At St. John’s, the teaching members of the faculty are called tutors. The title “professor” is avoided to signify that it is not the chief role of the tutors to expound doctrines in their field of expertise. Instead, learning is a cooperative enterprise carried out in small groups with persons at different stages of learning working together. All participants in a class are expected to prepare for their discussion by studying the text that is the principal teacher of the class—it might be Plato or Newton or Jane Austen or one of the other authors who wrote from the high point of their learning.