Booked Up : At Thomas Aquinas, Education Means Studying the Classics

It is 7 p.m. at Thomas Aquinas College and Machiavelli holds sway in a moonlit classroom, just as he did 450 years ago in the intrigue-filled court of a Florentine prince.

In this room, however, there are no critical antheologies, no lectures, no teachers.

There is only Machiavelli’s essay, “The Prince”; a tutor and 14 students, grappling with good and evil on a mountain meadow halfway between Ojai and Santa Paula.

“A prince needs to be street-wise and opportunistic to maintain power,” one student begins, suggesting that Machiavelli applied different rules of behavior to rulers and common men.

Immediately, another student objects.

“Miss Ayre, I don’t agree with what you just said. You didn’t cite anything from the text.”

So it goes at Thomas Aquinas, one of just a handful of colleges nationwide where students earn a liberal arts degree by reading solely what their schools deem the Great Books--classics that reflect Western civilization from 2,500 B.C. to the early 20th Century.

Students at Thomas Aquinas learn physics from Einstein, calculus from Newton, evolution from Darwin. They study Freud’s view of the psyche, they learn chemistry from Lavoisier and genetics from Mendel. They read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations. And, of course, they read St. Thomas Aquinas, the 12th Century Italian saint whom the Roman Catholic Church considers its most enlightened teacher, philosopher and theologian.

“We read only the greatest minds and the greatest works in every discipline,” the college’s Dean Thomas E. Dillon said.

Added Admissions Director Thomas J. Susanka, in a paraphrase of British author C.S. Lewis: “There are zillions of books about Plato, all of them infinitely more complex than Plato himself.”

The curriculum at Thomas Aquinas borrows heavily from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md, which in 1937 became the first college to base its curriculum exclusively on the Great Books.

On the eve of World War II, educators believed such programs “would sweep the country,” recalled St. John’s Dean Thomas J. Slakey.

While that hasn’t happened, several schools today--including St. Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif., Brooklyn College in New York and Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind.--have emulated St. John’s by adding courses or programs in the Great Books.

Such moves win laurels from education reformers.

How to Think

The classics “teach students how to think and pursue the truth,” said educator and scholar Mortimer J. Adler. “All colleges in which the great books are read are better than any others in the country.”

A growing number of students apparently agree. At Thomas Aquinas, the freshman class has increased by 38% since 1986; At St. John’s, admissions have jumped more than 45% in two years.

Some educational scholars see this as a boon: In 1984, William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, issued a report calling for widespread reform in liberal arts education. His study, called “To Reclaim a Legacy,” deplored the fact that in roughly three-quarters of all American colleges and universities, it was possible to obtain a bachelor’s degree without studying European history, American history or American literature.

High Ranking

The high academic standards at Thomas Aquinas have not escaped those who rate colleges. In 1987, the Wall Street Journal ranked it one of the top colleges with annual tuition of less than $8,000 and with admissions standards among the top 4% nationally. (Tuition has since been raised to $8,580.) Barron’s College Guide lists Thomas Aquinas as one of the most academically competitive schools in the nation.

The school enrolls 150 students. It lies on 135 rolling acres off California 150, watered by natural springs that flow into the Santa Paula Creek and ringed by the mountains of the Los Padres National Forest.

Pensive students can follow miles of dirt trails into fern-lined groves of redwood and oak. Here the water that gurgles in stone ponds and the occasional rustle of lizards or birds provide the only distractions.

This fecund paradise contrasts sharply with the spartan, modular buildings that sit on the grassy knolls. The school has but one permanent facility, a neo-Spanish colonial commons where students eat meals to the strains of a classical piano. Construction of the first, 44-bed dormitory is under way, but for now students live, segregated by sex, in beige-and-brown modular dorms.

Automatic Expulsion

Visiting between dorms, or bringing alcohol or drugs onto campus, results in automatic expulsion. Women must wear skirts or dresses to class; men cannot wear T-shirts. Students address each other as “Miss” and “Mr.”

For all these students care, though, they could be huddled in cold caves wearing bearskins. They are here for the books, the moral underpinnings and the intense friendships--and sometimes marriages--forged in this cloistered caldron.

In an educational system where only 20% of those who start college finish four years later, Thomas Aquinas graduates almost 70% of its students.

All students must begin as freshmen, despite the years they might have put in at other colleges. A handful of those entering Thomas Aquinas even have earned bachelor’s degrees from other schools. Occasionally, a freshman possesses a master’s degree.

Returning as Freshmen

What brings them back as lowly frosh?

Joe O’Hara, a 24-year-old electrical engineer, said he received a good technical education from the University of Wisconsin.

At Thomas Aquinas, his goal is to become “a good human being.”

Or there’s 24-year-old David Houseal of Michigan, now a junior.

“I knew all kinds of equations. I could do all kinds of math problems. But I couldn’t understand the principles behind them,” he said.

Kathleen Ayre, 23, who was three classes short of a degree when she transferred from a Canadian university, said, “I was tired of 600 people crammed into a lecture hall listening to someone sell his book.”

Ayre, who plans graduate studies in Medieval literature, still recalls her joy upon understanding geometry.

“That first proposition of Euclid, It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Students study math, science, philosophy, theology, history, music and literature. They learn Latin to read Ovid, Seneca and Virgil. Electives? What electives?

Commencement Speakers

Luminaries have been known to speak at commencement: In 1982, Mother Teresa addressed a graduating class of 22. In 1988, it was the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Frank Shakespeare.

Teachers are called tutors here, and they must be able to teach everything from calculus to philosophy.

“We try to emphasize that they too are learners, and the real teachers are the authors of the great books,” Dillon said.

Indeed, the Great Authors hover like disembodied spirits above every classroom as students wrestle with how Euclid defined a line, how Aristotle defined the nature of man, how Shakespeare portrayed ruthless ambition in “Macbeth.”

Mornings and afternoons are devoted to tutorials and labs, where students duplicate Lavoisier’s experiments that helped develop atomic theory and Galileo’s experiment with the pendulum. Missing are the paraphernalia of modern science, such as ultrasound equipment and electron microscopes.

“We have no need to explore new frontiers,” said Dean Dillon. “We’re trying to get an overview of those who have thought best about the basic principles.”

At night come the seminars, because “leisurely conversation prospers after dark,” said tutor Richard Ferrier, a St. John’s alumnus.

Tutor as Rudder

With the tutor as rudder--never motor--the conversation sets sail with a question.

The students speak gingerly at first, sometimes losing themselves in philosophical dead ends, other times engaging in heated arguments. Soon, students hunch forward in their seats, scrunch up their faces in concentration and plunge their heads in their hands.

Then, there are the epiphanies.

Susanka, who spent two years as a student at Thomas Aquinas before becoming admissions director, recalls the “exhausted but happy relief” after such a moment when he realized that Homer’s “Odyssey” was both a lyric poem and a universal allegory about man’s struggles.

Nearly 60% of the college’s 450 alumni go on to graduate schools that range from Indiana University’s medical school to Harvard Divinity School, the London School of Economics and Columbia University’s master of business administration program. One alumnus won a Fulbright fellowship last year to study logic and grammar in Germany. Eight percent are following religious vocations.

When it comes to law, Thomas Aquinas students are “sensational, top-drawer,” according to David Link, dean of the law school at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.

“Somebody out there is advising them well. They have a spirit of creativeness; they don’t want to just be legal mechanics,” Link said.

Starting at Age 26

Robert Orellana, a 1982 alumnus who went on to law school, clerked for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and is now with Latham & Watkins, a Los Angeles-based law firm, recalls starting at Thomas Aquinas at age 26.

“It really shocks you for the first few weeks; they question everything, including the Bible. That’s exactly what you do in law . . . whether you’re negotiating a contract or a real estate agreement.”

About 40 alumni work on Capitol Hill, where many staff Congressional offices.

Eileen Woods, a 1982 graduate, is a legislative assistant to Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) in social issues and energy.

“You read Hume and Locke and it gives you an idea of the proper role of government in people’s lives,” she said. “You learn the ability to reason and sort out arguments and can brief your boss for meetings and know what’s important.”

Some See Drawbacks

The drawbacks of such an education--of debating ideas fiercely past midnight and seeking truth for the mere joy of basking in its brilliance--are that the outside world may seem dull by comparison.

“I was never happier than there. It’s been the best part of my life . . . what I miss the most,” Orellana said. “If I could pick what I wanted to do the rest of my life, it would be to study those types of ideas and books with those people.”

Of course, Great Books programs also have their critics. Some, such as alumnus Felix McGinnis, said he was torn between loving and hating the school during his years there.

He did not like the emphasis on Aristotelian philosophy, and he said it was difficult to read Freud and Plato without a historical grounding. But he would send his children there, McGinnis said.

Others argue that such schooling breeds elitists fit only for ivory towers. And some wonder how Aeschylus prepares a 21-year-old American for life in 1988.

The president of Thomas Aquinas, Ronald P. McArthur--a tall, enthusiastic man with bushy eyebrows and a shock of equally bushy hair--had heard all these criticisms before and even raised some himself.

Successful Graduates

The success of his graduates speaks for itself, he said. Catholicism should steep students in humility, and as for the books, they stand alone, outside of history and politics, he said.

“Great books are written to be universal statements having to do with reality itself,” McArthur said.

Nonetheless, some say it is time to paint from a broader palette--one that is not strictly white, Western and male.

“There are a lot of outstanding books by women, minorities and non-Europeans. It’s hard to imagine them not playing a part in a modern college student’s education,” said John Perry, a Stanford philosophy professor who was active in the Western Culture debate that swept that campus earlier this year and resulted in a reading list that includes more minority and female authors.

Kennell Jackson, chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Stanford, added that “it’s important to see the human face of people who have been oppressed, people who have transcended their circumstances whether it’s slavery or segregation. You’re not going to see that in your European writers like Marx and Virginia Wolfe, you’re going to see dissenters.”

Open to Suggestions

The Thomas Aquinas scholars, who meet annually to discuss adding or dropping books, say they are open to suggestions.

In bows to the 20th Century, T.S. Eliot and economist John Maynard Keynes have been added. So has Plato’s “Statesman.” His “Phaedrus,” which deals with rhetoric, has been dropped in favor of a treatise by Aristotle. The school has also added the Lincoln-Douglas debates because it illustrates “a high level of political discourse,” Dillon said.

“Tell me a woman author who’s good and we’ll consider her. Not because she’s a woman, but because she’s a good author,” McArthur said. (So far, Jane Austen is the only one to make the list, with “Emma.”)

School officials say about 10% of the school’s students are not Catholic, although to be sure, Catholicism plays a big part in campus life. Many students attend daily Mass and stroll the grounds with Bibles. Crucifixes adorn classrooms and necks. Seminars begin with a prayer. When asked about the controversial movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” some students trounced it as blasphemous.

Relatively New School

Although some of its texts predate Christ by almost three millennia, the school itself is less than 20 years old.

It was founded in 1971 by a group of Catholics from St. Mary’s College near San Francisco who wanted to teach the classics while emphasizing a Catholic liberal education that “begins in wonder and ends in wisdom,” according to the school’s statement of purpose.

For seven years, Thomas Aquinas College was located at a former Claretian seminary in Calabasas. In 1978, it moved to its current site on donated land. An adjacent parcel, including a white adobe hacienda where McArthur lives, once owned by Estelle Doheny.

Today, Thomas Aquinas must raise nearly $1 million of its $2.7-million annual budget from private donations, and McArthur estimates that $10 million more is needed to replace the trailers with buildings.

But the school’s spirit, if not its physical foundation, is already in full flower.

Earlier this month, someone found a $10 bill and tacked it to the cafeteria wall. For two weeks it hung there, a mute testament to the school’s traditions and values.

Finally, someone took it down and stuffed it inside the church donation box.