BA Degrees
BA Degrees
The undergraduate programs offered by our partner universities focus on the great books, art, thought and practices that have shaped Western Civilisation. With Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Hume, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Mill, Nietzsche, Arendt and many others, you and your peers will ask and attempt to answer the biggest questions as they have arisen in the course of our long-enduring civilisation.
How do we resolve or even just ask the biggest and oldest questions about ourselves: about our experience of truth, of freedom, of beauty, of nature, of conflict, of hatred and of love, of good and evil, of God and religion, of family and society, of politics, justice, duty and leadership? Who else has thought about these things over the course of our civilisation, and what have they thought about them? How much of what we assume to be “modern” or “correct” in our thinking and attitudes is really just the recycling of ancient insights?
This degree may well be one of the few places in the world, quite possibly the only time in your life, when you can really engage, over a period of years, with these deepest meaning-and-values questions: when you can gain an awareness and appreciation of the distinctive but many-sided civilisation which informs so much of what we think and do. Along with the advanced skills you will develop along the way, this awareness will stay with you all of your life.
The BA programs may be taken as part of single or double degrees and include an optional Honours year for outstanding students.
Learn more about the Western Civilisation programs and associated scholarships offered by our university partners:
The spirit of Western civilisation is the spirit of inquiry ... Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak [their] mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.
Robert M. Hutchins - The Tradition of the West