November 14, 2024 | By Jennifer Levin

When tutor Sarah Davis assumed the Santa Fe deanship in summer 2023, she was determined to serve as a bridge between faculty, students, and administration. So, as the campus began celebrating its 60th anniversary earlier this year, Davis looked to its founding ethos for guidance, seeking inspiration in an era in which students are crucially engaged in building traditions and creating Santa Fe’s Johnnie culture. 

“There’s an openness that’s been built into the Program,” she says. “We encourage people to drop expectations of what conversation should look like and tap into something deeper, more authentic. When the college moved West, this kind of experimentalism and spontaneity were in its DNA.”

To that end, the Dean’s office has hosted numerous autumn events and initiatives that elucidate the past for today’s students, faculty, and staff. Davis has also increased student involvement in campus decision-making: students recently elected a representative from each class to sit on the Dean’s Advisory Committee alongside four tutors and representatives from student government and the Student Committee on Instruction.

“My intention is to really hear the students. Having them in the room with tutors reflects the collaborative way the college would like decisions to be made,” Davis says. “Students always have thoughts about the dining hall and the dorms, but they might want to talk about the Program, too. We’re going to see what it means to better understand those interests and concerns.”

Davis enthusiastically supported a temporary student gathering spot on the Meem Placita amid the Pritzker Student Center’s ongoing renovations, which the college expects to cut the ribbon on in early 2026. Students erected an event-style tent and filled it with secondhand couches and floor pillows, hung curtains, and even hauled in a piano.

Sophomores, who had been reading the Bible, named the space the Tabernacle. Johnnies hold study groups there, share meals, and even indulge in the occasional nap. “We’re taking advantage of this construction to be more creative about how we inhabit campus,” Davis says. “It’s been really fun.”

Despite the growing cold this fall semester, students are still flocking to the Tabernacle, as it provides students with a sense of ownership over their environment, says Malcom Morgan-Petty, Santa Fe’s associate director of student engagement. And it’s part of a growing trend.

“It’s their community, and they want to take care of it,” Morgan-Petty says. “In the past few years, we’ve seen a real increase in students seeking leadership positions, as well as in serious follow-through. They don’t just suggest change—they’re making it happen.”  

As Santa Fe Johnnies are busy building the campus’s future, a new art and history exhibition in a construction-free section of the Pritzker Student Center sheds light on the past. Western Bound: 60 Years of Great Books in the High Desert showcases building plans, newspaper clippings, student publications, and other items from campus archives. It also features testimonials on campus customs and traditions, some of which began in Annapolis and others unique to Santa Fe.

Veronica (Chuck) Tucker, who serves as both campus art gallery coordinator and assistant to the dean’s office, curated the exhibition alongside student gallery assistant Ana Jaime (SF25). Tucker was surprised to discover just how involved students were in creating events, publications, and other aspects of campus culture in earlier eras. It’s the kind of vested energy the Dean’s Office would love to cultivate. “The idea was to capture the zeitgeist of the Santa Fe campus, and how it was sort of radical to have a college in the middle of the desert when they’d had this college in Maryland for 200-something years,” Tucker says. “Part of my hope with this exhibition is to elevate a [student] life outside of the Program.”

One of Davis’s favorite parts of Western Bound is a promotional recording made by radio host Myles Jackson in 1967 that opens with a student singing the beginning of Plato’s Meno. “He does it in English, and then the guy asks if he can do it in Greek, so he sings it in Greek,” she says. Jackson also chatted with students in the campus coffee shop, who told him that when they first arrived, they were so immersed in conversation that they didn’t sleep for a few days.

The same up-all-night phenomenon happens with every freshman class, and Davis wants to make sure today’s students know how strong this thread is tying together past and the present at St. John’s. “I want them to recognize themselves in this tradition, to understand that they are part of a legacy, and a human mission that has always driven this place,” she says.

Keeping legacy in mind, the Dean’s Office has hosted a series of unrelated events over this past semester meant to connect today’s students to the evergreen ideas considered by tutors throughout the decades. In one lunchtime lecture-reading series, students presented vintage Friday Night Lectures and essays on provocative subjects, such as Jacob Klein’s “History and the Liberal Arts” from 1953, in which he deconstructed the idea of history and made sense of why it stays at the fringes of the St. John’s classroom.

On the faculty end, a special tutor-hosted panel explored what it means to be in conversation together in the age of artificial intelligence. “The tutors were pretty suspicious about how AI might influence the work we do here, but some students pushed back,” Davis recalls. “They defended using AI for translation, but collectively we agreed that using AI to understand Hegel, for instance, just won’t work. You have to struggle with that on your own, and with each other. That’s always been the task.”

St. John’s academic culture can be all-consuming, so in an age in which solo screen time is rampant, the college has revived and renewed efforts to connect students to the Santa Fe community. Morgan-Petty coordinates an annual service-learning event called “Community in Focus Day,” which is held at the end of student orientation before the first day of fall classes. This past fall, more than 100 Johnnies cleared trails and enacted fire prevention measures in the wilderness areas around campus, and also worked with Santa Fe nonprofits including Habitat for Humanity, the Santa Fe Humane Society, and Reunity Resources, an environmental organization that focuses on farming and composting.

“I thought it was refreshing to have an activity that got my hands in the dirt, and I loved knowing that my service was going towards a great cause,” says Raena Cole (SF25), who weeded beet plants at Reunity Resources. “We do so many highly mental activities, yet there’s this physical component for balance that we could grow as a school.”

At the end of the day, Davis says, it’s all about connecting students with the deeper—and ongoing—project that’s St. John’s College. It also means telling the campus’s story through time, as well as understanding just how timely it remains.

“The Program has a real intellectual and cultural legacy that they are part of, and right now, the essence of the Program is something people in all walks of life are actively craving. I don't think we can underestimate the extent to which people feel isolated by technology, by politics, by all the crises that fill the news,” she says. “St. John’s knows well that going back to the basics—picking up a book, reading and reflecting, talking and laughing, simply being together in real time—is where we begin to remember the grounding forces that make life meaningful.”

Paying homage to this ethos, eight students held an event at the Olive Rush Studio & Art Center in early September during the Canyon Road Walk, a civic engagement initiative that draws city residents to special programs along Santa Fe’s famed stretch of art galleries. Students read selections from Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude, Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” and “Walk ‘Bout” by Kwame Dawes, among other works. After each poem, readers either presented the audience with an opening question or asked them to provide one.

Dozens of Johnnies were in attendance, according to event organizer Sanyum Dalal (SF25). “It was like having an open class that lasted three hours, with participants coming and going,” Dalal explains. “We stayed so long that we actually missed dinner on campus. We were discussing how when you get truly absorbed in something or someone, you can’t be interrupted—which we determined is commonly referred to as the flow state. It’s funny because we hit that flow state in our dialogue.”

Davis described the evening as a beautiful expression of what Johnnies do in the classroom and says it shows just how much St. John’s students have to offer the Santa Fe community. “For three hours, people put down their phones and talked to each other about meaningful questions—about human life and death, about nature, about existence, about love. The kind of connection and purpose that conversations like this can bring forth is something the world really needs today,” she says.