Tom McDonald

St. John's Teacher Brought Ideas to Life

By Joe   Holley Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 19, 2006

On a recent springlike evening at St. John's College, the windows of a third-floor seminar room in old McDowell Hall open to the night air, a dozen  young spelunkers of the mind were probing deeply into philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Tom McDonald, with his dog, Jacqueline, was known at St. John's  College as a brainy, slightly eccentric lover of learning and ideas. (Family Photo)

Under the tutelage of Nicholas Maistrellis and Dylan Casey, the fledgling scholars spent two hours exploring such devilishly elusive notions as the following: The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of  various representations in an intuition ; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept of understanding.

So what, in Kantian terms, is a judgment? An intuition? And why do they matter?

Tom McDonald, who was 78 when he died of complications from Parkinson's disease in Baltimore on Dec. 27, could have told you, although he wouldn't   have. He would have insisted on guiding and suggesting rather than telling.

At St. John's, a school widely known for its demanding Great Books curriculum, that's the approach that all good tutors take, and for more than 30 years McDonald was one of the best. (Teachers at St. John's are called tutors.) On the tidy Annapolis campus a block from the Maryland State House, stories linger about the brainy, slightly eccentric lover of learning and ideas.

Despite McDonald's breadth of knowledge and masterful teaching skills, St. John's is one of the few colleges in the country that would have employed him as a professor. He had no degree, not even from high school. He had no academic specialty, never wrote a book, had few if any articles published. And yet his friends, students and colleagues were in awe of his engaged, intensely alert intelligence.

He was so interesting, and he knew everything, said Pamela Kraus, a St. John's tutor who became a close friend after she and McDonald lost their spouses. His way of opening up a text was so extraordinary. The way he probed and asked questions made it clear that he had a very deep understanding of the material.

McDonald came to his love of learning early. Growing up in Alexandria, he spent three years at George Washington High School and then enrolled at St. John's as a 16-year-old in 1944. With the war winding down the next year, the 17-year-old tried to enlist in the Marines but was told that at 6 feet 5 inches, he was too tall. He got a waiver from the Senate Naval Affairs Committee and served with the military police until late 1946.

He briefly attended the University of Virginia and then enrolled at the newly founded New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York City. It relied primarily on Jewish immigrant professors who had fled Nazi Germany and eschewed traditional categories of study.

McDonald studied philosophy at the New School and worked as a lecturer before moving to the University of Chicago's Basic Program of Liberal Education. Both the New School and the University of Chicago, home of one of the early Great Books programs, allowed him to indulge his eclectic interests.

So did St. John's, where tutors are expected to be conversant not only in philosophy, literature and languages but also in physics, biology and math. He joined the faculty in 1963.

John White, 63, a St. John's tutor since 1971, was McDonald's student in the early 1960s and remembers one particular study group. An overheated room,  McDonald's droning voice and the wavy, distorting antique glass in the window  behind him were conspiring to lull young White to sleep when suddenly something McDonald said reached him, jarred him awake.

I remember thinking it was incredible the way he was opening up the text,  White recalled. He was talking about reading in a way that  was very sophisticated but at the same time, you'd say, 'Of course!'

Years later, Matt Caswell had a similar mind-opening experience during a study group with McDonald, by then retired. I studied Kant for 10 years because of him,  said Caswell, 31, who became a St. John's tutor last fall.

I still hear stories of freshman classes he gave, translating a Sophocles play or doing a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible,  White said. Most students had not had a close-up experience of someone's concentration like that.

His students also adapted to his eccentricities. He might show up at 1:30 for a 1 p.m. seminar, and he might keep the group for an hour past the scheduled time.

He tended to get absorbed in whatever he was focused on, so there was a reluctance to let go," said Michael Dink, St. John's dean and a former  McDonald student. Then, once he got going with his students, he didn't want to break that off, either.

He was self-absorbed and abstracted but never a grind, friends said.Possessed of a razor-sharp wit and a great sense of humor, McDonald loved   poetry, music, art, the movies.

He took ideas very seriously and lived them," Kraus said. And that, she noted, is what the Great Books approach to learning -- and to life  -- is all about.