"Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language..."

"... not Greece, the civilization, though you’ll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There’s no choice in the matter. There’s little choice, period. Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it’s Kant. You have no major, only 'the program,' an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed."

From "The Most Contrarian College in America/What’s the highest calling of higher education? St. John’s College has some enduring answers" by Frank Bruni (NYT).

Bruni takes care to say "The degree to which “the program” omits the intellectual contributions of women and people of color troubles me." But clearly he loves the school, which he visited. He noticed 3 "dynamics":

The first was how articulate the students were. Something wonderful happens when you read this ambitiously and wallow in this many words. You become agile with them.

The second was the students’ focus. A group discussing Homer’s “Iliad” spent more than 10 minutes on the phrase — the idea — of someone having his “fill of weeping.”...

The third dynamic was their humility. They weren’t wedded to their initial opinions. They weren’t allowed to be. And they moved not toward the best answer but toward better questions. In the “Iliad” and in life, is there any catharsis in revenge? Any resolution in death? Does grief end or just pause? Do wars?

ADDED: The comments at the NYT are excellent. The top-rated one is beautiful:

My sister went to St. Johns' in Annapolis, and became a high-powered lawyer. I remember two things she said to me about the experience.

First, even though there aren't any composition classes, she learned to write with clarity and power. You write a substantial essay each semester on one of the books, and then, instead of getting it back with a letter grade and a few remarks scribbled at the end, the teachers sit down with you and ask you about the implications of your ideas. This conversation goes a lot better if you've written clearly and forcefully. It's a powerful incentive to develop those skills.

Second, law school -- which everyone told her was so difficult -- turned out to be easy. "Try reading Kant and Hegel," she said. "After that, law books are easy."

Full disclosure: I went to St. John's, too. Later, I got a PhD in Philosophy, and taught at a few schools. But the whole time, I missed the energy and intensity of life at St. John's. The life of an ordinary academic, where you have little time for your students, where research and publication is always the top priority, and where your true peers are not at your institution, is a thin substitute for what undergrad education had led me to yearn for. Eventually, I came back to St. John's, and have been teaching here for the last couple of decades. Now, my top priority is my students, and my most important, most intense and energetic conversations are with them. I wouldn't give it up for any other job.

And the second-highest-rated one made me cry:

When we were visiting prospective colleges, I bribed my son to visit St. John’s. (I promised lunch in nearby Washington, DC).

Having gone on tours of multiple colleges, we had developed stock questions to ask admissions officers, including “What’s the ideal [Name of College] student?” Most of the responses were stock answers performed in front of a crowd of parents and students.

At St. John’s it was just my son and me sitting across from two Admissions officers for over an hour. (We didn’t even have an appointment.) When I pulled out this stock question, “What would you say is the ideal St. John’s student?” the Admissions officers took her time turning the question over in her mind and thoughtfully replied, “I’d say St. John’s is for the intellectually courageous.”

I watched as my son sat up taller.

We spent two more hours touring the campus with an enthusiastic “Johnny” as our guide. Lunch time came and went. My son was smitten. He fell in love with St. John’s and graduated four years later. His passion for “the program” has never wavered.

Every time I'd visit, he’d take me for his own version of a tour of this magical place, unpacking and relating all he'd learned.

My favorite was standing in front of a series of framed mathematical proofs. His explanations became more expansive and incisive with each visit—from Euclid to Ptolemy to Copernicus to Apollonius to Galileo to Newton to Lobachevski.

The four years passed quickly, but this education is timeless.

What made me cry? "Intellectually courageous" and the son's reaction to those words.