In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Torrey Honors College, we’re looking back at some important moments in our history. One of those is the expansion and division of the College (then known as an Institute) into two distinct houses. To get the fell and the flavor of what that moment was like, we’re re-posting the podcast in which our founding director (John Mark Reynolds), our second director (Paul Spears), and I (Fred Fred Fred Sanders) announced and explained that house distinction. Ever since then, Torrey Honors College has been organized as two houses, as we are to this day (though I should note that we no longer maintain the two distinct curricula described in this lecture, but that’s another story from a later point in history).
It was a jolly event with a live audience, and even though it’s an extremely in-house conversation (so to speak), the discussion includes a great deal of the visionary educational project, the big ideas, and the goal of our instruction.
Click through and listen; Here’s the (rough) transcript:
John Mark Reynolds: Welcome to the Middlebrow [podcast] that services Scriptorium Daily. This is John Mark Reynolds coming to you from Biola University where we have a live studio audience! Yes. Many, many chums coming to you from the four corners of freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior with me as usual: theologian par excellence, cartoonist, Fred Sanders. Say hello to your mother Fred.
Fred Sanders: Hello to my mother.
Reynolds: -and Paul Spears playing the bear tonight in our version of Winter’s Tale.
Paul Spears: Hello to Fred’s mother.
Reynolds: We love you, Fred’s mother, we know you’re the only person who listens to these podcasts, my mother gave up long ago.
Spears: That’s because she lives next door now.
Reynolds: If though you usually listen to this podcast where we put big ideas through the digital martyrdom, tonight’s big idea that’s going through the digital martyrdom maybe a little idea. We’re going to talk about the structure of Torrey. So if you don’t have a lot of interest in the strange experiment in education, called the Torrey Honors Institute-
Spears: Click. Yep.
Reynolds: Goodbye. And for those of you who are still here, hi, Fred’s mother. We proceed.
Torrey has been in existence for a good long time now. And we’ve been engaged in an experiment of dividing Torrey into two houses if you’re an alum, who was here before that took place. The two houses are the Johnson House named after Philip V. Johnson and the godfather of Torrey, one of the founders of the Intelligent Design Movement and emeritus professor of law at Berkeley. The other house the G. Campbell Morgan House, Dr. Sanders, named after…
Sanders: G. Campbell Morgan, one of the most famous theo —sorry, not a theologian— but a preacher of the late 19th, early 20th centuries, had an international ministry and taught at Biola for a year and a half back in the 20’s, one of the most famous people ever to teach at Biola. So we named it after him.
Reynolds: So naming the two houses, of course, Torrey itself, named after R.A. Torrey, the founding dean and great around the world evangelist of the Edwardian and then up to the 1920’s. Really, inside of US evangelism. So honoring the Faith of our fathers and one contemporary Phil Johnson, we divided in half. Now what did that mean? How has Torrey changed? What’s going on? If you haven’t been around, or if you’re a current student, when Torrey got started, there were two ways we could have devised the curriculum. And they were —it was a real hard decision, to decide which way to go. One way to go. The first idea actually we had, was to divide the curriculum into big ideas. The great book set ends with a list of big ideas covered in the great books. And some people actually approach the great books, working from angels to whatever the Z topic that exists in the Synopticom?
Sanders: Syntopicon.
Reynolds: That’s right. The big idea book. We decided not to go that way solely because there wasn’t a West Coast model that we could point to. And we were already trying out enough new and radical ideas such as rotating tutors. If you’re not familiar with Torrey, Torrey students —Yes?
Spears: I am rotating. That’s true.
Reynolds:This podcast is also-
Spears: It’d be really good. If you have 3D glasses right now.
Reynolds: We have little visuals. Yes. It’s subtitled for the hearing impaired. Actually, it isn’t.
Sanders: John Mark, what is the Torrey Honors?
Reynolds: Tonight we’re going to talk about that division into two houses and what it means. One opportunity as we grew larger, good news for a long student faculty ratio hasn’t changed, it’s roughly the same. In fact, it’s a little better than it was the first year of the program. And secondly, student profiles haven’t changed. Even though we are admitting far more students than we could the first year we admitted 36 students, the immortal class. That we admitted this year, 88 students coming in the quality of the students has stayed right at the same bar. The same SAT bar, the same GPA bar, within real close numbers. But what we want to talk about tonight, the division of the houses between, this idea centered thing we couldn’t do, and the chronological model that is entering the great conversation from the beginning with something like Homer or early parts of the Bible and reading through to the 19th century. That was the Morgan House or the original way we introduced Torrey, but it wasn’t particularly a better way to do Torrey. It simply was the way we chose to go first, and then when we could do something else, we were able to introduce that idea. So what we want to talk about with Fred and Paul tonight, how that worked and how that how we go about structuring it. Paul, I thought I turned to you. We’ve divided Torrey in half. I still remain the director of the whole program, Torrey remains united. And and you’re the chair of- or the house director of the Morgan House, the house chair. I don’t know whether that makes you a comfy lounge chair or what kind of chair you are. But tell us about the Morgan House and what people would think about the curriculum there. And what are some of the advantages of the curriculum inside of Morgan House?
Spears: The one thing about going chronologically is that you can participate in this understanding of the great conversation that’s gone on in western literature inside of the western canon of great books. That’s not to say anything about the fact that the eastern canon, which in one way or another exists is not good, but it’s just this kind of a conversation that goes on inside of the West, is a dialogue, internal to itself, there are these big questions like: What does it mean, to think about your humanity? And they- and we are reading people like Homer, who are being read by people like Virgil, who are being read by people like Dante, and they are continually talking to one another about these great ideas that run over and over again, and you can see them even develop in the western sensibilities intellectual.
Reynolds: And so for all current alum at the time of this taping, they would have experienced Tory in that way, they would have come into the great conversation with Homer and some of the early biblical books early Greek thought they would have read Plato, kind of wasted Plato, their freshman year, when it’s sort of introduction saying forms recollection, and they were in their senior year, they’ll realize their paper they read on the cave was entirely wrong. But they don’t get to go back. And so there are some advantages right to the Morgan House. Namely, you come into the conversation the way people did, and some disadvantages. Fred, can you describe what you think are the advantages of the other house, the Johnson House?
Sanders: And the house is the House of Lords as opposed to the House of Commons?
Reynolds: Yes, that’s exactly right. Does that mean you’re meaningless, have little power and are gradually being phased out?
Sanders: That’s roughly it, Madame Prime Minister. The Johnson House is thematically organized. So we have eight-unit semesters which are interdisciplinary investigations around certain topics. So, whereas in the Morgan House, you sort of reel off a few 100 years of something and study as much of it as you can, in the Johnson House, we’ve named certain classic themes that have emerged down through the ages. So “On Origins” or “On Desire”, “The City and Man”, “On Knowing God”, “On the Cosmos”, these are the titles of the the courses that you take in the Johnson House. And those titles actually do map out on onto themes in certain ways. So we pulled together from the sort of menu of the great books that we’ve been teaching in Torrey for all these years; we pulled our favorite books to group under each of those categories.
Some of the big advantages include that we can assign books to the place where they are developmentally appropriate for students. So that we can read a little more Aristotle, some different Aquinas, some… basically some harder things because we can deploy them in the junior year instead of having to read Plato with freshmen because that’s when he occurs in actual history. Another nice thing is in our selection of classic books to deal with, in the Morgan House, there’s kind of a self-selecting cannon process going on. That is anyone that you take out—let’s say you decide Homer is not that important. So you take him out, well, that’s not going to work because Virgil will rise from the dead and scream at you, right? And as you trace the the development of the Western conversation, that there’s sort of a self-selecting element to it, if you leave Ovid out, you’re not going to understand big chunks of Virgil. That’s less of a constraint on the Johnson curriculum. So while there are certain big names that you’ve just got to talk about—you’ve got to read their books, or you haven’t done a decent survey of the Western intellectual tradition—it’s not quite as binding.
Reynolds: What would you say, both of you, disadvantages are for being in either house? So somebody says, Oh, I’m in Johnson House. I love being in Johnson House. What’s the disadvantage with something if you could and start to worry all over again? What would you have gained by being in Morgan House, Fred, and then I’ll ask the same question to you in reverse, Paul.
Sanders: Yeah, the sentence is the Johnson how students are going to be sick of hearing and are just going to keep hearing anyways. “Oh, but you guys didn’t read Plato yet. Right?” Right. So it’d be right in the middle of a wonderful passage of something and it’s all just right there in front of you. But for students who didn’t pick up the earlier voices in the actual flow of the historical conversation, there are some things missing. So Dante, for instance, is a radically different book in the two houses, right. In the Morgan House, it comes after Aquinas and sort of encapsulates a whole 1000 year run of Latin theological history.
Reynolds: The greatest of centuries culminates in Dante!
Sanders: Yeah… in the Johnson House, it’s an epic. It’s about the sixth book that you read in a freshman fall survey of great epics.
Reynolds: And if you’re not careful, probably Dante is the best author wasted in its progression in the curriculum.
Sanders: Yeah, there are of course, advantages. They go straight from Virgil to Dante. Well, not straight, but they go from Virgil pretty rapidly to Dante. So they still remember Virgil and care that he’s leaving Dante. Whereas Morgan students are already… All right, browbeaten by their tutors: “Guys, Virgil, underworld, remember freshman year?” “No, no. Was I a freshmen once? We remember Thomas Aquinas.”
Spears: Yeah, of the Johnson House is, the way that they synthesize is the way that they are having you think about the “City and Man” or how they think about epics or, or this semester on knowledge, those things are giving you sort of hooks by which you can come to understand how the different intellectuals in history have dealt with some of these great ideas.
Reynolds: You’re coming to the ideas, the way that people that came to the ideas came to them. You’re thinking with Plato, and you don’t have a lot of background that Plato didn’t have, which you might run into.
Spears: But it’s so you’re missing that and it’s nice in the Johnson House to be able to have that.
Reynolds: Yeah, just sort of experience the world in some ways the way Plato did. You don’t run into a book where so for example, when you’re reading Dante on truth, right, and you haven’t read, Sophocles are very much Sophocles, there’s a little bit of a problem there. There’s a conversation you didn’t have. So nothing’s perfect.
Spears: Right? So you’re not thinking about ethics in a way as a genre, as you would in the Johnson House.
Reynolds: Okay, in terms of structure, we’ll get to the really dull part. And if you are online, we’ll try to make available to you if you’re listening to the podcast, what we’re referring to, which is a chart of Torrey in two houses, it’s critical to see that lots of things that go on in Torrey that alumni would remember or that you’re looking forward to experiencing —things like convocation, the entrance of freshmen and into Torrey, which takes place tomorrow night, Friday night, and we hope all you would come— that remains a unified, all-Torrey event; graduation remains a unified event. Many of our lectures, major lectures —so for example, when John Granger was here recently— that remains a unified event. On the other hand, the curriculum is different. And so faculty are beginning to specialize inside of each house. And we’ll less and less teach between houses.
Spears: When you say specialize inside of each house, you don’t mean within the books in each house.
Reynolds: No. And of course, tutors could teach between houses and will occasionally, but more and more, you begin to think like a Johnson House person. That is, this big conversation we’re in, or a Morgan House person thinking chronologically where the timeline is the key, is the backbone to what you’re doing. I should say that I will continue to teach in both houses. The director, whoever the director is, will divide his or her time equally between the two houses. So I’ll continue to teach inside both houses and touch base with both kinds of groups. The office, the Torrey office, led ably by Jana Peck and my administrative aide Michael Fatigati and Nicki Yount.
Spears: Jana who?
Reynolds: Jana Lotze. Yeah, that’s right. People should never get married, it’s very difficult for me to remember. Having had such fun myself, I can only remember my own marriage. Anyway, we will continue to work for the entire program. So the Torrey level experience will stay the same there. I’d like to say how are the houses organized differently on the ground? I’ll start this time with you, Paul, as you look at the organizational chart, what do people in this room need to know about the structure of Morgan House?
Spears: Well, the structure of Morgan House is certainly going to be pointed towards certain kinds of expectations of how you understand the text, you’re going to have to grapple with things like thinking about them as an epic, you’re going to have to think about the way you gain access to the text, in a way that is going to force you to consider genre. Consider the time, consider the breadth of the discussion and places where you would not- What would I say? Normally, when you see hooks, you’re going to have to learn how to develop them yourself. So there’s going to be some distinctions there. Also, but there’s not a lot of radical changes. In other words, pedagogically, there’s really no difference. We’re going to be pushing you to think more about the different genres the way things hook together. But we’re not going to do things radically different pedagogically. The faculty aren’t going to be radically different, in the sense of how they work with you. In one sense, there’s going to be a lot of similarities.
Reynolds: Yes and all the faculty will continue to meet together once a month to discuss inner-house with me, and I attend both faculty division meetings, which is also once a month. So each house Morgan, Johnson House will meet once a month, I’ll go to both of those meetings as well to provide continuity. And then the whole faculty, Morgan and Johnson will meet in one unified meeting once a month to discuss issues of common importance so that we don’t fragment between the two houses. Anything, Fred, you want to say this will be a little bit different, because in some ways for those listening, especially on the podcast, if there’s a difference for them, it’ll be inside the Johnson House.
Sanders: Yeah, and this part is sort of dreadfully boring, but I have to say it anyway. The Morgan House was designed to get 44 units of your 60 unit Torrey education out of the way in your first two years, that’s designed to flex with certain majors, majors that tend to want you to get your prerequisites and your general education done freshmen sophomore year, then come your junior year for the advanced classes in that discipline. So philosophy and English probably are the two stereotypical majors that that program works really well for so that your Torrey experiences, eight units, then three gigantic 12 unit semesters that you can’t believe anyone can actually do. But then after that, this cliff of the junior year, where it’s four unit semesters, from then on out.
Reynolds: It can become, negative side, a book of the week club. Or it can become a wonderful, splendid Liberty into some metatorry to a group that only meets once a week. And so you can really concentrate on the book you’re looking at. So it depends on how people play it out.
Sanders:Yeah.
Reynolds: How will that be different for Johnson House student?
Sanders: Well, this is actually the mechanism that sort of prompted us to create the Johnson House, it wasn’t so much the thematic clusters idea, it was more the fact that we had some majors who didn’t have that prerequisites, and then upper division works.
Reynolds: Right. That was the trigger. It was made this possible.
Sanders: Yeah, it was the majors, like music or science would be the most obvious ones that needed to be working on their skills all four years at a steady skill development kind of a way. So we put together a straight eight unit, if I use a engine block term, right, just eight unit courses all the way out for the entire four years. It’s a four unit class that last semester.
Spears: And you —should I say that we— experimented initially with trying to do a chronological in the Johnson House too.
Reynolds: Yeah, that’s that’s exactly right. And it didn’t work out well, by going straight eights the natural flow that can occur inside. And I have to say, since I had noodled out the original plan, I was allowed to sort of sit with a yellow legal pad and devise both the plans and I can tell you, they cover essentially the same footprint, but they do them in radically different ways. How many books different is there now Fred? Originally it was about 30. What is it now?
Sanders: Oh, it’s 25 or 30 book discrepancy between the two houses, that is to say, houses that are, books that are read in one house, but not in the other.
Reynolds: And of course, as time goes on, and the faculty has taken ownership of the curriculum, my original plan is morphed into something entirely different as faculty try out books, and get them to work and have taken ownership of the curriculum. But it’s important to see the same mines that slowly shaped from an initial yellow legal pad what I threw out in the initial Morgan House curriculum, then shaped that also set to work on the Johnson House curriculum. So there’s real continuity,
Sanders: We sketched in The Education of Henry Adams, which is exactly the right book to read in that semester, but pretty much everybody hated it. So that didn’t work.
Reynolds: In fact, I began to mock it routinely, I would just come in-
Sanders: And that really helped me in my teaching the text.
Reynolds: Yeah, I think it was good.
Sanders: I will say because the Johnson House is just starting out, it’s half the size of the Morgan House right now. There are four faculty and, how many groups? Eight groups. Because of that, we’re experimenting some more. We’re doing sessions on music. Taking great works of music as the text for a session. We’re doing a number of other experimental things, including books we didn’t think we could actually teach in college or books by, I don’t know, my grandma or something, anyway,
Reynolds: Hello to Fred’s grandma.
Spears: And then also it is indicative of the way Torrey started, as even in Morgan House. It was an experiment, we were trying new things. And then we got through with it, we sort of solidified the canon and we said, ‘Okay, we’re done here with this part of the canon, we cannot touch it, at least for a certain amount of years.’ I think we made a four year mark.
Reynolds: Yeah, that’s right.
Spears: But then what Johnson House has enabled us to do is, say all the things that we wish we could have done in Morgan Houses, we’ve reflected on it over the years, but we really couldn’t, because it would change the way that it’s been constructed. We’ve been able to try some of those things in Johnson House.
Reynolds: Yeah. And so for those of you who are curious, who are listening or who are here, another thing we’ve been able to do is to experiment with Bible studies and other things. I have a class, an informal class, not for credit on film that meets at my house on Wednesday nights. And so we’ve been able to do some skunk work planning some things that are outside the mainstream in ways where we can try them out in there and their not for units, we’re not hurting anybody’s education by doing a class that turns out to be silly or doesn’t cover enough material or doesn’t fit Biola’s needs in that way. So we continue to experiment. But we’re because we have more people, we’re able to experiment in some new ways. We have faculty that try things like the Urban Plunge, that’s become a very important part of the curriculum in both houses, where we can take students inside the city. So Matt Jenson, one of the newer faculty members, if you’re listening on a podcast-
Spears: Hi Matt’s mom.
Reynolds: -has been able to take a leadership role there.
Reynolds:I’m not saying hi to Matt’s mom, because Matt’s mom and Fred’s mom are having a fight. And so I’m sorry Fred’s mom.
Spears: I love that.
Reynolds:Oh, are there anything else on this detail, plan? Before we open up for questions?
Spears: Can I, can I actually say even though I’m Morgan House a, an exciting thing about Johnson House is that they’re the willingness of the faculty and Johnson House to really take this on. It is a real new thing and a lot of different ways. And they’ve really taken it on an effective manner. And they’re doing things where we get to watch them. And in a skunkworks kind of ways used, you’ve described it, and I’m just waiting to steal things from Johnson House if they work. And when you did the music, I’m thinking, ooh, that continues to work. We are stealing that thing and putting it into Morgan House. So part of it is we get to watch the experimentation. That’s been really well done in Johnson House and have a little bit of envy of that, and take it on as it’s successful. So that’s, that’s one of the fun things about the Johnson House developed being in a growing program is exciting.
Reynolds: It’s as we add faculty, if you haven’t been around for a while, or if you are around for a while. If you look at the new faculty that we added this year, some of the most exciting people that I’ve met at Biola, period.
Spears: Thanks.
Reynolds: And at this point, it’s getting to be a good thing.
Spears: Paul, you are I know I’m a bear. I’m not excited. Yeah, ever. Bla bla bla bla bla,
Reynolds: I love you, Paul, blah, blah, blah, blah. One other thing before on my two questions, um, a lot of the questions are going to Sanders, what is the Torrey honors?
Sanders: Torrey Honors Institute as a 60 unit…. That’s good material
Sanders: A lot of the questions I’m sure are going to have to do with things like separation anxiety, or-
Spears: Oh, I’m working through that.
Sanders: That’s what the questions have been so far at least. Here’s the thing with dividing into two houses the the dream, the goal, the plan is to get Torrey down to a human scale. What do we have about 400 students right now? Yeah, that’s right. You can’t learn 400 students, come on. What we want is for each house is to have about 250 students in it and eight faculty members, those eight faculty will only mentor their 30 mentees will be within that house. They will only teach sessions within that house. It’s it’s possible even if you’re not some incredibly gifted people person, even if you’re not Melissa Schubert, you can remember 250 students and their learning styles and where they are in their intellectual growth and where their group is and what issues they’re working through. It’s possible to have that in your mind all at one time. So that as you drop in, as you’re doing the rotating tutor routine, as you drop in on a class, if someone’s talking a lot, you can say, that person always talks a lot, I will now help shut them down. Or you can say, oh, that person is talking a lot. She never talks a lot. Let’s encourage that even more. It’s not really possible to do that right now when you’re teaching across two curricula for four years each and 400 students.
Reynolds:: One concern that I got from alum and I want to express for the alumni that are listening is to point out that if you are in the first four years of Torrey, that means a house will be roughly the size Torrey was when you graduated. And our concern was from a pastoral level- and I talked to my dad who pastors who is Pastor now for about 40 years, retired now, but over 40 years in ministry- and he’s always felt like a church of around 200-250 was a church that a pastor could really pretty much get to know everybody in that church and establish some real relationships. And I think that was our experience too. As we begin to get larger than 200, as we move towards 300, 350, for those alum who are in the middle years, you’ll know, it got harder to know everybody. And so by dividing into two houses, we’ll get some of the advantages of being bigger. Being able to bring better speakers, Victor Davis Hanson, we were able to bring in in conjunction with some other clubs on campus to talk about Thucydides thanks to student leadership from Robert Stevenson. And we were also able to bring John Granger and have another Distinguished Lecture coming in the spring. So we’re able to do more yet at the same time. We didn’t want to lose the intimacy of about 200 people hanging out together.
