The Man, The Myth, The Legacy

How the Enduring Influence of John Brinkley ’59 is Shaping the Next Generation of Hampden-Sydney Scholars

from the Record, Fall 2024
by Alexandra Evans

Walking into John Brinkley’s home, Ropp House—named for Dr. Phillip H. Ropp, professor of English from 1935 to 1968—one was confronted with teetering piles of annotated, dog-eared books that threatened to topple over at a moment’s notice. The scene portrayed the temperament of the resident scholar: a man who loved letters and learning. No one was more dedicated to preserving the classical liberal arts education at Hampden-Sydney as the best means of forming good men and good citizens than Professor Brinkley, the College’s first Rhodes Scholar and long-time Classics teacher.

For a group of those young men, the atmosphere of Brinkley’s home brought to mind the quote “My library was dukedom large enough” uttered by Prospero in the first act of the Tempest. The line represents the character’s belief in the power of the ideas and words contained in his treasured tomes, a belief that Professor Brinkley shared and worked to nurture in his students and all the young men he impacted across his 37-year career on the Hill. When the founding group of the Prospero Society of Hampden-Sydney College came together in the wake of Professor Brinkley’s passing in 2012, they felt compelled to honor this larger-than-life legend by formally chartering the Prospero Society as a nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting the College’s classical education and enriching the student undergraduate experience in ways that would deepen relationships among students, faculty, and the College for a lifetime.

In 2023, with the 250th anniversary of Hampden-Sydney’s founding rapidly approaching, the 38-member Prospero Society saw an opportunity to honor their shared mentor by formalizing their group’s existence as a 503c nonprofit with plans to invest in the next generation of strong student-faculty relationships at Hampden-Sydney. “We got the collective notion of making a more serious endeavor in terms of trying to preserve the values that we all learned from John Brinkley,” says Billy Winburn ’79.

The College’s upcoming anniversary holds significant meaning for many of the Society’s members as they reminisce on the 200th anniversary, which occurred when several of the members were students. During the bicentennial, Brinkley’s teacher, mentor, colleague, and close friend Ned Crawley ’41, Hampden-Sydney professor of English, recruited four English students to assist with the research, writing, and editing of the Four Makers of the American Mind: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville. A Bicentennial Tribute. New Essays by Robert The Man, The Myth, The Legacy: How the Enduring Influence of John Brinkley ’59 is Shaping the Next Generation of Hampden-Sydney Scholars E. Spiller, J. Lyndon Shanley, Floyd Stovall, and Leon Howard. Crawley’s approach, akin to Brinkley’s, was to recruit students who showed promise and interest but who were not necessarily the top of their class, showing them that there was a place in serious research for anyone willing to work hard. Understanding that this heritage of pedagogical mentorship is at the heart of the Hampden-Sydney College academic experience, Prospero members John Feldmann ’68 and Charles Guthridge ’68 gave birth to the idea of the Brinkley Scholars Program, which was launched in 2024.

“A large part of the impetus for doing this Brinkley Scholars Program is to foster the kind of studentfaculty relationships that give students a direct and serious taste of what academic research is all about while forging relationships with the faculty that will perpetuate well beyond graduation day,” says Greg Feldmann ’79. “The Brinkley Scholars program directly aligns Prospero Society’s mission to enrich the undergraduate experience and to foster lifelong bonds between students, faculty and the school. The Prospero Society motto, sapere aude, translates, as ‘dare to know’ or ‘have the courage to use one’s reason’. Through Immanuel Kant’s adopted usage of sapere aude, the expression became associated with the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, which was the intellectual milieu which gave rise to Hampden-Sydney’s original curriculum.”

Hampden-Sydney’s low student-to-faculty ratio and small class sizes are cornerstones of the College’s culture and mission to educate young men in the distinctive way that has produced scholars, presidents, visionaries, leaders, good men, and good citizens for two and a half centuries. The relationships that are made possible by this environment and individualized attention, like the relationships between Professor Crawley and Professor Brinkley and between Professor Brinkley and these dozens of Prospero Society members, are transformative and enduring, as is the knowledge cultivated between teacher and student. Relationships like these are a hallmark of the Hampden-Sydney experience.

“Brinkley had a profound impact on all of us, and our goal is to perpetuate the impact that he had on us through the great work that Hampden-Sydney professors are still doing today with their students,” says John Feldmann. “There are many John Brinkleys at Hampden-Sydney.”

An initiative funded by the Prospero Society and administered by Hampden-Sydney faculty members, the Brinkley Scholars Program completed its inaugural year this past summer with three students conducting original research on topics related to the founding of Hampden-Sydney. Special thanks to Patterson Professor of Biology Alex Werth who served as faculty liaison to the Prospero Society.

Jeb Tucker ’26 | Philosophy and government major 
Project Title: “Patriots, Statesmen, and Christians: An Intellectual History of Hampden-Sydney’s Founding and Core Values” 
Advisor: Thompson Professor of Philosophy Marc Hight 
I wrote an intellectual history of Hampden-Sydney in which I identified and argued for three core values that the founders held at the founding and through the early years of the school. I argue for patriotism, statesmanship, and Christianity. The founders’ view of patriotism was particularly participatory with an angle of civil service. The idea of statesmanship influenced the model of education they used to form the kind of man was needed in the new country. Finally, Christianity was extremely important to the founders. The big takeaway of my research is that the founders’ stated goal was to create men to lead the burgeoning United States, and it was a direct enough mission that there are ideological currents from the founding that can still be seen in how the school operates and educates today.  

Jonathan Coleman ’26  | History and religion major 
Project Title: “Tracking Trends in Religiosity at Hampden-Sydney College: The First Sixty Years” 
Advisor: Ewing Professor of Religion Mike Utzinger 
I conducted a statistical study of how many Hampden-Sydney students in the first six decades were going on to become Christian ministers and pastors at any given time. Given the strong Presbyterian ties from the founding of the College, it was surprising just how few students were actually recorded as going into ministry those first couple of decades. It was interesting to see how important religion was to so many of the founders and early leaders of the College (the first four presidents were Presbyterian ministers), yet there was a push and pull to balancing that belief system with creating a college that could serve anyone in this new republic where separation of church and state was integral. 

Owen Kahn ’27  | History major and German minor 
Project Title: “Towards a Comprehensive Historical Understanding of the Naming of Hampden-Sydney College” 
Advisor: Patterson Professor of Biology Alex Werth 
My project began as an exploration of primary sources surrounding the naming of the College to analyzing the ethos and legacies of John Hampden and Algernon Sydney. My research revealed limited primary sources, so I came to rely on the political, intellectual, religious, and philosophical contexts of the time that highlighted Hampden’s and Sydney’s bridging of enlightenment liberalism and Calvinist theology, which founders like John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith looked to emulate as they formed this College. Through this project, I was able to situate lesser-known figures like Hampden and Sidney not just in the context of the founding of Hampden-Sydney College but also in the wider context of the intellectual ideals that drove the American Revolution. Seeing how the ideals that influenced the founding of the College also influenced the founding of the nation gave greater context to the place the College holds in American history.