Basic Program of Liberal Education

Alumni Offerings

Program Alumni may continue their studies through single Alumni Courses offered each quarter and/or by enrolling in a series of two-year Alumni Sequences.

Single alumni courses are offered each quarter on a variety of topics based on student requests and instructors’ areas of scholarship.

Alumni Sequences are two-year, curated courses of study that center on a specific era or culture while incorporating a mixture of texts from other times and places, continuing to deepen the conversation begun in the Core Curriculum. Students take one class per quarter in order, providing the same cohort experience as in the Core Curriculum Certificate.

Since the invention of the term medieval to name the interval between Classical Antiquity and the “rebirth” of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages have often been associated with benightedness: violence and repression, backwardness and ignorance. But this interval—of over ten centuries—is a vast and complex historical period that includes the transmission and transformation of classical thought as well as discontinuity with it; rationalism, skepticism, and mysticism as well as religious dogma; cultural contact and exchange as well as aggression and intolerance; and intense interest in subjectivity and personal experience even in the context of powerful institutions.

In this two-year Alumni Sequence, we will read some of the greatest works of the Middle Ages from a variety of cultures in conversation with texts produced before and after them in an effort to develop a sense of the richness and relevance of “the medieval.”

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-2 Paul, 1 Corinthians
3-5 Plotinus, Enneads
6-7 Beowulf
8-10 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Week Tutorial
1-10 Augustine, City of God

Winter

Week Seminar
1-3 Aristotle, De Anima
4-5 Ibn Tufayl, Hayy bin Yaqzan
6-7 Averroes, The Incoherence of the Incoherence
8-10 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles
Week Tutorial
1-3 The Song of Roland
4-7 Ibn Munqidh, The Book of Contemplation
8-10 Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople

Spring

Week Seminar
1-3 Piers Plowman
4 Everyman; The Second Shepherds’ Play
5-7 Spenser, The Faerie Queene
8-10 Poe and Hawthorne, selected stories
Week Tutorial
1-5 Boccaccio, Decameron
6-10 Icelandic Sagas

Autumn

Week Seminar
1 The Rule of St. Benedict
2-4 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
5-7 Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias
8-10 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed
Week Tutorial
1-10 Dante, Purgatorio

Winter

Week Seminar
1-2 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
3 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs
4-5 Rumi, selected poems
6-7 Petrarch, selected poems
8-10 Nabokov, Lolita
Week Tutorial
1-8 De Lorris and de Meun, The Romance of the Rose
9-10 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

Spring

Week Seminar
1-4 The Arabian Nights
5-6 Marco Polo, The Description of the World
7-8 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative
9-10 Calvino, Invisible Cities
Week Tutorial
1-10 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Corrupt politicians, scandalous celebrities, aggressive foreign policy, upheavals in cultural ideas about sexuality and marriage, income inequality, immigration problems, concerns about the justice system. Roman texts area a crucial part of Western civilization, but they are particularly important for Americans to read. From the influence on the Founding Fathers to the comparisons between the Roman Empire and modern America, the Roman Alumni Sequence will explore these issues by pairing the literature, philosophy, and history of Ancient Rome with other classic texts to continue the conversation begun in the four-year curriculum.

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-2 Plutarch, Lives - Theseus, Romulus (plus comparison), Marius and Sulla
3-4 Sallust, Jugurthine War
5-10 Machiavelli, Discourses
Week Tutorial
1-10 Livy, History Books 1-5

Winter

Week Seminar
1-2 Catullus selected poems
3-4 Vergil Eclogues & Georgics
5-6 Horace, selected poems
7-10 Ovid, Metamorphoses
Week Tutorial
1 Plutarch, Life of Cicero
2-3 Cicero Against Verres, 4th Philippic
4-5 Cicero Pro Caelio
6-8 Cicero On Duties
9-10 Petrarch, Letters to Cicero

Spring

Week Seminar
1-4 Apuleius, The Golden Ass
5-6 Plautus Menaechmi
7 Euripides Hippolytus
8-9 Seneca, Phaedra
10 Racine, Phèdre
Week Tutorial
1-5 Polybius The Histories (selections)
6-10 Montesquieu, Consideration on the Causes for the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-5 Lucan Pharsalia
6-7 Shakespeare Julius Caesar
8-9 Thomas Paine Common Sense
10 Lincoln, Cooper Union Address
Week Tutorial
1-8 Petronius Satyricon
9-10 Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Winter

Week Seminar
1-3 Epictetus, Handbook and Discourses
4 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
5-7 Seneca, On Mercy
8-10 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Week Tutorial
1-2 Hippocratic Writings
3-4 Vitruvius, On Architecture
5-7 Pliny the Elder, Natural History
8-9 Galen, On the Natural Faculties
10 Bacon, The Great Instauration and Novum Organum (Book 1)

Spring

Week Seminar
1-5 Tacitus, Annals
6 Gospel of Luke
7-8 Acts of the Apostles
9-10 Paul, Epistle to the Romans
Week Tutorial
1-10 Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections)

From its founding—and even before—America was as much a contested ground of ideals as it was a geographic region or state. Democracy, religious freedom, the pursuit of individual happiness, self-reliance, and perhaps above all liberty: America’s history is the history of struggles over the meaning and implications of these ideals and their collision with American realities like the destruction of native populations, slavery, the exclusion of minorities, the excesses of capitalism, and a culture of consumption. In this sequence, we will explore all of these issues as we try to understand what America really is and what it aspires to be.

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-3 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
4 Kandiaronk in Lahontan, "Dialogue on Religion"
5-6 Edwards, sermons
7-8 Franklin, Autobiography
8-10 Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Week Tutorial
1-10 The Federalist and Anti Federalist Papers

Winter

Week Seminar
1-4 Emerson, Essays
5-6 Bhagavad Gita
7-10 Thoreau, Walden
Week Tutorial
1-10 Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Spring

Week Seminar
1-2 De las Casas, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
3-4 Bradstreet and Wheatley, poems
5-6 Douglass, Narrative
7-10 Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Week Tutorial
1-10 Lincoln speeches, Lincoln-Douglas debates

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-2 Dickinson, poems
3-4 Grant, Memoirs (sel.)
5-7 Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
8-10 Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Week Tutorial
1-10 Melville, Moby-Dick

Winter

Week Seminar
1-3 James, Pragmatism
4-6 Adams, Education of Henry Adams (sel.)
7-8 Supreme Court decisions
9-10 Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Week Tutorial
1-10 American short stories (Poe, Singer, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Connor)

Spring

Week Seminar
1-2 Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
3 Stevens, poems
4-5 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
6-7 Wilson, Fences
8-10 Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
Week Tutorial
1-10 McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Modernity is characterized by the emergence of an entirely new, unprecedented form of consciousness, one that is critical, uprooted, autonomous, and intensely self-reflexive. This two-year sequence is an exploration of the “modern tradition” through classic texts of the modern period (1750 through the middle of the twentieth century) in conversations with earlier classical and premodern sources.

In the first quarter, we explore the meaning and complexities of individualism in the modern period, beginning with “the discovery of the individual” around the early fifteenth century as both a social and political fact and a new, historically unprecedented reality. But what kind of discovery is this? What does it mean to be individual? This course will discuss several major philosophers and social theorists and what is perhaps the supreme literary exploration of the role of memory in the construction of the self: Proust's Swann’s Way.

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-3 Rousseau, The Social Contract
4-5 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History
6-7 Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
8-10 Heidegger, Being and Time (selections)
Week Tutorial
1-10 Proust, Swann’s Way

Winter

Week Seminar
1 Aristotle, Politics (selections)
2-4 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
5-6 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
7-10 Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Week Tutorial
1-5 Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader (selections)
6-10 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Spring

Week Seminar
1-2 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
3-4 Ortega, The Revolt of the Masses
5-8 Ellison, The Invisible Man
9-10 Faulkner, “The Bear”
Week Tutorial
1-10 Modern poetry

Autumn

Week Seminar
1 Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian”
2 Luther, “The Bondage of the Will”
3 Genesis + Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
4-6 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
6-8 Freud, The Future of an Illusion
9-10 Tillich, The Courage to Be
Week Tutorial
1-8 Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
9-10 O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

Winter

Week Seminar
1-2 Presocratics
3-5 Shelley, Frankenstein
6-8 Darwin, The Descent of Man (selections)
9-10 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Week Tutorial
1-6 Einstein, The Theory of Relativity
7-10 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

Spring

Week Seminar
1-3 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (selections)
4-6 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (selections)
7-8 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (selections)
9-10 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”
Week Tutorial
1-2 Ibsen, “The Wild Duck”
3-4 Chekhov, “Three Sisters”
5 Pirandello, “Six Characters in Search of an Author”
6-7 Brecht, “Mother Courage and her Children”
8-9 O'Neill, “Long Day's Journey into Night”
10 Beckett, “Happy Days”

This sequence introduces Basic Program students to the literary cultures of Asia, using carefully selected English translations of texts from the Sanskrit, Pali, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese traditions. “Asian” is a term of convenience: this roster of traditions is far from exhaustive, and their historical impact reaches deep into Africa and Europe. We approach these non-Western literary classics in the same spirit and with the same methods as in the four-year core curriculum— emphasizing close reading, Socratic conversation, and the fascinating threads connecting all these texts together.

As a sequence intended for alumni of the four-year Basic Program, Asian Classics will further develop students’ skills at approaching, thinking through, and making use of challenging and sophisticated works. The introduction of several new classical traditions into the mix means that instructors will spend more time on historical and contextual background, but the focus will remain on lively engagement with the texts. Beyond classical works of narrative and poetry, the sequence also features a range of religious, philosophical, and historical materials—Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Confucian, and Daoist—which we will approach not just in their own terms but also as products of their respective literary cultures.

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-4 Rig Veda (selections)
5-7 Upanishads (selections)
8-10 Bhagavad Gita in the Mahabharata
Week Tutorial
1-10 Mahabharata

Winter

Week Seminar
1-6 Life of the Buddha (Buddhacarita)
7 Questions of King Milinda (Milinda Panha) (Selections)
8-10 Dhammapada
Week Tutorial
1-5 Ramayana
6-10 Shahnameh

Spring

Week Seminar
1-2 Al-Shafi'i, Epistle on Legal Theory (Risalah) (selections)
3-5 Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
6-7 Nizami, Layli and Majnun
9-10 Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Week Tutorial
1-10 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-5 Confucius, Analects (selections)
6-10 Mengzi (selections)
Week Tutorial
1-10 Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel

Winter

Week Seminar
1 Heart Sutra
2-6 Nagarjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way
7-9 Hakuin, Commentary on the Heart Sutra
10 Chomei, Hojoki
Week Tutorial
1-5 Laozi, Daodejing (selections)
6-10 Zhuangzi (selections)

Spring

Week Seminar
1-3 Lotus Sutra (selections)
4-6 Dogen, Shobogenzo (selections)
7-10 Chinese Poetry
Week Tutorial
1-10 Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji