is there a secret st. john's rule says you must never say you went to st. john's, only to 'a great books college', same as Harvard people used to delicately say they went to school "in Cambridge"
is it really so scandalous to admit to it

please be advised I did not go to St. John's, although there was a long period of my life when everybody who heard I'd been in Classics grad school told me the long story of how they wished they'd gone to St. John's.

(I do not wish I'd gone to St. Johns. I did once, but not now)

when I was of an age to apply, to get in you had to explain to them the meaning of plato's allegory of the cave. & I could not in good conscience do this because I believed my understanding of plato was imperfect. so I had a nervous fit and went to art school by mistake. briefly

"I could not write this essay because, though I am well able to reproduce the accepted interpretation of the text in my own words, I cannot ethically pretend to an understanding which remains obscure to me & is not yet my own possession" --a good excuse more students should use

anyway being disingenuous is just my personal private hobby, I do understand why people don't always like to name it (because one in five people will fall into a sudden melancholy reverie & tell you, lengthily all about their own tragedy of not having gotten to go to st. john's)

their imagined young selves held eternally poised in this branching alternate world in which they read Carlyle under the budding elm trees forever

(a vet was the last person to give me, who didn't even go there, the I-wish-I'd-gone-to-St. John's speech. WHILE manhandling my cat)