In 1982, St. John's College emeritus tutor Jim Tolbert was chosen to deliver the school's commencement day address. His remarks on that May morning were a master class on the nuances of the English language, the significance of speaking and writing it correctly, and more generally on learning and understanding. Tolbert believed that new college grads-but all of us, really-are judged by how they speak. And he drew a direct connection between writing well and speaking well, and emphasized the latter was shaped by the former. He told his commencement audience of college seniors, "But you must write in order to learn to write. Write as much as you can. Writers used to keep a 'commonplace book,' a sort of personal journal in which they wrote comments short and long on anything and everything, copied striking passages from their reading, recorded memorable events, and so on. Try it. Write enough to get into the habit of writing. If possible, get some qualified person to read and criticize your writing. You are so intelligent. With much writing and much study of writing, you can learn to write better, and your speech will get better and better as a consequence." Tolbert died in 1993, but his words have been preserved and shared and handed down by the students of that unique, venerable college located near the harbor in Annapolis, Maryland. St. John's is a nationally recognized model for liberal education in large part due to a unique curriculum centered around the Great Books Program. Nonsectarian from the start, the college began as King William's School in 1696 and was chartered as St. John's in 1784, making it the nation's third oldest college. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were among early supporters. The school's radical unified approach was and is based on the classics of Western thought and literature. Faculty members-called tutors, not professors-conduct seminars, tutorials, and labs through dialogue with small groups of students. There are no majors or electives, and all students follow the same course of study and submit a senior thesis. With a legacy reaching back three centuries and a curriculum that has changed little in nearly a century, the college continues to attract students and educators "passionate about the life of the mind."
