Nearly 1,000 people gathered about the Liberty Tree on the lawn of St. John's College in Annapolis yesterday for the college's 200th commencement exercises.
As the bells rang two o'clock, 76 undergraduates and 25 graduate students marched to their seats on the green.
There were, appropriately for a graduation, plenty of beaming parents and a few oblivious noisy children. There were the black-gowned graduating students, a bit misty, like the weather.
But because this was St. John's, it was not quite like graduation anywhere else.
Here, students read approximately 120 books and documents that form the backbone of Western intellectual tradition, the "greats," such as the Bible, Plato, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Nietzsche.
The goal of this tiny college, a campus of about 400 students, is to produce independent thinkers.
This made even the commencement program, which listed the afternoon's events and the graduating students, unusually entertaining, as it also listed the senior essays each graduate wrote.
The titles ranged from the respectably intellectual-sounding ("How the Inadequacies of a Purely Formal Ethics Lead to Separation from the World") to the more esoteric teasers, such as "How Wine Spurs You On and Cheese, Too."
After the college's Brass Quintet opened the ceremonies with a stately rendition of "Trumpet Voluntary," college President Christopher B. Nelson announced a bit of a problem -- this was not, in fact, the 200th anniversary.
The college was chartered in 1784 but took about five years to raise enough money to open. The first class matriculated in 1789 and graduated in 1793, he said.
Last year's was the 199th commencement, and the year before was the 198th, Nelson explained. But this spring, when the administration checked the college annals for background notes, they came upon the correct dates.
"What was I going to do?" Nelson queried. "The programs were already printed. I suggested next year be the 200th and this year as well."
Nobody seemed to mind. The audience of young women in long print dresses and sandals and young men wavering between Ivy League and trendy clapped for those receiving awards, then settled in to listen to the commencement address by Harris Wofford, Democratic senator from Pennsylvania.
Wofford, the surprise winner in last fall's election and honorary alumnus of St. John's, spoke about "The Great Books and the Active Duty Citizen."
