Never too late

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – In his first weeks as a freshman at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Roger “Rusty” Martin missed two days of crew practice.

Although Martin was due for CT scans and a checkup with his oncologist those days, he feared the coach might cut him from the team. At 61, he wasn’t quite four years past a battle with melanoma that nearly killed him.

Martin, the president of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., is the oldest freshman at St. John’s – by four decades. Some on the faculty are young enough to have been his students back when he was a history professor.

Martin went back to school because he wanted to study the freshman experience in a way that would be impossible from the president’s office. He wanted to know what first-year students were really like.

So he took a semester-long sabbatical from the top of the academic food chain to dwell at the bottom.

He went out for crew, he said, partly because of his battle with cancer.

“Deep down in me,” he told The Washington Post, “was this feeling that I had to prove that I had survived, that I was alive.”

After his semester at St. John’s ends, Martin plans to publish some of his thoughts in one or more magazine articles. He said his fellow freshmen were strikingly focused, keen to study, averse to drugs, loyal to their parents and quite serious about both politics and faith.

Martin didn’t hide his identity from the students and faculty at St. John’s. He and college administrators agreed that Martin would attend classes and events but would live off campus, with his wife and dog. He would take notes in class, but he wouldn’t speak.

Martin, a lifelong educator trained to lecture, worried he might upset the balance of St. John’s painstakingly egalitarian seminars if he talked.

“He wanted to see the freshmen up close, and kind of be in the milieu, and see what effect reading and studying those things has on the way they talk with each other and the way they think about life,” said Harvey Flaumenhaft, dean of St. John’s.

The oldest freshman sits and chats about crew practice with fellow rowers until class starts. Then, he sits and listens.

“He pretty much immediately fit in,” said David Miranda, 19, a St. John’s freshman from Boston who rowed with Martin. “Sometimes we’d talk about Plato, and sometimes we’d just talk about things that are going on day to day.”