Pickens, who is depicted in the book as a no-nonsense, intellectual sort of coach, said in an interview that he admired Martin's gutsiness. Also, he said, he successfully captured the spirit of St. John's.
"You can really feel the affection he has for our college," Pickens said. "I also marked how he's really trying drive home the point that the books that we're reading though they may have been written 2,000 years ago, they're timeless in that they're raising questions we might encounter today."
Martin hadn't planned to write a book. Initially, he thought he might squeeze a magazine article out of the experience.
But in 2004, some media outlets learned of what he was doing and descended on the campus to interview the wannabe freshman. The attention - which not everyone at the school appreciated, he said - led him to an agent and then a book deal. And now here he is, with the sort of journalistic, memoir-like book that he often dreamed of writing when he was plugging away at academic work about British church history.
In the book, he attempts to answer the question everyone has asked him from the beginning: Why, exactly, did he do it?
He has refined his answer over time, and over a soda in the coffee shop, he put it this way: "Having overcome a death sentence I thought I had, I was trying both to celebrate life and figure out where I was going," he said. "I was on a journey of self-discovery in a way, like Odysseus. And I came here to do that."
Martin made a decision early that he wouldn't participate in the discussion in class because he didn't want to undermine the experience of the real freshmen. Toward the end of the book, he writes about what he wanted to say - but couldn't because of his self-imposed silence - when they were discussing Plato's Phaedo, which describes the end of Socrates' life.
"To me, the Phaedo is about courage. It's about victory over death," he wrote. "It is a work that speaks poignantly to a patient in a hospital dying of cancer, because Socrates comforts us with the knowledge that a better world awaits us after we leave this one."
After his semester as a Johnnie, Martin returned to Randolph-Macon College, but he retired in 2006, largely because of his illness. College presidencies are stressful, he said, and after struggling with cancer, he decided that though he had been healthy for years, he didn't want to live like that anymore.
