Basic Program of Liberal Education

Past Courses

Proust and The Prisoner
BASC70161

The Prisoner is the fifth volume in Proust's novel, The Search for Lost Time. Albertine is the prisoner named in the title, and readers of the earlier volumes will guess easily who her jailer is! Join...

ornate library with lots of books
BASC70228

Throughout his multi-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust refers widely to texts, art, and architecture from the ancient, medieval, renaissance, and modern periods. In this course, we...

On the left: a photograph of Black Panther director Ryan Coogler. On the right: a photograph of author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ryan Coogler by Gage Skidmore. Ta-Nehisi Coates by Gabriella Demczuk.

BASC80022

The hugely successful film Black Panther was both entertaining and empowering for black Americans. But the film also connects to themes that go deep in our culture: slavery, oppression, the Black...

On the left: a photograph of Ralph Ellison. On the right: the first-edition dust jacket cover of INVISIBLE MAN (1952).
BASC70159

This course will consist of a close reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – a text now considered one of the greatest works of modern literature. Each class session will consist of distinct short...

Kant and Critique of Pure Reason
BASC70166

While Kant’s magnum opus sometimes scares readers off, those who have a guide and persist with it are usually stunned by the consistent logic of the work and the powerful vision and scope of its...

The Republic represented in marble
BASC70153

Using the strategy laid out in Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book, this course is devoted to developing a thorough understanding of Plato’s Republic by reading it once quickly to get an...

BASC80012

Silas Marner is the story of a sincerely religious young man who is betrayed by a friend who frames him for a crime he did not commit, alienating is fiancé and ruining his life. 

A painting of Moses receiving the tablets of law from the Moutier-Grandval Bible, an illuminated manuscript bible.
BASC70128

In this first course in a multi-term study, students will examine the Book of Deuteronomy. The fifth and final book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy (meaning “second law” or “repetition of the...

Detail from an attic black-figure neck amphora with a scene from the Iliad, ca 540-520 BCE.
BASC50106

Having completed the core curriculum and become better readers and thinkers, many Basic Program students want to revisit key works from the early years in order to find out what they missed the first...

Statue of Aristotle
BASC50103

Having completed the core curriculum and become better readers and thinkers, many Basic Program students want to revisit key works from the early years in order to find out what they missed the first...