It is not news that the liberal arts, the humanities, are in retreat. The enrollment declines, budgetary pressures, political suspicion, and technological disruption invoked as evidence are real. Yet these very challenges, properly understood, point in the opposite direction. They heighten the urgency of liberal education, clarify its purpose, and reveal its enduring vitality. At a moment when economic uncertainty, cultural polarization, and technological acceleration test the capacities of individuals and institutions alike, the liberal arts—rightly practiced—address needs that are becoming harder, not easier, to meet.
St. John’s College occupies a unique, or exceptionally rare, place in the American educational landscape. All undergraduates pursue essentially the same four-year course of study. There are no traditional majors or electives, no textbooks, and no lectures. Classes take the form of small seminars in which students study together demanding works—Plato and Aristotle, Euclid and Newton, Augustine and Aquinas, Shakespeare and Tocqueville, Darwin and Einstein, and many more: the Great Books of Western civilization from classical antiquity to the present. They do so with “tutors”—not “professors”—at the table with them. Our faculty are accomplished academics who leave traditional academic careers to teach and learn outside their expertise, throughout the program, in a non-departmentalized faculty. It is a rigorous and decidedly unorthodox approach, at once traditional and radical.
St. John’s is a rigorous and decidedly unorthodox approach, at once traditional and radical.
What is probably least appreciated, however, is that roughly half of our program is devoted to mathematics, the natural sciences, and music—also anchored in original texts, studied both theoretically and hands-on. Students demonstrate Euclid’s propositions at the board, reconstruct experiments from Galileo and Faraday, and study music not as performance alone but as a mathematical and philosophical art. This reflects a core conviction: Liberal education cannot be reduced to the so-called humanities. It must comprehend the liberal arts and sciences together, grasping the fundamental principles and techniques that underlie all forms of human inquiry and knowledge, as well as ethical and aesthetic first principles.
This program places St. John’s squarely at the intersection of the principal challenges now confronting liberal education—economic, cultural and political, and technological—and requires us to address them without evasion.
Begin with the economic challenge. Students and families rightly ask what a college education is for and whether it justifies its cost. Institutions respond by emphasizing immediate employability, credentials, and market alignment. The budgetary pressures are real, and St. John’s feels them as keenly as any small liberal-arts college. Our model is labor-intensive, seminar-based, and resistant to scale and could not exist in this form without outsized philanthropic support.
Yet the economic argument against the liberal arts rests on a narrow understanding of value. St. John’s does not train students for particular jobs; it educates them for a career, for a lifetime of change. Our graduates enter law, medicine, business, engineering, teaching, public service, and the arts. They grow, adapt, and flourish in their careers because they have learned how to read carefully, reason rigorously, speak precisely, and judge responsibly. In an economy increasingly shaped by automation and artificial intelligence, these abilities are not ornamental. They are durable, too rare, and increasingly at a premium.
The second set of challenges is cultural and political, and here the pressures come from both the left and the right. From the left, liberal education is often identified with a narrow canon of “dead white European males,” misunderstood to underwrite or reinforce historic inequities. From the right, it is challenged as impractical or subject to ideological capture by the left. Each critique mistakes what liberal education actually is.
At St. John’s, the curriculum is anchored in a shared tradition of inquiry that is neither partisan nor homogeneous. Students read works that disagree profoundly about God, nature, freedom, justice, and the best regime. They encounter arguments that unsettle their assumptions and challenge their moral and political instincts. The classroom is structured so that no one—student or tutor—can simply assert authority or retreat into slogans. Claims must be grounded in texts, arguments must be followed where they lead, and disagreement must be sustained with seriousness and charity. Our claim or aspiration is that, in the conversation of the classroom, “reason is the only recognized authority” (“Statement of the Program”).
This is liberal education as a training in pluralism—what some of us would today call hard pluralism, just as we speak of deep literacy. It forms habits essential to democratic life: listening across difference, reasoning in public, resisting the poles of cynicism and fanaticism. It is deeply political without being partisan. It precedes or transcends party affiliation and ideological sorting.
Abraham Lincoln forcefully articulated this necessity. In his Lyceum Address (1838), he argued that “sober reason” must replace passion as the animating force of American self-government if our system of government—“conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us”—was to endure. Such sober reason does not arise spontaneously. It requires formation. A liberally educated citizenry—however achieved—is a prerequisite for sustaining democracy and liberty.
The third challenge is technological. We inhabit a world of astonishing informational (and pseudo-informational) abundance and ipso facto collapsing attention, as has been well diagnosed by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Hayes, and others. Students arrive having spent more time on screens and less time with (whole, crafted) texts, extended arguments, or unmediated conversation. Many institutions respond by adapting pedagogy to these conditions.
What emerges is something increasingly rare: real faces, real voices, real conversation, seated around a table.
St. John’s has chosen resistance. Reading—usually whole—books and discussing them is a constant expectation. Mathematical demonstrations are worked through slowly. Phones and laptops are absent from classrooms. What emerges is something increasingly rare: real faces, real voices, real conversation, seated around a table, where we learn from and with those whose points of view are dramatically different from our own, using tangible, unhackable books as our principal “technology.” This increasingly appears to be a future-proof preparation for life in a digital age rather than a relic from the past.
It is striking that this view is shared not only by educators but, increasingly, by many tech leaders and futurists. Yuval Noah Harari has repeatedly warned that future societies will be defined less by information scarcity than by the struggle to preserve meaning, judgment, and human agency. Entrepreneurs such as Brendan McCord have argued that those building the technologies of tomorrow require philosophical and humanistic formation today. Recently, a New York Times journalist embedded with our students for a week as many undertook a “tech fast” reflecting this same spirit: a recognition that the most advanced tools demand more, not less, cultivation of the human faculties they cannot replace.
St. John’s stands within a distinctly American vision of liberal education shaped by both the promise and the crisis of modern mass democratic society. When Scott Buchanan, as dean, and Stringfellow Barr, as president, introduced this “New Program” in 1937, they did so amid global economic turmoil and rising totalitarianisms of the left and the right. Their turn to the Great Books was an act of civic seriousness. They believed democracy required citizens formed by sustained engagement with enduring questions of reason, justice, and the good life, especially at moments when ideological certainty proved dangerously seductive.
That same conviction animated the founding of the Santa Fe campus in 1964. The college’s western expansion came in the wake of a presidential assassination and amid deepening social unrest. When the campus opened, the dean’s first lecture warned that, unless serious conversation across differences about important matters could be cultivated through education, society would return to the barbarism of political violence. The Santa Fe campus was founded with the conviction that liberal education must continuously expand its reach and thereby sustain civility, pluralism, and political moderation.
Our alumni, undergraduate and graduate, include public figures across the political spectrum—journalists, thinkers, and civic figures such as Lydia Polgreen, Shilo Brooks, and Ben Sasse, among others. We do not aim to convert Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or progressives, atheists or believers. We do cultivate reflective, reasoned, empathetic—and, importantly, self-critical—conservatives and progressives alike.
I have waited until the end to say that, in recent years, our highly politically and socio-economically diverse campuses have not seen any protests worthy of the name. The largest protest I’ve seen in my twenty-two years at St. John’s College, as tutor, dean, or president, came several years ago: Students left class ten minutes early and sang Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus (a piece they study) to draw attention to the need for overdue raises for faculty. Such comity requires hard work and preparation. It is born not of groupthink but of the intimacy of shared inquiry and joyful learning across difference.
The seals of St. John’s capture these aspirations with austere clarity. The older seal (1793) declares, Est nulla via invia virtuti—“no way is impassable to courage.” The current seal (1937) restates our aim: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque—“I make free men of children by books and a balance.” Our aim is the intellectual or spiritual freedom that is both the peak and foundation of civic freedom. Together, our seals express claims about education and freedom: that liberty is cultivated, with difficulty, not assumed; that democracy depends on judgment; and that the liberal arts, rightly practiced, remain among the most powerful and resourceful instruments of human freedom we possess.
Walter Sterling is president of St. John’s College, “the Great Books college,” with campuses in Santa Fe and Annapolis. A graduate of St. John’s, he previously served as dean and tutor at the college. His writing and public speaking focus on liberal education, democracy, technology, and the formation of judgment, with essays appearing in outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and The Hill.