St. John's College

The raise does not impact this council, but it does the next.

Slash M, the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Museum at St. John's College is opening two new exhibitions this weekend.

Artist Miguel Braceli's Unburial is inspired by the Annapolis Liberty Tree.

That's the 400-year-old tulip poplar that once stood at St. John's and has served as a meeting place for the Annapolis Sons of Liberty before the revolution.

Any bets on the next move the city might take to discourage people from going downtown? First parking and now boating.

St. John's College has announced its fall lecture and performance series in Annapolis, with all programs free and open to the public, as they always are.

Most are going to be held on Fridays at 7.30 p.m. at the Francis Scott Key Auditorium in Mellon Hall, with seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

That capacity is at about 700.

I'm already there.

Ellen has also been published in numerous journals, and she had a wonderful production of her poetry that I saw at St. John's College.

How did that come together, Ellen?

Well, it was a It was a strange experience.

So right before that, I mean, that, that was kind of the way.

I'd grown up in Ohio, and I only applied to one school, St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.

And there you learn to translate ancient Greek.

You read all of the great books.

And so I was spending my days with Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, and you really start to take on that world.

You know, no one's allowed to have a TV at the school, so you really just start to live in, in what are ancient Greek principles.

And it was through that that I really started to see, you know, young people my age, they went to war.

Young men went to war.

Others on a house that was built for the governor but never was finished.

This governor's house afterwards became the main building of St. John's College.

A majority of the residences were of brick, substantially built within brick walls enclosing gardens in true English fashion.

Across the Potomac was Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, and the seat of William and Mary College, built partly of brick and partly of wood and resembling, it seemed to Lord Adam Gordon, a good country town in England.

Nothing was accomplished at the time, and as late as 1707, Governor Seymour could say that not one step had been taken for the encouragement of learning in Maryland.

The fact, however, that the school founded at Annapolis was called King William's School confirms the belief that a building was erected in 1701 before the king's death, though it is not unlikely that little or no progress was made during the first few years of its existence.

To this school, which was destined in time to grow into St. John's College, Benjamin Leonard Calvert left a legacy in 1733, and from that date, under the impetus of masters and ushers obtained from England, its career was prosperous and continuous.

On the other side of the bay, in Queen Anne County, a second school was established in 1723.

OK because it's it's something we we had to address.

And I went to graduate school at St. John's College, sort of the opposite of Hampshire down in Annapolis, and they went through the same thing.

It's a very small student body.

It's a very distinct type of education.

And so he had a bit of a born-on-third kind of upbringing.

Um, it afforded him the opportunity to enroll in Annapolis', uh, in Maryland there, uh, St. John's College.

Um, and, uh, i- imagine this, um, at the time, he was only 10 years old.

Which is crazy.

And there are blind spots, there are heinous things that have been done for the, for indefensible reasons, but there is a Western intellectual tradition that has led to some of what does or has worked for our nation.

And trying to understand that some people wanna bring back more of that sounds, particularly to me, having earned a master's from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, in the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, reading the great books of Western civilization, it, it sounds like a reasonable point of view.

And so I wanna learn more about where this conversation is happening, where it's not happening.

And, you know, it does have to do with can we as a nation find common ground? Because if we continue to go in completely different directions, I'm not exactly sure what our common future looks like.