Notes & Asides

A commencement speech given at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, on May 19, 1996, by Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

From quite early on, beginning when I was 12 or 13, I heard my father say that he hoped his sons, of whom I was the third, would, when reaching college age, attend St. John’s. This did not happen, my brothers opting for the geographically expedient Yale, only an hour’s drive from where we lived. But my father’s reverence for the idea that animates St. John’s lingers in the memory, and later on I would read references to this college in the work of my father’s friend Albert Jay Nock. Mr. Nock was not given to ambiguity, and if I remember right, at one point he pronounced St. John’s the only college in the United States where a student could still receive an education. As I think back on it, his views on education were more complacent than my father’s, who in a moment of exasperation with the modern curriculum told his ten children that, in America, either one went to college, or one received an education.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

A commencement speech given at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, on May 19, 1996, by Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

From quite early on, beginning when I was 12 or 13, I heard my father say that he hoped his sons, of whom I was the third, would, when reaching college age, attend St. John’s. This did not happen, my brothers opting for the geographically expedient Yale, only an hour’s drive from where we lived. But my father’s reverence for the idea that animates St. John’s lingers in the memory, and later on I would read references to this college in the work of my father’s friend Albert Jay Nock. Mr. Nock was not given to ambiguity, and if I remember right, at one point he pronounced St. John’s the only college in the United States where a student could still receive an education. As I think back on it, his views on education were more complacent than my father’s, who in a moment of exasperation with the modern curriculum told his ten children that, in America, either one went to college, or one received an education.