St. John's College Celebrates the Class of 2025

By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI27)

The skies were clear and spirits high in Annapolis and Santa Fe as the St. John’s College Class of 2025 observed Commencement in May with ceremonies featuring keynote addresses from notable alumni: former Latvian Prime Minister Krišj膩nis Kari艈š, a member of the St. John’s College Class of 1988, and Dr. Stephen J. Forman (A70) of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer centers.

Members of the Annapolis Class of 2025 congregate in McDowell Hall while preparing for their walk across the graduation stage. (Shane Kilberg/Drone US Photography)

Assembled on the campus’s front lawn on Saturday, May 10, guests at the 233rd St. John’s Annapolis Commencement ceremony in Annapolis applauded as more than 160 undergraduate and Graduate Institute students—the campus’s largest graduating class in at least a decade—walked the stage and received their diplomas. Longtime tutor Margaret Kirby addressed the crowd, delivering an extended meditation on the interplay of transition, change, and personal identity while citing Program authors such Shakespeare, Montaigne, Aristotle, and de Tocqueville. Soon-to-be-alumni Georgia Green (A25) and Amos Elwell (A25) represented the graduating senior class in a joint address, and Kari艈š, a Latvian American politician, business owner, academic, and St. John’s Alumni Association Award of Merit recipient, shared dispatches from his unconventional career path as the day’s final speaker.

Kari艈š transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in his junior year of college, where he also received a PhD in linguistics. Moving to Latvia in 1997, he left academia and founded a lucrative frozen food manufacturing and distribution company before transitioning to politics. Kari艈š served for 10 years as a member of the European Parliament, as a deputy in Latvia’s parliament, Minister of Economics, then Prime Minister, and briefly as Foreign Minister. Along the way, Kari艈š—now a senior advisor to Kreab Worldwide, a global advisor in strategic communications—encountered multiple setbacks, all of which wound up rerouting his career trajectory. His advice for dealing with so-called failure? Dust yourself off while exploring new terrain.

“Success isn’t something that just happens. It’s something that you continually have to work for,” Kari艈š said. “The way I see it, in life, you will get knocked down. It’s going to happen. And then when you get knocked down, you will always have a choice. That’s the beautiful thing.”

Two weekends later and more than 1,800 miles away, the City of Hope’s Forman delivered a similarly themed tribute to the power of resilience as Santa Fe’s 58th annual celebration on Weigle Placita honored approximately 130 undergraduates, Master of Liberal Arts candidates, and Eastern Classics graduate students earning their degrees.

Forman, a former member of the St. John’s Board of Visitors and Governors, attended medical school at the University of Southern California after completing his BA at St. John’s Annapolis. He has gained international renown over the past 40+ years as a physician-scientist at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer centers in Duarte, California, where he treats cancer patients and has developed pioneering medical treatments including stem cell transplantation and immune cellular therapy.

Forman led the City of Hope Department of Hematology and Stem Cell Transplantation for more than three decades, and he currently directs the centers’ Hematologic Malignancies Research Institute and the T-cell Therapeutics Research Laboratories. Between these roles and serving as an associate faculty member at the California Institute of Technology, Forman takes time to give back to his alma mater: knowing firsthand that the Program provides a strong foundation for pursuing vocations including—but not limited to—medicine, the physician played an integral part in St. John’s launching a funded summer internship program while personally hiring students from both campuses to gain hands-on work experience in cancer research labs.

“When I meet with prospective students,” Forman told the crowd at Santa Fe Commencement, “I am asked mostly by students and their parents what a person can do after receiving this kind of education. I believe you all know the answer to that question: anything!” To that point, Forman looked back on his own journey through the Program. He confessed to having barely understood “a word of Hegel,” and recalled classmates and tutors having to help him with challenging texts. But despite eventually trading Hegel for hematology, the physician attributes his success to the liberal arts: “I have not the slightest doubt every day of the year,” he told St. John’s in 2019, “that this work in the laboratory and at the bedside with a patient can be traced to those four years” at St. John’s.

From mandatory physics to Greek, music, and math, St. John’s College “is a very daunting place, as it exposes your fears, uncertainties, and limitations,” Forman added. “And rather than running away, you have stayed and, with help from the college—especially our tutors, who have by their very presence refused to adjust to the times, and without whom this would be an impossible journey—you have overcome them.”