The Practical Wisdom of Eva Brann

Eva Brann, dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis from 1990 to 1997, died peacefully on October 28, at the age of ninety-five. Born in 1929 in Berlin, her Jewish family was one of the last to emigrate. Her father, a doctor, had options others did not, and brought his family to New York City in 1941. Eva studied classics and archaeology before joining the college, where she taught for sixty years. In the final two decades of her time at St. John’s, she taught a reduced course load and wrote more than a dozen books on the imagination, time, feelings, and other philosophical topics, in her exploratory style and in inimitable prose. She also collaborated on a number of lively translations of Plato, sparkling with their origins in friendship with her colleagues.

I arrived at St. John’s in June 1990 to attend a scholarship program for high school juniors called the Telluride Association Summer Program. Fourteen of us shared a dorm and read from an eccentric and demanding reading list, including an ancient treatise on Being written in poetic hexameter, the prefaces to Ptolemy’s Almagest and Hooke’s Micrographia alongside Paradise Lost and Emma. We discussed the readings for two hours each day, seated around a simple wooden table in a high and spare colonial-era room. We had all met a certain threshold score on the P.S.A.T.; beyond that, we were mixed from two groups, academic high achievers and young people from working-class backgrounds.

I fell into neither of those categories. A self-identified high achiever in high school, I concentrated only on daydreaming and art projects, turning out a B-minus average. In retrospect, it is clear that I suffered from a serious depression. I did little to no homework and called in sick from school regularly so I could stay in bed, read novels, or listen to records. Even my reading endeavors were a failure: I carried around a copy of Plato’s Republic for a year or so in the hope of being recognized as the intellectual I aspired to be, but I can’t say my eyes ever met its open pages.

To say that the summer program at St. John’s was a breath of fresh air was a massive understatement. San Francisco, my home, was dry and brown, bright and wide. Annapolis, smothered in thick and watery air, nurtured a jungle of rich greens, framed by narrow brick streets. Dried and sickly as I was, like the weeds and vines in the humidity, I flourished in newly found soil and water. In the basement of our dorm, someone had scratched on a lampshade in wobbly, desperate capital letters: TEACH ME VIRTUE. I snickered, but my heart was captured.

I fell quickly and completely in love with the college, over which Eva—or Miss Brann, as we called her—presided. One night in July, sleepless with dread of going back home, I hatched the idea of skipping my last year of high school and enrolling immediately. I went the next day to Eva’s office. “I’d like to apply to be a freshman this fall,” I said. Eva tilted her head and looked straight at me. She said, in her clipped accent, “Are you serious?”

I was. She sent me to the admissions office, and the late-night inspiration became a reality, over my parents’ protestations. A mysteriously complete financial aid offer surfaced at the last minute, undermining their leverage.

The July conversation in Eva’s office is my first clear memory of her. But it suggests a prior acquaintance, even a prior friendship, whose grounds I cannot remember. When I met the college, somehow, I met Eva. As dean, she governed by presence, by regular and friendly communication, face to face and in print. So far as I could see, Eva knew every name and face on campus. She spoke the language of the college and lived its ideals.

She was my dean, as she was to all of the students over whom she presided. It is a difficult relationship to describe in the age of professional administrators. Merle Haggard’s pride that the residents of Muskogee, Oklahoma, “still respect the college dean” has lost its frame of reference. For all the unfortunate visibility of our contemporary college presidents, it is obvious enough that the rule of universities is not personal but procedural, driven by over-regulation and by the overarching goal of avoiding legal liability. Its only grandeur consists in talking points for donors.

Eva never taught me in a class, and while we held each other in warmth and respect, we were never intimate friends. In those days before email, she communicated either by mass-distributed scraps of paper or by handwritten note. I received one such note not long after arriving as a freshman. There had been a meeting of the incoming class with a group of faculty, and I had asked a question. “That was just the question the meeting needed,” she wrote. Small encouragements, expressed personally, were for her a matter of routine, although it never felt routine to receive one.

As a student at St. John’s, I went to her office regularly, once or twice a term, in search of advice of one kind or another, as did many of my fellow students. She offered advice on essays, careers, and survival at the college. As a freshman, still enwrapped in chaotic impulses and unable to meet deadlines, I found myself with five essays due in the course of two weeks. I went to Eva. “How will I do this?” I asked. Again, the friendly and dead serious gaze: “Look,” she said. “There is real work, and then there is work under pressure. Just let whatever thoughts you have”—pause—“dribble out onto the page.”

Twenty-five years later, in my first year teaching at St. John’s, I found myself telling this story to a similarly chaotic freshman in a similar situation. I then reformulated what I had long ago digested: “The virtue of an essay is done-ness.” So began a new phase of my life as a teacher, the passing on of all that I had received as a student.

Eva’s character, as anyone will tell you, was to all appearances remarkably simple. She was possessed by a limitless and omnivorous intellectual zeal. She read everything, and with unshakable cheerfulness, stood ready for conversation on any topic at any time. Her speech was remarkable—she formed perfect sentences from an enormous vocabulary, without repetition, without stutter or hitch or a wasted word. It is perhaps relatively common to write as one speaks, but it is vanishingly rare to speak as one writes.

Eva’s eyes sparkled with mischief, and she loved adventure. After her death, the college’s unofficial Facebook page was filled with stories. She played hooky with one of my classmates, accompanying him to a performance of Aladdin instead of his required evening seminar. She once spied a student flying kites from her office window, and came out to join him. Another student sought funding for his new club, “The Sensitive Man’s Milk and Cookie Hour.” The student authorities refused; Eva wrote the student a check.

All seniors at St. John’s write a capstone essay, examined in public by three faculty members. In my senior year, Eva found that an extra essay had been submitted, one more than there were seniors. The essay bore the name of Johnny Moronic, and consisted of sentences produced at random by a then-novel online service called the Kant Generator. “Every essay needs to be examined!” Eva reportedly shrugged, and scheduled an oral for Mr. Moronic alongside the others. The essay was examined one April afternoon by three faculty in unusually silly headwear.

Eva’s lightheartedness shone from within the boundaries of an exceptional dispassionate discipline. She considered favoritism to be the worst vice of a teacher. She kept up a written correspondence with hundreds of alumni and friends, from short notes to long comments. If someone gave her a book, she would read it and write or phone in response. If she read something she liked on her own, she would contact the author. She responded to every query and every invitation, and as her capacities permitted them, issued them in kind.

In 2019, Columbia University celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its Core Curriculum, and the Morningside Institute hosted a conference in its honor. The institute wanted Eva as a keynote speaker, and since Eva never once in her life used email, one of its members reached out to me for her sake. She chuckled a little. “I think I was at their fiftieth anniversary!” Eva was at this time close to ninety, and she thought it would be best for us to drive into the city.

On the drive up, Eva admitted that she was always nervous before giving lectures. She asked what I knew about the group we were meeting. “Are they very conservative?” she asked. She leaned in to confess, “You know, I am a liberal Democrat.” She knew that it was a funny thing, to be an outspoken defender of the Western canon, a featured writer on a website called the Imaginative Conservative, a recipient of a National Humanities Medal from George W. Bush, and a down-the-line blue voter, so far as I know, for her whole life.

The Morningside conference was a pleasure. On the way back to Annapolis, late at night, I missed the turn for the main highway. We found ourselves driving out near the Delaware shore, miles from home. Unlike technophobic Eva, I used email, but I drew the line at a smartphone or G.P.S. So I found myself in a growing panic, driving a very elderly woman on country highways in the dark, without any sense of the way home. Eva, by contrast, was delighted. What an adventure! We turned to talking about religion, which delighted her even more. For years afterward, she remembered our road trip to me with pleasure, especially our time lost in Delaware in the dark.

At the Morningside conference she presented the criterion for a great book she had learned from her classics professor at Brooklyn College, Alice Kober. “You know a great book,” Kober had said, “when the hair stands up on the back of your neck.” Kober, too, formed a part of our road trip conversation. At the time I had read the account of Kober’s life and work in Margalit Fox’s Riddle of the Labyrinth. A spinster, Kober taught five classes a semester at Brooklyn College and by night deciphered by hand and notecard the mysterious ancient inscriptions known as Linear B. She died of cancer before she succeeded fully, but her insights were instrumental in the cracking of the code ten years later.

Eva attributed her own turn to classical studies to Kober’s personal encouragement. After Brooklyn College, she studied for her Ph.D. at Yale and became an archaeologist. In later accounts of this time of her life, she reported facing a major turning point while working on a dig in Greece. One of her students remembered her putting it this way: “There was a fire, and I was eating some yogurt, and I realized I didn’t know what I was doing, although I was doing it very well.”

As it happens, the evening in Corinth with the fire and the yogurt was a story she told more than once. In other versions, she tells why the yogurt was memorable: it was the “seed” or “mother” of a yogurt beloved and famous among archaeologists. Her evening snack wiped it from the face of the earth. As Eva unknowingly committed this crime against culture, she determined to read every single one of Plato’s dialogues, collected there in olive-green Loebs. It was that encounter, she said, that changed her life.

In 1957, then, frustrated with professional archaeology’s technical focus and its neglect of foundational questions, she abandoned her career in order to teach at St. John’s. She joined an already flourishing and lively community of fellow Jewish refugees. At that time, Jacob Klein, a refugee scholar of ancient mathematics, was dean. It was Klein who had stabilized the vision of the radical educator Scott Buchanan for the St. John’s program.

Buchanan, to put it simply, wanted everyone to read everything. He was an extreme egalitarian, formed by his experiences with workingmen’s institutes in England and at the People’s Institute in New York City. He hated academia with a passion, and wanted to pour out its riches for the poor. That meant reading a massive list of books at a dizzying pace. The original St. John’s program included one year of study each in Greek, Latin, French, and German, and covered Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in a single evening.

Klein took over the deanship after Buchanan’s departure. He kept the egalitarianism; St. John’s is in principle open to anyone minimally capable who wants to study there. But he slowed down the curriculum so that students might reach into its depths. Klein’s great influences were Husserl and Heidegger, his teachers and associates in Germany. He put at the center of the college’s intellectual life their aspiration to break through the deadening effects of contemporary scientific and historical study in order to recover a personal encounter with the deepest truths and realities.

For Klein the chief obstacles to learning were the dull formulas of received teaching. John Henry Newman noted a similar phenomenon in his Essay Toward a Grammar of Assent:

And thus it comes to pass that individual propositions about the concrete almost cease to be, and are diluted and starved into abstract notions. . . . All that fullness of meaning . . . now that experience is absent, necessarily becomes to the multitude of men nothing but a heap of notions, little more intelligible than the beauties of a prospect to the short sighted, or the music of a great master to a listener who has no ear.

The remedy, as Klein saw it, was “desedimentation,” the return to the origins of the received notion, the original proof, the original experiment, the original poem in all of its richness. Eva’s way with words gave her a spectacular talent to this effect: by translating dried-up thoughts into her vivid and sharp phrases, she brought them back to life.

The college’s liberal egalitarianism, its studied commitment to the capacity of every human being to think deeply about the biggest questions, was from the beginning connected with its roots in the project of the American founders. The American founding documents, the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution were on the earliest reading lists. Over time, Lincoln, Tocqueville, Twain, and Melville were added.

Eva herself was a great student of the Founders. Her first major book, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, seeks the roots of liberal education in the writings of Jefferson and others. She sought to tie the universal aspirations of education at St. John’s to its concrete home in a particular time and place. The book is less of a polemic than a series of paradoxes or tensions, an invitation to thought and reflection as much or more as it is a call to action. That said, it has its zingers: “Nothing so subtly distracts human beings as an environment of vestigially thoughtful speech and uninterpretable objects of reason emitting a persistent rational gibberish.”

As dean, Eva developed the American parts of the reading list, concentrated in late junior and senior year, so that students at St. John’s would spend time connecting their four years of wide learning with the country they lived in. In part these changes showed the influence of her own enthusiasms, harboring as she did a deep love and admiration for Abraham Lincoln. Under Eva’s watch, the reading list expanded its meditation on slavery as the central paradox of the Founding. Frederick Douglass’s speeches were installed on the reading list, alongside The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois—then much less known than now. The latter addition was accompanied by a Friday night lecture by Lucius Outlaw, a scholar of Du Bois. As is the custom at St. John’s, the question period following the lecture had no official end point. I was there with the others until 1:30 A.M., fired up by the first open and serious conversation about race in the United States that I’d had in my life.

William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor also arrived on the reading list at this time, later and literary reflections on the racial injustice that haunts American life. The addition of O’Connor to the curriculum in the early Nineties is an even more luminous example of Eva’s genius. At that time, O’Connor’s letters had only just been published; she was a well-known author but hardly “canonical.”

The confidence of Eva and her faculty was such that if they judged a book to be great, and could persuade their colleagues to that effect, it belonged on their reading list. Yet the confidence at St. John’s rests on more than expertise. Even men and women who ate great books every morning for breakfast, who lived and breathed them for decades on end, could disagree about what to add. In the infinite riches of the books of the past, selection is driven by enthusiasm. The persuasion of the faculty was accomplished—or not—through reading things together.

From the cramped and perverted perspective of the contemporary culture wars, Eva’s deanship could be seen as an engine of diversity against the famously conservative St. John’s reading list. Not only was American slavery developed as a central topic, not only were Du Bois and Douglass added, but three female authors joined Jane Austen: O’Connor, Woolf, and Eliot.

The motivation for these changes was not a vaguely formulated and legally vetted administrative formula, nor middle-class embarrassment, nor fear of public shaming. Rather it was enthusiasm for these authors and for their books. Is there a better testimony for The Souls of Black Folk than a single conversation lasting half the night? Eva understood in her bones that the mission of an institution is formed and preserved by zeal. Just as we can only serve one master, our hearts permit only one ultimate zeal.

Of course, zeal finds its way even in conventionally diversified humanities departments. It would be strange if they didn’t: works of sufficient interest will kindle the hearts of the truly interested. Yet the free passage of enthusiasm is clogged by a sense of duty, obligation, or guilt, whether felt or only suspected. Our sense of obligation can communicate a subtle contempt for the authors we seek to include. As Eva would put it: is the race or gender of the author the only or best reason we have to read it? If zeal alone is the public standard, we must engage with the author’s writing directly, not from the outside. We must read, re-read, think, discuss, question, and get to know the book as we would a colleague. In the end, we can neither defer to an expert nor check a box, but must undertake the risk of making a judgement.

The bureaucratic imperative of contemporary curricular design smothers zeal even more effectively than obligation or guilt. An “administrated” university, eyes on the bottom line rather than on the meaning or mission of the institution, orders a community of learning as a consumer assortment. Like the order of a chocolate box or a restaurant menu, each separate offering is designed for a separate appetite. Eva knew, and taught through her example, that a healthy institution is kept in order not by fussy tastes and impulses but by the deep human passion that we hold in common, the desire to understand.

After the death of George Floyd in 2020, a few hundred current students and alumni of St. John’s wrote its leadership a letter pleading for greater diversity on its reading list. Eva by this time was not yet officially retired—she kept her place on the faculty until she was unable to attend meetings—but she was housebound by doctor’s orders because of C.O.V.I.D. We spoke on the phone. “You know, if I had been in charge, I would have written a letter to each person who signed the petition. The letter would say, ‘Thank you so much for your suggested additions to our reading list. Please write back with suggestions for which books currently on the list should be removed for their sake.’ Then,” Eva said, “the followers would peel off, and we’d get twelve letters from those who really cared about the question. And at that point, you can have a conversation.”

Eva’s style of practical wisdom, laser-focused and deeply humane, resembled what the spiritual writer Catherine Doherty called “the ingenuity of love.” I am sure Eva learned her prudence from others at the college, and equally sure that many others learned it from her. She followed and passed on a living model of a faculty officer. The practically wise faculty officer draws on an understanding of the mission of the institution to make judgements about particulars. Such an officer is personally present, knows of names and faces, and is ready at the drop of a hat for a conversation. Last year, a group of students approached our faculty’s assistant dean to request permission for a vigil for the victims in Gaza. He suggested that the Israeli victims be added. The students agreed. So the waters of peace washed over the controversy that tore many policy-driven campuses to shreds. I am biased, but I believe that peace was built on trust, and that trust was built on a shared way of life.

The writings of Plato and Aristotle are haunted by a figure who seeks wisdom of the highest things and who thereby gains practical wisdom, knowledge of how to govern. The first philosopher, Thales, fell into a well while looking at the stars, possessed by knowledge Aristotle called “wondrous, difficult and divine—but useless.” Yet Socrates fought courageously at the Battle of Potidaea, refused to fulfill the illegal orders of the Thirty Tyrants, and chose to die rather than to evade the law. Socrates lived his civic virtues while pointing to a realm of understanding beyond the capacity of human perception, whatever it is that leaves him captivated at the doorstep of the dinner party in the Symposium. Aristotle himself studied not only everything under the sun but things beyond it: God and other divine intellects. He wrote volumes of practical advice for rulers and legislators. In his view, political life should be guided by a signature virtue he called phronesis, practical wisdom.

The virtue of practical wisdom cultivates happiness for communities by devising means to bring out the best in us. It has taken me many years to understand that it is the deep experience of the activities found in leisure, in study, and in contemplation of the deepest things—this experience, and no other—that can guide the rest of life. An end in view, lived concretely, is a compass for the heart: the pointer shifts by one’s circumstances, but points unerringly to what matters and away from what does not.

Such an understanding comes through the best books, certainly, but not books alone. It is flesh-and-blood people who live by ideals, who seek the divine and treasure the human, who transmit wisdom from generation to generation.

There is more. Eva was a refugee. A month before her death, I visited her at her home while she was in hospice care. We talked about all sorts of things: what was going on at the college, reports from my sabbatical, and so on. At some point she talked about her childhood in Berlin, where as a child she was fascinated by the working class and their dialects. “I especially admired,” she said, “their beautiful leather boots.” The shiny boots, of course, evoked the movement that drove her from Germany along with her family at the age of fourteen. I asked her whether she felt her life had been marked by the presence of such a huge catastrophe.

With her characteristic light frankness, she said, “No.” She continued: “My mother was a brilliant person. When things got bad, my parents considered sending us to England on a Kindertransport. But my mother refused, insisting that the family had to stay together.” So they emigrated to the United States. “Another family was close to ours. They stayed in Berlin and spent the war in hiding. I think they were very much damaged by that,” Eva said.

Eva took to the United States like a fish to water. The family found a home in New York City, perhaps the most successful haven for immigrants in all the world’s history. She studied at American schools and dug into its intellectual and practical foundations as she grew older. Her American identity was the strongest of anyone I have known.

Every year at St. John’s, the college holds a Christmas party in the beautiful colonial-era room known as the Great Hall, with snacks, punch, and songs sung around the piano. I found myself there as a freshman, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. The group singing at the piano felt like a kind of family to which I had never belonged. Eva was standing near me at the time. I turned to her and said, “This is amazing.” She understood instantly and nodded: “Yes, I’ll never get over how amazing it is.”

What was amazing is that the college had made itself a home for people of all sorts, for preppies and mainstreamers alongside bookworms, refugees, weirdos, and depressed teenagers. Most of us fit into more than one category. A few years ago, at another traditional event called the Senior Dinner, a graduating student stood up to give a toast, one who had dedicated a great deal of energy to transgender issues on campus. The student said, “I’ve spent much of my time here fighting the college. But as I get closer to leaving, I realize it is my home.”

Anyone can see that the United States is ravaged by loneliness and placelessness, and always has been. What else would a country be that was formed by people fleeing from their past? What the refugees of the mid-century understood—at least the ones I knew, Eva Brann most of all—was that the United States was a home for such people, a home for the homeless. Instead of the wealth of inherited habits and the earthly wisdom embodied in them, we homeless and nomadic people must rely on our own devices. So the founders, nomads themselves, devised their own government, drawing on the practical wisdom of their forebears.

A home requires a discipline, an end, a higher purpose, but it also has a door open to a warm hearth and a set of habits and customs. A custom generated in a spontaneous moment can become precious with scarcely any passage of time. Our nostalgia for those who lived on the land, rooted in a place, bears some wisdom in it, but not without danger. We live in a time of mass migration. Looking back, we may see that the migratory age was centuries long. We must build institutions—from scratch, when necessary—to house ourselves and those on the way to us. We walk in the footsteps of our forebears, the intrepid migrants of the past, and have their wisdom to guide our steps.

As I left Eva’s bedside in September, I promised to return in January, if she was still there. Her face crinkled in a mischievous smile: “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to make an exit!” I pray that her final journey ends in restful peace, in the meadows of the heroes, if not the land of the just.