Four years later, with the determination and creativity of a core of teachers and with the support of the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), a pilot program, Portraits of Human Greatness, made its debut. Structurally the program required the elimination of four required courses (one each from philosophy, English, theology, and history), and the assembling of an interdisciplinary whole that would rely upon a common set of readings, weekly lectures, and seminars, and as much integration of the fine and performing arts as was feasible and affordable. All of this 20 years before the word "interdisciplinary" was even in vogue.

The founders of the program, insofar as they can be identified, are all more willing to give credit to one another than themselves, but one thing is certain, such a shift in the academic core could not have taken place without the leadership of the dean. "The program could not have become real without the will of Father Placidus deciding it was going to happen," says Professor Jim Mahoney who has taught in the program since its inception. Mahoney and Father Placidus both credit professors Jim O'Rourke of the Philosophy Department and Johann Moser of the English Department for the design of the program and the shape of many of the early units.

The pedagogical idea of portraits came from Moser who conceived of the program's name Portraits of Human Greatness one night after reading Frederick Nietzsche's essay "On the Abuse and Use of History for Life," in which he put forth the notion of monumental history.

The decidedly less romantic task of seeking funding for the program fell to the dean who authored the grant application to the NEH. Father Placidus recalls being sent off with a manual typewriter to a house in Dunstable, Massachusetts, in 1975. Somewhere between synthesizing what his colleagues had envisioned and contemplating the woods outside his window, Father Placidus crafted a proposal that would yield the College $700,000, a federal grant that, until recently, was the largest in the college's history. He mailed the proposal to Washington, D.C. that summer with the consent of the Curriculum Committee but without the approval of the full faculty. "That might never have happened," he muses.

Indeed, there was strong dissention. Some faculty objected to the very principle that Abbot Joseph had articulated the need for the humanities to engage and enhance the moral values of students. One faculty member referred to this as "an underlying ideological threat." Another was more resolute: "The core curriculum has been emasculated. St. A's is to follow the rest of  American higher education into a vague, nondisciplinary idealism, signifying nothing except the collection of tuition." And still another predicted inevitable doom: "Basically, I expect the Portraits to be one of the greatest failures in the history of the college."

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