In 2020, the Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion was charged by the Board of Visitors and Governors with determining whether there is more we can do as an institution to ensure that the college is a welcoming place for all, while preserving the uniqueness of St. John’s College. The Task Force members are all part of the college—alumni who have expertise relevant to this mission, tutors and staff members from both campuses, and members of the Board of Visitors and Governors. We represent a broad range of perspectives, cultural backgrounds, and lived experiences, but we are united in our dedication to the college and the Program.
We began our work with data gathering. One of the methods we chose was to distribute a survey to the college community. Along with other methods, including interviews and conversations with members of the college and alumni communities, data from large numbers of people give us a more objective starting point than our or any other individual’s personal impressions from which to recommend any action to the college. We delivered our internal report to the Board of Visitors and Governors, and in April, 2022 an extensive public statement resulting from the report was issued and can be found below.
As of June 2024, the work of the task force has been absorbed into various committees of the board. The below information includes an archive of the task force’s work.
Dear Campus Community,
We write to share thoughts on the work of the Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion, whose members recently reported to college and board leadership.
We believe the work of the Task Force, and our shared goals for the college, can most fully be understood in the context of the history of the New Program, which made us a radical college, committed to democratizing a form of learning that had previously been available only to the privileged few.
As cofounder of the New Program, Scott Buchanan said: “For various reasons the European citizen of the republic of learning would not have said that liberal education is for everybody.” Historically, liberal education was the education for “gentlemen.” The goal was clear: at St. John’s, liberal education would be for everyone who seeks it. Buchanan stated that this democratization is “the great revolutionary American contribution to our knowledge of what the liberal arts are.” In short, the most sublime themes and the deepest questions explored in a liberal education are not reserved for the few, nor for any section of society, but belong by right to all.
Since the New Program’s inception in 1937, St. John’s aimed at a liberal education that would strengthen the society of a democratic republic. To do that well, Buchanan believed the college needed to be broadly inclusive. Buchanan wrote that this is “the most glorious and most difficult proposition to which we are dedicated,” that each person “must have his measure of liberal education.” This belief was echoed by many subsequent college leaders. “A democratic society is incomplete if it denies liberal education to anyone prepared to receive it,” said President John Spangler Kieffer in his October 25, 1947, inaugural address. And this egalitarian conception of the college animated the form of our education: students and tutors sitting around a table, each facing the other, addressing one another as equals, and pursuing knowledge through shared conversation.
As time has passed, the college’s vision of what it means to offer its New Program to everyone who seeks it continues to expand, broadening the impact of the New Program’s egalitarian spirit. In 1938, Jacob Klein came to St. John’s, the first of several Jewish refugees from Europe to join the faculty, becoming dean in 1949. In 1948, St. John’s admitted its first African American student, Martin Dyer, becoming one of the first private colleges south of the Mason-Dixon line to integrate. Shortly thereafter, in 1951, the college admitted women as students and appointed women as faculty members. In 1967, the college launched the Summer Institute for teachers, which aimed to reach public school teachers, particularly from urban areas, which laid the seeds for the Graduate Institute.
St. John’s was a pioneer in offering financial aid to international students. By 2010 in Santa Fe and 2012 in Annapolis, at least 10 percent of the first-year class was international. Since then, the percentage of international students has soared, adding considerably to the diversity of the college. The current freshman class includes students from 22 countries, with more than one student each from China, South Korea, Germany, Ethiopia, Canada, and India.
As Dean Sterling wrote in an opinion piece published by the Los Angeles Times in 2019, the arrival of international students “is not just the most dramatic change in our students’ campus experience in the last 50 years—it’s a shift, or clarification, in the very meaning and purpose of liberal education… They are realizing and renewing the deep power and promise of higher education, and they are invigorating the college with an overdue ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Every day, they force our American students and faculty to revise an inherited map of the world into a more accurate and nuanced reflection of reality.”
Over the last several decades, the college recognized that offering our education to everyone who seeks it meant embracing a vision of ourselves as a “diverse” community, and our definition of what it means to be diverse grew to include race, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, faith, political philosophy, geography, socio-economic status, diversity of ideas, and more. As college leaders and faculty saw diversity yielding multiple benefits, achieving a diverse community became one of the goals of our admissions and recruitment efforts.
This vision has been articulated in accreditation documents and the college’s strategic plans. It was further affirmed in 2007 when the faculty voted to add this text to the introduction to the Statement of the Program:
The aim of the education offered by St. John’s College is the liberation of the human intellect. This is an education for all, regardless of a person’s race, sex, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or gender identity and expression. By reading great books and struggling together with the fundamental questions that they raise, students and their teachers learn from their differences and discover more deeply their shared humanity. In this and other ways, a diversity of background and experience enriches our community of learning. Because it offers an education for all, St. John’s College has sought and continues to seek to make its program of study known and available to people of diverse backgrounds.
Our notion of what it means to support a diverse community has also grown more robust. As we have enrolled students from many nations and vastly different educational, financial, and cultural backgrounds, and as the needs and demands of students from all backgrounds have changed, we have expanded and deepened our student support systems. And having established graduating a higher percentage of our students as a top college priority, the necessity of strengthening our support systems has become even more pressing.
In recent years, the Board of Visitors and Governors and college leaders have prioritized exploring whether the college successfully supports all segments of our ever-changing community. In 2017 the board formed the Campus Culture Committee (CCC) due to substantial alumni and student input that issues of gender and sexual misconduct needed examination.
The CCC found significant frustration and anger among female graduates of the college. They heard claims of sexual misconduct that had not been addressed and evidence of inadequate follow-through on the part of college officers. The CCC made significant recommendations, which have since been implemented, for policy and structural changes to better address sexual misconduct and potential gender bias amongst college constituencies. Based on extensive input from alumni and current students, the committee also recommended that the college further explore the experience of students, in particular women, students of color, and LGBTQ students.
In November 2020, the Board of Visitors and Governors appointed a Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion to further our understanding of how students from different backgrounds experience the college. Task Force members include alumni of many races, cultures and religions, tutors, college staff and members of the board. As a group they represent a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints. They shared with us that what they have in common is their love for the college, its educational mission, and the Program. Their work was rooted in the college’s mission to offer liberal education through great books to all who seek it.
And, indeed, the Task Force did not advocate for changes to the Program or changes to the process by which the faculty oversees and modifies the Program as prescribed in the Polity; they found that even among those who reported bias and discrimination to the Task Force, there is strong support for the college’s Program of Instruction.
We share the Task Force’s deep commitment to ensuring that we are welcoming and supportive to all who join our community.
In some ways, the college has lived up to our ideals. Significantly, the Task Force discovered that most students from diverse political and religious backgrounds find the college community to be welcoming and supportive. Also, it is worth noting that the percentage of Pell Grant students that we serve continues to grow—over the last five years, the Pell average for the entering fall class is 25 percent. On gender issues, the Task Force found significant evidence of progress. Following the implementation of many CCC recommendations and the work of many at the college, female students are less likely to have observed or experienced bias than they were five years ago—a positive sign that we can effectively address campus climate issues when we make intentional efforts to do so.
But we are very concerned that far too many of our students and alumni of color report feeling unheard and unsupported by the college, which complicates their ability to take full advantage of the opportunities that the Program and college offer. Most immediately this is what we and the members of the Task Force seek to address.
Issues for these students include:
We recognize, as did the Task Force, that the college has attempted to address many of these issues but not with ongoing or sustained success. The college is now engaged in many initiatives to address the above issues. Many of these initiatives are new, and have been influenced by the Task Force’s work, and some have been ongoing. These include:
Financial Support and Access
The college’s tuition reset, which cut tuition by a third, makes the college more affordable for low- and middle-income students. When you add in the Pritzker-funded Pell Grant match and an already generous aid program, the college has made great strides in providing ongoing financial support for financially at-risk students, many of whom are students of color.
Board and Donor-Led Initiatives
The Visiting Committee has focused on understanding the college’s low student retention rates, especially among students of color, and provided recommendations on how to make improvements. The board has created a College History Task Force, which is charged with researching the college’s past to better understand its historical relationship to Indigenous and enslaved peoples. In addition, multiple donors to the college have earmarked their donations toward important diversity and inclusion initiatives.
New Structures, Positions, Programs, and Resources
The college has restructured offices to create programs and positions that will make the college a more welcoming and supportive place for students from underrepresented backgrounds. These include:
From the Admissions Office:
From Student Life / Student Support Offices:
From the Dean’s Offices:
We embrace this work because it is our ethical obligation and also for practical reasons. In 1937, when the New Program was founded, America was 88 percent white, and a vast majority of college students were white males. Today America is 58 percent white, women significantly outnumber men at liberal arts colleges, and, perhaps most importantly, the majority of under 18-year-olds in the United States are non-white. Demographic trends make clear that we will continue to enroll more students of color, which, if nothing changes, will mean more students who struggle to find their place in our community.
The good news is that this does not need to be.
We aspire for St. John’s to enroll and support students of all backgrounds and also continue to be the force for freedom that Buchanan intended the New Program to be. Indeed, as we know from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, liberal education, at its best, has this power. Roosevelt Montás, former director of the Center for Core Curriculum at Columbia University, and author of Rescuing Socrates, has expressed his fear that the liberal education that fostered his own personal growth, now “threatens to retreat to bastions of privilege, with technical, vocational, and professional education, much of it online, for everyone else.” And Cornel West argues that “Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness run amok in American culture.”
And Graduate Institute alum and Task Force member Anika Prather told NPR, “The study of classics … is so interwoven into American history and life, that to remove it, we remove a piece of ourselves … and so, if you cancel it … then can you even understand all of the great history makers we so revere? Can you understand the Constitution? Can you understand the makeup of the government?”
As Montás notes in his recent book, “My being a brown immigrant from the Dominican Republic does not make the constitution less relevant to me than it is to my wife, a white woman born in rural Michigan. She is no closer to and no further from Homer and Socrates than I am or than our 2-year-old son will grow up to be.”
As more institutions retreat, we want St. John’s to stand out as an exemplar of continued commitment to the notion that liberal education should be on offer for—and empower—all who seek it. And it is clear that such seekers are to be found in all nations, among all ethnicities, and all races.
St. John’s is rooted more deeply than any other institution in the ideal of liberal education, an ideal that for us is inseparable from the effort to support, sustain, and ennoble democracy. The attempt to overcome obstacles to full participation in this educational community is inextricably bound up with the goal of sustaining and improving our democratic society.
The college has always aspired to an ideal that invites people from all backgrounds, with exceptionally diverse experiences and opinions on the most fundamental questions, into a shared conversation—one in which we learn from our differences, and learn about our shared humanity, even as we continue to hold differing views. Our present work is continuous with this long-standing, deep, abiding, and always challenging ideal.
We commit ourselves to validate, recognize, and support the good faith efforts of so many at the college, including alumni who have given so much of their time and care, to advance these goals. This should not be lonely work, off in the corners, for individuals who question the existence of broad institutional support. It is time that our students, our faculty, our staff, and our alumni know that we hear their concerns, honor their efforts, and celebrate progress, even as we recognize that there is much more work to do.
As we do this work, as we make progress, we can take satisfaction in knowing that our efforts further advance the vision of the New Program’s cofounder and inaugural dean Scott Buchanan in bringing democratic ideals to life, in furthering the inner freedom of intellectual inquiry, together as members of a welcoming, supportive, and caring community.
Mark Roosevelt, President, Santa Fe Nora Demleitner, President, Annapolis Walter Sterling, Dean, Santa Fe Joseph Macfarland, Dean, Annapolis
The survey working group of the Task Force has completed its analysis of the results of the survey distributed in October of 2020.1 We summarize the data here2 and identify the next steps in our work, and we will let you know how you can engage with us as we move forward.
While St. John’s provides a truly unique educational experience, the college, like other institutions of higher learning, also reflects issues faced by society as a whole.
1The Task Force thanks Alethea Scally on the Santa Fe campus for help in survey distribution and Xiuyuan (Flora) Zhang (A17) (MA in computational social sciences, University of Chicago) for initial data analysis.
2We focus on student and alumni responses here. Responses from tutors and staff make up about 13 percent of responses and are being considered along with other data that has been gathered by the policies and procedures working group.
The survey working group of the Task Force created a survey using questions taken directly from the University of Chicago Campus Climate Survey conducted in 2016 (material used with permission) and from similar surveys at other institutions of higher learning. Some questions were reworded specifically for the St. John’s context and some additional questions were added. Hanover Research, which is already contracted with the college on other matters, distributed the survey and anonymized the data so that neither the Task Force members nor the college have access to the identity of any respondent. The survey was developed, administered, and the data analyzed at no charge to the college.
We had a robust response rate, and approximately one-third of responses were from current students3 and from alumni who graduated in the last six years (Table 1). In addition to current and recent students, we received completed surveys from approximately half of the faculty and staff. In total, 45 percent of respondents were current members of the community. We therefore conclude that the data give us good coverage of the current and recent college community on both campuses. The remaining responses from older alumni (55 percent of the total) allow us to determine whether there was anything about the culture that may have changed over decades. Importantly, the demographics of respondents along race and gender lines match well to the distribution in the community of alumni and students.
BIPOC: Black Indigenous and other People of Color
3Approximately 50 percent of the current students who were sent links completed the survey. Freshmen were not emailed links because the survey was conducted in the fall, shortly after the term started. A very small number of freshmen were sent links after requesting them.
The results tell us that there are some things about our community that are unique. There are also many things regarding attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, and other factors that are very similar to other institutions of higher learning and may represent the way in which these institutions provide a mirror of the society in which they are embedded.4 As with many surveys on diversity conducted at other institutions, we find that individuals who are members of majority groups report a more positive experience as compared to their minority or under-represented peers. Men see the college as less sexist than women and gender minorities. White respondents see the college as less racist than those who are members of racial or ethnic minorities (BIPOC). These patterns repeat across groups (older alumni, more recent alumni, current students, tutors, and staff).
We asked respondents about any incidents of bias or harassment they had experienced at the college. Of recent alumni and current students, the percentage of BIPOC respondents who reported at least one incident of bias or harassment was higher than that of white respondents (Figure 1). (The statistics from older alumni are similar.) This pattern was the same for international student respondents, 73 percent of whom identify with at least one non-white racial category. Incidents of bias or harassment around political or religious beliefs were relatively low in number compared to other categories—12 percent reported religious bias and 14 percent reported political bias. Among recent and current students, these reports split along ideological lines. Judging from comments submitted, there are approximately equal numbers of religious and non-religious and equal numbers of conservative and liberal respondents who have felt bias along these lines.
One may ask whether anything can be done about the way people interact, if the types of bias reported in the survey data reflect society as a whole. In other words, can the college community counteract what is part of society generally? Interestingly, there is an indication that efforts in the past three to four years to restructure reporting and oversight of sexual harassment and gender bias may be having a positive effect. Gender bias reports in the survey data by current female students are 15 percent fewer than those by recent alums, representing a 27 percent drop in reporting of gender bias for the current time period relative to 2015–20 (Figure 2). The effect is similar on both campuses.
Of those survey respondents that reported incidents of bias or harassment, we asked about what actions they considered in response to those incidents. The three actions we consider to represent the most negative student experience are leaving the college, transferring to another school, and not recommending the college. The percentages of domestic BIPOC students and alumni who reported these very negative outcomes is nearly twice the percentage reported by white and international respondents (Figure 3). This imbalance likely also explains the higher rates at which these students leave St. John’s without graduating. This reflects a nationwide trend, which has been reversed in recent years at some elite institutions.5
4A recent Pew report describes attitudes about bias in the U.S.
5Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and Native American students graduate at lower rates than white students nationally.
There are some notable exceptions that depend on the institution.
Narrative comments give us more detail on the source of positive and negative experiences. Among the approximately 1,400 individual narrative comments, we also received many general comments about the survey, D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) work, and the Task Force.
Some members of the campus community have told us they are concerned that the sole or main purpose of this work may be to change the Program. However, across all demographic groups, of all the possible suggestions that the survey explicitly listed for the community’s consideration, changing the Program was one of the least supported of the initiatives. Among the listed suggestions, respondents ranked as the highest priority initiatives to increase the diversity of the faculty, staff, and student body. One of the most common suggestions in the narrative responses was to encourage and support deeper and more honest conversations around issues related to diversity and inclusion, so that all members of the community have the best possible experience at the college.
Some respondents offered suggestions about possible changes to the Program. These suggestions will be passed on to the Instruction Committees on each campus. As stated in the Polity, these faculty committees are solely responsible for considering any changes to the Program. The Instruction Committees have made periodic additions to the Program after careful study and deliberation and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Some of the more recent additions are W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to seminar and tutorial curricula.
Another concern was that the tutors might be constrained in how they run the classroom or that the mode of education might be dictated by restrictions imposed from above on how people are permitted to speak. Most respondents who offered comments on the way that the classroom operates did not ask that conversations be constrained by rules other than those that already govern the classroom. Rather, we received thoughtful expressions of a desire to ensure that the St. John’s classroom experience serves the broader community of students.
There were some respondents that questioned whether the Task Force is just for show and challenged the college to do better than it has in the past concerning issues of diversity and inclusion. We can assure all in the community that this Task Force is committed to its mission and that recommendations that will come out of this self-study are being crafted in consultation with all parts of the college community, with the best interests of the college and the Program up front. In particular, the tutors in our group have worked hard to engage with their colleagues on the faculty and are full partners in this work, and we are meeting with student representatives and others.
In summary, the survey data suggest that while the ideal of the St. John’s College classroom should operate free of cultural or other types of bias, respondents report that it does not always live up to this ideal in practice and not all students feel equally welcome at the college. This opinion expressed by respondents is supported by the lower rates of retention for BIPOC students as compared to white students at St John’s. One might fear that we cannot hope to fix a problem whose cause may be largely rooted in systemic societal issues, but we have reason to be optimistic, since the college has already accomplished some positive work on that front as regards female students (Fig. 2) and the Santa Fe campus was recently recognized as a First-Gen Forward college for its commitment to supporting first-generation college students.
The policies and procedures working group of the Task Force has spent the past months doing extensive interviews with staff, deans, and students on both campuses, so that we can better understand what policies and procedures are in place for everything from human resources to the student health center. We have been discussing classroom dynamics, with tutors playing a large role in these discussions, and we are examining the ways in which interactions on campus can be healthy, productive, and supportive to all members of the community. We are now in the process of considering and formulating recommendations for St. John’s to be delivered at the June board meeting. We are meeting with student representatives from both campuses and are open to hearing from all in our community.
The task force membership has been selected both for expertise and for representation. All of our alumni members are professionals with relevant skills for this work (read everyone’s bios below). Even with a large group of nearly 20 people, there are of course places where we may not have gathered enough skills or representation. There is much work to be done, and we have reached out and will continue to reach out further to the community for help in some of our work.
The first phase of our work (late summer through mid-fall) is data collection. This involves surveying our community and interviewing individuals on both campuses (see summary of response rates below). We have distributed and collected data from a survey distributed widely to our community, and we have received a robust response, far above the values typically seen for surveys of this kind. What we know from this is that our community wants to be heard. Our data collection is now expanding with targeted discussions and listening sessions with small groups of students and in the coming two months will encompass talks with small groups of tutors and staff. Data from the survey will be analyzed and consolidated into an interim survey report that will be available to the community in early January.
The second phase of the work is data analysis and developing recommendations for consideration by the BVG and the college (late fall–late winter). In this process, we will work with many individuals in all areas of campus leadership, campus service and infrastructure, and academics (tutors and students). We welcome community input at any stage of this process, which can be submitted to the email address taskforces(at)sjc.edu or via our task forces feedback form (NB: the form allows for anonymous feedback).
The final phase of the work will be a full report and final recommendations to be delivered to the BVG next June. This will also be developed with ample input from all groups of stakeholders on each campus—Presidents, Deans, Tutors, Students, and Staff.
The Taskforce was charged with determining whether there is more we can do as an institution to ensure that the college is a welcoming place for all, while preserving the uniqueness of the St. Johns education. We do not envision any set of recommendations being a one-size-fits-all response that comes off the shelf from another institution. Any proposals we may make will need to make sense for St. John’s. We look forward to being in conversation with you over the next several months.
The Survey working group in the Task Force created the survey using questions taken directly from the University of Chicago Campus Climate Survey conducted in 2016 (material used with permission) and from similar surveys at other institutions of higher learning. Some questions were reworded specifically for the SJC context and some additional questions were added. We aimed at a broad survey. To understand comprehensively the level of diversity and inclusion at the college, it was important to collect information about experiences at the college in connection with class, religion, political ideology, sexual orientation, and gender, as well as race and ethnicity. Hanover Research, who is already contracted with the college on other matters distributed the survey and anonymized the data so that neither the Task Force members nor the college have access to the identity of any respondent. Finally, and importantly, the survey was developed, administered, and the data analyzed at no charge to the college.
BIPOC – Black Indigenous and other People of Color
The survey was released on October 1 and closed on October 19. Over 1,400 respondents filled out one or more of the narrative response questions, and 384 respondents filled out contact information at the end to ask to be contacted by a member of the task force. We are currently sorting through these requests. If you submitted your contact information, you should have received a follow up email from taskforces(at)sjc.edu.
We obtained response rates of over 50% from tutors, staff, and students on both campuses, and a 12.5% response rate from alumni, most heavily centered on alums from 2005–2020. These numbers give us confidence that we have a large representation from the communities most likely to give us the most current information. We chose to collect data from older alums to understand what issues may have changed over the decades and what issues have stayed the same.
