Casting around for ways to spend a sabbatical, one US college principal hit on a novel idea - enrol as a student. His classmates thought he was 'a not-very-bright older person', but for Roger Martin the experience was very rewarding. Stephen Phillips reports

It was orientation week at St John's College last August, and the traditional icebreaker for freshmen entering the Maryland liberal arts campus was getting into swing. Separate pockets of men and women stiffly heeded instructions to mingle and find a partner at the pre-term waltz.

Looking at the fresh-faced school-leaver opposite him, Roger Martin was mortified. "I could just imagine what she was thinking: 'Oh my God!'," he says.

Perhaps he was being hard on himself. But at 61, Martin was three times the age of his fellow first-years. The veteran college president, with two bachelors degrees, a masters in theology from Yale University, a history doctorate from Oxford University and two grown-up daughters, was old enough to have taught some of the faculty members at St John's. But it was the desire to confront that age gap that had prompted him to spend a six-month sabbatical as an undergraduate in the first place.

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After eight years as president of nearby Randolph-Macon College, a 1,100-student campus in northern Virginia, Martin had decided he needed a fresh insight into the evolving generational dynamics among today's so-called millennial students.

Looking across the hall during the freshman ball, he found himself staring straight into the terrified eyes of one such undergraduate. Fortunately, males outnumbered females and a relieved Martin retreated to the margins to strike up a conversation with a fellow wallflower.

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Months earlier, his request to spend his sabbatical at St John's elicited incredulity from college administrators. "The dean looked at me for a long time trying to figure out whether I was sane or not," he recalls. At length, he suggested: "Maybe you'd like to come as a guest tutor." "No one had done this before," Martin admits.

Research, fieldwork or formal structured professional development are more the stuff of academic sabbaticals. Martin had spent previous leaves of absence in libraries, often in the UK, conducting research into church history. But he has long been interested in the first-year experience and wanted something he could mine for the day job, perhaps even work into a book.

"It's always good when you're in a leadership position to get back into the trenches," Martin explains. Returning to school at his own campus was not an option - he would never have lived down being the president. Off-site he could be more anonymous and have a more authentic experience.

Casting about for sabbatical suggestions two years earlier, he had shared his "weird" idea of seeing things from the other side of the lectern with Christopher B. Nelson, the president of St John's. "To my surprise, he encouraged me," Martin recalls.

St John's was not an incidental choice. The small privately funded campus is renowned for its "great books" course, specialising in the classics of the Western canon. Everyone takes the same curriculum, which includes re-enactments of scientific discoveries and mandatory Greek. "I wanted to go back into the classics unfettered by other demands," Martin explains.

Rules of engagement were soon drawn up. Martin would not live in the dorms, he would be a commuter student (mostly at his wife's insistence). He would also speak sparingly in class - not out of fear that he would cow the rest of the class with his erudition ("many of the students knew more than I did about the particular subjects," Martin says) - but rather because he did not want to cut into other students' contributions, on which their grades depended.

Apart from these conditions, Martin plunged himself into student life with alacrity. He, his wife and their dog vacated their Virginia home and leased a house close to campus. Things were awkward at first. Martin was introduced to his classmates as a principal going back to college. Some students didn't know what to make of him, Martin recalls. The feeling was mutual. "I was a 61-year-old president finding my way among first-year undergraduates. I had to divest myself of being a college president and became more like a student."

He credits turning out five mornings a week for rowing team practice with helping him win social acceptance. He forged a special bond with his crewmates. "People got curious and realised there was a real human being here." Beyond the camaraderie, Martin was driven by a deeper motivation. As an Oxford postgraduate, he had spurned rowing, sitting out Eights Weeks and watching from the comfort of the Lincoln College Boat House.

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But in 2000 he was diagnosed with skin cancer that had spread to his lungs.

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He was given one year to live. Thanks to treatment at Johns Hopkins University hospital, he confounded the prognosis. Dragging himself up at 5am every day to take his place in a seven-man rowing galley slogging up and down the Severn River proved "he was still alive". Still, it wasn't without trepidation that Martin embarked on the gruelling workouts. "I'm in very good physical shape, but I'm missing a good part of my left lung," he explains.

Before the prestigious Occoquan regatta in Virginia, at which crews from colleges across America's mid-Atlantic region square off, he was racked with self-doubt. "I was racing with teenagers, I was scared I'd screw up."

The 5km race "almost killed" him, Martin recalls, but he held his own and St John's trailed in 17th out of 21 - respectable against far larger campuses.

But knocking around with the rowers had its hairy moments. Laggards failing to make the team's crack-of-dawn reveille were rousted from their beds by raucous crewmates. Participating in this rite, Martin feared being arrested by campus police for disturbing the peace.

Being in the boat each morning also offered a candid glimpse into students'

lives. "I was amazed with what the kids would say." Today's students are on the whole a pretty sober, focused bunch, he says, far less inclined than their predecessors - the more hedonistic "slacker" Generation X - to dissipation.

But Martin admits finding it "very difficult being constantly yelled at by the cox when I wasn't rowing very well". "I'm used to being in a position of authority - the boss, hiring and firing people. But when I was rowing, I wasn't the president anymore. Being able to accept criticism from someone as old as my daughter was a metamorphosis."

Besides keeping up with a demanding reading schedule spanning classical Greek literature, Martin attended twice-weekly three-and-a-half hour academic seminars and a campus-wide lecture on Friday evenings. On top of this, he was writing a chapter for a forthcoming collection of essays, published by Sheffield University Press, honouring the 200th anniversary of the British and Foreign Bible Society. But he still found time to hang around the campus coffee shop, like any self-respecting US college student.

The experience evoked painful memories of his own "unsuccessful" first year more than 40 years earlier. Enrolling at Ohio's Denison University as a "geeky, immature" 18-year-old, Martin had a terrible time, eventually transferring to Drew University in New Jersey to start over. "It wasn't the college's fault, I was a social misfit," he says. "I suppose this is one of the reasons I'm so interested in the freshman year," Martin reflects. He ended up befriending four or five students going through similar struggles, he says, christening them his "projects".

Everything changed once the media got hold of his story last November. He had been blending in on campus as "just another bloke", but his cover was blown when an article on his unusual sabbatical appeared in The Washington Post . Suddenly, he found himself the subject of editorials in the campus newspaper, and when he was featured on The Today Show , America's most popular breakfast television show, a few weeks later, he became a campus "celebrity".

All the attention prompted a flurry of interest from literary agents, but Martin regrets that it cost him the unassuming relationships that he had cultivated with other students - even if these were at times a little humbling. "Who did you think I was?" he quizzed a crewmate towards the end of the semester. "You were just someone on the boat," the student replied.

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"I just thought you were a not-very-bright older person coming back to college."

Roger Martin's college diary

• We are all wondering why the hell any sane person would get up at five in the morning to spend two hours engaged in punishing physical exercise often in foul weather. Rowing coach Leo Pickens' mission, therefore, is to convince the novices reposed at his feet that rowing is a virtuous and pleasing activity. "I can promise you," he says, "that being out on the Severn at dawn on a crisp fall morning, watching the sun rising from the east and the geese flying to the south as eight oars move together in perfect unison over the glistening water is about as close to heaven as you will ever get in this life." I'm sold.
• We churn the water in a boat vaguely similar to the pentekontor that brought Odysseus and his crew to the ends of the world. Mike, the assistant coach, yells out: "Everyone in the catch position, oars square and buried."
• Not knowing what the catch position is, I lean back as far as I can - which is not very far - and my oar immediately fouls the oar of my rowing companion, who is leaning very far forward. The result is a loud noise and a huge splash. Mike pretends not to see this embarrassing gaffe. I'm sure he is feeling pity for the sorry physical specimen he sees directly in front of him, perhaps wondering whether this will happen to him in a few years.
• Over the next several weeks, my rowing improves, and as it does I blend in with the young men in my boat. I am no longer a self-important college president, just another novice learning how to row. I keep my mouth shut, I observe and I listen.
• October is upon us. My seminar is reading Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Today, as our four racing shells approach the Naval Academy Bridge we see an armada of yellow Naval Academy boats approaching.
• Laughter comes from one of them as it passes to our starboard. The midshipmen are getting a kick out of seeing this rather motley collection.
• There they are, in their spic-and-span white T-shirts and dark blue shorts, all looking extremely fit. Here we are, some of us in multicoloured T- shirts, others with long hair dripping with rain, some overweight, others rather skinny, some wearing earrings, others sporting tattoos, and one very tired-looking 61-year-old guy with a red beard rowing in the number two position.
• I notice a male freshman standing not too far from me. He is a skinny kid with freckles all over his face. He is wearing blue jeans that are far too short for his lanky legs, showing off white socks and penny loafers. He looks like a nerd - like I did 43 years ago. We are two of a kind.
• Is it becoming for a college president to enter an undergraduate residence hall with a bunch of angry teenage crewmembers to rouse a sleeping sophomore who might or might not be in the sack with his girlfriend? Never in my wildest imagination did I think that at age 61 I would become part of a posse assigned the task of breaking into freshman residence hall to wake up a delinquent teammate. What will I do next?