SARAH DAVIS AND DAVID CARL know something most of us have forgotten: that education isn’t about accumulating credentials, but about cultivating wonder. Sarah, as Dean of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, and David, as Associate Dean of Graduate Programs, have devoted their lives to a radical proposition — that reading Homer, arguing about Aristotle, and wrestling with Virginia Woolf isn’t preparation for life but life itself.
This June, something unprecedented will happen. For three days — June 12, 13, and 14 — St. John’s College has invited the Santa Fe Magazine Festival to take over their campus. St. John’s, perched in the hills with the mountains and sky as neighbors, has guarded its contemplative mission for decades. They have never opened their doors to an event like this.
You want your place of learning — of study, of changing and growing — to be something removed from the hustle of regular life. You want to take more than a passing shot at making sense of your life through the lens of geniuses who have paid you the compliment of writing down their thoughts. And you want that experiment both by yourself and with other people.
This is what Sarah and David have built on at St. John’s: a campus in the hills, where the neighbors are the mountains and the sky, where the buildings and the history of the place conspire to make learning not just possible but inevitable.
In the conversation that follows, Sarah and David explore what it means to learn across a lifetime: why rereading matters more than checking boxes, and how Santa Fe’s particular energy — that thing we all feel but can’t quite name —makes it the perfect setting for both their college and our festival. The Santa Fe Magazine Festival, June 12-14, is going to be the place you want to be.
Sarah, as Dean of St. John’s College, what are you trying to do?
Sarah: In other institutes of higher education, typically you have a professor who stands up in front of you and tells you what the book means or the condition of the world, or how to do something. What we’re aiming to do is to empower students to think for themselves. The idea is that what education really requires is more than a bag of knowledge.
That kind of empowerment means you’re a human being, and you have the capacity to think, to wonder, to inquire. The idea is to cultivate that as the grounds from which you come to know things. So you would show up in the classroom, and you don’t get to sit passively. You have to do the work.
Today, some education has been processed — made neat and tidy for easy consumption, versus food that comes out of the earth. Earth food doesn’t look quite as pretty, but it’s incredibly nourishing. So we want more of a non-processed education. Doing the processing is what learning is about.
David, what is unique about St. John’s?
David: When I started here 26 years ago, this was the perfect place for me. Susan Sontag says the notebook is the perfect literary genre for the student who wants to know everything. I think St. John’s is the perfect place for someone posing as faculty who’s really a student who wants to know everything.
We’re asked to teach everything from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the sonnets of William Shakespeare. How can you not be a student if those are the areas of your life?
Let’s talk about the idea of place, the university on a hill. What can you say about the physical place — this particular geography you have here?
Sarah: The entire property is 200 acres. The most important part of that is who our neighbors are: National Forest on three sides. We have this fascinating buffer of nature that will always surround us.
Is there something special, almost sacred about this place?
Sarah: I do think the work we do at St. John’s asks students to ask the deepest questions available to human beings about how they live their lives, about what it means to be human. The rigor of that work is located in the books we read — very difficult, extraordinary pieces of human creation that you can get lost in.
The surrounding area — the mountains, being surrounded by mountains and forest on three sides — I think we do talk about it being particularly conducive to, or reflective of, the kind of activity that really defines what we do here. That is to say, there’s what I think of as wandering and wondering.
That sounds a little soft, but I don’t think it is. I think that part of the human soul that can open up to these questions feels like the same kind of thing that one experiences on, you know, the top of Sun Mountain — a little tired and sweaty, the breeze comes across, and you’re sort of like, Oh my God, I’m here. I exist. I’m human. That kind of elevated — even sublime — experience is something that is true about the deep philosophical questions that we’re working on together. So it feels very well suited to the kind of work we do at the college.
David: I think the notion of the ivory tower or the college on the hill that’s isolated isn’t quite the full picture, because we’re providing young people, middle-aged people, older people with an opportunity to step back and sort of test themselves in their own thinking against the books that Sarah’s referring to. If you spend a few years or a few months or even just a week doing that, it seems to me that accrues to the larger benefit of the world you eventually reenter.
There’s something about an experience in nature that makes us feel connected, especially in this time and age when the pace of things is so fast and there’s so much technology and we’re constantly being distracted from ourselves, from our walk through life. I think we all feel it when we’re in the mountains — a kind of groundedness that transcends the pinging. There’s something — and at the risk of sounding cheesy, but I don’t think it is — an eternal character, a timeless character that really brings us back to ourselves and back to something that feels grounded and true and meaningful at a time where I think it’s really difficult to find that.
I think there’s a confluence, a similar pull toward something grand. And you have to be away from the maddening crowd to be able to do that.
It reminds me of the opening pages of Moby-Dick. After the famous sentence Call me Ishmael, it turns out Ishmael was teaching at a school and needs to get away. He was a teacher, and he says he’s exchanging the prestige of teaching and the respect of his students to go to sea. The first two pages are an extended meditation on why, as human beings, we are drawn to water. Water calls to us in a fundamental way. Well, we’re in the desert. So what stands in for water out here? It feels like the mountains, right? The mountains and the sky call to us. We’re built right up against the mountains.
Sarah: I ran into an alum who was here with me the first year I was teaching in Santa Fe, and she was talking about the intensity of Santa Fe. Whenever she comes back here, she’s reminded of a kind of energy that I think many people will say they haven’t quite felt elsewhere.
Your relationship to the city is important. You’re in a community where people’s jobs range from making clay into masterpieces to being involved in government. How do you think you should connect to the rest of us?
David: The tricky part about living in Santa Fe is it’s so many cities. Which city do we live in? Do we live in the city of the Trujillos and Rodriguezes, whose great-great-grandparents have lived here? Are we living in the city of people whose parents moved here from Mexico 20 years ago? Are we living in the city of the lowrider culture that’s leaking over from Española? Are we living in the city of the Canyon Road art galleries?
I mean, there are so many different communities existing side by side and kind of interpenetrating in rare opportunities. I feel like St. John’s is another part of that city looking for ways to interpenetrate when possible and searching for better ways to do that.
It’s the interaction between different worlds that I think creates this.
Sarah: I think there’s so much going on in Santa Fe, and St. John’s is a part of that. We invite people to think openly, to ask questions. We have community members more and more frequently come to our Friday night lectures and sit through the question period where our students are doing just that. They’re asking their most honest questions, often grounded in the books they’re reading, but it’s a lack of jargon. They’re just asking what they want to know of the lecturer. There’s this groundedness that once you’ve experienced a St. John’s classroom, I don’t think it has that above and separate from quality. It’s deeply human and deeply relatable.
David: I think we’re sometimes thought of, perhaps accused of, being elitist — small, prestigious, elite. I think in the cultural world we’re living in today, the word elitist is used in a condemnatory sense.
I think the way in which St. John’s College aspires to be elite is that we ask the very best of the people who join us. We demand effort, goodwill, intentionality. We’re not elitist in that we’re not for everybody. We open our doors to anyone who wants to participate in what we do here. But elitist in the sense that we ask a lot more than the sort of pandering world we live in, which wants to play down to people rather than lift people up.
So I think the kind of education we offer is simultaneously populist in the sense that it’s available for anyone who wants it, but elitist in that if you agree to engage with us, we ask of you what we ask of ourselves. And it’s a demanding and rigorous engagement. But I don’t think that’s an exclusionary kind of elitism. I think it’s an inclusionary kind of elitism. It’s radical.
This frames the question of how people continue to learn.
Sarah: I love being around young people because they’re ready. They’re somehow ready to break open to these big questions and take them really seriously.
And it’s going to form the person that they are for the rest of their lives. So that’s very exciting.
But the Graduate Institute has students that range — last year we graduated a 23-year-old and an 87-year-old. So that’s the range as of last year.
One of the things that I love is there’s a kind of student who comes to the Graduate Institute who’s really searching at a point in their life where they have done a lot of things and have sort of come across a longing. Their walk through the world, their job, whatever they’re up to, is not fulfilling, and they realize that they really want to go back to school. That relation to learning — a more mature relation to this longing for truth or for questioning — is a beautiful thing.
I think that group of students who come to us in this self-reflective way for the right reasons can be so nourished by what we do in the Graduate Institute.
David: I also think your relationship to these works changes as you get older. Sarah has heard me say this before, so I sometimes feel a little like a broken record, but I think about these things for young people and older people in terms of what I like to call means and ends.
Do we engage with these great works of literature, philosophy, art because they are means to an end, or are they an end in themselves?
Last night I left campus around 5 o’clock. I live out near Harry’s Roadhouse. The sunset was stunning. The sunset was so stunning I pulled over just to look at it. After 26 years of living here, the sunsets in Santa Fe still have that power. There’s no end to that kind of contemplation. I called my wife: Go out in the backyard. Look at the sunset.
I think works of art, works of literature — Macbeth, King Lear, Moby-Dick, Sophocles — can be like that. We just want the experience for its own sake. Young people have to engage in education to some extent as a means to an end. What’s the end? A career, meaningful life. The older we get, the more we have the freedom to treat our encounters with works of art as ends in themselves. It’s not a means to anything else.
I didn’t want anything from that time with the sunset except for that experience. It’s self-contained and its own reward. It’s not aimed at something else. And we live in such a utilitarian, pragmatic age where everything is supposed to lead to the next thing.
Santa Fe is a unique location for St. John’s.
Sarah: We’re not in the beating heart of the coasts of this country, we’re not in the big metropolitan areas. But is there a sense in which, insofar as our devices are tending to swallow more and more of our daily experience, it’s harder to forget the sky or to forget the mountains?
There’s a way in which, by standing outside the well-trodden path, there is something about having one foot in — certainly, because I have kids and they want to go to New York — but the idea of an environment in which we are both really invested in culture and learning and reading and all the things that you would find in these big metropolitan centers, but also we can’t quite escape the fact that the world is bigger than us. There is something grand about nature. Something about a kind of outpost-ness that is actually very nourishing.
I feel it particularly in this moment in time. The air is sharp. The sun is bright. That’s something particular about Santa Fe. We’ve all been drawn here, but we’re not here for strictly conventional reasons, because it wouldn’t make sense.
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IN-INTERVIEW PHOTO COURTESY ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
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