month of July. Living in a vacated student residence on an awesome mountaintop campus overlooking Santa Fe and eating in the student dining hall, you choose one book (from an offering of six or seven each week) and discuss it each morning or afternoon for a week with St. John's tutors. There are no entrance requirements, grades or exams. In your off time, you explore Santa Fe and the surrounding desert, making at least one excursion to colorful, historic Taos (of D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe fame). The charge for an entire week (tuition for five daily classes either mornings or afternoons, all books and other materials, six nights' accommodations and all meals from Sunday dinner until Saturday breakfast) is $1,445 per person, not including transportation to Santa Fe. If you want to pursue a second seminar in the course of your one week there (which I don't recommend, given the heavy demands a single seminar entails), you'll pay an additional $1,345. My wife and I participated in the program's first two magic summers, and it was one of the great intellectual adventures of our lives. Our first year, we read and discussed Thucydides' "The Peloponnesian War," that powerful depiction of military conflicts and national policies handed down, in Thucydides' words, as "a gift for all time." One of our tutors was the then-president of St. John's, the other was an equally eminent classical scholar, and the seminar room was electric with friendly argument. We read large chunks of the book each evening and even declaimed it aloud on some afternoons as we drove over northern New Mexico (probably the only sightseers in New Mexico's history to do that). The second year, we devoted a week to Dante's "Inferno," this time aided by two Dante specialists of the St. John's faculty. We read several cantos each night in our student residence, then discussed the thoughts and beliefs of the immortal poet for several hours each morning. This July, St. John's offers 19 seminars, each devoted to a single book or opera that is read and discussed either from 10 a.m. to noon or 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., for a week. Following is a partial listing: Week 1 (July 10-15): Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra"; Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov"; Machiavelli's "The Prince"; William Harvey's "Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals Week 2 (July 17-22): Tolstoy's "War and Peace"; Freud on Love and Death; Cervantes' "Don Quixote"; three comedies (Aristophanes' "Clouds," Moliere's "The Misanthrope," Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost"). Week 3 (July 24-29): Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo"; Herodotus' "Histories"; the operas of Benjamin Britten; Gospels of Matthew, John and Thomas. For a program booklet, write to Summer Classics, St. John's College, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, NM 87505-4599, or call (505) 984-6117. Class descriptions and other information also appear on www.stjohnscollege.edu (click Educational Outreach). ' |