City: Santa Fe, NM

Category: Education

Telephone: (505) 984-6000

Address: 1160 Camino de la Cruz Blanca

Description: You won’t find any big lecture classes on this campus, and students don’t chew their nails over which electives to pick. Most of the course of study for a Bachelor’s of Arts is required and most of the work is done in small seminars. The student to faculty ratio here is 8–1. Instead of textbooks, students read the original writing of more than 100 philosophers, scientists, poets, mathematicians, storytellers, and composers. Over their four years of study, students take language and math, three years of laboratory science, a year of music, and seminars in philosophy, political science, literature, history, economics, and psychology.Established in 1964 in a lovely location near the eastern foothills, Santa Fe’s St. John’s is an extension of the school’s historic Maryland campus, founded as King William’s School in Annapolis in 1696. Only Harvard and the College of William and Mary have existed in the United States longer.St. John’s ranks in the nation’s top 30 colleges for producing graduates who go on to work on higher degrees, with those who earn Ph.D.s evenly split between the sciences and humanities. The campus offers intensive eight-week summer graduate programs in liberal arts and Eastern Studies. That unusual course includes the classical Chinese and Sanskrit languages and uses texts from India, China, and Japan to prompt student discussions. In the summer St. John’s offers its Classics Series, which brings a variety of nontraditional students to Santa Fe to discuss literature, philosophy, and opera.St. John’s invites the public to sample its approach during Community Seminar Day, held twice a year. Tutors, as faculty members are called, lead discussions on topics such as “Scientific and Religious Skepticism,” which used Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello and Descartes’ Meditation as its texts. The campus hosts numerous public events and performances. Readings and book signings, arts shows, lectures, concerts, and other events bring town and gown together here.