The last bit of hot coffee is cooling on the camp stove, while the big sky morning warms into the full day. Most of the kids have already set out from camp, hiking the puzzles of the canyons until the too-hot sun sends them back for lunch, and they strip down and leap into the fresh, chilling river. Mark’s at the campfire, the embers still burning from the night before, and the night before that, maybe longer. He’s quiet, his eyes attentive, his big mug filled with the last bit of hot coffee. There aren’t many chances to find Mark without a big audience. There’s an open chair next to him.
I’m having a hard time focusing what it is that I’ve been wanting to ask Mark. “I’m sort of amazed, Mark, that you’ve never criticized anyone in all the time I’ve known you. I’ve seen you get frustrated with people, and tell what problems their choices are going to lead to. But I’ve never seen you tell them their making a bad choice. Why don’t you?”
“It’s the doctor’s orders,” he says smiling. It’s the same smile that I remember from the year before, and the year before that, maybe longer. “It’s a choice I made a long time ago,” he continued, “to let people learn from their own experiences. I don’t take you guys out onto the river to tell you what to do or to decide for you whether the choices you make are the right ones.” He breaks out his joking, but well-tuned, Irish accent. “It’s what’s called a Hegelian dialectical transformative principle.”
But Mark really just calls it life. It’s his main teaching tool and really the most important one he has. Give him a river, ten days, and twenty students, and he’ll do more with this little wonder tool than a lot of teachers might hope to do in their careers.
“If you don’t give a person the chance to make their own decisions, they’re never going to be the kind of liberated adults St. John’s tries to shape. It can be hard to watch, sometimes, without interfering. But learning never befriended force. And it just makes life a lot more pleasant to laugh to oneself than to get up in arms over an idiot.”
This moment, the spark of a life-shaping conversation, I will not forget. I will not forget the tiny clouds that crossed the sun as Mark and I kept talking. I will not forget the sand pictures I drew while I listened as if my life depended on it. I will not forget the gentleness and sagacity of the humble man whom I sat with that morning. The funny thing is, this wasn’t the first conversation of this kind I’ve had with Mark. Over the years, I remember many more of them, each very powerful and enduring, all of them on the river.
The question I want to ask is twofold. First: Where does the College see itself going in the next five years? ten years? fifty years? What is its self-vision? What lies ahead for the community, which includes all of us? Second: How are we going to get there without sacrificing the vision?
But maybe the real question is this: Can the College really continue to achieve its goal of being a liberating arts college without the presence and role-modeling of people like Mark St. John? Can the College afford to lose such figures? Or what’s more: Can we afford not to set Mark’s heart, intelligence, concern and well-roundedness as the benchmark for every new staff and faculty member the College hires?
Jason Scott (‘05)
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Jason Scott's Letter to the College Community
Posted - 2006 August 16 : 17:00:03
