Colonist

An oldtime newspaperman once said to Stringfellow Barr: “You know the trouble with the present generation? They’ve never read the minutes of the previous meeting.”

For nine years at tiny St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., Stringfellow (“Winkie”) Barr has helped his students catch up on the minutes of mankind’s most memorable meetings: the “100 Great Books,” from Homer to Bertrand Russell. (His list, which is flexible, differs from the University of Chicago’s, now numbers 109.) Last week President Barr announced he was quitting St. John’s, going off somewhere else to start a new college—almost exactly like the one he was leaving.

Oxford Was Right. Amiable Winkie Barr was parting amicably from 250-year-old St. John’s. An ex-Rhodes Scholar, he thinks Oxford University has the right idea in insisting on small colleges. Says he: “Learning is a kind of contagion. The group must be compact enough for the contagion to occur. I don’t want this one [St. John’s] to get any bigger. We’ve always assumed we would start another college when it got too big.” St. John’s, which graduated only seven students during one wartime year, expects to enroll 225 students this September—an all-time high. Barr has agreed to stick around until a St. John’s “insider” is picked to succeed him.

For the new college, Barr still had no name, no faculty, no campus or buildings. He wants to start his new “colony” in ready-made buildings, suitable for September 1947 occupancy, near but not in a big city. He hasn’t the least idea where to find them. All he has is a president (himself), a plan (the St. John’s idea, with variations)—and $4,500,000. This tidy endowment came from the Old Dominion Foundation, set up five years ago by young aluminum heir Paul Mellon, who enrolled in St. John’s at 33, when he already had degrees from Yale and Cambridge. St. John’s itself has only a $130,000 endowment.

Liberated Teachers. Barr plans to borrow a few faculty members from St. John’s, persuade some recent St. Johnnies to try their hand at teaching, and raid established schools to “liberate oppressed minorities” who believe in the St. John’s way. A teaching task-force from “College X” will invade the nearest city, bring the great books to grownups who are too old or too busy to go to college.

The new school will offer no graduate degrees, but plans to encourage research “between”—instead of “within”—fields. (“We need to cut passages between shafts we have already dug, instead of merely digging the same old shafts deeper & deeper.”)

Colonist Barr thinks the time is ripe for a new school, both because of the “shocking” shortage and because “I’m getting old.” (He is 49.) Will there be still more Barr-built colleges on the St. John’s pattern? “I’d like to think this is not the last. But somebody else will have to start the next one.”