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Honors Curriculum
Core Courses
All Honors students take the two-semester course, The Human Situation, during their freshman or sophomore year. This course is the heart of the college's educational core, an initiation into the great and continuing conversation that is Western intellectual culture.
By reading the required texts, students encounter the belief systems, thoughts, and literary art that constitute the heritage of Europeans, and to a large extent, of Americans. Through a combination of lectures and small group discussions, students are encouraged, not only to understand and appreciate this complex heritage, but also to use what they encounter to test their own cultural assumptions. Writing about the texts is an essential aspect of the course.
Honors Coursebook (need link)
The Human Situation
Antiquity
In the first semester, students explore Antiquity by examining the Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Christian cultures. The modern world is deeply rooted in these cultures, which were inspired and shaped by Greek and Platonic philosophies and by the Bible. The key texts or classics such as the Homeric epics, Greek philosophy and drama, Roman moralists, and the variety of writings that gradually came together to form what we call the Bible present compelling, though not entirely harmonious, insights into abiding features of the human situation.
Modernity
In the second semester of the sequence, Modernity, students continue the study and interpretation of the various forces that shaped the set of assumptions and allegiances that constitute the Modern mindset. Among these are the primacy of the individual over the collective with its attendant ideology of personal rights; the setting apart of humans from the natural world as its decipherers and manipulators; the rise of the nation-state as the exclusive focus of political allegiance; and the idea of continual progress toward material security and intellectual enlightenment.
