Integral Alumni Council IAC Biographies Project The Integral Curriculum and Its Alumni Vol. Two December 2020 Editors Tim Cahill, '72 S. A. Cortright, '75 Ernest S. Pierucci, ‘72 Laura F. Gibble, ‘09 Preface This second iteration of The Integral Curriculum and Its Alumni continues the on-going Integral Alumni Council (IAC) Biographies Project. The Council's intention is to supplement the collection continuously, aiming ultimately to chronicle, as accurately as we can as lives move on, each and every one of the Curriculum's alumni, who now number some 735. Special thanks are owing to IAC Board Member, Tim Cahill '72—CEO, Charles Bell, Co., attorney, playwright and world traveler—who conceived the project and continues to gather life stories. The Integral Curriculum of Liberal Arts—familiarly, the Integral Program—has been conducted at Saint Mary’s since 1956. It is a four-year curriculum devoted to conversational inquiry into the great books and leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree. A brief history of the Program and statement of its mission follow. The first class was graduated in 1960. This collection of 81 biographies spans the entire history of the Program, up to a member of the class of 2020. The collection stands—and future, expanded iterations will stand—as testimony to the truth of two propositions. The first is enunciated by the achievements recorded—and to be recorded—in the on-going collection. Although, over the last 60 years, society, the economy, and workplaces have changed many times over, the Integral Program, unchanged in conception and continuous in execution, graduates liberal artists whose lives and achievements demonstrate their education's timeless relevance: from one Program, a galaxy of excellences. The second was enunciated at the Curriculum's inception by the founder, Brother Sixtus Robert Smith, FSC, and is confirmed daily in the lives of students, tutors and alumni: What is most essential to a genuine work of education is an association of teachers who are united by a common tradition and who together are striving to develop and preserve it. It is through such a tradition that they are linked to the alumni and the current generation of students. A Note on the IAC The Integral Alumni Council (IAC) is an association of Integral alumni, affiliated with the Saint Mary's College Alumni Association, which gives concrete expression to the enduring affection alumni hold for their classmates, the Integral Curriculum at large, its present students, and its tutors. Among IAC's many activities calculated to support the Integral Curriculum, the Council is an organizer, and the chief promoter, of the Brother Sixtus Robert Smith, FSC, Endowment, which supports recruiting and Student Archonships; IAC has established the Integral Alumni Scholarship Annual Fund, which provides funding to help close the "gap" between Integral students' FAFSA- calculated need and their annual financial aid. 2 On the Integral Curriculum History The Integral Curriculum of Liberal Arts (“the Program”) had its origin in a two-year “Curriculum Study,” financed by the Rosenberg Foundation of San Francisco, arranged by James L. Hagerty, and co-led by Hagerty and Br. S. Robert Smith, FSC, over academic year 1955–56, then (after failing health forced Hagerty into retirement), by Br. S. Robert through 1956–57.1 Decidedly un- experimental for the study, on Br. Robert’s account, was the central place occupied by “the symbol of the Saint Mary’s liberal arts school . a series of readings in Great Books, called the World Classics Program”;2 thus (again, according to Br. Robert), the study’s second and defining year experimented, in the main, to see what could be done to deepen and to make more effective the reading of the Great Books by integrating this reading with other freshman courses . .3 The conclusion of the two-year Rosenberg study, then, left the experimental curriculum, the nascent “Integrated Curriculum,” on a trajectory for “integration” in the sense of “undertakings conspiring to a single ostensible end,” viz.: the effective reading of the great books.4 That orientation shaped the Program in its early incarnation (1956–57 through 1964–65) as an alternative to the College’s general (required) curriculum: all Saint Mary’s students read World Classics; students of the Integrated Curriculum—who, with their colleagues throughout the College, also undertook distinct major studies—read World Classics through a curriculum increasingly focused on, and ordered to, that reading as to their required studies’ single, ostensible end.5 On 20 November 1964, under the guidance of Visiting Director, Dr. Edward Sparrow (Tutor and latterly Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis), the Program adopted, and the Dean of the College, Rafael Alan Pollock, ratified, the Constitution of the Integrated [latterly, Integral] Curriculum of 1 Cf. Br. S. Robert, FSC; Frank Keegan, LeRoy Smith et alii, New Venture in the Liberal Arts: Two-year Report, Saint Mary’s College Curriculum Study, 1955 – 1957 (St. Albert Library, 378.1/Sa 240); Frank Keegan would go on to help found the General Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, then latterly serve as President of the California State UniVersity, Sonoma, in Rohnert Park, California. 2 Introduced to the College curriculum by (then) Dean of the College, James L. Hagerty, in the Fall Term, 1941, as an elective among the College’s extensive philosophy curriculum (a year later, World Classics would become a College requirement for all students) [cf. Edward Porcella, “The Seminar at Saint Mary’s College in Distillations: Occasional Papers by the Faculty of Saint Mary’s College (Office of the Dean, School of Liberal Arts; 5 October 1992): 1–4]. 3 Br. S. Robert, FSC, New Venture in the Liberal Arts, “The Revised Freshman Courses and Their Integration,” reprinted in What Is It to Educate Liberally? (Saint Mary’s College: Office of the President, 1996), 22 (emphasis original). 4 Br. S. Robert, FSC, et alii, New Venture in the Liberal Arts, “A Prospectus for the Later Years,” 27–28. 5 Cf. Saint Mary’s College Bulletins, 1960–61 through 1964–65, which prescribe how the College’s extensive, lower- division and upper-division requirements (some 88 Carnegie units) may be fulfilled alternatively: “Students who satisfy the requirements of the Integrated Liberal Arts Curriculum will haVe satisfied these [sc. lower-division] requirements also . Students who haVe satisfied all requirements of the Integrated Liberal Arts Curriculum will have satisfied also the foregoing upper division requirements” [Bulletin 1960–62, 31–32]. 3 Liberal Arts. In this document, for the first time and explicitly, the Program is proposed to be, taken altogether and in itself: first of all, a pattern for a liberal education . [S]econd, . the external form of this pattern, which reveals itself in certain activities and courses.6 Continuously, from 1964 (as from the second year of the Rosenberg study) the pattern involved activities and courses parallel to those pursued as elements of a bachelor’s degree entire at St. John’s College, Annapolis (and, after 1965, at St. John’s, Santa Fe). Likewise, in successive Bulletins/Catalogues from 1966, the Program is counted among the “Major Groups of Studies” offered at Saint Mary’s College and leading to the degree, Bachelor of Arts; by 1976–77, the College catalogue specifies, “A student who successfully completes all 30 required courses within the Curriculum qualifies for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Integral Curriculum” (p. 68). Over the intervening 40 years, the Program has preserved the pattern flowing from 1966 in enduring external form: • 8 chronologically ordered seminars at the center of studies—the great books encountered in all-or-nothing conversational inquiry twice weekly, each semester, over four years • 8 chronologically ordered mathematics tutorials, devoted to quadrivial triumphs from Euclid’s Elements to Relativity: The Special and General Theory • 8 language tutorials devoted to trivial excellences in grammar, logic, rhetoric, and in poiesis, hermeneutics, dialectic • 4 laboratories devoted to the ancients’ “unofficial fifth quadrivial art,” the inquiry into ta physika, into the nature-things that yield to observation, classification, measurement, the modern physics and chemistry that brought home the Bacon, Darwin, Mendel, Watson and CricK • 1 semester (until recently, two semesters) of music as practicum The history of the Program, then, charts the founding, development and conservation of a “curriculum” in the original sense, viz.: a “racecourse,” a prescribed set of itineraries, so calculated that the “runners” become something on their way to attaining something. The “runners” become (as the tutors hope and strive to promote) “journeymen liberal artists,” no longer “apprenticed” to their tutors, but still—like their tutors—beholden to the auctores, the teacher-authors of the great books. What the becoming entails, the marks of the “journeyman,” are given in the Program’s Learning Outcomes; the “runners” attain the degree, Bachelor of Arts in the Integral Curriculum of Liberal Arts, the degree proper to the curriculum they have “run.” Mission As the Integral Program’s tutors conceive it, the Program is an embodiment of liberal education intrinsically allied to the College’s Catholic and Lasallian characters and, therewith, wholly consonant with the College’s stated Mission, which the Program makes its own. Of course, “an 6 Constitution of the Integral Program [adopted 20