By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI26)

David O’Hara (SFGI00) wears a lot of hats as a professor at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he has worked for two decades. Not only is O’Hara a professor of philosophy, but he also founded and teaches in the college’s Environmental Studies & Sustainability and Classics departments. When O’Hara isn’t in the classroom, he is traveling the world conducting natural field research in Belize, Guatemala, and Alaska; participating in research, leadership, and writing fellowships domestically and abroad; and teaching humanities courses in the Mediterranean and Morocco. And in his spare time, he has taken classes in environmental law and Native American law between writing books on topics such as Appalachian ecology and C.S. Lewis’s views on environmentalism. That’s not even mentioning his proficiency in languages ranging from Spanish to Sanskrit. 

The trick to juggling so many disciplines, O’Hara says, is by approaching them not so much as an aspiring authority but as a willing pupil—a tenet he picked up long ago as a Master of Liberal Arts candidate at St. John’s Santa Fe. There, his tutors taught him and others a wide breadth of texts across the liberal arts by “showing up as the best student they could be,” O’Hara recalls. “This is something I took away from them: I can show up year after year, modeling what it looks like to not yet know these texts but to read them seriously.”

On paper, O’Hara is technically a card-carrying expert with a PhD and a master’s degree in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University. But like many Johnnies, his wide-ranging interests led him on an indirect path to academia. As a high school student in Woodstock, New York, O’Hara studied not one but five foreign languages. Middlebury College, known for its robust language department, seemed a natural fit, and he graduated with a major in Spanish.

For six or seven years after college, O’Hara and his wife, a fellow Middlebury alum, worked as college campus ministers in Vermont. But as O’Hara’s reading list grew, so did his curiosity. “We loved being around college students and hearing the big questions they ask,” he says. “And I found when we were doing that, I was constantly looking to philosophy and Great Books for answers to the big questions that the students were asking. Much more so than, say, the kinds of books you would read in seminary.”

O’Hara had briefly taken—and dropped—a single philosophy course in college, but he was due for a sabbatical at work and a professor he knew had recommended he check out the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in preparation for a potential PhD in philosophy. O’Hara requested a course catalog and liked what he saw: a lengthy list of primary sources with nary a secondary in sight.

During his undergraduate years, O’Hara had “learned how to talk about these [Great Books] as though I had read them when I hadn’t read them. We read things about the books. I was hungry to know what Aristotle had actually written. Looking at the Program at St. John’s, I realized just how much I didn’t know. Even if it didn’t get me into graduate school, spending two years reading these books was worth it for its own sake.”

O’Hara applied to the Santa Fe campus for a change of scenery; together with his wife and their three young children, they uprooted their lives and moved out West. With this new life came a radical shift in not just his surroundings but his pedagogical approach.

O’Hara previously read sections of Plato’s Republic, a mainstay Program text, but it “felt like we were dissecting the text instead of reading it,” he says “And then I showed up at St. John’s, and the tutor said something that I had never heard a professor say before: ‘I’ve read this text a number of times, and here’s something that I still don’t understand.’ I honestly don’t remember what it was that the tutor was pointing to because it was one of those jaw-dropping moments. And I realized at that moment that I was accustomed to thinking of professors as experts who knew everything. Here was somebody who was modeling for me what it means not to yet know.”

O’Hara’s sabbatical from his campus ministry ended up being permanent. “I wound up never going back to my previous job,” he says. “I just loved St. John’s so much.” He and his family did return East a couple of years later, where O’Hara completed his master’s and PhD in philosophy at Penn State with a focus on American Pragmatism; his dissertation was on scientist and mathematician Charles S. Peirce’s writings on Plato. Still, to this day O’Hara takes Santa Fe with him wherever he goes—which, following his doctorate, happened to be his present-day home of Sioux Falls, where he accepted an assistant position at Augustana College in 2005. He has since been promoted to full professor and served as department chair for Religion, Philosophy, and Classics.

Looking back on his three alma maters, O’Hara spent the shortest time at St. John’s College Santa Fe, but it is still “the one that made me the teacher I am,” he says. For that reason, he routinely steers his Augustana mentees toward St. John’s for graduate work—not just in the MALA, but in Eastern Classics as well. After all, O’Hara teaches not just ancient and American but classical Chinese philosophy. For him, it’s all part of a lifetime’s worth of learning.