Roger H. Martin was striding purposefully around the St. John's College campus on the sort of sunny, gentle fall day that makes the brick buildings and grassy quads of academia look like nirvana. He stopped in his old seminar room - complete with a huge wooden table and diagrams on the board - and pointed to the very chair he sat in during a freshman seminar. Then he was off to the river, where he spent many cold mornings learning to row crew. In the boathouse, he found the eight-person boat he raced in, the Harriet Higgins Warren, and knocked on its side. Next, he headed off to the coffee shop, a warmly lit warren of small rooms, where he spent hours chatting with other students over bad coffee.
It was the sort of tour any number of nostalgic graduates could have given. But the ruddy-cheeked, soft-spoken Martin isn't a typical alumnus - or exactly an alumnus at all.
His love affair with St. John's, the Annapolis institution renowned for its great books curriculum, was a semester-long adventure he undertook when he was 61 and on sabbatical from his job as the president of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia.
Another thing is different about his intellectual romp at St. John's: He wrote a book about it.
Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again, which came out this fall, documents his journey from a near-fatal brush with cancer to the semester he spent talking about classical Greek literature and philosophy from Homer to Plato, Plutarch and Herodotus. He wrote about the insights he gleaned from the texts, the insecurities he wrestled with, the young friends he made and, compellingly, about joining the crew team even though he had lost a piece of his lung during his battle with cancer.
After hearing the athletic director's beginning-of-the-year speech about how only thumos - passion - is required to join a team at St. John's and not skills or previous experience, he signs up.
Martin describes Coach Leo Pickens' first crew meeting in the book:
" 'I can promise you,' he preaches to us, 'that being out on the Severn at dawn on a crisp fall morning, watching the sun rising from the east and the geese flying to the south as eight oars move in perfect unison over glistening water, is about as close to heaven as you will ever get in this life.' I'm sold. I am also anxious to get out on the river."
