Most prospective college students, as well as their parents and friends – most of my readers, I’d venture to say – start their investigation of different colleges on websites like Niche or College Board. On these websites, searchers filter colleges by major to help them find the right college for them.

This, of course, presents some difficulties for St. John’s. What does a Johnnie major in? It’s not as simple a question as you might think. For students at other colleges, it’s a question that can be often answered in one word – maybe two, maybe a few more if a student wants to include a minor or a double major in their answer.

At St. John’s, it’s not that simple at all. You could say we have “one major” (the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts), or even “no majors” (because our students don’t focus on one subject to the exclusion of others. It might be better to say that at St. John’s we have a “universal major,” but that isn’t an option on the college search engines like Niche!

As I said, Johnnies graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Within that major you would find enough credits at a more conventional college to call it a double major in History of Mathematics and Science and Philosophy (including metaphysics, ethics and political theory), as well as a double minor in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature. This sounds like a lot, but it still doesn’t even come close to encompassing the breadth of what we study here!

On our website, we list eight primary areas of study at St. John’s, including:
Classical Studies and Greek
French
History, Politics, Law, and Economics
Literature
Mathematics
Music and the Arts
The Natural Sciences
Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology

Across all these subjects, our core study is this: how did the knowledge we take to be correct today develop (from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, to modernity)?

This differs from a lot of philosophy courses that might narrow in on one era or topic, such as “the Pre-Socratics” or “Ethics for Engineers.” At St. John’s, our focus is never so much narrowed. The aim of our course is not to learn what this or that specific philosopher might have thought of specific questions, nor to learn only what can be applied to our pre-planned lives. The aim of our studies is, rather, to understand how each idea fits into the larger arc of societal knowledge and thought.

If we really wanted to put a name to the major all Johnnies study, we could perhaps call it “history and development of knowledge.” That’s not particularly snappy or searchable, though. So, instead, we call it “liberal arts,” or “philosophy,” or “History of Mathematics and Science and Philosophy.” None of which are completely accurate. But they come closer to making us understood in the wider landscape of higher education today, though they all fall just a little bit short. Maybe if we had more space, more time, more words to do it with, it would be easier for us to make ourselves correctly understood. St. John’s is a school with an affection for words, after all!

Which is part of what makes us also such a great place to study literature. How, you may wonder, does reading fiction fit into this pursuit of understanding the progress of knowledge? How does the Iliad or Middlemarch have a place alongside Anselm or Kant or Marx in understanding the overall arc of societal thought?

Literature can never be divorced from the context of the state of societal thought that gave birth to it. By looking at novels, poetry, and other texts that fall under the umbrella of “literature,” we can see the same sorts of thoughts and ideas as we would see in philosophy, psychology, or political theory, simply expressed in a different medium. We can see how those thinkers who came before us grappled with questions of class, mortality, the divine, and much more.

At St. John’s, all the many topics we study – broad and diverse as they may be – weave together to form parts of our sought-after answer to that larger question. No part of the St. John’s curriculum could be divorced from the others and still seen as whole. That is why we say we only have one major, even though we study what might look like many different topics: because they cannot be separated from one another, because they are all parts of a whole.